Greetings…
The less written about Nebraska’s overtime loss at home to Illinois, the Huskers 25th consecutive loss to a ranked team, the better.
Salutary means something that creates a beneficial effect. For me, writing this blog is salutary. Although I sometimes struggle with thinking of content, as I wrote here, writing is cathartic.
What creates a beneficial effect for you? I would very much like to read about the good things you do.
******************
You think the US needs government-funded, single-payer health care? If you read this with an open mind, then your mind will be changed.
******************
Yesterday I showed a picture of the cactus with a face and referred to the human trait of recognizing faces. I wish I could share the link to the Free Press article from today that reports on both “super-recognizers,” people with an extraordinary ability to remember faces and to whom they belong, as well as people who are “face-blind” meaning they cannot even recognize faces of people they know well. (The medical term for that is prosopagnosia.)
Here is an excerpt from the piece:
It’s never not awkward. You see someone who went to your high school in, say, a coffee shop in Canada, and bound over to say hello, only to find they don’t recognize you.
We’ve all been there. But Jana Kozlowski ends up there more often than most. That’s because she’s what’s known as a “super-recognizer.” Yes, that is the scientific term. And yes, she has done a test, confirming that she’s in the top 2 percent of the population when it comes to facial recognition. In practice, that means that she very often says to her husband, “Look, there’s that actor who played a receptionist for 10 seconds in a decade-old Netflix show.”
And she regularly has to tell people who’ve forgotten her: “We worked in different departments of the same company of 5,000 people, six years ago!”
It’s equally awkward to be the other person in this scenario, though: To be the one who has to say, “Um, have we met?” This is a position Sadie Dingfelder finds herself in all the time, because she’s the opposite of a super-recognizer—she’s face blind. She’ll make a plan to have dinner with a friend, then won’t recognize him when he shows up. She mistook a stock image for her own cousins. Sadie has a neurological condition known as prosopagnosia, which means she’s in the bottom 2 percent of the population for facial recognition. This puts her, according to one Harvard scientist, “on par with a mediocre or below-average macaque.”
As I age, I find that many faces still look familiar to me, but that if it’s a person with whom I do not interact on a regular basis, I am now forgetting their name far more frequently. For someone who used to have total recall, that decline in acuity is extremely disappointing and frustrating.
******************
This Newsweek opinion piece, written by Joseph Epstein, is titled, “Israel’s Pager Strike May Have Arab Leaders (Quietly) Cheering.” Is he engaging in wishful thinking? According to Epstein:
In the days following the explosions, Arabic-language social media have been full of memes of Hassan Nasrallah, the militant group’s chief, with a blown-up backside; schadenfreude remarks of how Hezbollah got what it deserved; claims that the explosions were divine justice and songs praising the operation. In Northern Syria, soldiers even handed out sweets to passing cars to celebrate the “Hezbollah massacre.”
I have no way of knowing if what he reports is true, but I assume Newsweek still fact-checks pieces meant for publication. Epstein also wrote, “One of the many important nuances of the Middle East conflicts is that most victims of Iran and its proxies and clients such as Hezbollah and Hamas are not Jews but Arabs.” That FACT is NEVER reported in mainstream media.
******************
According to This Day in Automotive History by Brian Corey, Cord dealers got a first look at the Cord 810 on this day in 1935. This piece from In Retrospect is a very informative article about Errett Lobban Cord and his automotive empire, with a focus on the Cord 810/812.
The Cord 810/812–my understanding is that the only real difference between the model designations is the registered year, the 810 is a 1936 model year car while the 812 is considered a 1937–is, of course, one of the most iconic designs in automotive history. From the In Retrospect piece is more affirmation that while the cars were styling masterpieces and technologically advanced, perhaps the manufacturing techniques of the day were not up to the technology.
“It was not until February 1936 that the first 810s were delivered to their new owners, while in New York they weren’t available until April. Even then the mechanical problems that plagued the car had still not been fully eliminated, with owners continuing to report trouble with the gearbox, as well as fuel feed issues and overheating. Many people still admired the sleek new Cord but these unfortunate teething problems gave them pause for thought.”
Of course, the 1930s were a very tough economic time for the US and for the world. The prices for the Cord 810 at introduction were $2,000+. Cadillac Series 60 models were priced at about $1,700 in 1936. For model year 1937 Cord raised its prices: the un-supercharged 812s started at $2,500 while the supercharged models, introduced for 1937, started at $2,900.
The cars from Cord’s automotive empire–Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg–are very valuable items today. Sometime in hopefully the not too distant future my wonderful wife and I will make a trip to the A-C-D Museum in Auburn, Indiana.
#SalutarySaturday
#Cord810/812