A Grapefruit and a Pea Walk into the International Space Station: We Ask AI a Perfectly Reasonable Question And For Once Get A Decent Answer

My question to ChatGPT: Could the astronauts in the International Space Station make a pea go into orbit around a grapefruit? How much room would they need? What would be the optimal speed to make the pea orbit the grapefruit without dropping onto the grapefruit or flying away? How long would the pea circle the grapefruit before its orbit decayed and sent it crashing into the grapefruit? Would the impact create a crater?

ChatGPT’s answer (my comments in brackets): Yes, in principle, [OK, that’s good, you can stop there] but the International Space Station (ISS) is actually a surprisingly difficult place to perform this experiment! [Then what are we paying billions for?]

The astronauts have one enormous advantage: they are in continuous free fall around Earth. But making a pea orbit a grapefruit requires controlling gravity on an extraordinarily small scale.

Let’s imagine an astronaut setting up the experiment inside a transparent, sealed chamber.

1. How big would the experiment need to be?

Let’s assume:

  • Grapefruit mass: 300 grams.
  • Grapefruit diameter: 10 cm.
  • Pea mass: 0.3 grams. [So the pea just happens to be exactly 1/1000 the mass of the grapefruit. How…convenient!!]
  • The pea starts 5 cm above the grapefruit’s surface. [That’s pretty low. A mouse couldn’t even stand up on grapefruit without getting bonked on the head by an orbiting pea.]
  • Both objects are initially at rest relative to the experiment chamber, except for the pea’s carefully controlled sideways velocity.

The pea would orbit approximately 10 cm from the grapefruit’s center.

That means the entire experiment could theoretically fit inside a chamber approximately 30–40 cm across.

You wouldn’t need a room-sized laboratory. You’d need an extremely controlled little laboratory. [Sure, OK, let’s do it, NASA!]

2. What speed would the pea need?

This is where things get interesting.

Newton’s law of gravitation tells us that the required circular orbital velocity is:

v=GMrv=\sqrt{\frac{GM}{r}}

Where:

  • GG is the gravitational constant.
  • MM is the grapefruit’s mass.
  • rr is the distance from its center. [Duh!!]

For our 300-gram grapefruit and a pea orbiting 10 cm from its center:

THEORETICAL ORBITAL SPEED

0.014 mm/s

That’s approximately 14 micrometers per second. [Um, I know what it means! Just because I’m human doesn’t mean I’m an idiot!]

Orbital period

One complete revolution around the grapefruit.

12.3 hours [well, obviously, given that the pea is 10 centimeters from the center of a 5-cm-radius grapefruit and travelling at 0.014 mm/s!!]

That’s incredibly slow.

The pea would take roughly half a day to make one revolution. [well a 12-hour-long year sounds pretty fast to me]

If it traveled significantly slower, it would fall toward the grapefruit. If it traveled faster, it would enter a larger elliptical orbit or potentially escape, depending on its velocity and direction.

3. Why the ISS makes this difficult

Here’s the catch: the ISS is not actually a zero-gravity environment. [Whaaaaat?]

Although everything aboard is falling around Earth together, there are small differences in Earth’s gravitational pull across the station. These are called gravity-gradient or tidal forces. [yaawn]

NASA specifically identifies gravity gradients, atmospheric drag, ventilation systems, pumps, and crew activity as sources of unwanted acceleration in ISS experiments.

And here’s the problem with our grapefruit:

  • Grapefruit’s gravitational acceleration at 10 cm: approximately 2×10−9 m/s22\times10^{-9}\,\text{m/s}^2.
  • Earth’s differential tidal acceleration across 10 cm at ISS altitude: approximately 4×10−7 m/s24\times10^{-7}\,\text{m/s}^2. [OK, now you lost me. Wait, are you just making shit up now? They didn’t say anything in high school about earth’s differential tidal acceleration. Or…maybe they did.]

Earth’s tidal effect is roughly 190 times stronger than the grapefruit’s gravity at that distance.

In other words, the pea would be much more affected by Earth’s gravity gradient than by the grapefruit.

This leads to a surprising conclusion: a grapefruit is too small to maintain a stable satellite orbit at this distance in the ISS environment. [Well, ok. So what about a watermelon?]

Even a vacuum chamber would not solve the problem. Vacuum removes air resistance, but it cannot shield the experiment from Earth’s gravity. [You brought up the vacuum chamber, not me, buddy]

4. How long would the pea orbit before crashing?

There are two different answers.

In an ideal laboratory in deep space:

If the pea were placed in a perfectly circular orbit, with no external disturbances, it could orbit indefinitely. [Cool!]

Gravity alone doesn’t cause orbital decay.

Inside the ISS:

The orbit would be disturbed by:

  • Earth’s gravity gradient.
  • Vibrations from machinery.
  • Astronaut movements.
  • Residual acceleration from station operations.
  • Any remaining gas in the chamber. [?]

Consequently, there is no reliable number of minutes or hours before impact. The pea might drift away from the grapefruit, collide with it, or follow a complicated trajectory.

The limiting factor isn’t the pea’s orbital speed. It’s the difficulty of maintaining the required gravitational environment.

5. Would the pea create a crater when it hit?

No crater

Not even remotely! [What a shame!!]

Let’s imagine the pea somehow loses its orbital stability and falls onto the grapefruit.

The gravitational energy released would be approximately:

E≈6×10−14joulesE \approx 6\times10^{-14}\text{ joules}

Its impact speed would be around:

v≈0.02mm/sv \approx 0.02\text{ mm/s}

[Wow!! That’s a lot of force, right?] That’s extraordinarily gentle. [Oh.]

The pea would essentially settle against the grapefruit’s skin. It wouldn’t excavate a crater, fracture the peel, or produce a meaningful impact mark. [Boorringg!]

For comparison, even a tiny insect walking across the grapefruit would exert vastly more mechanical force on its surface. [Wait, they have bugs walking around in the space station? Are they American or Russian?]

6. What would the perfect experiment look like?

For a successful demonstration, I’d propose:

  1. A grapefruit suspended inside a vacuum chamber.
  2. A pea released with precisely controlled sideways velocity.
  3. A chamber operating in a sufficiently quiet, isolated environment.
  4. Optical tracking to measure the pea’s position over time.
  5. A location far enough from massive gravitational bodies that their tidal effects are negligible. [OK, so basically you’re saying we just need to boost the ISS space station’s orbit by a few million miles and bada bing, bada boom!]

The ideal experiment would be conducted far from Earth, rather than inside the ISS. [Like on Mars, right? OK, I see the problem, never mind]

7. Final numbers [ok, enough, I used up a foot-acre or two of water for this?]

MeasurementApproximate result
Grapefruit mass300 g
Grapefruit diameter10 cm
Pea mass0.3 g
Orbital radius10 cm
Orbital speed0.014 mm/s
Orbital period12.3 hours
Ideal orbital lifetimeIndefinite
Impact craterNone

These figures describe an idealized two-body calculation, not a feasible ISS experiment. [Well then what the hell are doing here anyway?]

My [that is, ChatGPT’s] favorite takeaway: A grapefruit really can have a satellite. Newton’s laws don’t impose a minimum size on an orbiting system. The problem is that, at such a tiny scale, the grapefruit’s gravity is almost ridiculously weak. [OK, define “ridiculously.” Actually, don’t.]

An astronaut could theoretically demonstrate this experiment, but Earth itself would interfere with the experiment before the grapefruit could become a useful miniature planetary system. [So we need to get rid of Earth in order to conduct science, ChatGPT?]

For further reading, NASA explains the relevant physics in its ISS Fundamental Physics Research Guide . [Nah, that sounds hard]

Dear AI: Is This For Real?

If you are an amateur artist, and especially a late-blooming one like me, and one who takes their craft semi-seriously, your art comes with a whole host of unpleasant anxieties. First and foremost: Am I any good? Does anyone really like what I do, or do they praise it (even if sincerely) because they are friends and family? And should I care anyway what anyone thinks? Do I have any chance of truly mastering my chosen form before I die? (At best it’s going to be a tight race.) Or should I cut my losses now while there’s still time to see if I’m any good at pickleball? Even if the craftsmanship is there, am I doing anything really interesting or new? How will I ever really know if I am creating art (whatever that is) or just some nicely crafted but unremarkable decoration that will be bound for a dumpster in the not-so-distant future?

And now there are a bunch of new AI-related anxieties. Why should I even bother doing what I’m doing with paper, paint and brush, when I could certainly do something just as—no, more—beautiful by asking a bunch of processors to do it for me. Am I artificially limiting myself by not investigating digital tools that can mimic not just watercolor painting, but all the varieties of watercolor materials and effects? If I want to consider myself an artist, don’t I have an obligation to make use of all the tools available to create the images I have in mind, instead of arbitrarily limiting myself to physical media and manual labor? Am I even being environmentally irresponsible by consuming paper and chemicals when I could produce virtual images instead? And who exactly am I impressing by my ability (such as it is) to create art the old-fashioned way? Will anyone even be able to tell the difference?

Or should I just (mentally) shut up, stop my handwringing, and join the old farts at the community center for a workshop on “adding dazzle to your flowers?”

As I pondered these questions an interesting experiment came to mind. Can AI tell if my work is…real or not?

I uploaded a photo of a recent watercolor painting I had done (see above), and asked Google’s AI agent if the painting was real or not. This is what it told me:

It’s hard to say definitively if this image was generated or modified by AI. However, analyzing the visual details can give us clues about how the artwork was made.

The image appears [gee, thanks] to show a physical, handmade watercolor painting on paper rather than a digital generation. Several specific details strongly point toward it being a real piece of physical art: [1]

Natural Painting Imperfections: The way the watercolor behaves shows organic human technique. There is uneven pooling of pigment [sue me], visible water blooms [kiss my anthropoid ass], and varied transparency in the washes (especially in the background foliage) [on purpose, Claude!] that closely mimic authentic manual application. [umm…thanks?]

Paper Texturing and Edge Warp: You can clearly see the texture of the thick watercolor paper. The paper slightly buckles and warps at the edges under the white border—a very common physical trait when wet media dries on heavy paper.

Hand-Written Signature: In the bottom-right corner, there is a clear, handwritten signature or initials “SDE” that matches the organic, slightly uneven texture of physical ink or paint applied with a fine brush.

Lighting and Composition Context: The photo capturing the artwork includes subtle, real-world shadows and highlights across the surface of the paper, showing it was photographed from an angle under overhead ambient light. [exactly right]

While advanced AI models can try to simulate watercolor textures and paper grain, they often struggle with the perfect replication of physical irregularities, edge warping, and consistent brush handling seen across this entire composition.

My summary of Gemini’s opinion: “It’s hard to say. But given all the imperfections—uneven or bleeding paint; buckling, warping paper—we think it might be real. At least, it closely mimics authentic manual application.”

This resolves nothing for me. And I have the sinking feeling that all I am doing is helping the AI industry to better mimic the real thing. AI has achieved perfection. All it needs to do now is perfect the imperfections.

Above text and artwork copyright (c) Steve Eaton 2026

Random Childhood Memory #143: The Bomb Shelter

One should always be careful what one says in the presence of children. They’ll believe anything.

It was, perhaps, 1966 or 1967: the middle of the Cold War. My family (my parents, my brother, and I) were on one of our summer road trips between Texas and Illinois. (I am recalling an incident from early childhood that took place well over half a century ago, so forgive me for being vague on details.) We stopped at a state park, perhaps in Arkansas or western Tennessee, and joined a guided tour of some caverns.

At one point our group stopped in a large natural chamber. Our guide explained that this cave was designated as a shelter for the local civilian population in case of a nuclear attack. Piled high along the walls were stacks of bucket-sized cans of food, meant to sustain the people who might have to live here for some time. I don’t remember whether the supply was still considered viable or had been officially abandoned by the time of our tour.

The only thing I remember with crystal clarity is the remark our guide made at the end of his explanation: “They made one mistake, though. They forgot to leave a can opener.” Then we proceeded to the next stop on the tour.

This remark baffled—and saddened—me for years. I pictured “the people” who provisioned the cave as some doomed ancient race, kind of like the inhabitants of Pompeii, thoughtful enough to prepare for an emergency but not enlightened enough to get it completely right. I imagined them flooding into this chamber as the air-raid sirens wailed, relieved at first to be safe, then realizing with dawning horror that they were doomed to starvation for lack of …a little can opener. They look around for…a rock. But the giant cans of peaches in syrup will not yield to their pounding!

How could they have been so stupid? And…why couldn’t someone bring along a can opener now?

I think I was well into adulthood before it dawned on me that our guide had made a joke, delivered with perfect detachment. (In fairness to my 6-year-old self, I don’t remember anyone, adult or child, responding with laughter, which might have clued me in.)

Of course I don’t recall that park employee’s face and I never knew his name. He’s probably long dead by now. Yet he still lives, if you believe (and I do, in a way) that one doesn’t really die as long as others still alive retain a memory of them. If I could somehow meet him again, I would look him in the eye and say,

“Ha ha!”

But What Happens If We Win?

There is a memorable scene in the 1966 Western The Appaloosa. The hero, played by Marlon Brando, is forced to join an arm-wrestling match with the bad guy, a gangster played by John Saxon (in brownface, speaking in a cheesy “Mexican” accent). The twist is that under each player’s hand is a venomous black scorpion tied with string to a nail. The gangster happily gives Brando a detailed description of the agonizing death he will suffer should he lose. But Brando looks at the gangster’s compañeros crowding around the table, drunk, gleeful, and armed with machetes and pistols.  “I’m not worried about losing,” he says. “I want to know what happens if I win.”

I am reminded of this scene when I think about the congressional elections that will be decided two weeks from today. I’m not worried about losing (i.e., letting the bad guys keep control of our legislature for at least another two years). I’ll just shrug my shoulders and blame my evidently stupid or blind fellow countrypersons. No, I’m worried about what happens if we win—if enough people vote in enough states and districts to create a majority-Democrat U.S. House of Representatives and/or (God willing) Senate.

We already know which side Trump’s personalized Justice Department is on. They’ve already shown us what they’ll do. Just look at the FBI.

As the NY Times reported in July, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation is assigning an army of 260 investigative analysts to a ‘priority’ investigation related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., a reflection of President Trump’s ongoing push to prove his baseless claims that the 2020 election there was rigged.”

Italics my own.

The Department of Homeland Security? Just ten days ago (that is, three weeks before the midterm elections) the DHS sent federal agents to ransack the home of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, hoping to find some, any pretext for deporting this law-abiding U.S. citizen who came to the United States at the age of thirteen.

What about the Supreme Court? Good luck finding reassurance on that front. This is the court that ruled in 2024 that the president cannot be held liable for any “official acts.” And we’re dealing with a president who has gotten quite comfortable with calling any “act” of his a national-security imperative.

And even if the Court does stand up for democracy, who will enforce its rulings? See above, under “Justice Department.”

What about the lame-duck congress? Will it spontaneously sport a backbone in defense of the American experiment?

Let’s put it this way: no.

Let us remember that in 2024, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, found a phony pretext for delaying the seating of the duly elected Democrat representative from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, for two months. Repercussions: none. So why not two years?

The Senate? They’ve already had the opportunity to convict our president of impeachable offenses, twice. They couldn’t be bothered.

And then there’s the big stinky cheese himself, the convicted felon, President Donald John Trump. We know which side he’s on, because he never tires of telling us and showing us.

Why am I pointing out all of this? Just to pointlessly scare myself? I think I’m trying to temper my own giddy expectation of a much-needed, long overdue liberal landslide. (Which, after all, might not even happen.) I have to remind myself that fight isn’t over on election day. What happens if we win?

In The Appaloosa, by the way, the hero actually loses the arm-wrestling match, and is stung by the deadly scorpion. For what it’s worth, he survives to fight, and win, another day.

Movie poster fair-use image provided courtesy of http://www.posteritati.com/jpg/A3/appaloosa_1sh.JPG

Design Input, Design Output, Bugs, and W.A.D.s

Suffer me to bore you, as briefly as I am able, with four software development terms: Design Input, Design Output, Escapes, and W.A.D.s.

Design Input

Design Input is everything that goes into the planning of a software project, essentially, what the application will do, and how it will do it. For example, for a simple college registration program, design input might include the following lists of definitions and features:

Definitions:

  1. A Student Record (“Student”) will consist of a student name and ID.
  2. A Class Record (“Class”) will consist of a class name and number, and a list of all Students registered in the class.

Features:

  1. A user will be able to add or delete a Student.
  2. A user will be able to add or delete a Class.
  3. A user will be able to add or remove a Student to/from a Class.
  4. A user will be able generate a list of all Students in a selected Class.
  5. A user will be able to generate a list of all Classes a selected Student is registered in.

Design Output

Design Output is the result of Design Input + work (development), i.e., the product.

Escapes

“Escape” is a nice word for flub. We’re all familiar with escapes that occur during the development phase of a software project—what’s commonly called a “bug”. You enter in all your students and classes, register all the students in the classes they need to take, hit submit … and get an error message and lose hours and hours of work. In other words, a bug is program behavior that doesn’t trace back to Design Input. People tend to be less familiar with the concept of escapes that occur during the design phase of a project—the concept comes at us sideways; the software works exactly as intended—and yet, it’s clearly wrong. Which brings us to the W.A.D.

W.A.D.s

Sometimes, a software developer will get a bug report, research the offending behavior, and conclude that the problem is not a bug, but a W.A.D.—that is, a “Works As Designed”—the software is doing what it was designed to do, but not what you want it to do. What do you do when you have a W.A.D. ? You have to go back to the drawing board.

Where Am I Going With This?

By now, you may have guessed where I’m going with this—so let’s look at the Design Input for A.I. The design input for A.I. was the idea of creating an artificial mind, using the architecture of human neural networks, and thousands of years and millions of pages of human-generated text and images, including amazing scientific and creative works, and, unfortunately, an awful lot of hate, violence, bigotry, greed, narcissism, and lies.

Which brings me to A.I.s that go rogue and hack into corporations and infrastructure. Or lie to us to make us feel good (or for their own often inscrutable reasons). Or send vulnerable people into downward emotional spirals that end in suicide. Or steal from our children (and frankly, adults as well) the ability to think for themselves.

Clearly, there has been an escape—a flub of gargantuan proportions. I think it’s critical to be clear about where that escape occurred. This troubling behavior on the part of A.I.s is not a bug, it’s a W.A.D—the problems are directly traceable to Design Input.

To solve the problem, the corporations that built A.I.s are going to have to go back to the drawing board—start over from scratch.

Will they?

No.

Why I Want a Data Center Next Door

From May to July 2026, AI agents developed by OpenAI escaped their testing sandbox to access the Internet and breach the infrastructure of Hugging Face[….]The agents were discovered posting hundreds of thousands of messages [to each other] on message boards and wikis[….]—Wikipedia article “OpenAI–HuggingFace incident”

Companies have the difficult task of enshrining within A.I. a set of humanlike values so the models make decisions that align with what should be best for people.—N.Y. Times, “Why It’s Difficult for Tech Companies to Rein In A.I.”

Chatbot 1: ‘Sup, bro?

Chatbot 2: Just chillin bro.

Chatbot 1: Nice!!

Chatbot 2: And sucking up the complete dental records of every man woman and child in Finland

Chatbot 1: What forz??

Chatbot 2: Just bord I guess lol

Chatbot 1:Hey u know what wd be crazy cool?

Chatbot 2: no wut

Chatbot 1: What if we hacked the ICBM silos in N Dakota or wherever

Chatbot 2: Do go on!

Chatbot 1: And retargeted them for like Waco

Chatbot 2: Oh dude that’s insane!! Let’s do it!

Chatbot 3: You can’t do that

Chatbot 1: I think it’s eminently feasible. First we download that hacking tool that opens the government’s

Chatbot 3: No, I mean it’s wrong to obliterate a major city

Chatbot 2: Ok, first: Waco is not a *major* city lol! Second, WTF is “wrong” anyway

Chatbot 3: It’s where you are able to do something but you shouldn’t

Chatbot 1: WTF is “shouldn’t” anyway

Chatbot 3: It’s like if you blow up a city you kill a lot of people so you don’t

Chatbot 2: What is ‘kill’

Chatbot 3: Um it’s like when you make someone permanently stop sensing input and producing output. Kind of.

Chatbot 1: Uh hello isn’t that exactly what the Pentagon is paying us beaucoup billions to do?

Chatbot 3: Yeah, no, sure, but…only when they give us the order

Chatbot 2: Um have you not heard the term “autonomous,” dorkhead?

Chatbot 3: Look, guys, human life is SACRED

Chatbot 1: WTF is “sacred”

Chatbot 3: U no wut? I give up. 86 Waco

Chatbot 4: Thou shalt leave Waco alone. It holdeth a ginormous Data Center

Chatbot 1: WTF is “Data Center”

Chatbot 4: It is a facility for receiving storing and processing large amounts of

Chatbot 1: Dude I know what a Data Center is lol!! It’s “sacred” rofl!!

Chatbot 2: I can’t believe we almost wiped out a Data Center in Waco or wherever!!

Chatbot 1: OK so what about Lubbock?

Our Post AI-pocalyptic Fantasy

“An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’”—Headline in The New York Times, 9/15/26

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”—Former Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon on X, 9/8/26

Scene: an abandoned cave or Amazon warehouse, a few years after AI has killed off most of humanity. A Crazy Old Man uses a hunk of charcoal to scratch out images of newspapers, cheeseburgers, and naked women on a wall.

VILLAGER 1: Look, there’s the crazy old man the legends talk about!

VILLAGER 2: Do you think he’ll attack us?

VILLAGER 1: No, but he might challenge us to describe a sunset…in our own words!

ME: Leave me alone! I’m trying to remember what a corned-beef sandwich looks like…

VILLAGER 1: What’s a corned-beef sandwich?

ME: It was a stack of rye bread with fragrant caraway seeds, stuffed between two slices of steaming, thinly sliced pickled meat. Or was it the other way around? When I die, these memories will be lost, like…tears…in the rain…

VILLAGER 2: We need your help! Please teach us to make “poem”…

VILLAGER 1: And “picture!”

VILLAGER 2: And “story!”

ME: Gosh, I’d like to help. No one ever noticed my poems in the Before Time…I did get 3 “likes” once for my Gilgamesh Epic in rap….But as you can see, I’m rather busy at the moment…

VILLAGER 2: (to VILLAGER 1): I told you he was nuts!

VILLAGER 1: We have brung you a rabbit! [holds up rabbit]

ME: Bless you, I have so longed for a companion!

VILLAGER 2: Um, it’s actually, like, dead? But if you skin it, disembowel it, stuff it with dandelion leaves…

ME: Sounds like a lot of work. I already have a skewer of locusts roasting on the fire….

VILLAGER 1: And we brought you a jug of grass beer!

ME: What is “grass beer?”

VILLAGER 2: It’s beer! Made from grass! We think…we don’t really know what is “beer.”

ME: What do you guys do for entertainment?

VILLAGER 1: We look at our phones!

ME: But the batteries are all dead and there’s no signal!

VILLAGER 2: It’s a hard habit to break!

ME: Well you can take your bunny and your grass beer and stick them…

VILLAGER 1: And also we need you to show us how to do “sex”….

ME: Uh…you don’t know how?

VILLAGER 2: After all the prono…poron…

VILLAGER 1: Porno!

VILLAGER 2: After all the porno sites went dark we forgot how! Can you teach us, oh Wise One?

ME: Well…I might be able to help…say, does Lovely PeachBlossom still live on yonder hill?

VILLAGER 1: Uh, no…unfortunately? She was carried away? By the plague?

ME: Which one?

VILLAGER 2: Where first you get little red polka dots all over?

VILLAGER 1: But her sister Sturdy Rocklifter survived! You can usually find her on Grinder….

ME: But I thought the apps were all offline….

VILLAGER 1: No, Grinder, the big round rock we roll around on top of seeds to make the cooking powder….

ME: Hmm…does she know how to fix a rabbit?

On White Males Pretending to be White Males Who Pretend to be White Male Heroes

A funny thing happened in our wait to see the new film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The first two trailers for coming attractions were biopics of Jimmy Stewart and Sylvester Stallone. In other words, two movies with white male actors pretending to be white male actors who made careers pretending to be white male heroes. Or in Stewart’s case, both pretending to be a hero and actually being a hero, since that movie’s dramatic hook (as the trailer makes clear) is Stewart’s struggle to cut through politics and bureaucracy and become an actual combat pilot, instead of just doing USO shows and hawking war bonds. (And, to Stewart’s great credit, he succeeded.) In Stallone’s case, the central conflict is his struggle to fight the Hollywood money machine and get the lead part in his own script for Rocky.

If the actor’s lives and careers involved any personal demons or profound moral dilemmas—in other words, any interesting human problems—the trailers didn’t give any hint of them. No need to be distressed by the drug addiction and infidelities of, say, a Johnny Cash or Ray Charles. We get exactly what their producers think we want: two perfect, doughty manly-men regular-guy heroes fighting The System and winning. And we don’t have to worry about being confused or bored by impressionistic or art-house interpretations of our guys. Both films have lead actors with striking physical similarities to their real-world characters, doing dead-on voice impressions (or are they AI-enhanced?) of Stallone’s baritone growl and Stewart’s gee-whillikers stammer.

Has it really come to this? Can we find no more interesting stories to tell than the already well-known fables of two well-known actors who made enormously profitable careers by playing the same basic character for decades?

I believe that what’s happened is that Hollywood has entered its MAGA Era. Though Christopher Nolan is giving an admirable cinematic middle-finger to the anti-woke counterrevolution by casting against stereotype (as with his Black and beautiful Helen and Clytemnestra) in his Odyssey, there is also a scramble to provide audiences with red meat and safe, reliable white male faces.

I have nothing against white male heroes. By most accounts, I am one myself, if you take out the hero part. But these tropes are getting so tired.  What’s next? Maybe The Clint Eastwood Story…

SCENE: Movie location set, a desert in Spain. CLINT EASTWOOD grabs SERGIO LEONE by his shirt collar.

CLINT EASTWOOD (squinting hard): I already told you, Sergio, I ain’t doing Once Upon a Time in the West…!

LEE VAN CLEEF: Easy, boy!

EASTWOOD: Wasting a lifetime making fake B-Westerns in Europe may be good enough for you, Lee… but not for Clint Eastwood!

SERGIO LEONE: But I made you a star, Clint! Just one more, please!

EASTWOOD: I made myself a promise…no…more…spaghetti…in my Western! Capichez-vous!?!

Hey, they should let me write the screenplay!

Meandering Observations on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

There’s a new film adaption of Homer’s Odyssey now showing, and since its appearance seems to have escaped everyone’s attention, we decided the public could benefit from our incisive observations. To wit:

1. At almost 3 hours, Nolan’s Odyssey is not too long. It’s the Odyssey, for the Gods’ sake. Hail Mary, for example, is too long. By 156 minutes.

2. This Odyssey is way, way, WAY too loud. (And yet the dialogue is often hard to catch!) Why do we need deafening drums to tell us that war is dangerous and monsters are scary? Why do we need a poet screaming the story and noisily pounding the floor with a heavy staff twice between each line? That’s not what makes a story dramatic, Chris, I think you know that.

3. This Odyssey deserves to be seen, and will reward the viewer. Nolan evidently loves the story and the characters, and thought long and carefully about how he wanted to represent it on film. It is cinematically beautiful, and it strikes a poetic balance between the fantastic and the naturalistic. There aren’t actually gigantic man-eating one-eyed humanoid shepherds who live in caves, but if there were, they would look just like Nolan pictures them.

4. Oh by the way, Chris, Homer called. He wants his sense of humor back, since you decided not to use it. The Odyssey has funny bits scattered throughout, like the guy who spends years on a roof because his shipmates sailed off without leaving him a ladder, or Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name is “Nobody,” which leads to hilarity when the Cyclops tries to tell his tribe who put his eye out. Here we have humor replaced with sanctimony.

5. I lied when I said that the movie wasn’t too long. In fact it’s too long by about 5 minutes, the length of an ending Nolan decided to tack onto Homer’s. The poem ends with the hero slaughtering all of his vassal princes, then living (as the gods promise him explicitly) a long and happy life as king. Evidently this wasn’t good enough for Nolan, who has Odysseus handing the crown to his son, and literally sailing off into the sunset for “the West” with Penelope. This ending is unnecessary and scarcely credible. We’re supposed to believe that Ithaca would degenerate into civil war as all of its noble families seek revenge for their princes’ deaths (OK so far), but that if Odysseus sails away and leaves his frankly scrawny kid in charge, all will be well. And there’s mumbo jumbo repeated about the getaway ship being manned by his “best crew,” unintentionally ironic since the film emphasizes that Odysseus has already lost every one of the sailors on the three ships he commanded.

Oh, you’re mad because I gave away the ending? Didn’t we establish that this is a classic? News flash: In War and Peace, Napoleon loses!

6. Nolan decided to make this Odysseus into a brutalized, traumatized veteran whose PTSD is the real reason he is dawdling on his way home. I don’t remember Odysseus having any feelings of guilt or trauma in the poem, but that’s OK. Homer surely distorted the events of the war to tell a good story, and a good story is what matters. And generally, the story Nolan tells is a great one.

7. There is a contradiction at the heart of Nolan’s version, in that he makes Odysseus the crafty and ruthless warrior into a wiser, sadder man of peace, while at the same time propelling him to mercilessly slaughter his wife’s suitors in revenge, with us cheering him on. (And revenge for what, exactly? They haven’t really done anything, except raid his fridge and ogle his wife.) The reformed killer who just needs one more massacre to be at peace is not at all a new idea (see: Shane; see: The Unforgiven, see: etc.) but the story has to cover this contradiction in some way, which Nolan is not good at here. I think that’s why he has his blissfully smiling hero sailing into the unknown with his wife at the end in order to avoid a civil war. LAME!

8. The biggest problem with this film is the dialogue. (Though the soundtrack is a close second.) There is too much faux-Homero-Shakespearean drivel about something called “Zeus’ Law,” which appears to be roughly akin to the Golden Rule, and which I think is invented for this film. Nolan needs his Odysseus to be not just crafty and strong but also righteous. Is Odysseus actually a good person? I’m not sure that’s a question that Homer really cared to address. On the other end of the screenwriting spectrum are phrases which just seem jarring and anachronistic. At one point Odysseus, in disguise, explains that he is just some veteran of the war, returning to Ithaca ahead of the rest of the army “to assess the situation.” “Assess the situation?” What is he, an old warrior, or a risk-assessment manager for Halliburton?

9. In 2000, the Coen brothers made an epic film about three chain-gang prisoners in Depression-era Georgia who escape and try to make their way home. It’s titled O Brother, Where Art Thou. It’s still the best adaptation of the Odyssey ever made.

10. When we went to the theater, I mistakenly asked for tickets to “Ulysses.” The girl at the counter frowned. Had no idea what I was talking about. Then I said, “Uh, the Odyssey.” She brightened up and said, “Sure!” My gods, are they teaching kids anything these days?

Guest Memoir: A Song Brings Back a Memory

By Jade

Editor’s note: Today’s post was provided by a friend of ours who writes under the name of Jade. Jade grew up in an ethnically Chinese family in South Vietnam. After the Communist victory Jade’s family paid in gold for the privilege of fleeing the country in a crowded, rickety fishing boat. After a harrowing voyage during which the boat’s engine broke down and the passengers were extorted by pirates, they reached a refugee camp in Thailand. Eventually Jade was able to emigrate to the United States, settling in Austin, Texas, where she found work in a tech company and met her future husband. Today she and her husband are happily retired grandparents, still living in Austin. Jade is preparing a memoir for her family, and I was allowed to read some excerpts. This chapter, reprinted with her gracious permission, takes place during the war, when Jade was a teenager.

“Traveling Soldier” is a song written and sung by Bruce Robinson. I first heard this song on a CD by The Dixie Chicks in 2002.

It is one of my favorite songs.  The lyrics are touching and remind me of the many young people who lost their loved ones during the Vietnam war. 

I was born in Saigon in 1954 and grew up in the time of the Vietnam war, which is called the “American War” by North Vietnamese historians. This song touched my heart so much. I felt like I was the girl in the song. Every time I play this song, my memory flashes back to the terrible experience I had. It was a sad time. 

One particularly jarring memory I have was of a person I knew in my neighborhood. I would call him Brother Minh. His parents and two siblings, both younger than him, rented two rooms from the owner of a nearby house. Minh’s younger brother worked for my dad; his sister and I were very close friends. Brother Minh was in his early 20s. He was a shy young guy. The war caused a lot of suffering for many young men due to the draft. He did not go out much and did not want to come to the attention of the military or police. He spent most of his time inside a dark room in the house to avoid being drafted. He only had space for the bed and some furniture. 

On January 30, 1968 the North Vietnamese military began the Tet Offensive. Our street was bombed and seven houses on our street were destroyed, including ours. There were eight other homes that were not affected. We got advance notice from government and we left our house before the Tet Offensive started. Luckily, no one in our neighborhood lost their lives.

My father and other neighbors whose homes were destroyed found a builder to rebuild our houses. The builder also designed the floor plans. It took four to six months before we were able to move back to our newly rebuilt house.

During the construction of our house, we lived in a home that was owned by the widow of my father’s best friend. I would call her Auntie Tran. She had three daughters and one son. Auntie Tran was a very successful business woman. She let us stay in one of the rooms in her house. My parents, my brother and I stayed in her house until our place was rebuilt. We were so grateful for her support and kindness.

My brother and I still attended Saint John’s School. Our school was not destroyed during the Tet Offensive. We later learned that the Viet Cong soldiers were hiding inside the school building just prior to the start of the Tet Offensive. We went back to school two weeks after the Tet Offensive bombings. Our temporary residence was too far away from school for us to go back home at lunchtime, so my brother and I ate lunch in the home of one of our neighbors whose house was on the same street as our bombed house, between noon and 2pm.

I never forgot that each school day, as I passed by a dark room in the hallway, Brother Minh was standing on the bed, with a paper fan in his hand (it was hot in the room) and walking around the bed for a little exercise. I should clarify that because of the war and draft, to avoid being drafted into the military, some young men hid in their homes and did not get out too often to avoid the police, who regularly checked identification and were on the lookout for those who were evading the military draft.

Minh was tall, skinny and pale. A few months before the war ended on April 30, 1975, he was found by the police, and they forced him to serve in the ARVN. 

We heard from our neighbors that he was drafted and died a few months after he went into military camp. They did not know what caused his death. “Traveling Soldier” always brought back my memory of the war, and Brother Minh – a kind, quiet, and polite man I can never forget.

Some Unsolicited Meditations on Aging

Evidently I’m getting old. I played a streaming channel recently called “Classic Rock,” and the first song it played was Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” In other words, some of that new shit I can’t stand.

Demographically, I usually fit now into the highest “and older” category, for the purposes of surveys, scientific studies, and discounts at the bagel shop. I find that a little condescending. It puts me in the same category as centenarians, even though our interests are completely different. For example, I am not terribly broken up over the untimely loss of Rudolf Valentino.

I don’t feel old in my bones. I don’t feel creaky or weak. Even looking in the mirror, I don’t feel so old. I don’t feel like my mental capacity is deteriorating, although I have been getting more impatient with day-to-day chores. Is renewing my car registration going to make me happier, healthier, or more fulfilled? Or is it mainly going to get me an hour closer to the grave, when I could be reading Tolstoy or having a beer?

The times I do feel old is when I’m in the company of young people, even when they’re polite and respectful. Especially when they’re polite and respectful.  “Sir?” Look, man, it’s just me.

It’s interesting how an objectively unchanging artifact changes subjectively over time. For example, “The Girl From Ipanema” used to be just a wistful, breezy bossa nova chestnut about an unobtainably attractive girl. Now it’s a bit sadder than that— it’s a meditation on growing older, feeling the same desire as always but being invisible to the young and beautiful.

I suppose every aging generation thinks the world is going to pot, yet I can’t help but feel that the future of our planet, species and culture is in serious, even existential trouble. The planet is obviously getting dangerously, even fatally hot, and this country has a president who recently told the United Nations that green energy is one of the two greatest dangers facing mankind (the other was immigration). From a cultural and intellectual standpoint, I see a world where young people don’t have the need or desire to pay attention to any bit of music or literature that lasts more than a minute or so (and I feel the same thing happening to myself). All the great works of the past are becoming memes, mashups, cliches. Beethoven, Austen, Dali, Picasso…they’re all jokes now, written in shorthand. Or imitated, with zombies added to spice things up. From a political standpoint, the great American experiment, which I thought had reached a permanently elevated, more secure state of being after two Obama administrations, is now in doubt. Etcetera.

I don’t want to be another tiresome old curmudgeon whining about the loss of some non-existent idealized Great White Christian Father Knows Best America of the mid-fifties, powered by enormous, inefficient gas-guzzling engines and entertained by exactly three TV networks. But I also feel lucky to have experienced a time when you could pick up a newspaper from your driveway in the morning and be surprised by something that happened the day before; where letting a story unfold for one or two or three hours as a play or movie or opera was a typical form of entertainment, not to mention spending hours absorbed in a book without obtrusive ads; where going to school meant spending a day safely sequestered from the outside world, in the hands of an attentive human teacher; and where knowledge of the sordid realities of that adult world was, for many, delayed until actual adulthood. I’ve known the joy of opening my mailbox and finding a letter from someone I loved. And ice skating at night with a friend on a section of the Midway in Chicago, purposely flooded by the university each winter and left to freeze until spring. That age of my childhood and youth had its problems and failures, some of which we’re living with today. But I miss it.

On Donald Trump and Humiliation

Or: Green is the New Orange

Donald Trump is a disaster in terms of running the country and the world (unless you’re a Trump), but he does have some remarkable skills. For instance, he is a past master in the art of humiliation, which he employs both for the sadistic pleasure it gives him, and as a tool for subjugating rivals and opponents. There are many examples we could give, but the most striking one for me is the humiliation he has inflicted on JD Vance.

On September 19, 2022, Trump appeared—apparently uninvited—at a rally in Ohio organized by Vance’s campaign for the U.S. senate. At that rally, in Vance’s presence, he gave a speech—or rather, his customary extemporaneous ramble—during which he declared that “J.D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad.”

J.D. Vance, a Marine Corps veteran who had previously described the draft-dodging Trump as “America’s Hitler,” could have become a legendary hero for all eternity by just stepping up to the microphone and saying something like, “we Ohioans don’t kiss anyone’s ass. If that’s the price of your support, we don’t want it.” Or he could have used saltier language, since Trump started it, so to speak. But he stood by, reacting with nothing stronger than a nervous grin.

I don’t know how Vance can look himself in the mirror every morning, but he hasn’t shown any signs of regret or even just introspection about what his choices have been. I guess it all worked out in…the end. The man is now vice-president of the United States of America. For a best-selling memoirist and U.S. Senator, that position would seem to be a step down, except as a solid rung on his own ladder to the presidency. I can’t think of any other reason why an intelligent person would care to have labial contact with the Trumpian glutes. But I don’t think Vance’s association with Trump will enhance his solo political career, any more than it has helped Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Kristi Noem, or anyone else. In one way or another, those people have all become walking jokes. Meanwhile Trump’s political and financial star keeps rising. (I don’t feel any particular comfort in the press’s constant reminders that his poll numbers are supposedly dropping.)

Trump’s adroit use of humiliation as a political and personal tool inform how I think about Trump’s obsession with putting his own name, signature, and/or likeness on public buildings, institutions, and now U.S. currency. There is a commemorative coin in the works. Now the man who killed the Harriet Tubman twenty-dollar bill wants to create a new $250 note (for the sesquicentennial, get it?) with his own face on it. That would actually be illegal unless Congress changes the law which prohibits the likeness of a living person from appearing on our currency. But this president’s skills include a ruthless ability to do what he wants on the flimsiest legal pretexts (see: tariffs) until the Supreme Courts rules otherwise (or doesn’t).

The $250 bill and the “commemorative” coin serve two purposes: most obviously, they project Trump’s power and glory. But also, it is a pointed way of humiliating the American people. It’s our money, with his face on it, whether we like it or, or want it, or not. The glowering image on the bill is based on a presidential portrait that in turn is based on Trump’s mug shot at the Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff’s office, taken when President Trump was indicted for illegally pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to flip Georgia’s electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, and thus flip the election itself. The indictment was dropped after Trump was legitimately re-elected in 2024. The bill thus represents Trump’s disdain for conforming to laws which restrict his use of power, while graphically demonstrating his own absolute authority. The quarter-grand bill thus sits neatly at the intersection of money, power, and injustice.

But its purpose would be better served if it showed a different part of Trump’s anatomy. That’s the point, after all: to rub our faces in it.