WHAT THE MIRROR SEES: I was looking at some digital photos from my office’s most recent Christmas Party (I didn’t go). There was a picture of some pretty women in formal party attire that caught my eye. But what caught my fancy was a mirror in the picture, where a mini-image of the women facing the flash of the camera could be seen. So I ran the shot through Photoshop and enlarged / enhanced the mirror segment. And I thought I’d share it with the world at large. Enjoy.

I was listening the other night to an NPR interview of Judge Richard Posner, the reigning “authority on everything”. Posner, a noted lawyer and economist, was talking about intelligence reform and preventing terrorism; he’s got a book out now called Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. The Judge is famous for his applications of cost-benefit economic analysis to almost every possible subject and issue. He wrote a book not long ago about possible mega-catastrophes (the end-of-the-world-kind, not your garden variety catastrophe) and what the cost-benefit perspective would be towards them. E.g., should we let physicists continue to perform research that has a tiny, tiny, tiny chance of causing a runaway physical reaction that might end the world (i.e., the “stragelet” scenario)? Not an easy one to answer, and maybe not even answerable with the mathematics and reason of cost-benefit assessment. So Posner is now focusing on somewhat smaller but still very nasty catastrophes, e.g. repeats of 9-11.

Posner’s equation-like thinking doesn’t play so well when you’re talking about the end of everything; pretty hard to put a price on that. But as to terrorism, he’s on somewhat firmer ground, although there’s still a huge psychological factor that’s hard to put a price on (that huge psychological factor is terror, not surprisingly).

The Judge does make some good points, even if they seem a bit sad and fatalistic. The most important one is that you cannot eliminate surprise. You just can’t be ready for everything, because there are just too many things out there that could happen. There’s gonna be a Pearl Harbor every now and then. If you tried to be ready for everything, you could never live your life. Likewise, if our nation tries to become ready for every possible threat, it will collapse from a martial-law environment that would make the old Soviet Union seem like July 4, 1776, and from the economic burden of enforcing such a militarized system. Posner is right, in that we have to ask whether we spend too much time and money building a wall against the last tragedy, based on our emotional response to its horror. The next punch may be nothing like the last one (although admittedly, you don’t want to make it easy for your opponent by doing nothing at all to stop a repeat attack — it’s a question of balance).

So, bad stuff will happen again, eventually. And you probably can’t imagine right now what it will be, although once it happens we all will say “why didn’t we think of that?” As Judge Posner points out, the Air Force once did a study on the possibility of hi-jacked airliners being crashed into buildings. They were going to put together a response exercise, but there were a million other things to do, so they never got around to it. Posner is NOT saying that we should make no effort to prevent terrorism or other forms of attack. But we can only do so much to detect and prevent them; we just don’t have the resources to put up a perfect shield.

So, under the Posner paradigm, we should also put a fair chunk of our limited resources have into disaster response systems, and make them flexible, portable and “modular” so that they can be quickly mixed and matched to meet whatever comes our way, be it a nuclear explosion or a series of small nerve-gas attacks or a major computer attack (e.g., at some point, a computer virus attack transmitted by wi-fi or cell phones might make huge numbers of autos unstartable or make them stall while driving; now there’s an interesting nightmare – the day that every car stopped, except for a few old junkers that had obsolete microchips – perhaps next summer’s disaster movie plot?).

The other thing our nation can do according to Posner –- sounds very Old Testament-like, but unfortunately we still live in an Old Testament world — is to retaliate against whoever hits us, and hit ‘em back hard. Eye for an eye, that sort of thing. Today I saw a bumper sticker today with a drawing of Gandhi on it, saying “an eye for an eye makes the world blind”. But the hard-core realists say that an eye for an eye saves the other eye.

One thing that Posner didn’t suggest, but I think is relevant, is to try to cool down all the discontent out there. Yea, there will always be some nuts out there, but you don’t get a big movement like Al Qaeda without some widespread resentment against the U.S. Maybe we’ve got to be a bit more generous with the poorest nations, and stop flaunting our wealth so much. I still think some of it is a reaction to current American cultural attitudes about wealth. The attitude is that wealth is everything; the more money you have, the more human you are; if you’re poor, then you’re poor in every way possible. Oh yea, there’s also God and prayer, all that value stuff; but at day’s end, cash is king.

I can’t help but wonder if that GOP / conservative attitude, which shows up on our TV shows, on the Internet, on our commercials, on just about everything that America does, triggers a lot of resentment in various places. (Admittedly it does win us friends in others, such as in Poland. My ethnic background is 100% Polish, but I never really liked the Polish culture, and the more I read about it’s current pro-American materialistic stance, the less I wonder why I never clicked with my ancestral heritage). I can’t help but wonder if a little less attitude and a little more humility (and charity) would also help buy some security.

But yea, I know it’s more complex that just being nice. The whole issue of supporting Israel is a big factor in the overseas threat, and if it’s right to support Israel, we probably have to do it even if it causes an increased risk of terrorism. But the whole Israel thing is incredibly complex, so I’m gonna cut it right here. Sorry, I can’t solve the whole world’s problems in one sitting. Only Richard Posner can do that . . . . . or so he would tell you.

Progress, Sisyphus . . . . or the Blow Monkeys? I was “chewing the fat” one night a few months ago with the Montclair Socrates Café group, where the subject de jour (actually, “de la soiree”) was whether evil was essential to humankind. As is typical for the group, we kind of danced around the topic, not following any cohesive line of thinking but instead presenting a cloud of dots. But actually, that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe that’s just what the master himself (i.e., Socrates) would have wanted.

For me, it all boiled down to another question: has humanity made things better (e.g., reducing the amount of overall pain and suffering in the world), or does the balance between good and evil stay the same no matter how much things change? Can there be real progress, or like Sisyphus, are we only rolling stones up a hill just to see them roll back down? Can we make a difference with our lives, or in the end does the good and bad that we do just balance out? Or if one person manages to accomplish some net good, is there another person who accomplishes just as much evil?

I used to honestly believe that “it doesn’t have to be this way”. And today I still want to believe it. But it’s so difficult; when I was young we had Communists and nuclear missiles and Vietnam to worry about. Now we have Al Qaeda and suicide bombers and Iraq to worry about. It’s different, but is it really any different?

Well ….. some days you’ve got to take refuge in the little things that make you smile. I did a Google search on the phrase “it doesn’t have to be this way”, and was surprised to find that there are plenty of songs that use this line. I always liked the Roger Waters song (Keep Talking, from the Division Bell album) where the lecturer chants this line in the background. Well, actually he says “it doesn’t have to be like this” … hey, close enough. But then I found out about a song from an 80’s band called the Blow Monkeys, entitled “It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way”. The Blow Monkeys — never heard of ‘em, but definitely a cool name . . . maybe even worth a smile!

As to the Montclair Socrates Café . . . . . . I’ve hit the road. Taken a pass on them. More on that next time, perhaps.

THE COUNTRY BOY KING: Speaking of those WMA music files that I bought and downloaded the other day, one of my selections was a tune by Elvis Presley. I was never a big fan of The King. The whole legend about Graceland and Colonel Parker and Blue Hawaii just never got me going. And even though I consider myself to be a disciple of rock music, I never considered Elvis to be one of the gods. Elvis may well have been The King, but not of rock and roll as I know it. Perhaps he was a predecessor, a step in the evolution of true rock, but he was not a rock musician per se. At heart, Elvis was still a country boy.

Despite being a city boy, I shelled out $0.99 for the rights to listen to a song by Elvis. I picked out the one and only tune from the huge Elvis Presley collection that hits a nerve in me. That tune would be “Kentucky Rain”. “Rain” was a ballad, almost a country-and-western ditty. It’s the perfect story-telling song. You listen to it and you say yea, I just heard a story. A story about some guy who had a woman he deeply loved, and one day she just split, so he’s out there wandering the back roads of Kentucky during the autumn rainy season, trying to find her. It’s a story without an ending; at the finish, all you get is a power-refrain and a fade-out. But the two story fragments in the song are entirely worth the price of admission.

In the first fragment, Elvis is at a general store in a little Kentucky town, talking with some old guys who, frustratingly, have seen his woman but can’t quite remember when she was there. In the second, Elvis is walking along the road with his thumb out on a cold and rainy day, and some big car driven by a preacher-man (in a black overcoat, no doubt) pulls over and lets him in. Elvis explains his quandary to the preacher-man, no doubt with much sincerity. They arrive in the town where Elvis is headed, and the preacher man leaves him with a prayer, a prayer that country boy Elvis might find his girl.

Ah, now that was Elvis in his true element, in the world of back roads and hollers and general stores and preacher-men offering prayers. No doubt that’s why the song was so good. You didn’t need a happy ending. Country boy Elvis was home, and that’s all you needed to know. In my mind, the King ain’t dead; his spirit is still wandering all those back roads down South.

MUSICAL MUSINGS: You know you’re getting old when you just can’t relate to popular music anymore. This week, the best-selling British group Coldplay released a new album called “X and Y”, which has caused quite a stir. I listened to some clips from it on Amazon, and it leaves me cold. I grew up with rock music, and I followed it over the years as it morphed into various forms. But now the music charts are dominated by new influences, including hip-hop and techno-trance. Coldplay’s sounds are arguably a “light-FM” version of the latter school. Ugh. At least the original stuff by Radiohead and their genre had a certain quality to it, even if I couldn’t listen for more than 30 seconds. Coldplay is definitely low-carb music. You get less, and you pay for it. But hey, if that’s what the kids of today want, well, fine. Old fossils like me will retreat back to our caves with our Van Halen and Aerosmith and Pearl Jam and Three Doors Down.

Speaking about music and being old, I recently bought some music downloads from Tunegenie. This was my first venture into the brave new world of protected WMA files. It seemed to go OK, though; I got the files, used my credit card, and managed to open up and play the tunes on Media Player 7.1. So I started looking around at other music download sites, including Walmart, Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster and MSN. And what I saw truly frightens me. Unless you have broadband, use Internet Explorer with Active X turned on, and manage your music with Media Player 9 or 10, you’re generally shut out of the game (other than Tunegenie, which doesn’t have as big a song collection as the others). Oh, not to mention the “special software” that you have to download for some of these music download sites. (Anytime you have to download and install “special software” to “take advantage of” some wonderful service on the net, think “TROJAN HORSE”).

I’m perfectly happy with my only-on-when-I-say-so dial-up service, with my Firefox browser, and with old Media Player 7.1. I don’t like Player 9 with it’s “let me look at your entire computer” approach to managing media files; it seems like a convenience, but I believe that it’s really Microsoft’s way of policing your music and video collection. Call me paranoid, but I suspect that Media Player will soon (if it doesn’t already) send Internet messages back to Microsoft headquarters without your permission, reporting on what kind of files you have on your computer and whether they might violate copyrights. Then MS can give such info over to the music industry and you will soon get registered letters from lawyers demanding that you explain why there’s an old mp3 on a folder somewhere on your hard drive that perhaps was taken from copyrighted material – and maybe you get sued for big bucks in damages. (As though BMG and Sony and the other music companies aren’t making enough money already.)

With Internet Explorer, Active X, and a broadband hook-up that’s always turned on, it’s all technically feasible. BIG BROTHER IS HERE, and millions of computer users think that it’s just a wonderful way to enjoy music and video entertainment. Hey, I’m perfectly willing to pay for music files; the days of freely available mp3s for most any tune out there were in fact immoral. But what’s going on now as a condition for the right to buy music files at a reasonable price DEFINITELY looks to me like a Trojan horse from BIG BUSINESS. It goes way beyond the licensing protections built into today’s WMA downloads.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want BMG, Microsoft, Walmart, Yahoo and Sony rummaging around on my hard drive, even though I have nothing illegal there. If that means that I can’t get 99 cent downloads (or 88 cents at Walmart), so be it. Besides, if new music is anything like Coldplay, then who needs it. I’ll stick with my old CD collection and my classic-rock radio stations.

Wake up people. Big business is watching you, 24-7. (As is government with the PatAct; big business and the feds are working together quite closely now.) You are letting them see everything you do on your computer, in return for a zillion songs for your iPod (and the false security that if there is some nut out there planning a terror assault on his computer, the authorities will be able to stop him; if you really want to cause mayhem, you don’t need the Internet). Is it really worth giving up what the founding fathers worked so hard to give our nation, i.e. a bit of freedom and privacy ?????

Religion seems to have two possible purposes. One is personal salvation. The other is “the achievement of a society which puts into practice God’s desires for the human race” (from Karen Armstrong’s 2000 book “Islam, A Short History”). Lets call it “social salvation”, for short. I don’t know which one is worse.

Personal salvation makes religion seem rather trite. The achievement of a God-like society sounds a lot more desirable and powerful. But it all runs into so many problems. The biggest problems regard “God’s desires for the human race” and how to put them into practice. Over the course of history, a lot of people have been pretty sure that they knew what God’s desires were and how those desires should be put into practice. But someone else always disagrees, and people end up getting hurt — when they’re luck. Usually, people wind up getting killed when a group attempts to achieve God’s social desires. Could that really be what God intended?

For most Christians, Christianity has been mostly about personal salvation. However, there are Christians who still have visions of “Christendom”, which in ancient centuries caused a lot of fighting and grief. The founder of Christianity, Jesus, was definitely looking for the formation of a God-like society. However, he had the good sense to tell his followers not to try to bring it on themselves; wait until God does it, he said. Jesus thought that God was due any day. His followers kept that faith for a few decades after he died. But once it was clear that God wasn’t coming to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth anytime soon, the early Christians decided to flip over to personal salvation. That would have been OK, but the whole movement got co-opted by the Roman Empire and the kings and nations who would follow the great Emperors. Unfortunately, some of those powers decided to bring back the idea of Heaven on Earth, but contra Jesus, thought that their swords could make it happen. And a whole lot of nasty history ensued.

I think that religion can still be a good thing, and that planning for a better world can still be a good thing too (despite all the lazziez-fairre worship of market capitalism going around these days). And the two of them can go together. But the guiding principle should always be gentleness, not force. And if that means that nothing can change right now, then so be it. Personal salvation can be had all at once. Social salvation is a long-term, slow-burn kind of thing. Which is why impatient firebrands always mess it up so much, despite all their good intentions.

This was an illustration in one of my kiddie books. Obviously, the book was about weather. I liked this picture when I was a kid; still do. It basically said to me that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all. There are natural cycles that keep things going. The sun evaporates water from lakes and rivers, which causes clouds, which causes rain, which puts the water back in the lakes and rivers. In between all that, crops and animals grew, people ate the crops and animals, and life went on.

(Later on I would become a vegetarian. Let the animals enjoy the cycle too.)

For a while there as a kid, I considered becoming a weatherman (no, not the radical kind). I always drawn by the idea of changing weather. As my kiddie book showed, it’s all part of life here on earth. Well, too bad that I took a different career path. I still have a spot in my heart for “WX”, even on the cold and grungy days of winter (or the hot, steamy days of August). It’s still nice to think that somehow, some way, it all fits in.

I just read a short article about Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Today we pretty much yawn at General Relativity, but when you look back at it, it was an incredible intellectual achievement. Einstein took nine years to come up with it. What was so difficult about it was that Einstein had to teach himself to imagine the world in totally different way from what our everyday experiences teach us. And no one was there to help him with this. Newton’s theories of space and time and force and matter pretty much rested on intuitive notions from real life. E.g., you need to use force to get an object moving, or to make it stop once in motion. Since things here on our planet naturally move towards the earth (you can find that out by jumping out of a window – or dropping a chewing gum wrapper), there must be a force coming from the earth that acts on everything near the earth. That’s the way to understand gravity; all that Newton did was to set up some numbers and formulas to allow you to calculate exactly what the effect of gravity and other forces would be.

(NONETHELESS – keep in mind that what Newton did was still an enormous achievement. No one before Newton had thought to set up formulas. Newton’s formulas allowed predictions to be made; for example, if you jump out of a window that is 10 feet high, you might want to know how long will it take for you to hit the ground, and how much force will act on your body when you do hit the ground. Obviously, Newton’s successors found better uses for these formulas, such as figuring out how to make steam engines run and flying machines fly and such.)

If scientists back in Einstein’s time had accurate measuring devises as we do today, they would have known that Newton’s formulas actually didn’t allow exact predictions of force and gravity effects. But Einstein didn’t know that at the time. He was pretty much cruising on his own intellectual gasoline when he came up with General Relativity. Somehow, he decided to imagine the world as a place where straight lines really weren’t always straight, where all of space — and, even worse, time – could get warped like a sheet of rubber. What did the warping was mass and energy. I mean, that was the result of a whole new kingdom existing only in Einstein’s mind. He was eventually able to set up a whole lot of complex mathematics (based on non-Euclidean geometry) to describe this new kingdom in his mind. And guess what? The new Einstein math turned out to describe reality better and more accurately than Newton’s math did.

That’s the challenge of being a cutting-edge physicist today. You have to be trained to see the world in a totally different way, one that leaves behind what you experience in daily life. There is a totally different world existing in your mind, that is shared by maybe a couple of hundred or thousand other people on the planet. You then figure out a mathematical way to describe this complex world of extra dimensions that warp and twist and do all kinds of non-intuitive things. Yea, that’s what all the string theory people are doing right now: investing gobs of mental energy into imagining a new kind of reality, and then describing it through some extremely complex mathematical abstractions; and then hoping that it all turns out to be proveable someday.

When you think about it, Einstein could just as well have been wrong. He might have invented a world in his mind that did not, in the end, reflect what really goes on in our Universe. (I do that all the time! although admittedly, not in the formal, mathematically precise way the Einstein and the string theory people do. And even if you can use matrix math to outline a peculiar kind of Alice-in-Wonderland geometry, it doesn’t mean that it truly relates to anything). But Albert got it right — even though he later got a lot of stuff wrong (e.g., quantum theory). So, hats off tonight to a true intellectual pioneer.

On being right when you’re wrong, and how to discuss it: Sometimes at work, I do some reading during lunch hour. Once in a while I bring in a book that discusses “the historical Jesus”. Occasionally, someone asks me what I’m reading. And every now and then, the person doing the asking is someone that I know to be a fervent believer in Christ as Redeemer and Savior. Thus far, I’ve just mumbled something to these folk so that they can walk away with a “that’s nice” feeling.

But I’m tempted to one day say to them that I’m reading some pretty solid analytical research about Jesus that blows to bits the theological conceptions that they hold in regard to him. Sometimes I want to tell them that the best, most unbiased researchers who have meticulously reviewed all the relevant historical evidence conclude that Jesus was a normal human being and not a God-man born of a virgin, that he died at the hands of the Romans and did not come back in the flesh, that he was a Jew, that he was a very charismatic man who gathered a following, that he was focused on one particular problem, i.e. the Roman Empire controlling the Holy Land, that he believed wholeheartedly in the apocalyptic myth about God coming very soon in judgment (which was very popular at the time), that he believed based upon his probable reading of the book of Daniel that he himself was to be the Son of Man who would carry out the apocalypse on God’s behalf and institute the Kingdom of God, right then and there along the eastern Mediterranean, just as soon as he sacrificed himself in Jerusalem . . . . . and that he turned out to be totally wrong. And finally, after reading the works of those researchers, I’m totally convinced that this point of view is the best, most logical explanation possible, the one we should all live by.

I’m sure that would get an interesting reaction from my Christian officemates!

But I’m not really interested in getting a rise out of people just because I’ve carefully studied the evidence and analysis as presented by some of the best academic minds. I ultimately agree with the underlying metaphysical belief which my Christian officemates possess, that there is more to the world than what the scientists can objectively document; that there is a mysterious force behind all reality that is ultimately good, despite all of the bad that we must experience. I fear, though, that if I presented my interpretation of Jesus to them, they would think that I’m attacking that ultimate faith. What I would really like to do is to have a discussion that would acknowledge that Jesus was subject to the same worldly physics as she / he and I are, but agree that there is a greater metaphysic as Jesus envisioned (however inaccurately).

OK, so under my viewpoint, we don’t have Jesus’ virgin birth and his miracles and his resurrection as evidence that such a greater metaphysic does permeate our lives and our Universe. But isn’t there other evidence for us to discuss, albeit more subtle evidence? And doesn’t Jesus’ story, despite its non-miraculous beginnings and endings, still provide us something to work with? Even though Jesus focused exclusively on a local Jewish problem and not on the salvation of non-Jews living 2000 years later, and even though his faith that God would deliver a miracle to him and his people totally backfired, didn’t something good still result from all that faith?

Jesus still changed the world, although in ways that he couldn’t imagine. He gave the Roman Empire and the many empires to follow a kinder and gentler way of living. Oh sure, you can tell me about all sorts of hypocrisy and inhumanity over 20 centuries of Christian history. But at the core of it all, Christianity still presents Jesus and his kinder, gentler way of being. Jesus tells us not to raise swords. Most people ignore that, but once in a while someone still takes it seriously. Jesus tells us to love one another, even our enemies. Those words still act on people’s consciences. There are other great religions on our planet that have great founders who said a lot of great things. And we should all get to know the great things that those great founders said (e.g, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, and Muhammad). But I can’t think of any other founder of a great religion who said “love one another, even your enemy; turn the other cheek; put away your swords”. The bad stuff of Christianity is pretty much like the bad stuff from any organized point of view. The good stuff, though, is pretty special. If just 1 in 10 people took Jesus’s Golden Rule instructions seriously at one part of their life, things are still the better for it.

Yes, I know that Jesus has been presented as a harsh, judgemental monster in many places and that this has hurt many people, especially in their youth. There certainly is stuff in the Gospels that can be selectively presented in that fashion. If we could understand just where Jesus was really coming from, i.e. a self-appointed prophet in expectation of an imminent “end of the world as we know it”, we could then defuse this nightmare side of Jesus. The light of modern rationality can still be the end of a superstitious nightmare.

For now, though, I’m not quite ready to take on my Christian officemates. For now, I need to get along with them, and not to rock the boat. But who knows. Maybe one day I’ll be able to take some chances for enlightenment and interaction – theirs and mine. Back in the 60’s, we “flower children” (well, I was actually more of a sympathizer than a real hippie) thought that all contention could be talked out, and thus there was no need for war. Unfortunately, human beings didn’t turn out to be quite as easy to work with as we then imagined. But ya can’t completely lose faith. Maybe I’ll yet have that discussion about history and Jesus and the metaphysical world. If we can do it all during lunch hour.

I work in the office that prosecuted a fairly famous rape case back in the mid-90s, one involving a group of suburban high school football jocks who sexually assaulted a mildly retarded girl (the kind we used to call “slow”). The girl was flattered by their attention. Unfortunately, she was too innocent to realize the power of teenage lust and the concurrent disrespect that she garnered from the “cool guys”. She thus fell victim to the dark side of a seemingly civilized, upper-income environment.

In 1999, ABC made a TV movie about the case based on the book “Our Guys”. Bob, the assistant prosecutor (i.e. trial attorney for the State) who handled the case was played by an actor; however, Bob actually got a bit part in the movie, not as himself, but as a detective. In one scene, he was actually introduced to himself when encountering his character — hmm, deja vu all over again! The other day I overheard Bob chatting with some fellow assistant prosecutors about his movie. He was quite proud of it, and pointed out that it was still being shown on cable channels and was occasionally in theaters in Canada.

I work regularly with Bob (who is now a “CAP”, chief assistant prosecutor), and to be honest, he’s a really good guy. He obviously isn’t interested in the kind of paperwork that I process (but he is one of the most helpful bigwigs in that regard — he always has a moment for even the most minute of the minutia). Bob found his niche; he wants to do what he does, i.e. function as a high-profile prosecutor and trial attorney. He found a road to follow his bliss, and he took it.

I can’t blame him for that. I want to follow my bliss too. But for now, I’m stuck with that paperwork, which ain’t all that blissful. Nevertheless, after hearing Bob discuss his movie, I followed a bit of my own bliss as a researcher by finding some internet reviews on his movie. Here’s what I saw: the E!Online site acknowledges his film and gives it a C+ rating based on viewer’s opinions. And the MSN Entertainment site had a review which called it formulistic and ultimately boring, just another made-for-TV movie.

Oh well. Bliss doesn’t come easy for any of us, I guess.

NONETHELESS … I must point out that Bob has put a lot of sexual preditors behind bars, and the streets are better for it. Recently he got a guy sent up for at least 60 years in a bizarre robbery, kidnapping and sexual assault case where the victim was a young man who was simply walking down the street. Two women accompanied the defendant, but were only interested in robbery; after the take, they left the victim to the sadistic insticts of his attacker. So yes guys, rape ain’t just for women any more. In an out-of-kilter world like this, first-rate CAP’s like Bob do good for all of us, even if TV and the movies don’t always do them justice.