Saturday, October 5, 2024

October Postcrossings with witches and ghosts

Autumn and Christmas/New Year's are my two favorite times of year to ramp up my Postcrossing participation. Sending and receiving Halloween-themed postcards during spooky season adds to the fun, especially at a time when the daily 100+ temperatures here in Arizona are making it hard to think about pumpkins and hayrides. (Having COVID-19 isn't helping, either.)

Show above are two of the postcards that have come to our mailbox in recent days. The witchy cat is from a woman in Germany who says her postcard interests include castles, ruins, cemeteries and skulls. I wonder if I could get an outfit like that onto one of our cats. I could see Brave Sir Oliver or Spice fitting the bill, if they'd stay still.

The ghost parent with the baby carriage was sent by a longtime Postcrosser from Lithuania — she's mailed more than 10,000 cards — who is also a mother of three, harvests mushrooms and is a Pokémon Go trainer. Phew! 

Shown below is one of the postcards I've been mailing out to some Postcrosser this autumn. I love the vintage illustration. It's a reproduction of an image that was used on a Gibson pop-up Halloween greeting card in the middle of the 20th century. (Gibson, which dates to 1855, is now part of American Greetings.)

Monday, September 30, 2024

RIP, Charlie Hustle & Mount Mutombo

(This is the first Pete Rose-related item I could lay my hands on: Street and Smith's Official Yearbook 1982 for baseball. From about 1981 to 1986, this was the most anticipated annual magazine for me each spring. It was the bible for the statistics from the previous MLB season and the rosters/previews for the upcoming season. For me, USA Today's daily sports section and then USA Today Baseball Weekly gradually took its place. These days, the magazine I most look forward to is Fortean Times. Don't judge.)

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024 — On this day, as the southeastern U.S. continues search-and-rescues and picking up the shattered pieces after the depredations of Helene; as Israel widens its military operations against terrorist states throughout the tinderbox of the Middle East; as we continue a stifling streak of unseasonable 100-plus-degree days in bone-dry central Arizona; as we consider what a presidential candidate truly meant when he talked about the need for "one really violent day" to combat crime; and as we prepare to celebrate former President Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday tomorrow, two baseball teams teams played a regular-season-ending doubleheader in Atlanta's suburbs, not far from a massive plume of dark smoke smelling of chemicals emanating from an industrial plant fire that forced thousands across multiple counties to either evacuate or shelter in place. 

As the second game of the doubleheader that sent both the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves into the MLB playoffs ended, the world learned of the death at age 83 of Peter Edward Rose Sr., who is MLB's all-time hits leader but was banned from the sport in 1989 for gambling on baseball games. Rose's great hustle and talent on the baseball diamond will forever be intertwined with the shame he brought upon himself by betting on games, including his own team's games, and then denying and lying about his misdeeds for many years thereafter. 

I first became aware of Pete Rose around 1979, when I was 8 and living in southern New Jersey and he was playing in his first season with the Philadelphia Phillies, at age 38. The next year, Rose helped the Phillies win their first World Series championship and became a legend in the city, at least until the summer of 1989, when the permanent ban issued by Bart Giamatti, who himself would be dead in eight days, broke the hearts of many of his fans. Not long after, Rose served five months in federal prison for tax evasion.

* * *

Another professional athlete who played in Philadelphia died today. His full name was Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo. 

Dikembe Mutombo brought his 7-foot-2 frame to Philadelphia and played basketball for the 76ers in the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 NBA seasons. He specialty was blocking shots. Off the court, his specialty was doing humanitarian work. As The Associated Press noted: "He became a global ambassador for the NBA and served on the boards of many organizations, including Special Olympics International, the CDC Foundation and the National Board for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. While he was playing for Atlanta in 1997, he founded the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve living conditions in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo."

“He loved others with every ounce of his being. That’s what made him so accessible. That’s what made him real. Dikembe Mutombo was salt and light, and today, on the 30th of September, 2024, he has been called to rest," his son, Ryan Mutombo, said.

Mutombo was 58. He died — and doesn't everything just seem interconnected these days? — in Atlanta.

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Surviving on Spaceship Earth

In this heartbreaking weekend of the Hurricane Helene aftermath, I've had this 1971 Ballantine paperback sitting at my desk for a while. I kind of just want to blog it while things are already depressing and then just shuffle it out of the way.

How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship Earth, by Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and Richard L. Harriman, isn't the cheeriest of topics, but it caught my interest a year ago when I was looking at advertisements in the back of Ray Bradbury's The October Country and other vintage paperbacks.

If it isn't clear from the cover, this is an alarmist book. In the opening pages, Ehrlich and Harriman write: "But crowded, hungry, and miserable as much of mankind is today, tomorrow seems destined to be much worse." Their primary concern was that the world's population was, in 1971, at a tipping point that would imminently cause cascading failures in global food and health systems. Or that simmering geopolitics would lead to a world war, waged with nuclear and chemical weapons, that would be too catastrophic for civilization to rebound from. 

Like I said, cheery stuff. But not too terribly unlike the news and stressors we deal with on a daily basis in 2024. Our Spaceship Earth (a phrase popularized, but not invented, by Adlai Stevenson in a 1965 speech to the United Nations) is certainly listing to the side a bit.

We could generously say that the authors' alarmism was correct but somewhat misfocused. Others of that era already knew about the ways in which we were degrading the environment and warming the Earth with fossil fuels. But Ehrlich and Harriman seemed much more concerned with the global birthrate and overcrowding.

Other critics aren't so generous, especially when it comes to Ehrlich, who also wrote 1967's The Population Bomb and who, at age 92, is still warning about doomsday. In 2023, James Woudhuysen, a journalist and professor of forecasting and innovation, wrote:
"All forecasters make mistakes. But few forecasters have been as consistently wrong as biologist Paul Ehrlich. ... It is important to understand just how consistently and absurdly wrong Ehrlich’s predictions have been. ... The reason Ehrlich always misses the mark is not just down to bad luck. He relies on a kindergarten understanding of political economy, in which multiplying human beings always run up against the limits of Spaceship Earth. What all his forecasts ignore is how human ingenuity, risk-taking ambition and technological innovation can overcome the apparent physical limits of the planet."
* * *

There are some interesting and divergent takes about How to Be a Survivor from reviewers on Goodreads. One writes: "A book with some good ideas, most of which are based in fantasyland. For example, the authors rightly spend appreciable time blasting the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption of the federal government, yet inexplicably suggest an alternative of even more bureaucracy to take its place." That's a fair point.

A recent reviewer discusses the urgent need for meaningful political action, though she's clearly discussing the climate crisis more than global overpopulation: "This [book] explains why anyone's chance of survival is directly dependent on political action forcing the governments of the world to face up to the environmental crisis. Individual efforts without political action just aren't enough."

Finally, there's this Goodreads viewpoint from 2011, which I find incredibly discouraging: "Thankfully this has proven to be total bunk with time. I regretfully read this as an impressionable freshmen in college in 1971. I keep around to remind myself to be skeptical."

"Total bunk" is taking it a bit far. Maybe the alarmism of Ehrlich and Harriman was, in part, a schtick to sell books. But I think it might also be argued that their hearts were in the right place. They want a better planet and more hope for human civilization. Consider what they're getting at in this passage:
"In the new society, education will be a subject of great importance. Children will learn early that their own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of all other human beings and upon the well-being of the world's ecological systems. They will also learn how to care for Spaceship Earth, to keep it running smoothly into the indefinite future. They will grow up to consider it their pleasant duty to spend at least part of their time serving as crewmen on Spaceship Earth. They will expect to participate on a regular basis in the governance and maintenance of the ship, and to spend part of their time in the service of the fellow passengers. They will also expect to continue their education throughout their lives so as to maximize the value of both their contribution to society and of their own existence."
To bring this to a conclusion and circle back to Hurricane Helene, I think these weekend tweets about the devastation in Appalachia may seem alarmist, but they represent the truthful urgency of the situation we find ourselves in right now on our rapidly warming and changing planet:

Anna Jane Joyner: "I’ve told my family many times that we can never sell our houses in Asheville because it’s one of the safer places in the US re: climate impacts. Never ever imagined it would get wiped out by a hurricane before our home on the Gulf Coast. Nowhere is safe. It doesn’t feel real."

Jeff McFadden: "People keep talking like collapse is some future event. Modern society cannot build towns, cities, roads, bridges, dams, and interstate electric grids as fast as they're burning up and washing away. This is a collapsing system."

Sarah Richardson: "Hardly any news about entire towns being destroyed, and hardly any national news about Phoenix reaching 114 degrees at the end of September ... the climate change denial is strong."

* * *
 
Meanwhile, Old Man Banjo just wants naps, cuddles and Temptations treats,
but, then again, he's not an elected official tasked with solving problems