Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

25. April 2007 · Comments Off on Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm, Science!, World

There are a good few reasons besides sheer contrariness that I am standing off to the side, pointing and snickering at the antics of the “global warming” warming crowd. One of them is that I have been to the “omigod-it-could-be-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” rodeo before. Several times, actually; when I was in junior high school the panic-du-jour was about overpopulation. Eventually we would all wind up, standing shoulder to shoulder, running out of food and clean water. When I got to high school, it was global cooling; great honking ice sheets were going to advance across the earth, the sun would grow dim and we would all freeze to death. If we didn’t starve, first.

Before and during that was the oldie but goodie of global thermonuclear war; we were all going to be annihilated by the Russkies or a melting power plant. Or die of starvation afterwards. For a while in college we were supposed to be all freaked out by the scourge of “future shock” wherein things changed so fast and so suddenly that our poor little minds just couldn’t cope, and we would… oh, I forget what was supposed to happen to us with “future-shock”. Curl up in the fetal position, suck our thumbs and turn up the electric blanket up to high, I suppose.

So, I am a little resistant to someone jumping up and down and screaming “oooga-booga!” and demanding that I panic along with the rest of the lemmings about the latest panic-du-jour. Deal with it.

See, I know the climate of the world has changed, is changing and will go on changing. There were glaciers over the upper Mid-West, once. In Roman times, it was warm enough in England to grow grapes. Until about the 14th century (give or take) it was warm enough in southern Greenland for subsistence farming. A volcano eruption on the other side of the world resulted in a year without a summer early in the 19th century in the northern hemisphere. So it went. So it goes. How much global warming in the last umpty-ump years-decades-whatever is due to human activity? I don’t know, but I am not going to rush into taking a position on the say-so of the same sort of people who were banging on about global cooling, overpopulation, nuclear annihilation, future-shock or whatever in the days of yore.

Sorry. I’ll make jokes about them, though.

Which brings me down to the one over-hyped panic-du-jour that followed upon all the others listed, the one that commanded tabloid-style headlines all during the mid 1980s. That would be the “ritual-satanic-abuse-of-children-in-daycare-centers” scare. While it is not the same kind of issue, it seems to be meriting some of the same kind of popular press. Standing off to one side and looking on, I keep seeing the same sort of shrieking hysteria, the same light-speed jumping to conclusions, the same degree of absolute conviction, the same kind of ‘piling on’, and the same shouting-down of all the people who said “now just wait a darned minute”.

The global-warming trend might very be as real an issue, as much as the day-care ritual abuse wasn’t, but the degree of shrieking hysteria on display when the issue comes up doesn’t do it any favors. Or win me over as a convert, because I am pretty sure that in ten years, the usual suspects will be banging on about something else.

No Such Thing

24. April 2007 · Comments Off on No Such Thing · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, World

…As too many books.

There is however, such a thing as not enough bookshelves.

When Blondie and I PCSed out of Spain over fifteen years ago, the packing crew had a pool going on how many boxes of books they would eventually pack. The grand total topped out at 64 boxes at that point. Since we returned to the land of the Big PX, replete with establishments such as Half-Price Books, the sales tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various library and book-club events, the increase on the 1991 book census has been geometric. At a certain point, accommodating all the books in free-standing bookcases would have reduced the house to a kind of solidly-packed, book-lined burrow, dark and fusty, with barely enough space for a reading light, and a stove.

Beginning bout five years ago, I took the situation in hand, and began buying lengths of shelving and brackets of the ornamental sort— for the ends that showed— and utility brackets for the interior of the shelves which wouldn’t show when properly packed full of books. The first efforts at securing order among the books involved a narrow stretch of wall where the kitchen merged into the dining area, to one side of a large window looking out into the back yard. Three small white-painted shelves advanced up the wall towards the ceiling, for the cookbooks that I used most frequently, and the jar of pencils and notepads best kept close to the telephone. The rag-tag collection of shelves that had served us until then were banished to the garage. Most of them were heavy, ugly dark-wood things that took up a lot of space, bought at the PX because I had an urgent need for storage at the moment, and they were cheap. A couple of weekends later, another set of shelves went up on the other side of the window, for the not-so often used cookbooks, and the gardening and home-improvement porn. I put up a long shelf over the window for the blue-flowering Danish china, and there was that whole end of the house rendered light, and bright, and all the books in order. So, I looked around and said, hmmmm.

The wall opposite the big window was next. This had a double-doorway from the living room into a little room that we used as a TV den, more or less in the center. Four-foot-long shelves went up on either side, all the way to the top of the door… and then five more shelves above those which ran the width of the wall, but shortened to follow the angle of the ceiling. I need a very tall ladder to get to the top three shelves… in fact; the stuff that I never use is all parked up there. Everything was ordered by subject or genre, and a couple of nice vases and knick-knacks interspersed between the books. Last of all, I fitted six shelves on either side of the fireplace, and all but one of the old bookcases were banished to the garage. Now the living room was lined with books on three walls, and all the space between freed up. The three wooden shelves I kept in the house still, were squeezed into the TV den, as they were oak and matched the stereo/media center.

The only place where chaos, clutter and disorganization still reigned was among the oldest collection of books… the paperbacks, banished to a set of tall walnut-veneer bookcases in the hallway, and shelved two ranks deep. I had made a stab at alphabetizing them by author, but locating a particular book was a particularly frustrating crap-shoot. But this last weekend, Blondie had prevailed upon me… since she had a shelf of her own books, overflowing in a most untidy way… to bring order, discipline and installed shelves to that last holdout.

We took ourselves away to Home Depot for brackets and five lengths of 5-inch wide shelving, and ran a series of shelves from the end of the hall to the washer and dryer closet. We’ll need to put in another three shelves, actually, but at least everything is now only single-deep. Heck, I can now find stuff that I didn’t lay eyes on since the last time I unpacked it.

Hey, I knew I had a copy of “That Darn Cat”… Granny Jessie took us to see that movie, and my copy was a tie-in, bought at Vromans for 35 cents! And I do have all of Dorothy Dunnets’ Francis Lymond books… read the first of them when I was sick with the flu in a youth hostel in Lincoln. And there was the episode guide to “Blakes’ 7”, and every damn one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” books. Wow, that’s kind of an embarrassment. So is the R.F. Delafield “The Dreaming Suburb”. Not too many Agatha Christie mysteries, though. They always seemed a little formulaic to me; I preferred Josephine Tey. And one of the most uproarious novels about the Restoration ever written, John Dickson Carr’s “Most Secret”… So what if they are all stacked sideways on the shelf? At least they are not all hiding behind each other! In not a few cases, I despaired of finding a book that I thought I had, and bought another copy. (Half-Price Books buy-back desk, here we come!)
At least now, we can find what we are looking for. And the hallway seems a great deal wider, too.

Anyone Want to Bet

24. April 2007 · Comments Off on Anyone Want to Bet · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Rant

…That in about twenty-five years, Cheryl Crow will star in an advert for toilet paper?
About a third of the audience will laugh, once they are reminded by someone else who Cheryl Crow is. Another third will ask themselves: You mean the old broad isn’t an actress? She was …what? Really? And the remaining third will not care. At all.

So, anyone else besides me getting tired of being lectured by well-heeled celebrities with lavish personal life-styles about how many pieces of TP we ought to use, and chided about leaving the lights on?

This is what we had grandparents for, people. Shut up and go get another $400.00 hair cut, or a dozen Priuses for your entourage. That or build another 20,000 square foot mansion. Just spare us the damned lecture about our carbon footprint.

Tales of a Citizen Militia: Northfield

20. April 2007 · Comments Off on Tales of a Citizen Militia: Northfield · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

It would seem from the history books that most veterans of the Civil War settled down to something resembling a normal 19th century civilian life without too much trouble. One can only suppose that those who survived the experience without suffering incapacitating physical or emotional trauma were enormously grateful to have done so. Union veterans additionally must have been also glad to have won the war, close-run thing that it appeared to have been at times. Confederate veterans had to be content with merely surviving. Not only did they have to cope with the burden of defeat, but also physical wreckage of much of the South – as well as the wounds afflicted upon experiencing the wreckage of that whole Southern chivalry-gracious plantation life-fire eating whip ten Yankees with one arm tied behind my back- anti-abolitionist mindset. But most Confederate soldiers laid down their arms and picked up the plow, so to speak fairly readily – if with understandable resentment. In any case, the still-unsettled frontier west of the Mississippi-Missouri basin offered enough of an outlet for the restless, the excitement-seekers and those who wanted to start fresh.

The war had been conducted with more than the usual brutality in the mid-west, though, in Bleeding Kansas and even Bloodier Missouri, where the dividing line between murderous vigilante bandit-gangs and well-disciplined mobile partisan units was considerably more blurred than elsewhere and some of those who had participated in warfare on that basis, were even more reluctant to shake hands like gentlemen and go back to a peaceable life when it was all over.

Such were men like the James brothers, Jesse and his older brother Frank, and their friends, Cole and Jim Younger. Jesse and Cole Younger had both ridden with the Confederate partisans led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill. The Coles and the Youngers were so disinclined to give peace a chance that they hardly waited a year before holding up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. Over the next decade, they hit banks from Kentucky to Iowa, Kansas and West Virginia, varying the program occasionally with robbing trains. By July of 1876 they appear to have made Missouri too hot to hold them, even though they had sympathy and quiet support among kinfolk and local residents who gave them the benefit of the doubt for having fought for the Confederacy. Casting around for a new and profitable target for robbery which would get them away from Missouri, the James-Younger gang may have taken up the suggestion of one of the gang members: Minnesota. Not only was gang-member Bill Chadwell a native, and presumably familiar with the lay-out – but no one would be expecting such an organized gang, so far off their usual turf. And robbing a bank in Minnesota would have the added piquancy of taking money from the hated Yankees.

In August of 1876, eight members of the gang, Frank and Jesse James, Jim, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell and Charlie Pitts all arrived in Minnesota – by what exact means is not certain. They pretended to be legitimate businessmen, and scouted various locations in southern Minnesota, in groups of two and three. They spent some time shopping for horses and equipment in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and did some gambling, drinking and recreating. Although they gave false names, they wore long linen dusters, to conceal their weaponry, and this had attracted notice. After some weeks of careful consideration, they settled upon robbing the First Commercial Bank in Mankato. On the day of the planned robbery, they noted a large crowd in the vicinity of the bank, and wisely decided on turning their attentions upon their second choice, the First National Bank of Northfield. They split up into two groups, to travel to Northfield, and arrived there on the morning of September 7th, where an alert citizen noticed that two of them had passed through Northfield and cashed a large check at the bank, some ten days earlier.
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Pouring Scorn and Derision on Terrorists

19. April 2007 · Comments Off on Pouring Scorn and Derision on Terrorists · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, General, General Nonsense, sarcasm

I thought we ought to have started stuff like this, ages ago. Here’s one small step on the road to making Binny and Friends a laughingstock.

I thought the line about taking out the Verizon guy was giggle-worthy. Courtesy of Rantburg, one of the finest veins of sarcasm around.

Our Peculiar Local Institution

18. April 2007 · Comments Off on Our Peculiar Local Institution · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, World

OK, now I am in the mood to thump the head of a spectacularly ignorant commentor….

“Being able to walk into a supermarket any time day or night, and buy a gun and bullets is obviously too much for the weak-minded American. It’s basic stupidity. Surely, surely the US can no longer deny the fact that their “freedom of protection” is a load of crap. Or must thousands more innocents die?”

Emily, Cape Town, South Africa, comment on Sky News thread, via commentor Dylan Kissane at Tim Blair’s place

Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit, if that doesn’t qualify in my book as purely the stupidest, most ignorant and bigoted statement I have run across in regards to the recent sad events. Of course, I have charted a careful course to avoid some of the deeper and most notorious fever-swamps in the blogosphere. There may be more densely concentrated blocks of ignorance out there, but fortunately I am not moved to hunt them down… stumbling over that little example was enough to get the bile ducts going like Old Faithful.

That and the fact that South Africa, as dear little Emily must be aware, has a hell of a problem with home-invasion robberies, rapes and violent carjackings just puts a nice shiny gloss on the phrase “freedom of protection”. Wasn’t South Africa the place where an inventor had worked up a flamethrower that shot out from either side of the car, scorching the hell out of anyone standing there and menacing the driver or passenger? Why, yes it was. Doesn’t look like it was popular for too long, though. Must have been hell on the poor squee-gee guys, too.

As a matter of fact, you cannot buy guns and bullets from a supermarket, any time day or night… either that, or I have persistently missed seeing that aisle at HEB Grocery, or Smiths or Kroeger. Nope, sweetie… not even in Texas.

You can buy ammunition during the wee hours at Walmart, though… and guns from those Walmart outlets which have a well-stocked sporting goods department, and they are open twenty-four hours a day, but it’s stretching things a bit to call Walmart a supermarket.

Here’s what the Constitution says about our “right of protection”, Emily dear…
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Savor the taste of the words “security of a free state” and “Right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. So, the part about “well-regulated militia” is a little loose and lumpy… somewhat like Michael Moore, come to think on it. My point is that a lot of common, ordinary Americans think of guns as tools… sort of like a band-saw, or a power drill, the sort of thing that a do-it-yourself enthusiast has around the house.

Because we are still, for a variety of reasons, a do-it-yourself kind of people… kind of prone to take care of stuff ourselves, especially in those places which do not boast 24-7 private security. We’ve been that way for a while… and sometime it gets ugly when it happens, but the odd thing that I keep noticing, is that it happens in the w-a-a-a-a-y biggest ugly way in those places…oh like Darfur, and Somalia, Kosovo and Zimbabwe, where the means of providing Miss Emily’s , “freedom of protection” is a little on the sketchy side. For the foreseeable future though, we are all stuck with the existence of unbalanced losers who want to go out in a blaze of glory and 24-7 news coverage, as well as the distain of people as exquisitely well-informed as Emily from Cape Town. It’s tragic and horrible… but it happens in other places than the US. And when some raving loony, or some hopped-up robber is disuaded by a do-it-yourself good citizen, it’s a couple of lines on the local police blotter… maybe on the local TV newscast for an evening.

I don’t own a gun, myself, and even though I have lived in Texas for a dozen years now, this last weekend was the first time I had seen a lot of people walking around with a surplusage of side arms. Even in the Air Force, our SPS were held down to one major weapon per person, two at max. Most of the antique firearms enthusiasts I saw this last weekend were dressed up in old West costume, and they were having fun plinking away at metal targets. It’s just not my cup of tea…but it amuses me as much as it would probably horrify Emily from Cape Town, to think that my own neighborhood may be as well equipped, weapons-wise as many small European militaries. (Say, San Marino, or Monaco? Do they even have militaries?) It guarantees that violent home invasions and car-hijackings in Texas are refreshingly not as frequent as they might be in those places where everyone has decided that “freedom of protection is a load of crap”.

In the Interests of Pure Research

15. April 2007 · Comments Off on In the Interests of Pure Research · Categories: General, History, My Head Hurts, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

In the interests of pure research, over the last couple of days, Blondie and I have ventured into deepest, darkest downtown San Antonio… and also to a point well beyond the city limits. I can report that I have returned with a dozen pages of notes indecipherable to anyone but me, and Blondie came close to having her leg humped by a wolf. OK, so a wolf-dog hybrid. About fifteen percent dog, eighty-five percent wolf, said the owners and proprietors, who also said that he was very friendly. Yep, we figured out that much right away. He was chained outside a vendor of frontier clothing and accessories at a re-enactor’s event, on the grounds of a ranch in the Hill Country. Some people we talked to at the event said that something set him off howling, night before last, which was a sound enough to make your skin crawl. We figured that any coyotes in the vicinity must have been a) scared out of their next years’ growth and b) decided after careful consideration, that discretion was the better part of valor and removing to the next county was therefore an excellent career move. For the duration of the event, of course.

This all came about because I emailed The Fat Guy a couple of weeks ago, asking if he (as an enthusiast and Texas history buff) could put me in touch with any collector in San Antonio who owned an 1830s model Colt Paterson revolver… and who would be kind enough to show me how it was loaded, sighted and broken down for maintenance. So he gave me a link, which led to an e-mail addy, which led to a club-wide appeal from a certain organization, which led to some contacts… which led to the owner of a matched pair of replica Colt Paterson revolvers, the only person in San Antonio who possesses such, apparently. We set up a meeting at his place of employment on Friday afternoon, and Blondie drove me there after her classes. We spent a very informative hour or so, in a locked and windowless conference room. This is not exactly the sort of event where one welcomes the casual kibitzers. Even in Texas, someone walking in and discovering three period revolvers and the necessary tools are spread out over the conference table is obligated to make a comment to the building management. The fact that there was no ammunition involved would not have ameliorated the resulting excitement.

So, I was actually able to examine very carefully, all the resulting broken-down bits and pieces of a period revolver. It was necessary for the plot and character development to do this, so that I could write about it with authority and attention to tiny detail, and I am extraordinarily grateful for having had the opportunity to do this… all hail the power of the fully functional internet! It was rather a curious experience, because I had been able to write about it and get things mostly right, just from looking at diagrams and reading… but still, nothing beats the experience of actually holding the real thing.

Oddly enough, it was a rather small weapon, dull matte metal with a polished wooden stock. It fit my hand comfortably, and I have rather dainty hands. Blondie’s fingers are about half an inch longer than all of mine, when we match hands for comparison; when I did M-16 training, and side-arm training, I found that my hands were too small to grip and still reach things comfortably on the issue M-16 and the Beretta. And the Beretta was hard for me to hold steady after a while, even with two hands. So, the revolver that made things equal in a fight between Jack Hays Rangers and the Comanche was actually… rather small, especially in comparison with the next iteration, the Walker Colt. The collector who generously took time from his workday to show us all this told me he has a pair of those, as well. The Walker Colt is a massive weapon, weighing about four and a half pounds. After expending all six shots, anyone armed with one would have still had a dandy club/brass knuckles. No wonder they were immediately popular. But after wearing a pair of them on a gun-belt for a whole day of re-enactor events, he really, really felt every ounce of them, in a considerably painful way.

And after the re-enactor event, we went on up to Fredericksburg, where I bored the heck out of Blondie at the Pioneer Museum, talking about the early Fredericksburg settlers. I wanted to take a look at the various household implements on display. And the wooden trunks they brought them in. And the corner town-lot that I willfully assigned to the fictitious family that I am writing about, at the corner of San Antonio and Adams. There is a one-story, stucco professional building on that particular plat… but strangely enough, I described my fictitious family as leaving two trees on their townlot, shading the back of their house… and there are two trees, shading the back of that building.

Really, sometimes I do scare myself. It’s scarier than Blondie wanting a wolf-dog hybrid… well, one that doesn’t try to hump her leg.

Donations being accepted, via the Paypal button, to the left, underneath the ad for the memoir. They will be used to set up a website to market the books, and if I don’t get an agent and a traditional publisher, I plan on doing a POD book of “Truckee Trail” and the “Adelsverein Trilogy”. I just listened to a story this morning on NPR about how best-sellers are decided upon by the publishing industry, so I am feeling particularly sour about the whole literary-industrial complex.

Memo: L’Affaire Imus, and Other Matters of Passing Interest

13. April 2007 · Comments Off on Memo: L’Affaire Imus, and Other Matters of Passing Interest · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Rant, sarcasm

To: Various
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Smell of Hypocrisy in the Morning

1. My mind boggles actually, that someone who was around long enough to have a comedy disc in the AFRTS library (from the late 60s, if memory serves) with a piece called “2,000 Hamburgers to go” was actually trying to sound hip, trendy and with-it four decades later. Mmmm, ‘kay. Well everyone has hobbies. Mine is gardening… mercifully, I have come to that stage in life where I do not have to even pretend to be trendy. Nothing looks more ridiculous than extreme trendiness a couple of decades past its “best if used by” date.

2. It is kind of amusing, watching some of the very people who lined up to be on Imus’ show, line up to throw him under the bus. Please check out the definition of “shock jock”. One of the things they do is… er, shock. Also offend, belittle and berate. Or so I have been told. I’m more a classical music fan, myself. NPR’s “Performance Today” is about as cutting edge as I feel like getting these days.

3. So the ladies of the Rutgers women’s basketball team were shocked, hurt, insulted, etc. by his crude remark about them. They have a perfect right to be shocked, hurt, insulted; ladies should be offended when men say vile, demeaning and misogynist things about them. I hope that they have been kept in blissful ignorance about the lyrics of most rap and hip-hop hits, thought. That sort of language might very well prompt them to curl up in the fetal position with the heating blanket turned all the way up. Oh, but that’s different….

4. Right on schedule, here come the race-hustlers; Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton grown as fat as ticks by playing the race card, carefully inflaming old grievances and playing their version of a protection racket. “Give us what we want, or you’re a racist!”. MLK must be so proud. He’s probably revolving in his grave like a Makita drill.

5. Oh, and as regards ‘Affaire Duque La Cross’ ? If there are any communities in these United States who would instantly recognize such a thing as a lynch mob, virtual or otherwise, I’d expect it would be the academic community… and the African American one. That certain members of it were so quick to join in is only sad proof of the axiom that those to whom injustice has been done are just as quick off the mark in dealing it out to others. And the sainted “judged not by the color of skin but the content of character” MLK had such hopes that it would be otherwise.

6. And our lords of the Mainstream and Legacy Media were right there, with the pitchforks and torches. Thanks, guys… you covered yourself with glory, as usual. Now take a gallon of bleach and the garden hose, go around in back and try and scour some of it off.

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

The Writers Life Waltz: Lento

12. April 2007 · Comments Off on The Writers Life Waltz: Lento · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, Site News, Working In A Salt Mine...

A little slow this week; working on revisions and rewrites to “Adelsverein Part One”, or as one of the regular readers calls it “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees”. I have begun sending out query letters on it, reasoning that by the time I hear from an agent who wants to hear more, I will have finished the revisions and polished it all to a high gleaming shine.

I also put together all the materiel necessary— basically, the first fifty pages and an expanded outline— for “Adelsverein” and “To Truckee’s Trail” both, and submitted them to Tor Books, which is just about the only one of the big publishers who condescend to review un-agented submissions. They take four to six months to make any sort of decision, by which time I’ll be well along in finishing “Adelsverein Part Two”. Part Three, maybe… depends on how fast I can research and write. (links here, here, here, and here, for those who are new to the site.)

At this point, three separate agencies have looked at “Truckee” and have turned it down. They all liked it, said nice things about it, but… and this is the Big But… sorry, no. Either it is too hard a sell, defies easy categorization, or there is no place for it in their current collection of offerings . But they all wished me luck in getting it published, and threw in some blah-blah-blah about it being a subjective business and perhaps another agency blah-blah-blah.

This is the book that just about every who has read it in full has loved, and at least three-quarters of those people are not related to me at all. Sooo… the fallback position is that if Tor turns it down, I’ll do POD, and hire my friend Dave The Marketing & Computer Genius to set up a website specifically for my books, AND do some serious marketing. Even if Tor does think it worthy (and you’ll be able to hear my jaw hit the floor all the way across several time zones if they do) or I do manage to get an agent, I will still do a book website of my own.

Hence, the Paypal donate button, over on the left, just under the link to my first book. The PJ ads support the site, donations will help me get the best book about the most incredible wagon-train story you have never heard about get out there in the mad world of books.

Rites of Spring

12. April 2007 · Comments Off on Rites of Spring · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, World

We are having a very pleasant spring here in South Texas…of course, being that it is South Texas, where is saying is “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes…” These conditions are apt to change with practically the speed of light. But this spring, all the climate u-turns have been favorable. Well, all but the overnight freeze over Easter Weekend which has probably trashed the Hill Country peach harvest for this year, as it hit when all the trees were blossoming. (As far as I know, Al Gore was not in town that weekend.) The next spectacular thunderstorm may yet favor us with golf-ball-sized hail… but so far all that has resulted is to make everything spectacularly green. Richly and lushly emerald green, as green as Ireland ever was, all the fields and the trees and the hedges that people have planted along the roads. And the flowers this year are splendid, not just the bluebonnets, but this year there are fields of purple wild verbena, and bright yellow daisies, drifts of pink primrose, more of them than I have ever seen before. And butterflies… we have had butterflies all this winter, for some strange reason. They are supposed to be especially sensitive to environmental pollution; guess we are not getting as much of it these days.

In my own garden, all the things that were blasted back to ground level by winter frost are practically exploding out of the ground. In a fit of boredom last fall, I had poured out some patented fertilizer goop on the ground under the rosebushes, and over the winter another fit of boredom led me to prune them all. Oddly enough, they have responded to this abuse by covering themselves entirely with bloom; red, white, pink and apricot. The sage and lavender plants that I scored from the severely-marked-down-get-em-outta-here-before-they-croak shelves at Lowe’s last fall are also blooming madly. The front garden actually looks, if you squint a little and back off to view it from a certain angle, like one of those spectacular pictures of a border at some stately English home; a mass of red, lavender and sulfur-yellow, on grey-green foliage.

Round in back, the wisteria came and went as it always does, in a week flat, but the jasmine is going strong, and the various potted limes and lemon, and the sweet-olive held out bravely… well, they did, once we banished the faint odor of dog-poop. The next rain shower took care of the lingering bits, and we finally moved around one of our junking finds to the back yard.

The last time the city came around for the bulk-trash pickup, where they will take everything but building debris and wrecked automobiles, Blondie and I spotted a wooden chaise-lounge put out in a pile of other trash. It was one of those sturdy home-made things, made out of 2x4s… very well made, actually, with metal slats on springs to support the cushions. The only thing the matter with it was one of the legs was a little rotted at the bottom, where it must have been sitting on wet ground for a while. And there were no cushions, of course. Until I made a set a couple of weeks ago, out of oilcloth, and we put it out where we have paved a large space with ornamental pavers set in gravel.

It is now nearly our favorite place to sit outdoors. I sat there for an hour yesterday evening, reading “The Worst Hard Time”… which seemed a terribly incongruous choice, given the garden and green trees all around me.

Relatively Unsung Heroes

10. April 2007 · Comments Off on Relatively Unsung Heroes · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, World

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be always on the border between the Anglo Texians and the Mexican Tejanos, during his lifetime and after. He was born in the first decade of the 19th century, a native of San Antonio. He came of a prominent local family; his father Erasmo Seguin was a signatory to Mexico’s first constitution of 1824. Juan Seguin married into another prominent local family, and was himself elected to the office of alcalde, a sort of cross between mayor and justice of the peace while in his late twenties. Altogether, he was a promising young man in local politics, when Texas was merely a far-distant province of Mexico itself, and gradually becoming disaffected by the dictatorial actions of the Centralist President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the self-styled Napoleon of the West.

When Santa Anna soon dissolved the Mexican Congress, and threatened to come down like a ton of bricks on those who disagreed with his way of running Mexico, moderates such as Seguin were thrown into opposition, right alongside their Anglo neighbors. Stephen Austin granted a captain’s commission to Seguin, who raised a company of scouts. When General Martin Cos was thrown out of San Antonio at the end of 1835, Captain Seguin’s company of nearly forty men were among those doing the throwing. He and his company were among the small garrison of the tumbledown mission compound known as the Alamo. I have read of speculation that Seguin might have been detailed as it’s commander, given his local prominence and background… but that he personally was too valuable, first as a scout, and secondly for his local connections. He was sent out of the doomed Alamo as a courier. At Gonzales, when Sam Houston began gathering his ragged Army of Texans, Seguin gathered up the remains of his little band of Tejanos, who served as scouts and as rear-guard, as Houston fell back into East Texas.

When Houston finally turned to fight Santa Anna, at first he wanted to leave Seguin’s company out of his line of battle, fearing that in the thick of it all, Seguin’s men might be in danger from their own side. After the massacre of the defenders of the Alamo and the Goliad, many of Houston’s army were not inclined to make distinctions between Mexicans. Houston first suggested that Seguin’s Tejanos guard the camp and the baggage.

Seguin angrily refused, insisting on a place for his company in the line: he also had lost some of his men in the Alamo. All of those he had left to him were from San Antonio, and they could not return to their homes until Santa Anna was defeated; they had just as much or more cause to hate him as any Anglo Texian. It was their right, to take a part in the fight. Houston relented, asking only that Seguin’s men must place pieces of cardboard in their hatbands, to distinguish them.

In Stephen Hardin’s book “A Texian Illiad”— a history of the Texas Revolution, illustrated with careful sketches of many of the soldier participants — there is one of a member of Seguin’s Tejano volunteers. His clothes and equipment are of the borderlands: American shoes, short Mexican trousers, a fringed buckskin jacket, a rolled serape and a Brown Bess musket, a gourd canteen and a wide-brimmed vaquero’s hat with a rosary around the crown and a slip of cardboard with “Requerda el Alamo” scrawled on it.

More about Seguin here :
His monument in Texas is the town of Segiun, a little south of San Antonio.
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Fire on the Hill-Top

07. April 2007 · Comments Off on Fire on the Hill-Top · Categories: General, History, Old West, World

On Easter-evening, 1847, the hilltops around the new hill-country town of Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, on the far frontier of Texas suddenly blossomed with a crown of fire… bonfires that appeared, after sundown. The story is told that many people in Fredericksburg first thought that the fires were lit by Comanche Indians, to send messages about the movements of citizens of the town, to their chiefs far north in the Llano country, who were then negotiating a peace treaty with John Meusebach. Fredericksburg was then on the far frontier, a huddle of log cabins and huts in a clearing in the post-oak forest between two creeks in the Pedernales River valley, built by settlers newly come from Europe.

They came straight from comfortable, well-established towns and villages, where you could not travel a mile or two without encountering something— a wall, bridge, a castle or a church— which had been there for centuries. They came from a secure and orderly country, believing the promises of the entrepreneur who had recruited them with promises of land. They had packed up their belongings and taken ship— leaky wooden sailing ships— expecting to find something approximating in a rough way to what they had left behind. Which they did, eventually… but only after they had buckled down and built most of it themselves.

But on that Easter-eve, they looked up and saw the fires, and a fair number of them were afraid. Perhaps a quick-thinking mother told her terrified children that the fires had been built by the Easter rabbit and his helpers, to cook the eggs that they would have on Easter morning, all colored and decorated, and so that comforting story came to believed… among some of the settlers.

But in fact, the custom of setting fires on certain hilltops had been long-established in north-western Germany, in Westphalia and Saxony, from which areas nearly half of the Fredericksburg settlers had come. But the other half, from Hesse and the south, they would never have seen the Easter bonfires on the hilltops. And in any case, Meusebach had already met and negotiated the peace treaty with the Comanche by Easter of 1847.

They had brought more with them then their keepsakes and books and tools: they had brought their customs and habits. Some of them were refined and changed by new circumstances, but they endured. As did the people who brought them.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN AGING DISC JOCKEY WHEN…

05. April 2007 · Comments Off on YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN AGING DISC JOCKEY WHEN… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Working In A Salt Mine...

(Courtesy of the FEN news group: One of those nostalgic things going around. I do, in fact, have scars on my fingers from miscalculated cuts, while editing audio tape with a razor blade. Just call me Miss Butterfingers)

– You were first hired by a GM who actually worked in radio before becoming GM.

– Radio stations were no place for kids.

– You excitedly turn the radio up at the sound of “dead air” on the competitor’s station.

– Sales guys wore Old Spice to cover the smell of liquor.

– Engineers could actually fix things without sending them back to the manufacturer.

– You worked for only ONE station, and you could name the guy who owned it.

– Radio stations used to have enough on-air talent to field a softball team every summer.

– You used to smoke in a radio station and nobody cared.

– Engineers always had the worst body odor, not because they worked too hard, but because they just didn’t shower that often.

– You know the difference between good reel-to-reel tape and cheap reel-to-reel tape.

– Religious radio stations were locally owned, run by an old Protestant minister and his wife, never had more than 20 listeners at any given time, and still made money.

– You have a white wax pencil, a razor blade, and a spool of 3M splicing tape in your desk drawer – – just in case.

– You can post a record, run down the hall, go to the bathroom, and be back in 2:50 for the segue.

– You knew exactly where to put the tone on the end of a carted song.

– You only did “make- goods” if the client complained. Otherwise, who cares?

– You can remember the name of the very first “girl” that was hired in your market as a DJ.

– Somebody would say, “You have a face for radio”, and it was still funny.

– Sixty percent of your wardrobe has a station logo on it.

– You always had a screwdriver in the studio so you could take a fouled-up cart apart at a moment’s notice.

– You always had a solution for an LP that ‘skipped’. (usually a paper clip or a dime on the tone-arm, somewhere)

– You would spend hours splicing and editing a parody tape until it was “just right”, but didn’t care how bad that commercial was you recorded.

– You still refer to CDs as “records”. (really old hands refer to them as ET, or electrical transcriptions)
– You played practical jokes on the air without fear of lawsuits.

– You answer your home phone with the station call letters.

– You used to fight with the news guy over air-time. After all, what was more important: your joke, or that tornado warning?

– You knew how to change the ribbon on the Teletype machine, but you hated to do it because “…that’s the news guy’s job.”

– You know at least 2 people in sales that take credit for you keeping your job.

– You have several old air-check cassettes in a cardboard box in your basement that you wouldn’t dream of letting anyone hear anymore, but, you’ll never throw them out or tape over them. Never!

– You can still see scars on your finger when you got cut using a razor blade and cleaned out the cut with head-cleaning alcohol and an extra long cotton swab on a wooden stick.

– You still have dreams of a song running out and not being able to find the control room door. (I have nightmares about the various players not working, or the control board has magically reconfigured itself)

– You’ve ever told a listener “Yeah.I’ll get that right on for you.”

– You have a couple of old transistor radios around the house with corroded batteries inside them.

– People who ride in your car exclaim, “Why is your radio so loud?”

– You remember when promotion men brought new LPs to the station – and you played them the same day.

– You have at least 19 pictures of you with famous people whom you haven’t seen since, and wouldn’t know you today if you bit ’em on the ass.

– You wish you could have been on “Name That Tune” because you would have won a million bucks.

– You even REMEMBER “Name That Tune”.

– You were a half an hour late for an appearance and blamed it on the directions you received from the sales person.

– You’ve run a phone contest and nobody called, so you made up a name and gave the tickets to your cousin.

– You remember when people actually thought radio was important.

Why I Write, Continued

03. April 2007 · Comments Off on Why I Write, Continued · Categories: General, History, Home Front, Working In A Salt Mine...

Over these last five years, people who blogged on the side, or got bitten by some other bug have moved on, in various forms and manifestations. Some have even decided that they had said all they wanted to say and moved on to some other enthusiasm. One of my very favorite early bloggers, Stephen Den Beste, packed it on over health issues, and three others (Cathy Seipp, Acidman, and Mother Bear) died in harness, as it were.

Others are focusing on things that just do not pull my interest as much; only fair, because I have gone wandering off on a tangent of my own, back into the 19th century. It is the pursuit of literary creation that drags me there, at least as much indulging my own interest. And it’s a damned fascinating century for all that: it made America, in all it’s contradictory glory, over the span of a single person’s lifetime. The beginning of that century of marvels and wonders saw a just barely post-Colonial nation, clinging to the land between the Atlantic coast and the spine of the Appalachians, a rural nation, where necessary things were manufactured by craftsmen working by hand, cooking was most likely done over an open fire, and heavy cargo moved by horsepower, or the wind caught in the sails of ships. It took two months to cross the Atlantic, six months or a year to get a letter from halfway around the world. Water turned the wheels of mills, garbage was thrown into the streets of cities, and two states away was practically a foreign country. The early part of that century looked much like the century before, and the century before that, at least in the way that people commonly lived.

Yet, within a bare hundred years, electricity lighted the cities, telegraphs sent the news instantly from halfway around the world, factories churned out a constant stream of goods and materials and it might take a week or so to cross the Atlantic on a luxurious steam liner… and another week to cross the United States from one ocean to another. In a theoretical single lifetime, over that bare handful of decades, the United States spilled over the mountain barrier, rushed headlong across the plains and the desert to the Pacific, while new intakes of hopeful immigrants filled up the spaces between, built and filled up cities where nothing but woods and clearings had been before. The States fractured, nearly fatally and fought a desperate Civil War, reunified and kept on building, inventing, innovating.

Again, it was a century of marvels, and made us in many ways what we still are… but we need to keep the memory of it green, but not in that self-flagellating, politically correct wank-fest sort of way so beloved by the modern academic bean-counters, so busy with finding fault that they miss the grandeur of the whole creation entirely. More than the grandeur that needs to be brought to mind, also the optimism, the hard work and the sheer stubborn courage. My first book was about a pioneer wagon train, the first to bring wagons all the way over the Sierra Nevada, and I am sure there is some snotty academic historian somewhere (probably whole departments of them, actually) who will whine nasally that my pioneers were grasping, land-hungry and bigoted, careless of the pristine environment, unsympathetic to other cultures, and embarrassingly unrepresentative of our multicultural society that… et cetera, et cetera.

So what? They were 19th century Americans, some of then native-born and some recent immigrants. Some of them were barely literate, others not even that. They chewed tobacco and spat in the street, didn’t care much for Indians, barely tolerated Catholics, and didn’t give a toss what Europeans thought of them. Most women of the time wanted to be married to a good provider, and thought going to church on Sunday was a good thing. They probably had pretty rank BO, and ate crackers in bed, too. But held against all those 21st century high-culture misdemeanors… on a day in 1844, they stood on the back of the Missouri river, and looked clear-eyed at two thousand miles of trackless nothing. With no one but themselves to rely upon, they took their families and everything they owned… and walked out into the wilderness.

This is where we came from, what we need to remember, even if most of our forebears came a little too late for that part of the American adventure. So this is what I do: reclaim our saga and our heroes, against the day when we will need them again. And I am afraid we will need them again, and sooner rather than later.

Why I Write

01. April 2007 · Comments Off on Why I Write · Categories: Domestic, General, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Because I breath, and I can tell stories, and stories are important. They connect us to our history. Those stories are a shining path in the tangle of that amorphous mass loosely known as popular culture. Stories are a guide and inspiration for those of us who must find our way through the tangled jungle, for those of us who would rather not sleep-walk along a perilous knife-edge… and certain stories are also a warning of danger

“The story of the Fall of Singapore has exercised a powerful influence over my imagination, because it was in its way a dramatic re-enactment of the tragedy of the Titanic on a much vaster scale. Singapore was a place where the assumption of the British hereditary right to rule was so strong that even the obvious advance of the Japanese Army down the peninsula could not waken social circles which had known nothing other than ineffable superiority to the new reality.

The British governor told his army commander, “oh I suppose you’ll see the little men off.” Only after the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk in an afternoon did it begin to dawn on them that they were all of them doomed. Doomed.

They simply couldn’t imagine what doomed meant. People accustomed to teas and dances, deference from the natives; accustomed to snapping their fingers and parting crowds at the bazaar simply couldn’t come to terms with the idea that in a little while they would beaten, raped, and starved. If they were lucky. This effervescent bubble of oh so clever people even organized something called a Surrender Lunch, during which they were supposed to gorge themselves in preparation for the privations ahead. It was beyond sad. It was pathetic.

And as I said, Singapore has exercised a powerful influence on my imagination because this forgotten incident is the nearest we can come to past as prologue. That is what awaits the liberals when Islam takes over. They will still be yelling for their rights as they are led away to be flogged.”

Comment, Wretchard, at The Belmont Club

Wretchard’s example of the fall of Singapore is an example of an historical event that I also circle back to, along with a handful of others. Writers have our favorites, apparently. Certain events, times and places force a recognition that all things are transient, that all flesh is grass, that these things shall pass, as immutable as they might seem to the casual glance. The apparently unsinkable ship can sink out from under you. We aren’t at the end of history, after all. Maybe this might be a good time to retrieve into active consideration certain of our historical memes.

I started writing on this blog when it was still Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, when the original creator of it put out a call for more writers, active duty and veterans both, round and about July or August of 2002. A lot of things changed in five years. My first post here is now three jobs (not counting temp assignments), and three posts weekly times 52 times 5 years more or less, plus a whole change in professional focus ago. When I started, I thought of myself as an office-manager/administrative assistant who wrote on the side, but as of last July I began to think of myself as a writer who did a little office managing/administrating on the side. So, for a few years, I wrote about mil-bloggy matters, interspersed with entries about my admittedly eccentric family and non-conformist childhood, about living in Japan and Europe as a military member, and about my daughter’s doings as she was deployed with her Marine Corps unit to Kuwait and Iraq, early in 2003.

I looked at writing for this blog as a means to educate and entertain the general reader about the wonderful, wacky world of the military. But on the way to that end, a lot of other stuff happened. First, there are other military blogs now, veteran’s blogs, family-of-military blogs. We stopped being unique in that respect quite some time ago, in blog years. (Which must be somewhat like dog years) Writing for the blog was always supposed to be about the writer wanted to write about. Current events, politics, war, military trivia, and popular culture. Whatever… just make it good writing, sparkle a bit; and someone will find it interesting. Which is good, but nothing stays the same for long.

I pretty much milked the family stuff pretty well dry. (It’s all in the book, mostly, be a sport and order a copy if you want all the scandalous details). The same for my various cross-Europe junkets; I wrote all about that, don’t want to repeat myself. I can only extract so much amusement out of the menagerie of dogs and cats, and the maintenance of my house. So… I moved on.

Everyone does. A lot of the bloggers that I used to read regularly in 2002-2003 have done exactly that. Other interests, other lives, they had said all they wanted to say on a particular subject, they wanted to write a book, they had health issues, family issues, other interests, another job. Some of them turned to writing seriously about things that they felt were important to them. And so have I.

(More to follow. Of course. Would I leave the regular readers hanging?)

Resist By All Means Available

29. March 2007 · Comments Off on Resist By All Means Available · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, GWOT, Iran, Pajama Game, War

From our POW Code of Conduct

“….I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy. If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.”

This code of conduct was created and adapted for all the American services in the wake of the Korean War, when American (and other nationalities) POWs were both brutally mistreated and exploited for propaganda purposes by their captors. While some service personnel may be a trifle foggy on the exact requirements of the Geneva Convention until the need for familiarity with those conventions floats up to the top of their personal “to-do” duty requirements, the POW code of conduct is branded on our consciousness. Well, that and the bitter knowledge that the last military opponent of ours who paid anything like strict attention to Geneva Convention requirements when applying them to captured American service personnel were the Germans in WWII.

So, we have quietly gotten our heads around a couple of facts, one of the most important being the brutal reality that Americans best not surrender. The odds of surviving long enough for the International Red Cross to make that all-important visit to verify your well-being are practically non-existent. Snuff videos made available through various pro-fundamentalist Islamic media throughout Middle East make it pretty damn clear that no surrender in the first place may be the most viable career option.

Even if a prisoner is lucky, and the market for death-porn is flooded, the odds of being used as a hostage, and paraded like a puppet in front of the video cameras are pretty much a given. Exactly how far one can or ought to go in resisting this kind of exploitation is a judgment call. Admiral James Stockdale, as the senior American POW in North Vietnam chose to mutilate himself rather than be paraded in public for propaganda purposes, and threatened suicide if the North Vietnamese continued to continue torturing other POWs.

Pvt. Patrick Miller, of the 507th Maintenance Company was taken prisoner during the dash into Iraq in 2003, (at the same time as Pvt. Jessica Lynch) and was one of the five surviving members of his unit paraded on Iraqi television. I remember seeing the clip of the five on the news, and thought that he was the only one of them who seemed to be defiant. He answered back with his name and rank, and looked like he was about to spit into the camera, even if he and the others were entirely at the mercy of Saddam Hussein’s goons. In the long run, ones’ response to the extreme of captivity and threatened (or actual torture) depends on training, and maturity. But sometimes it depends on strength of character, and maybe a large lashing of stubborn bloody-mindedness, which are harder to predict in advance and inculcate with training. But I digress. I have a point, and I am getting to it.

This week, it’s the fifteen British sailors and Marines, taken by Iranian goons, and paraded in front of cameras, while Tony Blair and the British media agonize over how to react, what should have been done, and what can be done to get them back without loosing any national self-respect, and their families try and maintain a stiff upper lip under the hot searchlight of media interest.

It pretty much looks like it was deliberate and well-planned, done expressly for the purposes of getting hostages to toy with, probably with an eye for a prisoner exchange, and building up their image internally. They announced their intentions to kidnap coalition personnel some weeks ago, but at this point in the war, American personnel are probably just too damn hard to catch unawares. So, go for the easily gathered harvest, and drag it out as long as possible. I am afraid that if it drags on for a long time, as long as the Teheran embassy hostage crisis that it will become as much of a political hot potato. I can see the Blair government in a cleft stick; having neither the means or the will to respond with gunboats, or the 21st century equivalent. Being that the war in Iraq is resoundingly unpopular (as near as I can judge from a distance) I wonder if there is any stomach for that kind of response anyway. And while the diplomatic alternative grinds slowly away, over weeks and months, and the hostages families fret and worry, and the national media pounds away, involvement in the coalition may become even less popular. Getting the hostages freed may come to seem to be such an overwhelmingly good thing that no one will care very much about the price paid for such an end.

I hope that there is a Stockdale, or a Miller among the captured British sailors and Marines. I hope that they are not being tormented, as Admiral Stockdale was, at the hands of the North Vietnamese… and I hope that they are resisting as best they can, for the sake of their own self-respect as members of a proud military with a long tradition of defiance and resistance to captivity. I hope they will return knowing in their hearts that they held to the code, and to their comrades, and never in their hearts surrendered.

(Also posted at Blogger News Network)

Texiana

27. March 2007 · Comments Off on Texiana · Categories: General, History, Old West

Still working my way through the tall stack of books, provided by the San Antonio Public Library (may their stacks never fail, and their incredibly helpful staff go on saying “shusssh” yeah, unto generation after generation). This has put me in the way of a lot of interesting, or startling historical tid-bits, for instance:

Ice harvested commercially from New England began to be shipped to the Gulf-Coast town of Indianola in 1851. Ice cream and chilled drinks were wildly popular and freely available from that time on. (Except during the Civil War.) Kind of a mind-blower to know that ice cream parlors could exist in a state at the same time as people cooking beans over open fires and fighting with the Indians.

Commercial shipments of sides of beef, under mechanical refrigeration began in mid-1869, also from Indianola.

Texas politics during the time of the Republic can be described in three words: Tomcats. In. Sack. No one emerged unscathed; least of all Sam Houston.

Sam Houston; a fascinating and contradictory person, and almost too big for the 19th century. Autodidact, runaway, alcoholic, slave-owner and Unionist, brawler and dandy, soldier and politician, twice-divorced, and Indian-lover. Worshipped and loathed in about equal measure.

Houston’s worst enemy (except for a couple of hundred others) was probably a man named Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. With a sissy name like that, he had to come to Texas, of course.

At the Battle of San Jacinto, where Houston finally turned and fought, defeating a much larger and better-trained Mexican army, his army advanced to music played by a small scratch field band; a raunchy and suggestive ditty called “Come to the Bower”. It may have been the only song that all the volunteer bandsmen knew.

Everyone who was in Texas in the 1840s and 1850s knew Captain Jack Hays… mostly from having served with him. He was kind of the Kevin Bacon of the period, but I can only find two biographies of him. And one of them uses the phrase “beauty and chivalry of San Antonio” in a completely serious and un-ironic manner.

Several useful volumes put together by local historians of the Hill Country, with all sorts of interesting stories, and accounts of local haps and heroes. Some of the biographical sketches are so reverent in tone that it reminds me of the old joke about Charleston.

Why are the Charlestonians like the Chinese? Because they eat rice and worship their ancestors!

(More to follow, as I encounter them)

Log Cabin Days

25. March 2007 · Comments Off on Log Cabin Days · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, Technology

Among the books in my tall stack to read, in preparation to revise and polish the current epic is one with the very dry title of “Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture” – which has actually proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together- which is good, especially since I need to write a description of building such a thing as a log building. Little details like how many days it would take to build one, what size it would generally be, and the layout – these little details count.

Previously, the one description of the process that I could bring readily to mind was “Little House on the Prairie” – and it turns out that Pa Ingalls was not building that cabin to much of a standard. He may not even have been all that skilled as a carpenter, but since he was working on it mostly by himself, and in a place where the swiftness of getting a roof of some sort over his family counted for everything – allowances were made.

That was almost everyone’s first and most urgent need, upon settling on a new grant or homestead, that and planting some kind of crop in the ground; building a cabin, to meet immediate shelter needs. This book differentiates very clearly the difference between a log cabin, and a log house. A log cabin was small, twelve to fourteen foot square, windowless, with a dirt floor. They were scratch and hastily put up to use as a temporary dwelling place, whereas a log house was larger, permanent, and much more carefully constructed; even quite elaborate as to comforts. For much of the 19th century, at least in Texas it was a matter of some embarrassment to still be living in a log cabin after a couple of years; rather like living in a trailer would be. In fact, many log houses were covered with siding and paint as soon as their owners could afford to do so. If they had lived in a little cabin before building the permanent house, the cabin was frequently reused as a smoke-house, or a stable.

Pace “Little House” and a whole raft of western movies, I’d always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a “Lincoln-log” house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.
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Iran Hostage Crisis Redoux

23. March 2007 · Comments Off on Iran Hostage Crisis Redoux · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, Iran, Rant, War

Not a good feeling about all this. Will the British let themselves be played for 444 days, like we were, after the Teheran embassy was overrun? Are we prepared for another long series of staged demonstrations and photo ops, fruitless diplomatic wrangling, a ceaseless media circus, yellow ribbons around the old oak tree, and an assortment of clueless do-gooders making their way to Teheran on their knees, and making sure their good side is to the camera? Five will get you ten, George Galloway already has his bag packed.

So, is this a calculated move from the highest levels in response to the alleged defection/kidnapping of a top Iranian military man a couple of a weeks ago, or just some ambitious and impulsive underling taking a chance and seeing how far he can go?

How far will the Iranians go? How far will the British go? Will Ahmedinajad still be admitted to the US on his way to address the UN? How many of the UN members will break out the old knee-pads and kneel down before him, metaphorically speaking.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets, please. I have a feeling it is going to get kinda interesting.

(Also posted at Blogger News Network… and corrected)

The Writers Life Waltz: Con Brio

21. March 2007 · Comments Off on The Writers Life Waltz: Con Brio · Categories: Domestic, General

I’ve come up for air this week, because I need to sit down and read a stack of books as tall as my bedside lamp table, and take copious notes in preparation for revising and expanding my first draft of “Adelsverein – Volume One”… or as a reader called it “Barsetshire with cypress trees”. Yes, I have taken everyone’s advice and broken it into a trilogy…since I was about a third of a way into my Sooper-Dooper Detailed Chapter Outline and had clocked over 105,000 words. I believe that in the mystery-writing biz that sort of happening is called “a clue”.

Otherwise it would take me the rest of the year, and result in a paperback book about the thickness of a concrete block. The first part stands alone as a ripping good yarn anyway, but I have salted it with enough foreshadowing to leave everyone hungry for Volume Two (The Civil War years). The stack of books for that part is another pile almost as tall as the bedside table, but the stack for Volume Three (the open-range cattle-ranching and Indian War years) is only about a foot tall, most of it taken up by a single book which I scored at the library sale for a mere pittance. It’s a massive compendium of first-hand accounts taken down from members of the Old Time Trail Drivers’ Association… pure gold for my purposes, but I am getting ahead of myself. (Oh, and the reason for the odd historical essays… I just find odd tidbits in all these books which I find kind of fascinating. Especially if some of them are not well-known at all. I write about stuff that interests me at the moment, ‘kay?)

I also needed to get cracking on marketing “Adelsverein” to agents and publishers, because it doesn’t look like “Truckee’s Trail” is going to go very far with them. It’s a ripping good yarn and I am not giving up on it, but I’m not holding my breath either. The feedback that I have gotten so far from the two agents who have read it is that marketing it to a publisher is a chore they don’t want to take on, for various reasons. It’s not quite a Western, not the sort of historical that really sells, the major romantic relationship is between two people happily married to each other; not an easy book to categorize, and that’s why it’s a hard sell. There is no word from the publisher who got it in January to review, but if they decline it, I’ll put it up to Tor Books… and by the end of the year I’ll go back to the POD publisher who did my memoir if they pass on it. It will be published, one way or another. I’ve put too much work into it, and the people who have read it have liked it too much to just stick it away in my desk drawer and forget about it. Frankly, I have enough stuff in that drawer already… and “Truckee” is just too damn good to drop. “Adelsverein” is more marketable, as it contains near-operatic levels of passion, murder, adventure, war, stolen children and Dire Revenge.

My friend the computer genius will set up a website especially for my books and help me market them through other means… which I will probably do anyway, even if I do manage to get somewhere with an agent and/or a mainline publisher. On the bright side, I just received an email from an agent who wants to take a look at the first couple of chapters of “Truckee”… could the third one be the charm? And I got another email from another agent who said she is intrigued by “Adelsverein” but is absolutely swamped in too much work to give it full attention… but if I haven’t found representation by July, she’ll be happy to take a look.

My writer friend on the West Coast counsels a spirit of Zen detachment and patience. Which I want now, dammit!

Comancheria: The Meusebach Treaty

19. March 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: The Meusebach Treaty · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(earlier parts, here, here, here and here )

But first, before they were welcomed to Ketumsee’s main camp, the interpreter Lorenzo de Rozas told Meusebach’s party that as a demonstration of their good faith and confidence, they should empty all their firearms, firing them into the ground, or into the air.
For the forty men of Meusebach’s peace venture, it was a pivotal moment, for they were far beyond the safe frontier, and surrounded by what was estimated to be five or six thousand Comanche, the acknowledged warlords of the Southern plains. They had assembled on a hillside near Ketumsee’s encampment on the San Saba, mounted on their best horses, in all their finery and carrying their weapons, on either side of a flag on a tall staff; warriors on the right, women and children on the left. It was a splendid and heart-stopping sight. In the event of Meusebach having entirely miscalculated the Comanche’s desire for a peace treaty there would be no aid, no cavalry pounding to their rescue. About the only thing that would be a certain guarantee in that event… would be that every one of them would die, in as agonizing a manner as the most creative sadist could devise.

Meusebach quietly ordered all his men to empty their firearms. And in response, the Comanche warriors who carried firearms also emptied theirs. Chief Ketumsee and his senior chiefs came forward to greet them with handshakes and with elaborate ceremony; Meusebach and his party were conducted into the village. They were invited to stay within the Comanche encampment, in their skin lodges, but on the excuse of finding better pasture for their horses, Meusebach graciously declined. They set up their own camp, but might as well have not bothered, because almost all of Ketumsee’s tribe came to visit over the next day or so; men, women, children and all, and mostly on horseback As one of the German visitors later wrote “Horses play an important role in the life of the Comanches… when there is a scarcity of food, horses furnish a supply of meat…from early youth both sexes are taught to ride… we saw children who had been nursed by their mothers until their third year, leave their mothers’ breast, jump on a horse and light a cigarette…”

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The Top Ten Signs That You’re Being Stalked By A Leprechaun

17. March 2007 · Comments Off on The Top Ten Signs That You’re Being Stalked By A Leprechaun · Categories: Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, The Funny

(More e-mail fun, for St. Patrick’s Day)

Generic-looking green van parked across the street with Notre Dame bumper sticker.

Every time you turn around the pitter-pattering stops and that green fire hydrant seems to have gotten a little closer.

Green lipstick marks on the butt of your Dockers.

You’re being followed by a large woman with a sultry voice and a dying career. (Oops! That’s a sign you’re being stalked by Chaka Khan.)

You don’t recall owning an anatomically correct lawn gnome.

Card delivered with the bouquet of 4-leaf clovers reads, “I bet you’re magically delicious!”

When you come home from work, the potatoes are missing from the cupboard and your parrot is singing “Danny Boy.”

Prank caller has a really corny Irish accent, and Richard Gere has an airtight alibi.

Those tiny green hairs on your toilet seat.

Sultry voice from shower soap dish asks, “Is that your shillelagh, or are you just happy to see me?”

Pink hearts, yellow moons, blue diamonds scratched on your car at knee-level, and Ross Perot is nowhere to be found.

Them little green pellets in the litter box ain’t M&M’s, Chester.

Every day this week you’ve noticed the same buckle shoes dangling just above the floor in the stall next to you.

Stories

16. March 2007 · Comments Off on Stories · Categories: General, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!, World

I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of “You Light Up My Life” was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read “The DaVinci Code”, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances… no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed — contemptuous, even — when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.

“300” looks to be one of those wildly popular things, for which the intellectual great and good have no explanation. This amuses me very much, because I think I do. As I wrote last week “the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years… Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country… those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for.”

It’s all about stories, and our human need for stories; stories about other people, stories that explain, that make things clear for us, that inspire us to great deeds, to set an example or spell out a warning. We need stories nearly as much as we need oxygen. And we will have them, bright and sparkling and new, or worn to paper thinness in the re-telling. We will have stories that have grown, and been embellished by many narrators, with heroes and minor heroes and splendid set-piece scenes, and side-narratives, like one of those sea-creatures that collects ornaments to stick onto its’ shell any which way, or a bower-bird collecting many brilliant scraps and laying them out in intricate patterns. A longing to hear such stories must be as innate in us, as it is to those creatures, for our earliest epic, that of Gilgamesh may be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture, and towns, and the taming of animals, and the making of a written language. It may go back even farther yet, but there is really no way to know for sure what those stories were, although I am sure the anthropologists are giving it the good old college try.

Our values are transmitted in the stories that we go back to, over and over. A long time ago, I read this book, which recommended, rather in the manner of the old Victorians, that children be given improving books to read, that their minds be exercised by good examples. I was initially rather amused… and then I went over the reading list in the back. I realized just then how many of those books the author cited I had read myself… and how many quiet demonstrations of honesty, courage, ethical behavior, loyalty to family, friends and community, of doing the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong had been tidily incorporated into such books as the Little House books, or Caddie Woodlawn, or “All of a Kind Family”, or Johnny Tremain. We imbibe all these values from stories… and lest we think that these sorts of moral lessons are obscure and tangled things, best suited for a long theoretical discussion of the life-boat dilemma in some touchy-feely ethics seminar, the author (or someone that he quoted – it’s been a long time since I re-read the book) brought up the old black and white movie “A Night to Remember”… the movie account of the sinking of the Titanic. The whole story of the unsinkable ship is laid out, based on research, and with the aid (at the time it was filmed) with many still-living survivors; running full-tilt into an ice-field, hitting an iceberg…loading the relatively few lifeboats while the band plays, and the ships engineers keep the lights and power going, of husbands putting their wives and children into the boats and stepping back to leave more room, knowing that the ship is doomed… of steerage passengers taking matters into their own hands and finding their way up to the boat deck, and deck-hands trying to launch the very last boat as the seawater rises to their knees. Twice a hundred stories, and at the end of it one has a pretty good idea of who has behaved well and honorably… and who has not.

Stories. We need them, and we’ll keep coming back to them. And to the best ones, we will come back again and again.

Job Descriptions in the Real World

15. March 2007 · Comments Off on Job Descriptions in the Real World · Categories: Fun and Games, General, sarcasm, World

(From one of those e-mail lists going the rounds)

A programmer is someone who solves a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand.

A consultant is someone who takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. (Mark Twain)

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he
predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the
personality to be an accountant.

An actuary is someone who brings a fake bomb on a plane, because that
decreases the chances that there will be another bomb on the plane.
(Laurence J. Peter)

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat
which isn’t there.(Charles R. Darwin)

A topologist is a man who doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000 word document and calls it a
“brief.”

A psychologist is a man who watches everyone else when a beautiful girl enters the room.

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.

A schoolteacher is a disillusioned woman who used to think she liked
children.

A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.

Against Fearful Odds: 300

11. March 2007 · Comments Off on Against Fearful Odds: 300 · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, War

To all men living on this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the Temples of his Gods?”
— Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome

So Blondie and I were intrigued by several different premises – intrigued enough to actually go and see the movie 300 on opening weekend; she because it starred Gerard Butler and several acres of well-oiled, well-built male hunkiness, and me because – well, it sounded interestingly unlike the usual Hollywood bucket o’krep poured out for the plebeians. For a start, no car chases, or machine gun fire, and most definitely not a remake of a TV show which wasn’t that good to start with, or a movie which should have been left alone. Neither one of us had ever read the wildly popular “graphic novel” it was based on. (Do I have to call them graphic novels? I always slip and call them comic books, it’s the same way I call “mobile home developments” “trailer parks” and it’s a movie, dammit, not a film.) Blondie hated the movie version of Sin City BTW, and I would like to serve notice right here and now that I would usually avoid movies which incorporate buckets of splattered gore, and collections of human grotesqueries – but the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years. Every forlorn last stand, against overwhelming odds has harked back to the King of Sparta and his picked band, standing in a narrow pass. And that many of those so choosing would have known of it— like Travis at the Alamo— testifies to the enduring power of their story.

Through the rise and fall of Greece itself, and the Romes that followed it, into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and into this century, the story of Leonidas and his stalwart few resonates – as much as the righteous and politically correct would have it not so. (like this reviewer. Note to Mr. Smith; Bite me. Sincerely, Sgt. Mom). Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country – those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for. To have them set out unapologetically in a movie like this is as jolting as a triple-latte with a shot of brandy, after a diet of nothing but mineral water. Some years ago, I lamented that Hollywood just couldn’t bring themselves to make a movie about the war we are in. (here) Perhaps this may be the closest that they can bring themselves to do it, without running the risk of having the gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office.

This is not one of those movies where you go for authenticity about Greece, Sparta and the Persian empire. I can just imagine scholars of the classical world hyperventilating and gibbering incoherently for the next decade on that topic. Ancient Sparta was not anything like a democracy as we know it, Spartan women probably wore a few more clothes and took no part in public life, Greek warriors in battle wore little more than a leather Speedo and a flowing cloak, I very much doubt that anyone has ever been able to use a rhinoceros as a war-beast – and Xerxes probably wasn’t a 7-foot tall mulatto with a lot of body piercings. Some of the dialog clunks a bit, though. I can tell, because I was mentally re-writing it. All that is beside the point.

Because it is not just the story by itself; there was the look of it, the whole visual spectacle. The word that kept coming up in my mind, over and over was “painterly”. That the story of 300 was created by some who is an artist was obvious in the very first frame. Every scene was set up as if it were a painting or a classical frieze, a vase-painting; all of it harking back to something that an artistically literate person would recognize. The flow of a cloak, the jut of a bearded chin, the fall of golden sunset on a craggy mountain pass, the way a man holds a spear and shield – all of it evocative and visually rich in a way that doesn’t happen much in movies. Without having read the book, I can’t say if the movie version was true to Frank Miller vision , but it definitely made for an arresting look. We did notice some little grace notes that seem to be quotes from other movies; the fields of wheat from Gladiator, Xerxes’ monumental throne looked the one from the Elizabeth Taylor vehicle in Cleopatra and the assorted war-beasts from Lord of the Rings. (Also Blondie was bugged throughout the movie as to where she had seen the actor who played Dilius – he was in Lord of the Rings, also. She could have asked me, of course!)

All in all… ticket price and time well-spent, especially for Frank Miller fan. There are also some bonuses for the straight women and gay male demographic as well. It seems to be going over very well in flyover country, too.

More Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm….

09. March 2007 · Comments Off on More Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm…. · Categories: European Disunion, General, My Head Hurts, Politics, World

Interesting trip report, from a regular contributor at “Cold Fury”. Anyone else whose traveled overseas lately have input?

Courtesy of Rantburg

Comancheria: The Separate Peace

08. March 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: The Separate Peace · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

That there would ever be any sort of peace between the Comanche people, the horse-lords of the Southern Plains, and the settlers who steadily encroached upon the lands which they had always considered their own particular stamping grounds in 19th century Texas verges on the fantastical. That it lasted for longer than about a week must be accounted a miracle of Biblical proportions; but there was indeed such a treaty, negotiated and signed about mid-way through the bitter, brutal fifty-year long guerrilla war between the Tribes, and a group of settlers newly arrived in Texas.

The need for a little patch of peace became a matter of urgency upon the arrival of nearly 7,000 German immigrants under the sponsorship and auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein, or as it was formally known; The Society for The Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, in a brief space of years after 1844. The Verein, as it was called in Texas, was formed by a group of high-born and socially conscious German noblemen, who conceived the notion of establishing a colony of German farmers and craftsmen in Texas. Their motivations were a combination of altruism, and calculation. This settlement plan would generously assist farmers and small craftsmen who were being displaced by the dwindling availability of farm land, and by increasing mechanization. But it would also establish a large, homogenous and German-oriented colony in the then-independent Texas nation, from which they hoped to profit materially and perhaps politically.

Unfortunately, their organizational skills and economic resources were not anywhere near equal to their ambitions; ambitions which in turn were only equaled by their astonishing naivety about the frontier. Their first commissioner in Texas was well-intentioned, well-born, and utterly clueless: every scammer, con-man and shady land-speculator west of the Mississippi must have seen Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels coming for a considerable distance. In a remarkably short time, Prince Karl effortlessly managed to piss-off most of the elected officials of the independent State of Texas, spend money as if it were water, burden the Verein with the Fisher-Miller Grant, (a large and almost useless tract of land smack-dab in the middle of Comanche territory), and amuse (or appall) practically everyone with whom he came in contact. Among the most risible of his personal peculiarities was the fact that he traveled in state with a large and specialized entourage, including a personal chef and two valets to help him on with his trousers of a morning. This went over with the rough denizens of the frontier about as well as could be expected.
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