G*y Cats and L**bian Dogs

20. October 2006 · Comments Off on G*y Cats and L**bian Dogs · Categories: Critters, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

So, now that Blondie and I are supporting a houseful of critters… some of whom interact agreeably with each other, and some others of whom maintain a guarded distance and a policy of non-recognition, and one who spits and snarls in a most hostile manner… we have noticed a rather odd thing. And that is that the two dogs and the two most recent cats have definitely formed affectionate and loyal same-sex unions. (Although one of the gay cats will frequently enjoy a vigorous frolic with one of the lesbian dogs. Wow. That sentence alone should get any number of hits from perverts looking for bizarre porn… yes, I meant you. Zip up your fly and wash your hands.) Yep, and in Texas, too… which ought to completely wig out all those who only know of Texas as Redneckville Central.

OK, so I started back in the mists of time, with a cat, one single cat, way before I had even heard of blogging, although I was aware of that internet thingummy-jig. Said singular cat was the last survivor and the only consistent member of a constantly mutating herd that lived with us overseas. We brought Patchie and her oldest son back to the States with us, the son ran away from my parents’ house while I was in Korea, we came to Texas with Patchie (the queen Elizabeth of cats) where she died of old age and diabetes and I swore that it would be a while before I had another cat, as she had become very high-maintenance in her dotage.

That vow lasted approximately two days; I took in Henry VIII, his littermate Morgie and his little brother Little Arthur over the summer of 1998. Eventually, I began feeding a couple of neighbors’ cats who preferred my garden to their own yards, and tamed a shy little grey catling named Percival… OK, so that makes four cats of the First Degree, although poor little Percy was very much on the outs for a long while with the other three. They regarded him contemptuously, rather like the popular high school kids treat the little, nerdy kid. “Ugh… you lameoid… You’re still here?” He has overlapping teeth; Blondie calls him “the snaggle-toothed wampire-kitty”. But they all rather grumpily adjusted, and then Sammy, the white cat from across the road fell head over paws in love with Blondie, and insisted on staying at our place rather than theirs, and survived being sideswiped by a car whilst crossing the road to get back to our place… well, that was a mark of his devotion. When they moved, he stayed, and officially he became Blondie’s cat. She thinks he is a flame-point Siamese, as he looks like a white cat washed with insufficient bleach, or an orange cat washed with too much. Whatever, he has deeply crossed and near-sighted blue eyes, and hirples around on three legs, holding one front leg up close against his body. Nerve damage, said the veterinarian, although he manages quite nicely, and Blondie says she sometimes thinks she sees movement in that damaged paw.

Since the dogs arrived, the original trio of Henry, Morgie and Arthur prefers Blondie’s room. Sammy and Percival, perversely enough, don’t mind the Lesser Weevil and Spike very much, and spend the long hard hours of a cats’ day and night sleeping on my bed. Curled up together, occasionally waking to wash each others’ ears with attention and deep devotion… oh, yes, they are a matched pair. When Blondie has her own place for Sammy, Percy shall go with them, which I will regret, but I know deep and abiding affection when I see it.

Sammy and Percival like the dogs, and are the only two who play with them, although they tend to favor playing with Spike more than Weevil, since she is so large and intimidating, a sort of canine Xena-Warrior-Princess. Spike is more or less their own size, and Percival does not seem to have any objection to being pinned down by Spike to have his own ears vigorously laved, or to have a good interspecies wrestle. (Sammy only puts up with a little of this.) Percival gives a good account of himself on these occasions; it’s usually a draw.

Now, with Spike and Weevil matches, it would be Weevil all day and all the time, if she didn’t choose to pull her punches. She is a sixty-pound boxer/whatever mix, and at her best and dripping wet, Spike is about ten pounds of dwarf shih-Tzu. On the occasion of their first encounter, Weevil planted one of her great boxer paws squarely on Spike, who yelped heartrendingly… she was only a baby. It hadn’t worked out with the original owner who had taken her home from the kennel from which she was bred, and when Blondie brought her to my house, she was as clingy as an abandoned toddler, and ready to attach. And so she did, to me and to the Weevil, who after that first rather rocky evening, has fondly indulged Spike as if she were a puppy, and allowed her to scramble all over her, and chew on her ears and jowls, without offering any more than token resistance. Funny as hell to watch Spike climb on top of Weevil, and try and rough her up, knowing that Weevil could, if she wanted to, snap Spike’s neck without breaking a sweat. Oh, yeah, they are such a pair. Should anyone ever break into my house in the middle of the night, I will be so protected. I think.

Apples and Lemons

19. October 2006 · Comments Off on Apples and Lemons · Categories: Fun and Games, General, Home Front, Pajama Game

My initial reaction upon reading Timmer’s post in re. switching to Apple was to discount the post and what I assumed would be numerous polarized comments. The axiom was established in my mind years ago that I am a Wintel guy (starting with an IBM 5150 PC in 1984 – two floppies and no hard drive). It was even more firmly established when my sister got an Apple several years ago and I made a derisive comment regarding the one button mouse, which resulted in what I believed to be a completely asymmetric response on her part – my first exposure to the passion of Apple users (she was equally defensive during her period as a Mormon – interestingly, she is no longer a Mormon and now owns an HP laptop).

But it did get me to thinking. The business world will always, at least in my lifetime, be Wintel – too many legacy programs and files along with an inherent mistrust of Mac Guy and his ilk on the part of management. At home though, the whole raison d’être of owning a computer is changing – and no matter how much Microsoft tries, they are not making it any easier. I now download lots of music both from download sites and from streaming on-line content, and I expect to do the same with video going forward. Is it going to really get that much easier with Vista? Maybe, but Apple seems to have a considerable head start in the intuitive ease-of-use department (although I still don’t get the single button mouse thing).

And then there are my home IT manager responsibilities. Real Wife has a pretty good handle on how not to make my life miserable (don’t change ANY settings, don’t install ANY software without my approval, etc.). Then there’s Red Haired Girl, whose ministrations would kill – not crash, but kill – PC Guy within seconds. Despite the best efforts of Norton Internet Security and my constant chiding about don’t do this and don’t do that, her computer has become a completely unstable virus ridden wreck. Moreover, she is fascinated with constantly changing display and other settings, resulting in entire range of other problems.

For the past six months her computer is unable to maintain a wireless connection for more than two or three minutes at a time. It isn’t the adapter because I’ve swapped it with real Wife’s and the problem stays. It isn’t location because a) the location and surrounding environment hasn’t changed in the two years I’ve had a wireless network, and b) it is actually much closer to the router than Real Wife’s, which works great. Compounding the problem is that she and her friends have discovered Instant Messaging, so now she is a squatter on Real Wife’s computer – bringing all of her Typhoid Mary tendencies with her. Last night she asked if she could install some other messaging software on her mom’s computer. I said no, she said too late. I checked said computer and lo and behold there was a warning screen for the Norton software informing me that a program was attempting to change the home page.

While uninstalling everything that looked suspicious (and listening to wife and daughter complaining – from different points of view), my mind wandered back to Timmer’s post.

Next stop – the Apple web site. I was kind of blown away by the newest Apple Mac Mini. It looks like it could do everything that RHG would want to do, and the size is awesome (6.5″x6.5″x2″). My sense is that I could turn her loose on one of those and not lose so much sleep over trying to figure out if the latest debilitating problem is a) a virus/Trojan horse/worm, b) something she did to Windows, or c) a genuine malfunction caused by i) a Windows bug, or ii) hardware. Yes, life would be good.

At $599 it seems reasonably priced (for an Apple) and it has a real high “cool” coefficient (important at her age – she is still dinging at me because the mp3 player she got last Christmas is clunky compared to an iPod), but I am concerned about all of her existing software. Does anyone out there know anything about Windows emulation software? In particular, she has an extensive collection of Sims software (a whole other thing I don’t get, although from what she tells me it is a great way to vicariously f*** with people). Also, is the included iworks at all useful for word processing and can the files be read and edited in a Windows environment? And what about freeware/shareware? Any other comments would be helpful. I don’t have to make an immediate decision – the plan all along was a new computer for her for Christmas.

If I go that route and it works out, I might even consider phasing in Apple replacements as the other computers are retired. I’ll likely keep a Wintel machine on the home net for running software that I cannot/will not replace and for work related stuff.

I can’t believe I am even considering this. On the other hand, I bought Apple shares two years ago at $22 and lost my nerve and sold at $25 (despite the chart, could I really trust a computer company that only built on-button mice). Had I taken a chill pill and hung on, I would be sitting on a gain of about 360% and a little closer to retirement. So, I’m gonna go home, don some jeans and a T-shirt (not tucked in) and just mellow out. I’ll probably pass on the O’Reilly factor tonight as well.

The Things They Carried

17. October 2006 · Comments Off on The Things They Carried · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(Part 2 of an intermidable series about the 19th Century emigrant trail to California and Oregon. I have finished revisions to my initial draft of the book in which an agent is interested. I am filling in the time until I hear what he thinks of it all with this sort of thing. I’ll try and force myself to write something vicious and cogent about Korean Nukes or the upcoming election silly season, but I’m afraid my heart is really with this. Deal.)

There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture: an upholstered wing chair, a spinning wheel, a very elaborate trunk fitted out with a number of smaller drawers for silverware: the trunk is open, displaying a fine mid-Victorian assembly of knives and silverware. There are a couple of inlaid boxes— portable desks or sewing tables, what appears to be the head and footboard to a Jenny Lind bed, a butter churn and a lighted kerosene lantern hanging from the center, mid-peak of the inside. The series of hoops holding up the canvas cover is reinforced with a pair of horizontal lathes along the sides of the wagon, from which hang an number of articles of clothing; some dresses, a shirt, a baby’s dress and a couple of sunbonnets. This may be a wagon in which a family lived during their journey, late in the days of the emigrant trail. In this wagon interior, there is very little glimpse of what a typical emigrant wagon would have had to have carried in the opening days of the trails to Oregon and California, when the only possible means of re-supply along the way, other than hunting and gathering, were at Ft. Laramie and Ft. Hall.

The greatest part of the goods carried in a typical emigrant wagon was food. Assuming a six-month long journey, an early guidebook writer advised 200 lbs of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 of sugar and 10 of salt per each adult, at a minimum; a schedule providing a monotonous diet on variants of bread, bacon and coffee, three meals a day. More elaborate checklists afforded a little more variety, not to mention edibility, suggesting such things as dried, chipped beef, rice, tea, dried beans, molasses, dried codfish, dried fruit, baking soda, vinegar, cheese, cream of tarter, pickles, mustard, ginger, corn-meal, hard-tack, and well-smoked hams. Common sense suggests that all sorts of light-weight preserved foods and epicurian luxuries would have been included also, to ward off the boredom of bread/bacon/coffee. Canned food was a science still in the experimental stage then… and such things were expensive and heavy, and seldom included. A number of resourceful families brought along milk cows, and thus had milk and butter for at least the first half of the trail. Recommended kitchen gear included an iron cooking kettle, fry-pan, coffee pot, and tin camp plates, cups, spoons and forks, and considering that coffee featured a s a major food group, a coffee grinder. Small stoves were sometimes brought along, but more usually discarded as an unnecessary weight.

Prior to the great Gold Rush stampede over the trail in 1849, it was possible for those parties which included some experienced frontier hands to eke out their foodstuffs with hunting alongside the trail; buffalo, antelope, sage hen, and from gathering various berries and plums from thickets along the rivers, wild peas, wild onions, and various sorts of greens. Nutritional science may have been only dimly understood, but most emigrants (or at least their wives) had a good grasp on the prevention of scurvy, dysentery and other food related ailments.

Other necessary gear for the wagon itself: water barrels, chains, 100 feet of heavy rope, and spare parts to replace that which was most readily broken, such as tongues, kingbolts, axels and wheel spokes, although such added to the weight, and some emigrants preferred to take a chance on being able to find suitable wood to make a replacement along the trail. The wagon itself was too small for more than two adults or a couple of children to sleep comfortably in, so the overflow would need to be accommodated by a tent, and blankets spread out within them.

Since they would be on their own, as far as repairs of anything at all would be concerned, a veritable tool shop was advised: knives, a whetstone, ax, hammer, hatchet, shoves, saw, gimlet, scissors and sewing supplies to repair canvas and clothing, nails, tacks, thread, beeswax and tallow, twine, washbasins and water buckets. Some comforts were not omitted; candles and lanterns, patent medicines, extra clothing; most emigrants wore the same work clothes they would have worn for a day of work on the farm, or a day out hunting, and perhaps, tucked away in a small corner, some small cherished luxury, a favorite book or a bit of china. Men with a trade took the tools necessary to practice it. Every party also took arms and ammunition, although as it would turn out, most had much less use for them than they had expected.

And as it also turned out, even with all the preparations and supplies, a fair number of the early emigrants arrived in California or Oregon on foot, with little more than what they stood up in, thanks to the difficulties of the trail. Having eaten just about all of their food supplies, jettisoned the non-essential gear, lost their oxen and animals to bad water and the cruelties of the desert, and abandoned their wagons in the desert or high in the Sierras, or along the Snake River… they arrived in the place where they wished to be, carrying their children… and thought it had all been a fair exchange.

Later comment added from B. D. who’s comment kept being eaten:

“1) The way to make butter on the trail is to fasten a churn on the side of a wagon, just above a wheel. The jitters and jolts of an unsprung wagon churn butter admirably well.

Not surprisingly, many emigrants walked as they could.

2) Gunshot deaths on the trail were a side effect of hunting, because one never knew when an antelope would appear. Emigrants would load the rifle and hang it up within easy reach, and in regards to the above jolting… well, gunshot deaths on the trail were pretty common, and most of them were accidents.

The End of the Oregon Trail Center in Oregon City is a neat little place that is designed to look like three huge wagons— they can even take the canvas-like covers off in the winter. (Real roofs are below.) The opening presentation is quite nice, thouogh of a type that raised more questions than it answered (“Bullet wounds were the third most common type of death on the trail.” Yeah? What are #1 and #2?) The second bit is a multimedia presentation that my mother liked and I found exceptionally silly, as it read more like a propaganda film than, say, Ken Burns’ Civil War series. I highly recommend the place regardless, because its virtues overcome its faults, and I wish that other parts of the Trail had similar centers, each dealing with the specifics of life at that point. “

Heading West

14. October 2006 · Comments Off on Heading West · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

The average so-called “western” movie or television series only very rarely gives a true idea of what it must have been like to take to the emigrant trail in the 1840ies and 50ies. Most westerns are set in a time-period from the end of the Civil war to about 1885, an overwhelming proportion have a cattle-ranch setting, sometimes a setting in the wild and woolly mining camps. The popular culture vision of the “old west” tends to warp our imagining of the 19th century in general, in that it puts in place people and technologies that were just not there until well after the Civil War. The latter part of that century was already looking forward to what would become the twentieth, and to extend what we commonly accept as a given about the late 19th century backwards to previous decades is give a short shift to the vision and sheer stubborn courage of the 1840ies wagon train emigrants, and to underestimate considerably the challenges they would have faced.

In 1840, there is no telegraph system in the West, and would not be for a decade or so, for the system itself was still under development. Ocean-going vessels are powered by the force of wind in their sails. News and the mail travels at the speed of a horse, a canal boat, or maybe a steam boat on the navigable rivers, although there have been some limited rail beds built, and serviced by steam locomotives for about ten years. But all those are back east. There are factories, of course… most of them powered by watermills. Other than that, power is supplied by animals, or the backs of humans. The first half of the century for most Americans is more like the century before, than the century afterwards.

There are no vast cattle ranches in that West. Gold will not be discovered until the end of the decade. What wealth came out of the West in the early decades of that century came in the form of beaver pelts… but the fashions have changed, and by 1840 there is no demand for them. There is no mail service; messages travel erratically. There is hardly anything representing the Federal government west of the Mississippi, only the occasional Army-authorized exploring party, and an American consul in such outposts as Yerba Buena. It is a six-month long sea-voyage around the Horn to reach the western coast of the continent. There are a scattering of trading posts and Mexican pueblos between the Mississippi-Missouri and the Sierra Nevada, served by enterprising merchants and fur-trading combines. Great caravans leave every year, but they are commercial enterprises, and their trail lies across mostly open and mostly level country. Little that they know and practice can be made use of by an emigrant outfitting a wagon to follow the trail towards the Oregon settlements or to fabled California.
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I’ve Been Sold

14. October 2006 · Comments Off on I’ve Been Sold · Categories: Pajama Game, Technology, That's Entertainment!

As I’ve been mulling over the how and when to buy a MacBook, I’ve mentioned it to some folks at work and in our circle of friends. There’s a SSgt that works for me that has looked at me with complete disgust and asked, “Why would anyone buy a Mac?” (His primary reason for owning a PC? Gaming.) The short answer is, “They sold their product to me and they did it well.” The long answer follows should you care to read on.

First of all, let me rave, yet again, about Apple’s best little salesman ever invented. Yes, I’m going to gush about my iPod yet again. Why? Because dear readers, my iPod works better than any other piece of technology I’ve EVER owned. That’s EVER. It’s a handheld item that (gasp) fits my hand. I can use it one handed with my thumb on the scroll wheel or two handed with the finger from the hand not holding the pod, my choice, either way works. Unlike so many Windows based updates, when you get an update for iTunes, things have changed for the better. I can put a bunch of photos on my iPod, or choose not to. I can watch videos, or not. I can put TV shows on it, or not. I can add album art to alllllllllllll of the selections, or not. I get to decide exactly how it’s going to look and act and I don’t have to go digging through menu after submenu after submenu to find out how to do it. I don’t have to research online for 45 freaking minutes to find out that once again, I need to download some form of powertools or another to configure it the way I want it to look. It works. It worked out of the box and it’s worked ever since.

Quicktime: Once upon a time, I hated Quicktime. Every time it autoloaded it’s way onto my computer for some sort of educational software we had for Boyo, it managed to cludge things up. It would open but not run the video or the sound would be messed up. These days, I’d rather run every video thing via Quicktime than WinMedia or RealTime. It’s smoother. It loads faster. The sound is cleaner. Clean sound is becoming more and more important to me. My hearing is NOT what it used to be. Living on the ends of and around flightlines has something to do with it I’m sure.

The commercials. On any given day as soon as I get out of uniform, I may not be as young as the Mac guy, but I feel and dress like the Mac guy. Not a good reason for dropping a grand or two. So let’s talk about the earlier commercials. I’ve got to buy a lot of additional software whenever I want to do what I do on my PC Laptop. The Mac comes with all the basic software I need to play with photos, music and video. That’s what I mostly do on my laptop. Windows is getting ready to upgrade, which tells me that I’m going to have to upgrade every damn piece of software in the next couple of years. There’s my photo editor, my sound editor, my video editor. Sigh. If I buy a Mac, I get the latest of everything for that system and I don’t have to worry a bit about it. I can upgrade to more powerful tools in increments instead of all or nothing. That’s just HUGE in my book.

And while we’re talking about software, let’s talk about all the CRAP that comes installed on your Gateway or Dell or HP as it comes out of the box. How many HOURS did it take you to clean out the crap software, the 30-day trial software, the “who uses this?” software the last time you bought a new PC? If you’re like me, you’re still finding stuff that you never use, taking up space, taking up RAM, taking up your time.

Mac Users. You know who I’m talking about. Them. They’re so smug. They walk around as if they don’t have a care in the world. Ask a Mac user what they think of their computer and they will gush forth expressions of purest love, dedication, and devotion. You can hear the arias in their heads as they sing the praises of their computers. And that my friends is my primary reason for buying a Mac. Mac Users L.O.V.E. their machines. You just don’t see that sort of dedication to a product anywhere else. They walk around like they know something the rest of us are missing.

When I was down in The Springs, I worked with a couple of Marine Comm Officers. I worked with more when I was out in Hawaii. Let me tell you, when it comes to Comm, no one does it better or smarter than our USMC. You wouldn’t think so just in passing, but then again, they NEED good, secure, stable comm. Every one of the really smart guys, the ones who solved problems, the ones who had their brains wrapped around what the net was doing for our military? They all had Macs and could not figure out why the HELL the military wouldn’t switch. They also preached, to all who would listen, the benefits of Mac ownership. They all felt like the change was finally coming, slowly, surely, but they were pretty sure that it was coming. More people would be buying Macs and soon.

And you know what…they were right again. More folks are giving up the PC headache and are switching. It’s not just longhairs and science geeks buying them anymore. They’re going mainstream. The iPod sold more folks than just me.

So that’s why I’m switching to a Mac laptop instead of waiting for the new Windows OS and getting a faster PC Laptop. I think I’m making the best decision and getting the most bang for my buck.

I also really really want to be that smug about the equipment I’m using.

The Fort at La Ramie

11. October 2006 · Comments Off on The Fort at La Ramie · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

Once upon a time in the west, there was a pleasant piece of land, of open meadows broken by stands of trees on the headwaters of the North Platte River by the foot of a range of dark hills, in the present state of Wyoming. A creek flowed into the North Platte, just there, where in the very early days of the North American fur trade a French-Canadian trapper named Jaques La Ramee was supposed to have been killed by hostile natives and his body thrown into it. So the little stream and the place where it joined the Platte became known as the Laramie River, and the confluence as the Laramie Fork, or in the alternate spelling of the era “Laremais’ Point”.

Those streams drained a rich and profitable area for trappers, and many of the mountain men, as the hunters and trappers of beaver pelts were called in the early 19th century were issued licenses to trap in the uplands and to trade their takings there. In 1834 a stockade fort built of logs was established there, by William Sublette… he and two other men in the founding party had the first name of William, and so the place was dubbed “Fort William”. It had not escaped Sublette’s attention that not only was the location on the route into the rich fur-trapping lands in the western mountains, but also on the trail south to Taos. A year later the interest in the newly-established trading post passed into the hands of the American Fur Company, later Pierre Chouteau & Co. Ft. William was described several years later as a quadrangle with block houses at diagonal corners, where Indians camped in great numbers, bringing animal skins to trade for cloth, tobacco, beads and alcohol… and where the whole enterprise came under the sniffy disapproval of various missionaries, even as what sketchy hospitality available was welcomed, somewhat grudgingly, I fancy.

Early in the 1840ies a rival trading establishment, Ft. Platte was constructed close by, and the competition in combination with the rotting of Ft. William’s stockade walls inspired Chouteau’s company to build a new adobe fort on higher ground, which the explorer John Fremont described as having more the air of a military construction: it was whitewashed adobe brick, with fifteen-foot tall walls, which formed a quadrangle entirely lined with houses. There were two entrances, the main one guarded by square towers loop-holed with firing positions. Most of the residents of the fort were described as French traders and their Sioux wives, for the Sioux tribes came to Laramie to trade and socialize. It was originally called Ft. John, but became known as Ft Laramie. Ft. Platte was described by Francis Parkman as being deserted in 1846, for by then the glory days of the fur brigades were over, and the days of the emigrant trains had begun with the Bidwell-Bartleson Party five years previous.

Every year after 1841, the wagons of emigrants on the Oregon Trail, and those who chose to take the turn-off to California at Fort. Hall, roughly three hundred miles or so farther west passed by the frontier trading station, coming thicker and faster. Every year there were more and more white-topped wagons splashing through the North Platte on the road from Council Bluffs which ran north of the Platte, or coming up the road that followed the south bank of the Platte from Ft. Kearny, from St. Joe, from Independence and Westport and the other “jumping-off” places along the Missouri River, until the tide of 49ers, seeking gold in the placer mines of California swept all the remnants of the sleepy-nine-months-of-the-year fur-trading station. It was bought by the Army in 1849. The adobe trader post, called “The Old Fort” formed the south edge of the fort parade ground, until demolition and replacement by officers’ quarters in 1870.

But until the deluge of the Gold Rush, it was a welcome outpost, marking one-third of the journey to the golden lands of California, or the rich farm country of Oregon, the gateway between the easy travel along the Platte, to the harsher challenge over the backbone of the Rockies, and the South Pass. Given the timetable of the seasons and the trail, an emigrant company should have reached the confluence of South Platte and Laramie Creek in late June, and might have, in earlier years camped among the skin lodges of the Sioux tribes among the cottonwoods and willow thickets below the whitewashed walls of Old Laramie, in uneasy amity with the Tribes. They might have expected to trade there, for pemmican and dried buffalo meat, for baskets and moccasins and Indian ponies, to look with expressions of pious horror, or genuine intellectual curiosity on Indian graves, air-buried on scaffolds in the trees, to meet and trade with the “Other” and then to continue on their own way, with a lot of mutual incomprehension; two wildly different tribes sliding past each other on the grease of commerce.

(The party that I have written a book about passed through Ft. Laramie in 1844. This is the first of a continuing series of meditations about the emigrant trails and the pre-Civil War Old West… a territory which is familiar to us is some ways, and yet totally unfamiliar.) BTW, I am still looking for an interested publisher. Yeah, there is one interested, but what’s the old saying about all one’s eggs in a single basket? Yeah, that one

Road Trip

08. October 2006 · Comments Off on Road Trip · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Pajama Game

A summer has passed with nary a blog from yours truly. And a busy one it has been. Although I have not had the time to actually sit and compose, I have taken in The Daily Brief on a, well, daily basis – or at least to the extent that I have been able to gain access to the Internet. Why is it that at Holiday Inn Express, you can get reliable wireless access at no additional charge, but at a Hilton (for $300 / night) you must pay an additional $9.95 per day for a connection that drops in and out like an old crystal radio tuned in to some far away station? My company recently equipped me with a Blackberry, which enables me to follow the blogs more easily (as long as there is Cingular service), however, I have not had any success to date using it to actually post anything – besides, they are a major pain in the a** to type on because, in the case of my particular model, most keys represent multiple characters

Anyway, my job has of late required more than normal travel, often with short notice. In the midst of that, Real wife, Red Haired Girl, and yours truly set off for north central New York to attend a family reunion. Although we usually take a plane or train, we decided this time to do a road trip. Loyal readers may recall that I bought Real Wife a new Jeep Grand Cherokee Ltd. (yes, with a Hemi) for our wedding anniversary. It is quite the ultimate highway cruiser, and we actually achieved 21 mpg on a couple of interstate stints, with the engine mostly cruising on just 4 cylinders. Put the pedal down though and it is Katie bar the door. Most inter-city driving is pretty calm – everyone getting into a groove and generally staying out of each other’s way. In the cut and thrust of beltway driving though, particularly around Indianapolis, 340+ horsepower (I installed a K&N reduced restriction air filter) is a useful thing to have. Mileage does take a hit – we saw 16.5 mpg in one stint. What the hell though, it was fun.

I mapped our trip to follow the old route 17 (now I-86) through the southern part of New York. It is normally one of the most scenic routes in the country – not this time though. We drove through nearly 200 miles of the worst rain I have seen in years, often at elevations of over 2000 feet where we were literally in the clouds. It finally stopped north of Elmira, but the rest of the week brought several new storms and near 100-degree temperatures.

Our reunion, held at my cousin’s house near Oswego, was interrupted by a brief but intense six-inch rainfall and winds high enough to knock out power to 30,000 people. The sky did clear and the party continued. There are twelve siblings in my mother’s family, close to fifty offspring in my generation, with well over a hundred of their kids of childbearing age – you get the message – a lot of people. I saw some relatives that I had not seen since probably 1970, and many others who I did not even recognize. The male members of the family can generally be identified by a) baldness and b) a neck size of at least 16 inches. Although a few of the female members can also be so-identified, the general tip off is red hair.

We did enjoy the local foods that I grew up on – salt potatoes, clams, Italian sausage and coneys. The term coney has different meanings depending on where you are. In central New York they are a white spicy hot dog, traditionally served at 117 year-old Heid’s in Liverpool (just north of Syracuse). We bought and froze 15 pounds of them to bring back to enjoy and share with deprived midwestern friends.

On our return trip we stopped at Niagara Falls and walked to Canada to get Hard Rock Café souvenirs. Red Haired Girl was in a particularly bad mood (generally because she is a teenager travelling with parents and specifically because she was – well, I don’t remember now). After lunch, we crossed back over to resume the trip. You actually have to pay twenty-five cents (Canadian, but they will take American) to leave their country. We did not have a birth certificate or picture ID for Red Haired Girl, which caused a problem at the border. Real Wife helpfully offered a Social Security card, with the agent responding that every illegal he has seen carries a Social Security card. Owing to RHG’s above noted foul mood, I was somewhat inclined to simply leave her in Canada, however, that would have been bad fathering (not to mention the serious implications to relations between the two countries). I then asked the agent to look at her (sulking with an expression that confirmed to any bystanders that she had the dumbest parents in the world) and tell me that she could be anyone’s daughter but mine. He ceded the point and allowed us to go on our way. I should note in fairness that by the time we traversed six hundred miles, and found a motel with a pool and a nearby Appleby’s, that had perked up some.

Real Wife, who had never previously taken a road trip of that length, is now fired up and anxious to head out again once school ends in the spring. I’m thinking maybe Kentucky or North Carolina for some golfing…

Curious Facts You Might Not Have Known

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, are you amused?

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

Reflections on Foleygate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROP, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

*Original Atlantic link is for subscribers only

Green Stamps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ye Choose and Ye Do Not Choose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sky Sisters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apostasy in Black & White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So You Heard…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She can see clearly now

10. September 2006 · Comments Off on She can see clearly now · Categories: General, Pajama Game

jessie2

I won’t spend my days
waiting for an angel to descend.
Searching for a rainbow with an end
Now that I’ve found you,
I’ll call off the search.

And I won’t spend my life
gazing at the stars up in the sky
Wondering if love will pass me by
Now that I’ve found you,
I’ll call off the search.

Out on my own
I would never have known
This world that I see today
And I’ve got a feeling
it won’t fade away.

And I won’t end my days
wishing that love would come along
‘Cause you are in my life
where you belong
Now that I’ve found you,
I’ll call off the search.

-Mike Batt (sung by Katie Melua)-

I was looking for a lapdog; she was looking for a lap. We found each other, so call off the search. Her little stubby body held an over-sized heart. Her opaque eyes shone with love for her human. She was the perfect size for a lapdog, and knew exactly how to keep my back warm at night.

The turbo-tail never stopped, and the retractable tongue didn’t fully retract anymore, but these added to her charm. A companionable nuisance at first, her annoyances quickly became endearments.

I’m sitting here thinking about her, and the memories are flooding in…

That restless first night in April 2004, when she didn’t really know who I was or where she was. She jumped over a babygate that night, surprising me with her agility and her grace.

The struggle to get her weight down while continuing the maintenance dosage of prednisone for her “liver abnormality.”

Her sheer enjoyment of almost any food. If it was edible, she was pretty much all over it. I learned early on to push in the chairs around the kitchen table. I didn’t have to do that with my big dog, and one day after lunch I looked up and saw her front paws on the table, her back feet on my chair. She was polishing off the rest of my lunch, that I had intended to have for dinner.

After she learned not to eat from the table, she would lie in wait while I ate, her cloudy eyes alert for any dropped crumbs. I never had to vacuum under my table after she moved in. As her eyes deteriorated, her nose took over, sniffing out every bit of dropped food.

She was not a young dog when she joined my family 2 1/2 years ago. She had spent 9 years devoted to a little old lady in Alabama, but the new husband didn’t appreciate the value of an IG’s love, so she needed a new home. I needed a lapdog and a companion for my greyhound, so it seemed like a good match.

And once we got past the adjustment period, it was.

Well, except for the time she wasn’t looking, and jumped off the sofa onto the sleeping greyhound. (oops)

There’s a reason someone coined the expression “Let sleeping dogs lie.” We did a “peace of mind” visit to the vet after that incident. I think that was our first peace of mind visit. There were many more after that.

Not only was she an older dog when she moved in with me, but she came with her own set of health issues. A “liver abnormality” that required prednisone to control it, cataracts (that are exacerbated by the pred), and a heart murmur. She got enalapril every day for that. The adoption lady was afraid no one would want an elderly dog with health issues, but my only concern was whether I could afford her meds. Thank goodness for the Costco pharmacy.
I was unemployed, so she came to me as a “permanent foster.” She would live with me, but the adoption group would pay the vet bills. Then I got a job. To celebrate her “gotcha day,” I adopted her.

My vet told me the “liver abnormality” was hepatitis, and the pred dose was probably too high, and could lead to Cushings Disease. We jiggered the dosage until we found one she could live with. Then one day she wouldn’t eat. I got her into see Doc the next day, and we discovered a severely abcessed canine tooth. She wouldn’t eat cause it hurt too much. She lost 5 teeth in that dental, including the abcessed canine, and was back to her sassy self again. That was last summer.

As the summer faded into fall, I realized she was losing her hearing, and her eyesight. It seemed an unfair blow to a little dog that had already dealt with so much, but we worked around it. She slept more, and would often be sleeping soundly when I arrived home from work, because she didn’t hear me come in. She would walk down the hallway like those robot toys that bounce off the walls, adjusting their path each time they hit an obstacle. We joked about getting her a bicycle helmet with curb-feelers on it so she would know when she was getting close to a wall.

This summer, it seems that every month brought some type of concern. She wouldn’t eat for a day or so, and then would be back to normal. On August 8, I dropped her off for her routine dental, at 8am. Doc called me at 915. Her bloodwork didn’t look good – kidney values were up, which is a side-effect of the enalapril. I’d never worried about her kidneys – my concern had always been the liver, because of the hepatitis. We postponed the dental, and put her on a kidney diet. I went out of town on a business trip.

My dog-sitter called me Wed night after I’d left. Jessie hadn’t eaten for 2 days, and didn’t want to come out of her crate. “Take her to Doc,” I said. “Drop her off in the morning when you take Angie for her dental.”

She did. Doc called me that next evening. UTI. Fixable.

Strong anti-biotics and life will be good again, we hoped. But she was apathetic about food still, and it took her over a week to get back to anything like her usual self.

I was still on the road, and found myself dreaming about my dogs. In my dreams they had gotten loose, and I was looking for Jessie. One night as I was falling asleep, I saw her in my mind. She was standing next to a hedge at the edge of a busy street. There was a gap in the hedge, and on the other side it was green grass and blue skies and sunshine. On my side of the hedge it was speeding cars, drizzling rain, and grey shadows. She looked around at me, and looked through the gap, trying to decide which one to choose.

“It’s ok, honey,” I whispered through my tears. “It’s ok if you want to go on. I can’t come with you right now, but I’ll be along later. I promise.”

She just sat there, staring through the gap in the hedge. That was the night before doc diagnosed the UTI.

After the UTI was cleared up, I dreamt again that she was missing. I wasn’t looking for her this time – in my dream I was accepting that she wasn’t there. This dream confused me, because she was better. Or at least, the UTI was cleared up. That meant she was better, to me.

She wasn’t better.

Doc called me last Thurs evening, and I pulled off the highway to talk to her, so I could give her my full attention. Jessie had been in for follow-up bloodwork, and it didn’t look good. The UTI cleared up, but the bloodwork didn’t. The kidney values had declined in the last month, and she had lost 2 pounds since Aug 8.

Doc said she was on a slow decline, and it wouldn’t improve. It would just get worse. She had told me last week that renal failure is NOT peaceful. That euthanasia is a generous decision. I asked her Thursday “what’s our next step?” She said “let her go.”

Earlier this summer, on one of my many “peace of mind” visits with Jessie, Doc & I made an agreement. She would tell me when she thought it was time to let Jessie go, and when she told me that, I would let her go, whether I was in town or not. I wasn’t going to make Jessie wait until I was back home if she needed to go sooner.

I was 400 miles from home when Doc called me, figuring to get home either very late that night, or sometime mid-morning Friday. Doc had a 40 minute spot open at 220pm on Saturday afternoon.We booked it. That would give me some alone time with my sweetie, and a chance to pamper her overnight, and to say goodbye to her and whisper into her deaf ears how much I love her, and how much she’s meant to me.

I picked her up Friday when I got into town, and kept her with me with me the rest of the day. I blew off my Friday night commitment, and we hung out together, watching tv and eating popcorn. She wolfed down some raw hamburger, eating like she’d not seen food in days. A couple hours later, she regurgitated undigested hamburger meat. Saturday morning, I took her out to breakfast. Some strangers at the next table collected their bacon and offered it to her. She ate it with obvious enjoyment. A couple hours later, I found undigested bacon on my livingroom floor. If I had any doubts about Doc’s call on the timing, these incidents cleared it up.

She’s a very lucky dog – she’s been deeply loved by several people in her life. Her first momma loved her for 9 years, and her vacation-mom and I have loved her for the last 2 1/2. Eleven years of love for a sweet little dog. It’s never enough, but it’s a damn sight more than some pups get.

At 205pm, we pulled into the vet’s parking lot. I had tried to time it so that we’d get there right on time, but for once the traffic was light, and we were early. My dog-sitter (her vacation-mom) wanted to be there with us, to say goodbye. I know that she loved Jessie as much as I did, so I couldn’t say no to her, even though I’d have preferred to be alone.

I sat on the floor in the exam room, holding my little one, snuggling with her, and telling her how much I loved her. Doc & Dee came in, and Doc gave her a sedative while i continued to hold her. Then Doc suggested we move her to the exam table, and we laid her on a towel-covered pad. That way we could all love on her. She fought the sedative, trying to stay awake and be with us. Finally she was asleep. Doc looked at me, and asked if I was ready. There was no way I’d have said “no” – it was the last gift I could give this sweet friend who has given so much to me over the last 30 months.

All 3 of us were petting on Jessie at the end. Doc gave her that last injection, and she almost immediately stopped breathing, but that oversized heart of hers didn’t want to give up, and kept beating, albeit weakly.

We just kept petting her and telling her what a good girl she was. I kissed her on her forehead and told her to run free, where she could see and hear and chase the bunnies, and that i’d meet up with her again someday.

It wasn’t too long after that when Doc said it was over. Then we sat there and told Jessie stories for awhile. Doc & Dee go WAY back – over 10 years, now. So it was like 3 old friends talking about another old friend.

I love the fact that she can see and hear now, and run and play without pain. But I kept looking over at the empty car seat on the way home, where her collar was lying, and every time I did, my eyes would leak. When I was cooking supper Saturday night, and dropped some fish on the floor, I instinctively looked towards where she would have been lying, to point it out to her so she could clean it up for me. That’s when it became real to me.

She knows that we loved her. That’s what matters most.

She’s seeing clearly now, and hearing the birds singing around her. The sky is blue where she is, and the grass is green. A brilliantly vivid rainbow is arching across her sky, and there’s a whole passel of greyhounds looking out for her, to keep her company and show her the sights around her new home.

I’ll see her again someday. The God who loves me created my little girl just as surely as He created me, and He doesn’t forsake his creations. Until then, I have my pictures of her, and my memories. I’d rather have my little girl, snuggling up against me at night, whining and scratching at me in the morning for her breakfast.

There will probably be more lapdogs in my life, at some point, but there will never be another Jessie.

At the Point of a Gun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the World Rushed In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They said I would cry….

27. August 2006 · Comments Off on They said I would cry…. · Categories: General, Pajama Game

Last week at the customer site, I told them I planned to visit Biloxi, and see what the gulf coast looks like now, a year after Katrina. I explained that I’d been at Keesler on occasion with the Air Force, and Biloxi held fond memories for me. They told me I’d cry. I said they were probably right, but that I needed to do it.

I left Mobile on Saturday evening, and travelled west on IH-10 to Ocean Springs, just east of Biloxi. Once upon a time, I could have jumped down to US90 at any point along that route and driven along the beach all the way to Biloxi. But the bridge is out across the bay, so you can’t do that now.

My motel was just off IH-10, so that was cool with me. I hooked up with a cyberfriend for dinner, and we had a grand time getting to know each other. By this time it was dark, so there wasn’t really anything to see.

I spent today visiting with my friend, but tonight’s hotel is the Hampton Inn on Beach Blvd. My friend lives north of IH-10, off Route 49. The last time I was in Gulfport, which I’m thinking was 1998, there wasn’t anything north of Route 49. Now there’s a good two miles of commercialization up that way. Just about every chain restaurant you could hope to find, and a good supply of stores, as well.

That was odd enough. But then I left my friend’s place and headed south on 49, towards the coast. Back in ’98, I was here as a civilian contractor, and we stayed at the Hampton Inn there on 49 & IH-10, in Gulfport. I left here that time just a day or so ahead of Hurricane Georges.

And now I’m back, a year after Katrina.

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Tails of the Lesser Weevil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sober Blogging (060827)

27. August 2006 · Comments Off on Sober Blogging (060827) · Categories: Domestic, Pajama Game

With all of the recent publicity about Mel Gibson’s drunk driving arrest, I thought I’d make some things clear to some of you more normal imbibers of spirits. There seem to be some misconceptions out there about how a real alcoholic does or doesn’t react. While I’m at it, I’m gonna talk a little bit about A.A.. Since I enjoy a degree of anonimity here, I don’t think I’ll be breaking any A.A. Traditions. And I’m comfortable enough with the folks here who do know my real name to talk about this.

There seems to be a common perception that alcohol is some great truth serum, and that a person’s true colors come out when they’re drunk. That may be true, if they’re simply drunk and not in a blackout. In a blackout, anything goes. Inhibitions go out the window entirely. We may assume the identities of our parents, a friend, a guy on television. I’m told I spent an entire three-day bender as Dudley Moore once. Only my friends didn’t find me half as funny as Arthur.

So when anyone goes off on Mel Gibson being anti-semitic or some other presumption that he’s really that way, I just sort of shrug and assume that they’ve never had a real drunk in their life.

Now, does that excuse what happened? Nope. If someone is an alcoholic and knows that they’re alcoholic and they drink again, then they’re playing with a time bomb and they know it…or not. If they’re still playing the, “This time it’s going to be different.” game, then they still might think they’ve got a handle on it. Not much anyone can do for them until they realize, “Ya know, I don’t get in trouble every time I drink, but every time I’ve been in trouble, I’ve been drunk.” Making that connection can be harder than micro soldering with a wood burner for some folks.

One of the other misconceptions about drunks is that we can just quit and everything will be okay. Once the alcohol is gone, we’ll be just peachy. Ya know, if that were true, groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) wouldn’t be necessary. For a lot of drunks, just not drinking will simply drive them crazy. I don’t mean physical withdrawal, that’s bad enough. Physical withdrawal from heroin will make you sick for a few days, physical withdrawal from alcohol can kill ya. But even after most drunks get all the alcohol out of our system, our heads are still playing with us: “Come on, one drink, what can it hurt?” “You’ve been doing so good for a month now, just have a beer.” And ya know, if you’re a normal drinker, you have no problem stopping after a beer or two. For a real alcoholic, one leads to two, leads to five, leads to oblivion. We’re kind of wired that way. One drink starts an actual physical craving for more, and more makes the physical craving worse, not better. And our heads just go along for the ride, “Well yeah, hell, we’ve already had one, might as well tie one on.” An obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. And that’s the disease concept of Alcoholism that everyone from the AMA to shrinks have used for decades. Insurance Companies HATE the disease concept because, well, if it’s a disease, they have to cover it.

Now some folks just plain don’t like A.A. and that’s fine. If everyone who needed A.A. was to show up at once, we’d need much bigger meeting halls. A.A. isn’t for people who need it, it’s for people who want it. And there are a lot of misconceptions about A.A. also, some of them for good reason and others not.

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Family Dynamic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The postal clerk would be screaming still, I think

The Empty Lands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shi Tzu Happens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vino, Veritas and Lucky

05. August 2006 · Comments Off on Vino, Veritas and Lucky · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game, Stupidity, Wild Blue Yonder

Unaccustomed as I am to giving a good goddamn about the blatherings of movie stars and other reality-challenged morons in the entertainment industry— we pay these people inordinately large salaries to dress up and pretend to be other people for our amusement, and I have always just tried to think of them as a breed of well-trained performing monkeys— I am a little surprised to find myself even considering a blog-post about Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and his subsequent widely publicized anti-Semitic outburst, recorded apparently in its very ugly entirety. It’s been all over the entertainment industry media, to which I never (well hardly ever) pay attention, but Blondie does – and if her reaction to the whole thing is anything typical, the very photogenic Mr. Gibson may have a big-post rehab problem. She was honestly revolted by the whole nasty diatribe, will probably not see whatever his next movie is, and is even put off by the thought of watching any of the old Mad Max movies again. In vino, veritas, you see, truth at the bottom the wineglass; she and I have been around long enough to know that an over-sufficiency of alcohol doesn’t really change a person. It just loosens inhibitions, and their grip on whatever façade they maintain over their true personality. Everyone knows people who are kind, funny and amusing sober, and even more so when smashed – and conversely, at least one individual who only appears to be kind, funny and amusing, when sober. When that kind gets a skin-full, the real underlying person comes out, and it is usually a memorably nasty piece of work. So, while drunk on his ass, a movie star who has a public persona of being a rather genial, fairly devout sort of family man is revealed to be – well, something rather less genial, to put it kindly. And since he is in the entertainment business, this has implications for more than just his family, circle of friends and therapist.

It’s enough to make one madly nostalgic for the old studio morality clauses, actually. On the whole and over the long run, we rather prefer our entertainers to have a private life pretty much be congruent with what they play on the screen, assuming that we have to know anything about their personal lives at all. Frankly I’d rather see someone like Meryl Streep or Judi Dench spend three decades or more playing a great many different and interesting characters, and living a dull and blameless personal life out in the suburbs between movie shoots. Or even a Robert Mitchum, who seems to have in real life been pretty much the same kind of two-fisted, hard-drinking brawler he often played. I’m fairly sure that Rock Hudson would never have been as big a movie star as he was, if everyone had known that in real life he played for the other team, although we can now appreciate him being a much better actor than we thought back then, playing all those love scenes with women. If he had been outed in the 1950ies, Rock would have been dropped – er, like a hot rock. What he was in real life, was just not congruent with the roles he played, and the public personality he appeared to be. I get the giggles myself, picturing him in a passionate movie cinch with Doris Day, knowing what I know now. So, how many people will giggle cynically when they see Mel playing a regular guy?

As I wrote here last month, anti-Semitism in the US never quite has attained the virulence that it has in Europe, for a number of likely reasons. Not to say it anti-Semitism never appeared in the American cultural or political body politic; there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But set against that are even more accounts of how in a lot of places, and on a lot of occasions, it was something that, to use an English expression, was just not done, being neither condoned or approved of, and on one famous occasion, it brought down a bigger hero than a movie actor, a man whose credentials for being an American hero were somewhat more substantial than being able to recite lines in front of a camera; Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy himself, who by 1941 had spent nearly two decades in the public eye, after his epic crossing of the Atlantic, solo and non-stop in a single-engine and the ghastly kidnapping and death of his first child and the resulting investigation and trial. Aviator, writer, scientist and traveler, he had become a passionate speaker, and one of the leading lights in the America First Committee, a group formed to oppose any American involvement in what would become the Second World War. Many of the founding members- intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians alike- were honorable, and passionate patriots, who were convinced that the war in Europe was none of our affair, and that involvement in it would not end well or to American advantage, and had the example of the first war to go on. Conventional wisdom of that time had it that America had been suckered into participating in World War One by an unholy cabal of slick politicians and greedy arms merchants, and as war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans very rightfully felt they’d better not get fooled again. But there were other, less honorable motivations motivating members of America First, traditional dislike of Britain’s imperial and financial powers, admiration for or fear of Germany, deep dislike of President Roosevelt – and as historian David Gardner wrote “Anti-Semitism was the most inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason to hate Hitler… Jewish interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to sacrifice American lives. The fact that interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population, had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the drive for war.”
And by the fall of 1941, events had skidded way beyond anyone’s control, least of all the passionate anti-interventionalists of America First. Rooseveldt had won re-election the year before, a military draft had been instituted, Lend-Lease aid and volunteers flowed towards Britian, along with considerable American sympathy. After a U-boat fired on an American destroyer, President Rooseveldt authorized the US Navy to shoot back. Passions ran high, as events converged, and Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in De Moines, saying “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire … These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence … it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany … But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences� Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government…”
Lindbergh had long been a hero to most Americans, even as he had become so deeply involved in America First, and certainly viewed by many, especially in the Rooseveldt administration as an admirer of Hitler, and the Nazi Party, but this speech— described as intemperate and inflammatory — brought down a storm on his head. The America First Committee, fractured and was made irrelevant by Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh himself was all but made a political outcast by the opprobrium that descended upon him.
Curiously, the speech that killed his political career was made on September 11th.
(More fascinating stuff about America First Committee… much of which seems curiously relevant, these days)

Dear Mel Gibson (060803)

03. August 2006 · Comments Off on Dear Mel Gibson (060803) · Categories: Fun and Games, Pajama Game

You might need A.A., N.A., and or alcohol/drug rehab if:

You and the lead guitarist in your rock ‘n’ roll band are refered to by Gerry Garcia as “The Toxic Twins.”

You’re the drummer for Guns ‘n’ Roses and Axel Rose tells you you’re too damn drunk.
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