Curious Facts You Might Not Have Known

07. October 2006 · Comments Off on Curious Facts You Might Not Have Known · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game

….About the trans-Mississippi West, and the emigrant trails generally

In the interests of my latest �book� I have spent a couple of weeks immersed in a number of books about the American West, and the California and Oregon emigrant trails. The first draft has been completed, actually, and revised, copyrights applied for, and it sits even now on the desk of an agent who is going to read it over and decide if he wants to represent me. Yes, I am chewing my fingernails down to my knuckles, why do you ask?

A couple of friends are reading it also, with an eye towards giving me critical and helpful feedback, so I�ll be able to sit down in another week or so and revise again, add in some more details, descriptions and fill out some of the various characters; hence the heavy reading and research schedule (and light blogging of late).

I have encountered all sorts of amusing things that either I didn�t know, or knew vaguely of, or that are not generally known, except by local historians and enthusiasts. Some of these may come as a great surprise to those who know only of the 19th Century American West through TV shows and movies. Such as:

A flock of sheep was taken along the Oregon Trail in the early 1840ies. And in 1847 a large wagon of nursery stock: approximately 700 live young plants, of various types of fruit and nut trees, and vines. This at a time when it still generally took at least five months to cross two thirds of the North American continent.

Up until the time of the �49 Gold Rush, emigrants to California and Oregon were� well, generally rather bourgeois. The cost of a wagon, stock animals and six months of food supplies tended to sieve out those who couldn�t afford such, unless they chose to work their passage as a teamster or drover.

They also tended to be teetotalers and fairly law-abiding, although one early party to California (Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841) did include an embezzler, escaping attention of the law in New York. His comrades did wonder a bit about the heavy lump of metal that he was at such pains to carry along with him. One did not need quite that much lead shot.

Other than disease… most emigrant deaths were caused by accidents with loaded firearms… and drownding.

There was hardly any trouble with the Indians, until well after the Gold Rush. A bit of petty thievery here and there, which was more of an annoyance than anything else. There is only one instance of a wagon train being attacked directly by Indians on the Oregon-California trail before about 1860. There was quite a lot of Indian-emigrant commerce going on during the 1840ies and 50ies and several tribes actually ran river ferries, at either end of the trails.

The emigrant wagons were pulled mostly by teams of oxen. Not horses. Sometimes mules, but mules cost three times as much as an ox ; and you could always eat the ox, if you got desperate. Three to four pair of oxen per wagon, usually� and the wagon usually carried about 3/4th of a ton to one ton of supplies and gear. Think on this the next time you watch a so-called emigrant wagon in a TV western bounce along, hitched to a single pair of horses.

The Mormon emigrants to the Utah settlements pushed handcarts; small, two-wheeled handcarts. And walked from Council Bluffs to the Salt Lake Valley. But they were organized, and had a lot of assistance and supply channels set up by the LDS church� the only group of emigrants who did.

Emigrant companies formed up and then elected their leaders. Another leader could always be elected, if the first one didn�t work out. Companies often split apart, once on the trail, too.

Quite early on, organized rescue parties began going out from the established communities in Oregon and California in the late fall and early winter bringing water, food, and assistance to emigrants who had broken down, or run out of food on the worst parts of the trail, in the Humboldt Sink, or along the Snake River.

In the 19th century popular wisdom had it that the high plains and the Rocky Mountains were extremely healthy locations: clean, dry air, pure water, and there were a fair number of invalids who came West for reasons of their health. Francis Parkman was only the most famous of them. A large portion of a party in the early 1840ies were in fact, invalids hoping to recover their health in this particularly strenuous fashion.

A teenaged boy, stranded in the Sierras at present-day Donner Lake over the winter of 1844-45 diverted himself with the contents of his brother-in-law�s small library of books, finding particular consolation in a volume of Lord Byron�s poetry, and Lord Chesterfield�s �Letters�. : – o

In California as of 1845, there were 850 foreign males registered as residents, an increase from 150 in 1830: emigrants, deserters from sailing ships, merchants and traders. They seem to have all known each other, or known of each other.

The Russians had an official presence and a small trading post, north of San Francisco, until they pulled up stakes and sold the lot, and a brass cannon too, to John Sutter. They may still be a little sore about this. I remember seeing a Soviet-era English textbook which claimed that they had found gold�. And the perfidious Yankees had stolen it all from them.

There was gold found in California well before 1849. The family of the man who pulled up a wild onion to have with his luncheon tortillas, and found a gold nugget in the roots of it did very well out of this discovery, but had the sense to keep it quiet.

Well, are you amused?

(Comments fixed 10-10: add any other curious and little known facts you may know of in comments
Sgt. Mom)

Reflections on Foleygate

05. October 2006 · Comments Off on Reflections on Foleygate · Categories: General, Pajama Game

The one thing that does rather upset me about Rep. Foley and his apparent inability to keep his hands, metaphorically speaking, off the junior help is how it messes up mentor relationships between teenagers on one hand, and their chances of having a good relationship with an older person not their parental unit. We’ve always known there was an occasional unhealthy or potentially exploitative relationship… and sometimes it was not the older person bringing that to the table, too. Lately it seems like any cross-generational friendship is being looked at with suspicious eyes, and that is not an especially good thing.

Bur it’s good to have boundaries, and it is good that (as it would seem from news reports) that Rep. Foley’s reputation was quietly known amongst the Capitol Hill pages. My high school drama teacher had a quiet reputation like that, too, back in the dawn of time. Snappy dresser, lived with his mother, middle-aged bachelor, flamed a bit obviously. A little worldly wisdom is a good thing; the pages themselves seem to have been sharp enough, and efficient enough to have protected themselves… just as the boys in my high school drama class made sure that if they stayed after school to work on a drama project that there would always be at least three or more of them.

But it does worry me that now we are to the point of viewing every apparently friendly overture from an older person as potentially the first move of a chickenhawk. This just has to poison the pool just that much more, and add one more smidgeon of crappiness to a teenager’s lot. It’s an awkward age, for a variety of reasons; being physically nearly an adult but emotionally nearer to being a child, craving respect and responsibility but not given much of a chance for earning either, the utter pointlessness of much that is taught in school… and then add to it the fact that you are stuck with your peers, for much of each day. Stuck with inane conversations, pointless rivalries, bitter feuds, bullying and mind-games. Feeling ill and over-grown, flushed with too many hormones, and no outlet, and even if you get along with your parents… they are, after all, your parents.

For a lot of teenagers, a friendship with an adult not their parent is a lifeline, and an anchor to sanity, a connection to a real world outside the confines of high school and their peer-group, a reassurance that they can connect with the real world. I remember very clearly thinking that most of my teen-aged peers were total idiots. Many of Blondie’s teen-aged friends also appeared to be idiots. Therefore I conclude that idiocy is rampant between the ages of 13 and 18, and if one doesn’t want to drown in idiocy at that age and go so far over the edge as to see a Columbine episode as a viable alternative , one has to have friends outside one’s immediate age group.

I have always had a conviction that teenagers, in order to get through the worst of it, need more than anything else, friends who are not teenagers themselves, but who have common interests and enthusiasms. It tends to take them out of an insular round of strictly teen-approved interests, encourages them to connect and to get away from that sour view expressed in my youth of “not trusting anyone over thirty.” One of our joint enthusiasms when my daughter and I lived in Utah was a regular meeting of the Salt Lake City Dr. Who Fan Club. About thirty or forty “Whovians” met socially once a month at a member’s house to watch an episode of Dr. Who on video and chat about their mutual liking for the series. I rather liked the “Whovians” by the way; they were much more cerebral and grounded than the Trekfans. One felt that they had fairly successful and interesting lives, and their appreciation for The Doctor was merely an amiable eccentricity, not an overwhelming obsession. Anyway, it gratified me as a parent to notice my daughter’s social assurance, as well as that of some of the other younger “Whovians”. At fourteen, she was much the youngest; I think the next youngest was sixteen, and the ages ranged well up into the seventies. But everyone always had a wonderful time at meetings, interacting as equals and friends, and I thought it was marvelous for the youngest fans, being reassured that there was a way over the walls of the teenage ghetto, and interesting friends on the other side. And at the very least, that one wouldn’t be stuck there forever.

There’s the mentoring aspect, too, which is just as important: How the heck… and from whom are you going to work out what being an adult really is, if all you have is your teenaged idiot peers, and the crazy-house hall of mirrors that is the media? Who can you pattern yourself after? What if your parents are dysfunctional and you do not get along with them? I had friends in the military that were able to find another mentor to pattern themselves upon; I have mentored a friend of Blondie’s whose parents were perfect studies in rotten parenting skills, and any number of young female airmen along the way. Such friends are the fallback position, the rescue, and the second chance at becoming a well-adjusted and functioning adult. That predators can inject themselves into this situation, can extend a pretend hand of friendship and respect and all the while be looking for their own sexual interests… ugh.

That might explain some of the fury about Foley and his ilk; not over what actually happened, but at what he seemed to be trying to do, in exploiting the general interests of the community in the welfare of prospective members of it, and those who might have had very real needs (or not), just for his own personal jollies. In this instance, the sort of teenager who gets to be a Congressional page may be just that more worldly, socially confident, and slightly more adept at recognizing that particular sort of predator. Other teenagers are not so lucky, and consequently, less able to evade that kind of exploitation.

The Inner Martha Strikes Again

03. October 2006 · Comments Off on The Inner Martha Strikes Again · Categories: Domestic, General, Technology

Just as we were fixing dinner on Sunday (pot-roasted chicken with lemon, garlic and rosemary, should anyone be interested) I ran the disposal so it wouldn’t backwash into the dishwasher when I did a load of dishes, but the water kept filling the sink and emptying very slowly. Vigorous action with the plumbers’ friend did not help at all… in fact, it got rather worse. The usual sort of caustic chemical goo emptied down the sink did not help either, although the metal parts of the drain looked amazingly clean following application of the goo. The water would back up, and then drain veeerrrrrryyyy slowly, which was not good. It was good, however, that water or sewage was not emerging anywhere else in the house… like the master bathroom sink, which is what happened last time there was a clog in the main outfall drain a short way downhill of the master bathroom sink. All the other sinks, toilets and bathtubs drained normally.

I am, alas, no stranger to my household plumbing system (said she, laughing hollowly!) I have replaced all three faucet sets in the house, as well as the disposal and the kitchen sink. The last time I had a clog in the main outfall; when several gallons of waste sent down the kitchen sink disposal geysered disgustingly up in the master bathroom sink a few minutes later, it cost me roughly $100, and an afternoon off work to sort it out. But I considered that it was money well spent; not just for the work done, all twenty minutes or so of it, but for the educational value.

Yes, I stood over the roto-rooter man like a deranged stalker girlfriend, watching every move and asking heaps of questions. It did not look like brain surgery or rocket science, and I was damned if I would pay that much money again for something I could jolly well do myself, with the aid of the kindly neighborhood rental equipment place. Oh, yes, they know me almost as well as the hardware store people… it’s where I rented the nailer and compressor when I replaced the fence, a tall ladder to do something or other, the long-handled arbor saw and all those other things one only needs for an hour or so every two or three years. (Northeast Rental Center, on Nacogdoches… ask for Dan. He’ll ask questions to sort out what you need, and then tell you exactly how to operate it.)

The manual snake rented at $15 for three hours. I had it sorted in twenty minutes flat, but I wanted to run a load of dishes through the dishwasher just to make absolutely sure the clog was dislodged. Twenty minutes, fifteen bucks, plus another ten minutes either way to the rental place, plus a morning not spent waiting for a plumber to grace your household with his presence. Works for me, people, works for me.

ROP, Part 2

02. October 2006 · Comments Off on ROP, Part 2 · Categories: General, Good God, GWOT, History, Pajama Game

So, what is it with Islam, these days; Is it really thriving like the green bay tree? Or might the Islamic faith militant, exemplified by Bin Laden and his merry chums, sympathizers and apologists be ridden by a secret terror of their own – that Islam is not growing, powerful, and omnipotent, but flawed at the root, and dying by degrees – a dangerous-looking but essentially hollow show, like the pufferfish? Is it a hollow faith, crumbling by insidious degrees, as it’s commonly assumed tenents are being examined in the spirit of skeptical scholarship? The ferocious reaction to any departure from orthodoxy suggests that the most fanatical believers may fear so, very deeply. Even the scholar of linguistics, Christoph Luxemberg, in his study of influences of the Aramaic language on the Koran must publish under a pseudonym – for his suggestion that translations of the Koran must consider the Aramaic in teasing out exact meanings is as explosive as what devotees of the Prophet strap about themselves, or pack into automobiles as their response to the insults of another extant belief system. And again, the violent response suggests that something more is going on here, something deep and dangerous – but the very violence of the response is enough to make a curious person wonder why? Why so touchy?

Last week on NPR they ran another one of those poor-mouthing stories about the sad plight of Hispanic female converts to Islam and how they must cope with family disapproval, and—horrors! How people look at them funny when they wear a headscarf! NPR seems to love this sort of story, they bang on (and on, and on and on!) about the Poor Muslim having to Cope In Heartlessly Hostile America about as often as they do about the Poor Palestinians Having to Cope with the Brutal Israeli Occupation, demanding our sympathies as if their listening audience were some sort of psychic ATM; swipe the story-card through the slot, here’s another twenty bucks worth of Sympathy for the Chosen Victim Class. I’d love to hear a story, for once, about Amish or Mennonite women having to cope with people giving them the eye-brow lifted look because of their somewhat distinctive and defiantly old-fashioned dress-sense, but that’s just me. And I am also left to wonder – what about converts from Islam? I googled that, this weekend “Islam+converts+from” and got a couple of stories and a query “Do you mean ‘Converts to Islam?'”

Well, no, I meant exactly what I typed in – but considering that conversion from Islam means a death sentence as an apostate – talk about a story that most major news media don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole, and a subject which converts would also prefer to remain untouched. Since exposure as a convert means the death penalty for apostasy, one can hardly blame converts from Islam for being extremely circumspect. Missionaries and ministers to converts also must feel the same need for a similarly subterranean profile but there are still a trickle of accounts and witnesses, mostly from religious organizations. One story which intrigued me when I first read it some years ago was about conversions to Christianity among the Berbers of Algeria – that very quietly, many local Berbers were rejecting Islam as a horrific death cult; in fact, reclaiming their heritage as Christians, which they had been up until the Muslim conquests of the 8th century. (St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica was a Berber Christian.)

There was the briefly famous Afghan convert, and a handful of others, leaving one to wonder how many other converts there are in the shadows, seeking no notice of themselves for fear of being murdered. One also wonders how many outwardly conforming Muslims have quietly declared apostasy in their hearts, going through the outward motions for the sake of their families and a bit of peace and quiet, or have moved to another city, or country and just let the whole thing lapse. There’s probably no way to work out the numbers, but it is food for thought.

Especially since life under a strict Wahabi Islamic rule seems desperately unappealing: Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban and Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors looked more like sort of religious concentration camp, with every pleasure in life, small and large being banned, constrained and forced underground. No wonder that only those who are allowed to exercise power over their fellows seem to look on it with any affection.

This is only a speculation, a working out of various themes and memes in my own mind. But it is different way to look at the whole structure of Islam, and a way to account for the hostility on display every time the followers of the Prophet feel disregarded and to have been offended. It could be that the disproportionate reactions are those of frightened men who feel power trickling out of their fingers, like grains of a handful of sand.

ROP

30. September 2006 · Comments Off on ROP · Categories: General, Good God, GWOT, Pajama Game

(part 1 of 2)
The pufferfish is an odd little creature with mostly poisonous flesh, which has developed as a primary defense, the ability to inflate itself in order to appear larger to predators. In addition, the spiny pufferfish is covered all over it’s body with short bony barbs. In full defense mode, it looks like nothing so much as a small spiky ball, a sort of aquatic porcupine, attempting to look larger and more combative, more dangerous than it actually is. I was reminded of these qualities this week when I read something apropos of the latest Muslim hissy-fit over Pope Benedicts’ mildly stated observation as regards violence and Islam. I am not quite sure where I read it, or anything but the general thrust of the suggestion, which was in a way, revolutionary.

What if Islam is not a strong, vibrant and attractive faith, growing like some sort of theological kudzu, sweeping all before it? What if it is actually a hollow construct, under stress from a number of directions, seeming strong but in reality fragile, riven throughout with tiny cracks, and teetering on the edge of implosion? What if the frequent explosions of violence at the slightest of critical voices were not a demonstration of power and strength, but of tamped-down fear – fear that if the orthodoxy is questioned or defied, then the whole construct will come crashing down in ruins? What if the whole structure of Islam is actually shivering on its foundations, and the whole bloody-handed constellation of imams and ayatollahs, of shaheeds and jihadists know and fear that, down in the pit of their souls? That the whole thing is a sham, based on the maunderings of a desert bandit, pulled from bits of this or that, for his own aggrandizement? What if the whole jihad against the West is the last spectacular lashing out of those who know in their hearts that if the roots of Islam are ever questioned, then doubt will set in, and the whole edifice come crashing down – and that quietly, here and there, the faithful are slipping away, and ever more would join them but for the threat of death for apostasy.

This is an interesting train of thought; as Eric Hoffer pointed out decades ago in his study of fanatical belief, The True Believer – a certain sort of fanatic is driven by secret doubts of his or her own abilities or qualities. The most violently inclined towards homosexuals, for example, may be someone who may in their deepest and most private part of the mind feel homosexual urges, and is then shamed and horrified by them. The most virulent advocate of racial superiority, for example, may be the one who at heart has doubts about himself – and reacts with special brutality against a member of what is supposed to view as a lesser race who yet exemplifies more superior qualities than himself. For myself, I have always observed that someone who was entirely comfortable in themselves and in their deeply-held beliefs was not threatened by someone who did not share them – and certainly not threatened enough to erupt in threats and violence.

Ages ago, I read Bernard Lewis – The Roots of Muslim Rage, when it first was published in Atlantic Magazine. I made a total pest of myself to my friends, because I ran around with my tattered copy (this was at about the start of the first Gulf War) saying “See! this is what makes them so angry with us!!!” It seemed only the sensible, empathetic way of looking at it then, and still does now: that the Islamic world, once so powerful, glorious, famed for tolerance, scholarship and culture, was diminished and shattered. That men who had been told all their lives that they were the righteous and blessed, should look around and see that their world was diminished, powerless and ridden by disease and ignorance, and should at once seek for a reason that this should be the way of things, that there should be a reason for this. And of course, it is always easier to find a reason – that the rich and powerful should be so because they had cheated, or were empowered by Satan. There could not possibly be any fault in Islam or in those who followed the faith most perfectly for they were chosen and favored by God, in being submissive to him. It was entirely understandable to me, with a great deal of sympathy and regret, that of course, those who thought themselves so chosen must be looking around and observing that most of the lands where Islam ruled were plagued with poverty, disease, ignorance and autocrats. Even those in the Middle East who sat on a lot of oil reserves were not in all that much better a shape. Only so much can be imported and paid for with oil money.

Being carefully raised in the Lutheran tradition and somewhat of a history nut as well, I had been schooled in the history of the Protestant Reformation. I knew very well how the great unified fortress of the medieval Catholic Church began fracturing once the Bible began to be translated from Latin into the various vernaculars spoken across Europe. It was revolutionary not just because ordinary people could read it for themselves, without the intercession of a priestly authority – but because a great many clever people had to sit down and work out for themselves exactly what each word, each phrase, each sentence actually meant. Ambiguities had to be resolved, alternate versions of varying antiquity had to be consulted – there’s nothing like a translation for thrashing out meaning from a text. The authority and power of one holy, catholic and apostolic church shattered on the rock of textual analysis – something that is just now beginning to happen with the Koran. Again in The Atlantic, I found a fascinating article about the work of various scholars, just beginning to analyze the Koran with the same attention and care long given to the Old and New Testaments. (link to article here)

But the Koran may not be translated, examined, analyzed – merely accepted whole and entire, memorized and recited. For what dangerous heresies and doubts might emerge then?

(to be continued)

*Original Atlantic link is for subscribers only

Lieberman Interview

29. September 2006 · Comments Off on Lieberman Interview · Categories: General, Home Front, Politics, World

PJ Media interview with Sen. Joseph Lieberman here.
(Gee, does this mean PJ Media is close to the big time? Is there any reflected glory for us to bask in?)

Green Stamps

27. September 2006 · Comments Off on Green Stamps · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

I don’t know what brought it on, remembering green stamps and blue stamps, and those thin little books that you glued them in to… possibly emptying all those receipts from the grocery store out of my purse, especially those wadded up ones that accumulate down at the bottom. Heck, is that one from the hair-cut place where if you bring in the last receipt again they give you a dollar off? Maybe I had been reading one of Lilek’s little musings about paper ephemera, and it all came together; the memory of Granny Jessie folding her receipts and a long perforated block of green S & H stamps neatly into her purse, and all those times when we were considered slightly older and more responsible, and dispatched to Don’s Market on Rosemead (about a block south of the intersection of Rosemead and Colorado Boulevard) which had had Granny Jessie’s grocery-buying custom for the best part of three decades, with a couple of dollars for some small item, and strict orders to bring back the change and the stamps.

When was the last time I ever saw a block or a string of trading stamps? Mom didn’t patronize grocery stores that offered them, but Granny Jessie did, and most likely Granny Dodie did also. It must have been sometime in the early seventies; by the time I came back to the States to live for good, trading stamps had gone the way of home milk delivery and those wire baskets with glass milk bottles that used to sit on front porches across the last. Which is to say, along with the dodo and passenger pigeon, except in certain very rare neighborhoods. They were a customer rebate scheme dreamed up early in the century just now over, intended to build customer loyalty, and keep the regular customers coming back, again and again and again. That description fit Granny Jessie to a tee. She patronized the same grocery and department store, the same shoe store, the same church and the same doctor for most of her long adult life, from the time she and Grandpa Jim married in the early twenties, until she went to live in Long Beach, in the Gold Star Mother’s home, fifty years later. According to this entry, they were given out mostly by grocery stores, department stores and gas stations. There were several different kinds, and colors of them. I remember S & H Green, and another sort which was blue; both were about an inch long, half an inch wide, perfed and gummed, and given out at the rate of a single stamp for every ten cents spent.

I do remember Granny Jessie sometimes had great long sheets of them, which must have come from Hertels’ on Colorado, where she had an account for as many years as she was a customer of Don’s Market. And Grandpa Jim must have gotten strings and blocks of them when he bought gas for the ancient Plymouth sedan which he had to sell after being rumbled by the local traffic cop when he made a left-hand turn from Colorado Boulevard onto South Lotus Avenue… from the right-hand lane of Colorado Boulevard. Grandpa Jim’s indignantly voiced plea that he had performed the turn in that manner every day for nearly thirty years cut no ice with the Pasadena constabulary, especially when they discovered that his license was several years expired and he was nearly blind, anyway.

Back to the trading stamps…. They had to be dampened and pasted into the pages of thin little books, so many a page, which was nice and easy when it meant the long sheets, earned when Granny Jessie had spent a lot on groceries and Christmas presents, but was not so easy when you had to paste the little strings and small blocks of stamps gleaned from many small purchases. This was rather finicky and tedious work, which may be why Grannie Jessie saved it all up for JP and I to do, when we came for a visit. She had a great lot of empty stamp books and a bundle of stamps in a drawer in the kitchen hutch. It would be our job, to sit down at the kitchen table with a damp sponge set onto an old china saucer, and fit stamps onto the pages of the blank book. This meant working in several months worth of stamps, tearing off the large blocks at the perfs, and fitting together the smaller quantities in order to completely fill in the page.

And this was entirely worthwhile from Grannie Jessie’s point of view, because the filled books could be taken around to the S & H Green Stamp store…. Which was, I think, on Rosemead, close to Don’s Market, and redeem the filled books for various bits of consumer merchandise; plates and saucepans, serving dishes, appliances large and small, furniture large and small. I have a distinct memory of Granny Jessie saving up her filled Green Stamp books for some rather substantial piece of household fittings, a television even. Probably much of what passed for luxury goods in the tiny white house on South Lotus, with the enormous oak tree in the front yard, came from Granny Jessie’s careful collection of stamps.

Mom had no truck with them at all, though; she was of the opinion that the stores that offered them were more expensive than those which didn’t, and Mom shopped on a strictly lowest-price-available agenda, no fancy fripperies like Green Stamps need apply for Mom’s household dollar. And furthermore, she had no time to fiddle around with pasting stamps into a book… and that is probably what led to the decline and fall of the whole scheme, although it does linger in several different and less cumbersome formats.

Deluged!

26. September 2006 · Comments Off on Deluged! · Categories: General, Good God, Site News

We have been deluged with another tidal flood of automated spam, all of it offering a number of semi-legal, quasi-legal and possibly-barely-legal services, commodites, and experiences.

I have had to add a number of new words to the totally banned/instantly nuked list, and another number of words to the held-f0r-review list.

There have been comments held over, and not appearing for a while, and some which may have been nuked. Sorry. Repost. And if your comment included some questionable language, or references to insurance, prescription drugs, or assorted possibly x-rated personal services… maybe do the old-fashioned thing, first and last letters and dashes for all the letters in between?

Or something.

My life is busy enough, I don’t need to turn on the computer at 5:00 AM and begin bailing out 150 spam comments, at least two thirds of which have references to beastility, shaved nether regions and drugs of dubious provenance.

An Obit

25. September 2006 · Comments Off on An Obit · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, GWOT, History, Military, War

One of the original military female “old breed”. Wish I had known her, but I didn’t. A Reservist. Exactly my age. A “first” in a lot of respects, according to this.

Link courtesy of “Rantburg“.

Ye Choose and Ye Do Not Choose

25. September 2006 · Comments Off on Ye Choose and Ye Do Not Choose · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Good God, GWOT, Pajama Game

Well, watching the all-Islamic spazz-out as regards Pope Benedict’s recent suggestion that violent coercion had no place in leading the individual towards a particular religious belief has afforded me a number of opportunities for cynical amusement: the indignant demand that the Pope be fired for his disregard for Moslem sensibilities was one, and the demand from a group of Pakistani clerics (very obviously not the sharpest scimitars in the drawer) that the Pope Benedict formally debate a collection of Moslem scholars, and snappily upon being defeated by logic and reason, himself convert to Islam was just another item in a rich banquet of shadenfreude.

It’s almost as comic as President Ahmedinajad demanding that President Bush convert to Islam himself… in hopes probably, that the entire US would follow after. Ah, the frustration of those who are just bloody-mindedly sure that they are right, and it is only perversity and ignorance that prevents everyone else from seeing it… but enough about the far-left of the Democratic Party, I was talking about those representatives of the “Religion of Peace” who seem to be all over the headlines of late. (Enable extreme sarcasm mode) That 98% of whom it is said, give all the others a bad name. (End extreme sarcasm mode)

The sheer gall and towering ignorance combined and on display is such a dense confection that it probably pulls light into itself and wanders through the universe as a nascent black hole. One can easily understand how a barely literate imam from the wilds of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia can achieve such a such a monumental mass of misunderstanding about the West’s religious beliefs, or supposed lack thereof. But when Sayd Qtub, supposedly one of Islam’s great modern political thinkers managed to see every sort of licentiousness and depravity in a church sock-hop in teetotal Greeley, Colorado in the late 1940ies, one is not inclined to expect too much out of Qtub’s intellectual heirs or their powers of observation. Alas, large chunks of Western media and intellectuals, to include our own very dear bi-coastal types, also manage to comprehensively miss or misinterpret the religious mores of heartland America, so I don’t suppose I can expect much from the Seething Islamic Street ™.

So, here we go, one more time, for the benefit of those who have, perhaps supped too deeply of the BBC and it’s ilk: Yes, America is religious, to a greater extent than the cultured and secular types consider seemly. But please, please stop with the old game of picking out some congregation of freaks like Fred Phelps, or any other assortment of fundamentalist nutjobs, Elmer Gantry-ish televangelists begging for dollars from their mega-church’s cable TV station, or some credulous hick who sees the Virgin Mary’s face in an oil slick, or a pancake or some other bit of ephemera… and implying that they are just typical of all devout Americans. They are not… they are, in fact, atypical, and we have been pointing our fingers and snickering at them for decades.

By the way, just to demolish another sweaty intellectual fantasy, there is no way on earth that a single bread-and-butter fundamentalist sect could ever take over the US, a la “Handmaids’ Tale”, other than in Margaret Atwood’s feverish dreams. There are just too many other sects, synods, denominations, congregations, or whatever, most of whom rather cherish their own particular idiosyncrasies, and many of which have, in the past, fought like cats in a sack. Look, you can describe both the Amish and the Mormons as being rather conservative and old-fashioned, but aside from the fact that they both have large numbers of adherents living in the US, that’s about all they have in common. Even the Lutherans have two opposing synods, both of whom view each other with deep suspicion. Frankly, the only way that Americans would ever conform to a single, over-arching religious belief would be at gunpoint, and very possibly not even then. Most of us, though, are unostentatious in our beliefs, or lack of them, and are somewhat suspicious of those who are not. Our houses of worship will probably never attract the attention of a BBC producer… nothing to titillate or tut-tut.

A church community of some kind or other has been the mainstay of American life since before the beginning of the Republic. Most of them came to these shores as refugees from religious orthodoxy in the places they originated; and while some of them were not averse to imposing their own orthodoxy, most did not care for having orthodoxy imposed upon them by others. This may yet be the hard rock upon which the wave of Islam breaks, that Qutb and Bin Laden and their ilk do not see, because they were too busy looking at the flashy vulgarity of popular American or Western culture, and never saw the bedrock underneath.

So let them bluster, demand away, stamp their feet in Peshawar, or Mecca, or Qom, and expect the arrival of the 12th Imam, and demand submission; in the meantime, we are watching.

“Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!”

Sky Sisters

21. September 2006 · Comments Off on Sky Sisters · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, Technology, Wild Blue Yonder

I listened to a story on NPR this week, about the finding of the wreck of the Macon, one of the great navigatable dirigibles that for a time – or so the great minds of the early 20th century assumed – would give a run for their money to aircraft. For quite a long time, beginning with the Montgolfier brothers, it was assumed that various forms of lighter-than-air constructions were the wave of the future – not those fragile little mosquitoes that were the prototypical airplanes. From just before WWI, and for some time after, it looked like dirigibles would be the kings of commercial aviation, the seas patrolled, and the continents spanned commercially by luxuriously outfitted air-liners. Images of great silver airships are ubiquitous in commercial art, and futuristic visions throughout the 20ies and 30ies; the Empire State building, after all, was topped with a mast from which it was fondly hoped to moor dirigibles. (The thought of disembarking from a passenger liner moored there, and tripping merrily along some kind of walkway down to the observation deck is enough to give any acrophobic a case of the screaming willies, though, which may be why it never came to pass.)

The Germans had developed such rigid-framed airships late in the 19th century, and used them extensively during WWI, first as bombers, notably targeting London and Paris. They were huge lumbering craft, capable of traveling great distances and staying aloft for many hours. Alas, they were also slow and un- agile, which made them splendid targets in offensive operations – and they also burned spectacularly when struck, since they were usually filled with hydrogen gas. Although such aircraft with a variety of types of frames, or no frames at all went on being used throughout the war, they were more utilized for observation, or on ocean-going patrols. But when the war was over, it looked like the day for long-distance rigid-framed aircraft had dawned.

The British built a series of them, one of which was the first to make a trans-Atlantic round trip, in slightly less than 200 hours, in 1919. That craft, and its successor both crashed and burned spectacularly, as did an Italian-manufactured dirigible purchased at around that time by the US Navy. In 1923, the Navy built an entirely rigid-framed aircraft designed to be lifted by helium, the Shenandoah, the first such entirely built in the United States. Two years later, while on a publicity tour in the Midwest, the Shenandoah was caught in a violent thunderstorm and ripped into three pieces. The command cabin dropped like a rock, killing all in it, including the Shenandoah’s commander, but the stern and bow sections floated down more gently. Crewmen in the bow section called out to a farmer on the ground below to grab ropes trailing from the nose and tie them to a tree, and when everyone had slid to safety, brought shotguns for the survivors to use to puncture the helium cells.

Another dirigible manufactured in Germany and delivered to the US as part of war reparations was renamed the Los Angeles; fitted out as a passenger liner, with Pullman staterooms and bunks, it made over 200 uneventful trips, mostly to Puerto Rico and South America. An Italian semi-rigid airship called the Norge, fitted out by a scientific expedition flew from Spitsbergen, Norway to Teller Alaska by way of the North Pole in 1926: it would have been the very first aircraft to fly over the North Pole, but for Richard Byrd in an airplane, three days earlier. the Norge, and part of it’s crew was subsequently lost on another flight over the Pole, two years later.

But enthusiasm ran high during the mid-Twenties, regardless. Progress would always be a little bumpy, seemed to be the prevailing mood, and all these problems would be worked out, eventually. The American company Goodyear was granted certain patent rights related to dirigible construction, and began work on two more dirigibles for the US Navy, the Akron and Macon. They would be essentially flying aircraft carriers, capable of launching and retrieving four or five single-engine patrol airplanes from a hanger-bay equipped with a trapeze-like winch.

In the meantime, the British government launched a great project to build two enormous dirigibles, the R100 and the R101, which would be the largest in the world with accommodations for 100 passengers. The Germany Zeppelin firm had begun to recover enough to launch an enormous airship named after its founder. The Graf Zeppelin would be the first airship to circumnavigate the globe, and with it’s successors, partake in regular scheduled transatlantic passenger service. It was hoped that the British R 100 and R 101 would similarly expand passenger service: the R 100 flew to Canada and back, with no other event that being caught in a storm. On return, it was put into a hanger, pending return of the R 101 from it’s maiden voyage to India. But the R 101, plagued by technical problems and forced to fly too low in compensation, clipped a church steeple and crashed in flames near Beauvais, France early in 1930, with the loss of nearly all on board. The British government quietly pulled the plug on subsequent airship construction; so later did the US Congress. The Akron, launched with great hopes in 1931 was caught in a violent storm off New Jersey two years later, with the loss of all but a handful of its crew. The Macon, put into service at the same time was also caught in a storm, this one off the California coast near Monterey in 1935. Most of the Macon’s crew survived, and the wreckage of it and the patrol aircraft it carried, has just recently been located on the sea-bed.

The spectacular loss of the Hindenburg, two years after the crash of the Macon, only added to public misgivings, although the argument has been made that the great airships were doomed, by increasing competition from commercial airplane services and the coming of a new war, where conventional air craft would be of far more use. But the fairly constant series of spectacular airship disasters probably darkened the public and the political view, too. In the long run, airplanes may have been as much at a hazard, the development of air services just as rocky, and the cumulative casualties just as many. But there was enormous prestige placed in those few great dirigible projects, and great expectations by the public made the various disasters all the more public and crushing. It would have been as if over half the Mercury or Gemini flights launched by NASA had failed spectacularly in mid-flight. No matter what the prestige involved with dirigibles, or the lofty goals, a lot of people just quietly decided it just cost too much, even if it wasn’t a technological dead end in the first place. Now there are only a few places where you can stand, and imagine a great silver craft, hovering overhead, or being winched into a huge hanger: this great hanger at Moffit Field, near San Jose is one of them. And now the underwater wreck of the Macon may be the largest piece of interwar aviation history still identifiable on earth.

Reader Kaj added this comment, which was deleted in in my haste to clear out an accumulation of 30o auto-spam-comments this morning 9-29-06

“Admiral Byrds claims of being first to the pole by air are at best a bit
tenuous. The first undoubted crossing was by Norge, incidentally making Roald
Amundsen(and crew) the first, and the first to be on both poles.
I would have liked to refer to Wikipedia, but their page on admiral Byrd has
been used by hollow earth conspirazoids, claiming Byrd found the entrance to the
inner earth(!).
So much for Wikipedia credibility. ” – Sgt Mom

All Apologies

21. September 2006 · Comments Off on All Apologies · Categories: Fun and Games, General, Good God, GWOT, sarcasm

So, Pope Benedict’s apology for having the temerity to point out that Islam is kinda, sorta, just a tad bit on the violent and coercive side, and that such coercion is something that Christians do not find logically defensible is not acceptable?

Well, since it was one of those “I’m sorry you were offended by what I said” sort of apologies, yeah, I can see that you have the right to seeth and whine, and burn churches and shoot elderly nuns in the back. So, how about a real apology… (Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!)

I am so sorry that you lunkheads wouldn’t know a logical theological disputation if it up and bit you on the butt.

I am sorry that large numbers of you are so illiterate that you believe any old load of old shoes that the imam tells you in the Friday sermon.

I am sorry that most of you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and an underdeveloped sense of logic, technological skills, and smell.

I am sorry that a fair number of you want to turn Western Europe right back into the disease ridden, violence plagued, and autocratically ruled hellholes that you crawled out of.

I am sorry that your much-vaunted Caliphate was built, and maintained by a reliance on treachery, war, plunder, and the brutal oppression and economic skinning of various conquered peoples, and that when what had been conquered was squeezed dry, and the march of Islamic armies towards new sources of plunder was halted, it still took a couple of hundred years for it to rot from the inside.

I am sorry that your standing armies can’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag, and that a nation and people you despise hand your own asses to you on a silver platter, every damn time. That must be so depressing for you… try valium.

I am sorry that all you have is a lot of oil, and limitless reserves of resentment. Wait until the oil runs out, my little desert chickadees, and there is no more money to buy western technology, medical treatments, and all those pretty baubles that you can’t build yourself because the education of your best minds (such as they are) is focused on memorizing the Koran!

I am sorry that I have to open the internet pages and read about Australians being blown up in Bali, teachers in Thailand being beheaded, the rape of Scandinavian school girls, the burning of cars in Paris suburbs, Afghan and Iraqi children blown up by car bombs, Spanish and English commuters exploded by bombs in backpacks left on trains, ad nauseum.

I am sorry you can’t just stay in the 7th century and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

OK, is that better, as apologies go? You’re welcome. I live to serve.

(Ok, so I am betting on Timmer or Paul recognizing the inspiration for this rant within 3 seconds reading it….)

Also posted at Blogger News Network

(Re-posted and re-titled… something about the title wouldn’t allow comments)

Apostasy in Black & White

17. September 2006 · Comments Off on Apostasy in Black & White · Categories: Domestic, General, Memoir, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!

My parents stoutly held out against the menace of television until the late 60ies, when they accepted the gift of a tiny black and white portable television from a good friend who was moving into a smaller place and had to shed possessions to make that transition. The television itself was about the size of a case of beer, and since Mom had very firm convictions regarding the trashiness, aesthetic and otherwise, of putting a television in the living room and angling all the chairs towards it, the television was banished to the bedroom that my sister and I shared.

The television, with its miniature 12″ screen sat on top of one of the long toy chests that Dad had built to maximize space in our room, and we generally piled onto the bottom bunk bed to watch, during those limited hours per week that Mom had decreed would do the least damage to our school work, family life and general social development. We also had to thrash out a compromise amongst ourselves about what to watch on Friday and Saturday evenings from 7:30 to 10:00 PM, and on Sunday from 7:30 to 9:00 PM. (School on Monday morning, you know.) Generally, if a program aired at any other time than that, we knew it not; or only during summer vacation when we caught up on other programs through re-runs, or visited my grandparents.

So we were television apostates: but I was secretly even more than an apostate. As far as one particular TV icon went, I was a perfect heretic. I wondered for ages what would happen to me, should I ever confess my deep and heartfelt loathing for a certain ground-breaking star of early network television. But I digress.

At Granny Jessie’s house, and at Granny Dodie and Grandpa Al’s, the television— generally a large console model— sat boldly and unashamed in the living room. Grandpa Al even ventured into exploring the wide world of color television, somewhat in advance of the neighborhood, but they drew the line about watching TV during the day; feeling as Mom did that really, one ought to have better things to do during the day.
Oddly enough, Grannie Jessie had no such compunctions, or perhaps thought that by putting no limits on our TV watching during our visits, that we would become surfeited. Generally, she kicked us outside when her soaps came on, and we would stumble outside, blinking at the daylight, dazzled by the real world. After spending hours focusing on the comparatively small, surreal and black and white one, we would be cast on our own inner resources for amusement, and always be at a bit of a loss for a while.

One of the classic television standbys at the time were re-runs of even older television shows – especially reruns of ancient episodes of I Love Lucy. This has always been fawningly described as ground-breaking, insanely popular, luminescently humorous and a veritable Mount Everest in broadcast television. Lucille Ball is similarly worshipped as a genius of comedy, a master of her own image, genius of physical comedy and a canny business-woman, blah, blah blah – and I didn’t accept a word of it – well, maybe the business-woman part. And she was still making movies and television shows well after I Love Lucy, so it appeared that people did, indeed, love Lucy.

But not me. From my earliest memory of watching that show, I was horrified, and embarrassed at the spectacle of ineptitude presented. It wasn’t funny, charming, or amusing – it was cringe-making,pointless – even a bit masochistic. Watching I Love Lucy meant observing a very pretty but spectacularly dim woman make a grandiose and impossible plan, screw it up in every way imaginable, and then bawl her head off in a totally unattractive manner, until her exasperated husband made everything better – in half-hour chunks. I usually felt like blowing chunks, two thirds into the episode. It wasn’t funny – it was a train wreck of ineptitude. Not only did I not find any of it in the least amusing, it made me embarrassed to be of the same sex.

Laughing at Lucy seemed to me like laughing at a retard; kind of cruel, when the decent thing should have been to look away and pretend that you hadn’t seen her embarrassing herself, her friends and her husband once again. And this was – what? Classic television? At any rate it set up in me a burning desire not to look stupid, never to be incompetent, to view situations with a coolly realistic eye, and never, never, ever cry noisily and expect anyone else to rescue you from the consequences of your own stupidity. Which as good a reason to have developed into a small ‘f’ feminist as any other available.

Not only did I not love Lucy, I couldn’t figure out why the hell anyone did, either.

Say, How About a Nice Car-B-Que?

15. September 2006 · Comments Off on Say, How About a Nice Car-B-Que? · Categories: General, Good God, GWOT, Rant

Oh, dear, the fabled Islamic Street is seething ….Again

Considering the sort of venomous and spiteful abuse of Christians and Jews that mosques and the more spittle-flecked imams dish out every Friday, reactions from the Islamic world on Pope Benedict’s remarks are… I don’t know, a little unbalanced?

Talk about being able to dish it out, but not be the least able to take it… when it comes to disputation of theological issues, the Religion of Peace has the greatest glass jaw of all time.

The funniest thing about the Affair of the Danish Cartoons? Aside from the manner in which most of the western press retreated at speed and in Keystone Cops disorganization, from defending the sacred principle of the “Freedom of the Press” and “The People Have a Right to Know”… well, that would have been the mildness of the cartoons themselves. Swear to my wholly orthodox and Lutheran Church version of the Deity, I’ve seen stuff with more bite in last week’s “Family Circle” comic. We’re talking mild, folks. Skim milk mild.

So now, the Pontiff of the Catholic Church has some… well, considering some of the things they called Martin Luther, back in the day… rather mildly phrased criticism of Mohammed, and the Islamic street goes ballistic? It seems like everything, real or imagined makes the Islamic street go ballistic, but never mind. Grow some skin, guys. Seriously. Realize that this toleration thing is two-way. You want some serious respect for your beliefs? Try reciprocating a little. Maybe plant a synagogue in Saudi, and gag some of the really rabble-rousing Friday sermons from the Friendly Neighborhood Imam with the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion playbook. At the very least, knock off the shouts of “Islam is a religion of peace… and if you don’t agree with is, we’ll kill you!”

And you can knock off the “carbecues”, any time now. Think of what all those burning cars to for that global warming thingy…

(also posted at “Blogger News Network“)

So You Heard…

13. September 2006 · Comments Off on So You Heard… · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game, Working In A Salt Mine...

…The one about the guy who was down in the dumps, and they told him…”Cheer up, things could get worse!” So, he cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse!

Well, it’s not that bad… actually it is, if not bad, at least semi-OK. I am coming down the home-stretch on the “book” first draft, which is the hardest part, I think. Just half a chapter and the present-day bookend-closer to go, explaining what happened to everyone. I think I will have it done by Friday… and then I will go back and polish vigorously. There are some people and sub-plots I want to flesh out a little more, and some characters who really started to come clear in the last half, so I must go back and fill out their terribly sketchy introductions, and make a more concerted effort to juggle a few more characters: there are eight or nine male characters who are extremely significant to the story, four female characters, ditto, and one child. Three, if you count the babies. And a cute bit with a dog. Then there are another dozen supporting characters, as it were, fleeting glimpses of certain historic places along the trail, and a lot business about wagons and ox-teams, though I don’t think I will need to include a recipe for fox, pot-roasted in a Dutch oven. (Excellent eating, by historical accounts, although that may have only been in comparison to coyote, which apparently was totally vile, no matter what the method of cooking employed.)

Everyone who has read a couple of chapters has said, “Omigawd, what a terrific story… and why did I never hear about these people, before?” This is a rather gratifying reaction. It means that it is not one of those things which as been done to death, and thus would have the charm of the unusual. Or, so I hope. So far, though, only Dad has read the entire manuscript to date, and has provided much useful feed back on the flora and fauna of the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada. (Note to self: write in some observations about pinon pines. And sage. Lots and lots of sage.) Dad also wants to know a bit more about the half-dozen or so hired men, who were working their way as drovers, or as teamsters. Since they didn’t have the wherewithal to buy a wagon, stock, and the necessary supplies, they worked for their food and board for those who did. Pre 1849 Gold Rush, emigration to California and Oregon was a fairly expensive enterprise; those who ventured it were usually pretty solid and stable citizens… in contrast to many other stereotypical frontier types. (Note #2 to self… put in a bit about the hired men.)

The last month, as I work away on the story have been the most terrific fun, and I am enormously grateful for having been let go from the last job… the one I had for all of seven months. I’ve temped a couple of days here and there, but came to realize that I… Well, I don’t hate it…I just don’t care for it any more. I want to be at home, sitting at the computer in the corner of the bedroom, immersed in the 19th century, with the Weevils sleeping on the floor and Sammie and Perce on the bed. I can only think my last employer perhaps was picking up on this attitude. Certainly, I was very close to snapping “The copier is over there, and you’re legs aren’t painted on!” whenever someone asked me to make a couple of copies of this and such.

I’ve still got the weekend shift at the radio station, and a couple of hours paid work three times weekly, writing for another blog-enterprise… plus the pension, and Blondie’s VA and GI Bill benefits. She started school at the beginning of the month, at a local community college which reportedly is a feeder into the veterinary medicine program she wants. So far, so good. Most of the professors seem to have high standards, and be fairly exacting; I have always entertained the suspicion that a junior college may be actually, the best place around to, I don’t know, maybe actually learn something? It does not have the cachet of the acclaimed institutes of higher so-called-learning, but it doesn’t have the price-tag, either, and Blondie is enormously happy to be in school, working toward the goal of being Dr. Blondie, DVM, at long last.

September has been a sort of holding month for us, a time for me to work away on the completed first draft, which the interested (and legitimate) literary agent has indicated would be sufficient proof of my commitment as a first-timer to actually producing a finished manuscript. It seems that August is the silly season in publishing. The publishers come back from their summer holidays in the Hampshires, or Nantucket or the Cape, or wherever during September, and look to have something brilliant on their desks, so the literary agents are working like dogs throughout August, polishing their best efforts like big shiny apples. He loved the sample chapter, though. And I feel good, about the whole project. I am just a long way down on his pile of stuff “to do”.

Oh, and the “things got worse” bit. Some idiot took my bank card information, and tried to charge $10,000.00 worth of merchandise to some on-line enterprise I have never heard of, much less done business with. Being fairly sharpish and observant when uncharacteristic charges are made… my bank very swiftly put a stop on my card. I can only wish that I could be in the bracket where this kind of thing would pass unnoticed, but I am not. It was damned embarrassing, at Huge Enormous Big-Ass Grocery, when my card wouldn’t go through for $20 bucks worth of dog-food, when I was fairly sure I had more than enough in the household account to cover. It will take a week or so to sort it all out, and not only restore the funds that I had, and send me a new card, but restore my access to the household account funds. In the meanwhile, another reason to stay at home and work away on “The Book”.

The Towers of Remembrance

11. September 2006 · Comments Off on The Towers of Remembrance · Categories: General, GWOT, History

It has been a beautiful day, here in South Texas, fair and a little warmer than most people favor for autumn days, but there you are. We do things differently here. Five years, half a decade, hardly any time at all in one sense – but a child born just after that shattering day is now old enough to go to school this fall, and a child old enough to be aware of what had happened is well into middle school or junior high school, and to them it is something that happened a long, long time ago.

The towers have never really been, for them, and for the rest of us, five years is long enough to grow accustomed to living in that other country. We are reminded of the WTC towers thought, almost ritually this time of year – and even when the reminders cease, they will continue to haunt September for many of us, most likely for the rest of our lives, unless superseded by some greater horror. Every once in a while, the towers appear unexpectedly, serendipitiously , and we can look back over the great gash across our days, and marvel at the time when they were just a part of the cityscape, the backdrop to hundreds of movies: the final scene of the animated feature Antz, and again and again in Men in Black, and Sleepless in Seattle – to mention just a few.

There was a great to-do in some circles, about removing them electronically from movies in which they featured, which were released or re-released after 9/11, which I think is kind of foolish. They were there once, and so were the lives of those people lost in them, and at the Pentagon, and on the four aircraft, and now they are gone. Might we have reached the point where we are better served by those little, fleeting glimpses and private memories, rather than a great clunky over-developed monument of bureaucratic taste genuflecting to political expediency and the whims of trendy architects? Not up to me, fortunately. But I wrote this, two years ago, and think it even more relevant now�
More »

At the Point of a Gun

09. September 2006 · Comments Off on At the Point of a Gun · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, World

I know that I am leaping into this very late – after all, it was so like whatever – last weeks’ tempest du blog, the kerfuffle as regards the two journalists kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza, and forced to win their release by being videoed avowing their conversion to the Islamic faith – at gunpoint. But I have been spending this week, buried in the 19th Century, in a snow camp in the Sierras, writing about imminent starvation, and perils that – well, to me this week, were a little more present in my mind. I’m focused on the next book, ‘kay? Being that I grew up in a world that was more than half convinced that Omigawd! the dirty Commies would rain down nuclear annihilation on us all , and now residing in one where even less-well-adjusted parties are freely brandishing a nuclear threat – well being stuck in the Sierra Nevada with dwindling food supplies and no rescue in sight seemed to have the charm of the unusual, as well as being – well, somewhat more manageable. In the 19th Century, one seems mostly to have had a little more time to consider the news cycle, as it were, and to proceed thoughtfully and deliberately down whatever paths of thought were presented to one. I am still buried in a mind-set which took a written letter a whole year to move from Monterey or Los Angeles, to the Middle West. I assure you, the 19th Century has certain discreet charms, once you adjust to a slower pace.

The resulting kerfuffle with representative opposing parties sounding forth, here (David Warren) and here (Captain Ed) seems to devolve around not so much the actual conversion, but the reluctance of the parties involved, to make clear they had been under duress, and/or denounce their treatment. Depending on whom you take sides with, it was either an understandable ruse to gain their freedom and lives – or the most horrible of capitulations, with serious of ramifications imaginable in the much-storied Seething Moslem Street – and then there are people like me, in the middle of the road, like the storied yellow stripes and dead armadillos, saying “But yes, to save their lives – but on the other hand, doesn’t that send some sort of signal – do you think? And what happens, next time – and what about -? –

Because, you see, it’s all about what you’ll give up, when someone points a gun at you. And as to what you’ll do in that circumstance, the truth of it is no one really knows what they would do. All we know is that other people have done, in some analogous situation. And some of those people have been most amazingly brave, have exhibited a degree of heroism and moral clarity that approaches – well something beyond what we have come to think of as merely human. And some people have been craven, and most of the rest of us have muddled through, and the great unifying principal of this kind of moral score-keeping is that one really never knows for sure, until one has actually faced the experience.

A story, from the Warsaw Ghetto, c1942-43: a party of German soldiers, SS or Gestapo, or whatever, amuse themselves by going into the Ghetto and make sport with the Jewish prisoners in it (and they were prisoners by the time of this story) by going to a coffee-shop next to a synagogue, rounding up the patrons and holding them at gun-point, while they ransack the synagogue and bring out the Torah. One by one and at gunpoint, they order each of the coffee-shop patrons to desecrate the Torah. One by one, each of them does: old-fashioned devout Jew, or modern and secular intellectual, young or old, each of the coffee-shop patrons does what they are bidden to do by the men who are holding guns at their heads, who have given every indication that they will shoot any Jew who refuses. Shamed, unthinking, embarrassed or otherwise, the coffee shop patrons do as they are bidden by the men who hold guns at their heads. Until they get to the one man, who is neither devout, nor intellectual – but he is modern, in that he is a notorious gangster, and has been for most of his life. A bad hat, a criminal, a dissolute menace, a frequent and enthusiastic violator of the laws of man and God – and when in his turn he is ordered to desecrate the Torah, he looks at them calmly and says, “I’ve done many things in my life – but I won’t do that.” He is immediately executed, at point-blank range. Alone of all the cafe patrons, he had an idea of what he wouldn’t do – and something innate led him to refuse, absolutely.

So, what would any of us give up at the point of a gun? Wallet, or handbag – absolutely. PIN? For sure. We’ve been told over and over, those are only things. You notify the bank and put a stop on the cards, get a replacement drivers’ license. All that stuff, sure, they can be replaced. Car keys? Jewelry ? Yeah, those too. That’s what insurance is for.

Slightly tougher question: They point a gun at you and say – “Give us the kid.” Or maybe “I’m taking the woman.” Or maybe, if you are a women, the person with the gun ties your hands and says “Don’t make a fuss.” Do you give them the kid, or the woman, or come along without making a fuss?

Now, the big question: what intangibles would you give up, under threat of violence, civil, nuclear or whatever?

We’ve already seen how swiftly most of our legacy media, newspapers and television stations quickly redefined intellectual freedom, in the wake of the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. The swiftness with which they capitulated to threats of violence if the cartoons were published , after decades of posing as fearless champions of the public’s right to know at any price was revealing. And cause for some dismay, for we are left to wonder what other concessions might be extorted in future by a nuclear threat – and that some of our most cherished traditions, principals, laws and allies would be yielded up with dispiriting speed by those whom we had expected to show a little more spine.

Burning Question of the Day

06. September 2006 · Comments Off on Burning Question of the Day · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not

So, was there any particular reason to watch Katie Couric’s anchor debut on See-BS News?

I didn’t have one, but if you did, share with the class. Be informative, amusing and vicious…all three, if possible.

Before the World Rushed In

03. September 2006 · Comments Off on Before the World Rushed In · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, World

Being that I am now engrossed in writing a story about the early California emigrant trail… (Yes, PV, I am working on Chapter 13…. But I have to do a post for today, ‘kay?) I have been going back through my books and recollections about California, at a time when it was for all intents and purposes, a sleepy little backwater at the far end of the known world, a six-month to a year-long journey from practically anywhere else on the planet loosely defined as “civilization”.

Growing up there meant a bit of an advantage in that one could be aware of all the other layers behind the glitzy modern TV and Hollywood, West Coast/Left Coast, surfing safari/Haight-Ashbury layer that everyone with an awareness level above that of a mollusk knows. But peel that layer back, and there is another layer; the pre-World-War II layer, of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, of sleepy little towns buried in orange groves, Hollywood Boulevard a dirt track and Beverley Hills a wilderness… go back another couple of layers, and you arrive at a place that always seems to have had a dreaming, evanescent feel about it to me; California in the first half of the 19th century.

In many ways, that California marked the high tide-line of the Spanish empire in the New World: when the great tide of the conquistadores washed out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century looking for gold, honor, glory and land, and roared across the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping Mexico and most of South America in consecutive mighty tides , seeping into the trackless wastes of what is now the American Southwest, and eventually lapping gently at the far northern coast, where that tide, cresting in the 18th century, dropped a linked chain of twenty-one missions, four presidios or military garrisons* and three small pueblos**, one of which failed almost immediately. Mostly on the coast, or near to it, this was the framework on which hung the charming, but ultimately fragile society of Spanish (later Mexican) colonial society in what was called Alta, or Upper California.

It was a rural society, of enormous holdings, or ranchos, presided over by an aristocracy of landowners who had been granted their vast holdings by the king, or the civil government, who ran cattle or sheep on their holdings which were worked at by native Indians. The great holdings produced hides, wool and tallow, and their owners lived lives of comfort, if no very great luxury, and from all accounts were openhandedly generous, amazingly hospitable, devout…perhaps a little touchy about personal insult and apt to fight duels over it, but that could said of most men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The climate was a temperate and kindly one, especially in comparison with much of the rest of that continent, winters being mild, and summers fair. The missions, which in addition to the care of souls had an eye towards self-sufficiency, did a little more in the way of farming than the rancheros; with great orchards of olives and citrus, and vineyards.

Far from the eye and control of central authority, they managed a fair degree of self-sufficiency; the scattering of structures from that era which survived to the 20th century set a kind of architectural tone to the whole area. Stucco and tile, courtyards, miradors and balconies, which looked back to cathedrals in Spain and Moorish castles in Grenada were adapted in adobe and brick, copied in stucco, and hung with church bells brought with great effort from the Old Country. Richard Henry Dana’s classic “Two Years Before the Mast” is an eye-witness account of the trade in hides with the rancheros, in the 1830ies, and this novel offers an accessible description of what it looked like, in the 1840ies, as well as the difficulties involved in even traveling to such a distant fringe of the world. The immortal “Zorro” movies and TV show is set in this milieu, which is probably where most people know of this little, long gone world.

But the Spanish empire slowly lost it’s grip, and independent Mexico fought a rear-guard action for a while. I think they succeeded for a fair number of years, keeping their pleasant and gracious outpost, because of it’s very isolation, but other national powers waxed as Spain waned. The British had Canada to the north, and trade interests in the Pacific Northwest, the Russians had Alaska, and even a tiny foot-hold at Ft. Ross, on the coast of present-day Sonoma county, north of San Francisco. There was even a vaguely Swiss interest in Alta California, due to the presence of John Augustus Sutter, who founded an agricultural establishment where Sacramento is now… which inadvertently brought and end to the gracious life of the rancheros. The Spanish who ransacked Mexico and South America looking for gold, even sending a fruitless expedition far into the present-day American Southwest, eventually gave up looking for gold on the fringes of their empire… and it’s the purest sort of irony that gold in greater quantities than they had ever dreamed of was found, initially discovered during construction of a millrace for a saw-mill that Sutter had contracted to build at Coloma in the foothills, as he needed lumber for his various entrepreneurial projects.

*San Jose, El Puebla Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles sobre El Rio Porcinuncula, and Branciforte
**San Diego, Monterray, San Francisco, Santa Barbara

Memo: Media Silly Season

31. August 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Media Silly Season · Categories: General, Media Matters Not, Rant, sarcasm

Memo: To Big Mainstream Media
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Can you hear me now?

In order of no special importance, I offer the following observations, with no special expectation of having them acted upon whatsoever, but more as a memo for the record, should any of you begin wondering at your crashing readership and/or media share.

1. A glamour-shot of a six-year old child, decked out in a teensy evening gown, sultry eye make-up and glistening lipstick is disturbing on a lot of mostly icky levels. Halloween is the only day of the year that a pre-pubertal person ought to be caught dead in lipstick. That such pictures of the late J. Ramsey are now plastered all over more than the supermarket tabs, and an insane amount of attention being paid to a ten year old murder case and a bizarre false confession indicates that a lot of media people share Mr. Karr’s unhealthy fascination with same. Ick, people, really. Ick.

2. Have any of your editors and bureau chiefs realized that practically every word and picture coming from local stringers and photogs in so-called Palestine, and Hezbollah-Land is either a lie— including “and” and “the”— or badly photoshopped? Or, what is even scarier for your credibility—- expertly photoshopped?

3. Are any of your reporters, dispatched at great expense and personal inconvenience to those areas aware of a subspecies of news event called a “dog and pony show”, and are they willing to entertain the suspicion that other bodies than the Bush administration may, in fact, be producing them? That thing in the corner, over there, with the spikes in the blunt end? It’s called a clue bat. Please thwack yourselves on the head with it a couple of times. Thank you.

4. Well, after having covered yourselves with glory over Hurricane Katrina, by repeating the most horrible of unverified and unverifiable rumors, over and over and over again, allowing the most ignorant and unsubstantiated statements to go unchallenged, and allowing a lot of absolutely heroic efforts and stories to pass practically unremarked… the reason we should continue paying attention to you at all would be? BTW, my own parents were burned out of their house in the Valley Center fire. Exactly one year later, they had managed to get the concrete pad cleaned off, and new exterior conblock walls put up. They were fully insured, and had lots of help, but it’s going on three years now, and even though they are moved in and the house is complete, there is still a lot of work left to do. Please keep this in mind, when you lament the slow pace of rebuilding in New Orleans and in the Gulf Coast. Just because they can rebuild a house in a week on one of those home renovation shows, doesn’t mean it happens that way in the real world. And blaming the federal government for everything about the damned hurricane starting to wear really, really thin.

5. So it was Dick Armitage who blew Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee to wossname, Novak! Well, (Gomer Pyle voice here) sur-prise, sur-prise, surprise! I’ve always thought it was an open secret on inside-the-beltway cocktail party gossip anyway, but thanks for sharing it with us peons outside Washington. I do want back every day of those three years of my life that I had to hear about Plamegate, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Yellowcake and Niger (pronounced Knee-gere, of course) Fitzmas, and the whole pack of nothing, though.

6. Dan Rather’s TANG memos, Katie Courics’ hips… a connection, you think?

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

Tails of the Lesser Weevil

27. August 2006 · Comments Off on Tails of the Lesser Weevil · Categories: Critters, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

The dog that Sgt/Cpl. Blondie presented me with at Christmas when she came home from serving in the Marines, after telling me that I would have either a dog or a gun in the house— my choice — now appears to have grown to her full adult size of about fifty-five or sixty pounds. She is a densely muscled, fawn-colored dog, with a black mask on her face, and a white chest and toes; almost everyone who sees her recognizes her immediately as being part-boxer. She displays much of the boxer temperament as well; friendly, intelligent and companionable, quiet as dogs go, but capable of being quite willful and stubborn.

The Weevil is much admired by the general public, as an attractive, and appealing dog, whatever the mix is. She has pretty well grasped the obedience thing at this point, also. She’ll sit, stay, come when called, knows that she cannot go beyond the garden gate, or into the kitchen, go into her crate with all speed, and these days, only pees in the house if I have frightened her. I yelled at her once, in a scary, Mercedes McCambridge-exorcist voice, one evening, after she swiped some food off the kitchen counter, and she was freaked for hours afterwards. I have even included her in the book I am currently writing, as a minor character, albeit with an intelligence transplant and a little more size to her.

It’s always been a bit of a mystery as to what the other, non-boxer half was, though. Something large, was the general consensus… Doberman, Great Dane, even Rhodesian ridgeback featured among most of the guesses. Blondie originally acquired her from a friend, who had her from a friend of a friend, who was reported to breed pit bulldogs, and I had always ruled that option out, as I assumed that pit bulldogs were generally smaller than Weevil, and her size had to have come from someplace. Working at home on the next book leaves me to run with her slightly later in the day, and last week, I made the acquaintance of a neighbor who took one look at Weevil and pronounced her to be, yes, about half pit bull. But I thought they were smaller dogs, I said, and the neighbor said, no, some of them were of a good-size… and Weevil’s head was just the right shape. She used to have pit bulls, and to her, it was as clear as anything.

I went home and looked up the characteristics of the breed on a couple of websites, and oh, my— some of them fit Weevil to a T. Like being an absolutely rotten watchdog. She loves people, any and all people, and has no inkling in that little doggie brain that she ought to be barking at any of them. William visited this spring, several months after Weevil came to stay. He has a key, and let himself into the house at four in the morning, and never the slightest “woof” out of the Weevil. She wandered up to him with her tail wagging, as a matter of fact, all friendly curiosity. In the event of a crazed, knife-wielding terrorist breaking into the house, I am almost sure the Weevil would be cowering behind me. The destructive chewing, when bored… yep, that’s the Weevil, all right. And the athleticism; she twirls like a dervish when she is excited, leaping and pirouetting in the air. First thing she does when I let her out in the morning, she leaps and spins three or four times in the air.

But the most convincing characteristic of pit bulls that she displays, would be how she reacts to strange dogs… and that is with extreme hostility.. But over the last few months, meeting another dog-walker with a dog on a leash has usually turned into an upper-body workout for me, and a couple of houses with barking dogs in the back yards send her so wild with hostility that I have to use both hands on the leash to pull her away, if I have not already crossed over to the other side of the road. Once or twice, we have encountered loose dogs, on our walk, and the Weevil turns absolutely rigid with tension. I’ve had to wrap the chain leash several times around my hand, hold her close to my knee and talk to her, as we walked by the loose dog.

Otherwise, the Weevil is very fond of Spike, and she was playful and affectionate with my parents’ and sisters’ dogs at Christmas, as well as a lot of other dogs that she met here and there, but I don’t think I will ever be able to take her to a dog park and let her off the leash , and I am not sure I could even take her into Petco, now, not unless I shot her full of tranquilizers, first. And as long as I live in this neighborhood, I shall keep rather quiet about it in any case.

Family Dynamic

25. August 2006 · Comments Off on Family Dynamic · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

So, Sgt/Cpl Blondie (as of this Monday to be College Freshman Blondie, hopefully over the next seven years to metamorphose into Dr. Blondie, DVM) and I were in the main post office this week to return unopened, some book club selections that I swear, I swear I had gone on line and said I declined but which turned up in the mail anyway and I only hope if I return enough of them refused they’ll cancel my membership anyway because I only signed up to get the four books at 50 cents or a dollar, or whatever, and I’ll sign up again next decade to get some cheap books….oh where was I? Got it. Post office.

There was a young man in line behind us with two small children at their most totally charming stage of life… which is at about 4 or 5. Old enough to be over the terrible twos, and damn grateful are we for all of that, and not old enough to begin laughing at your lamentable taste in oldies on the radio. The two children, a boy and a girl, were teasing their Fond Papa, trying to make him turn around and look out through the plate glass window-wall of the area where everyone lines up for stamps. Someone in the parking lot, they insisted to their Fond Papa, was trying to steal their car! And of course, he was teasing them in return, by not looking… which reminded me very much of what an awful tease my own father was.

I imagine it was because Dad was an only child; not only that, the only adored child of Granny Dodie, who could give the proverbial over-protective Jewish mother many valuable, and guilt-inducing lessons. Perhaps if Dad had been able to tease younger siblings… at least, it would have watered down Granny Dodie’s motherly instincts to a degree somewhat less overwhelming. I am fairly certain many of her own friends must have gotten damned tired of hearing her talk about Dad. On the other hand, Mom said that the one of the most wonderful things about marrying Dad was the fact that Granny Dodie and Grandpa Al instantly and unquestioningly accepted her as a daughter; she was theirs by virtue of marrying their son, the focus of unstinting adoration and approval— heady brew after her own parents’ difficult marriage, and the death of their own oldest child during WWII.

But Dad still was an awful tease. The little scene in the post office reminded me of the time at Redwood house when my little brother Sander was a toddler, on one of those evenings when we sat out on the terrace under the grape pergola and watched the reflected sunset fading off the mountains opposite. My younger brother JP and my sister Pippy sat on the shallow stairs that led up to the terrace, while Sander played on the lawn below, and Dad relaxed on one of the chairs on the terrace… maybe the canvas butterfly chair. We had one of those huge, canvas butterfly chairs, then. He looked out over our heads, at Sander on the lawn with his toys and remarked casually,
“You know, there is a very large tarantula, crawling across the lawn towards the baby.”
This had all the hallmarks of one of Dad’s teases. Of course, he was trying to make us look, so of course we didn’t.
“There is a large tarantula on the lawn, and it is crawling straight at the baby,” Dad insisted, with a perfectly straight face. “Really.”
Umm. Yeah. Sure, Daddy.

But eventually we broke, and looked over our shoulders, and oh, my god, there was a huge tarantula, all hairy legs and science-fiction googly segmented eyes, about four feet away and crawling straight at our baby brother. I flew off the steps and snatched him up, and JP flew straight into the kitchen for a mason jar and a tight-fitting lid.

As I was relating this to Blondie, the postal clerk begged me to please stop talking about nasty things like this, spiders and small children, she was deathly afraid to step out of her own house on most days, thanks to tales like this… although the children and their father did seem vastly amused.

I think it may have been a good and charitable thing that I waited to tell Blondie about the other spider story and Dad, until we were out in the parking lot. That would have been the time when he was in the midst of a craze for skin-diving, and used to go with certain of his friends to shallow-water dive, and had a rubbery black skin-diving suit, with a breathing mask, and long black flippers and all the accoutrements… and we often visited some of his friends’ houses, and watch our fathers melt lead to cast diving weights … why did they have to do this themselves, I wonder now? This would have been in about 1960 or so, when we were living in the White Cottage, in an era when anyone wishing to indulge in odd hobbies had perforce to resort to D-I-Y, I suppose.
Anyway, he came back from one of those diving excursions, driving the Plymouth station-wagon that was our main car then, with a great salt-water scented heap of sea gleanings in the back, covered with a couple of wet burlap sacks. He always brought back interesting things from these trips; abalone shells, and cork floats adorned with shell encrustations, this, that and the other.

“I have something to show you!” he said, enthusiastically, to JP and I. I would have been about six, JP about four… just the totally gullible age, and we followed him eagerly to the back of the Plymouth, while he undid the window and the gate, reached under the burlap… and brought out a huge black, many-clawed, many-limbed spidery-looking thing. It was a spider crab, of course, but it looked like the world hugest, most menacing spider imaginable.

He chased us with it, twice around the White-Cottage’s half-acre backyard, JP and I screaming every step of the way. Amazing stamina, when you think on it, really. I still do not care for spiders, although I can cope with them as long as they are smaller than a quarter… which might have been Dad’s inadvertent point.

The postal clerk would be screaming still, I think

It’s a Car! It’s a Boat!

22. August 2006 · Comments Off on It’s a Car! It’s a Boat! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Technology

I can so imagine my Dad doing something as essentially demented, but completely logical as this… had he been been born somewhere like Cuba, instead of being a second-generation Brit and citizen of the US of A.

It’s a pity in a way that the “truckonauts” all apparently live now in Florida – Dad would love to swap tools and techniques with them. (Hey, Paul… you ever consider building something like this, out of an old car??!!!)

(found via Tim Blair)

The Falling Man

19. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Falling Man · Categories: General, History, Media Matters Not

With all the recent photo-fakery attendent upon the fighting in Lebanon being much discussed in the blogosphere, I ran across a curious discussion of historic and iconic war photographs, and the chances that they were faked in some way, either by being staged, or having certain essential bits of information left out upon publication and dissemination.

I don’t remember hearing any of the aspersions about Robert Capa’s fameous snap of a Spanish Loyalist, caught by chance at the instant of death, but there is a rather fascinating story here, of how it was proved authentic, after all, and the soldier even given a name.

I would wonder if such a photo of a soldier today might be splashed all over the front page, above the fold… but I already know the answer to that one.

The Empty Lands

19. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Empty Lands · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Being that I am writing away on the book every moment that I can, this means a lot of computer time, building intricate castles of conversations and descriptions. Or leafing through my own books, or googling for bits of authentic and corroborative detail to lend convincing detail to the narrative: like, what would have been used in a makeshift humidifier in the early 1800s, or what would a teamster done to have treated an ox with sore feet? What would Ft. Laramie of 1844 been constructed of (adobe and timber, actually, there are paintings of it, too), what were all the names of the children and the wives in the Stephens-Townsend party? That and a thousand other questions send me back to the books constantly, since I really need to write about them with authority, and dislike the thought of being nibbled to death by the ducks of absolute authenticity.

It all does remind me though, of what most Europeans tend to forget or don’t realize in the first place… that the continental US is really, really huge, and terribly empty, and not much like most of Western Europe, although I think maybe the Russian “outback” might come close. There are bits of Scotland, that if you squint and pay no mind to the stone walls, can look sort of, kind of a bit like Appalachia. No wonder the Scots-Irish got off the boat and headed for the hills and hardly ever came down out of them again.

That part of Southern Spain called the Extremadura can pass as a small scrap of the Southwest all dry scrub and red dirt, if you can ignore the occasional fortified hill-town, so the hard-fighting poor noblemen from Trujillo took to Mexico and the southwest like ducks to water, if they were ducks and there were water, of course. This vast emptiness must have come as a horrible shock otherwise, to those who came as immigrants, from the 17th century on, especially once over the coastal mountains, and once out of the cities along the coastline fringe: Boston, and Charleston, and Savannah… which at a squint could look like the newer parts of a European city.

As any baffled American on their first trip to Europe will tell you… gee, everything is pretty dinky over here, isn’t it? Ceilings are low, the old houses have teensy tiny rooms, the streets are narrow, and everything is really, really close together. (Unless you’re staying in a palace or a stately home, someplace, where the dining room is a good quarter mile from the kitchen.) I have always been convinced that Copenhagen, a charming and welcoming city to me as a teen-aged Girl Scout, was entirely built at 3/4th scale, somewhat like Disneyland. The Lake District to me looked like a twee and dainty pocket wilderness, carefully manicured and groomed to look like a wilderness without actually being one. And driving across Europe fifteen years later, the next town was always three or five, or at most, ten miles on. It never seemed that gas stations were more than a couple of mile apart along the major roads. As Bill Cosby pointed out, in half an hour you’re in a whole ‘nother language! No, I can very well imagine that in the middle of the 1800s the most common reaction of someone straight off the boat from Hamburg, or Bergen or Liverpool to being plunked down in the Platte River valley, or the Great Basin of the Rockies would have been to assume the fetal position underneath the nearest piece of heavy furniture.

It was big and empty then, empty of all people but a scattering of nomadic Indian tribes; no established roads, other than printed on the land by iron-wheeled wagons, and what fortresses and settlements which did exist, with the exception of a scattering of adobe towns in what is now New Mexico and California, were new and raw. No terraces of grapevines or sheep-folds, no crumbing Roman or medieval ruins poking up from the grass, like bones of the land. No castles or cathedrals, with a thousand years worth of architectural accretions, or towns with a similarly aged collection of traditions, rituals and feuds. No, none of that, just the sky and the wind, and the land beneath it all, empty to the farthest horizon. It would have taken a particular sort of daring to venture out into that vast, indifferent wilderness, stepping away from the security of the known and knowable, and going… well, somewhere.

And it’s still pretty empty… there was a stretch along I-15 in Utah where it was fifty miles to the next gas station, and there’s another out on I-40, out east of Kingman: a hundred miles to the next one, and not a damned thing constructed by man that you can see except for the road itself, and the power-lines along side.

The Cubicle Farm

17. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Cubicle Farm · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Working In A Salt Mine...

So, last week I was back at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, for about the fourth time in a year. I was guessing that the temp service staff was living in the hope that if they only threw me often enough at the E-C-B that eventually I would stick. Their hopes are alas, a triumph over my experience. To them it is a mystery why I wriggle out of the E-C-B’s smothering but very well-paid embrace: “But you were military, you should love it!” they cry… well, yes I was and I still don’t. I flee, screaming (softly) at the end of every assignment, putting off my contractor ID badge and tearing up the parking permit, and swearing that this time, it will be absolutely the last time… really!

The E-C-B is one of San Antonio’s munificent and magnificent employers. I have met many people who seem to be quite happy, and enormously fullfilled, they smile in the corridors, and laugh in the lunchrooms, and decorate their cubicles with stuffed animals and family pictures, and little banners and awards for this and that… and most of them show no sign of having had lobotamies… but there are so many of them. I have never seen anyone from a previous assignment, again, the place is that big. The ranks of cubicles go on, and on, and on, as far as the eye can see.

Their main complex is a huge edifice, sprawling across the length of a ridge in the middle of a wooded and beautifully landscaped park. From a distance, the place looked like one of those sprawling and crenellated fortresses. A number of ponds and a resident herd of very tame and slightly undersized deer heighten the likeness to one of those rambling castles or palaces in the middle of a European city, or maybe a stately home in it’s own parkland. Employee appointments and convieniences are lavish: There is a Starbucks at either end of the mail building, and another Starbucks in an adjacent facility, an on-site gym, a daycare, cafeterias, snack bars and little lounges wedged in wherever there is a nook big enough to fit two cushy chairs and a table, and a bit of original art… and the place creeps me out, completely. It is just too big.

I have worked for big firms since I retired, and small ones, too. The small ones had a disconcerting tendency to either treat you like family— and in a dysfunctional and abusive family way, either that or fold underneath you. Bad sign, when the employer starts letting contracted services go, and stalling on cutting checks for work already done. Almost as bad as having employee paychecks bounce. That last hasn’t happened to me yet, but I did have an acquaintence who came to work one normal morning, and found it padlocked and empty of furniture and all the employees owed a paycheck. No, the smaller places have their perils, and even the medium-sized firm most recently on my resume had a creeply way of suddenly shedding long-time employees without warning…. to them or anyone else. Usually our first clue was the next morning,w hen the combination to the employee door wouldn’t work: we’d all be whispering to each other, “Hey, the combo is changed… OK, who got the sack this time?” This made all the slightly forced jollity of company picnics and events ring just a tad bit hollow.

Frankly, I’d rather spend my days at home writing, with Spike the Weevil I Know Nothing Of sitting under my chair, and just temp for a week or two here and there: there may be a fair amount of crap going on where I work, and I have pretty definitly lost my capacity for enduring it… but a week here, and a couple of days there pays the bills and I pack up my stuff and go well before it gets to me or I piss someone off. Or look around and realize that Ihave spent several decades in the cubicle farm.

Shi Tzu Happens

14. August 2006 · Comments Off on Shi Tzu Happens · Categories: Critters, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

We’re still working on that whole housebreaking concept with Spike, the Weevil I Know Nothing Of, or as Sgt/Cpl. Blondie calls her, “The Poop Factory”. Lately, Spike has been parking it in consistently pretty much the same place… lamentably, that place is NOT the out of doors, but we’re working on that, as well as purchasing paper towels in the multiple-roll packages. On the up side, Spike is a pretty fair and alert watch-dog, even if not a particularly intimidating one. I’m sorry, in her heart she may think she is a lion, but a six-pound-dripping-wet-pocket-puppy is not going to intimidate the crap out of an intruder, unless they are incapacitated by a phobia about small, yappy dogs… or fall over and hit their head, because they are laughing too hard at the spectacle of a tiny, noisy Shih Tzu with delusions of grandeur, bouncing up and down and menacing their ankles.

On the other hand, now I know why these people who do have these cute, ornamental toy breed of dogs, carry them around, constantly and ostentatiously! I used to think it was a kind of desperately hip affectation, and the dog was some kind of cute, trendy accessory… but now, through no fault of my own, I have one of those cute, somewhat trendy ornamental toy breeds… and let me tell you, people, it isn’t the owner’s notion…. it’s the dogs’ doing! Dogs have been associated with people for god knows how many millennia, they were bent and bred for our purposes, to do our bidding and with various specific jobs in mind; to herd sheep (border collies), or kill rats (rat terriers), to chase foxes (beagles), to assist the butcher in dispatching cattle (bulldogs), or the soldier in a similar job on enemies (mastiffs), to be draft animals (rottweilers), to dig burrowing animals out of holes (dachshunds), to run after coaches (Dalmatians), to assist dory-fishermen in hauling nets out of the water (Labradors)… In other words, for every dog breed under heaven, there was once a very specific purpose for it, and the very best of them know it to their bones and every fiber of their dog bodies, it is coded so deeply in their DNA that it comes out in their character and sometimes in the actions of those who have never otherwise come within a country mile of their ancestral mission.

I read some months ago of a young Labrador out for a walk with his owner along a scenic riverbank. The dog pulled his leash out of his owners’ hand, plunged into the water and swam to the rescue of a little boy who had been on an inner-tube excursion down the river, and had fallen off. He swam into the middle of the river, and dragged the boy back to the bank, performing as neat a life-saving exhibition as ever could be wished by the painters of sentimental Victorian scenes of the same, in response to his ancestral imperative. Everyone was properly astonished, of course… just as my close neighbors were, a couple of years ago, when they detected the presence of roof-rats, taking up residence in their garage. One of their family pets included a rat-terrier named Jessica, who enlightened them almost immediately as to the reason for the name of her breed, by her eagerness to sally forth into the garage, the resulting hunt-down of the prey and the efficient and total dispatch, once Jessica located them. She was swift, brutal, and so dedicated that she was trembling all over, once they let her loose, although to their certain knowledge, neither Jessica or her immediate ancestors had any first-hand notion of exactly what a rat was, or what indeed she should do about them. The ancestral mission came surging up to the forefront of that doggy brain, overcoming a century or so of conditioning as a family pet.

In the case of Spike, and the other toy breeds, they were bred and conditioned as companion animals, to want to be with or close by their chosen human, twenty-four-seven; in their lap, or at their feet, or as is said of the Chinese breeds, tucked into the sleeve of a long robe. Essentially, they want to be Velcroed to us… and that kind of adoration is hard to set aside. Spike sleeps in a little dog-nest under my bedside table, and when I am writing, she is under my chair, or sleeping on the bedroom rug, or in her doggie nest, in all cases not more than ten feet away. If I get up and move to another room, she follows me, watchfully. If I go outside, and she doesn’t come with me, she sits at the door that I went out of, or goes around to the slider door, or the dining-area window where she can see me, and claws frantically at the glass, until I come inside again. When I had to go to a temp assignment at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth for a week of administrative and creative work (to pay the bills, dontcha know, while I work on the latest Book) she was left in the crate for a good few hours. Even though Sgt/Cpl. Blondie came home at lunch from her job, and let her loose, Spike was so frantic by the time I came home, I had to carry her around in my arms for about fifteen minutes until she calmed down. All that time, of course, she was plastered to me, as clingy as a small child. Don’t even ask me about how she was, when I left her at the groomers’, the week before: talk about the huge-eyed and tearful look of betrayal, leaving a kid at pre-school has nothing on that.

So you see, all those celebs, carrying around those little toy dogs?— It’s the dog’s fixation, it isn’t the owners, I am convinced. Considering some of the celebrities involved, it just might be the dog is the intellectual powerhouse of the two, anyway

« Older articles
Newer articles »