Mika and Boo Boo

08. September 2012 · Comments Off on Mika and Boo Boo · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Rant · Tags: , , ,

So, Mika Brzezinski thinks that a train-wreck of a reality show that I have never, ever seen, “sums up everything I have to say about America.”

OK, then.

A smug television news personality like Mika Brezezinski sums up just about everything I have to say about smug, judgemental, fundamentally isolated television news personalities … especially those who got their jobs on the basis of nepotism.

So I guess we are even. You don’t even want to know how much I despise Nancy Grace and Anderson Cooper.

Comfort and More

14. August 2012 · Comments Off on Comfort and More · Categories: Domestic, History, Local, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

We were in Comfort this last Saturday … no, that doesn’t mean we were comfortable, exactly – just that we were in Comfort, Texas – a nice little town about an hour’s drive north from San Antonio, a lovely little Hill Country town situated where the Guadalupe River is crossed by the IH-10. In the larger world, Comfort is known for being the final burial place of a number of German Unionists, who either died in a vicious fire-fight on the Nueces River in August of 1862 or were murdered shortly afterwards. I was there because … well, this is the community in which a number of my books are set, and the ‘middle’ book of the Trilogy covers this tragic period. So, when another writer and enthusiastic local historian told me at the Meusebach Birthday celebration that I really ought to get in with this one … and we swapped copies of our books … well, I really must do things like this, meet people, talk to fans, and sell some books. It’s not a chore to actually be there and do that, but setting it up is sometimes a bit of a job and full marks to Blondie for taking the bull by the horns.

The plan was that a number of other local authors, some of whom had books about the Germans in the Hill Country, the Civil War in the west, or about the Nueces Fight and the subsequent execution of a number of Hill Country Unionists would have table space to sell their books at a picnic luncheon in the Comfort City park which would follow the commemoration ceremony and wreath-laying at the monument. After the the luncheon, there would be a symposium in the parish hall of the Lutheran Church … and we could set up again to vend books, through the good offices of the Comfort Historical Association … for a simple donation of 20% of total sales to them when all was done for the day. We headed up to Comfort, located the park without much problem, and set up on our portion of table, which was just large enough and under the shade of the park pavilion.
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In the Post

09. August 2012 · Comments Off on In the Post · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Local, Veteran's Affairs · Tags: ,

I’ve been thinking for a while – based on my own use of the service – that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no – not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location – like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them – sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.

Now, the packages come mostly through UPS or Fed-Ex. The various utility bills arrive as emails and are paid on-line. My pension and my daughters’ VA disability are paid by automatic deposit to bank accounts. Magazines? I dropped a lot of my various subscriptions through lack of interest (I am looking at you, Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly) or through the magazines or the publications themselves going under. My news and intellectual-contact jones is fed on-line. Email works for just about everything else save for birthday cards to Luddites like my mother. My various businesses as a freelance are conducted thru Paypal, or through email with my business partner. I realize that not everyone has this kind of luxury – and in the case of the zombie apocalypse or some sort of solar event that crashes the internet I will be SO screwed … but then I am not advocating abolition of the post office. Just that in those metropolitan areas in the continental US that are well-served by internet services and by the various rival delivery services, the Postal Service can probably dial it back, quite a bit. Nothing much comes in the daily mail any more, save the print equivalent of the stuff that I empty out of my spam email box. Really – I am never going to respond to the Capitol One offers for a credit card, so do they need to have their weekly c**p underwritten with tax dollars? My way back into the house from the group mailbox leads past my trash and recycle cans; convenient, as that is where the bulk of it winds up.

I’ll shed a nostalgic tear for the USPS, when they cut back services. I really will – as there are (or were) the occasional business that would send a payment check by mail, instead of an automatic transfer. And the businesses which depend upon cheap bulk mail deliveries will be set back a peg or two. I do dispatch my own books when bought by readers through media mail, and the workers at the post offices where I do and have done business are wonderful, competent and cheerful people (Yeah, I know that is SO much against the usual stereotype) … but otherwise I fear that the USPS is a zombie corpse, being kept alive out of habit. To enable it to keep shambling around in those places where it does truly provide a neccessary service, I’d be willing to give up delivery service on Saturdays and at least two weekdays.

I’d also be able to avoid encountering my slightly-deranged and very chatty neighbor, who haunts the group mailbox; another win-win, as I count it.

(Cross-posted at www.chicagoboyz.net, and my book blog)

Junker Delight

25. July 2012 · Comments Off on Junker Delight · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local · Tags: ,

This week in the neighborhood where I live was designated for the annual bulk-trash pickup – so residents were notified a week or more ago. Once a year we can put out on the curb … well, just about anything except concrete rubble and chunks of stone. The city sends out a couple of long open-topped trailer trucks, and a special truck with a large mechanized claw that reaches down and gathers up the bulk items.

Well, all of those who have not been picked over thoroughly by the pros … and the other neighbors, of course. This year, we were amazed at how little was left for the city crew, as the professional junkers had already descended like a swarm of locusts. Usually there are only two or three; they are easily recognizable. They are the people driving battered pick-up trucks, sometimes towing a rough flat-bed trailer of the kind usually used to haul yard-maintenance equipment – and pick-up and trailer piled tower-high with salvage. Rusted-out barbeques, metal frames of this or that, battered furniture of all kinds, upholstered chairs with gruesomely stained upholstery and stuffing and springs bursting out of the cushions, clapped out appliances and monitors, cheap furniture with the thin veneer peeling off the disintegrating pressed-board that it is made out of, and construction grade kitchen/bathroom cabinets that have been replaced by upgrades …

Yes, and if I am sounding very familiar with the contents of what is put out in front of my neighbor’s houses … it’s because I am. We inspect the bulk-trash offerings quite thoroughly ourselves, and have shamelessly selected a number of still-useful and/or salvageable items for our own use. At least half of the ornamental elements in our garden were picked out of trash-piles, including a good number of large pots, plant-hangers, plant stands, a standard to hang a banner from, shepherd’s crooks, bird-houses, the big pottery chiminea, a small ornamental bench … and those that weren’t gleaned from the bulk trash were bought at yard sales for pennies on the original price. So, I have that funky-junky shabby chic style going in the garden. It works, and it’s cheap. A good number of the plants in it were also rescued from here and there.

This year it seemed like there were a much larger number of junkers, circulating. As soon as it hit the sidewalk, within minutes – or hours at best – the battered pickup swooped in, and the item was gone. We noted that one neighbor had put out three or four clapped-out vacuum or carpet-cleaning units; they were gone by the next day. I had read somewhere or other, of a tinkerer who would scoop up items like this, repair and clean them, and sell them for a small sum on eBay, and was doing very nicely out of it, too. There are gifted amateurs, people like my Dad who could take apart an appliance and put it back together again and have it work, but there wasn’t – well, until a bit ago – too many many professional small-mech tinkerers working the retail trade any moe, not when it’s usually cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one. When I wrote about this once before, commenters waxed lyrical about items they had salvaged entire, or rehabbed for their own use; it’s all to the good, you know – it’s all being recycled, one way or another. Better to fix it up, and use it again, than let it take up space in the dump.

This year, we put out a garden chaise lounge made from lengths of two-by-four, which had weathered to the point that it was near to falling apart. We had actually picked it out of a bulk-trash pile five or six years ago, but now the legs and armrests were rotting away, the squirrels had raided the cushion (bought on sale at Lowe’s at the end of the season) and I didn’t want to take the time or effort to repair it. It was gone by the next morning. My daughter thinks another neighbor scooped it up. It will be kind of amusing to see if it continues going the rounds.

(Cross posted at my book blog, and at www.chicagoboyz.net)

Deep Summer in the Heart of Texas

10. July 2012 · Comments Off on Deep Summer in the Heart of Texas · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Local, World · Tags: , ,

Well, because of the drought and all, and in spite of the occasional productive storms blowing through, it’s not entirely bone-dry and ready to blow away on the next stiff breeze. As a matter of fact, the garden is looking quite beautifully lush, almost tropical. Of course, this may be due to about half an hour of hand-watering the pots and the hanging baskets every morning. But still – the back yard is no longer something I am embarrassed to have people see. Nothing like the desolation left in the wake of a hard and prolonged frost a year and a half ago, and the depredations of a pair of stray mutts that my daughter took pity upon, and we housed until we … umm, passed them off on a couple of likely suckers … no, make that fond and indulgent dog-lovers. As for rain – we went halfsies on a rain-gauge, and there’s been rain in it, every couple of days; how coincidental is that?

Anyway, the back yard was left pretty much as a wreck after these twin disasters, but now it is brought back, and if I can figure out a way to cram in even more raised beds to grow vegetables in, I will – for next year, at the very least. And there seem to be more and more people doing that backyard homestead thing; keeping chickens for eggs, bees for honey and all. If I had half an acre to spare, I’d consider one of those mini-cows … one of the regulars at Chicagoboyz suggested that breed, a couple of months ago, and don’t think I didn’t consider it, for when I have my eventual country retreat. My grandmother kept chickens during the Depression, and we had a hive of bees for a couple of years.

We went up to Canyon Lake for the 4th of July – rather than spend a day baking under the hot sun at the rocky edge of the lake, as we did last year. Since we took the dog, we had to go to the campground, rather than the public beach, so this year we omitted the dog and floated a bend of the river instead. Candidly, it wasn’t all that much fun, since the current wasn’t all that, and the river ran so shallow that we wound up portaging the tubes over the last third. Struggling out of the tube, schlepping through the rocky shallows, wondering what the heck is that nasty thing you are stepping on all unseen, knowing that the odds of turning an ankle on a slime-covered rock are pretty good, seeing that most everyone else is pretty well toasted – from alcohol and the sun – before they have gotten out of sight of the launch-point … not again, I don’t think. Unless we do the Comal, take some friends, a picnic lunch and remember to slather our shins with waterproof SPF-30 … I did remember to bring a hat, though. But the views of the banks, of cypress trees and of vacation houses that cost more than my entire family (including the brother-in-law who works for JPL) will make in five years or more were very nice. They went by, very slowly … and the tubers with loud, waterproof radios were … not pleasant. Mom and Dad always preferred a ‘stay-cation’ – they were doing it before it was cool, and now I see the wisdom of that.

Bring Me Figgy Pudding

03. July 2012 · Comments Off on Bring Me Figgy Pudding · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

… and figgy wine, whole preserved figs, dried figs and jam of figs … As you can deduce, we have a bounty of figs, at this very moment. This miracle has occurred, even as the small tree in my front yard stubbornly refuses to bear more than five of six measly figs in a season, which the birds usually beat us to anyway. How is this possible? Because we have neighbors who have fig trees … one of which – of the huge-and-purple-when-ripe Celeste variety – has the most of it’s fruit-bearing branches leaning over the fence into a public space. The other – to judge from pictures – is of the small-and-pale-yellow-when-ripe Kadota variety – and is growing in the front yard of a neighbor who has given us permission to pick the darned things when we feel the need. They are both prolific trees, the Kadota especially; and there is a point when the owners of a fruit tree get damn sick of eating the output. I know this – I had something like ten or fifteen apricot trees lining the south boundary of the house that I rented in Utah, and it was years before I could bear to look at an apricot again … dried, or ripe, or especially rotting in the grass. In any case, we have gleaned nearly fifteen pounds of them this week, and have barely scratched the surface of the Kadota bounty. In other words, there appear to be just about as many unripe figs left on the tree after we’ve spent ten minutes snagging all the ripe ones in reach and filled two plastic grocery bags half-full.

Now we know why figs are so expensive in the market – the things are delicate, almost impossible to pick without bruising them or splitting their skin. The supermarket sort must almost be wrapped in bubble-wrap in order to get them to the market in any condition at all. They are almost instantly perishable, which must be why most people only know them in their dried incarnation, or as the filling for fig Newton cookies. And the only way that I can only afford to explore the myriad modes in which ripe fresh figs can be preserved … is by having access to the fresh-from-the tree source. (Warning – do not rub your eye, with fresh fig-sap on your hands.)

Fig jam is easy enough – the dried version is a bit of a challenge, because drying them whole in the American Harvest Gardenmaster dehydrator which was a souvenir of my tour in Utah … is a tough fit, at first. Even the smaller Kadota figs are too fat to fit onto the drying trays – which are designed to accommodate fruits and vegetables sliced to inch-thick or less slices. I did three trays of them sliced in half, which was not satisfactory, aesthetically or taste-wise. Then, I put a tray of them in the oven at lowest temperature for a couple of hours to shrink and dry at least a little bit … and they seem to be moving on very nicely.

So, on to a recipe from a much-lauded Southern cookbook, which calls for them being washed in a bicarb-of-soda and water solution, and then simmered and steeped over most of a week in a sugar solution; this has promise, I think. And I will bottle them, and save on the pantry shelf, which is now taking over the top shelves of various closets in the house …

I don’t know quite why I am moved to do all this now. Something in the air, I think. Even thought it is scorchingly hot now … there is a winter coming. And I want my pantry shelves to be full. I want my household to have food to eat – to have pickles and jams, and canned bounty. It’s one of those atavistic impulses, I know. But winter is coming.

So Far From God

18. June 2012 · Comments Off on So Far From God · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, History, On The Border, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs · Tags: , ,

Poor Mexico, runs the saying usually attributed to long-time Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz, So far from God, so close to the United States. I was thinking of this, when we went to see the movie For Greater Glory – mostly because I had seen brief mention of it here and there on the libertarian-conservative side of the blogosphere, and the whole premise of it interested me, mostly because I had never heard of such a thing as the Cristero War. Never heard of it, and it happened in the lifetime of my grandparents, in the country right next door … and heck, in California we studied Mexico in the sixth grade. It appeared from casual conversation with the dozen or so people who caught the early matinee at a movie multiplex in San Antonio, only one of them had ever heard of it, either. Was there some cosmic cover-up, or did we have troubles enough of our own at the time … or was it just that Mexico was so constantly in turmoil that one more horrific civil struggle just blended seamlessly into the one before and the one after?
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L-D-S

23. May 2012 · Comments Off on L-D-S · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, Home Front, Local, Pajama Game, Politics, Tea Time, World

It looks like Mittens is our man, as far as the GOP presy-nom goes in this year of Our Lord 2012. Not my personal first choice, as I retained a sneaking affection for Rick Perry as one of the very first among our dear establishment Repubs who glommed onto the Tea Party from the get go … but, eh … this is not a perfect world, probably will never be a perfect world. Speaking as an amateur historian, it’s more interesting as an imperfect world anyway. As far as I’m concerned in this current election season, Anybody But Obama will do for me. I don’t care wildly for establishment career Republicans, especially the ones embedded in the Washington D.C. establishment like an impacted wisdom tooth … but in a realistic world, we work with what we can get.

Of course, one of the sneaky push-backs generated as the campaign season wears on through summer and fall will be objections and veiled – or not so veiled – criticisms of Mitten’s Mormon faith. That is, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, LDS for short, the common reference within those communities particularly thick with them. (In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which saw the Enterprise crew voyage backwards in time to our tumultuous century, Captain Kirk attempted to cover for strangeness in Mr. Spock’s conduct by saying, “Oh, he did too much LDS in the Sixties. That line raised an enormous horse-laugh in the theater in Layton, Utah, where I saw that movie in first run: Probably not so much as a giggle, everywhere else.)
In the event of his nomination as GOP candidate, I remain confident that every scary trope about Mormons will be taken out and shaken vigorously, as representatives of the U.S. establishment press furrow their brows thoughtfully and mouth the successor-to-JournoList talking points, and members of the foreign press corps (such as the BBC) worry their pretty, empty heads about those crazy fundamentalist Americans going at it again. Christian fundamentalists on steroids, is what it will boil down to, I am sure. Polygamous marriage, every shopworn cliché about Religion American-style that you’ve ever seen in books, movies and television will be put out there. How our press nobility can accomplish this and still look away from the nuttier-‘n-squirrel-poop ravings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago without giving themselves existential whiplash, I can’t imagine. I am confident that a prospective Romney presidency will be painted as about one degree off from A Handmaid’s Tale, and there will be plenty of blue-state punters who will eat it up with a spoon. I would hope that the sensible ones would be able to stop hyperventilating long enough to listen to reason about all this.
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Murderers of the Middle Class

08. May 2012 · Comments Off on Murderers of the Middle Class · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, History, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine... · Tags: , , ,

I was reading about an aspect of the composite New York girlfriend which our current President incorporated in that gracefully luminescent autobiography which apparently very few people read, when I was reminded yet again of how much I despise Bill Ayers. Yep, that Bill Ayers, wanna-be terrorist, influential educationist, neighbor and apparently BFF with said president. My daughter has a word (or several, actually) for people like him, of which the mildest is ‘hipster douchbag.’ It seems that some of the elements of the composite girlfriend have something in common with the girlfriend of Bill Ayers in his bomb-throwing days … the one whose skills at bomb-making were – shall we say – somewhat less than skilled?

Diana Oughton – like Mr. Ayers and some of his other confreres – came from an embarrassingly well-to-do family. They pleased and amused themselves four decades ago by messing around with violent revolution, bank robbery and the inexpert assembly of high-explosive devices, presumably for the benefit of the working class, the poor, the proletariat, or whatever Marxist euphemism it pleased them to label the recipients of their beneficence. The bomb, which exploded prematurely in March of 1970 in a Greenwich Village townhouse, was made of roofing nails and dynamite stuffed into a length of water pipe; the intended target was a dance at the Fort Dix NCO club.
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The Life of Celia

04. May 2012 · Comments Off on The Life of Celia · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, sarcasm, Working In A Salt Mine..., World · Tags: ,

(With apologies to the Obama perpetual re-election campaign. Other people have had a go at this concept – I think The Life of Brian is one of the funniest, but I wanted to have a go at this myself. )

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.
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May Miscellany

04. May 2012 · Comments Off on May Miscellany · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm

Holy krep, is it May already? Guess it must be – time flies when you are having fun. My excuse is that I actually took a whole Sunday off; Blondie and I went up to the World Famous Buda Texas Wienerdog Races on Sunday, and I have been working alternately on two paid projects all this week to catch up. So – barely able to keep up with the news, such as it is, between all this and noodling around in the kitchen making another wheel of Leicester cheese and starting two crocks of home-made sauerkraut. All this German stuff is starting to catch up to me, I swear.

Sauerkraut, red potatoes and nice little sausages from the best meat market in New Braunfels, all cooked up in the same pan, make a darned tasty meal. (The recipe is on my book blog, under “The Splendid Table” page. No, seriously – good eats. I’ve begun to wonder, tasting the glories of home-made cheese, how good are the pickles that we have canned, and the sauerkraut which will eventually emerge from the canning kettle.)
Anyway – the news is it’s usual bounty of the richly comic:

Like Professor Elizabeth Warren, who looks like an older version of a Bund Deutcher Madel recruiting poster (League of German Maidens, the female version of the Hitler Youth) claiming to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian … ok, then. Now and again, I met people who told me they were part whatever American Indian. A fair number of them were blue-eyed blonds, which led me to assume that … certain physical traits must have been pretty darned recessive. Even if my friend Esther T. who was one-eighth Shoshone did look like Geronimo got up in drag as a Wagnerian soprano. So who’s really a minority, when you look at first glance like a member of the majority class? Oh, and I won’t even get into how the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous is almost a dead-spit look-alike to my brother J.P. – who in spite of having dark hair and brown eyes and used to tan very easily … is a person of unmixed pallor, Anglo-Saxon and protestant descent for as far back as family records go. Seriously. But honestly, how seriously can you take this s**t these days?

I see where some Occupy Whatever doofuses had a plot to blow up a bridge. But they didn’t have the wit to see that all their needs for explosives were being met by surprisingly helpful FBI informants. I am being reminded of those dear sweet days in the late 60s and early 70s, when law enforcement alphabet agencies made up a substantial portion of the membership of so many of these fringe little groups with violent inclinations. Apparently, they were the only ones willing to come to tedious meetings and reliably pay their dues. I kid, I kid.

And now that all the jollies have been wrung out of President Obama’s boyhood proclivities for chowing down on chow (and hound, and peke and collie), I guess now it’s time to make fun of his composite girlfriends. Seriously, he had girlfriends, composite or individual? My impression was that he was too much in love with himself to get involved with an outsider, but OK … You know, after a certain point, when enough stuff has been composited, created, massaged and shaped, you may as well call it fiction, not a memoir.
And that’s my week. Working up a piece to accompany the administrations latest bit of work “The Life of Julia” will call for a separate entry of it’s own.

(links below – somehow the posting of embedded links on this blog is frelled beyond redemption.)
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/edit/a.3037076371979.2121366.1415091659/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls
http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/one-pan-wurst-supper/

WTF?

27. April 2012 · Comments Off on WTF? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General Nonsense, Good God, Health and Wellness, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, sarcasm · Tags: , , , , , ,

That’s the feeling, really – as Blondie and I walk the dogs of a morning, and discuss such weighty matters as who remembered to bring sufficient poopy bags, if it is safe enough to let the Weevil off leash long enough to have a brisk run up and down the long fence behind which lives another Boxer mix who carries on a sort of fence to fence tag run, how many tomatoes we are likely to get from our current planting of garden bounty, if there will be enough cucumbers to make a decent batch of pickle spears soon, what to have for dinner that evening … and the morning gleanings of various internet news sites that we favor, upon rising from our slumbers first thing of a morning.

I favor Instapundit myself – out of long habit, even if he did drop this site from his blogroll a couple of years ago, but my daughter favors a combination of TMZ and the Daily Mail website, which (oddly enough) often puts up items of American news days before it appears in our own very dear mainstream media organs. Nope, tis true, tis true: sensationalist, twee, celebrity-addled, frequently misspelled/ungrammatical/confusing/sentimental-enough-to-trigger-a-diabetic-reaction, the DM still unashamedly and without much bias that I can detect covers the news. What a concept, hey? (Leaving aside the DM’s editorial bias, whatever it might be. When it comes to Brit newspapers, I used to favor the London Times and the Spectator myself, until they put everything interesting behind a paywall, then the Telegraph, and even the Guardian – until … well, that last just went beyond the pale for me. The lefty establishment bias just got to hard to take. God knows what the Grauniad thinks of the Tea Party; I don’t have a stomach strong enough to check.)

Anyway – to see ourselves as the DM sees us. My daughter notes the increasing numbers of American commenters, who ask why they hell do they have to go to a British newspaper site to see relatively unbiased American news. I’d guess it’s probably because the DM doesn’t seem to actually have a rep in among the White House Press Whores, or among the local establishment in whatever city the interesting story of the moment comes from. So, they can tell the story and access-to-the-elite-establishment be damned. Kind of refreshing, actually: what was the old press motto? To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – damned if it doesn’t seem that principle has been reversed, in these degraded modern days.

Anyway – we were talking about a wide-ranging number of topics, but actually, they weren’t all that wide-ranging. Mostly it was the various aspects of the Federal Gummint’s heavy and strangling hand descending on a variety of concerns and businesses: the EPA going after coal-burning power plants (what – do they want rolling blackouts?), the Department of Labor going all ‘it’s for the chiiiiiiiildren!’ in forbidding children, tweens and teens from working certain essential jobs on family farms, hammering the Catholic church for not handing out free birth control like it was Skittles, the EPA going after rabbit breeders, the Justice Department casually allowing weapons to walk from border states into Mexico, prosecuting Gibson guitar manufacturing enterprise for using certain kinds of imported wood, the TSA (who easily could be the most despised organization in the US today but for all the competition from the EPA) feeling up four-year old girls and ripping off wheelchair bound veterans, the NOAA enthusiastically ruining the livelihoods of New England independent fishermen … and the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio, with respect to flash-mob violence and the disinclination of our own very dear Department of Justice to become involved in prosecuting those who incite racial violence. Long list it was, too. So, I don’t think I want to get fitted for a tinfoil hat just yet … but WTF do these various numbskulls think they are doing? Exactly how far do they think people can be pushed before an individual or a community entirely looses patience? I mean – do they want large numbers of Americans to openly defy the Feds, nonviolently or otherwise? Is this deliberate incitement or just dumbassery on an epic scale?

I know, cheerful thinking for a morning walk. I think I’ll go fire up the canning kettle, and put aside another dozen jars of home made pickles, relishes and sauerkraut. To the best of my knowledge, the EPA or the DOJ hasn’t come out regulating against that … yet.
(Links here. Impossible to embed links any more…
https://truthfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/rabbit-raid-redux-six-bells-farm-update/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903895904576542942027859286.html
http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-regulations-crush-new-england-fisheries/

All Things Doggish

20. April 2012 · Comments Off on All Things Doggish · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Domestic, Home Front

It has happened to us again; we came home from morning walkies on Thursday with an extra dog, to the bafflement and apparent disgust of the Lesser Weevil and Connor … who seem to be getting over it, even as I write. The current canine find is small, attractive, and relatively well-behaved and seems to be agreeable to cats. Which a dog in our house had damn-well better be … the cats outnumber the dogs, and are Superior Beings – at least, as the cats see it, and woe betide the canine which doesn’t acknowledge this superiority immediately.
We have done this quite often – arrived home with another dog. Usually we can locate an owner almost at once – either the original owner or someone who will step up to the plate and take said dog on. Now and again we have had to turn them over to the county animal shelter; a concern which is trying their damndest to re-house the amiable and healthy animals which are turned into their facility. This time we do have some hopes of locating the owner who is missing him. How many people in a short range of our neighborhood have managed to misplace what appears to the expert eye (of a breeder just a short way away) to be a young pure-bred male Pomeranian, of an appealing reddish coloring, an amiable personality, and agreeable to other cats and dogs. He (an unmistakably un-neutered he) was running around on one of the main streets through our neighborhood. It took a bit of effort to catch him, as they are fast-moving little b****rds. Two of our neighbors stopped and told us – as we were carrying him home – that they had tried to catch him, as he was merrily skipping about in the traffic along that main feeder avenue. We were the first to be successful, probably because he was curious about Weevil and Connor, so that after about three blocks of pursuit, feints and dodges, my daughter managed to scoop him up in her arms and carry him homewards – all eight pounds and some. Of which I think a pound or so is in the weight of his fur and about half a pound in the weight of his balls … un-neutered male, as I said.
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Not Prepping … Just Prepared

12. April 2012 · Comments Off on Not Prepping … Just Prepared · Categories: Domestic, Geekery, Working In A Salt Mine...

It would seem that once there is a TV reality show about something than you can assume that it’s gone mainstream enough that the denizens of the mainstream media world are interested. So it seems to have happened with ‘prepping’ – that is, being prepared for the zombie apocalypse with a garage or a bunker full of shelf-stable and dried foods, a water purification system and a couple of cases of munitions. Meh … a lot of people went nutso over this just before New Years’ Day 2000, and there always has been a lunatic fringe … but then ensuring that you have a plentiful supply of food, drink and supplies on hand used to be pretty mainstream, actually. It was called ‘getting ready for winter’ in the 19th century, especially if you lived on a homestead half a day’s journey from the nearest general store. It certainly has been a requirement for LDS church members, as I discovered when I lived in Utah.

It seemed pretty sensible for me, actually – having an emergency stash of food. I remember my mother telling me of a friend of hers, whose husband was laid off from the Lockheed assembly line. They bought a hundred-pound sack of dried beans, which formed the largest part of their daily meals until he was employed again. We never were forced to that extreme, Dad being regularly employed, but on occasion my mother finished out the last day or two before his paychecks arrived with barely a handful of dollars and change to buy groceries with. The grandparents remembered not just the Depression, but hard times before that. They always – especially Granny Jessie who was raised on a farm – had a stash of foodstuffs on hand. So, it always seemed quite natural to read in the Little House Books, of how Pa and Ma Ingalls planted a garden, harvested from it, stored away potatoes and squash in a root cellar, butchered a pig and smoked the hams and made sausage, made apple butter and wild-berry jam. I don’t remember if Ma made cheese from fresh cow’s milk; but I do remember descriptions of churning butter from it.

Mind you, my own parents weren’t that hard-core about do-it-yourself food, but they had the can-do-it-yourself attitude about a lot of things, including landscaping and shade-tree auto repair. I came away from the assignment in Utah with a full-size freezer, a dehydrator with a lot of extra trays, and a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer with a lot of extra attachments … like a sausage stuffer, for instance. It just seemed quite natural to get interested in home brewing, and home cheese-making as well, as the results have been so delicious … and doing this had the added benefit of me being able to write fairly knowledgeably about a 19th century homemaker doing all this. Although – I am not hard-core enough t do it over a wood-burning iron stove. There is something very satisfactory about eating a slice of home-made baguette with a slice of home-made cheese on it, to eating fresh salad greens from your own garden, tomatoes and beans and squash that you picked just that afternoon.
We’ve just started doing jams and pickles and relishes of our own, in addition to all the other things. How much better than the purchased food will they taste? I’m beginning to think the next thing will be keeping hens for eggs, and I just don’t know how the neighbors will feel about that. Keeping a small cow for milk, though – that is definitely out. The yard is just not large enough.

I Do Like Men

01. April 2012 · Comments Off on I Do Like Men · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Rant, Veteran's Affairs

Like them, appreciate them, adore them for their ability to wade in there and … fix stuff. I like them for all those qualities and more, although sometimes they exasperate me, and I have been exposed to slightly more than my statistical fair share of total male fahrk-quads. Twenty years in the military will do that to you. At best, it’s an 85% plus male-dominated profession, and one is guaranteed to observe them in their masculine glory and also at their absolute piggish worst. But on the whole, I like men when they shoulder responsibility, when they are stand-up great co-workers, when they are good in bed and fantastic with amusing children, when they come to your physical and emotional rescue – which they do – and when they give those perfectly thoughtful and slightly skewed gifts. From one long-time Significant Other, I got a birthday-Christmas present of two pallets of bricks. Yes, but it was what I really-oh-truly-oh-really wanted and I had said so. Dad once gave me a metal tool-box as a Christmas present, for pretty much the same reason. More »

Reviving The Garden

19. March 2012 · Comments Off on Reviving The Garden · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Local, Working In A Salt Mine...

One of the best things about buying a house and retiring from the military was being able to feel free to actually get serious about a garden. I went through a phase of planting roses – many of which have thrived and survived – and a long project to rip out the existing lawn, back and front, and put in xerioscape plants. The back yard was the place that I put the most into, though. Because of the layout of the rooms and the windows in them, the back was the part I looked at the most. And because of the peculiar soil composition – a foot or so of heavy, dense clay laid down over an impermeable layer of caliche which apparently goes all the way to the core of the earth – getting certain things to thrive and grow in it has been a challenge. Really, if I had known then what I do now, I would have hired someone to come in with a bulldozer, scrape up all the topsoil and replace it with Miracle-gro. But I made do with putting a lot of things in pots, and I had quite a nice little garden going, until a pair of disasters. The first were the two rambunctious young dogs that my daughter fostered for a couple of months. They were whirling balls of destruction … and by the time we found permanent homes for them, they uprooted half a dozen of the potted and planted specimens and dug holes everywhere. Then a hard and prolonged freeze in January, 2010 pretty well finished off everything else.
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Far Frozen Limit

15. March 2012 · Comments Off on Far Frozen Limit · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Good God, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!, World · Tags: , , , , ,

That is what I have finally reached this week, in the wake of the Rush Limbaugh-Slutgate imbroglio: the far frozen limit. I’ve never been one to flounce off in a huff, having neither the figure for flounces or possession of a late model huff-mobile. That was my Granny Dodie’s style; she was the one who was prone to throwing hissy-fits in public places at being the recipient of bad customer service. I personally always rather preferred the model provided by my other grandmother, Granny Jessie, who would simmer quietly, depart silently … and then never darken the door of the offending establishment ever again. Which, as Granny Jessie lived to the age of 96, probably resulted in a lot of establishments being vaguely puzzled as to why the heck they didn’t ever see the tiny, grim-faced old lady in the print rayon dress ever again … or maybe not. Say what you will, at least Granny Dodie’s method left the offending establishments in no doubt that they had offended grievously, which from a customer-service point of view, at least clued them in to the fact that there was a problem. And that they just might have to take steps to fix it.
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Spring in the Garden

27. February 2012 · Comments Off on Spring in the Garden · Categories: Domestic, Local, Veteran's Affairs

It’s nowhere near official, but it is pretty clear – Spring has Sprung, and it’s only the edge of February. By the books, the last freeze in this part of Texas is mid-March, but this year, we have already had one over-ninety degree day already. Well, it was only one day, and it was the tippy-topmost high for that day and I think that the high only held for about an hour and a half … but it still necessitated running the AC for half a day. Hold that thought in your mind for a moment. Air Conditioning. In late February. Fortunately, the next day, a cooler front blew in, and since then, the weather has been more or less back to something more or less resembling normal late-winter weather. Which is to say, highs in the seventies or so, lows in the fifties, with a ten degree deviation either way, enlivened by the occasional rainstorm; quite pleasant, as winters go, especially when the northern hemisphere is suffering under two or three feet of snow, and roads covered with black ice.

Anyway; because the weather has been so mild, we’ve been able to get started on spring planting. This year, it looked like early vegetable starts were everywhere, especially lettuce, mache, corn salad, mizuna – and early tomatoes. We had a couple of earth-boxes, lots of pots, and some topsy-turvy planters, so we bought some enormous bags of potting soil … and several trays of plants, and set about reviving my garden.
Among the empty pots was one of those strawberry planters, with the little pockets on the sides – which never quite work as advertised, as the soil leaks out before the plants grow roots enough to keep it all in place. This time, my daughter cut circles of thin coir with a slit in the middle to accommodate the plants – and not strawberries, but eight different varieties of mint. Mint is tough, invasive and grows like a weed, so what better way to keep it confined. Peppers and tomatoes went into the earth boxes and into the topsy-turvys, and the lettuces and greens went into ordinary pots, and everything looked very, very well … but that’s not all.
Last Thursday, we went out walking with the dogs, and saw that one of our neighbors was having their trees pruned back – in some cases, the limbs being pruned were pretty substantial. They were all piled up, waiting to be sent through the chipper – and so I asked the crew supervisor if they could drop off some of the mulch in our driveway once they were done working. He was agreeable, but warned – the mulch coming off the truck would mount up to at least two or three cubic yards. I said, cheerfully, that we could use every bit of it … and so we did.

That afternoon, they dropped off what amounted to a Matterhorn of mulch; good stuff, with hardly any twigs and green leaves in it. My daughter and I spent two mornings, scooping it into the wheelbarrow and trundling it hither and yon. We did have a dispute: I wanted it to go to the back garden first, as that is the part of it that we look at the most, but my daughter said that the front is what everybody else sees, and we didn’t want to be ‘those people’, did we? The neighbors whose house looks like it was just declared a disaster area? Well, no … We could have maybe used another cubic yard or two, but my daughter said flatly that her back couldn’t have stood another barrow-load. But the yard does look lovely now – and once again, something that I am proud to have people see.

Merry Christmas!

24. December 2011 · Comments Off on Merry Christmas! · Categories: A Href, Ain't That America?, Domestic

Flash Mob in a mall food court sings Hallelujah Chorus

 

 

Everyone living in my house hopes that everyone living in your houses has a wonderful holiday season and that 2012 will be your best year yet.

For Christmas 2011

24. December 2011 · Comments Off on For Christmas 2011 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Local

One of my favorite Christmas carol videos –

And from A Festival of Lessons and Carols, from Cambridge, England …

Temporarily Lost My Cookies

23. November 2011 · Comments Off on Temporarily Lost My Cookies · Categories: Domestic, Geekery, General, Veteran's Affairs

Yep … Sgt Mom has had to upgrade to a totally new, just out of the box computer. My semi-sort-of-old one died, after becoming more and more unstable and noisy … plus, it was a Windows XP, which Joe computer guy has been telling me is not going to be supported any more, and that I would have to resign myself to a wholly-new machine … which is kind of an upgrade. My first computer was purchased back when I was in Korea, and cost a bomb, relatively speaking — but I nursed that puppy along for ten years before the hard drive failed utterly. This is when I met my computer genius good friend Dave, who performed the last rites, told me that it had lasted well beyond realistic expectations, and sold me a perfectly well-working rehabbed computer from his collection at a completely reasonable price, and taking the dead one in trade for any functioning parts on it. Several years after that I wound up with another rehab, which Dave had supplied to my then-employer and which I inherited when that employer closed the office. The last machine, and my flat-screen monitor came from Dave, also – his family gave them to me, along with just about all the office supplies I could carry home, as they had no need for them after Dave died. I always thought of them as his bequest, and was terribly grateful for them. I didn’t need to buy paper for nearly three years, or another computer until now.

Last night the old one simply locked up, and wouldn’t reload Windows. This afternoon, on the advice of Joe the computer guy, we opened it up and blew dust out of the innards, and on his advice — “It’s not all dead, it’s only mostly dead!” plugged it in and powered it up again, in an attempt to salvage the last of my documents and favorites. Big pop-flash-fizzle from the power unit … like the Wicked Witch of the West, I fear that it is now most sincerely, completely dead. Joe says he can pop in another power unit, and retrieve all the documents, which will be nice. I had backed up all the super-important-absolutely-key ones, and all of my picture files, but not some of the small things … which are the ones, which aggravatingly, I most miss.

So, I am reconstructing all my favorites lists, reloading software and printer drivers, and trying to sort out the mysteries of Windows-7, which is a pain … but on the other hand, it’s nice to be able to get into a document or a website instanter, and not have to wait about half an hour. No, I exaggerate, it was more like fifteen minutes, sometimes.

Yeah, this is one of the things that I am going to give thanks for, tomorrow. That Blondie’s laptop is mostly paid for, and I could afford to put this all on my AAFES Star-Card. Heck, the woman at the Randolph AB BX customer service said that I could have bought ten of them, what with the limit on a card that I only use for emergencies like this anyway.

With a Crowbar

13. November 2011 · Comments Off on With a Crowbar · Categories: Domestic, Good God, Rant, sarcasm, World · Tags: , , , ,

That is the sarcastic answer to an ancient question lately revised in the matter of the Penn State University athletic department having enabled a coach to serially molest young boys for decades – the question being, ‘How you separate the men from the boys at ____?’ Understandably, a large portion of the public is upset to furious about this, and those who are Penn grads and/or college football fans, and/or Joe Paterno fans are particularly distressed and/or seriously disillusioned.

The very saddest result from this appalling state of matters is something that I had meditated upon five years ago, when it was the matter of the Capitol Hill pages and a one Representative Mark Foley, who was forced to resign once his apparent inability to keep his hands, metaphorically speaking, off the junior staff became public knowledge outside Washington. I noted that the long-term and most damaging after-effect was how this kind of predation – after the immediate damage is done – screws up any chance of a teenager having a good mentorly relationship with an older person not their parental unit. Any cross-generational friendship will be looked at with grave suspicion – and that is so not a good thing.

We came to the point several years ago – after the various scandals in the Catholic Church – of having to consider an apparently friendly overture from an older man to a teenage boy or child as potentially the first move of a chicken-hawk. This just has to poison the pool just that much more, adding one more smidgeon of crappiness to a teenager’s lot in life, or to that of a child from a dysfunctional home. Being a teenager is 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 really getting much of a chance for earning either, the utter pointlessness of much that is taught in a public school setting . . . and then add to the fact that the average tweener or teen is stuck with their peers, by custom and institutional practice for much of each day.

Picture it, if your own memory of middle or high school is not painfully vivid in your memory: stuck with inane conversations, pointless rivalries, even more pointless academic curricula, bitter feuds, bullying and mind-games. Feeling ill and over-grown, flushed with too many hormones, and no outlet – and even if you are one of the lucky ones who do 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 have always had a conviction that teenagers – in order to get through the worst of it – need more than anything else, the companionship and example of adult friends who have common interests and enthusiasms. It tends to take the younger generation 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 own youth of “not trusting anyone over thirty.”

One of our joint enthusiasms, when my daughter was in middle school and we lived then in Ogden, Utah, was a regular meeting of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the Dr. Who Fan Club. Thirty or forty Whovians met socially once a month at a certain 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, and 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 of the other members 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, in that they were tacitly reassured that there was an escape over the walls of the teenage ghetto, and an wide world full of interesting friends on the other side. And at the very least, I am sure they came away from the meetings of the Whovians with the assurance that they would not be trapped in the teenage wasteland forever.

So the mentoring aspect in society is critically important, for boys and girls alike: 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 in that situation, who were able to find another mentor to pattern themselves upon, and thereby have a chance at becoming reasonably well-adjusted and functioning adults. I have mentored a friend of my daughter whose parents were perfect studies in rotten parenting skills, and any number of young female airmen along the way. Adult friends and mentors are the fallback position, the rescue, and second chance at becoming a well-adjusted and functioning adult. That sexual predators can inject themselves into this situation, can extend a pretend hand of friendship and respect, while all the while be looking for their own sexual interests – this is an obscenity. It casts a more-than-decade-long shadow of suspicion and distrust on those – mostly male –volunteers willing to involve themselves in youth betterment-programs as well as discouraging any well-inclined adult from opening themselves up to potential accusation.

So, thank you, Coach Sandusky, and by extension those personnel in the athletic department faculty at Penn State U – who covered for your insatiable need to get your rocks off by molesting children – just thanks. You’ve proved yourself to be a really putrid, manipulative and exploitative human being, if the published indictments are anything to go by. And everyone else in the chain of command that enabled this? Well, just thanks again. Hope you feel good about having kept your job secure by keeping silent. In addition to having facilitated the serial abuse of kids, you have also put another obstacle in the way of well-intentioned men and woman wanting to do their bit for the larger community in ministering to kids and teenagers with issues and problems. Again, just thanks.

(Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz)

Gone with the Wurst!

07. November 2011 · Comments Off on Gone with the Wurst! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Fun and Games, Local, That's Entertainment! · Tags: , , ,

We went to Wurstfest in New Braunfels this last weekend, to celebrate all things Germanic. I posted the pics in a Facebook album here – enjoy!

And no, I don’t have a recipe for the German Taco … I would guess, since it is fair food, that it is basically a grilled country sausage, with jalapeno cheese and maybe some salsa, wrapped in a flour tortilla.

Notes & Musings – November Edition

03. November 2011 · Comments Off on Notes & Musings – November Edition · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Fun and Games, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, Site News, Tea Time, That's Entertainment! · Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Being that I am snowed under with finalizing the last details for the second edition of To Truckee’s Trail, and preparing to launch the sequel to Daughter of Texas at more or less the same time in order maximize my portion of what increasingly looks like a pretty dismal Christmas shopping season with sales of my books . . . I have been only intermittently able to put my head above the parapet lately and take a look around at the socio-political landscape. A more relaxed schedule might permit me to address each of the developments listed below at length . . . but time does not permit. Heck, brevity is supposed to be the soul of wit, anyway.

1. Potential Candidate Cain’s purported sex scandal. Hey, it would be a treat to have a sex scandal in which some actual sex was involved, rather like John Edwards and his campaign-trail inamorata/baby mama? At this juncture, all we have, though – is some unspecified act(s) committed by Mr. Cain, complained of by anonymous persons (presumably female) which took place in some unspecified venue, which resulted in an unspecified money settlement . . . which no one involved can talk about, because they all signed an agreement not to talk about it. At least the time frame of this unspecified action has been nailed down by our heroically working mainstream media professions to sometime in the 1990s. Ok, it’s nice to have that specific nailed down, but seriously; unnamed sources? I’m sorry, but unnamed sources, with a charge like this do not fly freely with me any more. If you want this charge to be creditable, start naming names and specifics, otherwise I will treat this matter like the gutter gossip that it appears to be,

2. At least the matter of the rock on a hunting lease in West Texas, which had a disparaging term for a racial minority painted on it, and which was painted over at least two decades ago, seems to have been dropped – er – like a rock into the well of memory. Did any of the faithful national press gumshoes actually find the damned rock? If that’s all the dirt you can find on Rick Perry . . . Look, the guy has been in Texas politics for years. They play for keeps here, politically – the brass knuckles at no extra charge. If there were any substantial dirt to be found on him, it would have been found, long since. Oh, and thanks for floating teh ghey rumor, alleging it to have been an open secret in Texas political circles for years. I haven’t had a good laugh like that since the last time I watched The Money Pit.

3. So – looking at the list of Occupy Whatever Street supporters and backers . . . including you, “San Fran Nan” Pelosi, Michael “One Teensy Thin Mint” Moore, Mayor Bloomburg, our “illustrious”* Commander in Chief, and assorted other fellow travelers, anarchists, anti-Semites and career protest ‘tards . . . you own them, root, branch and arrest records. They are all yours, even as various OWS locations melt down gloriously into Lord of the Flies territory. I repeat; all yours. Kinda make the Tea Party rallies look good in comparison, don’t they?

4. Isn’t it well past time for the Kardashian sisters’ ration of fame to be up? I mean; fifteen minutes each, there are three of the talent-free and parasitical skanks, which adds up to 45 minutes total. I had a case of mono which lasted longer than Whats-er-fern’s most recent marriage. The Cardassians of Star Trek fame were much more interesting. And realistic.

5. Finally, in site news; this weekend Brian is going to fight off the locusts that ate his day off, long enough to look at why we can’t easily post pictures on this website. I have a raft of pictures I want to put up, including a new header . . . and, well all sorts of stuff.

Sincerely, Sgt Mom

PS: The Kindle version of To Truckee’s Trail – second edition has already gone live. I am still taking pre-pub orders for Deep in the Heart, and for Truckee’s print edition. Your purchases help support me, and this blog, so . . . a portion of your consumer dollars thrown in my direction will be greatly appreciated.

So, Whither Occupy What Street?

22. October 2011 · Comments Off on So, Whither Occupy What Street? · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, My Head Hurts, Stupidity, Tea Time

As a terribly scarred and battle-hardened first gen Tea Partier, I am following the fortunes of the OWS with mixed emotions; those motions mostly being a combination of disbelief and horror. Your leaderless insurgency just sort of decided to get together, camp out in a public place and make enough of a spectacle for the media and general public to take notice. Well, that’s a goal of sorts, but didn’t anyone do any serious advanced event planning? Organizing skilled volunteers with specific skill-sets to see to billeting, portapotties and their maintenance, security, law-enforcement coordination, clean-up, outreach and education? Nobody gave consideration about yourselves and your main message (whatever that message may actually be) from pervs, rapists, assorted unappetizing/potentially embarrassing freelance whackos and a collection of thievish and destructive blights on the activist community. Was there no guidance considered to urge protest participants to make nice with business owners and members of the general public who have varying degrees of concern about the space you have chosen to take over for your purposes? Was there any prior planning (which prevents piss-poor performance, as the old military saying goes) in advance of these momentous decisions to take to the streets? No confabulations, through social media, no focused meetings of intensely interested volunteers, no hours-long conference calls, thrashing out the basics?

Sigh – it appears that the answer to these questions is not.

(As an aside – you will never get 100% consensus among rational adults about anything. Settle for 2/3rd majority, respect the dissenting 1/3rd, and move on. Give way to the minority on something else: it’s called negotiation, my dears – or in vulgar parlance: horse-trading. Prioritize what is important and which you will not compromise upon, and work out what lesser principals you will trade off to achieve that. It’s what adults in a functioning democracy do. People who have real lives and real jobs, those who do not live the Great and Shining Cause 24/7, 365 days a year, will not have the patience or endurance for epic meetings deciding upon minutia . . . however, I have noticed that a certain kind of career activitist/community organizer does have stamina sufficient for meetings of the endless and ultimately pointless sort. I’d advise you to avoid that kind of person, but it probably is a bit too late. )

I do have to hand it to the Occupy Whatever Street – the major national news media are already giving the various protest events the warm sloppy tongue-bath, even to the point of serving your public relations functions. It took the SATP a good six months of outreach and conferences with various local TV news directors and newspaper editors to get any respect at all. But, as a sort-of PR professional, I have to say that this good-will towards the OWS probably will not last, and may already be shriveling. A long-established protest site in the heart of a big city can only be made to seem cool, subversive, and glamorous for so long, in the face of ongoing noise and vandalism, reported harassment of local residents and law-enforcement personnel, and just the general rat’s nest appearance of the average OWS protest camp. This will not go over well in the long run with ordinary, hard-working, peace-loving citizens, even those in general sympathy with some of the stated goals. There are a fair number of new reports indicating that your immediate neighbors in your various venues are growing sick and tired of your presence. This is something that you should pay attention to; bad optics, from a public affairs point of view. Which brings me to my next point –

A street protest is just a starting point for a truly broad-based and ground-up political movement. Getting together in a public space all those who are moved enough to be unhappy about things as they are . . . my dear people, that is only the first step. The next one is to go home, to fully understand the issues and the various options that would perhaps alleviate those of most concern, and to continue the outreach, the consultations, the epic convention calls, the even-more-epic meetings among the most dedicated and skilled – the formulation of email lists, the cultivation of donors . . . all of that. It’s much more of a job and not as attention-catching as a simple temporary event. It’s work, and it’s hard and dedicated work. It is not fun – hardly a romp in the park, if I may be so kind as to draw that analogy. It’s work. Hard work and it will almost always take a lot more temporal and psychic energy than you might think at first. Been there – done that, ever since working to resettle Vietnamese refugees in 1975-75.

Unless you are all willing to do that work, then you are merely dilettantes in protest, having a public temper-tantrum.

I remain most sincerely yours and this entry is posted as my best professional advice

Sgt. Mom

A Little Shadow, Who Goes In & Out With Me

16. September 2011 · Comments Off on A Little Shadow, Who Goes In & Out With Me · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Domestic, General

Sigh – it’s happened again. Blondie, the Queen of All Yard Sales, went out prospecting last Saturday morning to the neighborhood on the opposite side of Stahl Road, and returned with a very cute stuffed bear (practically new!) who sat in his own (cheap but cute!) upholstered armchair, which was for sale for the OMG-have-to-have-it price of a whole $3!

And there was another item, accompanying her, upon this expeditionary trip into another neighborhood: something live, black-furred, wiggly and friendly. A small and relatively well-kept dog, about twenty pounds at a guess, somewhat gray about the muzzle – which Blondie found, running around in the street, a heavily-trafficked suburban street adjacent to the yard sale – a venue which could easily spell death to small dogs.

We’ve rescued a number of dogs, in our residence here – mostly lost, and now and again dumped. We can read the whole sad story in their demeanor and behavior. Someone gets a cute puppy, puppy grows up, becomes a handful and not so cute, someone decides not to want to cope with it any longer . . . short drive to a likely neighborhood, a quick dump out the door . . . and the problem dog becomes someone else’s problem. I wish we could put people like this in the stocks, so we could throw rotten vegetables at them. Better yet – dump them in a strange town, completely naked and gagged, and let them fend for themselves and find their way home. Dogs are . . . well, they are dogs. Thousands of years ago – wolves who decided to throw their lot in with us, to look to us as the leader of their pack of one or two. The love of a dog is the only kind of love that money buys – and sometimes a love that is horribly misplaced.

Why, oh why do we always seem to undertake these rescue missions on weekends? No collar, no tags. He (definitely he and neutered) is about 20 pounds, black fur with a grizzled grey chin. Mixed breed – almost certainly part Shih-tzu, for the body conformation is the right size and confirmation, although I think there must be something else in the genetic mix. He has a long muzzle, and the veterinarian’s assistant who regretfully turned up no chip guesses Maltese, or Maltese-poodle-Shih-tzu. He is inclined to be glued to whichever one of us is working at a computer, and lays quietly under the desk, unless provoked by a cat. This is what lap-dogs do, they want to be near their chosen person – He isn’t chipped, no collar, no tags. No one has papered the neighborhood looking for him. I’ve put his picture on a couple of local lost and found websites, but no one recognizes him. He was well-cared for, healthy, fairly clean, well-mannered, obedient and affectionate … the only rationale we can come up with is that perhaps he belonged to an older person, who either passed on, or was moved into a nursing home, and the next of kin just didn’t want to botherIn the meantime, we have another dog about the house. We will make one last stab at finding his owner this weekend, by going for a walk with the dogs in the neighborhood where Blondie found him – which will probably prove to be fruitless, for no one is papering that neighborhood with posters of him.

I confess – I have rather missed the rapid clicky-clicky-clicky-nails sound of a small dog’s toenails, as they follow me about the house. Another neighbor presented us with a barely used pet-bed – the kind with the removeable cover, over a heavy foam base. We washed it all, and put it under my desk, and there he is, every day after I work. He’s there now.

The Ghost Poet

23. June 2011 · Comments Off on The Ghost Poet · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, History, War, World

(Found through a link posted in a historical novel enthusiast group – the story of a poet who’s words inspired his community … the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.

Hey, Louis! You probably don’t know
What your punches mean to us
You, in your anger, punched the Brown Shirts
Straight in their hearts—K.O.

Lost Words – an article from Tablet Magazine

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