Two essays for this day, the eleventh day of the elevenths month: First – Austin Bay and second, my own reminiscence of my great-uncle William
Later: from Youtube, via my computer genius friend who sent it to me this morning – “A Pittance of Time“.
USMC, 232 years today and still kicking ass and taking names!
Now, y’all go and party like it’s 1775, you hear?
According to this story, this lot of blue-nosed busy-bodies is having another go at banning mags like Penthouse and Playboy from being sold in military PXs and bookstores on base. God save us, and as a small “f” feminist and mother I object to acres of objectified flesh on display next to the Air Force Times and “Family Circle” as much as any other woman with taste.
But hey, to each their own. I am fully cognizant of the fact that the military is largely made up of men. Most of them are young men, supposedly straight, and historically with an abiding interest in the female form – either in the flesh or pictorially. This is just one of those facts of life that one has to accept, as tacky as the morally over-fastidious may find it. Like the poor and recipes for tuna-noodle casserole that call for a can of cream of mushroom soup, these things are with us always. I can adjust, although apparently the good Reverend cannot.
Because, you see… the BX/PX Navy Exchange are there to supply the military community with the materiel items they need. Think of it as Wally-World with cammies and jungle boots. Embrace that concept, my dear little well-meaning anti-porn crusaders; the stuff for sale in military exchanges is there because the military members want to buy it – not necessarily because it has been judged good for them, or in good taste. And in overseas military bases, there is often no other alternative than the BX/PX, other than mail order.
Getting on a blue-nosed high-horse about banning certain magazines being for sale in the BX-PX is the start of a slippery slope – which is why I give a damn in the first place. The danger is that if every moral crusader and his brother, or sister can make a show of their virtue by pitching a fit about magazines whose appeal is contingent on displaying acres of siliconized boobies and Brazilian bikini-waxed hoo-hoos… well, what can be next, then? Eco-crusaders banning car magazines? Feminists wanting drive out “Cosmopolitan” or “Martha Stewart Living”?
I can very well recall how “The Last Temptation of Christ” was ostentatiously dropped from the Exchange inventory, never mind that some of us stationed overseas wanted to watch it, even if only to see what the fuss was about. The book and magazine selection used to run the whole political gamut, right to left and every shade and relevancy in between – but allow someone to burnish their image by engaging in a campaign to ban this, that or the other for the ostensible good of all military members… not good. It treats members of the military like children, with the good reverend and his ilk deciding what they think is good for them to have. And it sets a damn bad precedent.
I may not like the skin mags much – but someone obviously buys them, and if the BX/PX is in the business of supplying what military members buy… well, then… there you go. They are the military Walmart, not the YMCA.
Scroll down and take the poll in the middle of the story.
Mmmm… I’m building a website. For a writer’s guild that I have joined. I’m on the board, actually. There’s this group of people I met in an Amazon.com discussion group who have decided that dammit, we need to really do something about the literary industrial complex. And holy c**p, about two dozen of us have gone and done something.
We’ve formed a non-profit writers’ guild, and plan to collaborate on marketing and publicity, and some other stuff, like a newsletter and making the scene at various book-fairs.
We have mad visions of doing for the literary industrial complex what blogging did for the legacy media. You know, storming the barricades, and all that.
Wish me luck, and keep that flaming torch handy. I may need it…
The Hollywood writers are on strike? Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit – how the hell can you tell? Blondie just discovered that we have BBC-America in our cable package. We’re set for the next few months, what with Torchwood, Doctor Who and the new Robin Hood.
I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in at any time.
Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. There was no place for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating. I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving – didn’t find it a little bit of a relief, to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline. Curiously, the very first American female law officer was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming… in 1869. When it came right down to it, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage in Cheyenne quite as violently as it did in Westminster, or arouse a backlash anywhere near as vicious; curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.
But someone like Lizzie Johnson could have had the life and career that she did, nowhere else. She was born in Missouri in 1840, and came to Texas with her parents six years later. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Johnson was a schoolteacher and devout Presbyterian, who brought his growing family to Texas. Eventually he set up a boarding school in Hayes County, south of Austin and some distance from San Marcos, which drew pupils from the area – and astonishingly, a fair number from other Southern states. Lizzie’s father, known as the Professor had originally intended it to be a boys school but so many girls applied that it morphed into a coeducational secondary school. The school prospered, and Lizzie (along with her brothers and sisters) taught classes – including bookkeeping. Lizzie turned out to be particularly gifted at mathematics.
This talent would have an unexpected bearing on her later career, which began to blossom in the decade following the Civil War. She taught school in a couple of small towns near Austin before opening her own primary school there in 1873; in a two story house on property she had purchased in her own name. She did more than teach school, though: complaining of boredom with the same old teaching routine and social affairs in letters to her brother, she had begun to write popular fiction under various pen names for the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper… and she also did bookkeeping. Her brother John had kept the books for the Day brothers, who had extensive ranching interests in Hays County, and were old neighbors of the Johnson family. There were seven Day brothers; inevitably they were known as the “Weeks”. John never entirely recovered from battlefield injuries incurred during his service as a soldier, and when he died, Lizzie took over in his stead. Her father had kept a small herd of cattle to supplement his income from the school, and Lizzie was now in possession of an income of her own, which she could invest in whatever she chose.
And she chose to invest in real estate, and in cattle, about which she became startlingly knowledgeable, for a maiden lady schoolteacher. By the time she opened her own school; she had registered her own brand, owned land and cattle, and was sending substantial herds north to the Kansas railheads. Her life seems astonishingly modern, the farthest thing imaginable from the repressed and constrained fictional women in novels by serious writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. She worked at what pleased and rewarded her, and no one – not her father or other male relative had anything to say about her household, her income, and her considerable business interests. Well, her surviving brothers – all younger – might have had a lot to say, but little enthusiasm for attempting any means of control over a formidable woman like Lizzie.
I think of her as the anti-Lily Bart. Another astonishingly modern touch – she married well beyond the age that a woman was expected to have committed in matrimony, and it was not for lack of serious suitors. For Lizzie was – to judge from contemporary formal daguerreotype portraits of her, in which the length of film exposure made any facial expression except the kind you could hold for some length of time out of the question – a rather attractive woman. Victorian standards of beauty differed considerably from the modern one, admittedly; they favored round-faced blondes, and Lizzie was dark-haired and looked rather like a 19th century Demi Moore. She was no frump, either, but dressed elegantly and in the latest fashion. She was courted assiduously over several years by one of the Day brothers and a number of other prosperous men, every one of whom knew her as a woman of property… and moreover, exactly how she came by it. Brains, beauty and business sense apparently had considerable allure.
At the age of 39, this frontier Kate married her Petruchio. He was a handsome and raffish widower with several children, named Hezekiah Williams. Although a retired Baptist preacher, and a moderately unsuccessful rancher, he was also a bit of a gambler and drinker. Sensibly, Lizzie married him with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement in place. She would control her own property acquired before the marriage, as well as anything she acquired in her own name after it. It seems that Lizzie Johnson Williams chose as well in her marriage as she did everything else, for they maintained a devoted and happily competitive relationship, both in business and in their personal life for thirty-five years. They went up the cattle trail to the northern railheads three times, Lizzie and Hezekiah each with a separate herd; it is thought that Lizzie was the only woman rancher who trailed cattle that she herself owned wholly, in the post-war cattle boom. When she died in 1924, ten years after Hezekiah, her neighbors were astonished to find out that she owned property worth a quarter of a million dollars. She had lived in a modest, not to mention miserly style since the death of her husband.
Professor Barry Sanders* is back with a reply to his critics: “Y’all quit picking on me!”
Kidding. I am sure that Professor Sanders is sophisticated and would never be caught dead throwing ‘y’all’ about in conversation.
His reply does seem a tad whiny. It’s not his fault, you see, because the military operates behind a scrim of secrecy and it’s really difficult to get information out of them. You’d think the military is some kind of bureaucracy or something.
That and people were correcting his mistakes in a way that was not respectful. Shame on y’all. Professor Sanders is from the academic world where people are more polite and don’t call bullshit in such vulgar ways.
Let me begin by saying that this is a new world for me, the world of blogging.
One could be unkind and reply that the world of logic, facts and clean prose is new to him as well.
As a friend told me from the outset, one cannot take on the military in this country, without getting knocked about.
Is there a lot to criticize about the military? Darn right there is. My own beef is not that he is taking on the military but that he did so with a poor logic and ratty data.
As for the Standard, Goldfarb does not like the line, “The USS Lincoln helped deliver the opening salvos and air strikes in Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He says the Lincoln has no “guns.” I took that line from the Navy’s own web site. If I am wrong, the military has it wrong.
Reading comprehension is clearly not Professor Sanders strong suite – the Navy web site doesn’t mention guns but ordnance. Ordnance is typically defined as ‘stuff that goes boom’, but they don’t mention guns. Clearly the Navy is wrong for not being specific and inserting verbage like this
Lincoln delivered a big bunch of boom stuff by airplane. Because that’s what aircraft carriers do.
Or something like that.
He (Goldfarb) claims that only one aircraft carrier is not nuclear powered and so my claim about “ship tracks” is wrong. First, does he not think that nuclear power pollutes, or that no danger exists from an accident? What does he think one should do about spent fuel rods?
The article is titled ‘The Military’s Addiction to Oil’ so the confusion might be understandable. Goldfarb took his argument from the title – if he is wrong, Professor Sanders has it wrong.
The USS Independence did move out to the Gulf in the first Gulf War, in 1991. I mixed up the dates for the two Gulf Wars and inserted the wrong one.
The article centered around current activities and never mentioned a conflict more than a decade in the past. Yet one key point was meant to jump back sixteen years and talk about a now decommissioned ship. Maybe – he’s clearly not the most organized thinker.
Also, I inadvertently left out the word battalion in the sentence, “a pair of Apache helicopter battalions can devour more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night’s attack
The sentence as published was “Just one pair of Apaches in a single night’s raid will consume about 60,000 gallons of jet fuel.” Ya – inserting battalion in the middle of that makes a whole bunch more sense. Sure, Ace. And I am Marie, Queen of Romania.
Let’s now turn to the question of the number of carrier task forces in the Gulf. First, from Reuters: “On January 20, 2007, the USS Stennis set sail for the Persian Gulf as part of an increase in US military presence within the Middle East. The Stennis joined the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the United States Fifth Fleet of operations. On May 23, 2007, the Stennis, along with eight other warships including the carrier USS Nimitz and amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard, passed through the Strait of Hormuz. US Navy officials said it was the largest such move since 2003.”
How many ships does this total? Ten or Twelve? How many “carrier task forces” does that constitute?
This is not difficult – only an academic would make it so. A ‘carrier task force’ requires a carrier.
Now – all of this has a shooting fish in a barrel feel. I wrote this as a follow-up for yesterday’s post out of a sense of obligation and in the hope that by showing people like Professor Sanders he can’t use obfuscation and bad data in his arguments we’ll get honest data and real discussion.
If not we’ll get to make fun of them, which ain’t bad either.
*Take a look at his bio page: the title of two of his books is spelled wrong. I don’t know where the Huffington Post gets this data but one suspects that Professor Barry Sanders lack of attention to detail is to blame.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Barry Sanders – author, educator and tool – recently took aim at the big green machine, how much fuel it consumes and how wasteful all of this is and how this contributes to global warming. Sort of – it’s hard to work through the thicket of obfuscation and ratty data.
That armored vehicles are fuel hogs and that POL is a huge consumer of logistic assets is not news. Should we work on this? Log officers the world over would love to have a fuel efficient HMMWV – and it would cost a lot less to operate.
Of course this would make our armed forces yet more lethal and efficient at the business of breaking things and killing people so this might not have the end result Mr. Sanders desires. So it goes.
I’d be a poor blogger indeed if I didn’t – along with about eleventy-dozen other bloggers – point out where Mr. Sanders went off the rails.
The Army tries to keep its entire inventory of Abrams tanks up and running in Iraq–all 1,838 of them.
As opposed to just parking say, half of them in a depot. Tanks are heavy fuel eating monsters – I doubt even the Army would ship 1,838 of them to Iraq unless they really needed all of them.
Feeding the appetites of these voracious machines, with gasoline or diesel or kerosene, requires intricate logistical planning and support from some 2,000 trucks, a battery of computers, another 20,000 GIs, and, according to an Associated News report for September 2007, as many as 180,000 workers under federal contracts–more contract workers, in fact, than soldiers. Of the twenty-eight private security companies operating in Iraq, the major ones are Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy, Kellogg, Brown and Root, DynCorp International, and the Vinnell Corporation. The largest of them is not even American, but British, named the Aegis Corporation.
Many of the contract workers are former military Special Forces troops, such as Navy Seals and the Army’s Delta Force.
We jumped – in one paragraph – from talking about logistics to talking about trigger pullers. Rangers and SEALs might be able to handle fuel and logistics but they probably wouldn’t sign up for that job. But hey – logistics is boring and Blackwater and their fellow contractors are hot hot hot.
What contractors have to do with fuel and global warming … I have no idea.
He (Erik Prince – Blackwater) intends to expand into a “full spectrum” defense contractor, offering “one-stop shopping” for anything and everything the military might need, from unmanned planes to tanks and ammunition.
Lousy running-dog capitalist.
On its way to the Persian Gulf in 2002, a trip that took fourteen days, the Independence went through two million gallons of fuel.
Independence was decommissioned in 1998. For a ship laid up at the yard I’d say that’s pretty good fuel consumption.
Already sitting in the Gulf were ten other “Carrier Task Forces” built around the aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Harry S. Truman, and the Abraham Lincoln.
And this happened when? Twelve carriers in the Gulf at the same time? You could walk from one side to the other on the flight decks.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, familiar to us as the ship on whose deck President Bush declared to the nation, on May 2, 2003,”Mission Accomplished,”
Huffington Post Style Guide Rule 12: at least one obligatory slam against President Bush per post. No exceptions.
The USS Lincoln helped deliver the opening salvos and air strikes in Operation Iraqi Freedom. From March 2003 until mid-April of that same year, during its deployment in the Gulf, the Navy launched 16,500 sorties from its deck, and fired 1.6 million pounds of ordnance from its guns.
This was after her refit when the Navy mounted two turrets from the USS New Jersey on her flight deck, aft of the island, creating the first carrier-battleship hybrid. Next year they’re going to put wheels on her so the Navy can drive around on land like the Army.
Just one pair of Apaches in a single night’s raid will consume about 60,000 gallons of jet fuel.
This is the famous Whale variant that carries a 30,000 gallon external fuel tank.
Any of the large helicopters–the Sea Stallion, Super Stallion, Sea Dragon, or Pave Low III–sucks up five gallons every mile.
Surely this isn’t because the referenced models are, essentially, the same machine with different hardware and missions?
With its afterburners fired up, the F-16 Fighter Jet uses 800 gallons per hour, the F-15 about 1,580 gallons per hour.
Frick: Captain you’re using up 800 gallons per hour on afterburner! Frak: That’s ok, Colonel, I’m not going to be flying that long.
More dramatically, the F-4 Phantom Fighter
Do we even FLY these any more?
To keep the B-52 or F-111 in the air for extended periods of time requires in-flight re-fueling. Even though the B-52H holds an enormous 47,975 gallons of fuel, it requires mid-air refueling.
You’re repeating yourself. Someone call an editor for Mr. Sanders!
That’s the job of the aerial refueling tankers, the KC-10, which burns 2,050 gallons per hour, and the larger KC-135 Stratotanker, which itself carries 31,275 US gallons of fuel, and sucks up an impressive 2,650 gallons per hour; and the KC-10.
He’s doing it again – where is that damned editor!
We can assume, with confidence, however, that those bases run through a considerable number of barrels of fuel.
You know what they say when you assume …
The only way I know how to make military pollution in any way tangible here is through numbers,
It would help if you would use correct numbers when you have them available.
It’s not that his argument has no merit – it’s that it’s hard to take a fellow seriously who make mistakes with his basic facts and figures. What else is hiding in his prose? What else is he fudging or obscuring? If he’s dishonest he’s not worth reading. If he’s just dumb he’s fair game for mockery – and also not worth reading.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
That depends on your interests, of course. But these are some I visit almost daily.
Kim Du Toit: You’ll never wonder where you stand with him. From what I’ve seen, he’s not the least bit shy about sharing his opinions/thoughts, and won’t apologize if they differ from yours. Talks about guns, music, guns, culture, guns, and assorted other topics. I’ve learned a lot from him, on a number of topics. And if you want to talk guns — any kind of guns, or ammo, or whatever, he’s your man.
Ed Morrisey at The Captain’s Quarters: Politics, culture, and my daily fix of Chris Muir’s comic strip Day by Day.
Blonde Sagacity: Ala is a Philadelphian with attitude (or is that being redundant?).
Tim at Random Observations: Exercises in critical thinking, usually with a Christian flavor.
Joanne Jacobs blogs about education and education-related topics.
Over the past 4 months I’ve stopped reading blogs. The ones that I used to read every day simply don’t interest me any more.
So what are you reading these days? Anyone have anything new going on? Is there a milblogger out there who’s got something better to say than “Liberals suck! We can win the war!?”
Anyone blogging on pop culture in a fun and interesting way?
Seriously, let me know who you’re reading in the comments.
For no particular reason, over last weekend I was re-reading David McCullough’s account of the Johnston Flood, and was struck by the chapter which recounts the aftermath. Scores of reporters for American newspapers leaped upon the story – it wasn’t every day that a thriving industrial town gets wiped out in forty minutes flat by a sudden colossal rush of water from a catastrophic dam failure upstream, not even in the admittedly accident-prone 19th century. Among the first sensational stories reported from the wrecked city were lurid tales of gangs of Hungarian immigrants – the downtrodden and resentful minority du jour of that time and locality – looting the dead and raping the living, and of vigilante justice on the part of other survivors… all of which turned out to have been untrue. Even retractions and corrections afterwards wouldn’t squash those accounts dead in their tracks, and it reminded me of the stories of horrors in the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina; also lurid, also untrue… but widely disseminated, and even when debunked at length, with footnotes, forensic evidence and pictures… still passionately believed.
It all comes down to memes. They are a set of assumptions which have a life of their own through being repeated, especially by organs like the news media and beacons of popular culture like the entertainment industry. Thus propagated, memes are pernicious as nut-grass. No matter how many times they are debunked… still they exist, springing up sturdily in the cracks of public discourse and popular culture. Most of them do little harm, and even boost the subjects’ ego in a small way: Frenchmen are good lovers, New York is the center of American intellectual life, you get the best education at the most expensive college. Others exasperate experts by their persistence, in spite of being debunked, corrected or explained, over and over: Columbus was NOT the first European to believe the world was round, aliens from space did not build the pyramids- or any other monumental structure in the ancient world, and President Bush did not serve up a plastic turkey to the troops.
This morning the Blogfaddah linked to a discussion of l’affaire Beauchamp, which began with the lament “Isn’t it sort of disappointing that one has to spend this much time telling journalists, and journalist’s most ardent supporters, why it is important that journalists don’t lie?” Discussion immediately lurched away from examining what I thought was the point of the essay in question; why the milblog community landed on the New Republic’s fables with such energy and enthusiasm.
The answer is because it was another brick in the wall of meme under current construction, itself is an extension of the one constructed around Vietnam war veterans, which almost without exception painted them as tormented and drug-addled lost souls, riddled with guilt over having committed atrocities, and unable to make anything of their post-service lives. This meme had far more damaging results than just providing a handy stock character for movies, television and news documentaries; it impacted the lives of real veterans, essentially isolating and silencing them. Men and women who had satisfying, productive and well-adjusted lives did not particularly want to be identified as Vietnam war veterans, not if it meant being dismissed as a freaked-out looser.
That is why milboggers came unglued over Beauchamp’s and other fraudulent and malignant stories given credence by self-isolated specimens like Franklin Foer; because it’s being attempted, all over again with a new generation of veterans. Last time, it went unchallenged for decades. By my recollection it took about fifteen years for a TV show to feature a well-adjusted non-traumatized Vietnam veteran hero. It’s not going to happen again, not if we have the ability to forcefully question the individual meme-bricks before the mortar has set. Doesn’t matter that The New Republic is a small-circulation magazine or that some kind of truthiness about the brutalities of war -blah-blah-blah, or that our pop-cult gurus are too damn lazy to work up another set of clichés. This one we’re going to fight on the beach.
A more interesting line of thought is – is there something more than just intellectual laziness and the comfort of slipping into a well-worn track at work here, even if only subconsciously? Could there be something to be gained on one side of the debates about war, Islamic-inspired imperialism, the whole tar-baby of nuclear Iran, if military veterans whose service at the pointy-end-of-the-spear might have given them some particular interest or insight can be easily silenced and isolated… simply by being routinely characterized as ignorant, out-of-control redneck freaks?
Yeah, I’ve wondered about that myself, lately. Discuss among yourselves.
AFP’s caption generator goes on the fritz, hilarity ensues.
.
A US airman with a machine gun in Indian Springs. Burglars in the United States could once sue homeowners if they were shot, but now a growing number of states have made it legal to shoot to kill when somebody breaks into a house(AFP/Getty Images/File/Ethan Millar)
Next up – a story by AFP about the growing tend of homeowners to utilize M60s and claymore mines for deliberate ambush in their front yards.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
To: Various
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: A Surfeit of Crow
1. What a deliciously rich week this has been, as regards legacy media meltdowns! I can barely keep up with it all. Every time I repair to the kitchen for another bowl of popcorn,( lightly salted with schadenfreude) there is another development. At this point it looks rather like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers “Night at the Opera”. It’s as if everyone wants their fifteen minutes of infamy all at once.
2. Ted Rall has flexed his buns and squeezed out another offensive turd of a cartoon, alleging the extreme stupidity of those who join the military and claiming (if I can read his lettering correctly) that every one of them killed raises the overall IQ of the United States. To which I have two reactions: One – someone still publishes Ted Rall? And two: He hasn’t met too many military people lately, has he? A fair percentage of them do attend college, one way or the other – the conventional indicia, for what that is worth. Regardless, I’d bet most of them could draw better drunk than Ted Rall can sober.
3. A formerly obscure reporter for McClatchy Newspapers decides to be a total d**k to a soldier guarding an entry point to the Green Zone in Baghdad, and play the “Do you know who I am?” card? Note to Mr. Bobby Calvan – this gambit is only really effective if the public easily recognizes your face, or in Brittny Spears’ case, your nether regions. Mr. Calvan then compounds this bad judgment by lovingly detailing the incident on his blog, in an account which fairly oozes with faux-macho bravado and self-regard. He is promptly slammed with nearly two hundred comments unanimously pointing out with varying degrees of wit, exactly what kind of d**k he is. As was the phrase at Mount Gleason Junior High School, “he was chopped down so low he could play Sea Hunt in a loogie”.Such a beat-down is rare and to be cherished; and although Mr. Calvan took down the whole post and the comment string, it was saved and replicated by others for the delectation and amusement of us all.
4. Hollywood’s current string of anti-war movies are tanking like the Titanic… all except possibly “The Kingdom”, AKA “CSI-Riyadh”. Well then, what did you guys expect – as I pointed out here “No, we will not line up and plunk down our movie ticket dollars to have our country slimed, our military family members defamed and our efforts to fight terrorists belittled, and all the glowing reviews from your media buds will not make us toddle down to the multiplex to watch your damned movie. At least the Hollywierd ‘tards can comfort themselves with the thought of how well their anti-war wankfests will play on foreign movie screens. And all their media syncophants will coo and ahh and tell them how brave they are, speaking “trooth to power”! Apparently none of these “creative geniuses”* paid attention to the guy from www.boxofficemojo.com who pointed out “…audiences seek out movies for inspiration, for laughter and to be moved.” Yes, the audiences in flyover country America have indeed figured out that the yellow stuff pissing down on us from the cinematic clouds is not rain. You want to make movies for the overseas audience? Be my guest – everyone needs a hobby. But it looks like American audiences outside your little circle have a better use for their time and money than indulging you in yours.
5. And the wall of denial regarding Baghdad Diarist and Hemmingway wanna-be Scott Thomas Beauchamp finally crumbled, spectacularly! To quote P.J. O’Rourke – just desserts! Just hors d’ oeuvres! A just main course of crow! Practically every veteran or serving military member took one look at the infamous posting (once their attention had been drawn to it) and thought – “Gee, that doesn’t sound quite right…” Young Pvt. Beauchamp may survive the debacle relatively unscathed, but it doesn’t look like gullible editor Franklin Foer will for long. Frankie, Frankie, Frankie – it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up, as I am sure anyone who recalls Watergate could tell you. Jeeze, I’ll bet he falls for Nigerian spam emails asking for his bank account number. Some people are just too damn gullible to be in the news business!
Thank you all for providing this rich vein of amusement. I can hardly wait for next week.
Sincerely,
Sgt Mom
* viciously skeptical quote marks
Lovely video and song for the troops here, forwarded by Simon and also posted at his Power and Control blog. Simon also adds this note: “The author has given permission to those currently serving in the military to share it with nine of their best buddies, wives, husbands, parents, or children.”
Think of things like this as an antidote to the current out-spew of anti-war flicks from our friends in main-stream Hollywood.
Update: Simon has been authorized by the author of to give away 1,000 free copies of the song to our men and women in the military for personal use only. However, recipients of a free copy can let anybody listen to it if they want. Members of the military can put it on their i-pod, use it on their computer, or make one CD. Details and his email addy are here
(this is a post I originally wrote in November, 2003 after my parents’ house was burned to the ground in the Cedar/Paradise Mountain fire the month before. Sorry, all the cited links are long-decayed. I pulled the post from my own archive, as we are unable to access the the 2002-2003 blog archive on Moveable Type.
Mom and Dad are presently sitting tight, with a handful of their neighbors, having packed up their vehicles. Their neighborhood is in the evacuation zone, but the fire is well to the south of them, and moving fast towards the west. As of last night no one was making an issue of them leaving, since winds are blowing the fire front past them. Their only risk is of something starting up in the mountains to their east – in which case they will have to scramble. But for now, they are OK.)
I about fell out of my chair laughing, this morning when I read a letter to the editor in “Spectator” from some misinformed schlub who is convinced utterly that everyone in America is either rich and living in a gated community, or poor and living in the ghetto. From a distance, I guess it is perfectly easy to misplace the square miles and miles and miles of communities and suburbs which fit into the comfortably wide area in between those extremes, although the writer claimed to have visited the United States often. It was almost as funny as the columnist for the Vangardia, reported in Iberian Notes ( very last entry for 30 October)who believed all the people burned out of their homes in the recent fires were millionaires living in opulent mansions.
Maybe some of the Scripps Ranch houses may have been McMansion boxes on the hillside, all built out of ticky-tacky grown large, and I do know of one mercifully small housing development near Mom and Dads, but Valley Center, and Julian, and Lake Cuyamaca, and Santa Ysabel and all those other little communities which burned last week aren’t anything like your stereotypical gated suburb. But they were homes, and the loved by the people who lived in them, and most of them were not mansions, their owners are not millionaires.
When you drive east and north of the coast, and the belt of suburbs and towns around the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles you are in the back country, among tawny hills dotted with dark green live oaks, along rocky steams and washes grown with poplar trees, a country quilted with truck farms, and orchards of citrus, persimmons, avocados, apples, or steep mountains grown thickly with pine trees. The sky is nearly always blue, the temperatures almost always mild, summer and winter. It is possible to garden year round, and to live without air conditioning. The hills are full of quail, deer, coyotes and other interesting wild animal life.
Valley Center, part of which was threatened by the Paradise fire last week, is not a neatly contained, contiguous town like Julian, farther back in the higher mountains. Businesses, the schools, the post office, the Catholic church, fire station and community center are scattered along the length of, or clustered around the intersections of Valley Center, Cole Grade, Woods Valley and Lilac Roads, interspersed with truck farms, orchards, a cattle feed lot, a campground, Bates’ Nut Farm, and an extremely fragrant egg hatchery at the intersection where Paradise Mountain Road and the Lake Wohlfurt Road strike off in two directions into the higher hills. A number of properties are Indian reservation lands. Many are still working agricultural properties: avocado or citrus groves, mostly, but some are more of a hobby for owners who commute to San Diego or farther. Although the properties are large, many of the houses are fairly small; some are merely doublewide trailers. Many of the homeowners, like my parents, built their houses themselves. People have horses, cattle, goats and sheep: some of the newer residents are well-off suburbanites, but on the whole, it is more of a blue-collar, working class sort of place.
My parents bought five acres, some distance off Paradise Mountain road when my brothers and sister and I were still at home. In the early 1980ies, they sold the Hilltop House, put everything into storage, and moved into a travel trailer with two dogs and a cat, and set to building their dream house.
They built on a knoll, with a view down into a deep wilderness valley where cattle often graze, looking as tiny as fleas crawling across the distant green meadow, and across that valley to the ranges around Mt. Palomar, clearing away nearly all of the flammable brush around the house, and planting citrus, apple and avocado trees. They had a curving driveway bulldozed up to the site, climbing up the knoll to where Dad would set out a graveled courtyard, between the house, the garage, and Mom’s lath-house. In a little draw, too steep and shaded to plant citrus, they kept some of the native manzanita and live oak, and Mom planted bushel after bushel of daffodil bulbs. The house had a deep verandah on three sides, and a solarium built along the fourth, the side with the view down into the wilderness area. Outside the solarium, Mom grew roses in vast pots and planters, to keep the roots safe from voracious gophers. The house included a studio, where she made the stained glass panels for the solarium.
They had specialists pour the slab, build up the conblock exterior walls, and install the pipes and electricity, but Dad did all the interior walls himself, taping the wallboard, and setting the Saltillo tiles himself. They tiled the roof themselves, and Dad cut all the ornate beam ends for the roof himself. It took them five years to finish it to where they could move in, two more than they estimated, and just a couple of hours to burn.
They had been watching anxiously all Sunday, and by late afternoon it was obvious the fire was coming toward their street. Mom had enough time to secure the animals in the car, to go through the house making decisions over what was replaceable, and what was not. Dad had a camera with film in it, and the presence of mind to take pictures of the interior. Of all their neighbors they have lived in fire country the longest, but even the newest residents are aware of the need to clear native brush around their houses, to keep plantings green and damp as possible. The other houses on their street were spared, as the fire department could bring a truck close enough to protect them until the fire had swept through, but the courtyard at the top of their driveway is not roomy enough to turn a fire truck around. The firemen tell Mom to leave: she says the fire was making that peculiar deep, roaring sound that means it is well along. The fire jumped their driveway and came up the little draw that Mom called the Daffodil Valley, funneling the heat like a chimney, catching the garage, and leaping to the house. I was told that Dad, and some neighbors and the firemen were taking things out of the house until the windows began imploding. Dad stayed with neighbors, helping them secure their house.
They will rebuild, like many others, and like many others, with the help of their friends, neighbors and family. Last Friday, Mom told me that the pastor of their church is planning a workday, with volunteers combing the site for what can be salvaged. Dad wants to rebuild it all, exactly as it was before; Mom wants to change some things. They were luckier than many: they were not caught by surprise in the middle of the night, they are insured, and they have resources. It is a beautiful place to live: people like my parents consider it worth the risk.
(They have rebuilt – and they have made many improvements to make the new house a little more fire-proof, but there’s not much to be done when the fire comes on like a tornado, driven by the Santanna winds, and everything around is drier than old bones.)
Update: 1:PM CST: Heard from my sister – Mom and Dad are still at the house, though very tired and jumpy. There is a new fire which started just east of their location but is burning in a half-circle around them – from this map it looks like it’s going north of them, while the Witch fire continues burning south.
…or at least that portion of it encompassed by the inside of a small tract house in a north-side San Antonio tract house. Yes, the Meek-cat, whom Cpl/Sgt Blondie brought home from her workplace is adjusting to being a sheltered and protected indoors cat. His fur already seems to be thicker and plusher, thanks to a diet of premium cat kibble. He talks – that is, he is one of those cats who is responsive to remarks addressed to him, answering up with a variously pitched “meow”. I think of him as “Chatty-Catty”. Blondie calls him “Meow-mix”. He frequently curls up adjacent to Percival, and indulges in some mutual-ear washing, but is still a little wary of the dogs. Not total feline-claws-and-hissing-spazz-out whenever he happens to encounter Spike and Weevil in the very same room, more of a delicate unspoken negotiation not to try and occupy the same spot on the same chair at the same time. He is perfectly amiable about occupying different parts of the same chair at the same time, though. Usually when we are all watching TV of an evening: he and Sammy are lounging on the back of the sofa, Spike on my lap, Percy on the arm, and Weevil wedging herself onto the cushion next to me… TV watching in our house sometimes bears a close likeness to the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera”.
Yes, we have a lot of animals. Those people who see it as their life mission to find the perfect home for a dog and cat would doubtless look at us and curl their lips contemptuously. That is, if we would ever be demented enough to go to one of those oh-so-select shelters like the infamous Moms and Mutts and pay out a wad of money for the privilege of being condescended to, and having a couple of snoopy busy-bodies dictate the terms of pet-maintenance to us. Five cats, two dogs, erratic income and working hours… really, who do these people think they are?
A number of years ago, through no fault of my own, (other than not being able to afford the $500 vet bill that it would cost to neuter a female cat on the Spanish economy, or the long drive from Zaragoza to Torrejon to have Patchie neutered by the American vet there) I occasionally had litters of kittens to place with a suitable family. Since Patchie allowed Blondie and I to handle her kittens practically upon birth, they were always beautifully socialized as well as being very attractive kittens. (Damn that handsome orange tom!) Our home then was in Torre San Lamberto, just outside urban Zaragoza. It was a development of townhouses and four-unit garden apartments that were popular as summer rentals. Popular in a less savory way was the summer renter’s habit of abandoning their pets when they returned to their city apartment in the fall. There were always cats and dogs who had been abandoned by summer people, thrown upon the charity of those of us who were susceptible to appeals of our dumb chums; every one of them pathetically grateful to be taken to live indoors again, and fed properly.
So on this particular occasion, I had an ad on “swap shop” for two of the extraneous cats – one of Patchies’ get, and one of the strays. A listener called me at work and said she would take both the cats: her husband was going TDY to Germany, and by the time he returned she wanted to present him with a fiat accompli. “Cats – oh, those cats! I’ve had them for ages, darling – why do you ask?!” Could I bring the two of them to the base, and she would meet me at the station and take them home.
“B-b-b-but don’t you want to see them first?” I asked, somewhat boggled by how she had made up her mind already.
“No, I’ll just take them,” she answered, and explained that in her experience the cats which she had spent a great deal of time over choosing had never seemed to work out well. In fact, the cats which had been the most satisfactory were those who she had accepted on the spur of the moment, or which had just walked in and made themselves at home. Her husband had left the very day that she heard my swap shop ad for the cats; as far as she could see the timing was perfect. Those were the cats she was supposed to have. She showed up at the station with two carriers and took them away without any fuss at all. The powers that dictate such things had already ruled, and she had been chosen.
We do not choose our pets – they choose us. I just hope that there is no other cat out there, walking down the street, casting a businesslike eye on my house and deciding that yes, it would do very nicely. There isn’t much room left on the sofa….
The American Dream is alive and well. That would be the dream that I learned about in school, growing up in the 1960s. The dream that said even a boy born in a log cabin could grow up to be president. The dream that said your success in life is only limited by your willingness to work for it.
In Louisiana, they just had a gubernatorial election. Kathleen Blanco, of Hurricane Katrina fame, wasn’t running for re-election, so it was a wide open field, and the winner is an Oxford-educated son of Indian immigrants. The first non-white governor since Reconstruction, and a conservative, Bobby Jindal handily defeated his competitors. This was his second time running for governor, having lost to Blanco four years ago.
“My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana,” [Jindal] said to cheers and applause at his victory party.
To: The World, and Especially KDFW “News” Reporter Rebecca Aquilar
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Do-It-Yourself-Law-Enforcement
1. As you may have gathered by now, residents of Texas take a rather rough-hewn approach to law enforcement and defense of self and property. This sometimes results in the perforation and/or premature demise of assorted freelance criminal types.
2. In the long run, no one is very sorry about this. There are very few home-invasion robberies in the Lone Star State, since a fair number of would-be home-invaders are dropped on the doorstep, so to speak, by a well-prepared homeowner or tenant.
3. Count yourself fortunate that being an obnoxious pain in the ass with a TV camera attracts only scorn and derision. I trust that this episode has made it plain to you that a large chunk of the public holds your kind in contempt.
Sincerely,
Sgt.Mom
(Go to Instapundit and scroll down – Da Blogfaddah is all over this like white on rice)
And, an amusing poll to take, here, courtesy of Ace of Spades. And no, no multiple vote casting!
Addtional thought: One of the most gaulling things about this whole thing is how rude and relentless she was in questioning someone whom she would not expect to ever interview again… and contrast how deferential interviewers are when they interview someone they will have to deal with over a long period of time. Why don’t we ever see hostile interviewers hector people like Teddy Kennedy, or Al Gore, or anyone else you could name like this? It’s pretty clear that the press would cheerfully burn the little guy and suck up to the bigger ones in the name of preserving access.
Attention callers to Wireless Customer Service Centers!
Here’s a few things to keep in mind when calling in to your cellular phone company:
If you’re calling to buy a new phone, but have no idea what kind of phone you want…look, think about it, that’s just dumb. Nothing I can say is going to describe that phone well enough for you to make a decision. Go to a store. Put your hands on it. Does it feel right? Does it feel well made? Does it fit your style? At least look on the web site and see if you like the look of the phone. Seriously, you’re going to come to the conclusion that calling in wasn’t the best way to shop for a phone.
Your bill is simple. Everything you need to know is right there. I’ll be happy to explain it to you…twice! After that, I’ve already decided that you’re an idiot and incapable of understanding basic math. Oh, and just because you’re not an American Citizen, does NOT mean that you don’t have to pay the sales tax on your bill. Yes…it’s high…become a citizen and write your Congress-person.
Yes, we’re here to answer your questions…all of your questions…we kind of have to stay on the phone with you until we’ve explained everything that you’ve asked us. For the love of all that’s holy, try to keep in mind that we have an average call time that we’re shooting for to keep our bosses happy. Calling in once a year to review the four separate multi-line accounts you keep for your extended family because you’re the only one with a decent credit rating is just plain mean. Constantly putting me on hold for your girlfriends who keep calling you and then telling me alll about it before getting back to business is torture.
Please, please, please, don’t call us when you’re in the middle of a screaming match with your teenager because hormone boy downloaded over $1500.00 of games and ringtones last month. I’ll be happy to help you after you’ve hogtied and gagged the offending idiot. And ummm, yes, those are going to be valid charges, and no, there’s no way on this planet that anyone over the age of 5 could believe that all that stuff was “free.” The “You will be charged $9.99 for this game. Do you wish to continue?” message kind of destroys that defense. How does all that stuff fit on one phone? It doesn’t. Perhaps you want to give that phone to someone with a brain that hasn’t been fried from playing Halo 3 nonstop since it’s release.
We have absolutely no reason to lie to you about anything. If we tell you that your plan never included free mobile to mobile or free unlimited text messaging, we’re telling you the truth. We’ve got all the information right in front of us, we know what our company is capable of. We can’t say this out loud to you, but perhaps the gorgeous (well-proportioned) Russian “blonde” selling really inexpensive phones off a cart at the mall is the one who lied to you. Did you read everything that she gave you, or were you distracted by her hand on your lower back and just sign where she pointed? No…I don’t think she’s still there, she’s probably in another state at another mall by now and I’d give you a month’s pay if you could pick her out at a lineup.
…that I hate, loathe & despise packing? LOL
Moving Day is Nov 1, and I’m probably about half-packed, although my back thinks I’m all done (silly back – what does it know?). The last couple weekends have been spent purging and packing and cleaning, and it’s finally beginning to look like I’m making at least a small dent in it all. Of course, this week I’ll be commuting 30miles each way to a client site, and next week I’m out of state on a business trip. So I have 2 more weekends before Moving Day. And somewhere in there I need to find time to paint one of the rooms in the new house (schoolbus yellow is not a peaceful color, for me). Which means making time to figure out what color I want that room to be. Maybe I’ll wait and have my artist friend create a mural on the walls in there.
Next weekend I’m moving my storage shelves into the new garage, and my container garden to the new yard. It will give me a nice break from packing. I’m hiring a moving company for the actual move, but trying to do all the packing myelf.
A word to the wise…if you ever think about becoming a book collector, try to talk yourself out of it (it’s too late for Julia, I know). My thousand-volume library has taken forever to pack up, and bears most of the blame for my aching back.
…That�s fit to print.
Or not, as the case may be. My own disillusionment with legacy media over the last three or four years has been pretty profound � not that I had them on all that high a pedestal to begin with. Being in the military media afforded enough occasions for brushing up against the big guys, either at first hand, or at second. There were enough stories filtering around the world of military broadcasting, of incredible arrogance, lack of accuracy and lack of professionalism displayed by the big names to give me a bad taste in my mouth anyway. I was already aware of the tendency for blow-dried big-name anchors and reporters to helicopter in, do an on-scene standup reading words that some lowly staffer had written for them. I already knew of how news luminaries like Peter Arnett had to back down over the bogus �Tailwind� story � which had made my eyebrows raise skeptically from the very first; I mean, guys handling a chemical so dangerous that a single drop on bare skin could be fatal? And not being in MOPP-gear (or the Vietnam-era equivalent) up to their eyeballs? Pull the other leg, chaps � that one has bells on it. I could cheerfully write off the cack-handed treatment of all things military by the legacy media to sheer bloody ignorance � after all, the military is a weird and wonderful world, all to itself.
What became harder to take over the last couple of years is their ignorance, credulity and bias regarding just about everything else. This list is a pretty comprehensive encyclopedia, although I am given to wonder how many bogus stories were never noticed until the rise of the internet, and the ability of astute news consumers to fact-check legacy media asses from here to the ends of the earth.
And to add one more depressing example, there is the matter of General Sanchez�s recent double-barreled blast. Of course, it was relayed to us by legacy media in the manner which we have come to expect of them; omitting the withering criticism directed at them� which formed the larger part of General Sanchez� remarks. (linked here) Now that�s a shocker � one might think they didn�t care for criticism directed at their impartial and noble selves, so down the memory hole it goes, at least as far as the headlines are concerned.
And finally, another writer friend of mine is curious about this photograph � an AP stock photo which has been used lately in venues such as the LA Times and Newsweek in their stories about Blackwater. He is a veteran, a combat photographer and former AP editor himself � and he thinks it is a little too perfect. Well, the two Blackwater guys rushing towards the camera while the guys behind them are all sitting about, in apparent relaxation. Take a look � what does it look like to you? Firefight or lunch break? Both? Or just another example of AP faux-tography?
I have now come to that stage of life where I have seen every standard TV plot so many times that I am now able to predict the denouement almost as soon as I see the setup and have declared a personal embargo on watching any more shows about doctors, lawyers or cops. While some of the current offerings (House, Scrubs, etc) are quite passable � there are other occupations, and other situations which in the hands of the creative, will offer sufficient interest to keep viewers returning on a regular basis. Shows like �Lost� and �Ugly Betty� are splendid examples of what can be done by stepping outside of the cop-lawyer-doc box, and �Jericho � Season One� is another. Take an intriguing and (for television) a semi-original situation, involve a large cast of interesting people reacting to it and voila � something that will bring back the audience, over and over. Especially when it is a situation that we might imagine happening to ourselves. After 9/11, and Katrina (which provided the genesis of �Jericho� to its creators) it is all to easy to imagine what happens when the world we know suddenly ends, right in the middle of all our mundane plans for a perfectly ordinary day.
Which is exactly what happens to the citizens of the small town of Jericho, Kansas, to the family of Johnston Green (Gerald McRaney) and their neighbors and friends. Jericho is a small, pleasant place, full of people going about their own business � farming, stocking the grocery store shelves, going through a mayoral election, planning a wedding and enduring an audit by a visiting IRS agent. The school children are off on a field trip and the Green�s black-sheep son Jake suddenly appears needing a great deal of money � the only ripple in the pleasant still pool of a modern American life. In one of the most quietly effective sequences, the camera follows two children, playing hide and seek in a back yard, while one climbs on the roof of a shed, and then onto the house roof. The boy suddenly freezes there, silhouetted against the clouds and the sky � and then we see what he has seen; a mushroom cloud, coming up from a line of mountains on the distant horizon.
And that is the exact point where the people of Jericho, and a handful of visitors who just happen to be there begin a long slow devolution from the twenty-first century into something that more resembles the frontier West� and then to a condition that looks more like the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy, or classical Greece. First they struggle to figure out just has happened to the rest of the country � and then begins the fight to survive, ending in a cliff-hanger which promises a large audience for the second-season premiere. It makes for a more interesting television show than I had thought, when I first heard about it. The first season set of 22 episodes is neatly packaged on 6 discs. Commentary and deleted scenes are included for selected episodes on the same disc. I would have much rather that deleted scenes be edited into the episode where they belonged, to make a sort of �director�s cut�, rather than having them tacked on as an appendage. The omitted scenes would have done a lot for the overall story; it�s clear that they were omitted to shorten each episode for broadcast.
It’s an interesting show, on the whole – well worth watching, although I hope that it won’t disintegrate like “Lost”. I think of Jericho as a remorseless study of what people will do under prolonged stress in a particular situation. There are some who adjust to the situation without losing their own core values, some who can see into the situation and confront the unthinkeable without flinching. And then there are those who can’t and won’t… and you can never really tell in advance who will be one or the other. But as I wrote earlier this week, just having to think about this sort of thing is the first step in beginning to cope – should such a situation ever arise.
Cross-posted at Blogger News Network.
The Carnival of Space for Thursday, October 11, 2007 is up.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are mornings when Blondie and I can take our time, letting the dogs drag us briskly through the neighborhood, especially those days when I am not needed at the ranch realty office. We talk about things we notice in the neighborhood, like who’s house is for sale, how the renovation work on the “burned” house three streets over is going, say hi to some of the neighbors and/or their dogs, note any interesting garage sales shaping up on the weekend, encourage Weevil and Spike to piss on the lawn of the neighbor who yelled after us last year because someone else had let their dog poop on her lawn… and us with our pockets bulging with plastic bags, I ask you! She has moved away, but we like to see our dogs carrying on with the tradition. It does get pretty dry around here: moisture is moisture, y’know.
This morning we were carrying out a practical exercise, brought about because last night we had been watching the DVD of Jericho- Season One. I’m doing a review, and had to catch the ones that I missed, early on. Chilling stuff, actually; how the world ends, in the middle of the morning with hardly anyone noticing, until static fills the broadcast channels. One thing and another reminded me of a story about a poor neighborhood in New Orleans, whose residents rode out Katrina and the aftermath comfortably tucked up in a local school. It was one of those small stories which didn’t get much play, probably because most of the reporters were drooling over what was supposed to have been happening at the Superdome and the Convention center. I did hear of it on NPR, and read a brief feature on-line, and of course recall nothing but the general outline of events. Basically some of the neighbors got together, led by a couple of local military veterans, and set up their own shelter on the upper floors of the school, which they assumed would be safe enough, as some of the older neighbors remembered taking refuge there during the last ginormous hurricane. They laid in plenty of supplies, bedding, cots, lamps, batteries, cooking equipment – everything they would need. And there they remained, setting up a soup kitchen for themselves, looking after elderly neighbors who refused to leave their flooded houses; tidy, efficient and comfortable. They had even thrown out a couple of thugs, who came looking for trouble… and when anyone came around asking if they wished to be evacuated, no one really wanted to, as they were doing quite well through their own efforts.
So Blondie and I were thinking out loud of how our neighborhood could be organized; we’re on high ground, so flooding wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but no electrical power and a breakdown of local law enforcement would present a bit of a sticky wicket. The neighborhood is thick with military retirees, and active duty; we agreed that the problem at first would be everyone trying to be in charge, before sorting out how everyone’s experience and training would best be applied.
In the interests of security, we’d have to cut off access into the neighborhood, first. There are four main entrances, and privacy fences along all four sides. So, block three of them with parked vehicles, and keep the gate nearest Stahl Road and Judson open, set up roving armed patrols of two or three each, along the outside fences, and guards at the entrances. Mark them with some kind of armband, nothing fancy, just a strip of cloth. This is Texas, god knows if you canvassed the neighborhood, there’s probably enough weapons to supply the army of a small European state, and their police force, too. Secure the perimeter, and begin canvassing every house. Who is home, who is in need of medical attention, who is gone, but has left pets or children alone? We’d have to assume that the active-duty military would be gone, and so would the reservists, leaving us with a lot of retirees in varying degrees of fitness, and a lot of family members of all ages. Who has a portable generator, a charcoal or bottled gas grill? A freezer full of food which will thaw, when the power has been off for a week? Who has large cooking pots, has managed a restaurant or a dining hall kitchen? Who is a doctor, a nurse, an electrician? Can we set up dining facility at the elementary school, and is there a generator there? What about the assisted living facility and the day-care just outside the entrance at the other end of the neighborhood? If we could secure them, we’d have a facility to care for the frail and elderly… even better, if they have generators. Canvas the neighborhood; collect batteries and over-the-counter drugs, medical supplies, bleach, pet food, lanterns and candles, blankets and bedding. Trees, Blondie pointed out. After a bit, we can start cutting down trees, and taking out wooden fences within the neighborhood. Most houses have functioning fireplaces – not terribly efficient when it comes to keeping a room warm, or to cook over, but better than nothing. Blondie also favored dividing the neighborhood into quadrants as far as security patrols went, and stockpiling food at one house within each quadrant.
We’d be good for at least a week, we agreed, but after that, we’d have to send out foraging parties for food supplies, gasoline and medicine. A slightly off-kilter way to spend a morning, but sometimes just having thought about things like this is a good way to begin coping with the situation, should it ever arise.
There may be a chance – albeit hopefully a distant one – that at some point in the future either Blondie or myself will be taken away by kindly attendants in white coats while horrified animal control authorities remove a zoo of cats and dogs from an unspeakable house as neighbors gape in horrified disbelief and the news cameras roll. Unless there has been a mega-spectacular crackup in rush-hour traffic or Teddy Kennedy has been found in bed with a live boy or a dead woman, the resulting story will be about third or fourth down in the evening newscast.
Sigh.
Which is by way of saying that my daughter has brought home another animal! To add to the menagerie! In a very small house! And like a sucker, I said yes! Like a sucker I tried to insist that this one MUST go to the no-kill shelter eventually! Like a sucker, I know that it probably won’t! As soon as it has finished a period of quarantine in the garage, it will join the rest of the happy clan, shredding the furniture, shedding drifts of hair all over the house, fast asleep on anything soft, and it will remain until it pops off of old age!
Or Blondie takes it with her, when she finishes veterinary school and has a place of her own. Jay-sus, she had better qualify as a vet, it’s the only way we’ll ever afford to keep all the furry freeloaders in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed.
This one is named “Meek”. He is a cat, a neutered male, white with a brindle saddle and ears, about three years old. He’s been hanging out at the place in Selma where Blondie works part-time, one of the herd of tame and semi-ferals which she has fed off and on for the last year or so. He’s one of the tamest and the most slavishly devoted to her; she has always thought he was dumped by his previous owner. One of the other tame ones was run over and killed by a car a couple of months ago, and this morning when she left the office to run an errand, Meek ran after her and followed her car almost to the highway. Evidently, he has decided that if he can’t live with Blondie, he doesn’t want to live at all.
Not good survival instincts for an outdoor cat, living adjacent to a highway. The veterinarian pegs him to be about three years old, a real sweetie… and it appears that he has already survived a traumatic event that broke one of his legs and ribs. Hard to say if he was dumped first and then injured… or more horrible to imagine, injured and then dumped.
Sigh. There is a kind of symmetry to it, though. Two dogs, two gimp cats, two grey and two black. I swear on a stack of bibles, though; Weevil, Sam and Meek are Blondie’s critters. And there won’t be any more. Really….
Dear Bruce,
Look. I really appreciated hanging out with you in the summer of ’84 at Uncle Steve’s Blues Bar and playing pinball. It’s an hour in my head that makes me smile because I never expected you to be such a regular guy. But I’m sorry…
I’m not hearing anything NEW on this NEW album. I’m hearing bits and pieces of a lot of your old stuff. Jeez, you even revisit “10th Avenue Freeze Out” on “Livin’ in The Future.”
How about a new album with something…I dunno…new?
RHG called to let me know that they are dead in the water mear Nashville. In her narrative, a steel bar was dragging from rear of the bus leaving a trail of sparks. Again according to the narrative, a state patrolman followed them for five miles and finally pulled them over with lights and siren and advised the driver that the situation had to be corrected before proceeding. RHG, knowing the protocol, advised that there were three scenarios: driver fixes problem, mechanic is called, or new bus comes from Peoria. Later comm advised that scenario two played out. Advice to RHG – get sleep while you can (earlier advice #1) and enjoy adventure. Comment to Real Wife – by the time RHG is 30 the rear of the bus will have been fully engulged in flames.
Timmer, right now I am listening to Billy the Kid by Aaron Copeland. Try it, you’ll like it (well, maybe not all of it).
Radar
Another writer sent me this musical parody, to be sung to the tune of “Back in the Saddle, Again”. It was composed especially for me, as he was inspired upon actually recieving a copy of “To Truckee’s Trail”.
“BACK IN THE BOOKWORKS A’GIN”
Well, she’s back in the bookworks a’gin.
Writin’ away when she kin’.
‘magination’s never dry,
When there’s his’try there to ply,
‘Cause she’s back in the bookworks a’gin.
Writin’ ’bout his’try once more,
Poundin’ her ol’ com-pu-tor
She’s describin” Truckee’s Trail,
Starvin’ and tra-vail
Back in the bookworks a’gin
Chorus:
Whoopi-ty-aye-Oh
Writin’ to and fro
Back in the bookworks again
Whoopi-ty-aye-Yay
She goes her own durn way
‘N’ she’s back in the bookworks agin.
Now, the first book’s the worst
You think the whole durn thing’s cursed
But you stick right to the trail
And you know, you’ll never fail!
You’ll be back in the bookworks a’gin.
I’ll send her a cowboy’s farewell
Pop off a round, bang the bell
She’ll be back someday, I know
An’ a-writin’ she will go
Back to the bookworks a’gin.
Chorus:
Whoopi-ty-aye-Oh
Writin’ to and fro
Back in the bookworks again
Whoopi-ty-aye-Yay
She goes her own durn way
‘N’ she’s back in the bookworks agin!
(I’m also working in one office or other, every day this week – even parttime, it does cut down on the blogging time – sorry!)