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| December 2, 2025 |
My banner photograph today is of the copper beech tree in Northport, brought from England long ago by a member of the Thomas family and still flourishing today. In which season is this venerable tree at its loveliest? I can’t decide but took the photograph above with my Samsung android phone one December morning, a little after 10 a.m., and to my eye it looked magnificent.
Ogden Nash
I don’t think it’s belittling his gift to call Ogden Nash a versifier. My discovery of Nash came in a volume called Parents Keep Out! on the shelves in my hometown library children’s room, and how could any kid resist a book with that name? What fun to memorize Nash’s poems, from two-liners to those of many stanzas!
Here is probably the shortest verse Ogden Nash ever wrote. It’s called “Fleas,” and the entire poem is as follows:
Adam
Had ‘em.
Imagine my shock, however, to see that the site “All Poetry,” in analyzing the verse, refers to this clever couplet as a “witty quatrain”! Quatrain? A four-line stanza? Obviously not! Witty, yes. Quatrain, no.
Here is another two-line Nash poem, a favorite of my father’s and one of the earliest that I knew by heart without even trying:
God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
One of my longer favorites was “Very Like a Whale,” which I leave you to look up for yourself by following this link—and then see if you can stop from reading more and more Ogden Nash verse. Fair warning: It is addictive.
Why do I drag in these humorous poems instead of some more ethereal ode to trees? Because Nash himself took off on Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” following Kilmer’s first two-line stanza with a second of his own:
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Silly? Yes. Corny? Yes. But also irresistibly memorable, especially to a child discovering mockery of sacred literary cows for the first time.
Get Off of Your Cloud!
My son told me a couple years ago, “The cloud is just someone else’s bigger computer,” and with my initial skeptical aversion to cloud storage thus vindicated, I have continued to buy, read, and hold onto printed, bound books; to write letters and send them through the mail in stamped envelopes (treasuring written replies); and to store my digital files only on my own devices. (Note to self: Need a couple more flash drives, memory sticks, whatever they're called.) Here were my initial arguments against relying on the so-called cloud, i.e., “someone else’s computer,” somewhere else --
Ø How do I know the cloud won’t crash?
Ø How do I know my data (i.e., my precious image and text files) will remain unchanged, uncorrupted, and accessible by me—and only by me?
Ø Finally, after reading about the massive amounts of water and power necessary to maintain those so-called clouds, and the dreadful 24/7 noise the data banks put out, why would I want to park in someone else’s backyard something I don’t want in my own? Better, I believe, to buy extra camera cards and additional flash drives and keep them in a safe place at home.
If those arguments didn’t convince you, how about this one: Many people believe that massive data centers, currently touted for AI, are a bigger financial bubble than the country has ever yet seen. It all boils down to extractive industry and good old entropy. Most of the spending on the AI bubble, as is true of your beloved cloud storage, is not “virtual,” but very, very physical. Real estate. Buildings. Hardware. Electricity. Water. Now add to the deterioration of the surrounding physical environment and the rapid deterioration of electronic chips a super-scary degradation--the deterioration of information (“intelligence”?) gathered and synthesized as LLMs (Large Language Models) are put through post-training “learning.”
Word of the day: sycophantic. Look it up. So-called artificial intelligence degrades rapidly the more it “learns” from what human beings say online. Garbage in, garbage out. Bullshit in, bullshit out. When put through post-training, AI becomes an obsequious flatterer rather than a knowledgeable advisor!
If you don’t understand how something is made, you should not invest in it. (Think cryptocurrency.) In the case of generative AI, the more you know about it, the less likely you are to invest. Seriously, watch and listen, because others are investing for you—your government, your money managers—and you cannot afford not to know what's going on. Has your community been asked to make room for a data center? Sooner or later, one will be proposed near you, so prepare yourself now with information.
Fonts and Politics???
Do you recognize the font I use on this blog? It's called Bookman Old Style, and I like both the name and the look, being a bookseller and always having been partial to serifs (particularly adnate serifs), those little extras that seem so graceful and generous. Do you see them as unnecessary furbelows? Consider:
Bookman Old Style example: AI
Helvetica example: AI
Which one is clearer to you? To my eye, the capital letter I without a serif looks like a small L or even the number 1. With a serif, there is no such confusion. And, as I say, I have always simply found serif fonts graceful and generous in appearance, overall more attractive, although many people see the matter differently and consider the sans serif fonts easier to read, cleaner, and more modern.
One thing that would never have occurred to me would have been that a switch to a san serif font signaled some kind of political agenda, but leave it to Republicans to suspect liberalism's vile fingerprints on anything done by a Democratic administration, and so it isn't as unbelievable as it should be that Marco Rubio, current Secretary of State, has declared Anthony Blinken's switch to the simpler Calibri font a symptom of wokism and, somehow, “another wasteful DEIA program.” Good lord, it's almost enough to make me renounce serifs for life! But no, not quite. This insanity cannot last forever. For now, however, Rubio is reinstating the Times New Roman font “to restore decorum and professionalism” to the State Department.
Ha! Wouldn't that be nice? To see “decorum and professionalism” again in our nation's capitol? (Why do I think that will take more than a change of typeface?) For now, who can tell me how eliminating serifs was more costly than restoring them will be? How petty can anyone be?
Just another red herring, folks. Another little brushfire to add to the giant smokescreen....
Turning Toward the Sun
No, not yet. It will be eleven more days before days begin to grow longer, and yet I'm sure I heard on the radio that yesterday was the year's earliest sunset and that tonight the sun will set marginally later. Can that be? Did I only imagine it? And will it matter, anyway, if clouds keep us covered?
For me, though, every morning is a Sunny morning, come rain or come shine, and I know you want to see her, too, so here's the dog girl!
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| Her ears were blowing in the cold, cold wind! |
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| Indoors, cozy and photogenic |
We Lost a Most Memorable Northporter
It was a shock to learn on Monday evening that David Chrobak had died only that afternoon. My last relaxed visit with David (I'm not counting sidewalk chats outside the post office) was in his front yard one evening this past summer, and somewhere I have a photo taken from the yard, looking through hanging prisms and flowers to the Willowbrook Inn, but where can it be? Here, anyway, and much better, is a photo of David himself. The occasion was the 21st anniversary of my bookstore, which David on the cake he baked and decorated called “a love story.” David loved Northport, and Northport loved him back. There will never another like him. David, we miss you already!
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| David Chrobak, Northport, MI, June 2014 |
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