When you least expect it

I was looking at the university web page that displays a list of the students registered for a course that I am teaching. Thinking that there might be something to find out about how to download or print this list, I clicked where it said "Help". A little box opened, and here is what it said:

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Summary Class List

This list provides instructors with a detailed list of students who are registered for a specified course and term. The students can be ordered by registration sequence number (the order by which they registered for the course) or alphabetical order, depending on whether or not a registration process has been run by your Registrar's Office. If a student is deceased, the word Deceased will display next to the name. Choose CRN Selection to view information about a different course. Select Term Selection to view information about a different term. Choose a link to navigate to other pages.

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Nika

Our cat finds bags entertaining. We find her entertaining.

The edge of surfeit

In past years I used to occasionally interrupt my attempts at Christmas shopping by going into a record store and picking up a new seasonal tape or CD. You know: "Oh look, so-and-so has a Christmas album, I wonder if it's any good, it'd be nice to have some more of that stuff to listen to at this time of year." These years I do it at the iTunes store. One advantage is that you can hear a little sample first.

Most of it disappoints. You understand, all I ask for is a few good songs per album, but even so it's a crap shoot. There was the Roches' collection We Three Kings: They sounded like they were making fun of both the music and themselves in every song. Forget it.* And Linda Ronstadt's A Merry Little Christmas: Well, maybe I should have seen that one coming; she's got a way of coating a song in sugary sentiment anyway, and then you put that on top of Christmas and it crosses some horrible threshold ... It's like holiday food. You take for granted that you'll be eating more sugar and more fat than usual, but even so there are moments when it's just too much, even for a guy like me.

That line between "What a delicious holiday treat!" and "Help, I can't stand it! Get this away from me!" is a fine line, and of course it depends on the beholder and on the beholder's mood. Bette Midler made an album called Cool Yule. I have had it for a few years. I had been remembering it as almost in the Ronstadt category, but I listened to it right through yesterday and almost none of it had seriously ill effects. There are a couple of songs there that I'm not sure I would ever want to hear again. And I'm not saying I want to hear her special Christmas version of Nanci Griffith's From a Distance more than, say, three or four times in the season; it resembles an apple pie covered with butter frosting, and it's got incongruous bits of other songs stuck in it like sugarplums. But I'm glad it's there. Her Mele Kalikimaka is perfectly fine, although I can't help hearing it as a slightly pale imitation of the Bing Crosby version. In the case of that song, if you're not going to depart further than that from the canonical version, what's the point? The same applies to I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm; in this case it's the Dean Martin version that is the reindeer in the room. But I'm really liking her I'll be Home for Christmas and What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? They're neither better nor worse than, respectively, Bing's and Ella's: a bit heavily frosted, but yummy.

In the course of singing a duet with Johnny Mathis, a medley of Winter Wonderland and Let it Snow, Bette calls Mathis "The King of Christmas". Which led me to check out his Christmas stuff. Well, it may be too soon to say, but so far I'm disappointed. Maybe I need to get used to the pace, which is slow, and to that weird way he has of sliding up or down on a note as he modulates to a new key. In any case, it's not a total loss. For one thing, his Sleigh Ride is a keeper. For another, he includes (between two verses!) that intro to WW. At last I have the tune! Oh, and I'm putting his Chestnuts in with all those others (and taking out a couple -- the Crosby/Sinatra and the Brubeck).

* One bright spot: They sing the intro of Winter Wonderland ("Over the ground lies a blanket of white, ... Two hearts are thrilling, in spite of the chilling weather  ..."), which I never knew before. I was happy to find it, but frustrated by the fact that they do it in a kind of three-part harmony that leaves me wondering which of the three parts is the melody.

All chestnuts, all the time

Well, I did it. I listened to all thirteen renditions of Chestnuts. No regrets, but possibly there are one or two that I never need to hear again.

You wouldn't think that a chorus could really do justice to this song, and you'd probably be right. But it's not that simple: the Mitch Miller version and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir version are really very different. I prefer the latter, though I'll use it sparingly.

It occurs to me that it is not possible to record a version of this song without making implicit reference to the Nat King Cole version. (I am thinking of Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".) For example, if you don't sing "Merry Christ-ma-has" at the end, that's a statement in itself.

Carols

In  The Oxford Book of Carols  there is a footnote to "Good King Wenceslas". It begins

This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the delightful tune, which is that of a Spring carol, "Tempus adest floridum", No. 99. Unfortunately Neale in 1853 substituted for the Spring carol this 'Good King Wenceslas', one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call 'doggerel', and Bullen condemns as 'poor and commonplace to the last degree'.

Bing

Bing Crosby's album "White Christmas" has twelve songs. These years only about four of them get on my short list of seasonal music.

My favorite thing about Bing's style is the way he dances around the beat: a phrase will have an out-of-rhythm experience to the point where it seems to be getting lost, and then the next thing you know it's home safe and sound, like a ghost returning to its body or a plane to its aircraft carrier.

The second- and third-worst songs, in some order, are "Adeste Fideles" -- Latin with unapologetically American vowels ("A-des-tay Fee-day-lace") -- and the deeply hokey "Christmas in Killarney".

The absolute worst is "Faith of Our Fathers", the only one where Crosby's deliberate rhythmic looseness seems misplaced. He's doing it against a background of choral singing -- and in my opinion pretty lame choral singing and badly recorded at that.

Three of the best are those in which Bing is joined by the Andrews Sisters: "Jingle Bells", "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", and "Mele Kalikimaka"*. The sisters' tightly rhythmic self-contained harmonizing is just what Bing's loosey-goosey crooning needs, and vice versa. Each style enhances the other.

My other favorite is his heartfelt version of "I'll be home for Christmas". (Incidentally, this is what is playing in Nathaniel Fisher's new hearse at the big bad moment in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under.) This season I've been listening to Tony Bennett's cool and breezy version of the same song, but at this point I'm about ready to go back to Bing.

* This is deeply hokey, too, but in a good way.

It's like an advent calendar, isn't it?

A once a day thing, I mean. My last post was at 11:58 pm on December 2 (in my time zone), and now it's December 3. Maybe I will write about a different Christmas song every day for weeks. Probably not, though.

All I want to say now, before going to bed, is something about "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas": There are some variations in the lyrics. I grew up hearing "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" at the high point in the final stanza. I was happy to find the alternative "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" in the Ella Fitzgerald rendition, and even happier to discover later on that this meatier and more melancholy version of the song was the authentic one from "Meet me in St. Louis". It turns out that the bowdlerized "shining star"version was created especially for Frank Sinatra, who wanted to record the song but needed it to be injected with holiday cheer first. But the kicker is that the good sad version is itself a toned-down version of the songwriter's original truly grim creation, which began:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last ...

Judy Garland refused to sing it that way.

'Tis the Season

I get a little obsessed with Christmas songs at this time of year. Partly for my daughter's sake but mostly for my own, I load up my iPod with that stuff so that I can play it in the car.

I mean "Christmas songs" in a broad sense. But I do have a slight obsession with "The Christmas Song" itself, informally known as "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire". I guess the guys who wrote it, Mel ("The Golden Fog") Tormé and Bob Wells, were pretty lucky that that title wasn't already taken. They wrote the song in 1944 or 1945, depending which Wikipedia article you believe. Tormé said that they wrote the song while just hanging out one summer day: they began spouting wintry phrases as a way of taking their minds off the heat, and it somehow turned into a song. A year ago I got a little more obsessed than usual with that song, and now I have 13 versions of it in my laptop. Most of them are lousy, so I have only put three of them in the iPod right now, but probably before the season is over I will go on a binge and listen to all 13 of them one day on the way to work. My three favorites are:

(1) Ella Fitzgerald's. Like the rest of the album "Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas", this wears well. I could listen to it every day for a month.

(2) The instrumental version by Vince Guaraldi, on the soundtrack of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

(3) Aaron Neville's. Not quite as durable as Ella's, and not for everyone, but I could listen to it every two days for a month.

The ones that I don't like so much include one by Stevie Wonder that's uninspired and, I don't know, lame. There's also one by Dave Brubeck that's part of a whole album that's just no fun. And, come to think of it, the definitive Nat King Cole version just doesn't do it for me any more.

Pet mice

We kept them for a few weeks. We gave them food and water and a cardboard tube to hide in. There was an exercise wheel in the cage, which one of the three made good use of. As I recall, another climbed the walls a lot and the third mostly cowered in the tube. 

Based on the theory that mice need to be able to sleep in the daytime, plus the fact that one of them seemed to be terrified of us, we draped a kitchen towel over the cage to give some privacy. They appreciated this gesture very much, but not in the way that it was intended. They were able to grab the towel through the bars and rip off little bits of it, and they kept this up until they had plenteous masses of red and white nesting material in the cardboard tube and elsewhere. So much for covering the cage, though -- in effect, the curtain rose steadily as the days passed.

Eventually a thaw came and we judged that they would be happier outdoors; my daughter and I took them to the usual place and said good-bye.

Keeping mice warm

From time to time we get mice in the house. If the sight of their droppings bothers us enough, we set traps. Not those cruel spring-loaded things, of course: these are plastic boxes with little doors. You put cheese or something in there at the far end and set it down carefully with the door open. Then (1) mouse smells bait, (2) mouse walks into box, (3) box tips slightly with added weight, (4) door swings shut. All you have to do then is pick it up and take it outside and let the thing go. Well, maybe you don't want to just take it out to the yard -- it would probably come right back in. Well, maybe you don't want to just put it next to the neighbors' house, either: not fair to make the mouse move into their house instead. So you take it to a little patch of woods at the end of the street. Your child might be a little troubled by the thought that the mousie is so far away that it might never see its family again. You might even be a little troubled by the same thought, but you stifle it.

The first time I ever did this, I had an embarrassing false alarm: got all the way to the patch of woods before I figured out that there was nothing in the box. It had been sprung somehow without catching anybody, and I had jumped to a conclusion. Well, I didn't want to open it before I got there! It could have jumped out!

One time we caught a mouse in winter. The way the snow was falling that night, we couldn't see turning it out of the house: it must be so hard digging yourself a burrow when the ground is frozen and you're shivering. We improvised a temporary cage and reset the trap. A few hours later we had three of them in captivity and the weather was not letting up. So we borrowed a proper cage from some neighbors who no longer had gerbils or hamsters, put our three temporary pets in it and waited for a thaw.

Rhymes of the Times

People talk about moon/June as an overused rhyme in songs. I don't actually know any examples, but I would guess that the late 40s and 50s could be called the moon/June era. I like the idea that other eras could be named similarly. There was a schemes/dreams era around the Great Depression. There was a self/else era beginning in the late 60s. Maybe between moon/June and self/else there was a love/of era.

Comments? Criticisms? Examples? Elaborations?

Part 4: Peppermint oil

It turned out that I had not been quite careful enough not to imprison anybody. Desperate scrabbling sounds were heard. Back up the stepladder. Off with the panel, ducking my head.

It would have been nice if, as soon as I opened up again, the desperate scrabbling had turned into a desperate bid for freedom; even clawmarks on my scalp would have been a small price to pay, I think, for knowing we were done. But no action. I could see a squirrel cowering in what I called the "back room". Or rather I could see part of it. It was behind a sort of roof rafter and I don't think it knew that its tail was showing.

Common sense said that it was more likely to come out and let me finish if it was not being watched. On the other hand, I had to keep an eye on things if I wanted to avoid closing up prematurely again. I kept my distance and tried to be watchful but non-threatening.

At one point, losing patience, I got back up there and reached in with a stick to tickle the tail, thinking maybe I could scare it into fleeing. Of course this just caused it to pull the tail up and out of sight, making it even harder to keep an eye on things.

We began to consider ways of driving it out. My wife remembered a little vial of peppermint oil that a neighbor had given us once as a mouse repellent. A rodent is a rodent, right? I impregnated a fairly large number of paper towels with the stuff, put them in the squirrel house, and waited some more. No action. I put the panel back in place to keep the fumes from dissipating. At this point you could smell peppermint in the second-floor bathroom. Now what?

Part 3: Insulation

We weren't sure how to proceed. My wife's idea seemed to be that someone would have to get up on a ladder with some sort of power saw and cut his way in, wearing protective headgear -- maybe a bicycle helmet -- to protect himself from toenails when panicked squirrels came racing out. (She is by nature a worrier, and a planner for worst cases, although you might not guess that from the osprey story.) I was imagining something a little different, a hammer instead of a saw, prying things apart with the claw, but it was still going to be violence to the house and it was not very clear in my mind. We were both daunted. In the end she asked for help from a friend (a different one) who also knows something about houses. He took one look and pointed out the right way to get in there. There were several clearly visible screw heads; undo them and the front panel would come right off. Duh.

This friend then got up on a stepladder, took the panel off, pulled out armfuls of vegetable matter that the squirrels had been using for insulation -- he filled a fairly large trash barrel -- and closed it up again. He was pretty sure there were no squirrels in there. He nailed a piece of scrap wood into place to close up the chink between panel and stucco that they had been using to get in and out. We thanked him and he went away.

Within an hour or so, squirrels had chewed through that thin piece of wood and were busily reinsulating, repeatedly running in with mouthfuls of leaves and pine needles and out again to get more. I admired their industry, but it made me tired to think of all the wasted effort on their part and ours.

Then it was my turn to get up on the ladder. I took off the panel and pulled out all the leaves that I could reach. I was actually a bit more thorough about that than the other guy had been. This was in effect a two-room squirrel house, with the further "room" being hard to reach and hard to see into, but I did my best. And somewhere back there I found a piece of wood which was clearly the bit had originally filled that chink, which settled the question of what I would use to close up. It was sturdier and a perfect fit and it just needed some screws or nails.

I was as careful as I could be about not leaving the site unattended during this operation, so that again I could be reasonably sure that when I did close it up I was not imprisoning anybody.

Part 2: Stains on the stucco

Over the next, oh, I don't know how many months, it became harder and harder to ignore the fact that one or more squirrels were living in that enclosed space. (I was sorry to think that we might not have given them enough time to get their babies to safety up there, if that was the case, but it had been hard to just leave the helpless things on the ground given the danger of a cat or a dog coming around.) A bit of broken woodwork afforded a visible opening to it, and from time to time we would hear them running up and down the stucco wall that led to it from the ground. Sometimes they even used the first-floor half-bathroom window in that wall to get a toehold as they raced up, so that a peaceful sit could be interrupted by a very surprising clattering.

What finally moved us to action was two things: One, some strongly colored brownish liquid was making its way down that nice cream-colored wall in greater and greater quantities; presumably rain was getting into the top of that inhabited space and dripping out the side or bottom after becoming infused with -- what? pee and poop? pee and poop and something from the nesting material? Two, a trusted advisor of ours, a friend who is in the construction business (and has in fact done some major work on this house) told us that we were asking for big trouble. He pointed out that if the squirrels were to find their way into the walls of the house and from there to, for example, the attic, and to start chewing on things electrical, then we could find the house burning down some day. But we forgot to ask him how to get in there.

The other squirrel story, Part 1: Saving the babies

One day two baby squirrels appeared at our doorstep. They were too young to run or climb to safety. One of them was a more competent crawler than the other, but they both looked like goners. It seemed that they had fallen from a nest. We didn't see a nest, although we had a hunch that there was one in an enclosed part of the house right above the door -- unconnected with the inside, a sort of leftover space under an added-on rooflet. We didn't detect any parent squirrels trying to deal with the situation, so after some hours of this my wife collected the poor things in a box and dealt with it herself. She somehow managed to locate someone not too many miles away who has built an excellent rehab center and rest home in his back yard for injured and orphaned squirrels and was happy to take on two more cases.

Catch and release

One day we arrived at that same little country house to find something big flying around in the screened porch -- a fully grown osprey. It had entered through one of the window screens, probably blundering into the screen headfirst and suddenly finding itself more indoors than outdoors. The poor worried thing would cling to a screen with its mighty talons, flap its mighty wings a couple of times to cross the room to another window, and repeat, sometimes resting, never for long, hoping for a way out.

We could have just opened the exterior door, gone away, and waited. Instead, my wife took matters in hand, drawing on skills acquired in childhood when she used to assist a charming old gentleman in banding (much smaller) birds. She slowly approached the osprey, holding a large outstretched towel before her in a soothing manner. Then she deftly wrapped the bird up from behind and held it firmly but gently as she carried it outdoors, where she opened the towel and let it fly away.

In hindsight we both thought she had taken a crazy chance and was lucky not have been seriously cut up by claws or beak at the moment of release.

Saving a Squirrel

In our family's country house is a wood-burning stove. Opening it once after some months' absence, I found the corpses of two grey squirrels inside. We assumed that they had entered by the chimney, been unable to get out the same way, and starved to death. As we removed the dead squirrels we became aware that there was also a live one lurking in the flue. To save it from the same fate, we baited a Have-A-Heart trap on the hearth, opened the stove door, sealed off the immediate area with heavy plastic sheeting, and left the house.

The damn squirrel came out when all was quiet, ignored the yummy peanut butter in the trap, tore through the plastic, ran all around the house knocking breakable things off shelves, ate up all the toothpaste it could find, and generally made itself at home. When a human entered the house to check the trap (ha!), the thing exploded out of the kitchen garbage pail and raced back into the stove.

Later, when somebody with a little more sense tried annoying the animal with some smoke, it just ran away up the chimney and never came back. We never knew how the other two died.

A to Q

Ⓐ is for AWOL, away without leave.
Ⓑ is the Bug that is eating your sleeve.

Ⓒ is for Commissar; his ways are so set, that when asked for a favor he'll always say nyet.

Ⓓ is for Dancer, who may be exotic.
Ⓔ is for Everything wild and Erotic.

Ⓕ is for Fruitcake, a Christmas Day treat.
Ⓖ is for Goldfish, much better to eat.

Ⓗ is our Hero, Charlton Heston.
Ⓘ is the organ we call our Intestine.

Ⓙ is for Jesus, the son of a Jew.
Ⓚ is for Khrushchev, who's known for his shoe.

Ⓛ is for Let; it happens in tennis.
Ⓜ is a Merchant whose home is in Venice.

Ⓝ is for Nixon; he leads our great nation.
Ⓞ is his policy: Obliteration.

Ⓟ is for Pompey, Caesar's great rival.
Ⓠ is for Quicksand, which hinders survival.

empty promises

I promise that this blog won't always be about the empty set, but ...

Within the category of sets, Ø is what is called an initial object. That just means that for every set S there is exactly one "morphism" from Ø to S, in other words one function which associates to every member of the empty set a member of S. (The word "every" in this last phrase may take some getting used to.)

The empty set is also "initial" in a different sense. The reason why it took Russell and Whitehead hundreds of pages to get their foundations for mathematics developed to the point where they could prove that 1+1=2 was that they were defining "number", and some particular numbers, from scratch, or rather from set theory, and then defining "addition". They thought of the number 2 as, more or less, the set of all sets having exactly two elements; but in order to make sense of that idea in a non-circular fashion they had to actually define 2 to be the set of all sets of the same "size" as some particular set having just two elements. The set that they chose for this purpose was the set whose elements are the numbers 0 and 1. So they had to define 0 and 1 before defining 2. Of course, 1 was the set of sets of the same size as the set consisting of 0 alone. And of course 0 was the set of all sets having the same size as the empty set. Something like that. So the empty set was a starting point.

For me, part of the appeal of emptiness (and now I am not talking particularly about the empty set, but of empty vessels, blank minds, open-ended questions, clear skies... ) is the sense of beginning. So I'm glad that in category theory Ø is called an initial object.

On the other hand, a synonym for initial object is universally repelling object. So much for the found poetry of technical jargon.

doggerel

Ⓡ is for Rhinoceros,
Ⓢ is for his Snout,
Ⓣ is for the Trampoline on which he romps about.

Ⓤ is for his Underside;
Ⓥ's the Vest he wears,
and Ⓦ's the Woolen thread to mend it if he tears.

Ⓧ is for the Xerox which he likes to play,
Ⓨ is for the Yellow spot that always comes out gray,
and Ⓩ is for the Zero; there is nothing more to say.

- Anon