Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

August 18 is the birthday of my brother Mark, shown here on the day that he and his puppy Too-Shy won “Best of the Mongrel.”

As the only child of us four with a summer birthday, he was regularly talked into asking for money as a birthday gift–money that would all be spent on treehouse supplies.

August is here, but Mark is no longer “making trouble for a better tomorrow.”

I miss you, Mark.

One year ago, I was back in the 16th century, blogging “How Descartes made me stop being late for morning assembly.“

In 2004, I blogged my ex-Christian praise of Good Friday…No, I’m just not ex-Christian enough not to notice the day.

On a much more joyful springtime note, go listen to Dave Winer’s round-about-a-year-ago podcast of himself singing “It’s a Small World After All.” Then, as Dave said then (and I agree), “appreciate the philosophy.”

I didn’t know that the Nobel Foundation had posted a bunch of our family photos in Frank’s Nobel biography.

Regular readers of this blog have seen Frank with devil horns, posing with that notorious imp Richard Feynman, but I also really love this angelic photo of him giving a very long-ago talk.

Also, I must confess, the way I looked playing guitar in my early twenties…

Two brothers motorcycled west and found retro-paradise “Fifty miles east of Fargo“:

Mark surely enjoyed motorcyles and fast cars. Thrill was his mantra. But to be complete, Mark even more loved women. All of them. He adored and worshiped them. They were in many ways his holy grail.

This is a short tale of Mark and motorcycles and women, though not in that order. It is also a moral play, as it shows that sometimes, perhaps not often, the tales of a storyteller are far truer than one might expect.

Wonderful story from one of the greatest escape-blogs.

How’s your 50s, 60s. 70s photo-nostalgia craving? Thanks to a link from Boing Boing, I’ve satisfied mine: Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon (1964) Warren Beatty (1967) Squeaky-clean models advertising Midol (1969) Judy Collins (1969) Sean Connery in a ripped wetsuit, as James Bond Louis Armstrong (1966) Hippies, hippies, hippies everywhere!

p.s. The hobbit graphic isn’t from any of these–it’s from the Leonard Nimoy “Bilbo Baggins” video I blogged about here. I’ve been trying to post an animated gif I just made of Annette and Frankie, but so far no luck. Here it is on Flickr, however…

My great-grandfather,Hugo A. Dubuque–his 1928 obituaries described him as “a credit to his race,” said race being French-Canadian. He put himself through college, trained for the bar, and ultimately became a Massachusetts Superior Court Judge, spending many days riding the circuit far from his home and family in Fall River. And, late in 1918 he became something very like a blogger. My sister and I discovered his “blog” tucked away in the pages of our father’s baby-photo album–a series of short letters, written almost daily, that Judge Dubuque mailed home from his travels, addressed to his brand-new grandson. The series begins with a letter to his daughter Marie. The judge, clearly shaken by his youngest and dearest daughter’s delivering her first child in her girlhood bedroom: …I cannot tell you how glad we all are that you came through the ordeal all right. How pround Frank will be when he gets the happy news, and his folks also. You can now see, better than you ever realized before, why a mother is the center of such sweet and tender affection. The explanation is that she has earned it by going through the great trial and suffering for, and devotion to, her offspring. Suffering purifies and ennobles all things…. May God bless you and your dear little son, and bring back to you safely his father home [from the World War I battlefield]…

Here’s a characteristic “post” from January 1919:

I envied you this morning, my boy, nice and warm in your cozy bassinette. It was very chilly for grandpa — the wind was North and snowing — the walks were very slippery, but Gaga is always careful so he did not fall down.
There is no heat at all in the Elevated cars in Boston on account of the influenza.

What was that I heard this morning? that you gave an unearthly shriek, like a sort of Indian war whoop, because you were so hungry? That is very rude for a little boy to do that, and scare his Mamma and Atta Paul [Aunt Pauline]. But, of course, when a young man is hungry he cannot always repress his feelings. So be a good boy and we will all love you dearly.

Two weeks later, the proud grandfather has something new to blog:

It is the first time, yesterday, that my voice as a singer was ever appreciated. And you, sweet little grandson, were the one to do so. Nothing pleased me better than to see you apparently enjoy grandpa’s singing. You evidently could stand it with delight, on the ground, presumably, that any noise will do as an amusement.

Wait until your Dad gets home, he will sing “lullybys” for you. It will be great for you to be carried around by a hero of the greatest war in the history of the world, that of 1914 – 1918.

Springtime is a great inspiration to bloggers–even those of March 1919:

You missed it, Murray, in not getting up at 5 A.M. the same as your Gaga did this morning– There was a nice white frost, the harbinger of spring, spread over the trees and ground. The air was so sweet and pure. It is a real delight to be out early.

The spring will soon be here, and by the way this is your first spring. While you have seen flowers in the house, they are much nicer on their own stems in the sunlight outdoors.
Gaga expects to have a garden this spring, back of the house; so you’ll see things grow and you will learn farming and horticulture — garden and flower production — And you will sleep surrounded by flowers and vegetables, which will form a background to the picture of my little grandson–I hope your dad, when he takes you to Manchester, will have a little garden, if it is only to grow some flowers and a few of the ordinary vegetables like lettuce, tomatoes, rare-ripes, and the like…

I transcribed only a few of these letters–of course I now wish I had copied out all of them. A good excuse to go visit my sister again…

We got our first Mac in 1984, and Lawrence Krauss was the Johnny Appleseed who planted the first Macintosh seed.

In 1984, Frank and I were trying to collaborate on a book by using the arcane word-processing stuff on the VAX/VMS at UCSB’s Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Then one day, a young physicist named Lawrence Krauss rode into town, carrying with him everywhere
a big 15-pound plastic box he called a Mac.* We had never imagined lugging our good old
Atari 800 on our trips. (We used it to play simple games on an old TV set, and to write simpler games in Atari BASIC.) What did this “Mac” have that our computer didn’t?

Lawrence was eager to demo MacWrite and MacPaint. (MacWrite was [NOT*] the inspiration for Microsoft Word, only simpler and much more reliable.) We were instant converts, and so were our kids! I still have pages and pages and pages of dot-matrix printouts of their MacPaint creations to prove it.

The Mac was just what we needed to collaborate.

• Never mind that you had to save everything on a [128 K]** floppy.
• Never mind that no single chapter could be more than about 10 pages long.
• Never mind that the “illustrations” I created with the dot matrix printer were black and white and lumpy with pixels all over.

That first Mac was a wonderful revelation of just how much better computers could make people’s lives, and we’re still grateful to Lawrence Krauss (now here at the APS meeting with us, where he gave 3 (3!) fine talks!)

Long before Lawrence wrote The Physics of Star Trek, he helped us boldly go where no Wilczek or Devine had gone before.

* Oops — the Mac plus keyboard plus etc. plus bag weighed 22 lbs! Thanks to Kuba Tatarkiewicz of MIT for links to the original Mac spec
and to a computer timeline that makes it clear Microsoft’s Word predated MacWrite’s invention.”

** Oops again! and thanks to Kuba for pinging me that the size of the floppy “was 400 kB, while RAM of the original Mac was 128 kB, hence the so called Macintosh elbow when you tried to copy a floppy on a single-drive Mac (I once did 27 inserts – it was very painful!).”