Tidbits

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

-- T.S. Eliot

Rizal's calling card in Hongkong

A colleague at People's Tonight once showed me a copy she had prepared for the backpage of the morning edition. She had done a good job, and I guess that's why she wanted me to appreciate it. The lead paragraph indicated that it was a crime story involving an eye doctor.

"It's spelled ophthalmologist," I said, "the t is sandwiched between two h's."

"Are you sure?" She was already turning the pages of her desk dictionary, unable to find opthalmologist.

"Yep. Its root word did not derive from the Middle English optic, but from the 14th century Greek word for eye, ophthalmos," I said. "That fact is one of the tidbits I have picked up earlier."

"And I did not even think there is a problem here," she said, her smile deflating.

"Perhaps it's serendipity, but I have learned it just a few days ago from Ed there," I said, pointing to a nearsighted editor of a sister publication. 

She immediately brightened up, the twinkle in her eyes indicating that her UP masscom degree cannot be upstaged by an upstart with a grungy Engineering degree from that Dominican backwater joint, that... that UST. Her superiority restored, peace was allowed to reign. She even smiled when I lit up a forbidden cigarette. A Marlboro for me, supremacy for her. Life is good.

Technically I was her boss, and because my rank and pay scale were two ranks higher, I took care not to pull rank on her. It had taken quite a time before I earned her grudging acknowledgement that I was not as illiterate as she had expected. Finally, in her ophthalmos, I ranked above the amoebas, with high expectations to be elevated to bacteria soon.

I remember my first encounter of the editorial kind with her. She had just made a printout of the backpage, and I saw that her headlinewas about the Philippines to cut off diplomatic ties with blahblahblah...

"Should not that be Sever instead of Severe?" I pointed out. I did not pull rank, but I did not let errors get pass my watch either.

"Yeah, sure!" she said, the arch of her brows high enough to hang my neck on. To her credit she looked the word up in her dictionary, perhaps to show me not to meddle with a journalist with a valid degree. However, a few minutes later she showed me a new printout, with the third "e" severed from Sever.

"We usually use the past tense and sometimes get confused," I said, "we do not just add a 'd,' we add 'ed.' It's when we use the infinitive form that we realize how severe our mistake is, particularly when we use the word in the headline. That's why we prefer simple words like 'cut,' as in, The publisher will cut off my head if he sees a misspelled head."

"It's these tidbits that you remember best," the young Bobby Fischer had been attributed as commenting on his game against former world chess champion Max Euwe in 1960. Tidbit, according to Merriam-Webster's secondary definition, is "a choice or pleasing bit (as of information)." The word was first used about 1640. A variant spelling is titbit: I do not use it because I am haunted by the unpleasant impression of a breast having been past-participled by a hungry mouth.

More tidbits: Fischer's comment appeared in the book My 60 Memorable Games, ostensibly authored by Bobby Fischer himself, a high school dropout from Brooklyn. The book is now widely believed to have been ghostwritten by his erstwhile friend, Larry Evans, who wrote short introductions for all 60 games. Up to the end of his life, the mentally unhinged Fischer relied on the royalties from that book to sustain his troubled existence.

Fischer died on January 17, 2008, and was buried in Iceland, unmourned and hated by millions of Americans. Four hours after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, he gleefully announced on Bombo Radyo in Baguio City: "I applaud the act. The US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians for years. Now it is coming back to the US..." Bitter and paranoid, he died at age 64, a year for every square of a chessboard.

Fischer's book and grave

Other tidbits: In this article I relied heavily on the Merriam-Webster app of my iPad. The app is free. However, I have a hardcopy of the Eleventh Collegiate edition, which had made me P1,200 poorer. I think hundreds, if not thousands, of Webster knockoffs proliferate in markets worldwide now. Editions without the "Merriam-" prefix are much cheaper because anyone can publish and sell it without paying royalties to Noah Webster, who died in 1843.

Webster stamps and dictionary

I don't understand why Merriam-Webster allows free apps to its dictionary. Will it not drive out sales of the hardcopies? Encyclopedia Britannica has ceased publication of its printed version since 2010, converting to online format. Britannica died, as the hardcopy edition of Newsweek died, because we googled up for any information on Wikipedia instead of buying the printed kind.

Anyway, I am not really concerned if Merriam-Webster loses or makes a bundle: I am trying to learn how to write, not to learn economics. I have tried business, and I'm not good at it. I have been a newspaper employee, and I learned I could invent and write lies and sell them as news -- and get rewarded with a fat salary. Now I don't even read newspapers. What I read are novels, written by the best and inventive liars who earn gazillions of dollars. Alas, I can read but cannot write beyond a brief, shining lie. So I live retail because I cannot handle wholesale. Now I understand T.S. Eliot's line about measuring life with coffee spoons.

Facebook pics

Jolly profile c",)

No Facebook status is as good as it appears, although sometimes, not often, it is better, but that will not last. Not one is as bad as it seems: all is worse. 

In a way, that's a nutshell way of describing life. We tend to put our best profiles up front. Those who do not have good photos of themselves, they substitute something else. I'm guessing, but the substitute pictures depict things which make the presenters feel good or comfortable. 

Landscapes are good substitutes. Mountains are for those who want to ascend to higher things in life; churches are for the religious who favor spiritual over material considerations; the sea for travelers to far, foreign lands across the waters, maybe to escape unpleasant settings.

Comic and anime characters are popular profile pics. For the young, an anime hero represents the power which compensates for their inadequacy -- the handsome/pretty faces and body they aspire to have, and the easy confidence they wish for. For the young-once, a cartoon figure takes them back to earlier and happier times, when life seemed as simple and innocent as comic book stories. 

Decades ago, comics and movies and TVs were not allowed to show graphic scenes of sex, decapitation and other evidence that real life is brutal and senseless. Sure, we had Conan, but when he sliced an enemy's tummy open, we did not see the intestines falling out, presumably with body fluids dripping out. When he chopped off a head, we did not see the red hot blood gushing out from the stump of the enemy's neck. Happily, all that changed with the arrival of the Kill Bill series.

Now, when Hancock shoved a prison inmate's head into another's butt, we laughed. I also laughed when Bruce Almighty made a monkey pop out of a gang leader's ass. The arms and legs blown off in Saving Private Ryan took a lot of skill and effort to bring home the hard violence of war. A Nazi pushing the full length of a bayonet into a GI's chest made me see, as scenes in the Godfather made me see, that reality favors neither the good nor the bad. 

Was it just a year ago that I heard someone in TV say "Shit"? I thought then that the scene slipped through the government regulator's eyes and ears. Now I realize that it was I who had been out of sync with the trend. A movie or TV episode with SPG (Super Pogi or Strict Parental Guidance) rating is allowed to let fly an earful of bitch, fuck, shithead, asshole; and brains being blown off (or bits of brain matters splattered on walls and gunslingers), bodies sliced in half (lengthwise, crosswise, diagonally), arms and legs torn off brutally (How else? Try tearing one off gently. It's not KFC chicken, folks), and necks snapped sideways left and right, backward and forward. Imagine anything gory that can be done with the human body and I expect to see it soon on The Walking Dead. The comic book episodes also attract a lot of fans and dollars. 

I digress. Going back to our Facebook topic,  I also wonder about those who time after time change their profile pics, like me. So I ask myself: Is it discontent that makes me try to improve my image? What for? Other causes may be anxiety or angst, very different from angas, which exudes extreme ability and confidence. Happy are those whose profile pics, or cartoonized versions, smile -- until things eventually deteriorate and the smile turns into the angry frown of a Naruto or of a Zatoichi.

There are still a few who have no profile pics. Most are new to social network sites and are just preparing or choosing which side of themselves to show to the cyberworld. I feel a certain sadness when I see a profile pic deliberately left blank. Do you feel so low that you cannot step forward and face people? Why show half of your face only? The other half hides the sad aspects of your life, or there is a line wherein nobody, except close friends maybe, are allowed access. 

Some deface their photos, with a smear of makeup, a frown. Some hide their face behind a part of hair colored canary yellow, bright orange, or veggie green. I think of Nikki Minaj, who has survived hard knocks in life. This Thursday she looked pretty on American Idol, with the normal flow of long, flat and blonded hair, without the weird hats she uses as chips on her shoulder (Excuse the messy metaphor). But her face is creased with a frown, which goes away when a contestant performs rather well, and deepens when she snarls at one who delivered a "pageantic" song. Minaj, like many who have found their way out of a bad fix, looks pleasant now, like those who have replaced their shadowed profiles with pictures of themselves with kids, spouses, classmates, pets.

Artists, billionaires, megastars are people too, subject to whims and heavy mood swings. When a Facebooker uses Batman or Spidey as profile pic, he obviously wants some action, not just sit around the house but to swing above rooftops and clobber some evil mayors and congressmen. Others who can conceal their anger or sadness opt for sedate tokens to represent or efface themselves: a Chess pawn (Does he know he considers himself at the bottom of the food chain?), a King (Ha! I'm on top of the world), or a simple stethoscope (I will listen to your heart and, if need be, I can heal you.) Boys looking for mates should beware of girls who uses money as profile pics, especially if the girl is ugly: No compensation there, all headaches.

There are more variations, I'm sure, as there are species in Facebook. I may be wrong in some of my statements, but I'm just having fun. Because that, my friend, is what life is all about.

A gift

Want to hear what the Universe sounds like? Put your ear to a seashell. For full HD effect, read Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" while listening.

-- William the Henry

Silver and me

2:57 a.m.

It has become a habit to me, embarrassing I think, of extolling the magnanimity of the universe, of presuming to know its intimate nature, of imposing upon its generosity even. Accompanied by darkness, and insomnia and the silent stars, and the heavy purrs of Silver as she paws this electronic pad, I imagine my Chinese teachers in younger days, admonishing me for my lack of humility.

"Ah, so, already a wise man, hmm? Maybe as precocious as Feynman, if not as sagacious as a Sagan, eh?" Miss Lee remarks in the dark, sounding like a Jewish mother in a Philip Roth novel, instead of a proper but sardonic Chinese mentor marinated in the Analects of Confucius and steeped in blind faith over the goodness of the thieving Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek who, with his voluptuous wife, formed the original Conjugal Dictatorship of Asia. The Ferdinand and Imelda of the '50s, so to speak.

"He can't wait, our little genius," interjects Mr. Lim, "Not a late bloomer like that poor Einstein fellow, of whom nothing much had been expected of him, as we expect from our brilliant prodigy." I breathe a sigh of relief, making Silver, sitting between my nose and iPad, jump an inch. Mr. Lim, even in this imaginary exchange, has joined the scene, adding his own remarks in a bantering way to draw any potential poison from Miss Lee's harsh intrusion upon my afternoon nap (in her Geometry class). Mr. Lim had always protected me by deflecting the shrewishness of the old maids in the faculty.

3:31

How Mr. Lim got into this story, I don't exactly know. Maybe because he saw Miss Lee approaching my desk, in this imaginary flashback extending back almost 50 years? I don't even remember how this story got stuck in my head, pounding my sleep away in these unholy hours so I can type, to make this story as real as life -- "of such stuff as dreams are made of" -- to make it tangible as the ripe fruit fallen from the Raintree in my mind, to be printed, to be read by those who will be puzzled by its meaning, if any at all, and by those who will understand and appreciate it. Even if I myself don't get it?

Yes. I hear the answer. Without knowing why, I know the answer is right. Yes, you (this story, not I) are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the Universe is unfolding. As it should.

An affirmation! A fulfillment of a desideratum (not mine. Of the Universe?) to exist, to make a mark where life blooms with fecundity in this part of the vast Milky Way, contradicting the emptiness of space, giving breath to the lifegiving heat of distant stars. Red, white, yellow, the stars send off their seeds with each nuclear pulsebeat, to grow where they can, to evolve and develop a cellular structure that can type out the Master Formula. 

4:24

And so, seemingly, out of thin air I pluck this concept and share it here, through millions of pixels to cyberspace. This is one of the billions of stories that exists -- E pluribus, unum; one among those which survived to be seen, to be scorned, to be brushed aside, to be shunned, to be admired, to be.

All I understand is that weaving a story is not unlike the process by which a spider seems to pluck endless webs from thin air. A gift, if you will, from the Cosmic Cornucopia. Therefore never send for whom the bell tolls, just ask the Universe. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Mau, Silver, Chess & David Copperfield

“Never," said my aunt, "be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel..."

--David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

 

Mau, lovely Persian, jumps into the bed and prefers to perch on top of iPad covers, where she makes her observations, and wisely, never makes any comment. I think she is much more intelligent and honest than the bunch of Senators and representathieves plaguing our legislature. So she sits on the green iPad cover and looks intently on Gary Kasparov's book of Chess, Volume 4 of his My Great Predecessors series, this one discussing Bobby Fischer's life and games. 

The 11th World Chess Champion visited the Philippines sometime in 1973, more than a year after Marcos declared Martial Law, in connivance with the Minister of Defense at that time, Juan Ponce Enrile. According to Enrile's "Memoir," Marcos and he had been considering the imposition of military rule as early as 1971, two years before the next election, when Marcos' second term and hold on power should have ended. Anyways, I remember Fischer's arrival because I, with my boardmates, was herded to the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao to watch the ceremony of the new dictator welcoming the new Chess champion.

A little research revealed that on a clear afternoon in October 1973, me and my friends were strolling along Cubao when a group of men in barong suddenly accosted us and pushed us inside Araneta. It was the height of the chess fever gripping the world then, and all the newspapers were announcing Fischer's visit here, and anyone can buy a ticket and watch the ceremony at the coliseum. We did not have enough money, but we went anyway, hoping to get a glimpse of Fischer and the President-who-had-extended-his-term when they arrive. And we got in free! Inside, we realized why we were pushed into the coliseum: the seats were empty, and it would have been embarrassing to perform a ceremony without an audience. We climbed from the back row to the more expensive (but free for now) front row seats to get a better view.

Marcos went onstage first, making a speech I don't remember now: probably how much the Philippines had improved since he closed down the Senate, Congress, the Judiciary, the critical radio and TV stations, and he made disappear tens of thousands of disgruntled citizens who complained about something called freedom. Of course, Marcos did not exactly couch the situation in those words; he said something flowery blah newsociety bleh economicprogress duh we can now afford to invite celebrities like Cristina Ford, who is with the First Lady now. Imelda was wearing a dress with the so-called butterfly sleeves, probably matching her butterfly brain, constantly flitting between the lovely the perfect the beautiful. Bleh.

Fischer made a short speech; he had to bend down slightly because the microphone was still adjusted to Marcos' Ilocano height. We were not listening to what he was saying, or slurring, in his Brooklynese argot; we were looking at the elegant Mrs. Ford. I don't remember if there is a tall guy named Van Cliburn on that occasion. After his blurb, Fischer proceeded to another part of the stage, where Marcos and Florencio Campomanes were waiting in front of a table with a Chess set. We clapped after they made a few cursory moves, declaring the game a draw. Marcos had done what few Chess masters had done -- achieve a draw with the Chess maniac like Fischer, who had reportedly refused a draw with a grandmaster despite having only Kings left on the board.

When the Marcos group left, we prepared to leave. Near the entrance, we saw two or three boxes containing leaflets and glossy brochures about the Fischer visit and the Manila Chess Match starting that day. We took a few copies with us. In hindsight, knowing what such paraphernalia earn nowadays in eBay, we should have taken all the boxes and earned bundles of dollars today.

Kasparov's 4th volume (the object of Mau's interest) contains the second game of the 1957 match he played with Philippines' Rodolfo Cardoso, who was considered the best Chess player here at the time. Cardoso was 19 then, Fischer only 14. They played eight games, with Cardoso winning one game and drawing two, but it was Fischer who won the match with a final score of 6-2 (4 wins, 2 draws). The match was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. A bottle of Pepsi in 1957 was BIG and cost only 10 centavos. In those golden years, every 10-centavo coin contained high-grade silver. A dollar was equivalent to 2 pesos only. A Batman comics cost only 10 US cents or 20 Filipino centavos. I was already in the scene, although I was still a small, drooly but cute baby. Mau and Silver were still stardusts winging their ingredients to become delightful companions in my dotage.

***

Mau jumped off the bed when Silver appeared, sniffing for possible hoard of goodies. Middle photo shows Silver tackling the intricacies involved in Game 2 of the Fischer-Cardoso match. Fischer opened with P-K4 and Cardoso, in a psychological ploy, answered with Fischer's favorite defence, a Sozin variation of the Sicilian Defence, where White sometimes offers a Pawn the enemy can't refuse. Cardoso resigned after 31 moves and faded into oblivion while Fischer went on to win the US Open Chess Championship the next year and became the youngest Grandmaster in the world. He was also seeded to the Candidates' Matches to determine the next challenger to the World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik. He made it through the elimination but failed to become the youngest World Chess Champion ever. It would take 14 more years for him to wrest the Chess crown from Boris Spassky, thus breaking the Soviet hegemony over the game. After that Fischer's mind began to unravel slowly, until he finally lost his grip on reality. In 2001, four hours after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, he gleefully cheered the terrorist attack, telling Pablo Mercado in a live interview on Bombo Radyo network in Baguio City that the United States had it coming. After the US Chess Federation revoked his membership on 2001 October 28, Fischer addressed a letter to Osama bin Laden, telling the Al-Qaeda leader that "...We also have something else in common: We are both fugitives from the U.S. 'justice' system.'"

Fischer, unkempt, disgraced, deranged, hated, died of renal failure in a hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland. Fischer lived up to 64, a year for each square of the Chess board. He was not the only Chess player to lose his mind. The Mexican master, Carlos Torre (1905-1978), was crazy about pineapple sundaes, consuming several a day, sometime more than 10. But that's a minor quirk compared to his affinity to being naked in public. He was once arrested for running nude on 5th Avenue, New York. The next time he shed his clothes was in a bus full of passengers.

Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900), the first World Champion, claimed that he could call anyone with his wireless telephone -- not so crazy in this electronic era, but mentally offline in his time. One recipient of his calls, he said, was God. Steinitz said he could defeat the Almighty even with odds of Pawn and move. And there's the anthropophobic Akiba Rubinstein, who so disliked having people that his wife admonished his friends, "Do not visit too long, or Mr. Rubinstein will kindly excuse himself by crawling out of a window." 

***

Silver, after reading this, eventually lost her admiration for people who even considered Chess as a pastime. She took her afternoon catnap, leaving me to Dickens and his zany non-Chessplaying characters. I've read up to the first fourth part of David Copperfield, having met the boy's temperamental, eccentric yet kindhearted Aunt Betsey Trotwood at the beginning of the novel. The unmarried aunt appeared at the Copperfield home when David's mother was about to give birth; she declared the child should be a girl, and named Betsy, after her. When meek Dr. Chillip said the baby was a boy, the aunt trundles off the first chapter and is never seen again until David, an orphan in difficulty years later, seeks her out.

My interest in Dickens revived because in every mordant novels I read, writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, G.K. Chesterton, Kafka, Freud, Maugham, Woolf, John Irving, Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, Anne Rice, acknowledged the old master's influence on their writing. Even a poet like T.S. Eliot took notice: T. S. Eliot concurred: "Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.” Although Chesterton criticized the last half of David Copperfield, he concurred that this novel, Dickens' eight, is the best of his creation. It is also known to be based on Dickens' encounter with hardship and cruelty in his youth.

My favorite John Irving novel is The Cider House Rule,. The bildungsroman follows the life of Homer Wells, who grew up at St. Clouds orphanage after being left there by a young woman who refused to abort him but did not have the resource to take care of him. I remember young Homer finding a copy of David Copperfield at the orphanage and reading it to the other young orphans, starting with, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”   

Itinerant readers, I'm sure, have in their youth encountered Dickens' A Christmas Carol, of which many movie versions appear on cable TV, and A Tale of Two Cities, which begins, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." Whose mind can withstand the force of the combination of such simple words? It's like seeing for the first time 13-year-old Fischer's incredible 11th move (Na4!!) in his masterpiece game against Donald Byrne in the Rosenwald Memorial Tournament in New York in 1956. The game was nicknamed "The Game of the Century" by Hans Kmoch in Chess Review. Kmoch said, "The following game, a stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of 13 against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record in the history of chess prodigies." It is the existence of such works in words or Chess pieces that affirms the wonder of the universe. Geniuses among us give hope that our species will survive our mishandling of this planet.

Every genius, like the rest of us in the course of our journey, has sustained damages. A few months ago I heard a writer tell Charlie Rose (on Bloomberg channel) that writers have become what they are because they have damaged lives, himself not excepted. I can't recall if the writer is Salman Rushdie, whose autobiography, Joseph Anton, came out last year. In that book Rushdie reveals that Ronald Dahl, John le Carre, and singer Cat Stevens condoned the death sentence that Ayatollah Khomeini issued against him for writing The Satanic Verses. I mention Rushdie here because I have also come across his Shalimar the Clown, in which Dickens is mentioned repeatedly. As I said, in all good books the reader will encounter other good books, leading to an endless discovery of all the wonders the human mind can conceive.

Ayn Rand declared that the human mind is the most powerful instrument in the world: It can cut diamond, the hardest substance in the universe; it can create vehicles that can carry men to the moon, and voyagers that carry messages, about our existence, beyond our solar system, and speed toward fresh frontiers ages after we are stardusts again. On the other hand, I read two out of the four Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer and I find myself face to face with a dead-end, reminding me that we exist in a small speck of space enveloped by the vast vacuum of eternity. There are more Vacuums like Meyer than geniuses like Dickens. I learned that from someone somewhere.

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience... 

And that's it, so far. I'm expecting to meet more mad men and women in the next few days. When I rest, I turn the TV on and watch the insane people at the Senate do their gigs, and the antics of the Villafuerte clan. I also learned a long time ago that the things we write about, we draw from real life. I leave off with another quote from the book: “It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” 

Einstein's World

Words are flowing out like 
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.

-- John Lennon, "Across the Universe"

There are two kinds of people in the world: (1) Those who care and (2) those who don't. People belonging in the first category usually get famous for doing something big, scientifically or culturally. Like Einstein, who always thought something was wrong about the trajectory of Newton's apple, just a teensy-weensy bit off the mark, y'know, but it itches something bad. So Einstein had to learn calculus -- "The language which God talks," according to Feynman, another genius but a more fun type of scientist -- to understand how tiny atoms and huge planets move around.

Even planets, like women, are hard to understand. For example, Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, wobbles in its orbit, just a fraction (about the ratio of a dime to, say, a million dollars), a piddling accounting error even to the strictest IMF banker, but enough to blemish the elegance of Newton's formula of how the Universe works.

In Newton's time the level of mathematics could not meet his requirement to explain the movements of the sun and planets and a block of wood sliding down at an incline in Physics class -- yes, problems that give monumental headaches to the second type of people was not enough for the Great Dweeb -- so he invented calculus, thus making fortunes for laboratories who produced migraine pills for students who have to cram for the finals.

There's differential calculus, for computing very tiny elements, like the nucleus of an atom, the amount of real beef they put on your Big Mac, the waistline of Heidi Klum. And there's integral calculus, which deals with big bodies: the stormy Red Spot of Jupiter, Schwarzenegger's philandering phallus, and the difference between J. Lo's and Kim Kardashian's butts.

So, after going through Newton's Principia Mathematica and universal mechanics, he studied Faraday's and Maxwell's theories on electromagnetism; Euclidian geometry, which did not seem to apply to the real three-dimensional world, which he discarded and replaced with non-Euclidian geometry, so he can make everything four-dimensional. He also delved into Brownian motion, which predicted the paths of small particles; and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which basically said that if you believe Mr. Brown's notion about motion, you ain't nothing but a hound-dog.

Before learning many more things, Einstein had to unlearn what schoolbooks had tried to lodge into his mind. He found out that Aristotle's approximation of the Sun's distance to the Earth (5,000 miles more or less) was off by about more than 92,000,000 miles; that the moon is not made of green cheese but of cheddar (kidding!); that the world is not supported by Atlas or by a giant turtle; that in his Space-Time universe parallel lines eventually meet in blind dates, and the sum of the angles of a triangle (whether of the love kind or of the geometrical kind) do not add up to 180 degrees.

And oh boy! what this man gave to the world! If a body is massive enough, he said, it is capable of warping the space around it, like a heavy basketball placed on a trampoline, and light passing through that warped space will bend. That slight bend, seen and eventually proved after a solar eclipse in 1919, disposed of the centuries-old discrepancy in Newton's law of celestial motion and explained Mercury's wobble. This, in an extremely simplified way, is what Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is about. So it's not about his mother-in-law at all; that problem even an Einstein or a Hawking cannot solve. Some matters in the cosmos remain formidable.

Speaking of matters: Einstein realized that matter is just energy coagulated, that is, lazy energy that stopped moving fast enough and turned from fiery light-force into slow or inert material thing. I suppose that explains humans. Inversely, energy is matter sufficiently excited and heated to transform into a supercharged force. That, of course, resulted in the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. And sex, speaking from another level of existence. In a lazy nutshell way, this illustrates Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. E = mc².

Believe me, we have skipped truckloads of scientific personalities, theories, principles, equations and headaches just to talk about -- what? (1) The people who cares, who at at the top of the heap are the scientists who spend their lives thinking about and tinkering with all things in existence, from the origin of the universe to the infinite possibilities of existence. (2) And the people who don't, who make up the heap upon which the scientists are on top of. I noticed that since the appearance of man, his technology leapfrogged by lighty-ears while his dude-attitude or sense of life remained merely one step away from the cave, near where horny dogs hump to make God's little puppies in the summertime. For instance, photography, TV and Video were developed by the heap-toppers, and the man in the heap used them marginally for the advancement of knowledge -- What did Jesus really look like? Was Da Vinci really a gay fop? Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, how heartfelt did it sound on that windy, silent field of fallen Blue and Grays? Extensively, the new technologies were used in the billion-dollar sex industries -- Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, nude celebrity photos in sleazy tabloids and magazines; pay-per-view X-rated films on TV and video, cybersex, and we expect 3-D and hologram sex soon.

But, thinking thoroughly about this stuff, I can only see that this earth, forlorn but still lovely, simply teems with life. It's full of species intelligent and dumb, heaped top to bottom with organic lives while up above the stars die of old age and explode violently, sending more life-giving heat to distant planets. In the never-ending cycles of life and nonlife, matter and energy, what does really matter? Those who care, in their own way, are enjoying their stay, and play with God's cosmic dice. And those who don't, in their brute perception, are equally having fun. It all evens out, from Newton's Apple to the Beatle's Apple and, now, to Steve Job's Apple.

Just have fun. It doesn't take a genius to do that. Life is short. Have fun.

Tintin & Schopenhauer

What does Tintin think about when sitting alone above my pillow in the dark? I found out that life can be easier if you find the right philosopher to answer such questions for you. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that cats live for the moment, the present. They never reminisce about the past nor contemplate the future. That's why, he said, they are placid and contented. Unlike people, who impose unnecessary burdens upon their lives, fretting over past mistakes and scheming to set the future right, to catch the bluebird of happiness, to find the Rainbow Connection.

Tintin wakes up while it's still dark, goes to the food bowl and eats, licks and grooms herself, jumps onto the bed and lightly nudges my arm to see if I'm awake. Sometimes I wake up a little late and see her sitting on the pillow, just right over my head, looking patiently at me. I greet her and we snuggle for warmth; she purrs in delight while she sits on my tummy and I stroke her back and tickle her chin. We live for the moment: yesterday was a cancelled ticket, the present is the future unfolding second after second after second: a new present for each cancelled past. Life with a cat can be so simple and at the same time metaphysically complex.

And it is the inclination of great philosophers like Schopenhauer (hereafter simply referred to as Arthur) to make the complex as simple as possible, to make the elegant seem quotidian. To make us understand; to cast pearls before swines, so to speak. Arthur was the Great Pessimist, but not the type to see life as a glass half-empty -- to him the world is a glass full to the brim, of suffering and pain, where misfortune in general is the rule. Happiness, of course, is the exception. Happiness is merely a brief achievement of contentment, a temporary cessation of endurance or pain. Not a happy day in our life will pass untainted by the spice of sorrow, mischance, even dissatisfaction.

Certainly Arthur, a thinking man, wears the mask of tragedy; he bequeaths comedy to carpetbaggers, money-seekers, kings, pawns and bishops -- "to the crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads." Yet Arthur was not a man of dark design who took delight in misery. He was blunt, he was honest, but he was not dreary. If one of life's purposes is redemption from ignorance of evil, Arthur redeemed himself by this endearing statement: "The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole!"

Using Arthur's elegant mode of expression, I say, "Tintin finds herself suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: she lives for a little while; and then, again, comes to an equally long period when she must exist no more." What applies to my playful Persian applies to the whole existence of the universe. We are made of stardust: life is cosmic.

Tintin exists, therefore she thinks. Arthur believes that Tintin my pet, with less mental complexities and expectations than humans, does not suffer boredom. Still I wonder, when Tintin sits by my side in the dark, if she can anticipate the pleasure of play when I wake up. Arthur believes that creatures like Tintin does not possess man's power of reflection, memory and foresight: in short, Tintin simply wants to play, she does not reflect that I am the chosen companion, a bigger creature she can trust and approach without fear of harm; she has no memory of yesterday's pleasure, no anticipation to meet again at daybreak tomorrow. The philosopher, in this case, is way off the mark. I believe Arthur, in his long existence, had missed the good fortune of being loved and trusted by a cat, of understanding the silent communications between a human and another species, of the enduring memories of paws and hands meeting in affection. But, in case Arthur is right, that Tintin will in a short time outgrow the playful moments and memories, then I abide. Still, Tintin will stay in my mind. We have met, and I will not forget.

***

November 3: Yesterday two good people have decided to share their life with Tintin in their home. It is a comfortable life, with the right food, toys, a Ragdoll playmate, a scratch post, and a great expectation that her nine lives will be blissful. Live long and prosper, Tintin my lovely.

A Sublife: Birthday notes

When you are old and full of sleep...
Go back to bed, go to sleep.
-- William the Henry

For more than eight years I have been coping with the disabilities caused by a burst blood vessel in the left side of my brain, the part that controlled the physical movements of the right side of my body. After intensive therapy for more than six months, I was able to regain partially my strength --  to stand, to hobble unsteadily, to lift my arm, to remove the droop from my mouth, and to talk intelligibly if not intelligently. After six months the window for full recovery closed: for the rest of my life I will have to accept that I can no longer use my right hand and foot because my right extremities -- five fingers and five toes -- are disabled.

Disabled. That's how I describe myself. Not differently abled, a phrase which I hate as much as the political correctness and hypocritical politeness of this generation. As a former editor of a tabloid, I have learned to respect the integrity of words and to spit on those who disregard the precision of their meanings. To be disabled is to be physically or mentally impaired or incapacitated. In my case, my physical function is severely limited. I can no longer run, jump, climb stairs without aid, kick; my right hand has lost its ability to grasp, hold a pen, strum a guitar, draw and sketch, clap with its functioning partner. My abilities have been diminished, not transformed into different abilities. I know, though, that there are autistic individuals whose mental incapacity is compensated by astonishing feats, like extracting large chunks of information from memory -- information which enable them to recall intricate mathematical or musical combinations without effort, and without understanding. That, is differently abled. I, on the other hand, cannot do what I used to do. I am disabled.

To survive a stroke and through the years learn of the untimely deaths of friends and former colleagues bring only pain and grief, never the consolation of having outlived those good people. To lose allies, including parents, in this difficult world, is to be disabled further. Where is the consolation in that? Only the malicious and the malignant take comfort in the misfortune of other people; their moral disability exceeds my physical disability.

I live my remaining years in what I call a sublife; if I'm not careful and lose my sense of proportion, I can easily fall and become subhuman, like plundering politicians and leeching televangelists who have discarded dignity, kindness, and other values that make us human. My first taste of sublife came when I was deemed sufficiently recovered from my stroke. (Yes, my stroke. I, selfishly, do not wish to share it with others.) In the early leash of my second life, I was let out of St. Luke's, but I had to be taken around by wheelchair, because my right leg had not yet regained it's strength to support my weight. I notice that those in wheelchairs are no longer considered part of the mainstream of life. Sublifers have to depend on others to subsist, partially, as in my case, or totally, in severe cases. When you sit in a wheelchair, the average persons usually defer to you, even when they do not look at you; you are still an entity, but not complete; faceless, out of the game.

Therapy is supposed to bring you back into the rat race: to be employable again, to be competitive again with all the adjunct greed, envy, boot-licking, shoulder-slapping handshaking bribe-taking, and various contortions for positions. Or you learn to live a level down to a more quiet, sedate, comic-reading, DVD-watching, stamp-collecting existence. And sometimes type out, with the left hand, a blog of whatever runs through your mind. I remember telling a horrified therapist that the best doctors and therapists for stroke victims are those who have suffered a stroke themselves. Because then they will know exactly how we feel, so they will not call a patient lazy because the patient still refuses to stand and take the first strides to normalcy. "She is not lazy," I explained, referring to an elderly patient. "She feels she has become a burden now and she is afraid of standing and possibly falling and breaking a leg or an arm and becoming a heavier burden. Her stroke has already caused a heavy loss in terms of time and money. Her fear is not for herself but for her family." Even the fearful have courage.

Even today, I lack the sense to feel despondent. With my reckless lifestyle, I cannot blame anyone or anything else for what happened: I simply got what I deserve, and even survived to ponder and write about it. It's been a long time since I was able to shed my sense of schadenfreude: the malicious and hidden enjoyment people feel when others suffer a misfortune -- death, divorce, bankruptcy, ugly daughters, poor fashion taste, a new iPhone tossed by baby into aquarium, an expensive and mature Flowerhorn sick with indigestion. So I feel neither comfort nor consolation when, being wheelchaired to the therapy room, I pass by the Renal Section (I turn my head and look away from Oncology), where every day patients with impaired kidneys undergo dialysis to purge out the poison accumulated in their blood -- until money runs out or life mercifully ends. Former Managing Editor Fred Marquez described the process in an article he wrote for People's Tonight shortly before he died. (I paraphrase): "Dialysis is like riding a merry-go-round, you go round and round, feeling lightheaded and dizzy, until you can't pay for the ride anymore." Or the wheel suddenly stops. I can go on and on with stories of colleagues now departed, but what for? It's enough to know that the bell tolls for all. For the young, who shrugs at the fate of the old, as I once had, the Earth turns, like a merry-go-round, and the wheel stops for everyone.

Old sublifers hoard time as precious gems, so we don't count wholesale anymore. We retail day by day (but not by hours, that's for penny-pinchers). My personal math as of today goes like this: 57 years x 365.25 days = 20,819.25 days. My hair, what remains of it, has gray strays; my skin is a parchment marked by hieroglyphs of cat scratches; I walk like a pirate with a peg leg; my right arm and leg refuse to abide by the synapses. I'm worn out, jaded, a burnt-out case ready for the scrap heap, and I've lived for less what an iPad costs if each of my days is turned into a peso. Life in this context is cheap -- but still precious. I'd better stop: I'm getting morbid, and it's supposed to be a happy birthday, indeed.

Brain melted due to morbid thinking.

Before you measure the years, you measure the days.
-- Mitch Albom, "The Time Keeper"

Notes to myself

I am following what may be an obscure but a certainly effective procedure of learning: accidental education. I stumbled upon the term while frip-fripping the pages of The Education of Henry Adams, the autobiography of Henry Adams. Yes, the man has come up with a style of his own, writing about himself in the third person. By the standard of the New Journalism, this is old hat; but if we consider that this Henry Adams was born in 1838 and published his book in 1906, we kneel and touch our forehead toward the fount of such originality.

To fix the dates in our mind, we relate it to a familiar date, say 1861: In 1838 one Jose Rizal had to wait 23 more years before he could be conceived to make his own mark. People in those years wrote convoluted sentences, so prolix that the Victorian Henry James can consume more than two pages for a single sentence. When I first came upon the big block of paragraphs in a James novel, I blinked in disbelief. This was how the master told his tales, twisting and turning phrases where a simple subject-verb-predicate sentence would have sufficed.

I sifted through each line to make sure I had not just missed a turn and driven pass the merciful period. I waded through dozens of overworked commas, exhausted semi-colons, underpaid dashes, and parentheses gasping for breath until I found the treasured dot, miles away from the starting point. I'm sure the education of Henry Adams taught him not to write like Henry James.

Or like Charles Dickens. Someone told me that Dickens can discuss hats for 20 pages. That attitude, or style, can be understood if we are informed that Dickens was paid a cent per word for his stories, which were serialized in magazines. Erle Stanley Gardner, before he hit it big with Perry Mason, earned his dimes by padding his pulp fictions with sound effects. It takes no effort at all to hear his detective unload his gun: "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" All six shots earning 60c. Of course the gumshoe gets to reload and unload six more dimes.

Understand, I'm retelling all these by memory. This should teach me to take notes next time; verbatim quotes are more accurate and memorable. Still, I guess retelling is better than plagiarizing or sottoing.

Before I forget: Henry Adams and his third-person came up because I have just finished Salman Rushdie's latest book, Joseph Anton. It is Rushdie's autobiography, in which he includes the ordeal he suffered after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence upon him for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. Hiding and always on the move, he must assume an alias to elude the assassins eager to get the $1 million price for his head. After trying and discarding combinations of names, he decided to become Joseph Anton, after the Polish novelist Conrad and Russian short story writer Chekhov. For ten years the fictitious Joseph Anton issued checks to buy food, books, houses for the fugitive novelist. Rushdie explains in the beginning of his book why he chose his pseudonym. And why he referred to himself in the third-person.

Reality can be as fantastic as fiction. I suppose it's how you tell it.

Another note: Frip is the sound the pages make when I frip the edge of a book to arrive at a random page, where I start reading.

Lover's Concerto

Lover's Concerto Kelly Chen version on YouTube

3:33 a.m.

Vaguely I remember having heard Lover's Concerto for the first time way back in third grade. It was 1965 and a classmate seemed to know the lyrics to the catchy tune, which had been dominating air time then. I  encountered the tune recently in a splendid HBO presentation of the film Mr. Holland's Opus. Music teacher Glenn Holland, played by Richard Dreyfuss, played the tune in 3/4 beat on piano and asked his class for the title of the song; most answered Lover's Concerto. "Wrong," he said, "it's Bach's Minuet in G." The minuet is faster than the modern Concerto's 4/4 beat.

3:44

How gentle is the rain

That falls softly on the meadows

Birds high up on the trees

Serenade the trees with their melodies...

The playful lilt and cadence of the "hook-laden" lyrics, as intended, latched onto my schoolboy memory, to be held to finer scrutiny by Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia decades later, after I saw Mr. Holland's Opus, which replaced Close Encounter of the Third Kind as my favorite Richard Dreyfuss film.

Here's a scene from that film:

Mr. Holland was talking about music, but he might as well expounding on all the arts -- painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, dance, anything that makes life worthwhile, beautiful, and, as the song says, just as wonderful.

4:11

When I go through the Lover's Concerto lyrics, I remember the laughter induced by the zany poems of Lewis Caroll and William Lear, who appear in my mind  is transmuted into simple delight by the song, particularly the Kelly Chen version in YouTube. Images from old memories made vivid by technology. Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Twitter of birdsongs. Treasures everywhere.

One perfect day

It seems that when we come of age and shed the naïveté of youth, we lose the ability to go through a single day without encountering a minor hitch or Stresstab-reaching crisis.

For example, you are with your fiancee in your car, driving in the rain when a tire blows: that's a hitch. You're changing the #%¥* tire by the side of the road when three men appear and offer to help you by, relieving you of that new but troublesome car (as soon as you replace that flat with the spare), and those extraneous cash, ATM and credit cards -- hey, nice shoes! Is that the new iPhone? -- and the Rolex, that nice gold tiepin, and that Cartier lighter. They leave the pack of Marlboro in your pocket -- they are "menthol" guys. That, I think, qualifies as a big-time crisis.

Oho! you have just passed a stress management seminar, and this present crisis can be hurdled. Yes, you may call the banks to invalidate those ATM and credit cards. The insurance company can easily handle the case of the new but stolen car immediately, if only those #&%*s haven't taken your brand-new, top-of-the-line, expensive mobile phone. Oh, the shoes can be replaced, and you can walk in the invigorating rain. What a guy! That's the attitude, dude!

"Hey! Where's my girl?" You see, the fiancee, the girl in the car, has recognized one of the #&%s who relieved the stress manager of his car, cash, cards and blings. She had a crush on that particular goon all those years in high school. In fact she realized that her ardor has not waned for that kind of guy -- tall, y'know, muscular, with that fuzz on the chin, and that bad-boy sneer that melts her soul. What else could she have done but ride away with the gang. But not before she asked one of the goons to return her newly ex's shoes. She hates those two-toned Italian wingtips.

Definitely not a perfect day. Our stress manager at least has his shoes back. He says he will take a stroll to his condo unit (located on the seventh floor of those posh locales), take a bottle of Stresstab, another bottle of Rivotril, a pad of Valium caps, and then jump into the pool down below. Hope he does not leave a messy splatter if his aim is off. That may ruin the groundskeeper's day.

It's not going hunkydory for the three #&%s, either. They got their loot, all right, but they did not expect to add their victim's ex-fiancee as moll to their peaceful gang. A dame always spells TROUBLE, all caps. That gang is doomed. And this runaway fiancee, what will her socialite friends and relatives think? Her escapade will surely distract them from enjoying the topless photos of Princess Kate, who lately has been having a series of imperfect days of her own.

If I can have one perfect day, I will give it to God, who day in and day out has to face millions of prayers and petitions from troubled souls, including that jilted carless, iPhoneless, loveless victim, even those goons and their socialite moll, and the naked princess, and Mark Zuckerberg and the billion Facebookers, not one who will enjoy a perfect day.

I believe even God must have a break, one perfect day.

I took a nap in the afternoon, and in my dream I heard a voice say: "Thank you for the offering, my son, but I cannot take that away from you. You see, one perfect day for me is Eternity."

Tintin

Young Tintin

3:46 a.m.
What do kittens, alone in the dark, think about? A few minutes ago, Tintin climbed on the bed, then walked over my tummy. I gave her a few sleepy strokes on the chin, she gave me some playful bites which I thought were preludes to friendly wrestling and tumbles: I tickle her tummy while her legs kick in the air, sometimes wrapping around my fingers.

4:05

My eyes open and I notice it's getting light outside. Where's Tintin? First place I look for is above the headboard, there on the window sill where the bottom slat of jalousie was removed to give more space to generation of Ragdolls and Persians raised in our room.

4:12

Tintin just sits there on her hindlegs, quietly thinking kitten thoughts, just sitting, thinking. With a distant look, she surveys the small realm of her existence. How she has grown in 90 days! Sometimes I see her stride across the room with graceful maturity, as her ancestors did thousands of years ago, in now-forgotten African jungles or in the shades of Egyptian palaces. I imagine thousands of her forebears still lie with pharaohs in undisturbed pyramids under shifting desert sands.

4:31

My hand reaches out to Tintin, outlined by the false dawn against the jalousie. She acknowledges my greeting with gentle bites, then with some proprietary licks which seem to convey: "When was your last bath? You smell ripe, you know. Let me groom you up a bit. When mommy Mau wakes up ask her to teach you how to be presentable. Meanwhile, my love will see you through."

4:43

Tintin is asleep now, a lovely bundle in the window. So solitary, her mind so at peace. I follow her lead. Even kittens have more sense than me.

Note:

Mention of shifting desert sand made me think of  Ozymandias, my favorite Shelley Poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Tintin on Leena's bag

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.