Shaky Danny

The hardest part about managing anyone, including spies, is initiative. When someone is acting as your employee, whether as a spy or in any other capacity, you are responsible for their actions. They don’t know the big picture. They can’t know the big picture. You can’t have them running around knocking things over and messing everything up. Spies, like any other employee have to take direction.  James Bond better not kill anyone unless it is authorized.  That is what is so wrong with the Booth conspiracy. The idea that any spy ring would act without authorization makes as much sense as you going to work and deciding what your job assignment is.  Even if Booth himself decided to kill Lincoln, it is difficult to believe that the rest of the ring would go along without authorization. Abraham Lincoln is the only president known to have been killed by a conspiracy. There have been suspicions about others. The fact of eight convicted and four executed confirms conspir...

I am a big fan of the unsaid obvious.  Perhaps the best example was the fact that AIDS is passed by anal intercourse.  Sorry Magic. This deference of reality to propriety demonstrates the dangers of hypocrisy.  I remember the idiot virgin clubs where they proudly refrained from sex, because of all the dangers, then got that goofy sly look and mumbled about other things you could do.  Lazy eye is a good current example. If you look up strabismus, they will tell you that the cause is unknown. This is a lie. If you look up fetal alcohol syndrome, one of the symptoms is strabismus. It may be that there are other causes. But fetal alcohol causes strabismus. If you have a cast to your eye, perhaps your arms and your temper are a little short; chances are Mom was hitting it. Some people might consider this a lapse in good taste, but I think it is preferable to recognize a developmental disorder rather than a hereditary one. If they were truthful rather than pusill...

One of the first things you notice is how autobiographical most of the material is.  I guess people write about the things that matter to them.  One time this guy brought a fairly long manuscript, we are only supposed to read a few pages; he started at the beginning and read all the way to the end.  It was about child molestation.  At first I was surprised by his imagination, and then it occurred to me that he might actually know his subject.  My stomach turned.  No one interrupted him or asked him to cut it short.  Perhaps the material was gripping or perhaps like me they had all shut down.  I don’t remember what he said.  At the end he shoved his manuscript back into its manila envelope and awaited our comments.  A woman across from me took out a small pistol and shot the man through his forehead.  The man next to me said: -Mine is really short.

For thousands of years Jews have had a prohibition against mixing meat with milk. This is a lot of work. It involves separate sets of dishes, and by separate I mean compulsively separate.  In the last hundred years some of our rules have found scientific justification. One might suppose that correlations were noticed between behaviors and consequences, but given the short life spans it is puzzling. A lot of this stuff didn’t make sense until we saw germs under the microscope. I can imagine some saying: -I defecated near the well and nothing happened. Torah sometimes cloaks common sense rules in mysticism. If they told men that sex after childbirth is bad for the mother it might not have made an impression.  I knew an obstetrician whose children were born nine months apart.  Telling him: -She’s unclean, dammit, might have been more effective. Sorry to go mystical but there is the possibility that the prohibition on mixing meat and milk may one day find hygienic ju...

I doubt that most of you still read newspapers. This Sunday we read the Tribune in bed while drinking coffee.  Christine did have her laptop, which she used to plan our bike trip.  Then she spoiled the day by dragging me bicycling in the forest preserves. It is not surprising that the Tribune has endorsed Rauner a Republican for the position of governor over Quinn a Democrat.  It would be remarkable if they had chosen the opposite.  The Tribune has always been a Republican paper.  I suspect that their decision has far more to do with association than ideology or tradition.  Their justification for the decision is that they regard Rauner as the more subversive candidate; that he will: -Shake things up. Illinois recently suffered another governor embarrassment when it was determined that we had elected a flat out crook. The embarrassment was that while Blagojevich was eager to sell, he didn’t have anything worth buying.  That is how irrelevant the...

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum . I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them.  The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center.  It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future. My current favorite is the  Door County Historical Museum  in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key.  While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that?  That is what a museum is for. My favorite exhibit is the  Mathematica Ex...

At the end of 1971 the draft had ended and my school no longer had any ethical reason to keep me and I flunked out.  At the beginning of 1972 I obtained employment as a medical records clerk at University of Chicago Hospitals.  The mother of a girlfriend quit her job as an admitting clerk in the hospital and recommended me as a replacement. So part way through 1972 I became the night admitting clerk working from midnight to 8 in the morning at Chicago Lying In, the obstetrics and gynecology hospital at University of Chicago Hospitals. Termination of pregnancy was illegal and every few weeks I would admit from one to three emergency patients for botched abortions.  I suppose the illegal operation would do all its patients on those particular evenings.  After a few months it dawned on me that those I admitted were the ones who had made it to the emergency room and if there were these many botched procedures there must be others who had not made it to the emergency r...