Happy Birthday to The New Yorker

 The 100th anniversary issue of The New Yorker is now out. The cover date is “Feb. 17 & 24, 2025.” Excepted for the cover price (15¢ instead of $9.99) and date (“February 21, 1925¨) the cover seen on the newsstands duplicates that of the first issue. The anniversary issue also carries a stylized and centered “100” below the masthead. The current issue, we are informed is “VOLUME CI, NO. 1.”

I discovered The New Yorker in my college days and have been a subscriber for most of the time since then. Once my son married, my annual anniversary gift has been a subscription to the magazine.

I must confess that, upon receiving the magazine, whether electronically or physically, I first search out the cartoons. In doing so, however, I sometimes pause to read an article I cannot pass up before completing my cartoon-reading first pass through the issue.

Appropriately, current editor David Remnick has written “Comment” at the top of “The Talk of the Town” titled “Onward and Upward.” I recommend reading Remnick’s brief history of the magazine. It is both informative and occasionally quite humorous. Samples:

• “At home, [Harold] Ross [first editor of the magazine] and [wife Jane] Grant looked for inspiration by riffling through piles of magazines both defunct and funct … .” (This sent me to the dictionary. “Funct” is not really an English word, but it is a reasonable back-formation from “defunct.”)
  
• “Ross implored Dorothy Parker to come to the office and write something. Parker replied that she had dropped by, but ‘somebody was using the pencil.’”

Oxalis Flowers

I have been raising oxalis for 50 years. I have often taken photos of complete plants. Such pictures usually look like an explosion of leaves (green or purple) and flowers (white or lavender). Only today did I think of taking a close-up of oxalis flowers. The result can be seen below. I’m pleased with the result.

Multiple flowers branch off from a single stalk. The flowers are about an inch wide.

Software

Increasingly, I am encountering advertisements describing a particular computer program (or, more commonly, a phone program) as a software. One might hear of  “a powerful software” or “a convenient software.” This is not the traditional use of the word “software,” and it is an unfortunate neologism. I have been dealing with software for six decades, and I find this new way of using the word jarring.

What is software? Software is the stuff used with hardware to make computing devices work. Software is the collection of instructions that tell computers and computer-like devices what to do. Hardware, on the other hand, is the physical machinery that carries out software instructions. To be useful, those instructions are collected into programs for a particular purpose.

Traditionally, programs for computers are either applications or operating systems. Applications (“apps” on phones and, increasingly on computers) do useful work for users. Examples are Chrome, Word, Acrobat Reader, etc. Operating systems control the hardware, making it easy to control applications. Examples are Windows, iOS, Android, etc. (The earliest computers lacked operating systems and were exceedingly difficult to use.)

Applications are the entities sometimes being called softwares. But applications are made from software. Calling an application a software is like calling a short bridge a “concrete.” Perhaps a more useful analogy is to be found in underwear. People put on their underwear; they don’t don their underwears. If I buy T-shirts or briefs, I am buying underwear, not underwears.

Please don’t try to expand the meaning of “software.” Doing so is not useful.

Existential Dread

I signed up for the Clifton Springs Library book club the other day. We meet Thursday to discuss this month’s book, The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin. The early chapters of the book are set in Nottingham, England, in 1939, where residents are preparing their houses and persons for a war they hope will not come. In Chapter 5, however, England declares war on Germany, and the prospect of wartime catastrophe is suddenly no longer theoretical.

I had never thought about England’s domestic actions before entering World War II, a disaster that was both anticipated and prepared for. On this day when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on our nearest neighbors and biggest trading partners to extort actions from them he deems desirable, it was difficult not to feel the sort of dread felt by Ms. Martin’s characters. Like them, I was fearing a second Trump administration before January 20,  but that catastrophe is now upon us and will be for some time to come. Without reading the rest of the book, of course, I know that England survives. I am less certain about the the United States.

Activist Thursday

I’ve had a busy morning. I began by writing a brief note to The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, telling her how much I appreciated her plea to President Trump to have mercy on people who have been justifiably frightened by his pronouncements and apparent intentions. I am always gratified when there is a public indication that Christianity is not always that of Evangelicals seemingly ignorant of the Gospel message.

I next telephoned by conservative Republican congresswoman, Claudia Tenney. I have often sent e-mail to her, but this was the first time I have called her. I had three questions I wanted to ask:

1. Do you approve of the president’s pardons and commutations given to January 6 insurrectionists?
2. What do you plan to do in Congress to protect the rule of law in America?
3. Do you approve of the president’s plan for mass deportations?

I did not expect to speak to Tenney, of course, but I thought her office staff might have ready answers to one or more of my questions. That seems not to have been the case, and I couldn’t really be upset by that. I was assured that the congresswoman would get back to me.

I was surprised that the staffer who answered my call did not ask me who I was. He did, however, ask me if I were a constituent. I told him I was and gave him my name. When I tried to offer my address, he stopped me before I finished. It was not clear how the congresswoman was going to get back to me. Perhaps, because of my previous e-mail communications, the staffer had my contact information readily at hand.

I likely will eventually get a letter from Congresswoman Tenney in response to my telephone call. Such communications are usually standard responses that don’t address the specifics of my inquiries and parrot standard GOP talking points. I hope I made the point, however, that this constituent has serious concerns about the early actions of the second Trump administration.

Welcome to the Age of Stupid

On a frigid January day in 2025—many thought it would be a cold day in hell when this would happen—Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. The new chief executive immediately began the extraordinary task of remaking the country and its government.

Some of the president’s actions seem as though they might be innocuous or even beneficial, such as his instructions Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture. Others are nasty, mean-spirited, and perhaps illegal (Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which attempts to subvert the right of birthright citizenship granted by the Fourteenth Amendment and Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States, acknowledging a National Emergency  at our southern border (declared here) and tasking the military with mitigating the emergency.) Others seem designed simply to flex presidential muscle, for example, by renaming Denali to Mount McKinley and the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. (Surely we must celebrate McKinley for pursuing our glorious Spanish-American War!) ABC News reports that the White House has ordered the removal of General Mark Milley’s portrait from a Pentagon hallway. (Trump has suggested that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason, yet he has pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone involved in the January 6 insurrection.) And Trump is trying to limit human sexes to male and female, ignoring intersex variations and producing definitions clearly crafted by politicians rather than biologists (Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, which declares that: “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.” How ironic!)

I could go on and on, but Trump is doing crazy things faster than I can document them. Interested readers can learn about Trump actions on the White House Web site here.

Inauguration Day

I intentionally did not watch the inauguration of Donald Trump this morning, as I knew it would drive me crazy. I did, however, tune in to watch the ABC World News Tonight. All I saw was Trump’s speech, which, after 15 minutes, I could not stand a moment longer. Rather than throw a large, heavy object at my television, I turned the TV off.

Earlier in the day—before the inauguration—I posted the graphic below on Facebook, Twitter, and Blue Sky. I was afraid my message in that graphic might have been unnecessarily harsh. After listening to 15 minutes of the horrible human being we have mistakenly elected to a second term, I concluded that my prediction was an extreme understatement.

For the benefit of readers not familiar with the name “Nakba,” here is an explanation copied from Wikipedia:

The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة, romanized: an-Nakba, lit. ‘the catastrophe’) is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel.

For people in this country illegally, the catastrophe suffered by Palestinians may be exactly what they will likely experience. For the rest of us, Trump plans to destroy the America we have come to know, taking us back to the time of the Robber Barons. Most of Trump’s plans are destructive, such as again taking the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords. Others are stupid and mean-spirited, such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. (I don’t think Trump has the authority to do this, and, in any case, other nations will ignore his change.)

Clearly, Americans are in for a wild ride. By the time Trump is through destroying what took nearly a quarter millennium to build and improve, the immigration of people into the U.S. may have ended and been replaced by the emigration of citizens to free countries elsewhere.