Author: The Cat Herder General

aka Dennis Moser — Citoyen du monde: Peregrinator, photographer, retired librarian/archivist/academic, musician, teacher of English to foreigners, and sometime writer... Due to bureaucratic nonsense, I have left Europe. I DID not return to the US, I took a left turn at the Calgary airport and am a refugee trying to learn to understand, and maybe speak, "Jouai" over here amongst the Quebecois.

Brains! HUMAN BRAINS!

OR: I wasn’t a teenage zombie…

Some days this really gets tedious; yet another post that can’t go through META, so here goes:

The title of the post sets the tone immediately. And yeah, the RoboCop analogy is definitely on target here.

“Startup Testing Drugs on Freshly Extracted Human Brains That Are Kept On Life Support“

from the text:

“The company is extracting human brains just hours after their owners died and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the masses of pink mush no longer host electrical activity, most of their key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.”

Startup Testing Drugs on Freshly Extracted Human Brains That Are Kept On Life Support

Et tu, Canada

OR: It’s no secret…1

thewalrus.ca/trump-wants-to-tap-your-phone-ottawa-might-let-him/

Three highlights from the article —

  • Bill C-22 could align Canada’s surveillance laws more closely with the US A
  • CLOUD Act agreement could let US agencies conduct surveillance in Canada without Canadian oversight
  • Ottawa has not been transparent about the bill’s implications for privacy

Not so great, eh?

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGd2o-Z1VV8 ↩︎

“Ride, Sally, ride…”

Or: “So you think you know how to ride a horse?”

Sharing from here because Al Jazeera is definitely a “news source” and it would never get past the META Overlords from the Great White otherwise…

(Not sure if Montréal is REALLY “The Great White North” — I tend to think of that as a bit further to the West and North of here.)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/24/want-equal-respect-pakistan-females-galloping-to-glory-in-tent-pegging

‘Want equal respect’: Pakistan’s females galloping to glory in tent pegging

“Talk, talk, talk. . .

Or: Where to even begin?

The following was a brief adventure checking out a new LLM called “talkie” — started by asking “What is a theremin” 1 and it went downhill quickly from there. To wit:

. . . so I queried, asking WHO was Leo Theremin 2 .

Uh, yeah. I don’t think so. . .let’s move on. How would it identify the true nature of the theremin, i.e., among the first electronic musical instruments 3.

Hmmm. . .that didn’t go very well. So how does one play the theremin 4?

Wow — I don’t even have to do any of that on my semi-modular synths! Okay, let’s try who is Leo one more time 5.

Oh, dear. Houston, we have more than “just a problem here. . .how about the brightest star in the “Theremin Pantheon” Ms. Clara Rockmore 6?

Okay, so no concurrency, according to them. Let’s try something else 7:

Oh, dear.

So close, so hopeful 8.

Mind you, this was the SECOND time I’d run this line of questioning — the first run was both close and just as bad. I would have screen-capped the session if I had foreseen how bad it was going to be. I didn’t but I ran this about 18 hours after the first run. I’m tempted to do another run, but [SHRUG]. . .these really are pretty simple topics to track down without resorting the use of any kind of AI agent 9.

  1. https://www.classical-music.com/features/instruments/what-is-a-theremin ↩︎
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
     ↩︎
  3. See #1 above ↩︎
  4. https://www.wikihow.com/Play-the-Theremin\
    https://youtu.be/DhAHIMHel7U?si=DsNI95AjOVuRC     ↩︎
  5. See #2 above ↩︎
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Rockmore
     ↩︎
  7. See more details in #6 above ↩︎
  8. Well alrighty then! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=M.%20Wheatstone&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1\
    WHO? ↩︎
  9. I am a musician working in electroacoustic/experiment music — https://audiozoloft.bandcamp.com/ as well as a retired archivist/librarian, so yeah, a LITTLE insider knowledge but it really only informed the search queries. ↩︎

Resilience and “Bouncing Back:

Or: How do we deal with these cha-cha-cha-changes?

Rather than blocking out the things that have happened, this suggests that we integrate them in to move forward. This is not only for the physical, but other forms of trauma, too.

https://theconversation.com/bouncing-back-is-a-myth-resilience-means-integrating-hard-experiences-into-your-life-story-not-ignoring-them-275069

“Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?”

Or: “No . . . it was Beauty killed the Beast.”

Hadn’t planned to be blogging this but once again, I’m battling with the ongoing META embargo of news stories from posters residing in Canada and posting without using a VPN. Thinking that I may need to start using one on another computer to post things directly to “that other platform.”

Anyway.

Came across a piece by Thomas Pynchon, published in the New York Times back in 1984 (perfect for the timing!) about the Luddites and the history of the movement.

So here’s a link to the piece (archived, so you should be able to see it past their firewall)

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

Personally, I’m now inclined to answer that with a resounding “Yes.”

“These are not misprints”

Or: “Mistakes were made…”

As a long-lapsed rare books conservator, the lede caught my roving eye — “not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of” — and I had to dig deeper. Of course I had to follow that link, and down the rabbit hole we went!

The first link in the MetaFilter story went to artnet.com and provides the source — from the Yale University Library — of the images below. The “Ulysses” image is especially nostalgic: the multiple copies of “Ulysses” held at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center (I think there are twenty-two? I’ve forgotten the exact number) were the subject of some of the last treatments I performed when I worked there. I was responsible for cleaning the books and consolidating the paper dust jackets.

If you ever want to experience the very worst of the physical side of commercial paper-making, the 19th and 20 Centuries provide excellent examples. Given that the book was printed in between the two word wars, premium materials were not all that available and the paper dust jackets, seen here in the illustration, were made with some real crap. Yeah, a “technical” term to describe the highly brittle paper that was used. Fun times, indeed,

But the contents were also irresistible. The mother-in-law at the time and I discussed some of the eccentricities of Joyce’s linguistic games —“Agenbite of Inwit” has stayed with me the past forty years (Barb, you are missed by all).

So diving into these two articles was absolutely necessary!

The artnet story:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yale-errata-exhibition-2751007

The exhibition announcement:
https://events.yale.edu/event/beauties-of-my-style-errata-and-the-printed-mistake

Enjoy —