The past, of course. Near distant and far distant… and more alive than you would think, here.
(Check out the other links for other color photo archives. Courtesy of Photon Courier, and company.)
(Just for fun, this is one of the stories that I bashed out just after I retired, a sort of update of Kiplings’ Sergeants Three, and a way of explaining what women in the military were really like. Enjoy!)
One very slow news day at the tail end of the buildup to the first Gulf War, I decided to hunt up my three friends: Sergeants Leroy and Maculhaney, who were attached to the mobile AFRTS station, and Orvis who was attached to Combat Camera, where she was stubbornly campaigning to adopt the motto “You Kill Them, We’ll Capture The Moment.â€
“You lookin’ for Deege?” At the station, Ty Reese, Maculhaney’s friend and cohort on assorted broadcasting crimes waved to me from the studio trailer door. He had
kicked it open with his foot, and kept it in place by hooking his
toe around the edge of it. He also had a fistful of
plain CD jewelbox cases in one hand, a coffee mug in the other hand, and a three-day old copy of the “Stars & Stripes” tucked between his elbow and side,. Altogether it was an impressive display of organizational juggling.
” Just missed her… she’s off shift, probably heading back to her hooch. It’s two down, three over from here….Hey, that anything more current?” He eyed the newspaper I had brought out from my hotel downtown with positive hunger, and I answered regretfully,
“I bought it for Mackie, but I’ll ask her to pass it on to you when she’s done…its yesterdays’ Washington Post, though.”
“Ma’am, at this rate, I’m about to subscribe to the West Podunk Gazette Recorder, if’n they’d promise delivery to our hooch, and four pages of funnies on Sunday!”
“I can spare you a week-old copy of Time.” I fished it out of my bag, and Ty deftly snapped it under his elbow with the newspaper, saying
“Inquiring minds want to know… whaddy they say at the press briefings
that they don’t show on CNN?”
“That the doughnuts are stale, and the coffee is cold,” I said, wryly, and Ty grinned like the genial maniac that he was,
“Life is just full of these little tragedies, ain’t it?” and withdrew into the studio. I had met several more of the broadcasters, since I got to know Maculhaney and Leroy. While military radio broadcasters did not vary quite so much as the civilian variety, being more or less the same age, and displaying about the same amount of experience, education and physical fitness, they were a little outside the other military professionals I had met so far. The military broadcasters were intelligently verbal, aggressively impatient with the slow on the uptake, and needled each other on air and off with wit and creativity. Hanging out with them frequently sounded like an endless improvisational skit created by an off-the-wall comedy troop with a taste for lavatorial humor and an encyclopedic memory of twenty years of popular music.
I followed Ty’s vague directions. Although I had visited many times, the tent city lamentably looked all alike. Halfway there, I caught up to Maculhaney, just as a large tan vehicle rumbled past, missing her by inches.
“You ought to be more careful!†I said, “I’d hate to be deprived of one of my deep background sources.â€
“Ehh, they wouldn’t dare run me over… the paperwork would never end,†Maculhaney was casually dismissive.
“So you like living dangerously?†I asked and she answered
“Well, statistically, the only things I have to worry about are an airplane crashing on top of me, and the Viet Cong overrunning the compound. Drunk drivers and colonels who hate rock and roll are a much more significant hazard… stick with us, and you’ll just have to worry about falling aircraft, and substance abuse.”
“Thanks. I think,” I said, as the door to the female NCO hooch fell closed behind us. I knew by then, others lived there besides Maculhaney, Leroy and Orvis, but those others came and went, as the military mission required. Since they had been there nearly the longest, they had done the most toward making it, if not precisely homelike, a little less bleakly comfortless. The latest innovation occupied the center of Maculhaney’s bed, nestled in her upturned helmet on what looked like an old terrycloth towel, a tiny piebald puddle of fur.
“Do you know there’s a cat in your hat?” I asked, and Maculhaney replied
“Yes, but I’ve always more favored green eggs and ham better…. I forgot, you hadn’t met the Wee Morsel.” She gently slid her fingers under the sleeping kitten, and lifted it out. It barely filled the palm of one hand. Sleep disturbed, the tiny thing mewed a nearly silent, feeble, protest, and I said,
“Good lord, its eyes aren’t even open! Where did you get it? Doesn’t it have a mother, someplace?”
“It did… she was a stray that some of the Army guys were feeding. They had her sort of tamed, but something went wrong, after she littered. The guys found her dead, and they went looking for the kittens. This one was the only one still alive. D’you know we have a veterinary detachment here, for the bomb dogs? Well, they took the kitten to the vet, and one of the Army guys is an old buddy of Leroy’s husband. He is such a softie for our dumb chums, he begged Lee and I to take over, and we’re such softies ourselves that we said we would.”
All the while, Maculhaney was cuddling the kitten in one hand, and taking out a bottle of
some thick, yellowish fluid out of the refrigerator with the other. Setting the bottle on the table, she took an eyedropper from some mysterious store in her battledress pockets, and began dribbling the fluid into the Wee Morsel’s tiny pink mouth. “He… I know it’s a he, got itsy, bitsy teensy balls…is about a week and a half old. We’ve been feeding him like this for about four days, and I think it’s working. This stuff is condensed milk and water, with an egg yolk and
some corn syrup mixed in.”
The Wee Morsel sucked avidly on the eyedropper, wrapping his paws, fringed with translucent little claws, around it. It’s ears lay close against the skull like delicate new leaves and the black and white fur was still so thin and short that the pink skin underneath could still be seen.
“Whatever are you going to do with it?” I asked, fascinated. I already had an idea for a
human-interest essay taking form.
“Don’t know,†Maculhaney refilled the dropper, deftly easing it into the tiny mouth, “Depends on if it lives… poor little thing! I’ve hand-raised kittens before, but they were older than this.”
I noticed, however, that she stroked the Wee Morsel’s head delicately, and as tiny as it was, it rose to meet the caress.
The events of the next week or so pretty well drove the existence of the Wee Morsel out of mind. Leroy told me later that she managed to buy a wicker travel basket on the local economy, when it became apparent that the Wee Morsel was going to live, and needed a more suitable home than Maculhaney’s helmet. I presume that he shared the subsequent hours and days in the shelter during Scud alerts, since Maculhaney and Leroy were conscientious mother-substitutes. I honestly did not become aware of his existence again until several weeks afterwards, during another one of my visits to what Orvis described as “Mi dump, su dump.”
The black and white kitten drifted silently across the floor, after I had poured myself another cup of Leroy’s ever-present herb tea, and regarded me solemnly.
“Good heavens, he has grown,” I said, and Leroy laughed, and picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dropped him in my lap.
“He sure has, he’s eating solid grown-up cat food now, and sleeping all through
the night!”
Orvis, scowling at the letter pad propped against her knees, remarked
“Amen fo’ that!”
“Wait till you have kids,†Leroy said knowingly, and Orvis replied
“They the trouble that lil’ thang has been, then I won’t ever… waking’ up all nights, all hours, jus’ cause that thang let out a peep!”
The “lil’ thang” regarded me with ancient yellow-green eyes, and licked my wrist with a raspy pink tongue, before swarming up to table-top level, and crouching down, brief tail wrapped around haunches, to watch Leroy cleaning and reassembling a videotape recorder.
“The Prophet Mohammed is reported to have cut the sleeve off his robe, “I
said seditiously, “Rather than disturb his pet cat, asleep on his arm,”
Orvis retorted unprintably, and Leroy scratched the Wee Morsel between his tiny ears,
“Aww, don’ say that, Sunny… you just mad ’cause he put a dead scorpion on your pillow. That means he likes you.”
“A mighty hunter before the Lord,” Maculhaney remarked from her cot, where she was reading the latest “Atlantic”, “He is looking for your affection and approval. Be a sport and play along, or we shall never be able to place him with a suitable human.”
“I thought one of you would be taking him,” I said, and Maculhaney said,
“I have two already, and they don’t either of them takes kindly to interlopers. They are both elderly and cranky… it just wouldn’t be fair.”
“Mitch is allergic to cat dander,†Leroy said, “He can’t even stand to be in a room where a cat has been. I’ll have to wash everything that this lil’ fellow has touched, else Mitch ‘l be sneezing an’ coughing ’til next Christmas.”
“But what are you going to do when him, when you rotate home?” I said, and
Maculhaney answered,
“Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ll sort out something,â€
I let the matter rest, for the moment. I knew as sure as the sun rose in the morning, Leroy and Maculhaney between them would see the piebald kitten to a loving home, with a commodious litter box and tuna on demand.
Away in the desert towards Iraq, Desert Storm broke and fell, and in a matter of weeks, Kuwait was liberated. I threw in my lot with a couple of old reporter friends who had plotted a lighting trip in a rented Range Rover— another story I have told elsewhere. By the time I visited Leroy and Maculhaney again, the kitten was a gangly adolescent cat, wearing a bright red harness and leash, and riding Maculhaney’s shoulder, as she walked along the main road through
tent city. I had the driver let me off, and the first thing I said was,
“Wasn’t there a popular song about taking the cat for a walk?”
“Norma Tanega, “Maculhaney answered instantly. Of course, she would know that.
“‘Walking My Cat Named Dog’… 1967ish, I believe.”
She set the Wee Morsel down at her feet, and he scampered obediently at the end of his leash as we walked together. Nearly as many people stopped to pet him as spoke to Maculhaney. I had never seen a cat take very well to a leash before, and when I remarked on it she answered,
“I don’t think he knows he’s a cat. I’m not at all sure what he thinks he is, but he definitely thinks he’s something more than a cat. He doesn’t meow, for one. He tries, but all that comes out is a tiny squeak. And he’s very much an inside cat. He won’t go outside, unless one of us takes him. Since he has been handled constantly since birth, he has bonded very well to humans… we are pretty close to finding him a good home.”
Inside the female NCO hooch, she unsnapped the leash, and the Wee Morsel made a beeline for Orvis’ area,
“Long time, no see, Reporter Lady,” said Orvis, in pleased surprise, “Dammit, cat, get outta there!” She scooped Wee Morsel out of an opened portabrace bag, “Go catch a rat, ‘r somthin’! So where’ve you been keeping yourself? ”
“Here and there,†I said, “I got a ride into Kuwait, stopped on the way back to liberate a cup of Leroy’s Red Zinger.”
“How did you find it all?” Maculhaney asked, and looked at the canvas ceiling
when I said,
“Basically, by following the road signs… actually? Looted to a faretheewell. They even ripped the sinks and toilets out of restrooms. I talked to some guys on the road out of town, they insisted there was a wrecked Iraqi truck full of sanitary napkins further up the road… do you know why a group of guys would rip off a truckload of sanitary napkins?”
“I haven’t got an earthly idea,” answered Maculhaney
“It sounds like a setup to a joke,” Orvis said, and Leroy suggested.
“Maybe they were trying to corner the market… looking to be the kings of the sanitary napkin black market.” She capped that with a suggestion based on a crude slang expression and an ethnic slur, which was as apt as it was not repeatable in polite company. Maculhaney looked pained when the rest of us snickered guiltily, and I said,
“That’s a headline that will never see the light of day. I actually thought about doing a story about your furry friend, here. I talked to my editor last night, and he’s already drooling. Sort of human-interest thing. Resourceful American military women rescue and nurture a helpless little kitten, and seek good home for it. Played right, it would have people lined up to adopt the Wee Morsel, and get him a ride back to the States in royal comfort. It could put your names in the headlines,”
“And our asses in slings, “Orvis said, bluntly, “Cat, get yo’ furry butt outta that bag!” She lifted Wee Morsel out of the portabrace again, and plunked him on her cot, where he licked his paws and pretended it had never happened. I looked at Leroy and Maculhaney, and they looked equally unenthused.
“It’s a good idea, “Maculhaney finally allowed, with a diplomatic touch of polite enthusiasm. “It could work, too. But it only has about an eighty per-cent chance of working the way you wanted it to.”
“Not even that good. I say sixty to seventy-per cent, “Leroy said, “Which means a twenty to forty per-cent chance of rebounding on us. It’s a great idea… but I’d rather do this our way.”
“But why?” I said, “A story would make you all look great. It would make the military look great… it’s a win-win situation. Explain to me why it wouldn’t work, as you see it.”
“‘Cause you don’t know diddly ’bout how the military really works,” Orvis said bluntly, “Fo’ all you been hangin’ with us, you still ain’t got a clue.”
“Explain it to me,” I said, exasperated. “How could it make trouble for you?”
“Because this whole thing with the Wee Morsel has been… well, definitely against the rules,” Maculhaney explained with her usual air of cynical detachment. “We have been keeping a pet in the barracks. Diverting Air Force time, energy and resources towards a questionable end. What if someone living here in the last four months had been allergic? That Army veterinarian wasn’t over here to look after sick kittens. Those egg-yolks I got from the guys in the mess
certainly weren’t suppose to be fed to them, either.”
“We got away with it because no one here complained,” Leroy added, “But I guaran-damn-tee, if you write your story, someone would raise a stink, no matter how cute other people think it ‘ud be, no matter how many other people think it plays “abide with me” on the heartstrings! And it would just take one… some damnfool congressman, or some bastard of a retired colonel with his shorts in a twist about what women are doing in his military. Trust me, someone would see it their duty to see us nailed to the wall. And we’d be screwed, even if we weren’t just ordered to dump him back where we found him.”
“Which we wouldn’t do, to start with,†Maculhaney said, “‘Excuse us for caring, but
we’re rather fond of the Wee Morsel.”
“People over here now are pretty cool with it,†Orvis chimes in. I was interested to notice that she was ticking Wee Morsel’s whiskers, “Hey, nothing’s too good for our boys and girls in a war zone, we entitled to whatever keeps us outta the rubber room at Malcom Gow. But the war’s about over, and the regular rules are gonna apply here. An’ the biggest of the
rules is, “thou shalt not draw unfavorable attention”. ”
“Making a gesture might work, in the short term. It would get Wee Morsel back to the States and some cute pictures in the Sunday supplements, but when it all dies down, those that make the rules will be remembering that we rocked the boat. Like Leroy said, they’d see us nailed to the wall. Quiet honestly, I don’t think my career can stand it.” Maculhaney said, gravely and Leroy said,
“Mine for damn sure can’t!”
“But it’s a sure-fire story, “I protested, “Isn’t there some way I can write it… maybe without mentioning names?”
“Lose our names, change some of the details,” Maculhaney considered it soberly, “If you can wait a bit… once everyone rotates home, and starts to loose track of who was where, and did what with whom. It would still be a cute story…”
“And as cold as a plate of vichyssoise, “I conceded, “Well, if that’s the only way it will fly… at least get me a picture of the Morsel to go with it.”
“Deal,” Leroy said, “As soon as you get a picture of him, then you can publish your story.”
We shook hands on it, and I passed the rest of the afternoon in the manner of most of my other visits. I had intended to visit sooner, and have no one to blame but myself that several more weeks passed, and by that time, the tent city was in the process of being struck. The tents were empty, and half of them were down: I only recognized my friend’s hooch because of the shelves that Leroy and Orvis had built, forlorn and abandoned outside, with a pile of some other trash
and a stack of Maculhaney’s old magazines. With a pang of disappointment, I walked toward the radio trailer, dreading to find that gone as well, but it was still there, although the contents were rapidly being disassembled and packed into a series of bulky square anvil cases, under Leroy’s stern eye.
“At least you’re still here,†I said, and she looked at her watch, and answered
“For another forty-six hours, and approximately twenty-two minutes… but who’s counting?”
“I didn’t know you were so short,” I said, and Leroy cackled with laughter,
“Sugar, I am so short, I can’t even carry on a long conversation! Maculhaney left yesterday, matter of fact. Sunny’s been gone for, oh, nearly three weeks now. She sent me this…” Leroy fished out a scrap of paper from her breast pocket. “It’s her parent’s address, an’ that picture we promised you.”
I looked at the Polaroid, and recognized Orvis, skimpily and unfamiliarly clad in shorts and a tube top, sitting on the edge of a verandah, somewhere in the South by the look of the lush garden just visible beyond. The Wee Morsel himself lay adoringly in her lap, and I could think of nothing to say but
“I didn’t even think she liked cats… Orvis is the person you were trying to place him with? I can’t even think of a time she wasn’t shooing him out of her area, or complaining about him leaving dead scorpions on her pillow! Whatever made you think she would take him?”
“Well, the way he kept making up to her! Sunny, now, she never had a pet, growing up, with her father in the Army and all, so she had to get used to the idea…. There was this night when she was all upset about not hearing from her husband, and that cat just crawled up on her bunk, and began licking the tears off her face, and purring and pushing his face into hers. I never seen a cat get so upset because someone was upset, before. Maculhaney didn’t, neither. That
baby cat just decided it was Sunny that he wanted for his human.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, then?”
“We couldn’t, “Leroy answered, “She hadn’t really said yes, at that point and we was still trying to work out the logistics. It was her Daddy helped the most, though. He was flying home commercial, and took him along as live cargo on his flight. It all went as easy as pie… you didn’t need to write no sob-story stuff about him. We got it all scoped out.”
“It certainly sounds like it,” I said, “Since I have the picture, can I
write my story, now?”
“Be our guest,” Leroy laughed, and added, “You ain’t gonna use our real names, though? I’d hate people to know what a softie I am…jeeze!” her attention snapped to one of her sweating young troops, two of whom had just contrived to drop a large square case onto the ground, and she snarled “Be careful with that amp Airman, it cost more than you’ll make in your next two
promotions!”
“They’ll never guess,” I said. “Never in the world.”
And I met a kind man
He guarded the border
He said, “You don’t need papers,
I’ll let you go,
I can tell that you love her
By the look in your eyes, now”.
She’s the rose of the desert
In old Mexico….*
I wrote here once before of the shifting cultural terrain of the borderlands, of how the wash of people back and forth across the Texas-Mexico border over the last century or so made it extraordinarily difficult to have some kind of firm opinion about the current rush of illegal aliens from Mexico. Most people are truly torn about it, but the current rash of cross-border incidents and the open and ongoing warfare in those towns just to the south of the border give pause for concern. Just this last week a post on the American side of the border, guarded by National Guard soldiers had a brief, tense encounter with a heavily armed party on Mexican intruders… the first time this has happened with the National Guard.
But not the first time in history, either recent or long-past; the borderlands are fluid. I realized this only when I started doing the heavy research for the next book (“The Company of Noble Men” – A Thrilling Epic of the Settlement of Texas’ German Colonies, with operatic levels of drama, passion, murder, stolen children and revenge… plus a heroine who can beat the crap out of Scarlett O’Hara every day of the week and still have energy to slap around that simp Melanie. I’ve a detailed chapter outline finished, and six of them completed already…Where was I? Oh… border. Texas. Two way traffic. Gotcha)
I mean there was a heap of traffic here, going back and forth: a lot of it not strictly open and above-board in the legal sense for practically the last 200 years. Some was open, with the blessings of the governments involved, some with only quiet sanctions. The Texas War for Independence was just a particularly fractious divorce, the opening round in a long and contentious relationship… which if it were between two humans would likely show up on one of these Jerry Springer episodes where they throw the furniture at each other. It’s the sort of love-hate relationship which can exist when you know each other really, really well.
The historian Charles Robinson, in writing a history of the Texas Rangers, remarked that by the mid 19th century, Anglo Texans and Mexicans had become more like each other than they each would be comfortable admitting. Anglo Texans absorbed a taste for tortillas and hot chili, and a preference for working cattle from horseback from Mexican vaqueros— the touchiness about personal honor and affinity for violence was already there, courtesy of the Scots-Irish borderers. And perhaps the Mexican borderers absorbed something subtler from their Anglo neighbors, or maybe it was just the distance from Mexico City; one senses a sort of energy, a striving for something better than what they had, and a willingness to do the necessary to get it, even if a political culture that would have made it possible was tantalizingly just out of reach.
So, in between open war are all the incidents consigned to the footnotes of the history books:
Who knows that the Mexican general Adrian Woll raided San Antonio in 1842, capturing the entire district court which was in session; lawyers, judges, defendants and all… and was pursued all the way back to the border by a harassing force of Texas Rangers? Or that a retaliatory expedition after Woll’s raid was captured, marched into the interior of Mexico, and ordered “decimated” by none other than General Santa Anna; that is, one in ten to be executed, those to be chosen to live or die by drawing black or white beans from a pitcher?
Has anyone save those who live around Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley know of “Cortinas’ War” in 1859, when a hot-headed rancher, Juan Nepomuceno Cortinas raised a party of bravos and the flag of rebellion and took over Brownsville for a time? Or that his actions set off a cycle of retaliation that was only halted for the time being by the diplomacy (and let it be admitted, a very large club) wielded by the US Army commander in Texas, one Robert E. Lee?
During our Civil War, the Union blockade was broken by transporting supplies through Mexico: During the Mexican Civil War, Pancho Villa, and his men raided Columbus, New Mexico… probably for supplies to carry on with his war. Each of these conflicts sent refugees from the fighting and once the fighting was done, die-hards from the loosing side over the border. And some of this is only a little removed from living memory: a frequent reader emailed recently, that her grandfather ranched in west Texas, and used to buy cattle from Pancho Villa, who would drive up in a Model A Ford to collect payment, after his men had delivered the cattle. And when I was a senior in high school, I met an elderly man at the local Republican Party HQ who while we were supposed to be stuffing envelopes, told me how as a very young cavalryman, he had been part of Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa. And so it goes. I sense that what is happening now is just more of the same old, same old.
No, history isn’t past. And it isn’t even over.
(*Evangelina – Hoyt Axton)
As best I know, Al Gore has not come to San Antonio lately to bang on about global warming; this winter ice storm is just one of the usual South Texas winter things, only colder, icier and more of an inconvenience than usual. Ice, freezing rain, bitter north wind; all the elevated highways and overpasses closed, school classes cancelled, and as many people as possible being urged to stay home. As Blondie lamented this morning to the Lesser Weevil:
“Ya suppose if we gave you the leash, you could just walk yourself?”
It’s a good thing that I still have all of my serious winter gear from when we lived in Utah. At the rate I wear my winter parka, insulated boots, gloves and other necessary winter stuff, they will last me the rest of my natural life, since they only get good use maybe three or four days of the year. This being one of them: our version of a snow day. Residents of northern tier states are laughing their asses off, though. By their standards, this is a good winter day. Only the ice all over the roads is cause for pause. I’ve seen these folks here drive on wet streets, the last thing they need is black ice. I am not keen on being anywhere in the vicinity when Bubbah from the West Side zips up to the big intersection at Thousand Oaks and Perrin-Beitel in his monster SUV, slams on the brakes as he hits a patch of ice and spins all the way down to the Post Office, scattering other cars before him like ninepins before a 3,000 pound bowling ball. I can drive on ice, and in snow, I just have no faith in anyone else on the roads around here being able to do so. After all, they only have to do so about once every five years, and that is just not enough to keep those skills current.
At least we had plenty of warning about this cold front; so all the tender plants are in the garage, or under cover on the back porch; so far the only potted plant badly affected is Blondie’s painted coleus… which may or may not make it. I just don’t think it is any more sheltered in the garage than it is on the back porch.
We walked up the hill with the dogs at about midmorning: treacherous patches of ice in odd places on driveways and on the sidewalks. Spike the toy shi-tzu is always invigorated by cold; must be all that fur. She bounded ahead, displaying every evidence of keen enjoyment. Sometimes I amuse myself by picturing a team of six or eight little dogs like her, all hitched to a miniature sled and dragging it through the Arctic snow. Even if it is a breed which is supposed to be pampered lap-dogs all, I suspect that Spike and her tiny kind actually have dreams of glory, and heroic deeds. Today she skidded on a couple of patches of ice, and did not venture onto a lawn more than once. The trees, the lawns and parked cars are all glazed over with a layer of ice, crackling underfoot as if you are wading through cornflakes. The scattering of trees which still have leaves are coated also; the north wind rattles the leaves and branches like bamboo castanets. We met one of our neighbors, grimly scraping ice off his windshield with a credit card, and we both tried to remember how far down in our respective glove-boxes are buried the plastic ice scrapers.
Blondie was to start classes today; something she was looking forward to after three weeks of being bored out of her mind at home, but classes at most schools today are cancelled. Practically every elevated overpass and freeway ramp is closed, so even if she did still have classes, it would take at least half the day to get across town to them. Public events and lectures have also been cancelled or postponed, and a couple of corporations and city offices are either closed, or ask only essential employees to come to work. No, this is a day to stay home, and stay warm, and work from home. My sometime boss, the real estate broker doesn’t even want me to venture out: the ice is even worse in his neighborhood. And most unusual for here, it looks to carry on for more than one day. It’s rare for a winter storm to discommode San Antonio for more than one day at a time, but this one looks like going for a record. No word on snow, though. It last snowed seriously here about twenty years ago, and people are still talking about it as if it were a blizzard that left fifteen-foot deep drifts.
I’ll flog away on the next book, and Blondie is going to do some loaves of bread: all you can do on a day like this! That is, as soon as we melt the ice around the door lock to Blondie’s car. Global warming, indeed.
In the annals of the US Army, are recorded many strange and eccentric schemes and scathingly brilliant notions, but none of them quite equals the notion of a Camel Corps for sheer daft logic. It was the sort of idea which a clever “think outside the box” young officer would come up with, contemplating the millions of square miles of desolation occasionally interrupted by lonely outposts of settlements, stage stations and fortified trading posts which the United States had acquired following on the Mexican War in the mid 1840s. The country was dry, harsh, desolate… logically, what better animal to use than one which had already been used for thousands of years in just such conditions elsewhere?
The notion of using camels in the American southwest may have occurred to others, but it was one 2nd Lt. George Crossman who first raised a perfectly serious proposal for their use. One senses initially that the notion had people falling about laughing at the off-beat nuttiness of it all, and then slapping themselves on the forehead with a strange gleam in their eyes and saying, “By George, it’s a crazy idea… but it just might work!”
Crossman and other military men kicked the idea around for a couple of years; it had the backing of a senator from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and was in the position to advocate in favor of an experimental use of camels by the US Army. The senator also thought “outside the box” although it would not be clear for another ten years how far outside the box he would eventually go. But Jefferson Davis was not in a position to make a study of camels, US Army for the use of (experimental) happen until he became Secretary of War in 1852. Within three years, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose, and a designated ship set sail for the Mediterranean, carrying one Major Henry Wayne who had been personally charged by Secretary of War Davis with procuring camels. After a couple of false starts, a selection of 33 likely camels were purchased in Egypt. Wayne had also hired five camel drovers to care for them on the return voyage and to educate the Army personnel on the care and feeding of said camels.
The camels arrived at the port of Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast with one more than they started with, since one of them was a pregnant female; a rather promising beginning to a project so close to Secretary Davis’ heart. The herd was removed to Camp Verde, sixty miles west of San Antonio by easy stages from Indianola, where they were eventually joined by a second shipment later that year. At a stopover in Victoria, the camels were clipped and a local woman spun yarn from the clippings and knitted a pair of socks for the President of the US out of them. Once at Camp Verde they mostly transported supplies and amused and impressed skeptics by carrying four times what a single mule bear, without visible effort. (But a lot of grumbling.) They were also used for an expedition to the Big Bend. Late in 1857, Edward F. Beale, explorer and adventurer, friend of Kit Carson and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada took a contingent of camels on a long scout to explore the southwest along the 35th parallel, all through the vast deserts between New Mexico and California. Beale took twenty-five camels and two of the drovers, who were nicknamed Greek George, and Hi Jolly. The camels performed heroically all the way to California with Beale, and were used for a time to transport supplies from Fort. Tejon.
Alas for the demise of what looked like a brilliant solution; although it might have come to something eventually, but for the Civil War. Just about everyone who was a strong advocate for the use of camels suddenly had much greater problems to worry about than overcoming the resistance of Army muleteers and diverse other potential users. For the camels as draft animals were not readily biddable; they were even less cooperative than mules, which is saying a lot. They spat, nastily and accurately, stank to high heaven, and scared the living daylights out of horses and mules unaccustomed themselves to their presence, and generally did not endear themselves to most of the men who had to work with them. The California herd, those of them which had not been allowed to wander away, was sold mostly to small enterprises and circuses . Those camels, or their descendents who escaped into the desert southwest were spotted for decades afterwards, well into the early 20th century. Beale even took a few of them to his own ranch; a sort of camel refuge as it were. The Texas herd was also sold off or left to wander the range near Camp Verde; although according to this source, one of them found its way into the possession of an Army officer who used it to carry the baggage of his entire company all during the war. The drover, Hi Jolly eventually took a small herd of camels sold as surplus after the Civil War to the Arizona territory and used them to hall water for a time, before turning them loose. And so passed the end of an experiment, and the last of the US Army Camel Corps.
There is one small footnote to this; the story of the Red Ghost, which terrorized south-eastern Arizona Territory, for about ten years after 1883; a huge reddish camel… with the dead body of a man tied to its’ back. No one ever who he was, or how he came to be secured to the back of a camel, with knots that he could not have tied himself.
(this is one of a series of linked short stories I wrote just after I retired, when I was still getting it out of my system. Extra points for anyone who recognizes the original convention, and the writer who did a series of similiar stories.)
It was Maculhaney who told me the story of the mythical brigadier-general, during an interminable break in the exercise scenario, as we sat in a monitoring station in a trailer parked on top of a flat-topped red hill in Mississippi. It was the highest bit of land for miles around, and thick with mobile radar-lashups, tents and Army and Marine detachments to the right and left of us. Every vehicle going by kicked up a cloud of pink dust.
Maculhaney’s jungle boots were dull and smudged with it, and since it was a pleasant day — not a degree hotter than bearable, humidity sweating a puddle of water from a can of Pepsi that Orvis left in the shade just inside the doorway— and a tantalizing breath of salt-sea air on the intermittent breeze from the south, both Orvis and Maculhaney had shed their BDU shirts. Orvis sat in the doorway, with Leroy halfway down the stairs on a smoke break. Orvis flapped her cap at the smoke, shooing it away from the doorway as a couple of minivans crunched slowly along the top of the hill, obeying the 5 MPH speed limit in the exercise area.
“There goes the Congressman,†Orvis observed lazily, “Did you know we-uns had a real live Congressman among-us?â€
“No shit!†Leroy squinted through her smoke after the vans, “Democrat or Republican?â€
“Indicted or un-indicted?†Maculhaney murmured, dryly.
“Democrat.†I said, “Un-indicted. Visiting the Marines.â€
“The man has no taste…he should be visiting us,†Orvis pronounced. “Speaking of which, why aren’t you with the press pool, interviewing the Congressman?â€
“I do have taste,†I said, “And I interviewed him yesterday. He had a general with him, giving him a tour of the circus.â€
“Don’t say,†Leroy yawned. “I guess that’s why they haven’t indexed this mission yet.â€
“Prominent stop on the dog and pony show,†Maculhaney agreed.
“Speaking of dogs,†answered Leroy, “Them Guard Doggies aren’t barbequing today. Is anyone hungry? I had me a mind to go off-base to the Dairy-Queen.†She winked at me, “Maintenance run, of course. You hungry, Sunny?â€
Orvis stubbed out her cigarette by way of assent, pulled on her BDU blouse and took her cap out of her belt. Leroy reached over and took the radio receiver off it’s hook, and said into it
“India One, this is India Eight… going mobile.â€
“India One, acknowledge,†Answered the controller, away down at the Air Guard camp by the airport.
“You want anything, Mackie?†Leroy paused, on the way out and Maculhaney shook her head. I hadn’t expected her to. Maculhaney eschewed junk food on principal, insisting there was too much salt in it, and military chow made her nauseous. Leroy lectured her constantly about picking at her food, and I knew for a fact that the whole time Mackie deployed to Desert Storm she subsisted on raisins and granola bars. I had never seen her eat much else, unless it was that time in Daharan, when she monopolized a raw-veg-and-dip platter for the entire evening.
Now she extracted a granola bar from her bag, and nibbled on it daintily as Orvis and Leroy pulled away in their own unit van, and their own cloud of pink dust.
“Did you notice who the general was?†She asked, after a long while, “Local commander?â€
“Pentagon Public Affairs Office. Not a friend of yours, surely?â€
“No,†Mackie grinned, “I did meet his predecessor, several times removed, when I was a baby troop in Japan. Very short man. When I stood at attention in front of him I could look straight down at his shoulders. Lovely view of the stars.†He must have been short indeed, I thought, for Mackie was barely five-five in sensible shoes.
“You keep smiling as if you know a funny story about him,†I said, and waited. Mackie swallowed a crumb of granola bar and answered,
“Not about him… but it is a funny story. About a general. A very special sort of general… a mythical one.â€
“A mythical general?†I wasn’t sure I had heard right. “And you are going to tell me, of course.â€
“Nah… I thought I’d let you go nuts first, wondering.â€
I waited. Maculhaney’s stories were always scandalously amusing, and she had collected a lot of them during a career which stretched back nearly to the bad time, sad time, Vietnam time.
“I heard about him from a PA guy I worked with once,†Said Maculhaney, finally, and I breathed a tiny sigh of relief. “Big guy named Nicholson. He did it with two of his crazy buddies, when he was assigned to a major HQ, never mind where. The Head Shed was a huge place. Nicholson said it took him weeks to find his way from his cubicle to the latrine and back again. Anyway, one day he and his two buddies got bored and they wrote a memo. I don’t know what about, Nicholson didn’t say, but they signed it with a colonels’ name and posted it on one of the bulletin boards. And the joke was, they made up the colonel: they called him Colonel Elmer O. Diefendurfer.
“You can’t be serious,†I said at that point, and Maculhaney replied,
“Look this stuff is too funny for me to make up. I’m just telling you what Nicholson told me. Anyway, no one took down their memo for a long, long time, and no one kicked up a fuss, so they went one farther. They made him a member of the Officer’s Open Mess, with a club card and all. The nice thing about a club card…well, it used to be a nice thing, you can’t do it any more… you used to be able to charge your liquor purchases at the package store, and that’s what Nicholson and his buds would do. They’d charge it on Colonel Diefendurfer’s card on a Friday night, and then run around to the Club on Sunday morning and pay it off in cash.â€
“They did this for a couple of months, and then they decided that Colonel Diefendurfer ought to have a proper job, so they created him ‘Chief, MPSO’. Stood for ‘Mundane Plans and Silly Operations’. One of Nicholson’s friends was an admin tech, so they got the office of “MPSO†included on those interoffice routing slips. You ever see one of those? Slip of paper, they attach it to files and stuff they want to pass around for everyone to see. Well, anyways, stuff used to come back to HQ admin with the “MPSO†checked off. They even got him an office. Good thing no one ever really checked his room number. It was a real room all right, but it wasn’t an office. It was a broom closet. After another couple of months, they got really ambitious and put in the paperwork for a security clearance.â€
“Good lord, how did they pull that off?†I asked, awed and disbelieving and amazed at the lengths that truly bored and intelligent people will go in amusing themselves.
“They filled out all the forms, and slipped them into stacks of other stuff to be signed… usually by a Colonel or GS-13. They figured if their asses were ever caught, the blame would be spread around… and up. They tell me that clearances have about a ten-year backlog, these days.â€
“Anyway, the security clearance floated off into the system… they may hear back, about now, I think. They next figured they would take the Colonel on a TDY, so they write him orders for a trip Nicholson was making for something or other. He said the MAC crew damn near went spastic trying to reconcile the duty passenger list. They were paging Colonel Diefendurfer all over the terminal and on the aircraft, and Nicholson said he about ruptured himself trying not to laugh out loud. They did take care, though, not to file a travel voucher afterwards for the Colonel. That,†said Maculhaney virtuously, “Would have been fraudulent.â€
“Well, they went on for another six months or so, and the Colonel got to be pretty well known around the HQ. In fact, Nicholson swore that one of the Generals— it was a big HQ, simply crawled with generals— swore up and down he recollected this Diefendurfer from flight school, twenty-five years before! It came up to Christmas time, and Nicholson and his friends outdid themselves. They got a copy of the HQ protocol roster…â€
“Protocol roster?†I asked, knowing that it couldn’t be what it sounded like, but unable to guess what it might be.
“A list of local big-wigs and important people in the local community. Town council members, elected officials. Heads of companies, the chief of the gendarmes. Leading lights and other suck-ups to the military industrial. When the commander wants to host five hundred of the civilian crème de la crème to Chablis and cocktail weenies, Public Affairs comes up the list of five hundred. With their spouses’ names. Addresses, phone numbers, the whole enchilada. Do you want to hear about how Colonel Diefendurfer became a general or not?â€
“Pray continue,†I said, “But what did your creative friend do with the protocol roster?â€
“Sent a Christmas card to just about everyone on it. That is when they had to invent Mrs. Colonel Diefendurfer, the former Mei-Ling Lipschultz of West Palm Beach and San Antonio, and their family of talented and intelligent children. It was when they began getting Christmas cards in return… to the Colonel’s office address, that Nicholson decided it was time for the Colonel’s apotheosis. That is, to be promoted to General. After all he had been a sterling success as the head of MPSO. Nicholson also said,†and Maculhaney giggled, “That he put out a story about how the Colonel had been in charge of security at our Embassy in Teheran in the late seventies, where he had been an example to all…â€
“Anyone see the irony?†I asked, and Maculhaney answered with another giggle,
“Only if it had fallen on them from a very great height. So they wrote up a lovely bio of the Colonel in the proper format— they weren’t admin and PA for nothing, you know. And they sent in an announcement of the Colonel’s promotion to the Air Force Times, with a copy of the bio, and waited to see if the editors would bite. Which they did, hook, line and sinker. Nicholson cut out the page it was on, for their file. Honestly, some people are just too trusting to be in the news business. But that was their last fling with the mythical general.â€
“Were people starting to be suspicious?†I asked, and Maculhaney answered,
“No, they were starting to believe! General Diefendurfer was starting to get tasked with real stuff, and Nicholson and his buddies were starting to have trouble covering. They figured that any time now, someone would begin to wonder. I think the final straw came when Nicholson heard someone at Staff Meeting suggest that General Diefendurfer would be perfect to head up the next years’ Base Open House Planning Committee, and everyone agreed that he would be perfect. When he heard that, he knew the General had to go.â€
“Good lord, they didn’t kill him off, did they?†Maculhaney looked at me with distain,
“Certainly not. That would have really put the fat in the fire. They got rid of him the usual way. With a set of orders. They whited-out someone elses’ name, and made the social real blurry, Xeroxed it down a couple dozen generations and posted it on the bulletin board with a heart-felt letter signed by the General thanking everyone. I believe it said he was moving on to the Pentagon, to the Joint Staff. And that was the end of the mythical General. Although I do believe he made occasional appearances whenever Nicholson felt like livening things up. Last I heard of it, Nicholson was a Chief, out at PACAF HQ in Hawaii. Probably retired by now. He did always say that he would publish the whole Difendurfer file when he was gone far, far beyond the reach of the sense-of-humor-impaired.â€
Maculhaney wolfed the last of her granola bar, and wadded up the wrapper. She looked at me and added seriously,
“You have to keep a sense of humor in this field, otherwise you start to take it all too serious. You either drop dead of a heart attack or wind up in a rubber room at Malcom Gow. I don’t really know of other people really thought the General was real, or if they just played along with the gag.â€
“I’ve heard of weirder, real-life stuff,†I said. “I did a story once, on the Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley wedding.â€
“However did you keep your skin from crawling off, and curling up in the corner sobbing?†Maculhaney asked, with professional interest. “But yeah, that’s something that’s too weird to be real. Now, I went for six months in Greenland telling people I was really a space alien doing anthropological research on earthling customs and behavior. There were some people who sorta bought off on it. On the other hand, they might have thought I’d been there too long, and they’d best humor me before I got really irrational.â€
Outside the comm. van, tires crunched on the red bauxite gravel, and doors slammed open and shut. It rocked as Leroy climbed the ladder, a paper bag from Dairy Queen in one hand, and a large paper cup with a plastic lid and a straw sticking out of it in the other,
“Didja miss us?†she asked, and I answered,
“Mackie has been telling me about a mythical general… and also that she is a space alien doing research on Earthling customs and behavior,â€
Leroy didn’t even blink,
“Had my suspicions for years,†she drawled, “Ain’t the strangest thing I ever heard tell of. I knew two guys in Japan who ran a deli and catering service out of their room in the Navy barracks, and they had a recipe for chili con carne that would bring tears to your eyes. I could be telling you about that….â€
And she did. But that is another story
So here we are then, we few and happy few at the Daily Brief, standing in the middle of a cleared space and wondering where everyone else has gone. I looked back into the archives, and realized that I have been an active blogger for nearly four and a half years. I posted my first entry at the Brief’s predecessor, Sgt. Stryker, in August of 2002, after having been a semi-regular reader of it for a couple of months. When the war began in Iraq a few months afterwards, Stryker was one of a handful of military blogs, and readership soared. I am not sure exactly to what heights, but pretty far up there, and not at an altitude to be maintained consistently over a long period. Nothing in this world remains static; everything evolves.
Blogging is a hobby for most people, even those who take it seriously. Like all hobbies, people get bored and drop it, or find the discipline of providing content on a regular basis all too much. Or the persona they have developed is a bad fit, or they have changed and outgrown, or said all they wanted to say; mission accomplished. The original Stryker had other interests; he still blogs at another location, under another name, but many of first generation of contributors, and the second as well… they did it for a while, and moved on: Sparkey, Group Captain Mandrake, Kevin Connors and others, some of whom only contributed for a couple of months. Joe Comer, “HerkyBirdMan” died. It was the same with other blogs, some of which I read devotedly: Stephen Den Beste and USS Clueless, Diplomad, the Gweilo Diaries… and who was that movie producer, who was blogging most amusingly from Budapest, or Prague? They stop updating, and poof! They are gone, flying “forgotten as a dream flies at the opening day.” Vodkapundit is ill, and so is Cathy Seipp, Cori Dauber is on hiatus and writing a book, Rob “Acidman” Smith died. Nothing stays the same, everything moves on.
Which is not a circuitous way of saying that I am pulling the plug also… certainly not! Not after all the hassle of changing over to a new domain name! I don’t deny also that sometimes I am stuck for something to write about: after four years, I have pretty much covered all the endearing stories about my grandparents and my family, about Blondie as a child, and our adventures living and traveling in Europe. Practically everything I could write about current politics, and the war, and the military in general I have written before: three entries a week for four and a half years, it does add up. I hate to think I am repeating myself… especially when it was pretty good, the first time I said it.
As of this month though, I am ten years retired from the Air Force and Blondie is a year out of the Marines. We are milbloggers only in the sense of being veterans. We have both moved on, my daughter to college, and me to… well, that’s the point right there and the reason I am carrying on with The Brief. If I had quit every time I couldn’t think of something to say, in an interesting way, I’d have done it eight or nine times by now. Everyone has moments like that. I am sure James Lileks has moments— certainly he blogs about them… but he carries on. He’s a pro.
The thing that I came to take seriously over the last year was that I thought of myself as a writer, and not an office worker who did a little writing on the side. I upped my writing to a whole other level thanks to The Brief, and those readers who thought enough of what I wrote to encourage me. So, I can’t quit, it’s just that I am interested in other stuff; stuff like… oh, where Americans came from, and the people and events that shaped us, a hundred and more years ago. (Oh, yeah… and getting published by a real-live dead-tree no-kidding publisher,) My personal strength is telling stories. It’s what I do, what I want to do. If it’s what you want to hear, stick around, I’ve got some doozies. If not… there are a million stories in the naked blogosphere.
(PS Oh, I’ll do popular culture, and such events as catch my notice and interest, and the other contributors— Proud Veteran, Dragon Lady, Radar, and Timmer (Wow! That was the shortest long break in the history of this blog)— they’ll cover their own interests. It’s the way we’ve always done things here.)
I was never, even in my convinced feminist phase, much of a fan of hate crime legislation. Tacking on extra special super-duper penalties for a particular motivation in committing a crime against a person or property seemed… well, superfluous. Defacing someone’s property, lynching someone, harassing phone calls; most of the stuff of which hate crimes are made is already illegal anyway, with pretty hefty penalties already attached upon conviction.
But on the other hand, I could understand how the persons and communities against whom such crimes were routinely directed were pretty generally directed could feel particularly threatened, and could honestly feel that such legislation could provide a modicum of protection. Many of the crimes typically reported as being “hate crimes” were pretty vile, as well as being very widely reported. I could understand those fears; as a feminist woman, and member of one of those classes against hate crimes could theoretically be committed. Personally, though, the existence of misogynist comedians and the whole so-called patriarchal establishment dedicated to keeping women down so lavishly documented in MS Magazine just didn’t cause me a moment of worry. I just figured that being a bigot of whatever persuasion was punishment in itself. Ignorance and bad manners wasn’t something that could, or ought to be legislated against.
I could also understand and sympathize with legislators who passed hate-crime legislation. They run for office, and it must be extraordinarily difficult to look into the eyes of constituents who are frightened and beleaguered and tell them “no”. At the very least, our solons need to be seen as doing “something”. The same for community organizations, and local media outlets; the case against hate crime legislation was made, if it was made at all, almost apologetically. No one wanted much to be seen as being in favor of bigots and racists, misogyny and homophobia, which is pretty much where you must be if you were against such a worthy cause.
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Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay, called Indian Point, some miles to the north, selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. So many settlers farming so many acres, and the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres for themselves.
That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, and moreover was the stomping grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes… peoples not generally noted in the 19th century for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors… these things seem to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for… so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions; best to come straight off the trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his own choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant… and so it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.
Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels (that is another story entirely). Indianola was also the major port for supplying… among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road ran towards San Antonio, and south of the contentious border, to Chihuahua, Mexico supplying the interior mercantile needs of two nations . By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water… and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe, and in the cattle glut after the Civil War, experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.
But in September of 1875… September being a fateful month in those parts… a great hurricane slammed Indianola, and it’s low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge. Still, there were enough left, and it was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned; so the city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. Eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again. To add to the horror of it all, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in. At the height of the hurricane several of the survivors taking shelter in that building were burned to death, and several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable. There is still a bit of Indianola left; a few builtings, but mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with queenly grace; but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of a hurricane in 1900.
Found this lovely article here, about a writer who ought to be more well known in the US. I first read his books “Roumeli” and “Mani”, at the urging of my next-door neighbor in Athens, Kyria Penny. She about swooned when describing “A Time of Gifts”, and I was so enchanted when I read it that I bought the sequel “Between the Woods and the Water” in hardback and sight-unseen when it was first published. (I seem to have a first edition of it, but the dust-jacket is a little worn, and there are two dribbles of brown stain across the page edges and one edge of the book jacket)
At the age of 18 and on the budget of a pound a week, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This was in 1933; He kept a diary, and made notes, which were not written up until decades later; a third volume has been promised, but yet to be delivered.
Excellent reads… and as a side-note, Leigh Fermor had an extremely interesting time during World War II, working with Greek partisans on Crete, where he and another commando, W.Stanley Moss, kidnapped the German Army divisional commander, and spirited him off the island, a short way ahead of a massive German manhunt. This is a very good account of it, written by Moss some years afterwards.
Found courtesy of Photon Courier
So, here we are… same as it ever was, here at the Daily Brief. That didn’t hurt a bit now, didn’t it?!
Please take note of the new URL, www.ncobrief.com. We have an automatic redirect from our old URL at www.sgtstryker.com set in place for a couple of weeks, but only for a couple of weeks, so if we are on your blogroll, please take appropriate action!
Just a quick heads-up for regular readers: we are registering a new domain name for the Daily Brief, and will hopefully have everything moved in by Wednesday! After that point, we will be found at www.ncobrief.com, but will keep a link here to redirect traffic there.
As you were
As you were what?
As you were… oh, never mind!
If the personal stuff is anything to go by, then 2006 was the year of living dangerously. It’s the year when both my daughter and I cheerfully said “the hell” to what we had been doing for a while, and resolved to pursue what we really wanted. Blondie plunged into college (funded by the GI Bill, and a small VA disability payment), and I exited full-time employment in the pink-collar ghetto with a cheerful face and almost indecent haste. No, really, I think I was given a healthy shove just as I was nerving myself up to jump. Life is too short to spend it looking at the clock and wishing for the work day to end so you can get to the stuff you really want to be doing.
But I look ahead to 2007 with a vague yet unshakeable feeling of dread. I have the feeling that things are happening faster and faster; and that they are well beyond anyone’s ability to control. There have been… is the word “portents” too heavy? Baleful, maybe; like one of those Technicolor Texas sunrises; all purple clouds edged with gold and the sun rising blood-red in smear of pink sky. One thinks of that kind of sunrise as a herald, a red sky as a warning of storms.
The execution of Saddam Hussein is just the most recent of these events; did it not seem to happen very suddenly? The various trials looked to be one of those continuing circuses that would drag on for decades. Saddam would grow fat and old, and his lawyers would quibble, delay and appeal for stays, and he would eventually die of something prosaic like a heart attack, long after anyone ceased to care, except for the last few toothless protest ‘tards waving signs in front of the last few McDonalds’ in Europe. Instead… short walk and a swift drop, thank you very much.
Iran with nukes, and a charismatic leader with apocalyptic visions… and a hard-on for Jew-killing. Not a reassuring combination, all things considered. Consider also that this doesn’t seem to bother the usual UN and Euro protest ‘tards who have a conniption every time an American administration sneezes. The possibility of a mushroom cloud blossoming over Tel Aviv, or Marsailles, or Rome doesn’t seem to keep much more than a handful of us awake at night… Eh, it won’t be a US nuke, so what? They’re the only ones that really matter, apparently.
Even more dispiriting than the possibility of Iran using nuclear materiel for un-peaceful purposes, (which admittedly is only a possibility) is the challenge which has already been conceded, yielded up and surrendered by our mainstream press and so-called intellectual elites. Contemplate how easily and how consistently the flow of AP and Reuters news releases, video and still photography from Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority were slanted by partisan interests. Now there is a dagger in the heart of any pretense at impartiality. Rathergate and See-BS 60 Minutes might have been a one-off, and I’ve been able to avoid watching TV news magazines for years, but AP and Reuters releases are at the heart of local newspapers everywhere, especially those who can’t afford to send a reporter much beyond city limits.
The affair of the Danish Mohammad Cartoons depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon… but a dozen relatively tame cartoons. Oh, dear… we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Moslems. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people who might blow up the Press Club*. The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
Interesting times, interesting times… as that Chinese curse has it. It would make a great book, though… assuming that we survive it all. A then-obscure poem quoted in a New Years Day broadcast, sixty-eight years ago has a an odd resonance for me this year:
“I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown,’ and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”
(M.L. Harkins, 1875-1957, quoted by King George VI, 1 January 1940)
(BTW, The new book is shaping up nicely, with practically operatic levels of drama, murder, vengeance, betrayal and stolen children. The proposal for the novel about the Stephens Party is going to be presented by a writer friend of mine to his publisher, so keep fingers crossed on that one!)
* Meaning the MSM, legacy media, lamestream media… which as a national institution seems to be imploding of its’ own weight
“…From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean…”
In hot pursuit of my next “book”, I continue to plough through a great stack of readings, all about the German migration into Texas in the mid-19th century. Yes there is a great story there, of which practically no one outside Texas has ever heard, and given any sort of encouragement I will bore you rigid with all sorts of trivia. Like, for instance, the aristocratic patrons of the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas fell, hook, line, sinker and obscene amounts of cash to two of the biggest land swindles ever known. Three words “Fisher-Miller Grant”. That little fiasco was right on par with the sale of Manhattan Island, by a tribe that didn’t even own it. Ah, but it came out all right in the end… if the aristocratic members of the Society had possessed business acumen on par with their ambitions… well, let’s just say if that had been so, the second language of the state of Texas would not be Spanish. And it might not have joined the Union at all, but continued as an independent entity or quasi-German colony, which would have pleased a whole constellation of German princes and nobles, but really have annoyed the Confederate States, and deprived a great many Southern generals in the “late unpleasantness” circa 1861-65 of a great portion of their fire-eating, romping-stomping cavalry.
Texas joined the secession, to the heartbreak of Sam Houston, and enthusiastically entered into the whole spirit of the Confederacy… to be expected, since the Anglo (read American) settlers were mostly from southern states, and of that Scots-Irish breed of whom it has been oft-acknowledged that they were “born fighting”; Indians, British, the French or each other, whichever were most convenient at the moment. To read of the enthusiasm with which Texans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy is to wonder if it was just that they were spoiling for a fight, and the issues which impelled the secession were a minor bagatelle.
But this was not true of the considerable district around the German-settled areas around Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, all through the rolling lime-stone hills between San Antonio and Austin. This was the high country, the less-good land of hard-working farmers and small cattle ranches, solidly opposed to chattel slavery and who had opposed secession from the very beginning. They may have settled in Texas relatively recently, but they were a cohesive block, had put down deep roots, knew their rights and were prepared as stubborn and stiff-necked Americans to insist on them. If the Hill Country had been geographically contiguous with the Union at any point, doing a “West Virginia” and seceeding from the Secession would have met with solid approval.
As it was, the Hill Country Germans pretty much stood apart from the fray until a year into the war, in the spring of 1862, when the tide began to subtly shift against the Confederacy, to those who had the strategic sense to see the long picture. New Orleans was taken by the Union, whose forces began a slow progression up the Mississippi, slicing the Confederacy into two portions. Those who had been opposed to the whole secession thing were confirmed in their judgment, and those who had wavered began to wobble in the direction of loosing confidence… while the die-hard Confederates began to see the skull-grimace of death and defeat grinning at them from the corners.
Texas was put under martial law, and the supreme military commander was a foppish and overbearing little martinet named Hebert, who did much to make himself detestable to even supporters of the Confederacy. But what ignited resistance in the Hill Country, and farther north, around present-day Dallas, was the institution of conscription. Texas had poured 25,000 volunteers into the Confederate Army during the first year of the war. But volunteers were not enough, and in the spring of 1862 legislation passed which authorized the drafting of every Anglo (white) male between the age of 18 and 34… shortly thereafter, it was changed to 17 through 50. Resistance was instant and furious among Unionists. A party of 65 Unionist men from the Hill Country attempted to flee across the Rio Grande; they were ridden down by Confederate troops along the Nueces River, and half were killed outright or executed out of hand. In following weeks, another fifty men in Gillespie County, around Fredericksburg, were executed… many of them by Confederate vigilante gangs. It was said bitterly for decades afterwards, that more were killed in the Hill Country by such gangs during the Civil War than were ever killed by Indians, during the war or after it. A footnote in the history books, if even noted to begin with.
The experience of the Civil War had, I think, the effect of drawing the Texas German colonies into themselves, and emphasizing their distinct character, rather than diffusing amongst their neighbors as similar German enclaves did in the northern states. For they were long in forgetting what had been done to them, by their neighbors, and fellow Texans.
More about the German settlers, here and here, from the archives.
Some few Christmases ago, when Blondie was still stationed at Camp Pendleton, and my personal economics allowed me to fly out to California to spend the holiday at Mom and Dads’ house, my daughter and youngest brother conceived a grand scheme to give them a large color TV for Christmas.
Blondie and Sander also wanted to surprise them, and a huge box under the Christmas tree, no matter how cunningly wrapped, just would not deliver the same element of surprise… no, my daughter and my little brother had worked out a cunning plan to remove the old television, which had been inherited from Granny Dodo’s estate, install the new one, and gift-wrap the remote in a little box which would be in Mom’s Christmas stocking. They could pull this off because the television normally resided on a shelf of its own in a wall of books and cupboards, with a pair of louvered shutters closed over the screen. It was one of Mom’s enduring standards about television; that it be out of sight when not actually being watched, if not out of the living room entirely.
Such was the plan, but for the maximum surprise to be achieved, several challenges had to be worked out: the installation would have to be done after we were all done watching television on Christmas Eve, and Mom and Dad would have to be out of the house. The old TV would need to be unhooked from the antenna and VCR, and the new one put into its place, and all the evidence removed. Blondie and Sander estimated they would need at least twenty minutes. The optimal time to perform this substitution would be while everyone was at midnight candle-light service, at a church in Escondido, about half an hours’ drive away. As soon as they were out of the way, Blondie and Sander would set it all up and follow the rest of us in his car; hopefully not missing too much of the service. After all, this was one of the two official times per year when Dad actually set foot in church.
On some pretext, Blondie and Sander would lag behind, while all the rest of us; Mom and Dad and I, Pippy and her husband and the children, and JP and I would head down the hill to church service in several cars. And Blondie had sworn me to secrecy; my part in the plot was to make sure that Mom and Dad left the house on time. The new television was outside in the back of Sanders’ car, having been hidden at a neighbors’ house… oh, yeah, everyone was in on this, except for Mom and Dad, and possibly the pastor and church council.
At about twenty to eleven, Mom began reminding us all to change into something suitable for the midnight service. Dad turned off the television and closed the shutter doors, an event we all noted with covert interest, before Blondie and I went to the guest room to change. Blondie was going to wear her dress uniform… this always went over well with Mom’s friends at church, who were heavily into competition on the grandchild front. And her excuse for lagging behind would be an inability to locate one of her dress pumps, which she had carefully hidden under the bed.
So, everyone was ready but Blondie, with one shoe in her hand and making a pretense of frazzlement as she looked for the other, Dad was looking at his watch, Pip and her husband had rounded up the children, and were herding them towards their vehicle out in the driveway. In accordance with the agreed-upon plan, I put on a bit of a frazzled look myself (really, I am a better actress than most people give me credit for) and announced that Blondie can’t find her shoe, and that we should leave now. Sander chimed in on cue: he would stay and help her look, and catch up with us in his car.
“Don’t you have another pair of shoes you can wear?” Mom asks.
“No, I only brought the one set of dress pumps,” Blondie answered. No one even suggested that she borrow a pair; for a start, she wears a size nine and a half.
“It must be in the guest room,” Dad said determinedly, “Five minutes, we’ll take everything apart and look for it.” He and Mom looked like they were about to drop everything and look for the damned shoe. It meant a lot to them to have Blondie show up in uniform.
“Give us another minute, we didn’t look under the bed.” Blondie and I retreated to the bedroom and close the door.
“You’re got to get them out of there!” Blondie hissed at me.
“Give me a minute… OK, got it.” Of course… how devious. Devious, but effective.” I put on my coat, and picked up my purse. Down the hall, Mom was fussing around with her own coat and scarf.
“Did Blondie find her shoe?” she asked, and I whispered, conspiratorially
“It’s not lost, it’s just an excuse for the two of them to stay behind and set up a surprise present for Dad. Forget about the shoe; just get Dad out of here.”
I found Dad pacing up and down in the solarium
“Did you find it?” he asked, and I lowered my voice again,
“It’s just a ruse, so Blondie and Sander can stay behind and bring in Mom’s surprise Christmas present… just get her out of here, so they can get to work.”
Dad looked amused; he has always liked this sort of intrigue and with a minimum of fuss, they both headed for the car, with me trailing after and congratulating myself on my efficiency and guile.
And so it went according to plan… all except for Sander and Blondie getting to church after service had started, not knowing that they had locked the door into the sanctuary because of the late hour, and having to pound on the doors until the ushers let them in. The next morning, Mom unwrapped her first gift, and looked at the new TV remote with great bewilderment. Under all our expectant eyes Sander opened the doors to the TV cabinet with a great flourish… and Mom and Dad were both very, very surprised.
Merry Christmas… May all your surprises be the nice ones!!
When Timmer upgraded the site to a newer version of Word Press, he also installed the Akismet spam-killing option, which keeps a running tally of spam comments intercepted and deleted. This is actually kind of amusing, because at current rates of accumulation, I believe we will have deleted 100,000 individual spam comments by New Years’ Day… none of which have actually posted.
I scroll through the pages of spam occasionally— like when there is only a hundred or so—just to make sure that there are no legitimate comments stranded there, and a depressing chore that is, too. Multiple identical, ungrammatical or just plain gibberish comments, with a link to a website embedded somewhere out the wilds of the internet.
Lots of kinky sexual practices, porn that to judge from the title line tends toward the disgusting side of the scale, boatloads of dubious drugs, a scattering of payday loan sites, insurance, and of late, a couple of sites that push ready-made term papers. A depressing collection of topics, and even more depressing is that it was probably less trouble for the originators to send it all out than it is for me to delete it all.
100,000 of these, all dumped on one site… none of which were actually posted. I presume there must be blogs somewhere out there with an unwary or careless administrator, where such comments do get posted and stay up, and presumably serve as free advertising, but probably not many. I suppose the spam-scum sending out this huge quantity of comments must get one or two links somewhere, and that must make it all worth while. But it’s kind of depressing… it’s the marketing equivalent of carpeting an entire town with spray-paint graffiti over every imaginable surface; walls, windows, other billboards, fences and retaining walls, all advertising some nasty sort of pawn-pornshop on the bad side of town. Even if all of it is swiftly and magically scrubbed away, a dozen times a day, I still resent the effort of having to do it. I loath everyone involved: the spammers who repeat this pointless exercise several hundred times daily, and doing it very badly, their disgusting clients with their rip-off business plan, and their schlubby loser clients. I hope they all get disgusting diseases, that their servers crash, and their pets all bite them. Bah, humbug, spam-scum… I wish a Merry Christmas for everyone else in the world but you.
So, taking bets on when we will get the magic 100,000; when will we cross the magic threshold?
Ran across this little account of the Very Worst Toys Ever, and began to chortle…. Not so much at the toys themselves, although JP, and Pippy and I were actually given at least one of the deadly worst and a couple of the others mentioned in the comments.
We, of course, emerged un-maimed, although Dad probably regrets to this day that he didn’t give either one of us the atomic energy lab. Probably couldn’t afford it, as he was only a poor graduate student on the GI bill, round and about then. We did have loving and generous grandparents, though; how we didn’t ever get BB rifles like all the other neighborhood kids is a mystery. Mom probably put her foot down about that, believing that yes, you could put out an eye with them. Well, so could you with a “wrist rocket”. We had a pair of them, a sort of bent-metal sling-shot with a bottom end that braced against your wrist so that you could sling a bit of gravel at practically ballistic speed. But they weren’t toys- we had them to chase the blue jays away from the house where they tormented the cats and dogs unmercifully. As far as I know, Dad was the only one of us who ever actually hit a blue-jay with a wrist-rocket impelled missile. Square in the butt, actually. It let out an enormous squawk and vacated the premises henceforth and forthwith and at a good speed.
We did have a variant of the creepy-crawler toy, with the heater that heated up a pair of metal moulds that (IIRC) made little GI Joe figures and their various little accoutrements. Just open the little bottles of black and brown and OD green rubber compound goop, pour into the molds, and bake until done. It did heat up quite hot, and the baking rubber smelt pretty vile. Still, no dangerous adventures to report, no animals ever ingested the little marble-super-balls… but the “clackers” rather lost their charm after some painful bruises. Picture a pair of billiard-sized balls, on either end of a length of cord, with a finger-hold in the middle. The object was to get them going, “clacking” them against each other while hanging from your hand, and then get them going so fast that they would rebound and “clack” against each other above your hand. Eh… it was the novelty toy in about 1966… for as long as it took for kids to figure out that the damned things hurt.
Other bad, bad toys? Definitely the water-rocket. I clearly remember watching Dad and JP launch them from the back yard of the White Cottage, which would put it squarely in the early 60ies, the Golden Age of Really, Really Dangerous Toys. It was bulbous blue plastic rocket; there may have been a pair of them. They flew on an interesting combination of (I think!) baking soda, vinegar, water from a garden hose screwed into the launcher mechanism, and some kind of pressure pump-thingus. It was a wet and messy business, preparing for flight, but they zoomed up to a thrilling height from the ground when released from the launcher with considerable force.
Who needed lawn darts to maim each other with, when you had rocket power? Although to be fair, I don’t think we had nearly as much thrilling fun with them, as we did when Dad was overseeing the launching. And Dad brought us enough in the way of dangerous toys; it was his notion to snake-proof us at an early age, by having us handle the not-so-dangerous sorts. And Dad was the one who gave us an enormous magnifying glass and showed us how to focus the suns’ rays with it, so that we could set stuff on fire. And he brought home dry ice from the lab; heaps of fun, throwing a great lump of it into the baby’s wading pool, and enjoying the bubbling, and the billows of white vapor. That was nearly as much good clean fun as the insulated flask of liquid hydrogen, and dipping leaves and rose petals into it for a moment… then dropping them on the tile kitchen counter where they would shatter like glass.
Grannie Jessie was notoriously blasé about toy hazards, but even Grannie Dodie, who wasn’t, still let us play with Dad’s classic old Erector set, which included enough small nuts and screws to provide a choking hazard to an entire elementary school… and the crown jewel, a small electric motor. Said motor was a good three or four decades old when we played with it, and even to my eyes looked a little… I don’t know… frayed? Insulation cracked… connections not quite up to par? We never managed to spindle, shock, or mutilate with it, so perhaps it wasn’t quite so child-unsafe as I remember it. Oh, yeah dangerous toys – bicycles without helmets, large horses, and go-carts on steep hillside trails, rope swings in tall trees.
Oddly enough, we survived. Even without the toy nuclear lab. Add your own accounts of Bad, Bad Toys. Especially if they were received as Christmas presents.
(Don’t drool, people… Dad’s old Erector set survived our childhood, still in the original case, but it was in their garage when the house burned to the ground, four years ago.)
And I mean a day that sucked so badly it pulled small objects nearby into itself, a day that started off setting a new record for suckage, a day that spread blight, disaster and discouragement in every possible direction, even to the gingerbread cookies that Blondie attempted this afternoon, following a recipe from the pages of “Joy of Cooking” which defiantly should have stayed there and never seen the light of day. It’s the Gingerbread Man recipe on p 712 of the 1970s edition, BTW. Can’t miss them… tastes like ginger and molasses playdough, and look most unfortunately like dog turds. And we know dog turds, these days, for we are the one set of responsible pet owners on our street who do, in fact, whip out the approved plastic bags… no matter what that rude woman on the corner with her herd of nasty-tempered rat-dogs called after us, yesterday.
Oh, yeah, ginger-flavored dog turd balls, that’s for sure what we’re going to give to our neighbors for Christmas. The ones that don’t speak to us will probably never not speak to us again, and the ones that we do speak to will be looking after us strangely and discretely spitting out the bite they were polite enough to take into a paper napkin.
Does anyone actually ever eat the Christmas cookies from neighbors, anyway? I think they just pass them on to someone else. Like fruitcakes.
My computer has been glitching, over the last couple of says, abruptly terminating the internet connection, and sending me repeated pop-ups for things that I am not interested in, and so yesterday I burned several hours of writing time running the usual sort of diagnostics, with the result that this morning, absolutely the third thing I tried to do on line froze it up entirely: there was the desktop, and my documents and everything…less my accustomed cookies and log-ins…and it remained frozen. So, first thing of the day, a day dedicated to writing and a chapter of the new book which I had been thinking about all night, and planning to pick up where I had left off yesterday…and I can’t. All my notes, and the very complicated excel spread-sheet I spent hours on this week, plotting out the various events and characters…all locked up, because of course I haven’t copied them over to disc because they are not finished yet.
My computer genius friend says he can’t get to it until tonight, but if we meet his daughter at a place in our neighborhood that she is going to show to a potential buyer, she’ll take the computer to his place, and he’ll work on it after work tonight. We spend some time, locating the place, and waiting for the daughter. She tells us that there has been a sudden rash of malicious worms and Trojans, in the last couple of days… his own website crashed and a lot of his clients are infested up the wazoo with them. He may just have to rescue my documents, wipe the hard drive and start all over.
I have always thought that the jerks who write and set loose malicious stuff like that should be stripped naked, smeared with honey and staked out over a fire-ant nest. Alive. The prospect of perhaps having to re-write what I have so far (not all of it, because a friend who is away for the holiday had the first chapter sent to him as an attachment and he may have it still, but I won’t know until he is back after the holidays!) or even interrupting me when I am in the throes of creating something really, really terrific…and putting a crimp into earning my living writing makes me really, really furious. Yeah, I’ll go for the fire ants nest, but I’d like do to this malicious little bastard (who is probably chortling to himself in a nasty cold-water walkup in Russia or the Philippines or wherever these shits congregate) what the Comanche used to do to their prisoners. (Wasn’t pleasant, BTW. Involved eye-gouging, amputation of marital tackle, hot coals, and stakes.)
I finally finished hemming a length of fabric for a scarf for Blondie, and adorning each corner with an elaborate tassel of beads, all very headachy work, done under bright light with very tiny glass beads. I’ve been putting off finishing it for days, finally did so today, and when she took it back to her room this afternoon, one of the tassels caught on the baby-gate we use to keep the dogs our of her end of the house… and ripped it all loose. Beads all over. When I finally finished it, it stayed finished for a whole… I dunno, fifteen minutes?!!!
I can’t pay a bill that I have been promising I’ll pay today because I haven’t been paid… and I worked three hours and a half, clipping certain real estate ads out of the newspaper, trying to clip them so they could be readable, even if the particular section was on two sides of the same sheet of newsprint. I have a headache from this, and my fingers are all over newsprint and dust. Again, I won’t be paid for this until next week sometime.
I am waiting for the book I have already finished to connect with the publishing world; which is moribund until after Christmas, or even New Years, even. I had the mad notion to do a proposal for the new book, and include it as a two-fer, and I also wanted to try and do my Christmas card letter today… but can’t because my computer is frelled, all because some malicious little twerp decided to stick it to the man.
And we can’t afford to go to my parents for Christmas, when everyone else will be there, and it’s a week before Christmas, and we are juggling time and commitments and money. Candidly, I kind of wish Christmas was over already.
Oh, yeah, and some kids were running around the neighborhood vandalizing cars. And I have to write this on Blondie’s laptop, which has a keyboard and the weird little tracing pad and two buttons instead of a mouse, and everything is in the wrong place…
Bah, humbug… Merry ******Christmas! The person who tries to tell me how it could all be so much worse is getting an internet nuclear wedgie, as soon as I can figure out how to administer it.
I’ve been following the AP-Captain Jamail Hussein-Sock-Puppet imbroglio with somewhat less than my usual vicious interest in the follies of the MSM for two reasons: one, I’m distracted by the entrancements of the 19th century, and two, I’ve been pounding on this over the last two or three years, and I’m really, really tired of repeating myself.
It’s become pretty damned clear to us news junkies that depending on local stringers in certain areas of conflict, unrest or just generally feelings of bad karma was a shaky construction for a news entity who still wished to maintain some pretension of impartiality. The list of news-producing areas— those places which generate an inordinate number of headlines and passionate concern — where the crystalline flow of pure information has been tainted by the sewage of partisan interest has always been long. In my youth it included practically every news organization behind the Iron or Bamboo curtain; of course, the news bureau of a Communist state was slanting, censoring, bending folding and mutilating the news, and you were an idiot or a college professor of the Marxist bent if you didn’t know it and apply salt to taste.
Add to that now any coverage of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, southern Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, and hefty chunks of the Middle East by entities like Reuters, AP, CNN, France 2, the BBC, 60 Minutes…. Well, you get the idea. There isn’t a chunk of salt big enough to take away the taste of krep when partisan journalism masquerades as impartial newsgathering.
And what is the reaction of formerly trustworthy purveyors of news, upon having been repeatedly busted for falsifying pictures, for use of incompetently faked documents, staged footage and outright lies, pissing away decades or more of accumulated credibility? Oddly enough, it appears to follow a progression rather like the five stages of grief: denial, followed by anger, followed by bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.
AP, as an aggregate news distributor has the most to lose when busted for credibility. It is not just one channel, or one reporter, like CNN or the egregious Dan Rather, but it feeds stories to newspapers world wide. It’s an authoritative higher power, kind of like the Pope. To have thousands of readers across the US open their various daily papers, see a story from Whereverthehellistan credited to the AP, and to realize that all of them are thinking, derisively “Whotta load!” and turning the page must be a bitter pill indeed for AP’s management. Hence the denial and the anger directed at those pesky bloggers who raised questions about the AP’s Baghdad Sock-puppet o’the Month, Captain Jamail Hussein. After all, we might start wondering about how many other sock-puppet sources feature other AP stories… or how many featured in the past.
Anyone else see AP’s credibility and profitability , flaming up and collapsing in ruin like a journalistic Hindenburg, if readers begin putting the AP brand on par with those supermarket tabs that always have stories about alien abductions, monkey-human babies and antique airplanes on the moon?
Give Reuters credit, at least their management zipped through the cycle to acceptance, in pulling suspect pictures from their archives. They can see the writing on the wall clear enough, and what they will loose by no longer being credible. But Dan Rather is still stuck in the bargaining phase, and it looks like AP is mining rich veins of denial.
I love the smell of desperation in the morning…. It smells like victory. Or maybe it’s just those weird pine-scented aromatherapy candles my daughter insists on burning.
Last week I nerved myself up to actually call the literary agent who was reviewing the entire manuscript of “To Truckee’s Trail”. He had e-mailed me at the beginning of November that he was savoring every word and would let me know “soon”… but I had already begun to sense what the word would be, when I didn’t hear anything by mid-month.
And the word was, no, he didn’t think he’d be able to “sell” it to one of the big name publishers; although he was very complimentary— it’s a terrifically gripping read, very nice characters, and researched down to the third decimal place— but…
And this is what I have come to think of as the “Big But”; it would be a hard sell, harder than he wanted to dive into. It’s not quite a genre western, definitely not a romance, since the passionate relationship is between two people who have been married for a decade at least, and it’s not the sort of historical novel that seems to sell these days, which as he explained it, is about an unknown aspect of an event or person that people have heard about (Sigmund Freud, the Civil War). He floated the Stephens Party in a couple of casual conversations, and drew an absolute blank every time… which I thought would have been a selling point, but never mind.
No way does this put me back to square one: I’ve been applying to other lit agencies all along; so far, three form rejections which are about what I’d expect, but…
Another “Big But”… a friend of a friend who is a writer himself and coached me through writing up a proper proposal, and sample chapter, etc, is going to put it straight to his publisher. He is not one of the really big names, but he has made a regular living at it for a long while, and moreover is a big fan of my stuff. I’ve tweaked the manuscript again, in response to feedback from knowledgeable readers, and he will review it one more time, and send it in after Christmas. Apparently, nothing happens in the publishing world over Christmas.
Over the last month or so, I sent out a number of proposed articles to various magazines; rewritings of some of my best blog entries, actually. One of them is being considered by a history magazine, and two of them have been rejected…. But with a hand-written note of encouragement from the reviewing editor, expressing profound enjoyment of them, and apologizing because the publication had no budget for free-lancers this quarter.
This represents a step up for my rejection slip collection, actually; yeah, they’re rejection slips, but they are nice rejections, and give evidence that the submission was actually read and considered. It’s all about progress.
I’ve started the next book, too: the one about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Now, that will have positively operatic levels of everything: the wild frontier, lust, cliff-hanging danger and sudden death. I might even put some sex into it, too.
…upon certain so-called celebrities who either cannot afford underpants or who have never been schooled on how to exit an automobile gracefully while wearing a short skirt.
Not quite safe for work, though… or the family hour, unless your family is Paris Hilton’s. Link found through of 2 Blowhards who found it someplace else… but scroll down, the other stuff is hysterical.
This was sent via e-mail from a pet-loving friend, and posted for your amusement
To be posted VERY LOW on the refrigerator door – snout height.
Dear Dogs and Cats:
The dishes with the paw prints are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Please note, placing a paw print in the middle of my plate of food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.
The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn’t help because I fall faster than you can run.
I cannot buy anything bigger than a king sized bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort. Dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep.
It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize space is nothing but sarcasm.
For the last time, there is not a secret exit from the bath room. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, meow, try to turn the knob or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. I must exit through the same door I entered. Also, I have been using the bathroom for years –canine or feline attendance is not mandatory.
The proper order is kiss me, then go smell the other dog or cat’s butt. I cannot stress this enough!
To pacify you, my dear pets, I have posted the following message on our front door:
To All Non-Pet Owners Who Visit & Like to Complain About Our Pets
1. They live here. You don’t.
2. If you don’t want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. (That’s why they call it “fur”niture.)
3. I like my pets a lot better than I like most people.
4. To you, it’s an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn’t speak clearly.
Remember: Dogs and cats are better than kids because they:
1. Eat less
2. Don’t ask for money
3 Are easier to train
4. Usually come when called
5. Never drive your car
6. Don’t hang out with drug-using friends
7. Don’t smoke or drink
8. Don’t worry about having to buy the latest fashion
9. Don’t wear your clothes
10. Don’t need a gazillion dollars for college, and
11. If they get pregnant, you can sell their children.
The Texas Revolution in 1835 initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. “Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,” summed up the attitude. The Mexican government, beset with factionalism and seeing revolt against it’s authority everywhere, sent an army to remind the Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ train was 800 pairs of iron hobbles, with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did not win any friends, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, which was supposed to re-establish and ensure Mexican authority was ignominiously beaten and sent packing.
Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from another attack, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were not much fitted to face the terrible wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February, and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of volunteers… San Antonio de Valero, called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.
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After the last time America declared a victory and went home…
Cambodia.
(link through “Classical Values“)
With a great deal of tinkering and experimentation, Blondie and I have worked out a pretty damn good home-made pizza, starting with this lovely crust recipe, taken from a recipe for deep-dish Chicago pizza in Cuisine at Home Issue #53 (p.8)
Combine and proof (let sit until foamy)
¾ cup warm water
1 T sugar
1 pkg or 2 ¼ t dry yeast
2 T olive oil
Blondie usually adds a couple of T’s of chopped fresh or dried herbs to this: cilantro, rosemary, oregano, garlic to the yeast mixture. It gives the crust a certain oomph.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine:
2 cups all purpose flour (We use King Arthur bread flour)
1/3 cup yellow cornmeal
2 t kosher salt
Add the yeast mixture and knead on low speed for 10 minutes, or until smooth. Form into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl, turning once to cover with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down, roll into a ball again, return to bowl, cover and let rise again for another hour.
This makes enough dough for two 16-inch thin-crust pizzas or 2 9-10 inch deep-crust pizzas made in an iron skillet. (We have one of those patent pizza pans, with tiny holes drilled through. This would also work on a pizza stone.)The trick is to roll out the dough, and pre-bake for about 10 minutes in a 450 degree oven, on the bottom shelf. The other trick is to cover the baked dough with thin slices of mozzarella cheese (the original deep-dish recipe calls for a layer of very thin sliced deli ham) to keep the crust from getting all soggy. When the baked crust is lightly brown, take it out of the oven, and cover it with the insulating layer of cheese. Then, spread out about a cup of good bottled marinara sauce (Newmans’ is excellent!) over the top of each pizza— not to much, it will overflow, or make the crust soggy. Top with all the various toppings that you favor: thin-sliced onions, mushrooms, cooked crumbled sausage, pepperoni, etc. Don’t pile on too much, this will have to cook through, in a hot oven in a very short time. Top with shredded mozzarella, and sprinkles of whatever extra herbs you may like, but with the herbs in the dough, additions are not necessary. Bake again, in the 450 degree oven until cheese is just lightly melted.
(The dough can also be frozen, and thawed again, if you don’t have a need for two pizzas.)
Gift giving becomes a hassle when you don’t really know the person very well, and a gift of some sort is obligatory (bosses, co-workers) , or you know them really well but have given them practically everything they want/need on previous occasions (parents and siblings), or they already have everything already (grandparents.)
Books are a good fall-back for me, as far as gifting my nearest and dearest, but an even better all-purpose gift is something to eat, and I don’t mean a plate of rock-hard Christmas cookies or one of those little baskets from Swiss Colony with the triangular little packets of cheese-food that taste like a pair of cruddy gym-socks smell, or one of those lavish and overpriced catalogue numbers. (Although I love Harry & David fruit baskets, ever since we got one at the office one year: oh, yum. The office staff fought viciously over the apples and pears.) I mean a carefully constructed food basket, and no, you do not need Martha Stewarts’ skills…or her pocketbook.
My favorite gift food-basket starts with a cookbook: any cookbook. Those tiny specialty cookbooks about the size of a Beatrix Potter book, the thin paper-bound books that used to be given away by companies, any of the Sunset cookbooks… really, anything that has some nice recipes in it that would appeal to the recipient. You do not want to build a basket around a cookbook of sweets for someone that is a diabetic, or a book of barbequed meats for a vegan. I score cookbooks of this kind at Half Price Books, but any source for literary overruns and overstocks is fine.
Pick a recipe out of the book, mark the recipe with a book mark, or a piece of ribbon… and measure out all the ingredients for it in appropriate containers, carefully labeled and packaged. I have bought little bottles and cellophane bags, and sheets of labels at the Container Store, or hobby shop, or at the local big-box import place. You can also purchase sheets of shrink-wrap, or shrink-wrap bags— the kind that you can use a hair-dryer to shrink over the basket when it is all finished, and excelsior or finely shredded packing materiel at the same place.
Really, you are only limited by your budget; there is nothing to stop you from building a basket around a whole meal— but if perishables are included, either assemble at the last minute, or keep refrigerated. Include in a bottle of wine, or a loaf of bakery bread, if you like, and any fancy accessories you can afford. I have done baskets based on a recipe for tea bread, and adorned it with a wooden spoon or an inexpensive metal whisk. I did a basket for the head of the firm I worked for two Christmases ago with the recipe for this soup and a copy of the book it was taken from. The finished basket was trimmed with a bunch of bay-leaves and whole garlic clove.
It’s not strictly required to stick to items for human consumption, either: I did a basket for some friends moving into a new house in the suburbs, filled with a bird feeder, a pound of bird-seed to fill it, and a little field guide to local birds. I also did a basket for the significant other last year, which included a spa-style shower head, some aromatherapy soaking salts and male-oriented toiletries, and a really nice cotton towel. It’s not even strictly necessary to use a basket, either; just some sort of appropriate container; say, a terracotta pot for a collection of gardening supplies, or one of those big tins for a collection of gourmet popcorns, with a popper and an oven mitt, for instance.
About the baskets, though; this is the embarrassing part. To buy an empty basket at retail price will likely make it the most expensive single element, which is counterproductive to my goal of a high-end one-off gift basket at an affordable price; Neiman-Marcus quality at a Walmart cost. And the best place to find a variety of attractive baskets…(hanging my head and blushing deeply) … is at the thrift store. Goodwill, Salvation Army, even yard sales will do. I usually pay only a dollar or two. They can be washed in mild soap and warm water, or even painted with spray paint, to match the color theme (if any) of the gift. And it’s not like anyone will really be looking at the basket; they’ll be looking at the contents anyway.
So there you are: stuck for a gift for someone you only know casually? Food is always gratefully received: trust me.
I did, on one single occasion, spend the entire Friday-after-Thanksgiving in the mall and department store. Not because I had a yen for joining the yearly Christmas-shopping exercise in masochism… but because I was working retail that year. I was on terminal leave, and job-hunting in a desultory fashion, and took a temp position in a department store which paid a salary plus commission on sales. (If nothing else, this arrangement will guarantee attentive sales staff… and besides, the employee discount was totally generous.) It was rather fun, at first; If you truly enjoy shopping, and hanging out with other women, and people-watching, who wouldn’t get a kick from hanging around a department store? But the day after Thanksgiving was all that and doing a sort of sales-floor triathlon; we were at top speed all that long day. Not much more than half an hour for lunch, no times when it slowed down long enough that you could sit down in the back room and put up your feet.
Dense crowds in the mall, cars slowly rotating the parking lots looking for that rare species, a parking place, long lines at every cash register, and workdays that stretched out so long that another sales associate lamented that the only place she could shop for Christmas, besides the store we worked in was Walmart, because it was open twenty four hours a day. I had my fill of holiday retail madness after that experience, and truth is, I usually don’t need to shop for Christmas presents during December.
That is because I am one of those tiresomely organized people who shop for Christmas throughout the year. I didn’t start out that way, honestly… it came about because of being overseas for so long. The mail deadline for sending parcels to the States, and getting them there by Christmas was routinely in October, which meant that I had to be done with shopping by the end of September. Sometimes opportunities to shop were limited, which stretched the shopping season out for a couple of months, and bumped back even thinking about what to get everyone to… oh, say early summer. Spring, even. This set the habit for me, of buying things with an eye towards Christmas… especially if they were on sale, whenever I saw them. “OOhhh, that would be perfect for (insert name here)!”, so add it to the collection in the box on the top shelf of the master suite closet. Christmas… it comes every year, just like April 15th. Putting off doing anything about buying gifts or doing the income tax return will not, will not make either of them go away. Trust me on this.
This has the advantage of being extremely easy on the pocketbook… as long as you remember who the heck you bought something for; a disadvantage with a large family. So, all I have to do during December’s retail madness is to take out the box with the gifts bought throughout the year, and wrap them… in the paper that I bought the week after Christmas of last year when it was marked down 70%.
And put up my feet and have another glass of Chablis. You’re welcome – I live to serve.
(next: Sgt. Mom’s specialty gift Christmas baskets)