Nel Museo Nazionale Archeologico dell' Umbria a Perugia--

I visited it more than once, but I was glad to have Phil with me on my last visit, so that He might (and indeed did) confirm the difference that I saw in the amazing side-by-side exhibits of contemporary Homo Neanderthalis and early Homo Sapiens Sapiens stone-chipping--a difference which would probably have been imperceptible  to the long extinct Neanderthal (or judged by him meaningless or irrelevant), as well as to the willfully blind Postmodernist Archeologist who is so obsessed (and obviously titillated) by the yet-to-be-established, though ardently wished-for, bestiality (inter-species fornication) of a human/neanderthal sexual connection, that to acknowledge such a difference, even in stone chipping, might threaten to deprive him of  one of his fondest, and nastiest, masturbatory fantasies; and, of course, a difference invisible to most women, to Marxists, and to all those with i.q.'s less than 115:   Our ancestral Human spear points, and other artifacts, are all different, even among themselves, depending apparently on the whim of their individual makers, and there is an immense concomitant variety of all kinds of points, from spears and arrows, down to specialized knives and fishhooks; while the Neanderthal spear points are rigidly limited in shape and type of manufacture, with no specialization of knife or arrow points, and no fishhooks.  The further, very important difference is that Neanderthal spear points are peculiar to the geographical location of their manufacture--indicating that there was no communication among the various wide-spread groupings of Neanderthal communities, even regarding the most basic technologies.  Obviously because Homo Neanderthalis had no language in which to communicate skills or expertise.

Intelligence? Civilization?

The photograph, taken in 1908 on the Island of Capri, is of Gorki kibitzing at a chess match between Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov--proof that, in some things at least, Lenin was not an unscientific idiot.  And yet, and yet...he believed in the existence of an Ether.  He believed that Dialectical Materialism was true in the sense that its truths are supreme even over the truths of empirical science.  He believed that there was truth in the fustian cobwebs of Hegelianism and German Idealism.  But how could such a barbarian play chess?

Weekly phone call from Phil (in Germany) last night

We never, ever tell one another jokes or stories, but last night Phil told me two, which he'd just heard from Pavelas (the canny Muscovite); one of which I've forgot, but the other of which goes thus:

Question:  Why do women always watch pornography clear  through to the end?

Answer:  They want to see the part where they (the actors) get married.


Funny joke!

Russell Oberlin, male alto, Handel: Vivi, tiranno

Russell Oberlin - Ombra Cara (high F in modal voice)

Russell Oberlin, male alto, Handel: Dove sei

Finally, in 1961, I graduated from high school--It should have been 1960, but I had taken a year out to have mononucleosis and feel sorry for myself.

My high school grade point average was a fairly dismal median of the many things I did poorly or not at all (PE and Math), and the few things that I did excellently well (History, English, French). The official record, of course, makes no mention of my reading in Art and Music History, which by the time I graduated was vast; nor of my intensive reading of Milton, Pope and the non-technical works of Bertrand Russell, Ayers, Wittgenstein and Carnap; nor of the fact that I finished my senior year in French by correspondence (getting A+'s); nor of the fact that from about my 14th year onward I was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica morning, noon and night every day of my life (just as, from years 10 to 13, I had continuously read The Book of Knowledge--and just as I now read for an hour or two every morning on the Internet, whatever strikes my fancy); nor of the fact that as a student of the piano I had begun seriously to practice Bach's French and English Suites and both books of the Well Tempered Clavier, as well as the more difficult Mozart sonatas, along with some fairly disciplined Debussy and Chopin.  Still, I had no idea how I would fare in college--and when I found myself rather over-whelming the little land-grant college that I chose to do my freshman year in, I was puzzled and anxious, and not relieved as maybe I should by rights have been.

The big plus about my freshman year in college was that nobody cared or wondered about my sex life--and basically, except for  masturbation, I didn't have one.  Girls at last I could and did ignore as coldly, stonily and indifferently as I wished; with no hovering maternal presence to ask me which girls I "liked," and when I thought I might be "dating" one of them, I barely noticed that girls existed, and I found their virtual total absence in my life as bracing and exhilarating as the smell of free oxygen in a spring wind.

The big minus was ROTC, which, though it occupied no more than a credit or two per quarter of my grades' transcript, was a constant festering, galling insult to me and everything I had come to believe in.  Moi un Soldat?  I should hope to Christ not!  The bastards even gave me a gun--a rifle, which, in the guise of "cleaning," I utterly fucking destroyed.  So I took my one or two credit hours of ROTC "F" per quarter, and by dint of getting "A's" in all my other classes I still made the Dean's List and the Honor Roll every quarter, even the last quarter, when, as officially and messily as I could, I dropped out.

In sum, three important things happened in my freshman year in college:  (1) I kept my honors' grades in French--making a 4.2 in my last quarter, even though I seldom went to class and missed most of my tests.  (2)  I made a friend.  (3) I fell in love.  The grades in French were still (though provisionally) good when I went back to school at the U(niversity) of O(regon) 37 years later.  My friend and I shared remarkable experiences and adventures for nearly five years.  Following my true love, I found the philosophy and the way of life that has sustained me ever since.

The American Civil War was:

Hideously bloody, wasteful and utterly unnecessary.  Of course race-slavery as practiced in the Old South was an abomination--but it was as nothing, in the way of abominations, from my point of view, compared to Fugitive Slave Laws.

Cenk Uygur interviewing Peter Joseph on Economics (2013)

Listening to this, reflecting on Michael Hasting's and Michael C. Ruppert's "suicides," and Aaron Swartz's--how effortlessly the Cretinous Ghouls in Charge of Everything annihilate every glimmer of light, freedom and reason, as soon as it threatens to illumine the Universal Darkness that shrouds and protects them, and in which they bask and swell and pullulate.  

Hollywood, je t'aime

Funny, smart little movie.  A glowing jewel of a little movie.

Franz Joseph Haydn : Symphony n.85 '' La Reine '' ( The Queen ) - Nevill...

La Reine

She was the epitome of everything a queen ought to be.  Of course,  a queen of France is another, thornier, matter--but in general her training as an archduchess stood her in good stead:  Protocol she could handle, and, being born a princess, she was not a snob.  From her fabulous dragoness of a mother, she inherited a first-rate musical talent and a type of physical beauty much admired in her time; and from her father, it's said, she inherited artistic talent and a ready wit.  The clue to her downfall (to the decapitation of her husband and herself, and the murder of her children) is probably to be found in the fact that she did not get the Americans--and  that the Americans particularly, in turn, did not like her, and blamed her, and her "extravagance" for everything that was wrong with the ancien régime. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who was there, in Paris, as the American ambassador to France through 1789, said so.  Her "extravagance" was not so much Trianon, and her creation of a whole little representative world, even when French queens were not supposed to have representative worlds of their own (though it was that), as it was--way back--when she joined the cabal that forced Louis to dismiss the finance minister Turgot, which nobody ever forgot or forgave, and which was, in fact, the principal cause (along with the fearsome expenditures of the American war) of the eventual bankruptcy and collapse of the government.  The other thing that people could not, or would not forget about Marie Antoinette's association with that same cabal (which consisted mostly of her brothers-in-law and their wives--a natural enough association, you would think), was the betting on horse races and the gambling for high stakes that being a member of that "smart set" entailed.  A decade later, when the toy domaine of Little Trianon was affording its mistress privacy, entertainment, fresh milk and eggs, and justification of her domestic managerial skills, all people could talk about, or think about, still, were her meddling in the firing of finance ministers and the debts she had run up, gambling and betting on horses. She wasn't a stupid person, or insensitive, or unkind, but she failed to grasp--or grasp soon enough--the fatal consequences of being thought "extravagant," as she was judged to be by her own méchants sujets and by the Americans.

One is reminded of a couple of interesting things in this regard:  how (1), virtually unanimously, the French people, even today, believe that Louis XVI was guilty of treason and therefore deserved to be executed; and how (2) Louis himself, utterly persuaded of his own innocence (at least, of treason), right up to his very last days, was asking himself and his closest advisors, "Where did the money go?  Why did we give so much to the Americans?"