It's been 1,602 days since I last posted to this blog. Back in my journalist days I'd bang out several posts a day. I ground out thousands of posts back then. So maybe going more than four years without a single post to this blog is my way of evening things out. 

I want to get back in the game but I wonder, do people even blog anymore? Or is it all about Substacks these days? I asked Google, whose A.I. Overview provided the following answer:

I'm persuaded. Apparently people still blog. Consider my flame rekindled.  

The deadly coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world in early 2020 brings to mind a wonderfully astute passage from the start of Bill Bryson’s entertaining romp through science: “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” 

He writes: 
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So along comes the novel coronavirus, technically named SARS-CoV-2, which causes the dreaded Covid-19 disease. It’s both fascinating and horrible that death can come calling in so minute a package. Virus particles are about one-millionth of an inch, or about 1,000 times smaller than a bacterium. I know; I have trouble visualizing that, too. At least as unhelpful is this fun fact: 55 million of them could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. That is beyond comprehension.  

And yet this absurdly minuscule packet of genetic material hijacks cells to do its bidding, which is to create more absurdly minuscule packets of genetic material. And it will do this even if the collateral damage is the eventual death of many hosts, which would be counterproductive if there weren’t so many more hosts for the virus left to infect.  

You have to hand it to nature. When it comes to death and destruction, it can go as mind-bogglingly small as a virus or as breathtakingly large as a volcano or earthquake. That is quite the range.   

The Covid-19 pandemic is a reminder that life on this planet is a game of existential dodgeball not just for us as individuals but, sometimes entire species. The new coronavirus will, tragically, take many lives but our species will survive it. We’re not yet the dinosaurs after the asteroid that ended their 140-million year reign. That’s the good news. The bad news: one day we will be.

To be in love with the idea of what America could be, and to know what it is and has been, is to suffer.

That pain suffuses a musical work I only recently stumbled across, “The Transformations Suite,” by composer Samora Pinderhughes. ​

Inc​orporating spoken word poetry and soul-searing vocals into a jazz ensemble, Pinderhughe’s suite is an hour-long meditation on the hurt the nation has inflicted on so many for so long for the benefit of so few. It is also a plea for America to, as Dr. King said, “live up to the true meaning of its creed.”

The suite is specifically a response to the unjustified police violence behind too  many headlines of our time. But it also recalls the nation’s tragic history, a history that for many Americans is as hidden from polite view as were the humans stacked like cordwood in the holds of ships during the Middle Passage.

In its way, the suite is also a love letter from the heartbroken to the cruel subject of his affection. In a performance of the piece at a church in Berkeley, Calif. in 2016, the  disappointment is palpable. But so is the hope. 

“America, you know I love you but we’ve got to change,” sings Jehbreal Jackson in his evocative, glass smooth tenor-falsetto. “We can’t keep going on like this.” It is a message known to everyone who has had a troubled relationship that brought them to the edge of despair but not the end of love. 

Listen to the entire suite. It will well repay your time. This clip gives a sense of the beauty and intensity of this confrontational work which, I hope, finds a much larger audience.

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Elbert “Big Man” Howard was an unfamiliar name, at least to me, until I learned of him in his obituary in the New York Times. Howard,  who just died at age 80, was a founder of the Black Panther Party, a driving force behind its community programs, like free health clinics and prisoner re-entry efforts.

Illustrating the New York Times obit was an intriguing photo. It captured Howard in 1970, with his perfectly shaped ‘fro, holding a microphone as he speaks to a crowd in some unidentified location. Meanwhile, standing a small distance from Howard, was a young white man wearing, of all things, a necklace featuring a large swastika pendant.​

​It certainly makes more sense that hippie culture would find common cause with the Panthers than American Nazis ever would. Or than motorcycle gangs would (they apparently also were known to use the swastika to symbolize their bad-ass, outsider status.)

So Swastika Man was more than likely a friend, not foe, of the black power movement represented by the Panthers and “Big Man” Howard. The fog of cognitive dissonance caused by the photo has lifted.

(This post about a racial incident I experienced a few years back was originally published in August 2014 on my blog that was deleted, in toto, by my previous web hosting company. Moral of the story: pay attention to those emails from your web hosting company. They might contain a bill you need to pay to keep your website from being "disappeared." 

Fortunately I kept a copy of the 2014 post. It got a lot of attention then from my Facebook friends four years ago. I'm republishing it in part because one of the friends I was with that evening is now besieged by an aggressive cancer. This is my way of remembering a foul experience that, we had no way of knowing then, we would now recall as the good old days.)

Curiosity can be a weapon.

During a recent trip to the New Hampshire ocean-side town of Hampton Beach with two childhood friends, we experienced a moment that revealed the ugly side of curiosity. The old Dave Chappelle Show could have done a skit about the encounter, calling it “When Curiosity Goes Wrong,” a sister concept to its bitingly clever “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong.”

We had found a restaurant we enjoyed so much that we dined there three consecutive evenings. On the third night, after yet another great meal and much spirited conversation, we headed to the upstairs bar to check out a musician highly recommended by a waitress.

Shortly after the three of us middle-aged men who happen to be black -- a veteran TV sports producer, a senior Air Force non-commissioned officer and I, a recovering Washington journalist – found a bar table with stools, a middle-aged woman who happened to be white, approached and stood next to my right elbow.

“Three black guys walk into a restaurant...,” she said.

Instantly, we all thought this the beginning of a joke. Probably a tasteless one of the “a rabbi, priest and imam walk into a bar” variety. We were certainly curious. Where was she headed with this? We soon found out.

“And I just want to know what you're doing here?” she said. “It's unusual to see blacks in this part of New Hampshire and in this restaurant and I just wanted to know why you're here? I've been coming here for 15 years and I want to make sure you're going to uphold the high standards we have here.”

Even as I write this, a few weeks removed, I can feel my heart rate increase.

“What?” one of my friends said, shaking his head before planting his face in his palm.

“I'm going to get a drink” said my other friend, pushing disgustedly up and away from the encounter.

“Whoa,” I said.

“I don't mean to be rude,” she said.

“Well, you are.” I said. “What if you walked into a restaurant where you were the only white person and someone asked you what you were doing there? How would you feel?”

To this, she said she had been in an all-black place, a soul-food restaurant somewhere, and that a black woman had sat her “big-fat ass down” next to her to try and show her how to properly eat something.

“Time-out,” I said. “That's enough. You've got to go. We've been really patient with you. Now please go.”

And she did. She was put out but she headed back for her seat at the bar.

We left shortly afterward, determined that we wouldn't allow this encounter to ruin our time at the beach. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't affect us. 

As I sorted through the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the encounter, it struck me that the woman's behavior, probably less inhibited than it usual thanks to alcohol, fit into the curiosity theme I intend to explore with this blog.

She certainly demonstrated curiosity by approaching us. Key to curiosity is an assertive exploration of what's novel in one's environment and we certainly were novel. The three nights we visited the popular restaurant, we never saw any other black people there.

She asked a question that likely crossed the minds of other patrons: what are those guys doing here? Other questions that I imagine occurred to the people in the restaurant were what's their story? And did they play for the Celtics or Patriots? (We range from 6'3” to 6'7”. Indeed, we met as teenagers who played youth basketball together.)

But then her curiosity went off the rails with her “there goes the neighborhood” attitude that our very blackness made us potential threats to one of her favorite night spots.

In short, she quickly went from demonstrating curiosity to the very antithesis of curiosity – racial stereotyping. To unthinkingly ascribe the least positive behavior demonstrated by some members of a group to all members of that group is to stereotype and she certainly did that by suggesting that our skin color alone made us dubious characters to be interrogated.

She provided a strong example of how human curiosity can be the handmaiden to that other human tendency to crudely and quickly sort what we encounter in the world into categories of the good and the bad, often with horrible results.

In hindsight, that strange New England interaction has fueled my curiosity about that woman. Assuming she did consume alcohol before she descended on us, how many drinks did it take before she could act so boorishly? Two? More? Just one?

Where did she grow up and what was her family like? Does she have any relatives or friends who aren't white? One of my buddies noticed she had been seated at the bar with a white man. What was their conversation immediately before she approached us? How about after she returned from our table? Did she remember the encounter the next day? Where would she place herself on the spectrum of racial tolerance and intolerance? (She did go to that soul-food restaurant, after all.) If three black strangers walked into her favorite bar in the future, would she behave with them as she did with us? These are questions I'd love answers for.  ​

From my first hearing until now of "Dido's Lament," composer Henry Purcell's aria from "Dido and Aeneas," the song has struck me, as it has so many, for its simple beauty and universal plea of the dying to those left behind: Remember me when I am gone. 

​Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who dies from that ancient staple of melodrama, a broken heart after being abandoned by Aeneas, the Trojan prince, not only asks her court to remember her but to forget the misfortune at the end of her life's end.

Over the years, I have often thought about Dido's final request. With nearly every premature passing of a relative or friend by disease or accident, I have reminded myself that it is the wondrousness of their very existence, brief though it was, that our departed would want us to fix on, not the car wreck, not the cancer. Forget their fates, they would tell us. That's what I hope to remember to say, if there's time enough, when my own end approaches. 

Maybe in that moment my mind's eye will conjure up operatic star Jessye Norman, arrayed in queenly finery, singing "Dido's Lament" in what may be the most moving version of the aria ever performed. There are certainly far worse ways to go. ​

Space is the ultimate getaway. Whenever the world is too much with me in the form of bad news either near or remote, I draw an odd sort of comfort from musing about stars and recalling that the Universe really could care less about us.

A million dyspeptic tweets on Twitter are as meaningful to the Universe as a million grains of moon dust. War, elections, hurricanes, police shootings. The Universe is unmoved by what moves us Earthlings.
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No matter the latest headlines from Washington or elsewhere, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, its mass several million times that of our Sun, disappears anything getting too close -- interstellar dust and gas, stars, planets. Billions of stars -- red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars -- turn nuclear fusion into light. Billions of galaxies zip away from each other under the influence of dark energy, whatever that is. Like "Ol’ Man River" from Jerome Kern’s famous “Showboat” musical, the Universe “just keeps rollin’ along.” 

That the Universe is indifferent to us is actually positive. I prefer my Universe to be pure physics and math without the emotion or illogic that endlessly trip up us humans, causing so many of us to inflict misery on so many others of us. Maybe if we truly understood our place in the cosmic scheme, we’d show each other more mercy.  
The Universe doesn’t take sides. It doesn’t condescend. It’s not hypocritical or driven by passion. It is, quite literally, above it all. That’s what makes learning about it, wondering about it, marveling over it, a welcome respite. An imagination that leaves Earth’s orbit can find a sanctuary so big that it would take 13.7 billion light years before you reach the edge of it. 
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So much of popular entertainment is mindless, which probably explains why it’s both popular and entertaining. 
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Rap, the newest form of popular entertainment, has more often than not played to the lowest common denominator of human concerns. But as Lin-Manuel Miranda so famously proved with “Hamilton,” it need not be that way. 

True, there have long been "conscious rappers" who have used their music to protest police violence, war, political leadership or social conditions. But few and far between are the rappers who promote challenging ideas of science and rationality in their work, and do so with a lyrical complexity that rivals good literature.

Two such rappers I only recently learned of but who have been turning out great work for years are Greydon Square and Baba Brinkman. 

The two could not be more different. Square, whose real name is Eddie Collins, has the more dramatic biography of the two. African American and straight out of Compton, he was raised in a group home, gangbanged as a teen and wound up in juvenile detention. He enlisted in the Army, served in Iraq and later became deeply interested in physics and computer science. 

After his first album, “The Compton Effect”, the titles of his succeeding albums have referenced astrophysics: “The Kardashev Scale,” is named for the method astrophysicists use to theoretically sort civilizations across the Universe based on how well they harness  energy. Another album was titled “Omniverse.” These titles suggest rather expansive ambitions, to say the least.   

"I'm an artist who creates music  for intellectuals," Square says in a video on his landing page on Bandcamp.  "Who creates music for thinkers, people who are analytical, people who like fringe concepts in science and science fiction. That's really my lane," he says. 

Dirk Murray “Baba” Brinkman is a white Canadian who was raised by well-connected parents in British Columbia. His mother is a member of Canada’s Parliament who also co-founded reforestation companies with her husband. Baba has a master’s degree in comparative literature. 

His first rap splash was a hip hop retelling of the Canterbury Tales. Later, he delivered rap guides to business, religion, evolution, human nature, medicine and consciousness.

Like Square, his ambitions are cosmic. Besides rapping, he's an actor and a playwright. He estimates he  personally planted more than one million trees while working for his parents. 

While they come from very different backgrounds, both Square and Brinkman converged on atheism and aren’t shy in giving voice to their stance that all religions fail abysmally at explaining the “how” of the universe, and are shackles on human curiosity and knowledge. When you listen to Square and Brinkman's work, it’s as though Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and famous atheist, were a rapper.  Brinkman has a music video for his song "Neighborhood Atheism" in which Square appears.  

Carl Sagan is a role model for both men, as he is to many of us who wish the “demon-haunted world” would come to grips, sooner rather than later, with the evidence-based nature of reality. 

​These two rappers have captured my imagination. They will capture the imaginations of many more before they’re done. Thanks to the Internet for serendipitously leading me to them. Such discoveries almost make up for having to endure the Internet’s worst features. Almost. ​​