More Photographic Waybacking

There are three things I like about funerals: meeting old friends and relatives you haven’t seen for years, unlimited quantities of food and browsing old photographs. A few weeks ago my sister and sister-in-law went through my mother’s closets and found a stash of old photographs that had eluded my frequent attempts to catalog and archive family pictures.

I have a thing about family pictures. If you want to piss me off make a big pile of your family’s pictures and set them on fire! For reasons that are utterly inexplicable to me many of you don’t seem to give a damn about your family pictures. My wife’s father was a very organized photographer that took hundreds, maybe thousands, of black and white snapshots in Iran from the 1940s to the 1970s. Apparently he took the time to meticulously label each print with where, when and who information. I would love to paw through his pictures but that’s not possible because his kids, my wife’s siblings, trashed most of his pictures. The few that survive, like this one of him sitting and reading a newspaper, hint at a never to seen again world.

My wife’s father reading a newspaper 1955.

Such crimes against imagery are common. My maternal grandmother was also a keen unorganized photographer. She didn’t label prints or neatly file slides but she shot everything that caught her eye. Over six decades she piled up thousands of images, but when she moved into town, she accidentally sold stacks of what she thought were empty slide carousels to yard sale strangers. Some of the carousels were empty but the rest held the bulk or her slide collection. The surviving images, like this old Kodachrome of my great-grandmother and her sister, constantly remind me of all the great shots I will never see! Don’t trash your family pictures you will grow to regret it.

My great-grandmother (light blue dress) and her sister 1950s.

My mother’s recently recovered stash held a few gems I had never seen like this great little snapshot of my maternal grandmother with her two daughters: my late mother as a pouty girl and my aunt as a baby. The old car in the background would be marked down as a “distracting element” in many photography classes. This merely shows how bad the advice and guidelines dispensed in such courses can be. The car is an essential element; it turns a nice snapshot into a sweet period piece.

Hazel, Alberta (baby) and Evelyn 1940.

Here’s another snapshot of my mother and aunt with a puppy. This picture is almost seventy years old but I still see the same expression on my aunt’s face. Your smile is a lifelong affliction; I would recommend getting used to it.

Evelyn and Alberta with puppy 1944.

Along with the amateur snapshots a number of professional studio portraits turned up. The following is a hand tinted print of my mother as a ten-year old. Color photography obliterated the art of hand tinting. It is rarely seen outside of photographic art classes today. Tinting is often unnatural and hokey but it sometimes lends an eerie painting quality. Here the tinting works. Tinted prints are becoming rare and valuable. Don’t throw them away!

Evelyn age ten hand tinted 1945.

Finally, here’s a wonderful never seen portrait of my mother as an eleven year old. This may be the best portrait of my mother at any age. The studio photographer caught her in the middle of a great smile. This picture was taken over six decades ago but I doubt that modern imaging technology could significantly improve it.

Evelyn age eleven studio portrait 1946.

Finding this portrait shortly after my mother’s death took away some of the sting. I had a great mother, and because I treat family pictures with the respect they deserve, I have the photographic evidence to prove it.

Evelyn’s Eulogy

Last Saturday, May 11, 2013, I attended my mother’s funeral and gave this short eulogy. 

I will start with an apology. I hope to make it through this without crying. There is a reason husbands, sons and daughters are not encouraged to give eulogies; we don’t always make it through them. Never-the-less I am going to talk because if there is one thing my mother loved it was talking to her children, her family and her friends. I have probably spent more time talking to my mother than any other person. Many of you here today have fond memories of talking to my mother. She always engaged with relish, gusto, enthusiasm, intelligence, wit and most importantly respect.

My mother treated everyone with respect. She had only one class: human being, and we were all invited in.  Of course mom was aware of social standing, rank, professional achievements and all the other distinctions we sort ourselves with but she wasn’t going to treat you differently just because you’re the CEO of an oil company or shot par on the Old Course, and, in Mr. T’s immortal words, “I pity the man,”  and it was usually a man, that expected her to fawn over such trivialities. If I where to design a coat of arms for mom it might say Bane of Bullshitters – in Latin of course.

I loved talking with mom and her words shaped me in ways that I am still discovering. Of all my teachers she was the greatest. She laid my moral keel with reason. She always provided good reasons for me to stop being a moron and seldom resorted to the, “because I’m you’re mother,” edict. After learning of mom’s illness I have spent a lot of time thinking about her. I vainly thought I might go through my memories and craft a biggest hits montage. Where do we get such dumb ideas?  Every nook and cranny of my mind is filled with mom.  My best qualities are largely her doing  —  my worst — well,  that’s my own work. I will never separate out mom because so much of who I am is due to her.  Mom is gone but she lives on in the people she influenced.

A few days ago Sharon, an old friend of my sister Aileen, sent us a message about my mom.  Aileen, Sharon and my mom basically hung out when Aileen and Sharon were teenagers. This is some of what she wrote:

I remember Evelyn as a beautiful, extremely intelligent, witty and gracious woman. I am honored to have known her in my younger years, when she accepted me into her family and her heart as if I were another daughter. Those times that I spent visiting with Evelyn and the whole family sharing adventures with them in Scotland, Denmark, Barbados and lastly Frank and Evelyn’s 50th anniversary celebration in Toronto at the Royal York Hotel are forever etched in my memory as special highlights in my life.

When Evelyn said goodbye to me at the end of that evening in Toronto, over ten years ago, she gave me a hug and said, “Have a good life Sharon.”  I’ve never forgotten her words of good wishes and love and they have stayed close to my heart over all of these years

Thank you Evelyn, your wishes and loving spirit followed me and yes, I have been fortunate to have a good life. You were one of the person’s who I looked up to with admiration when I was younger and wanted to be something like you. Although I could never be as good as you, haven’t lived the life of high adventure and I haven’t been the world explorer and traveller that you were,  I was deeply influenced by you.  I always wanted to be someone who wasn’t afraid to try new things, wanted to be adaptable, wanted to experience the world,  examine the world, understand different cultural and geographic perspectives, know things that you just don’t learn staying in one’s own back yard, and embrace the whole world in all of its idiosyncrasies and wonderful beauty. You led me to those desires and I think my life has been better because of you. I always loved your wittiness, humor and intelligent perspective and enjoyed our many talks about almost everything. You were like a mother, but even better!

I’d like to think that people who really got to know my mother feel the same as Sharon.

Ours is a culture of things. We’re not encouraged to think about the people in our lives as our most precious gifts but at the end of a life our things do not matter. What matters: who we love, and who loves us! Mom loved all of us and that’s why we all love her. Good bye mom.

Now for a Nursing Home

Yesterday my mother left the Bozeman Deaconess hospital and went to a nursing home. The week before she fell on the way to a radiation appointment. The fall was serious enough to put her back in the hospital. The poor woman has been in and out of hospitals for six months. She has terminal brain cancer and is about half way through her radiation treatments. When her radiation and chemotherapy treatments end  the focus will be on keeping her comfortable and pain-free until she dies.

My mother’s mental state is up and down. The tumor started near her speech centers on the left side of her brain. The surgeons managed to remove most of the tumor and the radiation and chemo have kept the remnant in check. Unfortunately, the cancer and surgery have impaired her speech and memory. She cannot reliably recall her birthday or tell us what year it is. Sometimes she cannot recall why she is in the rest home and her sense of time is out of whack. Today she was asking for her own mother: a woman who died six years ago.

People have mixed feelings about losing your mind when you’re close to death. Some say it’s a blessing. It takes away the fear and blunts oppressive anxiety. Others feel it’s a premature death. What’s the point of living if you cannot remember your life? I’ve watched Alzheimer’s drain people from the inside out leaving breathing hulks where sentient beings once dwelled. Brain cancer is faster but it seldom dulls the fear and comes with a menagerie of cognitive deficits. Believe me sudden unexpected death has many benefits.

One thing is clear, don’t expect your golden years to unfurl like some idiotic AARP or Viagra commercial. Forget about banging hotties or gathering around the campfire with a horde of cute grandchildren. You’ll be lucky to get out of bed for bowel movements. Old people smell is a real mixture of loaded adult diapers and stale body odor. Live now — there’s always time for death.

At the Palliative Care Ward

Visiting hospitals is almost as tiring as staying in them. For the last few days my siblings and I have taken turns spending the night with our mother in the Bozeman Deaconess’s palliative care ward. She is terminally ill and doesn’t want to be alone. Keeping her company is about the only thing we can do for her. I am pecking out this blog entry on my phone while my mum sleeps. It’s her sole break these days.

About two months ago my mother was diagnosed with stage four Glioblastoma Multiforme a nasty aggressive terminal brain cancer. I was terribly upset when I first learned of her illness. This cancer is utterly lethal. If it doesn’t kill you it’s because something else gets you first. In black humor circles this cancer is called “the terminator” and unlike Arnold’s robot this terminator cannot be crushed in a machine press.

We’re all adjusting to this new reality in our own ways. I have been surprised at the excessively decent behavior of my greater family, my in-laws and even my “outlaws.” My long divorced first wife, a Canadian physician, made the trip from eastern Canada, to help my parents. My dad said, “that was darn decent of her,” and it was. My younger brother has shown an ability to care for others that we never noticed before. He is determined to see mom live as long as possible. My chaotic sister has a very effective bedside manner. She’s been brushing my mother’s teeth and fussing with her scarves and hair. My dad, never noted for doling out care, is spending long hours sitting and talking with mom. My wife, currently tied down in Toronto with her own demented mother, is more upset about my mom than I am. Her sisters are encouraging her to let them look after their mum so she can get west to see mine. Everyone has shown compassion and concern. I may have to reassess my negative view of mankind.

As for myself, I had a few teary moments when I first heard the news, but I have recovered my phlegmatic state. Right now I am more tired than sad. I expect to grieve and mourn soon enough. For now I will keep my mother company and try to steal a few hours of sleep on the bench beside her bed.

Review: The Signal and the Noise

There is nothing like being right to make an impression. After calling the majority of congressional districts in the 2012 US election Nate Silver enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame. Before his election prediction I was only dimly aware of Nate Silver. I knew he worked for the New York Times, but that’s no longer an indicator of excellence or even sanity. Heck, even Nobel Prizes no longer guarantee excellence or sanity. Obama, vain narcissist that he is, was embarrassed by the dolts on the Nobel Peace Prize committee that confused existence for accomplishment.

It wasn’t Silver’s employer that led me to his book; it was his stint as a serious poker player that told me he wasn’t a standard NYT brain-dead progressive. Progressives do not bet with their own money! They bet with other people’s money. Anyone that puts their money where their mouth is is worth a hearing and Silver is worth a hearing

The Signal and the Noise is a series of essays about making predictions. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that some fields suffer poor, dare I say idiotic, predictors. Economists and partisan policy wonks are among the worst. Silver’s statistics show many of these people are clueless ideologues or cynical liars. They’re not even reliable contra-indicators. If only Nancy Pelosi, that Botox saturated crone, was consistently wrong, rather than randomly moronic, we might profit from her emissions.

As bad as some predictors are it’s not all bleak. Meteorologists have dramatically improved their forecasts. A few decades ago it was anyone’s guess where hurricanes would hit land. Now it’s possible to forecast landfalls within a hundred miles two days in advance. The weather service called Katrina before it hit New Orleans. It’s too bad so many ignored the warning.

One of the best sections in The Signal and the Noise deals with the dangers of “over-fitting”, over-fitting occurs when a model ends up modeling noise instead of signal. Over-fitting is an egregious statistical error but human beings are evolved over-fitters. If you “predict” the wind is shaking a bush and it’s a tiger you’re cat food. If you predict a tiger is shaking a bush and it’s the wind you have a bad hair day. Evolution favors the latter. If life is short, nasty and brutish, it pays to over-fit immediate dangers. This is not the case when over-fitting tells you something is highly unlikely when it isn’t.

Silver makes a good case for the Fukushima nuclear disaster going down in history as a classic case of the dangers of over-fitting. Earthquakes are currently unpredictable. Silver goes over the history of earthquake prediction and it’s sobering. Forecasts made by 21^st century geophysicists, armed with petaflop supercomputers, are only marginally better than simple historical means. This is a tough scientific problem made orders of magnitude harder by the difficulty of collecting data. We cannot directly measure stresses twenty kilometers underground. Hence the data feeding earthquake models are at best approximate and incomplete. This is unfortunate because models based on sketchy data are essentially conspiracy theories without black helicopters. You won’t find many geophysicists making short-term Vegas bets on the output of their earthquake models.

Power law fit of earthquake intensity – click for details.

This doesn’t mean that earthquakes are random or lack order. Earthquakes are remarkably orderly over geological timescales. They eerily fit a power-law distribution. This excellent fit makes it possible to pick any point on the Earth and compute an earthquake probability.  Such probabilities were computed for the seas near Fukushima but the earthquake model used was over-fitted and it dramatically underestimated the likelihood of magnitude 9 earthquakes. The Fukushima model had been “tweaked” to echo the fact that rare magnitude 9 earthquakes had not been observed near Japan in centuries. Instead of following a nice linear log-log plot the Fukushima plot was “bent” and the bend led to the assumption that it wasn’t necessary to plan for  magnitude 9 earthquakes and potentially huge tsunamis. Here model over-fitting lead to seawall over-topping. This is not your average stats 101 screw-up.

Looking back it’s easy to see where people went wrong. Maybe evil crony capitalists, bent on saving a few yen on concrete, conspired to sabotage earthquake models before submitting low ball Fukushima seawall bids. Doesn’t Lex Luthor do this every other day? Here it’s not necessary to invoke super-villains, good old fashioned short-term thinking, fortified with professional hubris, is all that’s required. Silver makes it abundantly clear that prediction, “especially about the future”, is hard but not necessarily hopeless. This is an excellent book for both lovers and haters of statistics.

The Myth of Sisyphus: Camus’s Absurd Prototype

In 1942, with World II raging, readers of The Myth of Sisyphus could easily identify with Camus’s absurd man. Not only is man absurd he has reduced his entire world to absurdity. Now, seventy-plus years later, Sisyphus readers are more likely to politely yawn and wonder what the fuss is about. Camus’s themes are not trivial or obvious but we, denizens of the early 21^st century, are thoroughly habituated to them. Absurd is now beyond mainstream; how else can one explain facile growths like Facebook. Just like homosexuals kidnapped the word “gay” and changed its meaning Camus abducted “absurd” and changed its meaning. The old “absurd”, synonymous with ridiculous, nonsensical, ludicrous and preposterous, becomes, in Camus’s hands, something few would call absurd. But, part of a great writer’s job description is changing the meaning of words, and it’s easy to see why the best of us have become absurd men.

Camus’s absurd man is a thoroughly honorable creature. He respects reason and wants to understand all things. This is beyond his reach but he doesn’t claim it’s impossible, only that his own limits make it personally impossible. Perhaps you’ve vainly argued with scientific illiterates that assert evolution is wrong because they cannot see how it could work. If I don’t understand it then it cannot be understood. Absurd men recognize, but do not generalize, their limitations. Absurd men also see that in the long run absolutely nothing matters. In a thousand years all but the greatest of us will be forgotten, in a million years even the greatest will be forgotten, in a billion years only precision instruments will detect our remains and in a trillion years it will be like we never existed. Many red dwarf stars will still be shining long after every microscope trace of humanity has disappeared. This is an inescapable scientific truth. It’s a terrifying banality that is often ignored or wrapped up in sky fairy nonsense. Yet, the absurd man faces cosmic futility without flinching or whining.

Instead of being crushed by a vast, difficult to comprehend, cosmos the absurd man soldiers on. He doesn’t curl up, go on food stamps, or complain about lurid Koch brother conspiracies. He gives a middle finger to his fate and then does what he can. Up yours universe: this is Camus’s revolt and, in our time, it’s a universal sentiment. This part of being absurd is easily faked; every brain-dead rapper and air-headed celebrity sports up-yours-airs, but absurd men do not play at revolt! They do their best to create without delusions and what idiot would claim celebrities are free of delusions? Many like to think cathedral masons were honoring god. Even in the Middle Ages this was delusional. Most were simply earning a living: if a pile of well-shaped rocks pleased god who knew or cared. Besides, in a geological blink, the same cathedral stones will weather to mud. Camus is very clear: absurd creation is self-consciously ephemeral.

Camus started The Myth of Sisyphus with what’s become his most famous line:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

This is one exam question we all face. Cowards run and hide; they turn the knob to eleven and pop sweet — there’s an app for that — distractions. The religious create elaborate fantasies and declare war. Pure rationalists drag in Spinoza’s objects that long to persist in their being. They don’t commit suicide because that’s not part of their program. Ironically, only Camus’s absurd answer is remotely satisfying. In our lingo:  man-up, stop whining, pull your weight, don’t take crap, expect nothing, use your head and create. Any modern libertarian would approve.

When casting the prototypical absurd man Camus brilliantly chose Sisyphus. Sisyphus put death in chains, claiming immortality for men, but vindictive and jealous gods freed death and condemned Sisyphus to roll a heavy stone to the top of a hill only to watch it crash down and roll it up again, and again — forever. This sounds awful but Camus saw Sisyphus’s fate as a blessing. Life sucks when you’re pushing your rock up the hill but after it rolls down you get a break. While climbing down the hill Sisyphus has time to think, to absurdly create and, unlike poor doomed mortals, Sisyphus gets an eternity of breaks. This is an absurdly happy fate.

Oz the Gratuitous and Purile

This is not the Oz you’re looking for!

The original Wizard of Oz, the one we have all seen many times, is on a very short list of nearly perfect movies. Everything about the 1939 film is superb in excess. It’s as fun to watch today as it was over seventy years ago and you cannot honestly say that about many films. Because Oz is such a towering film classic it has overshadowed all cinematic attempts to reenter and reimagine Frank L. Baum’s world. Without exception every Oz wanna-be, and there have been many, suck like motivated gay prostitutes. Perhaps if we hadn’t seen the original, Oz the Great and Powerful, might be judged a “good” film, but we have and this overblown homage underscores, yet again, the magnificence of the 1939 Oz. I have some advice for Baum fans. If you want to reimagine his world — read his damn books! Believe it or not the book, The Wizard of Oz, is as good, if not better than the film classic. As for film makers — just stop it! Oz is close to sacred ground; if you’re not a Kubrick-level cinematic genius, and very few of you are, all you’re going to do is embarrass yourself and induce Dorothy nostalgia in your audience.

Watching Oz the Great and Powerful (OGP) has its own minor schizophrenic charms. On the good witch side OGP is another stunning special effects extravaganza. 21^st century movies are now in a weird place; if you can imagine it you can render it on the screen. If the ancient Greeks had a god of special movie effects it’s unlikely he could top your average contemporary big budget — tiny brain — movie. For decades producers and directors have strived to out-effect each other and they’ve finally ended up in a place Sophocles would recognize. Real improvements in modern movies can come from only one place: better stories! It was the telling of the story that distinguished the 1939 Oz. They took brilliant source material and merged it with equally brilliant songs. This is incredibly difficult and rarely achieved. In OGP’s case they didn’t even try. The suits that ruin Disney these days have a reputation for phoning stories in. With OGP they’ve out John Carter’ed themselves. I believe a bad Oz witch went all premenstrual on the screen writers. How else can you explain the transformation of classic source material into the Phantom Menace of Oz?