The internet is a great resource

Whatever else it may be, the internet is a great resource.  I seldom write something about any fact without verifying what I can with a search on the internets, as our plain-spoken former president used to call the internet.

A moment ago I wrote a phrase that referred to “the mobius strip of our DNA”.  I was picturing the double helix and it looked in my mind like images of mobius strips I have known.   There seemed to be a disconnect, an element of physical impossibility in the blueprint of life being the mathematical abstraction of a twisted oval with only one side. I checked to see if DNA actually was a mobius strip.   I didn’t want to say it was, if it wasn’t.  A quick search turned up this wonderful answer:

Best Answer:  Although bacterial DNA is indeed circular and twisty, the main difference between it and a Moebius strip is that in order for the bacteria to reproduce, it has to be able to separate the two strands and give the two strands to its two “children”.

Consider a zipper as an analogy. Take a long zipper, remove the “pull”, and sew the ends together to make a circle. If you sewed it together without any twists (bacteria have an enzyme that de-twists the DNA during replication), when you pull the sections apart you will get two “half zippers”. This is what the bacteria does. After it gets two “half DNA’s” it has enzymes that use each of the halves as a template to synthesyze the other half. With your zippers, it would be like taking the half zipper and then fitting loose teeth into it – you would end up with two whole zippers where there was originally only one.

Now if you sewed your original zipper together with a half-twist, like in a Moebius strip, when you separated it apart you wouldn’t get two half-zippers – instead you would get a single half-zipper that was twice as long as the original zipper. This is no good to the bacteria. It wants to give each of its children a copy of its DNA. If its genetic material was like a Moebius strip, one of its children would get a double dose of DNA, and the other would get nothing, and die.

The similarities the article tries to draw between Moebius supercoiling and human consciousness are just plain loony. It’s an absolutely meaningless comparison. Anybody who uses the terms “isomorphism” and “limnocentrically” in the same sentence is not to be trusted.  [emphasis mine].

Dig it.

Lest the tone of these posts tend to bring you down

I strive to make this blog more than a compendium of carping cavils, a cellar of acidic whines, a half-full glass of luke warm dysphagia with a dyspepsia chaser, despite an often robust appearance to the contrary.  

We all have our complaints, which sometimes must be shouldered out of the way before better things can come in to play.  Some of these posts are just grunts I put my shoulder into, to allow me to do something more productive.   Sometimes setting some galling absurdity into a few short paragraphs helps me move forward, though I am always happier when a post can help someone else move forward too, or allow some gentle, or even vicious, reader to pause and consider something from another perspective.  

It is a blessing to recall, when pressed, the blessing of all this; the gift of life.  The senses that sense, the limbs that work, the interactions with those we care about, the things we love to do.  Life is hard and grim, or easy and fascinating, partly depending on what we are undergoing and partly the result of our perspective.  

We learn now of a happiness gene, some people born genetically predisposed to feel good, be chipper and positive.  These types are apt to burst into song, because of the presence of a gene on their twisted coil of DNA.  We have long known of a predisposition to melancholia and other qualities that drag on the spirit.  A happiness gene, there’s a delightful fucking thought!  God bless the happy.

The narrative of a successful life is constant and pervasive: it is a busy life filled with tangible and regular achievement.   Hardly time to sit down in this tightly programmed life, let alone brood, and certainly not about problems well beyond your power to help solve.  On the other hand, those too busy to brood… I don’t know about them.  

Seems to me a person who doesn’t have time periodically to ponder things outside their own life is missing something.  On the other side, a person who has only time to ponder is clearly not doing enough with their life.

It’s possible that I have mastered nothing but the art of rationalization.  I have found the thing I most want to do with my life at this point:  be in a room full of kids who don’t have a chance and watch them excited about feeling like they have a chance.  Becoming a finger pointing to a world of creative possibilities.  

By the time these at-risk kids are grown up, if they make it to adulthood, water might be too expensive for them to afford anyway.  The oceans may have reclaimed cities everywhere, the world might be more like Mad Max than anything else.  The odds are clamorously against anyone who does not avail themselves of every advantage their life offers them.  The odds are always tilted against fairness and decency on any kind of large scale, particularly with a multiform mass media megaphone droning “fuck them!” 24/7.  Self-interest and the profit motive rule the world, Mr. Fucking Ahimsa-face.

“Slaughter sides!” screams the skinny kid on the team of losers, looking at the muscular, athletic giants chosen for the other side.

“Yeah, you got a problem with that, squirt?”  A game’s a game.  The game must be played, the hand dealt must be smelt.   

“The one who smelt it, dealt it.”  False, but at least it’s got a bouncy rhyme.

I’m rambling a bit here, and have to get back to my busy schedule, time is money and chop chop and all that rot, but take a few seconds to breathe one deep breath and let it out slowly.  

Seriously.  Take a moment and breathe, just once, deeply.

I’m doing it now. 

Nice.   Few things compare to that, my friend.  

Now, let’s take a quick look at some accidental, if minor, delight, provided by our friends in the world of professional sports.

While checking in on Tanaka’s and Scherzer’s pitchers’ duel yesterday, I noticed this, at the bottom of the box score.   I thought this was very nice of them, and a kindness you don’t often see in the macho world of sports:
Picture 3

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Update

I have been getting calls, and now collection letters, regarding an unpaid $81 toward a discounted $131 deductible (a savings of $119 over the list price!)  from a quick pre-colonoscopy consultation I was required to have last October.  I’d been told the procedure was fully covered as preventive care, except, apparently for the visit to the gastroenterologist to shake his hand and give his receptionist my $50 copay the week before.  There were also a few hundred in fees, it turns out, because a polyp had been sent to the lab for analysis.  Lab fees, obviously, have nothing to do with the preventive procedure.

“Why am I required to pay $100 by check on the day of the procedure if the procedure is fully covered by the premium I pay every month?” I asked the woman at the hospital.  She didn’t know, but the procedure would not be done without the payment.  I paid.

Fast forward eight months, calls to the insurance company regarding charges, conversations with the doctor’s office.   Eight months of demands and threats and finally another letter from a lawyer who specializes in collection.    My position is that I’ve already paid the $81 in the form of that $100 check nobody can seem to justify.  

Out of the blue, yesterday, another envelope from the hospital.   Without any explanation, a check, written out to me, for $100.

cold breeze in Cyberia

Facebook, which we’re told is indispensable for any business or would-be business, allowed me to quickly set up a page for my would-be business.  I had a kid managing it for a while, then it went fallow for a year or so.  I was able to update it when I wanted, but didn’t do it often.  If I’d managed to whip up excitement among 10,000 followers it would have been much easier to raise money through crowdfunding, but I had a few dozen and the effort of raising its facebook profile felt mostly wasted while I needed to work on so many other things.

I got a notice from Facebook a few months back informing me I wouldn’t be able to manage or administer the page I’d put up unless I signed up for a personal page.  I did this with reluctance and had “friend requests” from a few dozen people, some I’d known decades back.  

A friend request, it strikes me now, is such a poignant thing to call this transaction.   “Will you be my friend?”  cue visual of adorable little bear, bashful and wearing some kind of cute hate.  

Since I’ve set up my personal page I’ve been unable to post on my own business page, despite having done what facebook’s instructions had told me to.  “You do not have permission to do this,” it tells me.  Or, it lets me post something as a visitor, with my own first and last name visible. 

Taking a break from other things, I had an idea for a work around.  Create a new email address “loves to draw” or “dances with voles” and make that person an administrator.   Then “animation rules” could post to the page, instead of me personally, with my birthday 58 years ago also displayed.  It took only a few moments to find the “settings” tab referred to below and I set off to follow these seemingly simple instructions:

How do I give someone a role on my Page?

You’ll need to be an admin to give someone a role on your Page. If you’re an admin:

  1. Click Settings at the top of your Page.
  2. Click Page Roles in the left column.
  3. If the person is your Facebook friend, begin typing their name and select them from the list that appears. If the person isn’t your Facebook friend, type their email address.
  4. Click Admin to select a role from the dropdown menu.
  5. Click Save and enter your password to confirm.

Page Roles never came up on that settings page.  The left column, yes.  The next step I needed to follow?  No.   Must mean I am not an admin.    

Sekhnet, who has never been on facebook, suggested I call someone at facebook for help.   A friend who is active on facebook laughed, as I would too, if I were not busy gathering my coat around my neck as the cool breeze from the Cyberian tundra whips in.

The Case for Madness

A slam dunk, really.

Hire an accountant to do a complicated calculation that needs to be clearly explained to the vulnerable person on the other end of the complication.   The guy compiles three completely different sets of numbers, using incorrect percentages, a useless and confusing chart and an inaccurate letter, addressed to a name he himself has invented, explaining nothing.  $675.  Send an email explaining the problems, asking him to get back to you when tax season’s over.  

Two weeks later: another bill for $675.  Write and mail a letter patiently and concisely explaining the insufficient work and the impossibility of paying the number this fellow has pulled out of his ass.  Wait a month.  A third copy of the same bill arrives.  

“I told you he’s senile,” reassures Sekhnet.

Bills keep arriving for the useless visit to the distracted physician’s assistant.  These bills have been approved by the insurance company pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare.  That twenty minutes sitting as the PA asked no relevant questions and cluelessly searched google for a symptom she’d never heard of:  $507, patient’s responsibility.  

“Go talk to the ombudsman, that bill is ridiculous, even if it’s legal,” says Sekhnet.

Your childhood friend, in the role of peacemaker, winds up raging at you.  Now you have to make an appointment to patiently discuss whatever the fuck that was about.

These are, of course, trifles and not arguments for going mad at all.  They are mere annoyances, payable by cash, check or credit card, even for someone on a fixed income.  They may be symptoms, signs of a demanding world grown aggressive, but not, even with ten of their close cousins, arguments for the Laughing Academy.  

The Laughing Academy I’m thinking of, by the way, is not the Ivy League kind where even Freshman can find sexual relief from the staff.   The madness I’m thinking of has no real upside, except the end of trying to make sense of the senseless order of business we are constantly attending to.  And, of course, it’s crazy not to consider the downside of going mad, isn’t it?

You complain that nobody listens to anybody.  It’s like being trapped in that famous one-frame cartoon where the response is “I’m sorry… I wasn’t listening.  Were you saying something?”   Nobody listens to anybody, as a rule.  Just life in our energetic, go-go-go, do ‘im, Sarge, society.  We are too busy achieving, striving, we all have troubles,  here’s a quarter, go call somebody who might actually give three rat’s ass hairs.

You know the deal.  So you take all your time, skill and money, invest in a nonprofit you dream up dedicated to carefully listening to doomed kids, letting them demonstrate their wild creativity.   You’ve never run a business, it’s true, but this one is so needed in the world, so intuitively reasonable, so simple, and it works, can help so many little wretches — how can it not get up and run itself?  

You may not want to know it, brother, but you are more than halfway to the public wing of the Laughing Academy, a smelly subway car you can use as your living room, until the cops eventually take you in for smelling too bad.

I still take a shower everyday, and shave five or so times a week, but the case for madness, never weak to begin with, is becoming stronger by the day.   I can feel it dribbling a basketball on my skull sometimes, angling for a circus shot.  I imagine it, at the buzzer, soaring over the distracted seven-footers between it and the basket, and while they check their smart phones, slamming the rock through the net as time runs out.   

“Game time!” it whoops, harmonizing maniacally with the sound of the buzzer.

When Thomas Jefferson’s beloved daughter didn’t write to him

Aggrieved that her beloved father had retired from retirement to get back into the intrigues of early American politics, mounted a vigorous and all-consuming presidential campaign and moved from Monticello to the nation’s capital, Martha took a break from their lively correspondence.  When she did finally write after he was elected president she did not congratulate him on his win or make any other mention of the presidency.

Damn!

Thomas Jefferson, now president, was long accustomed to keeping his darker passions subdued.  In fact, most biographers site his whipping of his horse bloody as one of the only outward signs of anger he ever showed.   His beloved daughter’s silence finally got to him, though, and he wrote to her:

“It is a terrible thing that people will not write unless they have materials to make a long letter when three words would be so acceptable.”1

Dig it.

1: Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History; Fawn M. Brodie  p. 327

America, America

I must find something to occupy me more productively during the long working day. Come home after work too tired to think, with a feeling of accomplishment or even just relief to be done, get a paycheck.   This unpaid uphill life I’m living is too challenging.  

Having a simple, self-evident and overdue idea: that kids in trouble need to be listened to, need to be allowed to play, make creative and editorial decisions in relation to their learning — testing it a hundred times, watching it succeed everywhere — what the hell is that balanced against its failure to thrive, against the vast landscape of intolerable annoyances that can only truly be surmounted by unqualified success, or, in the meantime, a dedicated spiritual practice or an all-consuming job?  That it might well help every child it touches?  Succeed against the odds or shut the fuck up, loser.  

Why for example get worked up about the details of the new trade bill President Obama is trying to fast track through Congress?   Up or down vote, you don’t need to debate the details, it’s bipartisan.  

Personally, I have other things to worry about, like the $507 bill for last month’s twenty minute session with the Nurse Practitioner ($180) and a blood test ($327).  I have to take a walk and arrange a meeting with an ombudsman or patient advocate at Columbia Doctors, see how far I can negotiate it down to a reasonable number.

“Sir, $327 for a blood test IS a reasonable number, approved by Empire Blue Cross under the terms of the PPACA, as is $180 for a consultation with a medical professional who, arguably, should not have been on Google perplexedly searching for ‘pink mucas’ for the bulk of your short meeting, shouldn’t have offered to do a rectal exam she knew — when asked– would tell her nothing, and who should probably have asked about your recent diet, stress, changes in life, exercise, sleep and so forth instead of just making a referral to a specialist– particularly since the questions she didn’t ask turned out to be keys to solving your bowel problems, as you did on your own. But your bill has been negotiated on your behalf and approved by the insurance company and is legal, mandatory and collectible under the PPACA.  If you have a problem with it, talk to your congressman.  You owe us $507 and since you have insurance your argument about being treated as uninsured, and allowed the discount we often give to such patients, is flatly absurd.  Unless you’d like the bill turned over to our debt collector, like many before it, pay it now.  How would you like to pay, cash, check or credit card?”

I don’t know, for the life of me, why I’m not making a call now to make arrangements to have that fun discussion instead of tapping here.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is no doubt a massive and complicated bill.   The president gets hot when he’s accused of keeping it secret.  It is not secret, he insists, any member of Congress can make an appointment to go read it.  They simply may not bring staffers with them, may not photocopy any part of it or remove it from the restricted reading room, may not make notes or discuss its terms with anybody with clearance who hasn’t seen it.  That’s what fast-track means, up or down vote — “yes” or “no”– there’s no need for debate.  Plenty of Republicans are already on board to vote “yes”.  What the hell is the problem with the liberal wing of the president’s own party?

Maybe it’s the lack of public debate?  I don’t know.  Secrecy, and even semi-secrecy, has a bad smell in a democracy where an informed electorate is supposed to be involved in the decisions made on its behalf.  We all know this is a bit of a myth, but still, secrecy is a slap in the voters’ faces, and it smells bad.  

When Vice President Cheney and President Bush could not stall the 9/11 Commission beyond November 2002, they set conditions for speaking to the commission. They would go before the commission together, not be sworn to tell the truth, nor would they testify, no notes, no recordings, everybody on the commission was sworn to keep whatever they said secret.   Struck me as a deal a couple of mafia dons would make, if they owned the court system and the police force.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant for abuses of democracy, as well as hateful free speech, except, apparently, when it shines into the dark side where it doesn’t belong.  Some things are best kept secret from a skittish electorate that can’t handle the truth, is the theory.

Think of the stink that would have engulfed us if the enhanced interrogation program had not been kept secret, except for those members of a Congressional committee who got restricted access to secret memos, after agreeing, under the penalties for treason, not to disclose their classified contents. The memos, it turns out, justified everything by arguing that each enumerated torture technique was not torture if a doctor was present to make sure death did not result from it.  Imagine the outrage if the public had been let in on the details of that program!

We’re just finding out now about guys hung by chains naked, submerged in ice water, kept in cages half the size of a coffin, kept awake for days on end, in cold, and heat, and menaced by snarling dogs, and look how pissed off some of us feel.  Imagine if we’d known while it was being systematically done to hundreds, or possibly thousands, of suspected bad men held without charges in secret prisons scattered around the globe?  Imagine if we’d known that $81,000,000 in taxpayer dollars had been paid to two rogue psychologists to oversee this controversial, failed experiment in counter-terrorism?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement  has at least one provision that some people will get upset about, rightly or wrongly.   I don’t know how we know about this provision, since the contents of the trade agreement have never been made public, but nobody seems to be denying that this is one of its provisions.  Ah, I see some traitor has apparently leaked a section of it, to Wikileaks, natch.

Corporations whose profit expectations have been diminished or damaged by laws or regulations of member states will be able to sue those state, local or federal governments, in special Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals.  The judges in these tribunals will be lawyers who have experience in the area the corporation works in, be familiar with the nuances of their profit expectations.   Many will have, without a doubt, worked for, or even still work for, these corporations.

“But it’s the same with the Security and Exchange Commission,” you will argue, correctly.  “The government lawyers there charged with catching financial shenanigans are the minor leaguers, the best of whom will get to work for the corporations they regulate for many times their government salary.  That’s the world, why be a weak little whiny bitch about it?  Make some money, you’ll feel better.”

The conspiracy theorists among us imagine the worst.  Alarmists and weaklings, one and all.  After all, NAFTA turned out fine.  And the draft provision for the Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals (see linked Washington Post article) includes, ironically, clear transparency rules, requiring that all cases brought under the TPP must be public.

The enhanced interrogation program, or torture program, if you’re being a pain-in-the-ass stickler for accuracy, even though it was far more extensive than admitted, even though evidence of some of the more medieval abuses was deliberately destroyed, even though it must be admitted that little or no actionable intelligence resulted from this widespread, systematic trampling on decades of evolving human rights law and the anti-torture treaties we championed, well, no harm no foul.  You can understand the need to keep that kind of shit top secret, just look at the harm the after-the-fact revelations have been doing.

Barack Obama is a good man, a brilliant and witty man.  He’s a funny, cool guy with everyone’s best interests at heart.  If he says this bill needs to be fast-tracked, who is a nation of obstructionist ignoramuses to say no?   Finally he has a truly bipartisan bill he’s trying to sign into law and stubborn members of the president’s own party are standing in his way.  Many Americans hate him simply because his father was African and, under the time-honored American code of racism, he is considered a black man.   I rest my case.  Fast track this shit.  Father knows best.

“Get a job, you bum!” a witty fan yells at the ump.

Abuse on the sly

I was a U.S. Census enumerator in the 1980 Census.  I went door to door in apartment buildings, knocking and interviewing households on a list I got from a supervisor.  The list was comprised of people who had not mailed back their census forms.  The answers to these census questions were used by Congress to apportion funds, based on population.  It was important work for the neighborhood, the eye contact avoiding, Amish bearded supervisor impressed on us the first day.  Because my neighborhood is largely Dominican, I quickly learned to shout “Censo” through the closed doors in response to muffled queries.  Most doors, when they opened, opened reluctantly, some not at all.  I didn’t blame them, I hate uninvited knocks on my door, after all, even though it made my job harder when they didn’t talk to me.

It was a commission business.   We were paid strictly by the number of completed census forms we handed in every week.   There was one guy who handed in exactly the same number every week– a large number, he was the highest earner.  He undoubtedly wrote them out sitting at his kitchen table, or in the local diner, making up the information that nobody else was ever going to follow up or confirm, as fast as his hand could fill in the blanks.  It is likely his answers gave our part of NYC the maximum federal dollars for population, since he was, clearly, a canny fellow.

I, however, was raised to be an honest idiot, and so I walked to each apartment the required three times, at different times of day, times I duly documented in my sworn-to log, before filling in as accurately as possible an ‘estimated’ questionnaire based on asking a neighbor, or like my more successful colleague, my best and fastest guess seated at my kitchen table or on a park bench.  It was pretty dull work in any case, bubbling in circles with a number two U.S. Government Census pencil.  The memorable moments were very few, but there is one that stayed in my head and came up yesterday with sudden and disturbing clarity.

I was 24, and I recall one good-looking young woman being openly seductive, shifting on the couch in her scanty nightgown, which slipped off her shoulders and receded at the bottom to show most of her smooth, caramel colored skin.  Her skin was lovely, and her body nicely formed.  She had a pretty face, too, and smiled invitingly, sitting close by the spot she’d patted for me to sit, but I was hesitant to be seduced, only partly because she didn’t speak any English.   She asked me in Spanish if I was married, and I shook my head slowly with a small smile accompanied by the jarring thought of her jealous lover turning the key in the lock as I leaned in to kiss her, or worse, a few minutes later.  

But the visit I recall even more vividly was to a married couple in another building.   The very friendly man opened the door with a big smile and a welcome the guy from El Censo usually didn’t get.  He may even have offered me a beer, which I would have thanked him for but declined.   I recall thinking this fit, self-possessed, likable guy in the immaculate wife-beater was what’s known as a man’s man.

Behind him in the tidy kitchen was a woman with a tear-streaked face, her eye make-up a mess.  She made desperate, pleading, mad-looking gestures behind his back.   He was very relaxed, but kept an eye on her too.  Whenever he noticed the histrionics she quickly hid whenever he turned to her he would shrug to me and casually laugh it off.  “She’s very emotional,” he told me with a smile, his raised eyebrows adding “you know what I’m talking about, my man, I know you know.” 

He quickly and efficiently answered all the census questions while she said nothing, stood behind him mugging like a mad woman.  

“He’s going to kill me,” she mouthed distinctly behind his back as I wrapped up the questions and put the clipboard back into my official plastic U.S. Census satchel.  

I had a moment of confusion then, cognitive dissonance of a sort, but there was now no mistaking where I actually was, nor the sharp pang of fear I still recall.  The strong, friendly man in the wife-beater was actually a wife beater.  If I let on that I knew, he would kill both of us right there in the kitchen, the reality of that hummed electrically in the air.  Calling the cops once I left wouldn’t be the end of it either, it was her word against his, and I’d already seen how that would play when the cops arrived.  

The cops would clap him on the back and thank him for the beers as they went out smiling, especially back in 1980 when people were not so aware of the dynamics of domestic violence.  If the guy even spent part of a night locked up he’d get out and come directly to find me, which would not take long, I lived alone a couple of blocks away.  When he spotted me he’d yell “cabron!”, race across the street, catch me by my collar, beat the shit out of me, break both my arms and my legs too.  The smell of fear was all I smelled as I smiled and shook his powerful hand.

I am not proud, all these years later, that I did nothing, even as I know there was not much I could have done.  Today I probably would have done something, I like to think.  I have done brave things for weaker people in such situations a couple of times since.  Plus, times have changed over the decades, the cops today would not necessarily roll their eyes at the emotionally worked up woman and or uncritically buy the calm, easy patter of the affable guy.  

And yet– people live in terrible situations, not to blame victims for being victims, mind you, but people, for twisted psychic reasons they themselves are mostly clueless about, place themselves in hells that they stay in, like that apartment I visited… like crummy and beautiful homes everywhere, behind the walls and doors of which unspeakable cruelties are routinely and systematically committed.

The sometimes grotesque effort to survive

Survival against the odds sometimes takes on a grotesque aspect.  

“How is that thing even still alive?” a person will say, wonder mixed with horror, watching the dried out, half-eaten creature dragging itself along by its remaining limbs.

The will to live is strong and does not, after a certain point, obey the dictates of good taste.  It is no surprise that we sometimes prefer to look away.