Laugh, Clown, Laugh

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Dyspepsia doesn’t strike me as a particularly attractive flavor for a pundit to emit.  I mean listening to someone like me carp about all the things that are going wrong or will go wrong sounds like the height of boredom.    But it’s also kind of the world we live in.  I guess that marinating that flavor in humor might make it more palatable for the audience.  And I do try to add gallows humor and mockery of all the truly awful villains we face whenever I can.  But sometimes it’s almost impossible to paint a smile, even a wry smile, onto my face, when considering the catastrophically damaging events that seem to happen more and more frequently every day.

But we must laugh.  Despite the fact that it is very likely that Joseph Biden will be re-elected president of the United States, or maybe because it is so likely, we must laugh at Joe Biden.  All of the gaffes, the incoherent mumbling, the lies about everything from COVID to cannibals eating his uncle, to his creepy personal interactions with everyone from small children to the Pope.  All of this needs to be mocked and laughed at.

Because we need catharsis.  In ancient Athens, comedians like Aristophanes would rail against the politicians and accuse them of all manner of dishonest and even scurrilous behavior.  And the politicians had to take it with no recourse to the law courts.  Because the Athenians believed in the almost sacred right of the people to mock their elites.  And they were right.  There has to be a place where the high and mighty get taken down a peg.  It’s necessary, it’s healthy.  If that doesn’t exist you end up with Soviet Russia where the legitimacy of the state is slowly lost to cynicism and eventually when the social capital reaches zero everyone just ignores the leaders and wander away to become bandits.

Now maybe that is our fate.  With Donald Trump being stripped of his money and his freedom by kangaroo courts it won’t take long before even comedians will be hauled off to the gulag for mocking Joe.  I fully expect in the next Biden administration laws against disinformation will probably begin to mushroom around the country.  Maybe we’ll all have to refer to Biden as “the dear leader” instead of Dementia Joe.

But in the meantime, I intend to continue mocking these turkeys whenever they do something especially absurd.  And that’s bound to be any minute.  Why just today I read that during the White House briefing Haitian Shirley Temple claimed that videos of Joe Biden staring in the wrong direction from the parachutist that landed practically at his feet at the G7 conference was a “deep fake.”  We watch as the Italian Prime Minister takes him by the arm and turns him around to see what everyone of normal intelligence has already seen.  Karine Jean-Pierre is sort of like the voice of the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

And who knows?  There’s always the slimmest of chances that something goes wrong and Trump gets elected.  And that would be the funniest joke of all.  Can you imagine if Trump actually did drain the swamp?  Hilarious.

Troy (2004) – A Movie Review

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As a former student of classical languages and literature I suppose I should be categorically opposed to this movie.  But to be honest I probably enjoyed around three quarters of it.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Now full disclosure, the movie Troy resembles Homer’s Iliad about as closely as my grandson’s middle school band’s rendition of the Blue Danube Waltz resembles that performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.  In other words, not a lot.

But that really isn’t important.  The question is whether it succeeds on its own terms.  What we’re presented with is an adventure film masquerading as a literary epic.  We have the story of Orlando Bloom as Paris absconding with Menelaus’ wife Helen from Sparta and taking her to Troy where her new father-in-law Peter O’Toole as Priam decides that they’ll defy Agamemnon and try to keep Helen even if Brad Pitt as Achilles is preparing to run amok on the windy plains of Troy.

In order to turn an epic poem into a two-hour movie some compromise had to be taken with the plot.  Instead of a ten-year war we have a ten-day war.  And some folks had to be sacrificed.  For instance, both Menelaus and Ajax are axed in the second day of battle.  Now that is surprising since in the Hellenic version Menelaus is one of the few heroes to reach a ripe old age after the war.  And equally surprising, not only does Paris survive but he ends up keeping Helen.  Shocker!

So, you might ask what does survive the translation from page to screen?  Well, I’d say Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, Priam and Hector are recognizably themselves.  Agamemnon is an arrogant fool.  Odysseus is the wily survivor and Achilles is the aristocratic demi-god following his doom.  Priam is the honorable king who must see his country and family laid waste.  But the most sympathetic character is of course Hector.  Here is the good man, prince, husband, son, brother and father trying to save his country from a creature that no man can defeat.  It is his fate to kill the cousin of the monster and now have to face him in single combat.  And he will die and his body will be lashed to the back of Achilles chariot and dragged around the plains of Troy in ignominy.  And this gives his father the chance to beg Achilles mercy to allow for decent burial.

So quite a bit of the story survives.  We even get the Trojan horse scene, which truth be told isn’t part of the Iliad.  It’s more of an aside in a story in the Odyssey.

As you can imagine, the whole thing is sort of a hot mess.  To his credit I think Brad Pitt acquits himself quite skillfully in his characterization of Achilles.  His relation to the primary and secondary characters is consistent and generally very entertaining.  Unfortunately, all of this relatively positive film making falls apart in the last scene.  The sack of Troy is highly unsatisfactory.  The death of Achilles seems to fall flat and lacks emotional interest.

So, who, if anyone, can I recommend this movie to?  Well, to start with Brad Pitt fans might want to give it a watch.  I’d say fans of sword and sandals epics might like it.  Strict devotees of Homer will be affronted and may throw things at the screen.  My opinion is that it is relatively entertaining with some weak scenes and an unsatisfying ending.  Of course, your milage may vary.

How Many Macromolecules Can Dance on the Head of a Pin

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Here’s a very interesting discussion of Levinthal’s paradox.  In a nutshell, the paradox is related to the almost infinite possibilities in the ways that a macromolecular protein can fold into its primary, secondary and tertiary shape versus the effortless way that proteins function in living thing.  The author says the degrees of freedom inherent in a large protein molecule have been modelled and there are supposed to be 10300 different shapes that the protein could assume.  Now the point is that this number is so absurdly large that the chance of any particular protein molecule assuming the shape it needs in order to perform its biochemical function in a living cell within a short enough time to sustain the metabolic requirements of life seems impossible.

Well I must admit that is a ridiculously large number.  Someone did a guess at how many separate atoms there are in the observable universe and he came up with 1082.  So that gives you a feel for the absurdity of 10300 .

Basically this argument is supposed to demonstrate the unlikeliness of the genesis of life occurring again elsewhere in the universe.

I guess I’m not sure what I think of this.  While the large size of macromolecules render their physical properties subtle and hard to predict, nevertheless, they do possess these properties and these are exactly the properties needed to sustain life in the world we live in.

If they occur on Earth then they could occur elsewhere.  Now the point really is how could life occur in the first place if the exact sequence of amino acids and nucleic acids needed to make up the macromolecules of life are so absurdly complicated and the random forces involved in creating these exact molecules would be so blind?

It seems what the paradox is hinting at is God.  Well, I won’t argue with that.