A Quick Word Before I'm Due To Visit The Phlebotmist

I uses to think that I knew a huge amount of the music of Bach, because I was familiar with more of his music than my friends were, but the more I study his opus, the smaller the estimate of my familiarity with it shrinks!

I encountered Bach in these ways: 

1. When I was but a child, My dad was in the habit of playing a favorite Bach tune at bedtime: Jesu joy of Man's Desiring (an miserable metrical English replacement for the first line of the German chorale), a number in Cantata 147.  This chorale was wildly popular in Britain, and as a result, also in Sri Lanka.  Our recording was by the legendary Bach Choir of London, led by Sir Reginald Jacques, on an old 78 rpm bakelite disc, played on our (non-electric) phonograph!

The reverse side had two movements from the B minor orchestral suite: the Rondeau, and the Badinerie, which I loved greatly.

2. When I started school at Wesley College, Colombo, I heard the choir sing the selfsame chorale from BWV 147.  I resolved to sing in this fabulous choir as soon as they would let me, and when I was 12, I did. 

3. A couple of years later, I began music lessons, for exams of the Trinity Schools of Music, and my first piece was a Bach minuet.  (This piece was from the Anna Magdalena music collection—curated by Bach's second wife, many of whose entries have recently suspected of being not by Bach, but by his contemporaries.  The three minuets have been generally considered beyond suspicion for more than a century.  But the needs of musicologists will intermittently drag all of Bach's works back under the microscope.)

4. Once my elder relatives happened to notice my interest in Bach, I was given sundry Bach music and recordings, the latter of which I played incessantly. 

5. A certain teacher at school, who had recently returned from graduate school in England, and was a Bach enthusiast, was temporarily given in charge of our school choir.  He wasted no time in inserting chorales from the Christmas Oratorio into our Christmas carols.  The next term, for Prize Day, the choir prepared and sang another well-known chorale: Wachet auf, or Sleepers wake.  Soon my passion for Bach choral music was kindled!

6. My father was appointed Chaplain to one of the campuses of the University of Ceylon, and we found ourselves surrounded by Bach lovers, who were ever ready to form impromptu choruses to sing at every church celebration.  From there, it was just a short step to having to rein in my Bach mania, because not everyone was happy with a never-ending stream of Bach music all the time. 

7. When I arrived in Pittsburgh for graduate school, I discovered that American libraries had not only books, but collections of recordings, and even phonographs and headsets with which library users could sit and listed to the recordings at all hours of the day and night, until they were expected home for meals.  Furthermore, the university bookstore stocked inexpensive recordings of the Bach orchestral works ($1.98) which I bought,  one on each payday!  I played these at as high a volume as I was allowed, and I presently acquired a tape recorder, with which I recoded all the Bach music onto cassettes.  Then I got a little cassette player on which I could play the cassettes, even as I was walking between classes, waiting for classes to begin, or walking home. 

8. Across the plaza from the Pitt Library, was another library: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which had sheet music!  I lost no time in acquiring the scores of my favorite movements, and playing them with my friends.  They were impatient with how slow I was with sight-reading; they could play anything at sight. 

Then came the Internet (maybe shouldn't capitalize the word anymore), and now Bach material was everywhere, and I'm not going to itemize from where Bach information was seeping into my brain.  Then I arrived in Williamsport, and it was the home of the John V Brown library, which had a great collection of recordings, and also sheet music.  At this point, I foolishly assumed that I could consider myself sort of an authority on Bach.  But, in the nature of the subject, different people could consider themselves authorities on different parts of the study.  By playing organ to accompany church services for years, I found myself memorizing the Bach harmony for numerous hymns.  (Bach harmony has long been the preferred harmony, by the Church of England, for hymns not usually associated with Bach, for instance Now thank we all our God, and From all that dwell below the skies.)

Arch, on Bach's Old Style birthday anniversary 

Catching Up

There are a great many things in the news about which I have an opinion, but you know, just because an opinion exists is really not an excellent reason to air it.  (Especially since my readership is getting to be small!)

Politics 

Lots of different things happening; maybe I should review them.  For a while, there seemed to be a sustained assault on Minnesota, especially Minneapolis.  The more well attended the peaceful protests in that city were, the more vicious the ICE attacks were.  They shot many people, including Renee Good, a married lesbian, with at least one child; and some time later, Alex Pretti, a health care worker attached to a VA hospital.  (Generally speaking, the Trump administration seems to view Veterans and POWs, and retirees from the Pentagon with manifest disrespect.  Added to the fact that Trump evaded conscription several times, quoting heel spurs, I can't imagine why servicemen and women don't resign en masse from the services.)

It's well known that the Trump Cabinet consists of wildly unqualified, and even inept ìndividuals recruited from the ranks of TV personnel, some of then, and some of them— Kristi Noem springs to mind— from no obvious source.  (Yes, she was the Governor of Montana, but ... I still don't know how that pathway works out, except that she claims to have shot a puppy.  It might just be a story made up to appeal to Donald.  She's very much into cosplaying a cowgirl, and spending government money to draw attention to herself, ɓut no qualifications other than those.)

The government has run out of money at least twice, having cut taxes for high income Americans, and of course, extravagant White House redecorating sprees, and playing golf on the weekends. 

There must still be some who support the GOP and MAGA for being uninformed of misadventures of the federal government.  It's been more than a year, though, of ineffective Trump tweaking of the economy, with the expert help of Elon Musk, and the faithful conservatives should not have any remaining hope that Trump will make the USA a better place; a shinier, bigger, city on a bigger hill than Reagan imagined.  Now Trump is grasping at straws, such as schemes for discouraging women from going to the polls (by making the voting procedures more difficult).

Will the conservatives lose this election?

Unless Trump's—and his enablers'—cheating works, and they steal the election, they will lose the election.  If the Republicans win, I expect a repeat of January 6th, except that this time it will be the anti-trump folk that will be enraged.  They're playing with fire.  The liberals have rolled over and played dead for so long, that Trump and his playmates expect that it will be a cakewalk.

War again 

Trump's attack on Iran was unjustified.  Certainly the theocratic leadership of that country was repugnant to a large sector of the population, including almost all the women.  Heaven knows Trump is no friend to women, especially Islamic women.  But the US did not drop bombs on Teheran to cut the women a break.  It was, most likely, to draw attention away from the Epstein Files.

Why does he care so much about the Epstein files?  We knew he was a pedophile all along, and all his MAGA Bros, and Fox news, they all knew that Trump and friends were no respectors of women (and girls).  So why not own up to it, and have some wild parties at the White House?  Decent women would certainly stay away, e.g. the US Olympic hockey team.  Ónly team players like Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi N, and Pam Bondi, would attend, and blind eyes will certainly be turned.   (Ooo, am I nåsty?)

Arch 

Isaac Newton's Date of Birth

Well, I'll be snookered!

Remember when I made posts about how J.S. Bach's birthday was incorrectly recorded?

Well, let's review the facts, this time using some convenient terminology.  (Truly, language helps us clarify an absolute host of obscure ideas.)

Basically, our Earth year is not an exact number of days.  Little kids are taught that a year is 365 days long.  But most of us learn later, that it's about 365-and-a-quarter days.  We let the quarters pile up, and every 4 years or so, we add in Feb 29.  (You realize that February usually only has 28 days.)

Unfortunately, a year is a tiny bit less than 365 and a quarter days.  So, the Feb 29th Leap Day is advancing the calendar too fast.  Over several centuries, the Equinox landed almost a month too late.

By the time the papal astronomers got up the guts to make a move on this problem, it was the papacy of one Pope Gregory (Pope Gregory XIII, 1572–1585), a millennium and a half after Julius Ceasar.  Luckily for everybody, the shortfall (each year) is, I believe, in the order of a few minutes.  But over so many years, these minutes certainly added up.

In certain parts of Germany in the 1600s, people hated the Pope with a passion.  (Remember: Martin Luther was from Saxony, the very region in which Bach was born.)  They stuck with the outdated Julian Calendar.  The dates recorded for births in Thuringia, for instance, were according to the Julian Calendar.  Some time later, everybody realized that calendars had little to do with religion, and that using the new Gregorian Calendar had huge advantages.  The Gregorian dates were called New Style Dates, and the older dates were called Old Style Dates.  Bach's Old Style Birthday was March 21.

I celebrate his birthday on that date, because it's the Equinox, which is cool.  Also, if Bach were somehow raised from the dead, he would give his DOB as March 21.

Well, guess who else had an axe to grind about the calendar?  The English!  At the time of Isaac Newton, England, too, used the Old Style Julian dates.  Isaac's birthday had been celebrated for a Century or two on Christmas Day!  But then, British astronomers saw the light, and Isaac's birthday was revised to be January 4th.

You might not realize that the divergence between Old Style and New Style dates grows steadily, as those minutes add up.  In 1643/1642, Newton's birth year, the difference was just about 10 days; in Bach's time it was about the same.  Today, if anyone aspires to use the Old Style Calendar, the divergence would be crazy.  (I should be able to tell you exactly how much, but I'm too unmotivated to figure out out; after all, I'm retired.  Or just plain tired.)  [Added later: 13 days.]

Well, Happy Wednesday, as the man said!

Arch 

Deeply Ashamed

Since I made my last post, 

(1) Trump has made a kidnapping run into Caracas, and abducted the Venezuelan PM, Nicholas Maduro (and his wife), and brought them to the USA.  Oil company executives were informed, but not Congress. 

(2) A woman was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis (?) with a gunshot to her head through a car window.  As far a I know, the woman was unarmed—though ICE is trying to put together a case against the deceased woman as having attempted vehicular homicide. 

Well, that's the background.  Most of us are convinced that all this excitement and government lawlessness is intended to distract from the Epstein files, which are strongly believed to indicate that Trump was connected to a pedophile ring. 

MAGA is at this time sufficiently morally discredited that having a pedophile as head of the USA is not a notable embarrassment.  The degree to which Trump exerted himself to avoid being connected with Epstein suggests that Trump is uncomfortable being accused of pedophilia.  He isn't too upset about sexual harassing adult women. 

Ever since Trump entered the White House in 2017, one thing has been on the rise: the gradual A$$#olification of US men, and some women.

Most of us do a minimum of certain actions: returning shopping carts to their collecting areas; allowing pedestrians to finish crossing the street; making allowances for those carrying infants, especially mothers; being polite to checkout clerks in supermarkets.  Gradually, over the last few years, these acts of common decency seem to be in the wane.  Sometimes I wonder how different this society is, from the one I knew before Trump.

Trump can hardly say a word about President Obama without declaring how terrible he was!  If you compare side-by-side statistics of work done, laws passed, hours taken off for recreational activities, money spent recklessly in supposed improvement of the White House, by President Obama and Trump, I can't believe that Trump would even consider competing with Obama.

Testosterone is fully unleashed.  Hegseth declares that the 'new' armed forces is going to be vicious and muscular. 

And is not going to abide by the law.  Abiding by the law, it appears, is what made the US weak and ineffective. 

Arch. 

Getting inside Another's Head

It's not uncommon to ask ourselves: What was he/she thinking?

People often do inexplicable things.  What we have to do is to get inside their head(s), and try to follow the reasoning they must have gone through.  We've heard the advice that we should not condemn someone until we have walked a mile in their shoes.  That's a slightly different thing: to imagine what they've experienced.

It's my belief that education makes this activity—of imagining what someone else is thinking—a little easier.  It's never truly easy; if it seems easy, you're probably not doing it with enough enthusiasm. 

In these days, I try to imagine what it's like being a follower of Trump.  Bear in mind, though, that there are a number of different sorts of Trump followers.  There are those who (1) have followed Trump for years, and feel that they know exactly what Trump is thinking.  I have to believe that, having done that, they're ready with good reasons why he says things, promises things that he couldn't possibly deliver.  They probably don't take those promises seriously; they probably think: that's just politics; only just a fraction of election promises will be made good!

Then there are (2) people who have made a calculated decision to take Trump as their man because of some aspect of his character: perhaps he looks just like some family member who was uncannily sharp about political outcomes.  Maybe it's the way he talks.  Maybe it's his blonde hair and blue eyes, or how tall he is. 

Maybe there are some (3) who cling to him in the hope that he can do something tangible for them.  There are a lot of people (4) who dislike Democrats and Congress with a passion, and just want to make life as difficult for them as possible.  And of course, there are those who think that there are just too many Federal Regulations.  They don't feel that this is a free country anymore.

Given all this, (a) what do we think that Trump followers are thinking?  Can we get inside their heads?  And (b) what do these Trump followers think we're thinking?  Some writing by Trumpees (about what anti-Trumpers are thinking) are totally off the wall.  Well, at any given moment, people hostile to Trump and his followers could be thinking a lot of different things, that's true.  But I think the proportion of anti-Trumpers thinking to make the Trumpees angry are probably very few!  (Making ICE angry is different.  Also making Lindsey Graham angry could be a lot of fun.)  I, for one, am totally occupied with very different matters, and baiting Trumpees are very far from my mind. 

Thinking what's going on inside the heads of Trumpees 

Quiet! Quiet, Piggy

This whole country appears to be going to Hell in a Handbasket.

There used to be some doubt whether Trump had some psychological condition which made him insensitive to social norms.  But he seems to have surrounded himself with similar people, all of whom are perfectly happy to throw the entire USA under the bus, to stretch the meaning of that phrase.

I've contemplated responding to the flood of terrible administrative actions taken by the White House over the last few months, but being retired, I don't any longer have the necessary vigor to address the problems.  The election of Mr. Mamdani to the mayorship of New York City seems to be one happy thing to celebrate.  Mamdani is due to meet with the prez soon.  I sincerely wish we vould securely archive Mr. Mamdani to the Cloud, anticipating a hostile environment at this meeting, but better heads than mine are probably working on the security problem.

Arch 

Correlation Between Trump's Presidency and Drug Use

I think that there is some suspicion that the current administration might be causing a lot of headaches.  [This idea was first introduced by Andy Borowitz.]  Of course, we know that correlation is not causation; I mean, they teach that in Sunday School.  But if they do a study about the use of painkillers before vs after the inauguration, they might find that use has dramatically increased.  And we can draw the obvious conclusions. 

Arch