Great poem, Prufrock

One of my dad's favorite riddles was this one:

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. How many were going to St. Ives?

I was determined to get the answer and did the math: 1 man + 7 wives + 49 cats + 343 kits = 400 going to St. Ives, oh and don't forget the one who asked the question, 1 more person, so 401 is the answer, there were 401 in all going to St. Ives.

"Wrong!" chortled my dad, happy to have tricked me. "There was only 1. As I was going to St. Ives! All the rest were returning from St. Ives!"

It taught me to listen more closely to what is being said, and when my friend at school said, "How many of each kind of animal did Moses take with him on the ark?" I said, "None. It was Noah on the ark, not Moses."

My dad also liked tongue twisters such as these:

-- She sells seashells by the seashore.
-- Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
-- How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
-- Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?

These are trite now, but they were real knee-slappers back in the day.

I am a bit more cerebral than my dad, who also liked to say "Pull my finger."

I am more the type to wonder aloud whether, if T.S. Eliot had lived in Rochester,New York, J. Alfred Prufrock would have said, "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Lake Ontario." Stuff like that.

The commonality is that we both have (or in his case, had) weird aspects to our personalities, so much so that my mother often said to each of us, "Everybody's crazy except me and thee, and even thee is a little bit crazy."

I grow old ... I grow old (83 on my last birthday) ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair (what's left of it) behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me....

Great poem, Prufrock. Every old person should reread it, even if it never made any sense to you when you were younger.

This is quite a disjointed post, n'est-ce pas? And yet I will send it on its way, out into the world, to do what it will, what it was meant to do from before its creation. If you can figure out what that is exactly, please enlighten me in the comments section.

A few more proverbs

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
You can't get blood out of a turnip.
Great oaks from little acorns grow.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
A miss is as good as a mile.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

My dad would always add that an onion a day keeps everybody away. Sometimes he could be infuriating, but sometimes he made a lot of sense.

What are some of your favorite (British, favourite) proverbs that haven't been mentioned in these last two posts?

October ruminations on no particular subject

There are proverbs and then there are proverbs. Here are a few:

A stitch in time saves nine.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
A new broom sweeps clean.
You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Once burned, twice shy.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Out of sight, out of mind.
Waste not, want not.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) of Milledgeville, Georgia, said, "When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville ."

Just as two of the proverbs in the above list say opposite things (absence making the heart grow fonder versus being out of mind when out of sight), in the book called Proverbs in the Bible there are adjacent verses in the 26th chaper that convey opposite messages:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." (Proverbs 26:4)

"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." (Proverbs 26:5)

which only goes to prove that these cannot be commands from God (since it is imposdible to do both, only one or the other) but merely a collection of things people say.

It is also possible that these verses advocate choosing to do whatever is best in the moment, which requires discernment.

Finally, and for no particular reason, here is a list of things that come in twelve:

Things That Come In Twelve

Eggs
Doughnuts
Labours of Hercules
Apostles of Jesus Christ
Parts of the Boy Scout Law
Days of Christmas
Months of the Year
Signs of the Zodiac
Sons of Jacob
Tribes of Israel
Pence in an old-style Shilling
Tones in a chromatic Scale
Faces on a Pair of Dice
Hours ante meridian (a.m)
Hours post meridian (p.m.)
Jurors on a jury
Baskets of food left over after Jesus fed the 5,000 using only five loaves and two fishes

A Boy Scout, just so you know, is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

Oh, and it follows as the night the day, exhausted. Don't forget exhausted.

Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, ends at sundown today. Remember to start writing 5785 on all of your checks (British, cheques).

I'm kidding.

Closed captioning still needs some work, people

Closed captioning (CC) based on voice recognition software (VRS) has certainly improved a great deal since it was first introduced -- I remember seeing lots of errors in days gone by -- but it ain't quite perfect yet, folks.

Case in point:

Earlier today I saw a report on an all-news channel about today's grand jury indictment of the current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. As part of the report, the station showed an older video clip of the mayor saying "Make no mistake, when I was elected I promised to lead this city, and I will lead this city." Across tbe bottom of the screen the closed caption said "Make no mistake, when I was elected I promised to leave this city, and I will leave this city."

This is the stuff of which conspiracy theories are made, in my opinion. The people who depend on closed captioning to get their information received, in this case, a message completely opposite from the one the rest of the population heard.

Either voice recognition software needs more work or artificial intelligence (AI) isn't what it is cracked up to be, or perhaps both statements are true.

Am I right or am I wrong? Feel free to agree or disagree in a comment.

The US presidential election process explained

I hope to explain how a US president is chosen without becoming hopelessly bogged down in minutiae (or, if you prefer, becoming bogged down in hopeless minutiae). So fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, and try to stick with me all the way to the end, at which time you will have either ascended to a higher level of enlightenment or descended to a lower circle of hell (a shout-out here to Dante Alighieri and his Inferno).

Here we go.

Until 1960, only US citizens who resided in one of the many states (currently there are 50) could vote in presidential elections. Since 1960, US citizens who reside in the District of Columbia (the nation's capital, Washington, DC) can also vote in presidential elections because of an amendment to the US Constitution. US citizens who reside in the US-owned territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Solomon Islands, and the Virgin Islands cannot vote in presidential elections. Non-citizens of the US are not permitted to vote in a presidential election no matter where they live, although some communities do allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. (The fact that in many states a person obtaining a driver's license is automatically registered to vote is a cause for much concern, nay, alarm to those who don't like that the current administration has allowed illegal border crossings into this country to surge.)

If you think the US president is determined by which candidate gets the most votes in a national election, you would be wrong. We do not have a national election for president, which makes so-called 'national polls' meaningless. No, friends, we have 51 elections held on the same day, one in every state plus the one in the District of Columbia. The US presidential election is decided by an 'electoral college' consisting of 538 electors. The candidate who wins a majority (that is, 270) electoral votes wins the presidential election. More on this in a minute. If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the US House of Representatives, where each state gets only one vote for this special circumstance, decides who will become president. (This actually occurred in 1800, 1824, and 1876. Another special circumstance occurred in 2000, when the US Supreme Court effectively decided who would be president by stopping Florida's prolonged recounting of votes because of disputed ballots with infamous 'hanging chads'.)

Why 538 electors? It's a little complicated and I'll try to make it as simple as I possibly can. There are 435 voting members of the nation's House of Representatives. The size of the US House grew as the nation grew until the number of seats was frozen in 1929. After each national census, which occurs every ten years, the number of people represented by each House seat changes, and the legislature in each state draw up a new congressional district map to accommodate the changes. This process is called reapportionment. Since the last census in 2020, some states gained seats (for example, Texas gained 2, Florida gained 1) and some states lost seats (for example, California, New York, and Pennsylvania each lost a seat). In the US Senate, the other house of our bicameral (that is, two-house) legislature, each state gets two senators regardless of its physical size or population, and because the US has 50 states, the Senate has 100 members (note that if the District of Columbia and/or the territory of Puerto Rico becomes a state the number of seats in the US Senate will increase).

If you add 435 and 100, you get 535, which is close to 538 (the number of electors in the Electoral College). The remaining three electors are allotted to the District of Columbia, which is not a state but whose residents can vote in presidential elections as I mentioned earlier, one for its population and two for senators. Each state's allotment, then, is based on its population; that is, the number of congressional districts it has (for example, California has 52, New York has 26, Wyoming has 1, and Georgia where I live has 14) plus each state gets 2 more electoral votes for having two senators.

Each political party with a candidate on the ballot puts together a slate of electors in each state (plus DC) who are pledged to vote for that party's candidate when the Electoral College meets on the same day in each state capitol. Sometimes an elector will break his or her pledge and become a 'faithless elector' who votes for someone else.

The 435 House seats are allotted to the 50 states according to their population. Each state is divided into congressional districts based on population and a representative from each district is elected to serve for two years in the nation's House of Representatives in Washington. The size of the H of R grew over the years as the nation grew and more states were added to the union. According to the most recent official census, the population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 331,449,281 in 2020. Because the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1929 and the census of 2020 counted about 332,000,000 each congressional district during this decade should contain around 750,000 people but some districts are smaller and some are larger. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, nobody's perfect.

This year, Georgia is one of seven states referred to as 'battleground states' or 'swing states' in the presidential election (the others are Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin). The remaining 43 states are considered fairly predictable as to which party they will choose based on their past selections. That is, some states are more liberal, some are more conservative, and some are toss-ups. Accordingly, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are both concentrating their presence and their campaign money contributions in the seven states I mentioned. Lucky us (I'm being sarcastic).

A month after the election, the slates of electors meet in the 50 state capitals plus the District of Columbia and officially cast their ballots. which are certified and transported to Washington. Sometimes, as I mentioned, there are 'faithless electors' who go rogue and cast their ballots for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged. In Washington, each state's certified results are opened and announced in a joint session of Congress led by the sitting Vice-President. Last time around it occurred on January 6, 2021. Maybe that date rings a bell. We won't pursue it further at this time.

Already in this campaign season, with seven weeks left until Election Day, there have been two assassination attempts on one of the major party candidates. There is trouble right here in River City, and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that doesn't stand for pool.

There now, wasn't that simple? (I'm being sarcastic again.) Seriously, I hope this post has helped you to understand how a US president is chosen. If not, I suppose it would only muddy the waters further by telling you that there actually are not 51 elections but 3,242 county or county-equivalent (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs) elections including, of course, the District of Columbia.

The 650 members of the House of Commons in the UK represent 68,000,000 people, give or take, while the 435 members of the US House of Representatives represent 335,000,000 million people currently, give or take. We are neither a monarchy nor a paiamentary system, but which government sounds more democratic to you?

How much is that doggie in the window?

Dogs I had before I met Mrs. RWP:

--Tippy, a male Border Collie
--Sandy, a male shepherd-collie mix
--Frisky, a male shepherd-collie mix.

Dogs Mrs. RWP had before she met me:

--First Nellie, a black female cocker spaniel
--Second Nellie, a black female cocker spaniel
--Tangie (short for Tangerine), a brown female dachshund-chihuahua mix

Dogs Mrs. RWP and I have had together:

--Koko, a tan female Manchester
--Spot, a male beagle
--Gigi, a black female miniature poodle
--Tasha (short for Natasha), a brown female Irish setter-Afghan mix
--Cricket, a gray female toy poodle
--P.J. (short for Pierre Jean-Jacques DuBois), a white male miniature poodle
--Jethro, a cream-colored male Havanese
--Rudy (short for Rudolph Valentino), a brown male dachshund
--Abby (short for Abigail), a white and fawn female chihuahua-Jack Russell terrier mix (I think)

In summary, I had three, Mrs. RWP had three, and together we have had nine. Fifteen in all.

I feel as old as Tolkien's Gandalf the Grey who became Gandalf the White, who knew many generations of hobbits. I wish our dogs could have lived longer, but if they had we probably wouldn't have known all of them.

Each of them was memorable in his or her own way.

Why I love hexadecimal

I love hexadecimal, a big word that means 16, because it makes me feel so young. Let me explain.

In our familiar decimal (base 10) system there are 10 units, and we use the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 to represent them. After reaching 9, we add a 1 in the next column to the left (the "tens" position) followed by the same unit symbols and get 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 all the way to 19, and then we add 1 to the tens position and repeat the units (20, 21, 22, and so forth). Eventually we get to 97, 98,99, and repeat the process of adding 1 in the next column to the left and reach 100 (1 hundred, no tens, and no units).

We should have learned all of this in grammar school. In the world of computers, however, one will soon eccounter (at least people used to) the word hexadecimal because computers are not based on the decimal system. Computers are based on binary (base 2) arithmetic, and hexadecimal (base 16) is a shorthand method of avoiding having to read long strings of zeroes and ones in binary. Hexadecimal notation uses the same 0 to 9 as decimal but adds six more symbols (A, B, C, D, E, and F) that correspond to the decimal numbers 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 before we can reach hexadecimal 10, which is equivalent to 16 in the decimal system.

If you don't understand the previous paragraph, keep reading it over and over and do not proceed further until you do. If the light never dawns, however, you will be caught in what computer programmers call an endless loop.

So if hex 10 is the same as decimal 16, and it is, can you hazard a guess as to what hex 20 and hex 30 are equivalent to? If you said 32 and 48, go to the head of the class.

The reason I love hexadecimal is that I can sort of fool my aging self into pretending I am not as old as I really am. When I turned 50, the folks in our office gave me a cake that said "Happy X'32' Birthday"!

And now that the two adults in our home are 83 and 89 in decimal, we manage to think of ourselves as quite a bit younger by thinking of our ages in hexadecimal, 53 and 59, respectively.

If I should happen to live three months longer than my grandfather did and reach my 96th birthday, I will be a mere 60 in hexadecimal (16 × 6). The only drawback to carrying on our pretense is the difficulty in trying to explain such ages as 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 5E, and 5F (90 through 95 in decimal) to ordinary mortals (i.e., non-computer geeks).

I may have written a post similar to this one before, but I'm not sure. Maybe my brain isn't as young as I try to fool myself into thinking.