Flannel Shirt

Bridget and a little strawberry

We've been having a dry spell with news, as opposed to our weather, so here's a blast from the past: Robin in a strawberry-themed outfit and her cousin Bridget. 

Otherwise, things are pretty quiet around here. Joan's friend from California, Catherine, has been up visiting with a son and his family for the last few days. Meanwhile the dogs and I have been walking the block. Our neighbor Barb is the owner of Izzy's best friend, Mickey, who was out there this morning. Bill across the street came out with his dog Frankie (called that because of his blue eyes, thus Frank Sinatra, "Ol' Blue Eyes"). The three of them were chasing squeaky balls, while Gil sort of played around them and sniffed and peed on things. Little Mabel, who's about two now and lives at the end of the block, loves touching Gilbert, who is fluffy and wonderful and doesn't mind Mabel patting him and then smiling and giggling. 

When Izzy and Mickey play, chasing each other, tugging on a rope or a ball or stick, they are filled with so much excitement that it's obvious they're having a great time. The two old ladies who live at the end of the block (I guess not that old, they're our age) just love to watch the two dogs run around. One even made a rope for the two of them to tug. 

Great way for everyone to start the day. 

My trust in mankind...

...is getting tested.

More people in Louisiana's Republican Party think Obama is to blame for the post-Katrina government actions than George Bush. Obama wasn't President for another three years after Katrina. Bush was.

This is not a hard one to figure out. How stupid do you have to be?

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

Bush was criticized heavily when he did not immediately return to Washington from his vacation in Texas after the storm had reached landfall. The government was also slow to provide relief aid and Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), admitted in a televised interview that he learned that many of the storm's victims at the New Orleans Convention Center were without food and water well after the situation had been reported in the press.

Brown's handling of the response ultimately led to his resignation, but Bush offered an infamous endorsement of the FEMA chief only days before he stepped down. 

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.

Need a bigger hard drive

Joanie and I were sitting around Saturday morning. I was working on my second cup while Joan was thumbing through the Spring Eddie Bauer catalog. We had the radio turned to the local jazz station. And on comes a familiar tune. What I remember are the lyrics, only the first two lines really. I'm an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.

Now I haven't heard this song for decades, maybe half a century. And yet there it is in my memory. My mind can work throught the jazzy ornamentation of the tune and down at the bottom is that old cowhand from the Rio Grande. 

Memory is remarkable. But then why can't I as easily embrace, say, the Lumineers? Or some more recent music?

This may explain it. The hard drive is full.

Mice whose brains were genetically modified to resemble those of adult humans showed no decrease in the ability to make the strong synaptic connections that enable learning — a surprise to neuroscientists at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, whose findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

Yet as the modified mice entered adulthood, they were less capable of weakening connections that already existed, and that made it hard for them to form robust new long-term memories. Think of it as writing on a blank piece of white paper versus a newspaper page, said the lead author, Joe Z. Tsien. “The difference is not how dark the pen is,” he said, “but that the newspaper already has writing on it.”

The researchers focused on two proteins — NR2A and NR2B — long known to play a role in the forging of new connections in the brain. Before puberty, the brain produces more NR2B than NR2A; in adulthood, the ratio reverses.

By prodding mice to produce more NR2A than NR2B, effectively mimicking the postpubescent brain, scientists expected the subjects to have trouble forming strong connections. Instead, the mice showed no trouble creating new short-term memories, but brain scans showed that they struggled to weaken the connections that had formed older long-term memories.

“What our study suggests,” Dr. Tsien said, “is that it’s not just the strengthening of connections, but the weakening of the other sets of connections that creates a holistic pattern of synaptic connectivity that is important for long-term memory formation.”

This suggests that until "I'm An Old Cowhand" and stuff like "They're Coming To Take Me Away" by Napoleon the XIII get cleaned out of the brain I'll have trouble moving in the new stuff.

Plus, I'll probably wander around with the "Old Cowhand" earworm for the next week.

Today in history

May 5th is Cinco de Mayo. My 'pájarita' was born today.

Also, on 5/5/1818 Karl Marx was born, and on 5/5/1821 Napoleon Bonaparte died, in exile on St. Helena Island.

If you didn't see my birthday card to my daughter, it's here: New Blue Spaces For Candy Hat People.

Unstable Idol

I took this photo in the early 80s. It's a statue in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and at the time it had some stability problems. I used it for the cover art of a cassette of songs I'd done, which I called "Unstable Idol". I was also thinking of folks like Elvis Presley. There's something about the boards that hold the statue in place and the wild eucalyptus trees in the background that struck my artistic eye.

Merry Christmas, Jean Shepherd

Donald Fagen, the main man for the rock group Steely Dan, grew up in New Jersey listening to Jean Shepherd on the radio. Like me. Shepherd wasn't a perfect man, but was a man for that age. Here's a very good article about him:

In the late '50s, while Lenny Bruce was beginning his climb to holy infamy in jazz clubs on the West Coast, Shepherd's all-night monologues on WOR had already gained him an intensely loyal cult of listeners. Unlike Bruce's provocative nightclub act, which had its origins in the "schpritz" of the Catskills comics, Shepherd's improvised routines were more in the tradition of Midwestern storytellers like Mark Twain, but with a contemporary urban twist: say, Mark Twain after he'd been dating Elaine May for a year and a half. Where Bruce's antics made headlines, Shepherd, with his warm, charismatic voice and folksy style, could perform his most subversive routines with the bosses in the WOR front office and the FCC being none the wiser. At least most of the time.

I was introduced to Shep, as his fans called him, by my weird uncle Dave. Dave, who was a bit of a hipster, used to crash on our sofa when he was between jobs. Being a bookish and somewhat imperious 12-year-old, already desperately weary of life in suburban New Jersey and appalled by Hoss and Little Joe and Mitch Miller and the heinous Bachelor Father, I figured Dave was my man. One night, after ruthlessly beating me at rummy, he put down the cards and said, "Now we're gonna listen to Shepherd—this guy's great." The Zenith table model in the kitchen came to life midway through Shepherd's theme music, a kitschy, galloping Eduard Strauss piece called the "Bahn Frei" polka. And then there was that voice, cozy, yet abounding with jest.

He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my 12-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with 25 more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down, and loosened his tie. I was hooked. From then on, like legions of other sorry-ass misfits throughout the Northeast, I tuned in every weeknight at 11:15 and let Shep put me under his spell. Afterward, I'd switch to an all-night jazz station and dig the sounds until I conked out. Eventually, this practice started to affect my grades and I almost didn't graduate from high school.

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; "slobism"; "creeping meatballism"; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in "trivia," bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone.

I have a memory of riding somewhere with my family in our Studebaker, on a cold gray winter afternoon, with Jean Shepherd on the radio.

Turn it up, Dad.

Merry Christmas.