Dr. Metablog

Baseball Purity

My father played excellent tennis and basketball -- he was a guard on the CCNY team under Nat Holman until he left school to put a few cents in the family coffers.  During the 20s and 30s he also played some semi-pro baseball. He'd make $5.00 or $10.00 a game as a "ringer" -- and in those days, an extra buck or two went a long way.

He was a catcher and had the busted-up fingers to prove it. He paid for the broken bones when the arthritis caught up with him. Although he had been an unusually strong man, in his last years he didn't have enough left in his twisted fingers to pull the match out of the matchbook to light his pipe. But he could still discuss "inshoots" and "outshoots."

Sometime in the early 80s (it was after mom died), he was in the hospital recuperating from a hip replacement. He was not a good patient and the confinement left him testy and bored, but he could be a little cheered by watching whatever sports were on the TV. One day I visited him and found the television off.

"Pop, there's a Yankee game on. Why aren't you watching it?"

He waved his gnarled old hand. "American League. DH rule. Not baseball."

I'm glad he didn't have to see the changes since he left the scene. It's a new, impermanent, history-hostile, TV-friendly, high-scoring production: franchises jumping all around the country; new stadiums with mighty short porches; players coming up to bat wearing not only gold necklaces and earrings, but also helmet, gauntlets and greaves; the incredible shrinking strike zone; pitchers no longer allowed to knock down the over-aggressive batter; an epidemic of steroids that has led to  unnaturally bulked-up sluggers; balls flying out of the park as if the guys were playing Sunday-afternoon slow-pitch softball; mediocre hitters slamming 40 hr's a year -- not to mention baseball played in the thin Colorado atmosphere where the batted ball takes off like a rocket and where curve balls can't curve.

I know exactly what my father would have said: "Not baseball." 

A Little Spellcheck Humor, Maestro

I first stumbled over Spellcheck's wayward sense of humor years ago when I was writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Spellcheck rejected Capulet, which is Juliet's family name, and presumptuously instead offered the choice of either "co-pilot" or "copulate."

Spellcheck is deeply offended by proper names, uncommon words, neologisms, words in a language other than English, etc., and sometimes makes its impatience known by suggesting dadaist or absurd substitutions.

For example, everyone (everyone except Spellcheck, that is) knows that Muggletonians are members of a religion founded in England in the 1650s by Lodowick Muggleton which held, among other doctrines, the idea that heaven was only slightly above the reach of our uplifted arms. Spellcheck has an irrational animus toward this harmless, near-extinct religion and proposed as substitutes for Muggletonian, the words "Argentinian," "Miltonic," "Macedonian," "Justinian" and (as a pure instance of spellcheckian whimsy) "melatonin."

Apparently untutored in geography, Spellcheck rejected the ancient north African and modern upper New York state city of Utica in favor of "Attica," which makes a kind of sense, but also "Utah," which is a bit off-the-wall, "Utopia," which is nowhere, and the imaginative but bizarre "erotica."

A recent entry on berries provoked an orgy of spellcheckian absurdity. For fenberry, "Canberra"; for crowberry, both "crowbar" and "crockery"; for lingonberry, "linguine," "lingerie" and "nunnery"; for whortleberry, "wheelbarrow";  for earthberry, "authoress"; for cloudberry, "glittery" and the truly wild, out-of-left-field "Goldberg."  Speaking of left field: for rbi's, Spellcheck proposed both "ribs" and "rabbis"; for Ebbets (as in Ebbets Field), simply "beets";  for Newcombe, as in the great Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, "encumber."

In another recent post I invented the word "mccranwichorama," defined as a display of inferior coinages of words in which detached segments (such as the wich in cranwich) acquire new meaning. I knew that when I batted mccranwichorama over the net, I would probe the outer limits of Spelllcheck's powers, but I must say that the program rose to the occasion when it parried with a transcendent absurdity: for mccranwichorama:  "mercurochrome."    

Three Cheers for the Blue, White and Red

It's been a Krzysztof Kieslowski festival here the last few days. We've watched, two times each and with concentrated and astonished attention, Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs films: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Individually (which is how we viewed them in 1993-94 when they first appeared) they're splendid; taken together, they're an even more wonderful achievement. 

Kieslowski tells complicated stories with economy and precision; I don't know any filmmaker who can make every corner of the frame count for so much. It must be his training as a maker of documentaries that accounts for the rich, factual surface of his narrative. And yet his chosism -- his thing-ism -- is always in the service not of plot only but of the enigma as well. Kieslowski knows what accomplished novelists also know -- that an object, studied closely, becomes a metaphor. The three films share a common theme -- that it's impossible to find happiness outside of society  -- but the presentations are so various and imaginative and the characters so rich that philosophical questionings are as unobtrusive as they are omnipresent.

Kieslowski swore off directing when he finished Rouge, but had apparently relented and had started on another trilogy (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory) when the heart attack killed him. But there's the earlier work; we'll track backwards to watch, once again, The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique.       

Predators Then and Now

There's more neighborhood mountain lion news: yesterday a seven-year-old boy, walking in the rearward of a group of six or seven hikers, was pounced upon in the mountains just west of town by a big guy. The child was bitten and clawed but is now recovering. Family members drove the lion away.

In my view, they should never have allowed the child to pull up the rear. 

I’d been thinking about predators even before this last attack (see the entry for April 8).  By one of those curious convergences that make life so rich, I just happened to be reading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), a travel narrative ostensibly about the sacred but invisible paths along which the ancestors of the Australian aborigines traveled and 'sang the world into existence.'  The thesis of this quirky, self-indulgent and intermittently brilliant narrative is that human beings are by nature not sedentary but migratory.

But the book isn't only about migrants;  n one of The Songlines' many meanders, Chatwin writes a few pages on the age-old interaction of human beings with big predators like the mountain lion. He takes issue with the much-loved claim of right-wing thinkers that human beings are naturally territorial and aggressive -- that we are nothing more than naked apes who must continually strive to control larger and larger dominions. Instead, he offers the alternative view that because of our long history of fending off predators, human beings are naturally not aggressive but defensive  -- and, moreover, that It's the defensive imperative that caused our species to move from savagery to civility. He asks us to think of the situation of the earliest humans. "The first men were humbled, harried, besieged -- their communities few and fragmented… clinging to life and one another through the horrors of the night."  "Might not," he asks, "all the attributes we call ‘human’ – language, song-making, food-sharing, gift-giving, intermarriage... have evolved as stratagems for survival, hammered out against tremendous odds, to avert the threat of extinction?"  It's a challenging, overarching hypothesis -- and whether or not there are facts to validate it is beyond my ken.

It's certainly true that first humans in Africa had to cope with a variety of nasty predators -- lions were there long before people -- and that when  our ancestors migrated to Europe they walked into a wild, dangerous country. The European lion, panthera leo, widespread from 900,000 years ago to the end of the last ice age, was a third taller and longer than surviving African lions, which themselves can weigh 450 pounds and reach a length of 8 1/2 feet. The lions in the virginal land that our ancestors crossed the Mediterranean to colonize would have been as tall as a fully grown Paleolithic man and might have weighed as much as 880 pounds.  And remember that for 99% of our time on earth, humans were either entirely unarmed or possessed only of the hand ax -- a palm-size piece of sharpened but haft-less flint. No matter what theory of the origins of civilization we embrace, we should remember that our genes were selected in a world of woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, aurochs, and wolves and that we competed with the big bears for what were then the best residences on earth-- the limestone caves in the Ardeche region in France.

It's in these caves that the memory of European lions is beautifully preserved. Thirty thousand years ago, a long tradition of animal representation climaxed in the paintings in the Chauvet Cave. There are beautiful representations of European lions on the hunt and at rest in Jean-Marie Chauvet's The Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Abrams, 1995) --  irrefutable evidence that our forefathers knew them at first hand.  It's unquestionable that many a child -- and many an adult -- fell prey to these adversaries. And perhaps Chatwin is right; perhaps those humans who survived to reproduce were selected not for aggressiveness but for congeniality and especially for artistic ability. How else can we account for our species' continual preoccupation, or perhaps obsession, with all the many forms of beauty?

April 17.  The authorities tracked and killed an 80-pound female panther. I sincerely hope that it was the offending animal and not an innocent bystander. 

More on Prayer Science

In my post on the Templeton prayer study, I did not mention the outcome least congenial to prayer enthusiasts: not only did prayer do no good, it also caused real harm. “A significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain [whether or not they were being prayed for”]. 

How could it happen that prayees did worse than patients who were just let alone?  Dr. Charles Bethea, co-author of the Templeton study and cardiologist at the Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City proposed that "it may have made [patients] uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?"  It's a possible scenario -- it’s no secret that depressed and anxious patients do worse than happy ones. But the “patient is anxious” explanation doesn’t work for those who didn’t know that they were on the receiving end of prayers.  Among the group of unwitting prayees, “18 percent suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.”  Researchers offered no hypothesis for this unanticipated result except to say that it was a chance outcome.

So let us review: when prayees know that they’re being prayed for, their decline is a product of anxiety; when they don’t know that they're being prayed for, their decline is the result of chance. In both cases, the unwanted phenomenon is explained by natural rather than supernatural causes.

Let us now imagine that the study produced contrary results and that the prayees had lower rates of complications than the unprayed. Would there not have been banner headlines in newspapers and on Fox proclaiming that prayer has been proven to be effective remedy for the complications of surgery?

The error in logic is enormous and obvious. When prayer fails, it's for natural reasons. If and when prayer succeeds, it's because of supernatural intervention. It's a flagrant double standard where a symmetrical standard should be mandatory. If prayer succeeds because of divine intervention, it's only logical that it must fail because of symmetrical supernatural intrusions -- because, for example, malificent demonic forces located the prayer providers, hijacked their prayers mid-flight, and turned good into evil. It's a difficult hypothesis to prove, it's true, but it's exactly as credible as the ideas that are put forward by prayer science.   

Prayer Science

According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost of $2.4 million (contributed by the ever-zealous Templeton Foundation, a powerful supporter of prayer research). The details are utterly and weirdly fascinating. "Researchers monitored 1802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half of the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers asked the members of three congregations -- St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City -- to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names. The congregations were told that they could pray in their own way, but they were instructed to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'" The shocking result: "researchers found no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not." Prayer, it would appear (or intercessory prayer as this variety is called), does not change things. 

I admire the dedicated men and women of science who put heart and soul into this project, but with all due respect, I must question both their conclusions and their protocols. For starters, the inference that prayer doesn't work is far too broad. Inasmuch as the scientists engaged only Christians to pray, all that they proved was that Christian prayer doesn't work. It's marvelously ethnocentric to suggest that just because Christians tanked, other religions could not succeed. It was Bailey Smith, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, who authoritatively proclaimed that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." And yet, in a stunning theological upset, the scientific evidence now proves that God Almighty does not hear the prayers of Christians. But such a conclusion is itself far too hyperbolic. In actual fact, all that the study established is that God did not hear the prayers of three particular groups of prayer-providers. It's certainly a black mark against the Teresian Carmelites and their friends, and it will be a cold day in hell before they see another Templeton prayer contract, but there's nothing to say that Southern Baptists, even Bailey Smith himself, with his private line to the Almighty, might not have had more sway with the Great Jehovah.

If the researchers had not been so blindly and thoughtlessly ethnocentric, they might have solicited the prayers of people of various faiths, especially those praying to different gods. Or even better: they might have assembled disparate groups of prayer providers. In one set, for example, there would be a Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, and a Hindu; in another, a Muslim, a Wiccan, and a Methodist; in a third, a Scientologist, a Baptist, and a Muggletonian. Although the number of possible permutations is intimidating, the cause is noble: to determine impartially which of these groups can best cut the prayer mustard. It's wrong to put the entire burden on Christians. Scientists need to mix and match the various religions so that they can discover the most effective synergistic combination, or as it might better be called, the appropriate prayer cocktail.

In addition, the study is guilty of flagrant mishandling of dosage. There was simply no control over the amount of prayer that was administered. Just as traditional medicines come in cubic centimeters, prayer comes in units of time. Let's say that one person praying for one minute yields one prayer unit.  Pending further study, there's no way to establish exactly how many prayer units a heart patient might need. For a bypass, fifty prayer units might be a minimum dosage, but perhaps twice or three times as many units might be necessary to alleviate the symptoms of a hallucinator of witches, extraterrestrials, or other supernatural beings. It's entirely possible that the prayers in this study failed simply because they didn't meet a minimum prayer-unit threshold. Moreover, it's important not to over-prescribe. For all we know, excessive prayer might precipitate iatrogenic illnesses. And it's also a question of efficiency: once an optimum dosage can be established, prayer providers can go about their business and not waste their time generating superfluous and expensive prayer units.

Moreover, prayer scientists seem to have given no serious consideration to the group power of prayer providers. Given the present abysmal state of prayer science, it's still unknown whether prayers are more effective when delivered by just one or a very few providers, or in large choruses. Jews seem to think that a minyan, or quorum, is ten, but hard science has not confirmed this number. It's therefore imperative to experiment with different size groups in order to establish a proper medical-minyan. This is not easy, or inexpensive, but it's essential.  It would indeed be unfortunate if it turns out that a thousand prayer providers are necessary to improve the condition of just one bypass patient, but good golly, the Ancient of Days works in mysterious ways, and it's not for us to question His prayer needs.

There are some other areas in which more scientific rigor is required. A)  different diseases: just because prayer didn't work for bypasses doesn't mean it won't work for scrofula. Perhaps some diseases are more prayer-responsive than others. B) fervor: prayer science has made the naive error of assuming that all prayer providers are equal. Yet the unalterable laws of random distribution determine that some people will pray more effectively than others. In point of fact, it's entirely likely that some prayer providers will be more effective with one disease than another. If I were a patient, I'd be mighty bent out of shape (and might even seek legal recourse) if I were assigned a prayer provider who had a proven track record with ulcers but who amounted to zilch for my hip replacement.  C) identification: prayer providers were given only the first name and initial of their prayee. But "Bob S." is entirely too vague-- there might be hundreds of "Bob S"'s all over the world undergoing bypass surgery at any given time. How the blue blazes is the Lord of Hosts supposed to know which particular "Bob S" is meant?  Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Prayer providers should continue to pray for Bob S., but just remember to add the last four digits of his social security or major credit card number. 

I'm not the only person disappointed with this study. According to the Times, "Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,' Mr Barth said, 'but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'"  Bob B's assertion that "prayer works" is anecdotal thinking and has absolutely no merit whatsoever, but I can't imagine a single person who wouldn't agree with him that prayer science is "just getting started"-- and also that it has a long bumpy road to travel. Fortunately, the Bush administration invested over $2 million of our tax revenues in prayer research, with more in the pipeline, so some revolutionary breakthroughs in the spiritual sciences soon might be achieved.  We'll be waiting.

Beast in the Backyard

On the night of August 23, 1990, an eighty-pound, two-year-old female mountain lion wandered into our backyard.

The story appears in a book on cougar-human interactions (David Baron, The Beast in the Garden [New York: Norton, 2004], 182-187) -- a book which also contains a picture of "our" lioness, lying drugged on the ground (167).

My strongest memory of that encounter doesn't appear in the book and deserves a report.  The lioness was crouching on a low branch of a box elder, and a goodly number of police loitered on the street and in the yards and alleys waiting for the wildlife-control officer and his tranquillizing dart. Eventually the marksman arrived and shot the lioness. The animal leaped down from the tree. As soon as she hit the ground and started to run, we could hear the sound, resonating throughout the neighborhood, of car doors being slammed shut as the officers rushed into their vehicles -- to re-emerge only when the lioness collapsed.

Last week, there was another mountain lion in a near neighbor's backyard. It was daylight;  the owner of the house had her video camera available and produced a very clear record of a magnificent animal -- much larger and more formidable that the one we had seen. Two nights ago, the neighbors held a meeting and the author of The Beast in the Garden, who lives in town, came to tell us about cougars in our county and what to do if we encounter them. The good news is that the odds of being attacked are small: only one local person (a high school student jogging alone near Idaho Springs) has been killed -- or taken, the word is -- during the last decade. The author's advice: bring a companion with you when you go walking in the mountains-- it's unlikely that a catamount will attack two people, and if he should attack, then there are two of you to fend him off. (He didn't repeat a familiar bit of local humor: "Always bring  a friend with you when you walk in mountain-lion country. Remember, you don't have to outrun the lion; you just have to outrun your friend.")  He also reminded the audience that it's wrong to run away (because you will look like prey) but that you should make yourself look big, make noise, throw rocks, etc. Do not, repeat do not, play dead -- or worse yet, get down on all fours and try to crawl away. But on the whole it's not the mountain lion you see who's the danger; it's the mountain lion whom you don't see, but sees you. The one you feel.

A jogger was in the mountains with his faithful pooch at his side.  He came to the top of a rise and there, on the road, was a big panther.  The jogger's dog immediately disappeared into the roadside vegetation. The man did everything right -- shouted, threw things, stared the lion down. Eventually, and slowly, the big beast moved away and the jogger continued on his run. When he came to the bottom of the hill, Faithful Companion, who had taken the long way around,  reappeared and resumed running  with his master.

Man's best friend, but within sensible limits.

Quintessence of Motherhood

A friend, a retired nurse, was keeping watch when her ninety-plus-year-old mother was about to breath her last. The mother, who had not been coherent for some days, was either unconscious or sleeping deeply when she suddenly roused herself, looked closely at the daughter, uttered the words "you need rouge," and died. 

This story is self-explanatory but nevertheless I feel compelled to embark on a course of no doubt supererogatory explications. The mother expresses a variety of emotions: some positive, some not so good.  Primarily she is affectionate and protective. She wants her daughter to take care of herself and be her best, so she proposes a practical cosmetic enhancement. But at the same time, she is intrusively judgmental, because the statement "you need rouge" clearly finds the daughter deficient and in need of cosmetic enhancement.

 The mother is also impolite -- but only in the way that people who know each other intimately can sometimes be unmannerly. This particular mother wouldn't speak nearly so frankly to anyone in the world but her own daughter. In addition, she's competitive. "You need rouge" means not only "you're pallid, you need help," but also hints at "I never needed rouge."

It's a humorous anecdote, because it's about the eternal continuity of mothering.  Even at the moment of death, the mother remains entirely and unequivocally maternal. The phrase "you need rouge" also makes us smile because it displaces other last words  -- words of wisdom or serenity or love -- that we might anticipate or for which we might hope.

And what about the daughter?  Was she, or should she be, pleased, resigned, offended, amused?   

And Speaking of Berries...

The cranberry, some say, is so named because it is eaten by cranes. Perhaps. But it's just as likely that the word derives from the similarity between the plant's stamen and the crane's beak --  as the common geranium or cranesbill is named after the flower's distinct enlarged pistil. (The American cranberry has an English cousin that is known, from its watery habitat, as the fenberry. The fenberry is neither eaten in nor by fens.) But if in fact cranberries were the food of cranes, what about the common bearberry (also known as crowberry, foxberry, and hog cranberry) -- did this plant also derive its name from its consumers?  I'm skeptical, as I am skeptical about the derivation of the word lingonberry or cowberry, cows not being famous for berry eating. In fact, lingon means berry in Swedish, so the lingonberry is, etymologically speaking, a berryberry. Inasmuch as berryberries contain thiamine, they may help to prevent beriberi.

The bunchberry, a member of the dogwood family, is also known as the squirrelberry, pigeonberry, and crackerberry (from crake = crow), but never as mooseberry, though it's prized by moose, who have themselves provided a name for a favorite food -- the mountain maple or moosewood.

The circumpolar cloudberry is sometimes called the salmonberry, but no one claims that it is nibbled by salmons. And what about the gooseberry?  There's no discernible relation between gooseberry and geese.  There are also gooseberries that have shed whatever goosiness they may once have possessed. The plant that was originally known as the Chinese gooseberry was transported to New Zealand, where it was selected, hybridized, and cloned, to emerge after commercial re-christening as the kiwifruit or kiwi -- the name gooseberry not considered classy enough for international export. To the best of my knowledge, kiwis are not eaten by kiwis. 

Blackberry and blueberry pose no etymological challenge, but raspberry is a bit of a mystery, there being no obvious rasp to the berry. The word raspberry was most definitely not derived from the slang term for a rude derogatory sound -- a usage that is only traceable to the last part of the nineteenth century. The unpalatable bristly dewberry has no particular connection to dew. It's popularly said that the serviceberry is so called because, when it flowers early in the spring, the ground has thawed enough to bury -- or conduct a service -- for last winter's dead. But it's a false etymology -- in fact, the service in serviceberry comes directly from its Latin ancestor sorbus (just as the mul in mulberry derives from Latin morus). The juneberry does in fact derive its name from its month of flowering. The loganberry is named for its hybridizer, James Logan, who crossed the blackberry and the raspberry. Although the name huckleberry -- also known as a hurtleberry or whortleberry -- is sometimes applied to the blueberry, it describes a botanically distinct species. The slang term huckleberry for a layabout -- nowadays a slacker -- was in use a generation or so before Mark Twain made it famous. Huckleberry Finn might just as easily be known as Whortleberry Finn. The bilberry is more distinguished when it is called a fraughan. The jostaberry is brand-new to the market; it's a cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant. (Currants are berries even though not called so; the word currant derives from their older name -- raisins of Corinth.) The strawberry has nothing whatsoever to do with straw. Some think that name derives from the chaff-like external seeds or achenes which cover the fruit, but it's more likely that the name is drawn from the plant's habit of growth: runners stray or are strewn over the ground. A thousand years ago strawberries were called earthberries, a name not especially suitable for commerce.