Oksana asks a subtle and very useful question. Not "Do you love me?" but "Why do you love me?" It cannot be fobbed off with a simple "of course I do." I have to come up with reasons." Makes me be inventive.
Last night she gave me another good reason. She went to dinner with Anna, a cute young thing whom I have known about as long as Oksana, 14 years. Woody Allen had a great line about the change in his life when he started to gain recognition as a comedian. He said he was "being turned down by a better class of women." That was my sentiment my first two years in Kyiv, before I met Oksana.
Cute young things are always on a guy's radar, though we are generally perceptive enough to know whether it is worthwhile making any moves. I always enjoyed Anna's company, but she never dropped any clues that I might take it anyplace. A forty-year gap can do that.
Anna was a member of one of the Toastmasters clubs that I often visited when I was single. My recollection, which Oksana could not confirm, is that she was a lawyer.
Here she is in pictures taken at our barbecues in 2016 and 2017. If I told you she was the cute one, it would do you no good at all. Aren't they all? Oksana was apparently busy with other guests and didn't get into the photos. At any rate Anna is the petite girl in red.
The war having given her an opportunity to leave Ukraine, Anna is now in London working in the theater. Oksana reports that she is put off by the high prices and is happy to be back here on vacation.
Last weekend Oksana invited two other old friends from Toastmasters, Olga and Irena to a barbecue lunch with their children. They are among that happy minority who are content with their husbands and children. They are busy with the here-and-now and don’t give thought to the might-have-beens.
I chatted with them for half an hour. Olga (third from the left in the first picture above) wanted to know all about the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967. Telling the story convinced her, and reconvinced me, how wonderful our normalcy is.
I am blessed to have a sociable, outgoing wife, one who maintains a wide circle of friends. She looks forward to opportunities to participate in the neighborhood. Without her, I would not be nearly as well wrapped-in.
Our super prolific cherry plum tree outdid itself this year. Eddie bought a 20 foot long, eight-foot-wide piece of netting to lay under the tree and catch the fruit as it fell. His plan to bicycle to the farmers market to sell the fruit fell through when it turned out that the bicycle was so tail heavy that he couldn't manage it. We put the fruit in a box on the corner with a sign saying "Take it, it's free." Even so, by the end of the weekend the box was still half full. I brought it home before the fruit spoiled or the rain weakened the box.
Oksana took a picture of the fruit and posted it on the neighborhood Viber site. Sure enough, somebody came to take the whole box. He has a recipe for steeping the fruit in vodka to make an aperitif.
No sooner had he left than somebody else showed up. Oksana had taken a picture of medicines her father no longer used – she had laid them out in a 3 x 3' arrangement on the floor – and she said that they were free for the taking. The guy who came by said that he had an organization that accepted them, sorted them and gave them to the Army. I used the opportunity to get a bunch of old stuff out of my medicine cabinet as well.
I have a dilemma as I finish reading Edward Dutton's latest book "Breeding the Human Herd." Dutton is no doubt a genius. He is truly a nonconformist – his YouTube sobriquet is "The Jolly Heretic." He is also highly prolific, turning out approximately one book per year. His books are not original. Rather, he builds on the same themes book after book. It is worth reading them to follow the development of his ideas.
The dilemma is this. He is so offbeat that for all his genius he has nobody to correct his obvious mistakes. Since he says the same thing in book after book, the same mistakes keep cropping up. While I want to praise him for tackling subjects nobody else wants to take on, I also want to hit him across the head with a 2 x 4 to open his eyes to obvious things that he overlooks. But gently, because he is on the side of the angels.
You will see the book review before it shows up on Amazon. Putting it most briefly, Dutton attributes just about all of the degradation in the human condition to genetics. More than that, he credits vaccinеs with having vastly improved public health. Wrong. Improvements in public health came before the immunizаtions were widely used, and the contribution of vаccines to autoimmune diseases, autism and other disorders is increasingly well known. He says that the anti-vаaxxеrs are uneducated know-nothings. Absolutely the opposite is true. Malone, McCullough, Berenson, Jessica Rose, Matthew Crawford, Igor Chudov et. аl. are the brightest of their generation.
With regard to intelligence, he manages to claim in every book that the average of children’s intelligence is the same as that of their parents. He brushed me off when I send a link to my video showing how that is a mathematical, statistical impossibility.
Substack keeps improving to the point that I don't understand it. There is a wonderful long post this morning by Edward Slavsquat, one of the most knowledgeable writers about Russia and one who can write someone close to him partially about the current war. This is the post I tried to share. If it worked, I can't see it. He asks the most essential question. What, if anything, could Russia now gain from this war, however it ends up?
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where we are looking forward to a week in the 80s. We finally have to water the lawn.
Graham
Did he actually deny regression to the mean? I hope not. It’s true of every trait that we care about, including IQ.
On the “genetics explains all” point, you are right: there’s a tendency for hereditarians to make two mistakes. 1) to overvalue an admittedly very valuable trait: IQ, and 2) a tendency to push back against blank slatists by insisting almost everything is genetic, including rapid cultural deterioration. Both of these are clear overreactions to a rotten zeitgeist