A Birthday Song:
Las Mañanitas

(Song, lyrics, and animated story) 

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the New York Post Office Building in 1914.

Today is National Postal Workers Day.

From the website Elia Kazan: Postage Paid...

"Many years later Kazan said 'Viva Zapata!,' which he was filming during the time of his committee testimony, 'was structured to expose the ineffectiveness of idealistic revolutionaries, I believe that democracy progresses through internecine war, through constant tension - we grow only through conflict. And that’s what democracy is. In that sense, people have to be vigilant, and that vigilance is effective. I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.' This was a profound statement about his values and beliefs. Kazan never backed away from his statements."

Note: In honor of Kazan and of Brando, who really is a contender, the background music of this website has been hushed, so that those who click "A Birthday Song" above can hear it clearly.

If one were to write a "secret history" of the twentieth century, one possible organizing theme might be the religious struggle between worshippers of the Semitic deity (variously known as Yahweh, God, and Allah) and worshippers of the Aryan deities... notably, the Aryan god of music, light, and reason, Apollo.

(See my jounal notes of Monday, Sept. 2, 2002, below.)

In perhaps the best academic website I have ever seen, Karey L. Perkins quotes Walker Percy:

"The truth is that man's capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness..."

The greatest symbol-monger of the twentieth century was, of course, Adolf Hitler. His use of the Aryan sun-wheel symbol rose to the level of genius. Of course, it ultimately failed to win the approval of the sun god himself, Apollo, who is also the god of reason.

Since symbol-mongering cannot be avoided, let us hope that it can be done in a somewhat more reasonable way than that of the National Socialist movement. Two examples suggest themselves.

1. From Peggy Noonan's column of Friday, Sept. 6:
   
   The cross, the heart, and the flag.
   
   

2. From Karey Perkins's website:
   
   A brain, a heart, and courage. 

On this Rosh Hashanah, the cross as a symbol of intelligence may be offensive to some worshippers of Yahweh. Let them read The Archivist, a novel by Martha Cooley, and then my journal note The Matthias Defense.

They might also contemplate the biblical quotation in the musical "Contact" broadcast from Lincoln Center on September 1, 2002: "Let there be light!"

Three Jews named Paul have been associated with light...

1. Saul of Tarsus, who later assumed an alias.
2. Paul Newman, whose performance in "The Verdict" continues, indirectly, to trouble Cardinal Law of Boston.

3. Paul R. Halmos, a personal hero of mine ever since I saw his Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces and Measure Theory as an ignorant young undergraduate browsing the bookstores of Harvard Square.

In accordance with the "secret history" theme mentioned above, the struggle between Aryan and Semitic religions may also be viewed in the light of the struggle between Christianity and Communism. Hitler exploited this viewpoint very successfully, pretending to be the champion of the Christians against the godless Reds. Peggy Noonan also successfully uses this strategy. Both Hitler and Noonan manage to ignore the fact that Christianity is itself one of the Semitic religions, and that at least two of its three deities are Jewish.

As for me, I rather identify with the young Hitler clone at the end of the film "The Boys from Brazil." Forced to decide between Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, he sides with Olivier. His reason? Peck lied.

In a similar situation, forced to decide between Peggy Noonan and the Jew Halmos, I would probably side with Halmos. Halmos, who should, if not a saint, be at least dubbed a knight, does not, unlike the great majority of the damned human race, lie.

See Halmos's memoir, I Want to Be a Mathematician. In particular, see the single index entry "communist by allegation" and the 29 entries under "Uruguay."

Happy birthday to Elia Kazan and Peggy Noonan, and a happy and prosperous New Year to should-be-Sir Paul R. Halmos. 

Edmund Gwenn, actor, died on September 6, 1959.

When asked if he thought dying was tough, Gwenn reportedly said,

"Yes, it's tough, but not as tough as doing comedy."

This may or may not be true; if it is, Gwenn may be the true source of a quotation variously attributed to Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, David Garrick, Donald Wolfit, William Holden, and Groucho Marx, Marcel Marceau, Noel Coward, and Oscar Wilde:  

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

A very dubious version of the Gwenn story attributes the "comedy is hard" part to Jack Lemmon:

The lesson is best illustrated in a story involving Jack Lemmon, whose best work was in comedy. He visited the British actor Edmund Gwenn, suffering in a hospital. Gwenn is said to have lifted the flap on the oxygen tent and said, ''It's really tough to die.'' And Lemmon responded, ''It's not as tough as doing comedy.''
-- Elvis Mitchell in The New York Times Week in Review, Sunday, August 25, 2002

David Bruce, an English instructor at Ohio University, supplies another version of the Gwenn story, from Movie Anecdotes, by Peter Hay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990:

Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar playing Santa Claus in the movie Miracle on 34 Street. As he lay dying, Jack Lemmon visited him and asked if dying was dead. [sic]  Gwenn replied, "Oh, it's hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy."

Santa might appreciate the above misprint, as would Vladimir Nabokov...

"Life Everlasting--based on a misprint!"
-- Pale Fire 

and John Donne...

"And death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die."
-- Holy Sonnets

A description by Arthur Koestler (born Sept. 5, 1905) of a

close encounter with the divine:

"...a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue."

Koestler also mentions the "blue Andalusian sky." 

Some thoughts suggested by the above and by the Sept. 5, 2002, New York Times story on the first anniversary of the murder of the Mexican lawyer

María de los Angeles Tames....

1. The blue of the Andalusian sky is essentially the same as the blue of the sky above Baja California.  See photographs of the last Jesuit mission in Mexico,

Santa María de los Angeles. 

2.  A Google search for "blue Andalusian sky" yielded two results: the Koestler page quoted above, and a page on the Gypsy film "Vengo."  For a reasonable likeness of St. Sara, patron saint of the Gypsies, also known as The Dark Lady, also known as Kali, see the poster of dancer

Sara Baras at Flamenco-world.com. 

"MONCHO ELCHE, ALICANTE, ESPAÑA ARTE, DUENDE, MAJESTAD Y GRANDEZA Es imposible resumir el Flamenco en cuatro palabras, pero al mirar el poster Sara Baras por Paco Sanchez, son esas las palabras que me vienen a la mente.  Gracias, Paco Sanchez."

For the music Sara dances to, composed and played by Jesús de Rosario, listen to audio clips at

Juana la Loca: Vivir por Amor.

3. For an American version of The Dark Lady, see an homage from Catalonia to

Emmy Lou Harris. 

For a Harris song that seems appropriate to the blue-sky theme above, see

Thanks to You.

Born today: Arthur Koestler,
former Communist and writer on parapsychology

From To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973: 

"Mary-Molly luv, it's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we're the original nonconformists.... and Society will never permit us to integrate.  That's okay!"  He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers.  "The Talented form their own society and that's as it should be: birds of a feather.  No, not birds.  Winged horses!  Ha!  Yes, indeed. Pegasus... the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy.  A bloody good symbol for us.  You'd see a lot from the back of a winged horse..."

"Yes, an airplane has blind spots.  Where would you put a saddle?"  Molly had her practical side.

He laughed and hugged her.  Henry's frequent demonstrations of affection were a source of great delight to Molly, whose own strength was in tactile contacts. 

"Don't know.  Lord, how would you bridle a winged horse?"

"With the heart?"

"Indubitably!"  The notion pleased him.  "Yes, with the heart and the head because Pegasus is too strong a steed to control or subdue by any ordinary method." 

Born today:  Darryl F. Zanuck,
producer of "Viva Zapata!"

Director Eliza Kazan consults with scriptwriter John Steinbeck about the production of "Viva Zapata!" in Cuernavaca, Mexico:

When John woke, I asked him, "Isn't the Syndicate of Film Technicians and Workers here Communist-dominated?"

Elia Kazan on Darryl Zanuck's insistence that Zapata's white horse be emphasized:

Darryl made only one suggestion that he was insistent on. He'd stolen it, no doubt, from an old Warner western, but he offered it as if it were pristine stuff. "Zapata must have a white horse," he said, "and after they shoot him, we should show the horse running free in the mountains -- get the idea? A great fade-out." We got the idea, all right. Darryl was innocent about the symbol in his suggestion, but so enthusiastic about the emotion of it that he practically foamed at the mouth. John's face was without expression. Actually, while I thought it was corny, the idea worked out well in the end. 

Born today: comedian Bob Newhart

Among Zanuck's films were "All about Eve" and "Viva Zapata!"

Bright Star

I do not have a photograph of Lucero Hernandez, the subject of my journal notes

Shining Forth and

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

In keeping with Zanuck's commandment that "The kid stays in the picture!" -- The photo at left, of a very young actress, captures some of Lucero's beauty.

Center for Global Education,
Augsburg College 

Semester-abroad Program in Mexico

"The program is based in Cuernavaca, a city known for its perennial springtime (70-80 degrees). Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, is about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Both the city and the state are important in Mexican history: the palace of the conqueror Hernan Cortez borders the central plaza in Cuernavaca and Morelos is known as “the cradle of the Mexican revolution” of 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata, who was born in a small town near Cuernavaca. A city of more than one million, Cuernavaca is also known for its innovative grass-roots education programs, economic cooperatives, and base Christian communities inspired by liberation theology." 

If you enter the question "Is there such a thing as artificial intelligence?" as a Google search phrase, you will be referred to ALICE, a chat robot. ALICE's possible answers include "Yes," "No," and "Maybe." Another search strategy leads to the following Google Directory page:

Computers > Artificial Intelligence >
Neural Networks > Companies.

This page, unlike ALICE, suggests that the appropriate answer to our question is the punch line to an old computer joke:  "There is now."

Enter the question "Is there such a thing as artificial intelligence?" as a Google phrase search, and you get five sites, all suggesting that you visit the chat robot ALICE for an answer. 

I did so, and learned by repeated interrogation that ALICE thinks the answer is "Yes," "No," and "Maybe," depending on when question is asked.

A better answer is supplied by some cursory research into the history of AI, by the following Google Directory page --

"Mathematics is the music of reason." -- J. J. Sylvester

Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase "synthematic totals" to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called "rather unwieldy objects." See Curtis's abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez's essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory. See also the abstract of a December 7, 2000, talk, Mathematics and the Art of M. C. Escher, in which Curtis notes that graphic designs can "often convey a mathematical idea more eloquently than pages of symbolism."

Almeida was a Brazilian guitarist, composer, and arranger. He was one of the pioneers of the bossa nova style. Although he did not write the song " Manha de Carnaval" ("A day in the life of a fool"), I added this song as background music for this site today partly to honor Brazilian music... and partly because the song is from the classic Brazilian film "Black Orpheus." (See the two notes below, from today and yesterday, on Orpheus and on vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.)

Some religious fanatics may be offended by my account, in the note below, of a theatrical bartender-priest at Lincoln Center who last night held a CD aloft in what may seem a parody or satire of the elevation of the host in the Mass. They should consider the following account of how a medieval nun viewed the host:

...she saw a great brightness between the priest's hands, so vivid and so bright and of such wonderful beauty that in her opinion it could not be compared to anything the human spirit could imagine. And it seemed to her that this brightness had a circular shape....

For another appearance of a priest associated, if only by synchronicity, with Lincoln Center, see the photographs below, both from the New York Times obituaries section of Friday, August 30, 2002.

	Richard Lippold, a sculptor known for radiant, expansive abstractions in metal, died on Aug. 22.... Richard Lippold’s ‘‘Orpheus and Apollo’’ at Avery Fisher Hall in 1996. Jack Manning/The New York Times
	Bill Wassmuth, a former Roman Catholic priest who opposed the Aryan Nations group in northern Idaho, died on Tuesday, Aug. 27.

In this little drama of August 30, played out in the obituary section of the New York Times, it is not clear from the Lippold sculpture who is to play the role of Orpheus and who the role of Apollo. One might interpret the note below, written two days later, as implying that Orpheus is to be played by Lionel Hampton and Apollo by Christ himself.  Such a drama is neither parody nor satire.  It is, on the contrary, deadly serious. 

"A great brightness," as seen by the medieval nun described above, is traditionally associated with the Aryan sun god Apollo.  For more on this theme in Roman Catholic art, see

Sun-Worship and Catholicism,

The Monstrance and the Wafer God, and

A Catholic rebuttal.

For a less dogmatic approach to these matters, see my journal note of June 13, 2002,

 A Mass for Lucero.

The great musician Lionel Hampton died at about 6:15 a.m. EDT Saturday, August 31, 2002, in New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Quincy Jones said, "Heaven will definitely be feeling some backbeat now." (AP story)

Hampton himself said, "I learned all that in the sanctified church." (N.Y. Times story)

Can we hear an AMEN?

Yes, we heard an amen... Live from Lincoln Center on PBS from about 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT tonight (Sunday, September 1, 2002), in a live broadcast of the final performance of the musical "Contact."

Theology was made visible by Colleen Dunn, who appeared as Grace (the girl in the yellow dress). Christ himself was present in the form of a CD of "Do You Wanna Dance?" held aloft by a priest (the after-hours club bartender).

The evening ended with the redemption by Grace of a sinner (a maker of TV commercials) and with (as Quincy Jones noted) a strong new backbeat in heaven.

CONCISENESS, SIMPLICITY, OBJECTIVITY.

...Dante gives excellent advice to teachers when he says, "Let thy words be counted." The more carefully we cut away useless words, the more perfect will become the lesson....

Another characteristic quality of the lesson...  is its simplicity. It must be stripped of all that is not absolute truth.... The carefully chosen words must be the most simple it is possible to find, and must refer to the truth.

The third quality of the lesson is its objectivity. The lesson must be presented in such a way that the personality of the teacher shall disappear. There shall remain in evidence only the object to which she wishes to call the attention of the child....

Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. 

Mathematicians mean something different by the phrase "block design."

A University of London site on mathematical design theory includes a link to my diamond theory site, which discusses the mathematics of the sorts of visual designs that Professor Pope is demonstrating. For an introduction to the subject that is, I hope, concise, simple, and objective, see my diamond 16 puzzle. 

"He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter."
-- Deety in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.

For more on this theme, see my Journal Note of December 21, 2001.  See also the film classic "Forbidden Planet," and the play "The Tempest," by William Shakespeare, on which it is based.

Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday....
-- Bernard Holland, The New York Times of  Monday, May 20, 1996

The New York midday lottery number for Monday, August 26, 2002, was 666, the biblical "number of the beast."

For the beast's Friday response to the calling of its number by New York State on Monday, see

Lucifer Media Corporation.

A Chain of Links

The creator of Frankenstein might appreciate the following chain of thought.

Lucifer.com

Lucifer Media Corporation

Lucifer Media Sites

The Extropy Institute: International Transhumanist Solutions

Why Super-Human Intelligence Would Be Equivalent To Precognition, by Marc Geddes:

"Consider the geometry of multiple dimensions as an analogy for mental abilities...

...if there is a 4th dimension of intelligence, to us ordinary humans stuck with 3 dimensional reasoning, this 4th dimension would be indistinguishable from precognition. Post-humans would appear to us ordinary humans as beings which could predict the future in ways which would be inexplicable to us. We should label post-humans as 'Pre-Cogs.'

In the Steven Speilberg [sic]  film Minority Report, we encounter genetically engineered humans with precisely the abilities described above."

Internet Movie Database page on "Minority Report"

IMDb page on "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick

IMDb biography of Philip K. Dick, where our chain of links ends.  Here Dick says that

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."  

On the other hand, Dick also says here that

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

These two quotations summarize, on the one hand, the cynical, relativistic nominalism of the postmodernists and, on the other hand, the hard-nosed realism of the Platonists.

What does all this have to do with "the geometry of multiple dimensions"? 

Consider the famous story for adolescents, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle.   The author, a well-meaning Christian, tries, like all storytellers,  to control her readers by controlling the meaning of words.   The key word in this book is "tesseract," a term from multi-dimensional geometry.   She insists that a tesseract has mystic properties and cannot be visualized.  She is wrong (at least about the visualizing). 

See The Tesseract: A look into 4-dimensional space, by Harry J. Smith.

See also the many revealing comments in Harry J. Smith's Guestbook.

One of Smith's guests remarks, apropos of Smith's comments on St. Joseph, that he has his own connection with St. Augustine. 

For a adult-level discussion of Augustine, time, eternity, and Platonism, see the website Time as a Psalm in St. Augustine, by A. M. Johnston.

See also the remark headlining Maureen Dowd's New York Times column of August 28, 2002, Saint Augustine's Day:

"I'm with Dick." 

Whether the realist Dick or the nominalist Dick, she does not say. 

As for precognition, see my series of journal notes below, which leads up to two intriguing errors in an Amazon.com site on the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack.   The first two audio samples from this soundtrack are (wrongly) entitled "Birdland" and "Flamingo."  See also the West Wing episode rebroadcast on Wednesday, August 28, 2002,

The Black Vera Wang

   C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney), who models a black Vera Wang dress in that episode, has the Secret Service codename Flamingo.  

"...that woman in black
She's a mystery
She's everything a woman should be
Woman in black got a hold on me"

(Foreigner 4 in my August 28 note below)

St. Ingrid Bergman:

Like Shakespeare, Ingrid Bergman was born and died on the same date... In her case, August 29.

To honor her performance in "Spellbound," here is a copy of the first crossword puzzle ever published. 

The Reversible Diamond Puzzle

"This puzzle appeared in the November 1874 number of 'St. Nicholas.'

ACROSS, from top to bottom:

1. A consonant. 2. A number. 3. Measures of distance. 4. An abyss. 5. A consonant.

DOWN, from right to left:

1. A consonant. 2. A snare. 3. A name. 4. The point of anything small. 5. A consonant.

    S
    T E N
    M I L E S
    P I T
    M

The across words are different from the down words, but there is a direct relation between them: one is the reversible form of the other."

One might also compare an eerie sound clip from the  Oscar-winning score of "Spellbound" with a weird clip from "Selim," by the World Saxophone Quartet.  The latter is from the album "Selim Sivad" (Miles Davis backwards). One reviewer claims that this album displays "astonishing, telepathic group interplay." This may or may not be true; if the services of a psychiatrist are required to help decide the issue, let us hope she is as attractive as Saint Ingrid.

The above remarks are, of course, intended as a partial antidote to the music inevitably associated with Bergman... "As Time Goes By."  (Please do not play it again, Sam.)  Of course, the World Saxophone Quartet may be too powerful an antidote... It reminds one, as does the greatly superior weird music from the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack, of Monsters from the Id.  From such monsters, let us pray to Saint Ingrid for deliverance.

"I might be sitting in some piano bar hoping somebody will leave 50 cents in a glass saying 'Play "Melancholy Baby"' for the seven-millionth time." Here's Charlie Parker's version, and a few more notes.

High praise for Allison Janney, TV star:

"Allison is like the great movie actresses from the '40s," says the creator and executive producer of NBC's The West Wing (Wednesdays, 9 P.M./ET). "She's the best actress working today, and she gives the dead ones a run for their money." As scrappy White House press secretary C.J. Cregg, Janney does seem like a dame who could out-drink Spencer Tracy, slay Bogie with a withering stare, yet still melt seductively in Cary Grant's arms.

For C. J. Cregg on Saudi Arabia, click here.

For Maureen Dowd (nicknamed "The Cobra" by President George W. Bush) on Saudi Arabia,

click here.

Sample clips of Thelonious Monk compositions: Four in One, Criss-Cross

A 1999 Mike Melillo Trio album, "Bopcentric," includes the above compositions.

"Melillo is a striking pianist, a chameleon who has a Bud Powell touch on a Charlie Parker be bop number, who evokes appropriate echoes of Thelonious Monk".
-- John S. Wilson in The New York Times

From sleeve notes by Orrin Keepnews at

The Thelonious Monk Website:

For many years regarded as an awesome genius, but one whose ideas were too far-out for general consumption, Monk now seems finally to be gaining long-deserved acceptance....  some critics feel that he is becoming (as John S. Wilson has put it) "increasingly lucid."

From The New York Times of August 28, 2002:

John S. Wilson, the first critic to write regularly about jazz and popular music in The New York Times, died yesterday at a nursing home in Princeton, N.J. He was 89 and lived in Princeton.

Two journal notes below deal with the general mythology of the Dark Lady.  This note, more personal, deals with a particular incarnation of this Lady that certain songs from this 1981 album remind me of.

Waiting for a Girl Like You, Urgent, and especially Woman in Black:

She draws me in
But she teaches me well
I never need any explanation
From that woman in black
She's a mystery
She's everything a woman should be
Woman in black got a hold on me

For sample sound clips of the above, click here.

For a summary of the August 27 note below, see the quote from William Congreve on the cover of the September 2002 Vanity Fair magazine:

"There is in true beauty, as in courage,
somewhat which narrow souls
cannot dare to admire."

From a Fictionwise eBooks summary of Mike Resnick's novel The Dark Lady... 

Leonardo, an art historian of the far future, is given a mission... 

"His instructions: Search the galaxy for any piece of art bearing the image of his obsession: the mysterious Dark Lady, a beautiful and somber human female whose exact likeness, he has secretly discovered, appears in paintings and sculptures throughout history--dating all the way back to Earth's ancient Rome.

Leonardo's research reveals the link between the artists of the Dark Lady: human men who voluntarily risk their lives. If she appears to men who court death, she may be their Angel of Death ... or, as Leonardo hopes, the female of an ancient... legend--The Mother of All Things."

Today, August 27 (or tomorrow, according to some accounts), is the date of death of a great actor, Robert Shaw, who died at 51 in 1978.   If in real life he was anything like the brave men he played... King Henry VIII,  SPECTRE assassin Red Grant, Panzer commander Colonel Hessler, and shark hunter Captain Quint... he, if anyone, deserved to be greeted in heaven by the Dark Lady.

For a more scholarly treatment of the Dark Lady, see this Princeton University Press site.

Doble-V + Doble-V = W.W.

From Carole A. Holdsworth, Dulcinea and Pynchon's V:

Tanner may have stated it best:

“V. is whatever lights you to the end of the street: she is also the dark annihilation waiting at the end of the street.”

(Tony Tanner, page 36, “V. and V-2.” in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).

W. W.

A link for the August 26 birthdays of

Rufino Tamayo and Julio Cortazar:

Homage to Thelonious Sphere Monk.

See also "Sphere" in Pynchon's V. 

From Battlefield Vacations, Edinburgh:

On the film "Braveheart" --

If you've ever wondered about what exactly "drawn and quartered" means, there's a good demonstration at the end.

See The Great Man Himself

and The William Wallace Directory Page.