Random Notes from a Crank

Dana Milbank has a really good opinion piece in The Washington Post: "McCarthy Won the 15th Vote to be Speaker--But Lost the House for All." 

Here are three ¶s of note that should make anyone shudder:

"This is insurrection by other means: Two years to the day since the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, Republicans are still attacking the functioning of government. McCarthy opened the door to chaos by excusing Donald Trump's fomenting of the attack and welcoming a new class of election deniers to his caucus. Now he's trying to save his own political ambitions by agreeing to institutionalize the chaos--not just for the next two years but for future congresses as well. 

On Thursday, the day McCarthy failed on an 11th consecutive ballot to secure the speakership, he formally surrendered to the 21 GOP extremists denying him the job. He agree dot allow any member of the House to force a vote at will to 'vacate' his speakership--essentially agreeing to be in permanent jeopardy of losing his job. He agreed to put the rebels on the Rules Committee, giving them sway over what gets a vote on the House floor, and in key committee leadership posts. He agreed to unlimited amendments to spending bills, inviting two years of mayhem. He agreed to other changes that make future government shutdowns and a default on the national debt more likely, if not probable.

Perhaps worst of all, the McCarthy-alingned super PAC, the Conservative Leadership Fun, agreed that it would no longer work against fair-right extremists in the vast majority of Republican primaries--a move sure to increase the number of bomb throwers in Congress. Essentially, McCarthy placated the crazy in his caucus by giving up every tool he (or anybody) had to maintain order in the House." 

I'm not a betting man, but I'd guess that a shutdown of government is in our future over the next two years of the GOP's control of the House. 

Republicans' typical bromide is that "government doesn't work." When they get control, they usually show that government doesn't work - because of them being in control of government, not because of government itself. 

What is the deal with the price of eggs being so high lately? Are the corporate egg farms trying to screw us now too? 

Apparently, one of the reasons (see link above) is an avian flu along with higher feed prices and energy costs. 

I'm neither a vegetarian nor a vegan, but a darkly humorous joke I heard from a vegan comedian is how he described eggs as "chicken abortions." For all those pro-lifers out there, they better stop eating eggs. 

I'm thinking about creating a school of philosophical thought that combines hedonism, utilitarianism, and Taoist and Buddhist principles. In a sense, it might reflect a more wide-view version of Dudeism, which follows the example of Jeffrey Lebowski.

Random Notes from a Crank

If you're interested in how brains react to music, check out "Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing" in the New York Times. The bottom-line is that music we like releases dopamine in the reptilian part of our brains, and as the researchers relate, "Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better." That point reminds me of why I like Todd Snider's "Big Finish" so much. 



I recently finished Kurt Spellmeyer's Buddha at the Apocalypse. It's a good book, but he covers ground I've gone over previously through other Buddhist texts, Deep Ecology thinkers, and various social critics, especially those discussing environmental issues. Here's a few quotations to consider though: 

• "We we call knowledge might actually be another example of the images of order we've mistaken for the real."
• "The future can't undo what we do here -- not even with the best technology. Our only hope is acting mindfully today."
• "From the polemical perspective of Zen, living for the future isn't living skillfully. In fact it's destructive in many ways that we ignore at our detriment." 

Below is a short video, a precis, of his book.



Now I'm on to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and various other books from my on-deck shelf. 

Random Notes from a Crank

The craft beer industry has exploded the last twenty years. There's no doubt about that. You could probably go into evan an IGA grocery store and find some manner of craft brew on the shelves. But the beer that began production in 1980 by a homebrewer with dreams is a hard beer to beat still to this day, thirty-three years later. That beer is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. A damn fine beer. And their Torpedo IPA and Ruthless Rye are outstanding. 

I started reading Lodro Rinzler's The Buddha Walks into a Bar... recently and got informed about the Four Dignities of Shambhala. As Rinzler explains them, they "are four mythical and nonmythical animals that represent different aspects of our training in wisdom and compassion. Of the real ones, they are the tiger and the snow lion. One of the mythical ones is, as you could probably guess, the dragon, but the other one is the garuda, which apparently is a creature that is part bird and part man. I don't remember reading about the garuda before, but maybe that's because I've read more in the other schools of Buddhism. 

  
So there you have it: Beer and Buddhism.

Last Words

Tonight I was reading an article in Ode Magazine in which the author was using Buddhist principles to talk about how to cope with wild and mundane happenings in one's life. In other words, the author was looking at life through a Buddhist lens.

For the most part, the article wasn't anything I haven't read before and nowhere near as interesting as Brian Haycock's Dharma Road, but the author does provide presumably the final words of Buddha Shakyamuni's last sermon before he died. Those last words are the following:

"Transient are all conditioned things.

Strive on with diligence."

A bit later in the article, the writer cites a knowledgeable friend of her who says a better translation of the final sentence is this: 

"Move with confidence into the future."

Regardless of how one translates the last line, my crude paraphrase of the Buddha's words are this: 

Good and bad stuff happens.

Deal with it. 

I like the Buddha's words better though. 

Anapanasati

The steady inhale
of your breath, of consciousness,
of attention to
focus of attention--then
the exhale and back again.

Lack of New Year Traditions

Yesterday Daiva Markelis on her blog The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman provided a post about a past tradition for New Year's Eve when, as part of the title, says, "...I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get drunk."

I got to thinking about my own lack of traditions associated with New Year's Eve. While I've been known on occasion to howl at the moon (metaphorically speaking), I don't really care for New Year's Eve much. After close to forty years on this earth, only one New Year's Eve celebration really stands out, and that was a big blow-out for the millennial New Year's Eve at "Chuck's Place" in O'Fallon, Missouri. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to midnight that night. But for the most part I turn a jaundiced eye toward the holiday since it is a hollow one for me.

As my dad told me when I was younger, "Life is a struggle." And Virg knows something about that since he grew up on a farm in rural northeastern Missouri during the Great Depression. Since life is a struggle even though some English professors will try to sell you on the "life is a journey" metaphor provided by The Odyssey, New Year's Eve is just like any other day: another day closer to death.

When I think about my own family's traditions around the holiday, well, we didn't have any that I can remember. Back when I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get sloshed, I think I probably just brainlessly watched the New Year's celebration TV shows with my parents as my Dad read the Waterloo Courier.

When I was really young, my dad worked as a meat cutter for National Tea and then got laid off. He then sold insurance for a few years, thankfully got a small business loan to open up his own small grocery on the East side of Waterloo, and once he "retired" from the grocery business, he got bored and started a liquor store near the grocery store he sold to my brother.

I worked at both the grocery store and the liquor store. And December 31st was always a day when we were wonderfully slammed with business. Hours flew by because you were busy. The date is a gold rush for liquor stores as you can imagine. By the time I got off work at 10 or 11 on those New Year's Eves during high school and later when I worked over breaks during college, I was tired and tired of drunks.

But as we said in both stores, New Year's Eve is "amateur night." Rather than serving our regular customers who wanted half-pints, fifths, or Texas fifths (1.75 liters) of "bumpy face" (Seagram's gin), "Mad Dog" (Mogan David 20/20), "Erk & Jerk" (E&J brandy), and all manner of hard liquor, we trucked more in various cheap champagnes and spumante. Andre champagne or Cold Duck (one of my favorite names for a libation) for $5, people. And for whatever reason liquers sold well then but more so around Xmas. Nothing says booze like the holidays. You can even get your beloveds gift sets of booze with glasses and whatnot: liquor as gift ~ a gift that gives and gives.

I also dislike how New Year's spawns resolutions, but maybe that's just because, like most people, I rarely keep them. I've had better luck setting goals and working toward those goals irrelevant of the time of the year.

So why do I still lurch toward making New Year's resolutions though? Damn you socialization.

Lately, I've been drawn to something I read about in Brian Haycock's Dharma Road. As the author details in Chapter 18 "Thank You, Thank You," "Most of us have much more than the bare necessities. A Mahayana Buddhist practice is to make a list of everything we are given in the course of a day--not cab fares, but the small blessings that come our way. A tasty snack. A song on the radio. A water cooler with really cold water. They add up. If we keep a list, we can look back at the end of the day and realize just how lucky we are. And we can be thankful for that."

"Much of Zen practice is just to develop an appreciation for everyday life. Whether it's a glorious sunrise over the green hills of Texas or a frantic street scene anywhere in the world, we should take it all in and see the beauty behind it. And we can appreciate that and give thanks for it. Wherever we are, we're lucky to be there. We're lucky just to be." (120-1).

As he details in the paragraph after those two, "[t]he hard times are valuable as well" since "[w]e can be grateful for the trials we face, the obstacles we have to overcome" (121).

Okay, I admit it. I almost made a resolution to do exactly what he details above: listing the everyday blessings or positive negatives that happened in my day. But I didn't. I'm mulling it over. For a short while a few years ago, I was writing a daily tanka, which was usually fun and interesting but sometimes it just turned into work. And I got enough work. I got enough.

I may just do the list like I do my tankas, when I feel like it. But I'm drawn to the discipline of a daily practice.

For example, for today I could note how Hannah, who starts back at first grade tomorrow, held my hand as we went to and from the mall today. And I could also record how my first attempt at making Swedish meatballs didn't go so well. They came out more as Swedish meatblobs. I failed to remember a lesson I've learned before: adhere strictly to the recipe on your first try making a dish. And Mrs. Nasty joked with me about whether I'd write about that dish.

Well, there you go. I did. Duly noted.

Yahtzee Mind, Beginner's Mind

It had been such a long time since I played Yahtzee that I returned to having a "beginner's mind" about the game as I tried to sort through how exactly you play the game and then explain it to my daughter a couple of days ago.

As Shunryu Suzuki says in his famous book, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In expert's mind there are few."

I played the heck out of that game when I was younger. During the holidays or when my nephews (sons of my oldest brother are around my age) would spend the weekends at my parents' house per the divorce agreement, we'd all sit around the kitchen table and play Yahtzee, Risk, and other assorted board games. Yahtzee and Risk were my favorites.

So now I'm thinking about the different options I have for strategy when Hannah and I play, not closing off the many possibilities for winning the game via diverse means.

But I have some questions and concerns about Yahtzee that I might not have thought of back then.

In the Upper Section once you add up the scores for aces, twos, and so on, if your total score is "63 or over," you "score 35" more points. So why that number, 63, a number that seems odd to me now? It doesn't even look strong. It's a wimpy number. It exudes wussiness. If I were to see 63 on an offensive lineman, the number doesn't exhibit greatness. I can think of no famous 63s in college football or the NFL. Even looking at the number, it's soft, all roundy and stuff -- not jagged lines that inspire greatness like 72 or 54 or 78 or 77.

Ok, maybe the above about 63 is a stretcher. But how did the R&D folks at Parker Brothers come up with this number I wonder. Was it based on weeks of playing the game, or did some statistician calculate the possible variations of total scores in the upper section and find the mean or median? I would assume the latter method is what went down, but I prefer to believe that a group of four folks playing for weeks on end, drinking cocktails, and scarfing down food at Hasbro HQ in Pawtucket, RI. I prefer that story. I have preferences.

From my perspective now, I have issues with how the Lower Section is arranged, an arrangement that I propose is the reason why I still have problems figuring out what beats what in poker. You see, in poker here are the hands in order of strength: straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of kind, pair, etc.

Now in the Lower Section of Yahtzee, it's all screwed up. From top to bottom it goes: 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, full house, small straight (sequence of four), large straight (sequence of five), yahtzee (five of a kind), and chance. All you can see, there's no semblance of order here except for 3 and 4 of a kind. Statistical and organizational tomfoolery.

Because of this, to this day when I play poker, I still get an overwhelming feeling that a straight should beat a full house. I feel it in my bones. You see, Lg. Straight is right next to Yahtzee.

Meditating

Hannah's dance performances are finished for the year, but I just thought I'd share this picture of her meditating before one of her last performances of the year.

She told me tonight that when she meditates it makes her calm and not so "riled up" before she goes on stage. And she also claimed that meditating gives her "good luck."

I don't know Buddhist masters would feel about the luck connection, but I know there have been a number of really interesting scientific/psychological studies in the past decade that have linked meditative techniques not only to better mental health but also to improved physical health.

Regardless, this photo is one my recent favorites of her.