Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
From all Katrina, all the time…
It’s official… I have spotted the first holiday catalogue of the season. It was in my mailbox this afternoon.
September 1… and three months and 25 days of shopping left until Christmas, courtesy of this fine establishment.
(Of course, I can’t afford any of the stuff I want until I land the well-paid executive assistant job… but I can dream can’t I?)
From my collections of antique postcards, a view of the French Market, some time early in the last century— something to hold in memory, against all the pictures of the last few days.
And as part of the Katrina Flood Aid blogburst, I commend the Salvation Army and Lutheran World Relief to our readers
I know we’ve got a seriously generous group of readers. You’ve proven it many times in the past, time to do it again.
I did my very last TDY at the little Naval station in Gulfport ten years ago to the month. It was a charming, sleepy place, flat as a pancake inland— as near as I could tell with my hill-bred senses—all around and between Gulfport and Biloxi. The highest bit of real estate anywhere around seemed to be a great artificially built ridge on Gulfport Naval Station, called the “Bauxite Mound”. We were sent there, and set up there, for a vast aerial war-game, involving the ANG camp by the airport, Keesler AFB, and an assortment of other units and bases.
I was there for two weeks or so, tasked to sit in a trailer on the Bauxite Mound, and hit “play/record” and “stop” on a videotape recorder twice daily. The VTR was connected to a Hi8 camera bungee-corded to a vantage-point in a mobile radar trailer, and focused on a radar screen. At the end of a two-hour exercise scenario session, I popped the tape out of the machine, another Combat Camera TDY expert did the same with the VTR that she monitored (from another camera, bungee-corded in another trailer) and we put them both in a padded envelope, and a runner with a security clearance came to collect them. I think they were Fedexed somewhere, for after action review and analysis. For this onerous duty twice daily for two weeks, the DOD paid airfare, travel and per diem. (Your tax dollars at work, people… the peacetime military had certain discrete charms.) Most of the unit videographers were on a real combat doc assignment elsewhere— those on this one were stray broadcasters, and a couple of engineers— I think they sent the unit graphic artist as well. The unit was essentially emptied of everyone but the commander and the admin NCO. We joked that they might as well pull down the blinds, turn on the answering machine and pretend that no one was home.
For all but the four hours or so that we were needed at the exercise, Monday through Friday, we were free. We had the use of a couple of rental vans, though, and by careful scheduling and cooperation, were also able to amuse ourselves in a mild way in what passed for the fleshpots of the Mississippi Gulf Coast— although I ought to make it clear that my own excursions were to a fabric store, services at an Anglican congregation in Gulfport on Sunday, and to funny little nursery and pottery where I bought some concrete and pottery animals for the garden.
People who don’t know better claim that Texas is a southern state. It isn’t. I found that out the first evening, a van full of us buying groceries at the largest upscale grocery in Gulfport. At six of an evening on a weekday night, it was all but deserted. Maybe one clerk, and a couple of other customers besides ourselves. At that time of day, that time of week, grocery stores in San Antonio are jumping. No, Texas hustles… Mississippi was lazy and languid and mellow. Except for the casino barges all along the coast to Biloxi, the sidewalks all rolled up at about 4 PM. (A clerk in the Navy Exchange told me that she had to finally take the afternoon off, when she wanted to buy a car. By the time she got off shift in the late afternoon, all the dealers were closed.)
Every local I met, on post or off— they were gracious, friendly, languid, unhurried. I was too much, I realized, the energetic and keyed-up Yankee to feel comfortable with that over a long period of time, not unless there was something mellowing in the water. I knew that otherwise, I would eventually snap and grab a local citizen by the shirt-front and begin screaming “Wake up! It’s the poppies, I tell you! Snap out of it!!” But since I knew that I would be going home long before I reached the exasperation point, I could accommodate the laid-back and casual attitude— well, for two weeks, at least— and enjoy the differences.
Back of the ocean front, the land seemed to be very flat, and lushly wooded, threaded by slow-moving creeks, ditches and canals. I loved to run a circuit around the back-forty of Gulfport NS, which featured a golf course and a picnic ground with a large lake. Turtles the size of soup plates basked in the sun, plopping hurriedly into the water almost as soon as I saw them. Egrets and other water birds haunted the woods and the tangle of canals, and one day I saw what I thought first was just a pathetically skinny, reddish little stray dog, grooming himself on the grass verge between a ditch and a paved road. But no, it had a sharp little muzzle and pointed ears edged in black; every time it looked down for a bit more grooming, I stepped closer to the fox. It would turn, and look at me uneasily, I would hold very still… and reassured, the fox would resume grooming, until I was almost close enough to touch it. I wouldn’t, of course. Besides fleas, parasites and rabies, it also had very sharp little teeth— but I had never seen a real fox, not up so close.
The coast between Gulfport and Biloxi was beautiful— not because the beaches were scenic like Big Sur—but because they were white sand, and the sea always smooth and calm, and Highway 90 was a four-lane motorway with a landscaped median that paralleled the shore, sweeping around every gentle curve and headland. On the inland side of it a graceful series of large and small houses overlooked the road and the endless beach. We drove along that highway a number of times, but the one that sticks in memory was coming back from dinner at one of the Biloxi casinos (the pirate ship one— I won $5.00 on a slot machine). It was just about sundown, daylight fading out of the sky. All along the coastal road, the beautiful homes sat, with their windows and curtains drawn open to the sea breeze, lights on inside the rooms. It was like looking into the windows of a series of elaborate doll houses, but ever in the back of my mind—even then— was the thought of how close the water was, how flat the country and how fragile those beautiful mansions and cottages would be, in the eye of a storm.
The news reports have the storm surge that hit Biloxi as being 30 feet, and I am wondering, without any way of ever knowing, how many of the lovely houses that I admired, and how many of the places that I spent my TDY money at, and how many of the people I met in passing— at the nursery, at the church service, or ringing up my groceries— are OK, and alive. Thirty feet of water, all at once…We think of our world as solid, immutable, but it is not— it has its own whims.
It looks sadly as if the worst-case scenario is happening in slow motion. New Orleans will be rebuilt, of course, but how, and maybe even where, and with what technologies… and what it will look like, a watery phoenix risen from the delta in ten years or twenty… well, who knows? It won’t be the city it was, last weekend, last decade, the century before.
But this is what it looked like, once. I offer it as something to hold in memory against the images of the last two days. (I will go on posting one of my antique postcards every other day or so)
Could it possibly be that King of the Hill isn’t the greatest sit-com ever?
I have a old Kinney shoebox full of antique postcards: this is one of about fifteen of various places in New Orleans— Jackson Square, the FrenchMarket, the Cabildo, the St. Louis Cemetary— all the touristy places. There is no date on most of them, but the mix of automobiles and horse-drawn carts and trams have a look of the 1920ies. Most of the rest of the postcards in the box are about the same vintage, most of them never used, and bought by the hasty handful to amuse a little invalid boy by his parents on their travels around the world. (Nice and Cap Jean Ferrat, castles of Britian, monuments in Japan and Paris, Italy and the Pacific Northwest— glamorous relics of the days of liesurely travel on luxuriously appointed ocean liners.) The little invalid boy was the youngest son of the family Grandpa Jim worked for, as the estate gardener. He died in his teens, and many decades later the estate was sold off, all the furniture and valuables removed. There were a lot of odds and ends stored up in one of the garages, and Grandpa Jim was allowed one day to bring us— Mom, JP and I— to look it over and see if there was anything we would like. I don’t know what JP took away, if anything, but Mom liked a cast-iron garden chair covered with three decades of paint (and regretted not taking the love seat that matched it, but was terribly heavy) and I was enchanted by the wealth of postcards. They have been in my posession ever since. Since I took them away from the deserted estate, I have been to some of the places pictured.
But New Orleans is not one of them, and I rather regret that I didn’t take the one chance I did have to see it, when I was TDY to Gulfport, Mississippi a decade or so ago. Unless we are terribly, terribly lucky, New Orleans will not look much like my postcards for a long, long time.
(Cpl. Blondie’s boyfriend left from New Orleans about mid-morning. His family planned to leave from Metairie last night, but put off leaving until this morning. The roads going out to the west were impossibly jammed, so they are all heading for Atlanta. Blondie can reach the BF on his cellphone, but he can’t make outgoing calls. He was out of the city on back roads by midday. She’s keeping in touch with him, as much as she can.
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about another gulf city, and another hurricane here.)
That’s the answer to the question our local newscaster just posed as a preview to the Ten O’Clock News. The question?
How much are you willing to pay to see The Rolling Stones.
I gave up on them when “Some Girls” came out.
Muttering to myself, “Woopsheedoobee, shattered…GACK”
I think every village or suburb or city block must be afflicted with a bad neighbor, or in the luckiest locations, the “not so good” neighbor. At best this neighbor may be merely rude, clueless, thoughtless or just disagreeable— or an unfortunate combination of all those qualities. Ordinary bad neighbors may play loud music late at night, neglect the unmown lawn, leave garbage cans at the curb for weeks on end, and permit weeds to thrive unmolested until they are the size of small shrubs. They may dismember industrial machinery in the front yard, or leave the broken-down heap with three flattened tires parked in the street in front of their house for months on end, and have rowdy parties on weekends.
This sort of ordinary bad neighbor invariably lives right next door to the picky and house-proud sort, who lovingly groom their borders with nail scissors and maintain an exquisitely velvety green lawn… which renders the torment all the more excruciating. The bad neighbor may not actually be a suburban sloven, but instead maintains a rackety, public and disreputable personal life, one involving a lot of yelling, flung objects and frequent visits by law enforcement authorities. This sort of neighbor actually serves quite an enjoyable function, as the focus for lots of scandalized gossip. These are the two commoner sorts… blissfully, rare indeed is the malevolent or deranged bad neighbor. This would be the kind of person, which when they finally snap and melt down, usually involves automatic weapons or explosives, a number of messily dead bodies, and headlines in the local paper above the fold for days. And none of the neighbors, interviewed by minions of the press, are quoted as saying “Oh, very quiet. So nice. Kept to him/her/theirselves. Wouldn’t hurt a fly… we were just that shocked!” No, when they talk about this kind of neighbor, everyone says, “Well… we’re surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” Or “Human catastrophe, looking for a place to happen.” Or even, “They fought with everyone, and we all hated their guts.” And usually, someone throws in a lament about the authorities not having seen the danger signs and acted promptly, saving (fill in the blank number) lives.
My parents had such a neighbor when they lived at Hilltop House— and I was glad on one account when they moved down to their very own hill in Valley Center, as I was afraid that this particular neighbor would snap, and mow down half the neighbors with heavy artillery… as opposed to just harassing them with spurious complaints about manufacturing drugs.
Mr. F. and his wife (I will call her Mrs. F.) lived in a house on a cul-de-sac lower down the hill, and ventured only rarely into our ken, so were spared the full malevolent blast. (According to his mythology, with our house full of teenagers and the yard full of old cars, we must be in the distribution end.) His immediate neighbors were not so fortunate, as he gradually developed a bizarre delusion that they— immensely respectable, middle-aged home-owners all—were all manufacturing, selling, and transporting illegal drugs.
He insisted there were pipes full of drugs, running between all the houses. His suspicions were as strong as actual physical evidence was weak; over the course of several years he cut a swath through every law enforcement body in the state of California. Initially being interested enough, then increasingly disillusioned, and finally writing him off as just another unbalanced crank, Mr. F. would move on to another agency which knew of him not, and repeat the process. All this was terribly difficult for the immediate neighbors— everyone up to the DEA eventually wore a path to their various doors. Mr. F. was well spoken, immensely convincing at first, but as law enforcement increasingly declined to humor him, his behavior became freakishly bizarre. He took to prowling the streets at odd hours, taking pictures of visitors, or carrying around a box he claimed was taking samples of the air to test for drugs. Pippy’s wedding reception was held in the garden at Hilltop House, with Mr. F lurking in the oleander hedge by the front gate. We felt rather like the mafia family in the Godfather, with the shrubbery full of FBI agents, on this marital occasion.
But by that time, Mr. F. had well gone past the point of being an amusing local nut-case. One of the closer neighbors, a woman in late-middle age, was slowly dying of MS; Mr. F. insisted that it was actually the result of drug abuse. Even if no one credited that, it was a cruel thing to say. Other neighbors filed injunctions and suits, to no avail— Mr. F. could put on a pretense of rational normality in court. Eventually, Mom told me that people selling their homes nearby had to list Mr. F. as a sort of local toxic waste dump and inform potential buyers of his malign presence. Some time after I had enlisted and left Hilltop House for good, and Mom and Dad had decamped for the wilds of Northern San Diego County, Mom told me of the cruelest, most horrible thing he had done. A couple with two small children had bought a house farther down the hill— not on the same street, but a house where Mr. F. could see into their back yard from his. He called the child protection authorities, accusing them of drug abuse and neglecting their children— and because he was new to them, they believed. It took six months for them to get custody of their children again.
Several years later, I read of him in the “news of the weird” section of the local newspaper. Among other things, it seemed there was an injunction against him in the State of California, forbidding him to ever call 9-11. I can’t find confirmation via google, but that was a long time ago. With luck, he went undeniably barking mad, before the rise of the internet, and at this date, all the neighbors around Hilltop House are sleeping sound at night, knowing that Mr. F is not lurking in the shrubbery, or that gullible law enforcement officers are not wearing a path to their front door. We shall, with luck, not see his like again. Or very soon. And especially not on the same street.
(Accounts of horrible, impossible, malevolent and generally deranged neighbors are eagerly solicited, of course. I’d love to know that somewhere, some time, there was worse than Mr. F running around loose.)
I know exactly what caused this issue.
This is one of my favorite pictures of one of my favorite roommates. She’ll be 14 in October, which means any time I have with her from there on out is gravy, since greys have an average lifespan of 12-14.
She’s been with me for about two and a half years now, and I honestly cannot imagine not having her here. She may be one of the best gifts that I’ve ever given myself.
(photo taken in Sept 2003, with an Olympus C2100UZ, in natural light)
Update: This is embarassing. I’ve alwasy said Math is not my subject, and I’ve proven it here. She was born in 1992, which means she’s coming up on 13, not 14. No need to age her prematurely, ya know?
From Yahoo! News….
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested on-air that American operatives assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”
“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club.”
“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
I’d just like to go on record, as a self-described fundamentalist evangelical Christian, and say that Pat Robertson does not speak for me, even though I fit his demographics.
Can anyone explain to me how Robertson’s comment is any different from the Imams who incite their followers to Jihad? (apart from the obvious difference that Robertson is saying the *state* should take out Chavez, as opposed to recruiting suicide bombers) Seriously, if I’m mistaken and shouldn’t be disgusted by this, let me know.
OpinionJournal.com (free registration required) shares a story today written by a Major in the IDF Reserves, who is a historian in his civilian life.
Together with thousands of Jews, I sat on the flagstones before the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The time was midnight on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the day on which, according to tradition, invaders twice overwhelmed the city’s defenders, destroying their Temple and crushing Jewish independence in Israel. Two thousand years later, a new Jewish state with a powerful army has arisen, yet Jews continue to lament on that day, and rarely as fervidly as now. For the first time in history–ancient or modern–that state would send its army not to protect Jews from foreign attack, but to evict them from what many regarded as their God-given land, in Gaza.
It’s well-written, and worth reading.
disclaimer: Personally, I hate sites that make me register before reading, but in the several years I’ve read their pieces, I have never regretted registering, and as far as I can tell, I’ve never been spammed by them.
To: Ms Sheehan and Friends
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Thinking Ahead
1. It seems that there are a lot of you out there with an enormous, throbbing hard-on to recreate those golden days of yore, those glorious patchouli-scented, Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Min chanting, drug-addled, socially-conscious days of freewheeling protests, days of rage and nights of long-haired hippy chicks getting it on with equally long-haired, sensitive draft-dodging musicians. OK, fine, everyone needs a hobby, but most people that in love with the past eventually hook up with a re-enactors group.
2. I will, however, accept that you mean well, and are acting from the best of intentions, but cannot help recalling the proverbial paving materiel of the access route to the infernal regions.
3. Should you be successful in infantilizing our volunteer military, and returning them from Afghanistan and Iraq to the bosoms of their families, from whence they were ripped by the brutal, unfeeling minions of the BushhitlerchimpAshKKKroftEvilOverlordRove conspiracy, repercussions in Afghanistan and Iraq will in all likelihood mirror those events which followed upon withdrawal of American troops and American support from South Vietnam.
4. In the interests of effective long-term planning, I urge that consideration of a refugee resettlement project become part of your “bring the troops home” campaign.
5. A comprehensive listing of those Iraqi and Afghan citizens who would be most endangered by an American withdrawal should be drawn up, to include (but not limited to) members of the current government, members of the military and police, the intelligentsia, minority clergy, employees of the American military and civil establishment, and their families. While the actual evacuation plan would be contingent upon actual events, and would probably fall to our military in any case, consideration should be made of where to position the initial reception camp. Ideally, it should be in-theater, situated in the territory of a friendly country.
6. Your input is also solicited on where to site the main refugee camps within CONUS, and on the processes for resettling families permanently in cities and towns across the USA— ideally in locations which as of this date, do not have good Persian or Afghan restaurants. Volunteers will be needed both at the grass-roots level, and to lobby Congress to set aside the funds for a refugee resettlement effort. This is a responsibility which should not be shirked, although it probably will, if past performance is any indication. At least you can say afterward that you tried.
7. Finally, if it is all about the $#%*#@!! oil, why did I just pay 2.53 a gallon for mid-grade last week, when I filled the tank of the VEV?
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
After my last Bond post, I find myself rewatching Thunderball (undoubtedly the best Bond ever), and You Only Live Twice (arguably the worst of the Connery Bonds, only saved by that drop-dead-gorgeous Toyota 2000GT).
Anyway, as said in comments on the earlier post, I think that, while Dalton did the best Fleming Bond, Brosnan’s Bonds have, overall, (while Goldfinger and Thunderball rise above the fray), best executed the cinema Bond formula.
Comments?
Update: Here’s an idea; how about the Felix Lieter factor? In You Only Live Twice, it always struck me how Tanaka was such a poor substitute for Lieter, and the Japanese commandos such a poor substitute for the U.S. Marines.
Sears has been pushing hard, of late, its Craftsman 19.2V power tool line – a new thing, with promise of “more tools to come.”
But I find this half-step curious: 18V is the “old-tech” standard. (I bought an 18V Coleman drill kit for about $37 at Costco last year.) But the rest of the industry is going to 24V. I can’t see why Sears is putting such an investment in 19.2?
I just heard the IDF forces are digging trenches around former Jewish settlements, to keep Palestinian squatters out, pending destruction.
But I don’t get this: Israel is perfectly fine about bulldozing the homes of suspected terrorist supporters, But they are not ok with bulldozing the homes of clearly illegal squatters?
The end of the eighth month of the year in South Texas is usually an arid and dreary time, scorched and blasted by heat. At the end of the day, the large-leafed plants in my garden are limp, and begging for water. Clouds blow over occasionally; huge towering grey and white things, which sometimes deliver rain, and sometimes only tease with the possibility. This summer has not been quite as bad as others: the grass in the huge meadow over the back fence of my place is still pale green, only lightly tinged with yellow. The sky above it is infinitely blue, seemingly as huge as the sky can be, only in the American West.
The garden is recovered from the disastrous hailstorm of this spring, and newly adorned with a series of gorgeously colored glazed pots, offered as a seasonal bargain this spring by the local grocery-store chain, the Huge Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. Due to some quirk of the global economy, or expert wheeling and dealing (and excellent taste) on the part of their purchasing agent, fine-quality glazed pots and urns from Malaysia, China and Italy were available for next to nothing (comparatively speaking), lovely things, glazed in jewel-tones of celadon, deep green, rich blue, and amber. A selection of them is now displayed in the Garden of Cats, lining the walkway and the border at the back, planted with small lemon and lime trees, an exotic coffee plant, a flowering quince, an assortment of gardenias and others too numerous to name. Alas, it is too hot to sit out and enjoy this bounty in the afternoon; that pleasure awaits the day in autumn when the heat finally breaks, we can open the windows and turn off the air conditioning.
The cats enjoy it, nonetheless. Not my own cats, but an assortment of neighbor cats who look on my place as their gentleman’s club— not in that nasty titty-bar sort of way, but as a home away from home, a quiet place of comfortable repose and a light snack. It is a select club, however, with a limited membership. The other afternoon I was looking out from the window over the kitchen sink, when a large ginger cat with white underpinnings suddenly appeared, balancing on the back fence and looking into the yard with curious interest. It poised there for a moment, and then jumped down— I couldn’t see where it went, over the enclosure around the AC unit, and the cannas growing around it. Just as the ginger-cat jumped down, I looked out through the slider door onto the back porch, where Bubba-from-down-the-road, Sammy-from-across-the-Road, and Parfait-from-who-knows-Where were all lazing on the sun-warmed bricks. Bubba rose deliberately from his post-kibble snooze, and sauntered around towards the little path behind the cannas. He came sauntering back again in a few moments, and I heard no snarling, no yowling, no bad-cat-language, but the ginger cat obviously left swiftly and by the shortest and most efficient route. I could imagine Bubba, growing confidently to him, “Oi, you there… Ginger-cakes… a word in your shell-like, if I may… this here is a private club… Unnerstand? There’s the road… ta, then.” (OK so I imagine Bubba talking like Chief-Inspector Dalziel. Sue me.)
Oddly enough, all three tolerated, seemingly with amusement, the opossum family that lived on the porch roof this spring. I was amused myself by the opossums— at one point there were five of them, then three, then none at all. They would come down the trellis and help themselves to the leftover kibble, funny rat-tailed rodenty-looking things with white faces and dark eyes, and prehensile little paws. One afternoon when I was reading on the glider, the boldest of them suddenly swarmed up onto it as I sat very still, then climbed onto my lap. It experimentally gummed a fold of my shirt, then the pages of the book I was reading, and then my finger, evidently deciding that none of them were promisingly edible. It scrambled down off the glider and returned to the cats’ kibble dish; one of my neighbors to whom I told this, said she would be screaming still, if a nasty little bare-tailed wild animal had crawled onto her lap, on a sunny spring afternoon. The opossums are gone, now. I found the bones of one while mulching the corner of the shady border last month, and saw the body of another on the road; the others most probably fell to a new predator. An owl, a very large owl, has been observed perched on a streetlight standard at the corner across from my house, and it seems the local population of roof-rats and squirrels has declined precipitously. Well, nature is like that… and I had thought my relative freedom from rodents was due to the presence of the Gentleman’s Club.
Sammy’s people were the ones who first spotted the owl; they have moved to another house in the neighborhood, but have left Sammy to me, or more precisely to Blondie. When she was home for Christmas this last year, Sammy was only an occasional visitor the Gentleman’s Club. He fell into deep and slavish affection with her, much to his original owners’ surprise, they having raised him on a bottle as a tiny, tiny kitten. He grew into a very large, stately off-white cat, with watery, severely crossed blue eyes; we think he must be close to being blind. He looks like either a ginger cat washed with too much bleach, or a white cat who has not been washed with enough. His devotion to Blondie was such that he continued returning to the Garden of Cats after she returned to Cherry Point, and shortly after that he was struck by a car, while crossing the road. His people rushed him to the veterinary emergency room— he lived, although they could not afford extensive surgery. Sammy now gimps around on three legs, and some of his teeth were smashed, although he eats well enough, and can clear the fence and even go up onto my roof. Still, Blondie and I worried about him, and even felt rather guilty. When I tasked his original owners with the dangers of allowing him out at all, they said that he clawed at the door and yowled so much, they just had to let him out. Of course, they also have a herd of about half a dozen yappy little teacup Chihuahua dogs— did I live in a house with them, I’d be clawing at the door and yowling to be let out, myself. No place this, for a self-respecting cat with a yearning for peace and quiet.
And so Sammy came back, every day, spending most daylight hours in the Garden of Cats. His original owners moved this week: I went to ask them about Sammy, and were they taking him with them? They had planned on it, but then temporized— they were moving to another house, two busy streets away. Would he make a bee-line for us, if they let him out? I left the gate open, so they could come and take him away… but cats have a way of making their own choice, and Sammy had made his clear. He has hardly left the garden in the last four days, and I have gotten the estimate from the veterinarian. At the end of the month, he will be freed of fleas and intestinal parasites, and upon being pronounced feline HIV and Leukemia negative, will be permitted to come indoors— something I think he devoutly wishes for. Blondie, darling, you are “with cat”… when you have your own place, please take him with you. I have no desire to be the local crazy cat lady.
And I am still looking for a good family for Parfait: he has lovely peridot-green eyes, and occasionally when I pick him up, he relaxes so completely, it feels like he has no bones to him at all.
This lady of leisure stuff is for the birds, I tell you. I was so bored last week I detailed my sewing machine… no really, with q-tips into the little ventilator grilles and all. And today, I put in fresh shelf-paper in the dish-cupboard. It’s a thrill a minute around here, waiting for the temp agencies and potential employers to call.
There is nothing so far about a starting date at the very promising start-up which offered me gainful employment after a very nice interview three weeks ago, and indicated that the middle of August would be the tentative start-date. Candidly, I have the feeling that as a start-up, it may have been on somewhat more shaky ground than indicated, and continued scoping out other possible sources of a regular and generous paycheck; it ain’t for real until you have the paycheck in hand… and it doesn’t bounce, of course.
I still haven’t heard, although I have called the agency on Monday… they were supposed to call on Tuesday, and let me know something definite, and here it is Thursday with no news at all, and the conviction that A) I am being gaffed off, B) The investor is doing the same thing to the eager start-up entrepreneur, and C) The agency is hoping that I won’t keep calling.
So, yesterday I strapped on my “Serious Interview Outfit” (grey light-weight Talbots suit, white blouse with white and purple silk scarf, amethyst earrings, string of pearls, black shoes and black Coach handbag) and drove over to interview at another start-up, which had advertised itself as being in dire need of an Executive Admin Assistant… and oh, my god… my heart began to sink when I turned off the main road into a side street lined with… well, mostly warehouses. Warehouses and auto body places— dreary, shabby and emphatically low rent. It was in the nineties yesterday, and a half-hour drive, so I wasn’t going to put on the scarf and suit jacket until I got there, but I took one look at the place as I parked, and figured I was overdressed enough as it was.
Well, it turns out they are working out of a warehouse because the rent is cheap and no one would ever think there was anything to the place at all… and the entrepreneur didn’t even wince when I answered his question of what salary I was looking for ($27,000 to 30,000 yearly, depending on the benefits, or lack of same). But when he asked me what I would do first, I couldn’t help myself…. I said;
“Well, organize things for you…. And vacuum this carpet.” Not that it would do a lot of good, as it appeared— under a layer of dust, paper scraps and assorted other detritus— to be the color of dog turds. And the ceiling tiles had marked water stains on them, from leaks in the roof. Blondie said, “Don’t be a snob, Mom… you can always find something else, later.”
The entrepreneur was going to be interviewing other people, and would make a decision on Friday. I’m in two minds about my hopes for this one. On one hand— A paycheck. Possibly an interesting job with interesting and brilliant people. On the other: A long drive, to a dubious neighborhood, and a workplace that is… to be charitable, a bit of a dump. Decisions, decisions.
But another agency called this afternoon— this is the one that specializes in high-end staff. I have a initial telephone interview Monday morning, for a position as executive admin assistant at a very large industrial concern that is opening a new plant, locally… which would be, if it worked out, be about as good as it gets as high-end executive staff in this town. I’d take it in a heartbeat, if seriously offered. But I have to get that offer soon— I have the pension, and the part-time work at the radio station, and some incidental work from my previous employer, although I have had my last regular paycheck from that. I also have a couple of writing projects out there, although I have yet to get any income from them.
Although if anyone offers a lovely bonus at this point, for the Book, or some of the really good stuff I have stashed away, I certainly would not say no, at this point. (The Really Good Stuff I am saving, for the future, for a literary agent waving a large advance. What I write here is for everyday, I write it to keep my hand in, and to keep you all amused and informed.) Wish me luck and a dazzlingly good and productive interview— I will need it.
Enough, already! If I never again hear the name of Cindy Sheehan, that will be too soon. I have no problems with anyone who is opposed to the war, in fact no one in their right mind would be in favor of war. War is messy, people get killed and hurt, and countries get laid waste. But, there are times when even the most hated thing becomes necessary, and this, I fear, is one of those times.
Ms. Sheehan has the right, as does anyone, to protest. But, we have heard her, and it’s time to move on. She has allowed herself to get wrapped up with some not-so-nice organizations, and that is a shame. At first, folks would have said, “OK, she’s in grief over the death of her son.” And, who wouldn’t be? But as things progressed, and we found out that the President had already met with her once, I began to question why he should grant her another meeting. He’s a busy man. Even on vacation, he has to work, his responsibilities don’t end, and she should have had enough sense to realize that her demands were not going to be met, especially by anyone like GW.
As I was writing this, FNC announced that she was leaving because her mother has had a stroke. I’m sorry about her mother, and I feel for Ms. Sheehan, who should have been with her family instead of tilting at windmills while her mom got sick. We can now just hope the other nutcases will leave Crawford and go home, let the President get some rest, and give the rest of us some peace. No doubt, the media will go hunting around for the next thing to talk about hour after hour, boring the crap out of us all.
So, what’s next?
This guy’s drop-dead-gorgeous Mercedes 540K Special Roadster has just been mis-represented as one of “Hitler’s Cars” (Hitler rode in the 770K), in the History Channel’s AutoManic series.
I’m watching Fox News coverage of the Israeli army forcibly removing the remnants of settlers from the Gaza Strip.
Earlier, they showed four soldiers carrying out a young man. One soldier holding each limb, the young man easily 2 feet above the ground (waist-high to the soldiers, basically).
And yet, Fox News persists in saying the settlers are being DRAGGED from their homes. Dictionary.com tells me that “drag” means to “trail along a surface, especially the ground.”
These people are being carried, not dragged. None of their body parts are touching the ground. using the term “dragged” brings to mind pictures of the 1968 Democratic convention, when police were literally dragging protesters to the paddy wagons.
In their favor, Fox is making sure to include the info that each settler has been given months of notice, and offers of substantial compensation for their move. It’s just that nobody really likes to give up their homes (just ask the folks in the Kelo decision), and not all of them agree with the resettlement, so they’re holding out to the bitter end.
The Great Raid is a solidly old-fashioned kind of war movie, of the workmanlike sort made during or in the two decades immediately after World War II. Whether you like it or not depends very largely on whether you see this old-fashioned quality as a good thing or a bad thing.
Three linked stories are competently woven together, all taking place over 5 days in January, 1945, as the Japanese occupation of the Philippines comes to a final bloody end. The threads of the story come together at the POW camp at Cabanatuan, where the last five hundred or so ragged survivors of the Bataan Death March, and the siege of Corrigidor wait for death or liberation. Cabanatuan was the central holding camp for POWs in the Philippines, and by this time the fitter and healthier prisoners had been moved to other camps or to Japan for forced labor. Those left are sick, crippled, starving, many barely able to stand, mentally gone somewhere far beyond despair. They are afraid they have been forgotten by the outside world, but they have not been. In Manila, a Catholic nurse named Margaret Utinsky runs a small underground circle which smuggles desperately needed drugs into the Cabanatuan camp. Margaret, although the widow of an American Army officer, holds a passport from a neutral country and manages to stay at liberty and ahead of the Japanese secret police – for a while. The man she loves is in Cabanatuan, desperately ill with malaria. As the Japanese control over the Philippines begins to waver, he and the other prisoners are in danger of being murdered outright.
A massacre of American POWs at another camp sets the third story in motion; a hit and run raid on the Cabanatuan camp to free the POWs there, and spirit them to safety. The liberators will have to walk the last thirty miles, avoid any encounters with the Japanese forces, and pull it off with no rehearsals. The job falls to 120 picked men from the 6th Ranger Battalion, and their bombastic and colorful commander, Col. Henry Mucci. In turn, Col. Mucci assigns one of his company commanders, Capt. Robert Prince to come up with a plan to hit the camp, and to come up with it in 24 hours. Refining the plan, getting information about the camp, doing reconnaissance on the spot, coming up with a means of transporting the sick and unfit to safety, distracting the Japanese guards— it’s all done on the fly, over the next four days, working in concert with two separate Filipino guerilla organizations.
The elements of the actual raid is the most interesting and seemingly the most carefully recreated, a scheme of meticulously organized chaos— counting down to the last minutes as the Rangers carefully take up positions in the dark, just outside camp, and the Filipino guerillas prepare to block access on the road to either side. The moment when they open up is quite jolting, as it follows on fifteen or so minutes of quiet whispers, and the scuffling sounds of men crawling through the weeds. I think I would have rather seen more of the planning of it, rather than the doomed romance, which seems rather jammed in as an afterthought, and a contrivance. I did think it a little odd— since one of the keys to operating a successful underground organization is to be physically ordinary and persistently unnoticeable— that they could cast a dishwater blond actress who stands a head and a half taller than everyone else, as an underground operative in an Oriental country.
Otherwise, the attention given to the Philippine underground, and the guerillas out in the country was very appropriate, and much overdue in movies of this sort. The cast is a solid ensemble, turning in respectable performances; the lack of star power being somewhat of an advantage here. (Only three of the leads: Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielson and Joseph Fiennes are anyone that I have ever heard of, or noticed in a movie before.) The director and producers also hired Dale Dye as their military advisor, and would appear to have paid attention to him, although I am sure that William or any other enthusiastic experts will find small flaws and discrepancies in uniforms, weapons and vehicles. There was also a quiet, unobtrusive nod paid to religious beliefs, which I rather appreciated— another old-fashioned note. And the brutality of the Japanese forces in their treatment of POWs and Filipinos was not softened, or played down in the interests of political correctness; I doubt The Great Raid will play well in Japan, but it will go over splendidly in the Philippines. And if you see it, stay for the closing credits: it opens with what looks like contemporary black and white newsreel footage of the fall of Bataan, the Death March— and closes with the arrival of the transport ship carrying the survivors to a cheering crowd in San Francisco.
A VERY interesting article from Fred Vogelstein at Fortune:
Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she’s been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet. As Chrysler’s director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. She decides how many minutes of the carmaker’s commercials appear on networks and cable channels nationwide and how many pages of its ads turn up in magazines like this one and newspapers such as USA Today. Here’s the scary part: Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler’s money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: “I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are.”
No wonder media executives are concerned. One of their headaches is Googlemania—Google effectively reinvented online advertising with the targeted, classified-like text links that you now see everywhere. Soaring profits from selling those ads have helped drive Google’s stock market capitalization to some $85 billion, making Google the most highly prized media company in the world. But while the old guard is keeping a watchful eye on Google, the company it really fears—and the one advertisers like Roehm increasingly love—is Yahoo.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
As I predicted, Sgt. Mom got the last one without breaking a sweat.
This one should be MUCH more challenging:
To what Hollywood bigshot can this infamous quote (concerning the proponents of “talkies”) be attributed?
They fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures. And the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot and the imagined dialogue, for himself.
(from an AP story of 9/03/1926)
BTW: I have to agree with our subject. There is a quality to silent films, shared with radio drama and books, in that, by compelling one to use their own imagination, the story becomes more engrossing and enriching.
(NPR has revived an old radio series, inviting members of the public to expound on their personal credo: herewith is my potted list of personal beliefs.)
Women of a certain age should not wear mini-skirts. Ever.
Actual proof of Islam being a religion of peace is pretty thin on the ground, and in the headlines these days.
Teabags are a scourge and invention of the Devil. Real tea is made from loose leaf tea. And the pot is rinsed out with boiling water, first.
Children should not be allowed to call their parents, or any other adult by their first name, unless said adults’ name is adorned with an honorific such as “Aunt/Uncle” or “Mr/Miss”.
95 Percent of any popular culture—books, movies, art, music, and fashion— at any one time is utter crap. In five years or less, everyone will be poking fun at all but that quality 5%. Teenagers arrayed in the latest popular fashions, body-piercings and makeup would do well to keep this in mind.
That William Morris had the right idea: “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And as my mother said, “The bigger the house is, there more of it there is to clean.”
Only fools and the impatient pay full retail price. And second-hand will not kill you… how many previous owners do you think that expensive antique has had?
One way and another, the whole world is bigoted and prejudiced. To quote Tom Lehrer
“The whole world is festering with unhappy souls,
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
The Italians hate the Yugoslavs, South Africans the Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much!”
The best one can hope for, is to live in a place where they aren’t very much prejudiced about what you happen to be. It’s a human thing— adjust. Relocate, if absolutely necessary.
Children are not possessions, only undeveloped people.
(More to be added, as I think of them.)