Flying Status

02. April 2006 · Comments Off on Flying Status · Categories: Air Force, General, Pajama Game

My first flying experience was at a local fair in 1962 near Fulton, NY. There was a barnstorming pilot type with a Steerman biplane trainer who was offering short rides for “a penny a pound” which, as I recall, set my dad back by about sixty-five cents. I was hooked. Three years later, my father arranged to have Mom and the four kids fly on Eastern Airlines from Syracuse to NYC, where we met him and traveled on to Connecticut to visit his sisters and their families. In those days flying was an important event in the sense that people actually dressed up, with my brother and I in suits and ties, and my sisters wearing skirts with crinolines (today sweat suits seem to be de rigeur, with the airport experience only a couple of notches above that of the Cleveland Greyhound terminal).

Joining the USAF as a radar technician (328X1) gave little hope of flying, other than in transport from one duty station to another. However, things changed around late 1974, when SAC decided that it needed to have technicians available to fly missions in order to troubleshoot certain types of problems that only occurred while airborne. Until that point we were limited to high-speed taxi checks, which involved accelerating down the runway to near S1 speed, and then hitting the brakes. They wanted people who could fly entire B-52 and KC-135 sorties, often 8 – 10 hours or more in duration. I had just earned Master Technician rating and, with an expressed passion for flying, I was able to convince the powers-that-be that I was the ideal candidate. Another plus was that I would collect flight pay. As I recall, this amounted to $75 each month that I flew for some minimum amount of hours (I think it was five or ten). Qualification for this status required that I undergo physiological flight training, which meant a TDY to Pease AFB New Hampshire. More »

Globalization of Taste

29. March 2006 · Comments Off on Globalization of Taste · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game, World

Sgt/Cpl. Blondie stumbled across evidence of this, at a local chain grocery—the one I always call the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery. It is truly one of the glories of living in Texas, a local chain which has run practically every other big grocery chain out of town with a combination of unparalleled customer service, quite good prices on their house brands, and an unimaginable variety of fine grocery items for the discriminating foodie. I firmly believe that the Iron Curtain would have slipped off its’ rod and collapsed even sooner if selected members of the Politburo could have been given guided tours of the average HEB store… the sheer lavish glories of American grocery stores are legend, and HEB does that all one or two steps better. They pay really close attention to their local market. I have a theory that you can calculate the average per capita income in a neighborhood (before taxes) by counting up how many varieties of olive oil are on the shelves at the local HEB… so many varieties X so many $ thousands in income, and there you have it. I haven’t worked out the exact figures yet (I’m only an English major, you know!!!!), but the greater the variety of olio d’ olive, the higher the income. The HEB nearest Lackland AFB, I’ll have you know, had only 2, and one of them was that nasty yellow Pompeii brand drek, which was all that was on the major grocery markets for decades, before anyone acquired any taste in the matter at all.

Olive oil— it’s a small thing, but something I noticed, because of being in Greece, where it was the font of all civilization (according to legend), and then in Spain where Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent to Walmart, with every imaginable item under one roof, and at next to wholesale prices, offered an entire aisle of olive oil, of every quantity and quality.
I came home from Spain with six 1.5 liter bottles of a good and faintly greenish brand of the stuff, which lasted me for barely a year.
That’s the trouble with being stationed overseas a lot; eventually you sample the local stuff- something that is a local taste, and hardly ever exported, and when you come home, you are bereft… sometimes. A year or so after I came home from Japan, my friend Marsh (She of the marvelous engine-mount challenged car) were overjoyed to discover a small Japanese-American eatery that offered… Katsudon!

Katsudon; a dish all the more luscious because it is very good, and filling and cheap, and most marvelous of all— available everywhere. (And when you said it, the waiter/waitress understood it!) It was the hamburger, or the meatloaf of Japan, a bowl of rice topped with a breaded and friend pork cutlet, and a savory glob of poached egg and onion, all the juices seeping down to flavor the rice with sweet liquor. You could go— or so said the Japanese lady who taught the “Intro to Japan 1A— into any casual eatery in Japan, and ask for “katsudon” and get some variant of it. There is of late in one of my cooking magazines, a recipe for such, which shows how adventurous the foodie population may have become— two decades ago, practically no one who hadn’t done a tour in Japan had ever heard of it at all. People who have served overseas have heaps of examples— lovely and particularly local foods which they became addicted to, and could never find again, or if they could, at great expense, once they came “home”.

Which gets me back, however circuitously to HEB, and food items from Japan. Blondie found an import item at a local HEB store, and fell on it joyfully; a particular brand of Japanese soda. It came in very distinctive blue-green glass bottles, sealed with a blue-green glass marble in the neck of it. A bulge in the neck, and a pinch molded into the glass on one side kept the bottle from rolling back into the top opening if you drank it holding the bottle in a certain way. Vendors kept a particular punch at their stand, to open it by pushing the marble back into the neck— where it had otherwise made a tight seal against force of carbonation. The soda was otherwise fairly indistinguishable from ginger ale, or some other clear, mildly sweet and carbonated drink… but still. Neither of us expected to see it on the market here, but whattaya know. Here it is.
Street Fair 1977
This pic of me (center) and two other girls from the barracks (Sorry, I can’t recall their names!) was taken during a local festival, about 1977, when all the traffic on Misawa’s main street was cut off, and it was decorated with lanterns and banners, and stalls. All of us have a bottle of this particular soda in hand.

The Fantasy Country

26. March 2006 · Comments Off on The Fantasy Country · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

With a bit of surprise, I tallied it up today, and realized it has been slightly over 20 years since I was in France, actually, driving across Europe in the VEV (Very Elderly Volvo) with a nearly-5-year old Blondie tucked up in the back seat with a couple of pillows, the tattered striped baby blanket that was her woobie for more years than she is comfortable admitting and a stock of Asterix and Obelix comics. I took a zig-zaggy course across Europe in the autumn of 1985; the car-ferry from Patras to Brindisi, then up the boot of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, across the narrow neck of Austria, west across Germany with a stop in the Rhineland and a charming small town along the Moselle – and because the major roads across France were toll-roads, and (to me) hideously expensive, I went across France entirely on secondary roads, guided by my invaluable road atlas, the Hallwag Euroguide.

I hit a couple of places in France that I had visited 15 years before, as a teen-aged Girl Scout on a sub-budget, Youth-Hostel & Eurail-Pass tour of Europe, and a great many more that I had not, thanks to a slightly higher expenditure allowance (the going rate for the Youth Hostel & Eurail Pass summer vacation trip in 1970, which now seems as far distant as the proud tower of pre-WW1 Europe, was $5.00 a day.)
England— halfway home, deja-vu familiar, Germany— slight distrust, being an enemy and the land of Mordor, metaphorically speaking, for two generations, but won over by overall tidiness and devotion to children .Italy— charming, slapdash and slightly grubby. But France—there was ambivalence.

France meant so much to us, after all, and not just when it came to cooking, and an appreciation for fine food and wines. It meant marvelous architecture and interior decoration, translated into the American landscape, gallery after gallery of paintings, the Impressionists and Moderns and all. France was Monet’s Gardens, salons filled with witty conversation, the fountain of elegance in couture clothing, Madeline and the old House in Paris Covered in Vines, Chartres and the soaring galleries of the Louvre. France was the very last word in sophistication. It was where our aspiring artists and intellectuals went to acquire their training and polish, and American tourists tried for a bit of the same— although always with a feeling that such heights of worldly savoir-faire were well beyond them — and being pretty certain that the headwaiters were laughing at them anyway.

France was my collection of cookbooks, and Peter Mayle in Provence, Van Gogh’s fields of sunflowers, Chartres floating like a stone ship in a field of golden wheat, me negotiating country roads and traffic circles in tiny towns, and Blondie’s Asterix and Obelix comics. It was buying a copper pudding mold at Dillerhain, and carrying a heavy box packed full of porcelain cooking things on packed subway train car, and watching a street musician plug his electric guitar onto a portable amp, play some fast boogie-woogie, pass the hat and dash off at the next stop. France was also fields of lavender in Provence, and fields of crosses in Flanders and Normandy. We had a history with France, after all.

It’s been an on-again, off-again history at that, more troubled than most Francophiles like to admit. France is usually visualized— starting with Henry James– as the elusive and mercurial girlfriend, but it strikes me these days that France is more like an erratic and long-time occasional boyfriend. Most women have had a brush with that sort: the guy who swoops in and sweeps her off her feet, because he is attractive, and lots of fun, sometimes handsome, always cultured, at home in the world. It never lasts, because he starts to make her feel lumpish and homely by tactlessly criticizing her clothes, or preference in books and friends. Or he is denigrating her in front of his friends, laughing at her behind her back, even while he helps himself to anything he pleases of hers. And then he borrows a lot of money— never repaid— or throws a horrendous scene in a public place, and is off again for a good long time, leaving her furious and embarrassed, and wondering if he really some sort of sociopath after all. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of this, she deletes his phone number, and doesn’t answer his messages.

Which is by way of leading up to these essays written over the last half-decade or so, by an American medievalist, fluent in French, who visits often. They make depressing reading; and I look at my collection of cookbooks, and memoirs by people like Peter Mayle, and wonder if that France, of vineyards and old houses, and cafes full of charming people talking about art and history is now a fantasy itself.

Volunteer Fire Departments

25. March 2006 · Comments Off on Volunteer Fire Departments · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Pajama Game

I grew up surrounded by my mother’s family, which included eleven other siblings. Of the males in the clan, there were 3 Navy vets (2 in WW II), and two Marines. This is not about the military service though, but rather about another form of service that, in some respects, directly affected far more lives. It all started in 1947 when Grandpa was heading up the stairs of their modest home in upstate NY. My mother, then eighteen years old and a telegrapher at Western Union in Syracuse (where, by the way, she met my father a year later), was smoking a cigarette in the girls’ bedroom – a practice forbidden by Grandpa despite his proclivity toward cheap cigars every evening. To avoid detection she threw it out the dormer window whereupon it immediately started the wooden shingles ablaze. More »

Personal Responsibility Takes Another Shot

23. March 2006 · Comments Off on Personal Responsibility Takes Another Shot · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Pajama Game, Stupidity

I went to Boyo’s TaeKwonDo class at the Youth Center tonight to watch like I do on most Thursday Nights. Beautiful Wife watches on Tuesday Nights. We all enjoy that…for the most part. Other parents with smaller children often-times let their hellions run wild and they get in the way of the class and are generally disruptive. They’ve been talked to. Other parents have tried to calm the offending kids only to be glared at by the parents. It’s no worse than any other place with kids who can’t or won’t behave with parents who can’t or won’t parent, but yeah, it kinda sucks.

Tonight I noticed that there were a few parents in the snack bar and as I entered the gym I noticed there were no parents watching the class in there. One woman who is in the class and acts as a sort of liaison walked up with a letter on letterhead in her hand. She told me that parents were no longer allowed in the gym to watch the class. That was the solution. I found the Director of the Youth Center and told her that I understood, but I wasn’t happy about her solution. She looked annoyed that anyone would question her GS-ness and informed me that it’s ALWAYS been the policy that parents couldn’t be in the gym while class was going on. Okay, myself and other parents have been watching our kids for over a year in there and no one’s ever said a word before this, I knew I wasn’t going to get anything like a straight answer out of this self-important twit. She cited safety concerns and yadda-yadda and I stopped her and asked, “Why not just ban little kids who aren’t in the class from the gym and solve the problem? There’s like four kids who’s parents won’t discipline them, simply ban them.” She looked horrified. “We couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t do it across the board. Besides the instructors can decide on SOME nights that parents can watch.”

Okay, I was done. When they have an across the board hard policy that isn’t an across the board hard policy…

So because a few parents won’t discipline their brats, none of the parents can watch their kids in class anymore.

Crap like this makes me livid. Everything I’ve learned in 22 years of service about responsibility and culpability is trashed at the Youth Center. These are the people who are watching my boy after school. Don’t hold the responsible parties to a standard, simply punish all the parents and kids who want us there watching. The very last thing I expected from any organization on an Air Force Base.

Personal responsibility has always had a decent stronghold in the military, and it’s eroding at the edges.

Set a standard. Enforce the standard. When did this become hard?

The twist of lime to this story is that I found out today that it wasn’t even the brats in OUR class that caused the action. It was ONE kid in an entirely different class. One parent who wouldn’t control one kid completely ruins things for at least a dozen other parents.

Deaquisition of Illusion.

22. March 2006 · Comments Off on Deaquisition of Illusion. · Categories: General, GWOT, Pajama Game, War, World

Well, if we read the polls right, in the light of the port-management imbroglio, it may indicate that there is a sort of sub-rosa, grass-movements, silent-majority distrust of… well, international Islam. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This comes as a matter of slack-jawed amazement or grave concern to parties as various as the Zogby polls, CAIR, and our local congress-critters on both sides of the aisle. The rote insistence on Islam being a Religion of Peace is wearing very thin, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary… evidence that bulks large despite all the heroic efforts of Hollywood, an assortment of well-meaning civic associations, the intellectual strongholds, and last and not least, that final bastion of telling truth to power, those major news establishments.

Whoo-hoo! We must have all been brainwashed by the powers of the major media, at the express bidding of the eeeeeevviiiil Bush administration.
Yes, that would be the major media who have no trouble “disappearing” all those pictures of people jumping from the Twin Towers, tying up the 2004 presidential race in a pretty pink bow and handing it to a favored candidate, and making a mockery of every brave pledge of a free press and all the news that’s fit to print, unless it’s mockeries of Mohammad. The lords and grandees of our established press are powerless to banish uncomfortable suspicions amongst the proletariat, who have latched on to the very infra dig notion that the forces of militant Islam— which might possibly incorporate quite a lot more than the tiny percentage which is always being presented to us as being that which has committed the outrage du jour— presents to us a real and present danger. Despite our marching orders from our betters, we persist in our peasant conviction that the Religion of Peace is something other than advertised. This knowledge is the elephant in the room. Not looking at it’s wide flappy ears, long ropelike tail, and tree-trunk legs and all the rest of it, will not make it go away. The elephant is in the room, and has crapped copiously all over the carpet. Some politicians and pollsters, whose livelihood depends on accurately sensing certain aromas on the breeze are reacting already— an otherwise competent, well-thought of, and efficient port-management concern may have caught it in the neck because of this conviction. Interested and easily offended parties like CAIR are frantically applying the metaphorical room freshener, with less and less effect. It’s all gotten very, very stale, and I suspect that a lot of us are very, very tired of it all.

We are tired, and wearied to death of it all, and the Affair of the Danish Cartoons was the final straw. Or perhaps a sentence of death for apostasy for a Christian Afghan convert is the penultimate final straw… unless there is one absolutely final, ultimately ultimate straw, a Religion of Peace inspired outrage which I desperately hope will not involve a mushroom-shaped cloud over Tel Aviv, or some European or American city.

Whatever the Islamic outrage du jour is, we are tired of it. We are tired of easily-set off mobs, burning and murdering, of hatred preached in mosques and middle-eastern newspapers, of vile insults and lies, of beheadings and bombs, of bullying and threats, of rapes and mutilations and the oppression of women, and the usual slickly-suited creatures oozing justifications for it on the TV and radio afterwards. We are tired of the same old whine about persecution by the same creatures whose co-religionists practice persecution with vigor and keen enjoyment. We are tired to exhaustion of the Islamic worlds’ tattered woobie of the Palestinian people, taken out and shaken about whenever interest flags—never mind that the so-called Palestinian people seem to have suffered more at the hands of their so-called friends than they have gotten from their ostensible enemy. (If we need an example for strategic stupidity, counter-productive behavior and bad choice of friends in the face of misfortune and adversity, the Palestinian State must be Exhibit A through Exhibit-X whatever. But that is material for another rant, another day.) We are tired of being told we have to understand, to respect and to tolerate… and yet to see that that understanding, respect and toleration is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, in most of those places where Islam meets the other.

We are tired of being hectored about getting to know the Koran, and the Islamic street; especially since the more we get to know it, the more we dislike it, all of its works and ways; prejudices, ignorance and barbarities on full display, courtesy of the unfiltered blog media.
We are just tired, tired of being tolerant and calm and understanding and enduring. We want to think the best of people, truly we do— but there is a limit, and someday — probably terrifingly soon– it will be reached. I hope, personally, that it will not be tomorrow or the day after, when the last patient nerve is shredded into microscopic threads, and the limit has been reached. If and when that happens, the going will get really, really ugly.

Note to the Islamic world; please, please do not step on that last un-shredded nerve. Just, please. Don’t. It won’t be worth it. Trust me on this. Just don’t.

A Square Hole In the Ground…

16. March 2006 · Comments Off on A Square Hole In the Ground… · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game, Working In A Salt Mine...

…Into which you throw money— and that is a house, or so sayeth Dave Barry, who adapted the saying (or so I believe) from a famous witticism about yachts. There is something about owning your own private patch of paradise, it satisfies some deep and atavistic impulse, even though that private patch may be quite modest, not the stuff of which “House Beautiful” or “Country Life” photo features are made. A couple of Christmases ago, the staff Christmas party for my weekend job was at one of those houses that could, in fact, feature very nicely in one of those magazines. (I work at a public radio outlet on weekends. It’s single weekend shift, just to keep my hand in. The pay is a couple of bucks more an hour than minimum wage, and a couple of bucks less than the hourly rate for my Mon-Fri job.) The house was one of those lavish, sprawling jobs, on a hilltop north of town, with a spectacular view, a terrace and a pool, landscaped and manicured, marble kitchen countertops and tile floors, every top-o-the-line appliance, furniture, fitting and convenience. Fifty or so circulating guests barely filled up the adjoining sitting room, dining room and kitchen.

It was a lovely house, or what I saw of it was, at least. The owners lived in it alone, and their grown children and their grandchildren visited often, but I thought about how empty the place would seem with just the two of them in it, rattling around like two peas in a huge, empty gourd and the very thought gave me the heeby-jeebies. I’d been informed for years by all sorts of TV shows and home interior-decorating porn that I should want a house just like it, but I was ever so glad to get back to my cozy little book-lined living room, with it’s blue-striped curtains and blue and white pottery, and a cat asleep on practically every soft and horizontal surface. At least, if some perv were trying to break in, I should know it right away. I wouldn’t have to hike an 8th of a mile to the other end of the mansion to find out for sure. I didn’t envy the owners of that house in the least, in spite of every inducement from the surrounding culture to do so. It was a very nice house, a lovely house, with a splendid view, and I was everlastingly grateful that I was not the one expected to live in it. One woman’s dream-house is the next woman’s nightmare-house. As my mother so cogently observed, the larger it is, the more time it takes to clean.

It’s not like I was immune to the dream house— I built scale model houses and 1/12th scale interiors for years, and carted a collection of 1/12th scale furniture and accessories around the world for most of my time in the Air Force. This was always a marvel to my friends: tiny chairs and desks, printed wallpaper with the tiniest patterns, terra cotta floor tiles the size of a thumbnail, and copper pots, and wine glasses and all. The best of my miniature stuff is housed in a dollhouse built to look like a log cabin—the logs crafted out of a wooden crate I picked out of a neighbor’s trash when I lived in San Lamberto, outside Zaragoza AB. I spent hours at the workbench in whatever work area, in whatever house I lived in, making tiny furniture, fitting kitchen cabinets and flooring into scale interiors, gluing slips of shingles to the roof, and creating plates of realistic food (sometimes on the slips of plastic from the insides of soda bottles, which— in the miniature world, looked exactly like paper plates) out of fimo plastic clay, rosin and various clear or tintable latex media.

But all this hobby building went by the wayside when I had a real house to play with, a house of my own, which I could paint whatever color I liked, and replace full-size fixtures and fittings as the mood and my pocketbook allowed me. I have barely touched my miniature things, and haven’t built another 12th scale environment since I had a full-sized place of my own to play with. I wonder now, how much of that nesting impulse was just diverted to the miniature scale as an outlet, a portable outlet, one that I did not have to leave behind whenever the Air Force moved me on. Perhaps a lot of my disinclination to pack up and move on, yet again, as I was coming on to 20 years TAFMS, was due to the fact that I had a house of my own, a place where I had planted a garden and begin to fit out the place to suit myself, secure in the knowledge that I owned it, that whatever in the world came about, I could paint it whatever color I wished.

And over the next couple of weeks, Blondie and I are doing the outside: a sort of dusty peach color for the walls, with off-white trim, something that will match the color of the bricks. All the most successful color schemes in the neighborhood were those chosen by people who took a care for the color of the bricks. The garage door and the front and garage door will be a contrast, a pale mint-green. We’ll be doing the trim and the garage door this weekend, and the body of the house next… it really is not much a change from doing a miniature house; just that the stock and supplies are very much bigger, and the tools are heavier.

Truth In a Print Petticoat

12. March 2006 · Comments Off on Truth In a Print Petticoat · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Pajama Game, World

Sometime around the turn of the last century, Rudyard Kipling (my very favorite short-story writer, after Saki, or H.H. Munro)— a writer not entirely unexposed to the real world, or the machinations of newspapers, society or the military—wrote a fine little story about three newspaper writers, whose life advendures had them on a little tramp steamship in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly, there is a strange, underwater volcanic explosion, a mysterious fog over a mysteriously calm sea, with all sorts of strange debris floating in it… and a pair of aquatic, apparently prehistoric sea dinosaurs nearby. The sea monsters are enormous, but it becomes clear to the riveted newshounds that they are a mated pair. One of them has been terribly injured by the underwater eruption, and is dying, right before their eyes, and to the evident distress of it’s mate. The three journalists watch in horrified sympathy… and their first impulse is to make it the biggest scoop of their lives… but then they realize that it is so incredible, that no one will ever, every believe them, and by the time they are all safe on land and trying to sell the story to their editors, they realize that they are best off just putting it across as fiction.
“For truth is a naked lady,” says the narrator, in the story’s punch-line, “And if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behooves a gentleman to either give her a print petticoat or turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.”

It’s a pretty apt description of how most of our western media outlets treated the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. Throw a print burka over it, repeat the obligatory invocation “But Islam is a religion of peace!” as needed, as reflexively as a Catholic congregation crossing themselves at the mention of the Trinity, turn away and look at the wall and pretend you just don’t see anything in the interval. The trouble is, the monsters are being thrown up to the surface faster and faster. For most of us who are drawn to pay attention, especially after 9/11, we are all but drowning in a tsunami of incidents and portents, every one of which involves militant Islam, political Islam, aggressive Islam, or just local thugs (or individual nutcases) justifying themselves by wrapping themselves in a supremacist Moslem identity. The Madrid and London bombings, the Paris riots, Bali and Beslan, Kenya and Cronulla. Mass protests demanding that their archaic religious laws apply to non-believers. Demanding a respect to their beliefs which is not reciprocated. A tidal spew of insult, lies and incitements to individual and mass murder, from so-called religious leaders across the Moslem world. Simmering war in Chechnya and Indonesia, Darfur, and European banlieus; car bombs, gang rapes, beheadings; the victims are piled high and world-wide. American contractors, Russian soldiers, Afghan teachers, Indonesian school-girls, Australian teenagers, Iraqi policemen. Dutch filmmakers, British and Italian writers, Danish cartoonists, American reporters and pacifists, doctors and do gooders. Hindu temples, Shia shrines, Egyptian and Kenyan hotel complexes, bars in Bali….

…and our Western freedom of speech. Our right to discuss, criticize, parody and analyze critically is nakedly threatened, and our intellectual and cultural leading lights, as well as our mainstream news personalities guard their own tongues metaphorically, lest the rest of them have to be guarded in reality. To be fair, there are some brave exceptions, and a sense of good fairness and rough knowledge of people in general commands me to admit that there are good and upright Moslems in nations across the globe who are content in their beliefs, they are internally strong and confident in their beliefs, and are not demanding our intellectual and political obeisance.

There are those good people in the Arab and Islamic world, and I trust in their existence, and honor their courage when they speak out… but alas, there are so few of them, and the ignorant mobs, the oil-money fueled imams, the bought-and-paid for lobbyists speak so deafeningly louder. They crush all the questions and doubt with the certainty of their vision; it is all too horrendous, all too large. To admit the reality of it is to shake the foundations of ones’ safe world. Better for those mainstream news outlets, those with buildings and employees and a market-share at risk, just to pull the print petticoat, the print blanket, the print shroud over it all, let it go away, and hope that tomorrow will bring something easier, more amenable, more ordinary, something that can be safely tucked into the same old comfortable world vision.

The mainstream media can indulge themselves in fantasies; the rest of us can not. We cannot escape the world; it is still with us, in spite of how hard some of its manifestations are to believe.

Paved Paradise…

09. March 2006 · Comments Off on Paved Paradise… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

… and put up a parking lot. Well, not exactly that, so far. Half of the green belt, in the back of my house is doomed. The first harbinger came months ago, in a notice about a change in zoning, affecting those homeowners who lived within a certain distance of an area where the city was proposing to change the situation to favor the establishment of… well, housing. Neither Judy, or I, or any of the other immediate neighbors could fathom what sort of housing was meant; small, free-standing cottages like our own? McMansions, with back bedroom windows that would command an intimate view of our backyards, and cut off our view to the sunset over the trees and grass, and the great marble faced Celtic cross put up at great expense by the congregation of St. Helena’s, the Catholic parish that owns the green belt behind all of our houses? Or some sort of apartment complex that would house an inordinate number of the rude, crude, low-rent and barely housebroken? Of such horrible possibilities are the stuff of suburban nightmares made. None of us are all that high-rent ourselves, but we do like our peace, and quiet, and a change in the status quo and view of the sunset over the greenbelt is not welcomed.

The presence of the greenbelt is precisely the reason I settled on this house, out of all those properties the realtor showed me, more than a decade ago; it was the smallest of the lot, about the most expensive, but the best-built… and that, over the fence at the back of the tiny house and tiny yard was nothing but green and open space. It made the place seem larger, oddly secluded, and very, very quiet. The greenbelt went all the way between the major cross-streets, with St. Helena’s floating in the middle of it like some great stone ship, the rest of it all empty and windswept. But it has all been nibbled away at the north, with short streets of development coming down to just short of the parish holdings, and now the southern part of it absorbed in one fell swoop; there is a fence across, just below Judy’s house, and everything to the south has been scraped, leveled, graded, terraformed and staked; I suppose to mark the eventual streets and house plots. The machinery of development has been hard at work during every working day for the last month; were I not at work during the day, the noise would drive me to distraction… that and the dust.

The dust blows in whenever the wind picks up— a fine, gritty grey coating on the floor and kitchen countertops. If I weren’t holding on to those precious weeks of cool evening temperatures, and low electrical bills, I would say the heck with that, close all the windows and run the AC; but the wisteria and the jasmine are blooming, the nights are cool— these are the days that I live for, all during the furnace-blasting heat in summer. I can’t possibly give it up. I just bought a formerly-expensive wind-chime (at a chain that provides up-scale goods at dollar-store markdowns) and I love to hear it at night, when the breeze picks up, and smell the jasmine, and hear the birds in the morning.

But the new houses are coming… not near to me, but close enough that I will have to see them when I look out at night, close enough to think about encouraging the hedge plants against the back fence to grow tall, and leafy enough that I don’t have to see them. The Lesser Weevil has trashed a lot of the back yard, after the December frost got to it first, but Blondie and I put up an electric fence to keep her out of the borders, and the construction company (from those nice people who did the roof last year) came today to pressure-wash the whole place, and tomorrow they will do some small repairs to the siding and trim, and over the next two weeks, Blondie and I and maybe Judy, and some of our friends, will repaint the house exterior. (Peach colored, with white and sage-green trim, for anyone who cares to know about fine details like that.) I have it in mind to Weevil-proof the back yard by fencing off a small part of it just for her, and doing the space that was formerly a patch of lawn in gravel and limestone pavers… with maybe a small water-feature in the middle—something modest, to trickle a small steam of water into a pool, in the middle of a collection of jewel-toned pottery planters full of herbs and lemon tree-shrubs… a private paradise.

Something dog-proof, anyway. It is shaping up to be a long, and hot, and dry summer, so making it xerioscape would be even better.

Borderline Radio

04. March 2006 · Comments Off on Borderline Radio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!, The Funny

Our local public radio station (which full disclosure impels me to mention that I am employed by their 24-hour classical sister station on a part-time basis) is advertising a special which airs this weekend on “border radio”— that is, a collection of stations located just over the Mexican border which during the 1950ies and 1960ie— joyfully free of FCC restrictions on power restrictions… or practically any other kind of restriction— blasted the very latest rock, and the most daring DJ commentary, on stations so high-powered they could be heard all the way into the deep mid-west… and probably on peoples’ fillings, too.

My parents were… umm, kind of stodgy about radio entertainment, and Mom kept the radio at home always tuned to the venerable Los Angeles classical station, with the result that I may have been the single “ most totally clueless about popular music” military broadcaster trainee ever to graduate from DINFOS. I knew about Elvis, and the Beatles, of course— JP played the “White Album” incessantly, and the Beach Boys were omnipresent in California… and I rather liked Simon & Garfunkle, but everything else… major unexplored territory there. Except for obscure and weird stuff like… umm, classical music. And the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. JP was a fan. I actually won money in tech school, betting on the existence of a band called the “Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band”. (They had a single in the AFRTS library— my winning move, going to the index file and triumphantly producing the card for “I am the Urban Spaceman”.) Otherwise, popular music, country music, all the rest of it was pretty much new news to me. I could be really open-minded about it all, which turned out to be a good thing, in the long run. DJ’s with strong personal inclinations about genre, decade and groups sometimes had a problem when it came to being ecumenical. (Weekend jazz… no problem. Midnight AOR.. no problem… just give me a couple of bottles of extra-strength Anacin. Afternoon drive-time… eh, no problem.)

So I managed to get to that point in my life without ever having heard of Wolfman Jack, the king of the border radio personalities. Raunchy, borderline profane, very funny, the Wolfman was about the most daring DJ in the regular weekly AFRTS package of radio programming for a good long time, which might have seemed even longer to station managers gritting their teeth and crossing their fingers that there might be nothing potentially offensive to the host nation in his show… this week, anyway. Master-Sgt. Rob, the first station manager that I worked for, at FEN-Misawa had been around for at least fifteen years before that. MSgt. Rob was one of the old-timers, who had served tours in South-East Asia, a clannish set loosely known as the “Thai Mafia”… so many of them had passed through a tour of duty at Udorn. Thailand’s reputation as a sort of sexual Disneyland dates from that time— although I swear Scouts’ honor, (fingers crossed here) that military broadcasters contributed very little to that. (Military broadcasters tended to be a little odd. I’d be willing to take bets that many of them had some degree of Ausburgers’ Syndrome). The Thai government was and is extremely embarrassed about this reputation, and sensitive of slight against national honor. So late one night, MSgt. Rob happened to turn on the radio, and of course, the Wolfman was on, and the first words MSgt. Rob heard was a joke:
“What’s brown and lays in the forest?” And the Wolfman answered his own question in that deep baritone that seemed especially made to relay the punch-line of raunchy jokes. “Smokey the Hooker!”
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Going, Going, Gone

26. February 2006 · Comments Off on Going, Going, Gone · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Pajama Game

The advent of spring brings with it the serious start of auction season. I only went to one or two auctions prior to taking up residence in the land of pigs, corn and soy beans, so I can’t speak much in the way of what they are like elsewhere. I suspect that because they are, in a way, a passion play that tends to be governed by human nature, they are pretty much the same no matter where you go. I’m not talking about the artsy fartsy auctions like Christi’s, or the charity type auctions where the only purpose is to provide a social means of funding something or another. I mean the kind of auctions where the auctioneers wear cowboy hats and the bidders are there for blood sport.

Real Wife and I traded a small two-bedroom bungalow for a large Victorian soon after our wedding and upon learning of the upcoming arrival of Red Haired Girl. As a consequence we needed lots of furniture. Keeping with the architecture of the house, we decided to hit the auction circuit and decorate the house with antiques. It seemed to us that if we bought carefully, we could obtain many pieces for prices equivalent to those of new ones, and that appreciation rather than depreciation would be the rule. Certain things needed to be new – Victorians were alien to the concept of a queen bed or comfortable living room furniture. So we bought some new and went auctioning for the rest.
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Tales of the Lesser Weevil: The Over-large Cat-Dog

24. February 2006 · Comments Off on Tales of the Lesser Weevil: The Over-large Cat-Dog · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

So, OK, the Lesser Weevil has been in my increasingly battered, chewed and pee-bedewed household for… oh, my, has it been two months now? How the time flies when you are having fun. Other casualties include a couple of rosebushes, most of the border planting, the space where a small lawn used to be (I have kissed off any possibility of there ever being one there again and resigned myself to paving it all with limestone flagstones and gravel), my gardening hat, a long length of garden hose, three window screens, and the sliding screen door to the back porch, and other stuff too long and depressing a list to think about.

However the Lesser Weevil’s socialization progresses… somewhat erratically, but it is progress. I look at all the stuff that she could chew, trash, dig, crap on and otherwise demolish— but hasn’t yet— and I have reason for hope. After all, she only knocked me down three times last week, during the morning run, and this week she hasn’t managed to do it once. There has been only one puddle on the floor in the morning this whole week; kicking her outside for half an hour in the evening just before we go to bed, and letting her out as soon as I get up has paid off. The chain leash is working well, and she does pay attention when I snap the leash and halti. She sits patiently to have the whole contraption put on, before her walk in the morning, but I really don’t know that she is grasping this whole guard—dog concept. She loves people, and frolics up to them, eager to be petted and admired. Last week I was admiring some renovations being done to the outside, and the inside of a house up the street. It turns out the owners were doing more than just replacing the garage door with a bay window and new front door: the inside of the house was being entirely re-done. I stopped to admire, and get a card from the construction firm, and the work-crew supervisor very kindly offered to hold Weevil’s leash so I could look at the work being done on the inside. Blondie and I suspect that in the event of any danger or threat, Weevil will be cowering behind us.

My neighbor Judy reminded me about dogs being pack animals at heart. They live for the pack, run with the pack, play with the pack, curl up and sleep with the pack. In casting their lot with us humans, all of that affection and loyalty is transferred to humans, as their pack leader, or other members of the household. And thus the Weevil’s overflowing fountain of love and devotion has focused on us, on Blondie and I… and those others in the household, the lesser members of the new pack, but members who are above her in the hierarchy and often above her, physically. That is, the cats.

There is an amusing dynamic going on here. The Weevil’s self-identity as a dog is somewhat fluid. It is likely that she, in fact, sees herself as some sort of over-sized, barking cat. She spends a great deal of energy in trying to get them to play with her, she has tried on several occasions to climb up onto one of the favored cat-perches in the house (the back of the chair and the back of the sofa), she responds to the cats’ favored toy, a tuft of pink feathers at the end of a string and wand. She vies with the cats to be closest to Blondie or I… there is always at least one of the cats orbiting around us. She would sleep on our beds, too, but I—and the cats refuse to let her go that far.

The cats response to the Weevil is mixed; none of them is the least bit afraid of her, and only Little Arthur (AKA “El Blob”, who checks in at 16 pounds and is so fat that he is entirely circular when he plops down on the floor) is actively hostile. Henry VIII and Morgie, as the senior ranking cats are lordly and indifferent. She rates a hiss and a dismissive swipe of the paw when she tries to get them to play with her. They stalk off towards their refuge in Blondie’s room. But Sammy the Gimp, and Percival are recent additions, and relatively junior, and permit an astonishing degree of familiarity. Percival allows her to nuzzle his flanks, and to lick and even gum his ears, head and paws. Sammy will let her nuzzle, not quite so sloppily. They both bop her on the muzzle and head with their paws— claws lightly unsheathed— when it gets too much. Eventually, I think, they might curl up and sleep contentedly side by side, especially when the weather is very, very cold.

But I don’t think Weevil will ever, ever learn to use a litter-box. Damn.

The Ancient Lore of My People: Granny Clarke

20. February 2006 · Comments Off on The Ancient Lore of My People: Granny Clarke · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Memoir, Pajama Game

Granny Clarke was the mother of my mothers’ dearest friend from the time that JP and I were small children, from that time before Pippy was born, and my parents were living in a tiny rented cottage in the hills part of Beverly Hills… a house on a dirt road, with the surrounding area abundant in nothing much else but chaparral, eucalypts and rattlesnakes. Mom and her friend, who was eventually of such closeness that we called her “Auntie Mary” met when Mom began to attend services at a Lutheran congregation in West Hollywood, rather than endure the long drive to Pasadena and the ancestral congregation at Trinity Lutheran in Pasadena.

Auntie Mary Hammond was a little older than Mom, with four sons, each more strapping than the other, in spite of Auntie Mary’s wistful hopes for one of them to have been a girl. The oldest were teenagers, the youngest slightly younger than JP… although Paulie was as large and boisterous as his older brothers and appeared to be more my contemporary. They lived all together with Auntie Mary Hammonds’ mother, Granny Clarke, in a townhouse in West Hollywood, an intriguing house built on a steeply sloping street, up a flight of stairs from the concrete sidewalk, with only a tiny garden at one side, and the constant background noise and bustle of the city all around, not the quiet wilderness of the hills, which JP and I were more used to. But there was one thing we had in common with Paulie and his brothers— an immigrant grandparent with a curious accent and a long career in domestic service in Southern California.

It is a little known curiosity, outside Southern California (and maybe a surprise to even those inside it, in this modern day) that there was once a thriving and very cohesive British ex-pat community there; one that revolved around the twin suns of the old and established wealthy families, and the slightly newer movie business… united in their desire for employment as high-class and supremely competent domestic service, or just residence in a place offering considerably nicer weather. They all met on Sundays at Victor McLaughlin Park, where there were British-rules football games, and even cricket matches, all during the 20ies and 30ies. (My maternal and paternal grandfathers may even have met there, twenty years before their son and daughter resolved to marry their respective fortunes together).

All unknowing, my own Grandpa Jim and Auntie Mary’s mother, Granny Clarke, represented the poles of that lonely expat community. Grandpa Jim worked for nearly three decades for a wealthy, well-established Pasadena family of irreproachable respectability… and Granny Clark, for reasons that may be forever unknown, sometime in the mid teens or early 20ies of the last century, took it into her head to work for “those Hollywood people”. According to my mother, who took much more interest in Granny Clarke and held her in considerable reverence, this was an irrevocable career move. In the world of domestic service in Southern California in the late teens or early 20ies, once a domestic had “Hollywood” people on the professional resume, they were pretty well sunk as far as the other respectable employers were concerned. It is all rather amusing at this 21st century date to discover that the Old Money Pasadena/Montebello People looked down on the New Money Los Angeles People, who all in turn and in unison looked down on the very new Hollywood People… who had, as legend has it, arrived on a train, looking for nice weather and a place to film those newfangled moving picture thingies without being bothered by an assortment of … well, people that did not have their best economic interests at hand, back on the Other Coast.

So, while Granny Clarke might have been originally advised that she was committing professional suicide by casting her fortunes with “those Hollywood People”, it turned out very well in the end, for her, even though she appeared, personally, to have been the very last likely person to take to the waters of the Tinseltown domestic pool with any enthusiasm. She was a being of the old breed, a stern and unbending Calvinist, the sort of Scots Lowlander featured in all sorts of 19th century stories; rigidly honest and a lifelong teetotaler, fearlessly confident in the presence of those who might have assumed themselves to be her social and economic betters, honest to a fault… and thrifty to a degree that my mother (no slouch in that department, herself) could only genuflect towards, in awe and wonder. One of the first things that I remember Mom telling me about Granny Clarke was that she would carefully melt and re-mold the half-consumed remnants of jelled salads, pouring the liquid into an even smaller mold, and presenting a neat appearance at a subsequent meal. Neither Mom nor Grannie Jessie ever had felt obliged to dress up leftovers as anything else than what they were, but Granny Clarke was a consummate professional.

Her early employers, so Mom related to me, were so enormously and touchingly grateful not to be abused, cheated and skinned economically, (or betrayed to the tabloids and gossip columnists) that no matter how personally uncomfortably they might have felt in the presence of someone who was the embodiment of sternly Calvinistic disapproval of their personal peccadilloes, Granny Clarke was fully and generously employed by a long sequence of “Hollywood people” for the subsequent half-century. Granny Clarke managed to achieve, I think, a certain ideal, of being able to tolerate in the larger arena, while disapproving personally, and being respected and valued in spite of it all. She was painfully honest about household accounts, and ran the kitchen on a shoestring, buying the least expensive cuts… and with magical skill, conjuring the most wonderful and richly flavored meals out of them.

She was for a time, employed by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the legendary Pickfair mansion, before moving on to her longest stretch of employment, as housekeeper and cook for the dancer and star, Eleanor Powell. According to Mom, she only and regretfully left service with Ms. Powell after the formers’ marriage to Glenn Ford. The impetus was that Granny Clarke collected stamps and so did Mr. Ford, and after the marriage of Mr. Ford and Miss Powell, Granny Clarke no longer had an uncontested pick of the many exotic stamps that came in attached to Miss Powell’s fan mail. She went to work for James Mason, instead. Presumably, he didn’t grudge her the stamps from his fan mail.

In retirement, she lived with her daughter and son in law, and their four sons, which is when I knew her. We were all only aware in the vaguest way that she had been the housekeeper to the stars; that all paled besides the wonderful way she cooked, and the way she cosseted us smaller children. I wish I had thought to ask for more stories about Hollywood in her time, for she must have been a rich fund of them. One hot summer day, when we were at their house for dinner, Mom was not feeling very well, and when she confessed this, Granny Clarke said, sympathetically,
“Oh, then I’ll fix you some poached eggs in cheese sauce.”
It sounded quite revolting to Mom— I think she may have been pregnant with Pippy— but when Granny Clarke set down a beautifully composed dish of perfectly poached eggs, bathed in a delicately flavored cheese sauce, Mom was able to eat every bite, and keep it down, too. She had never tasted anything quite so delicious, and when she said so, Granny Clarke allowed as how her poached eggs in cheese sauce had been a favorite among certain guests at Pickfair. Those movie moguls and directors and that, she said, all had ulcers and stomach upsets, through being so stressed… but they were all, to a man, very fond of her poached eggs and cheese sauce.

I rather think it must have been something rather like this cheese sauce, taken from Jan & Michael Sterns’ “Square Meals” savory cheese sauce:

Melt 2 TBsp butter, adding 3 TBsp four, 1 Tsp salt, a dash of pepper, 1 Tsp prepared mustard and 1 Tsp Worchester sauce, and whisk until smooth. Stir in slowly;
2 Cups milk, and add 1 cup grated American or cheddar cheese. Simmer 5-10 minutes, stirring constantly until sauce is smooth and thick. Makes about 2 cups of sauce, enough to puddle generously around 4 poached eggs— two servings of 2 eggs each. Depends on how much you like cheese sauce, I guess, or how much you like eggs… or have toast fingers to dunk in the cheese sauce.

The trick to poached eggs is to break each egg into a small bowl, and to pour it into a pot of boiling water after you have taken a spoon and whisked the water to make a small whirlpool… or to use one of those patent egg-poacher saucepan inserts so beloved of outlets like Williams-Sonoma.

“Prayers for the Assassin” Review

17. February 2006 · Comments Off on “Prayers for the Assassin” Review · Categories: Good God, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!

I’ve finally finished Robert Ferrigno’s, Prayers for the Assassin.

I’m not a literary critic. I’ve got a relatively decent vocabulary and I can write in a way that usually gets my point across. I read a LOT. I read popular fiction and science fiction and, to the surprise of one of the guys in my office with a big ol’ brain, I read non-fiction on occasion. So if you’re looking for a scholarly review of this book, move on. I’m just an ol’ fart AF MSgt who’s going to do a couple more years and then go teach high school back home.

Before I say anything else, I want to thank Robert Ferrigno for sending advanced copies of his book to bloggers and giving us the opportunity to comment on his work. First of all, I LOVE free books. More importantly, I love it when someone asks a shmoe like me what I think.

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Memo: Heroes of the Day Before Yesterday

17. February 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Heroes of the Day Before Yesterday · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Good God, Military, Pajama Game, Rant, Wild Blue Yonder

To: Ms. Jill Edwards, Ms. Ashley Miller, Student Body Senate, University of Washington
From: Sgt Mom
Re: “The University of Washington’s student senate rejected a memorial for alumnus Gregory “Pappy” Boyington of “Black Sheep Squadron” fame amid concerns a military hero who shot down enemy planes was not the right kind of person to represent the school.”

1. How very, very precious, and I do not mean that in a complimentary way, Ms. Edwards & Ms. Miller. It does not reflect well on the education for which someone is presumably paying a great deal of money, to be so casually dismissive of the qualities of someone who of someone who— along with a great many of his contemporaries— risked his life decades ago in order to make it possible for you to sit in a quiet, well-appointed classroom and pass judgment… and a factually misplaced judgment, at that.

2. I really can’t, at this distance, make out what you and your peers may have been taught or not taught in your comfortable, academic Eden, but it appears that history, ancient and modern, is most decidedly not on your personal study plan. If more than anything can be learned in a… ahem… a real history class, not the thinly disguised Marxist polemic so in fashion at certain establishments, it would be the truth of the old adage that “Peace is the dream of the wise, but wars are the history of men.” And by “men” of course, I mean humankind as a whole, not the gender in particular. So sic the Women’s Studies Department on me for not using the approved PC phrase du jour… like I give a flying F**k anyway.

3. Since war is lamentably a certain constant, much as we might wish and hope and pray otherwise, warriors are also a constant. Let me break it to you gently, Ms Edwards, Ms Miller, the common experience of a lot of your fellow humans down the ages has been that of being hapless, inoffensive, hardworking and peace-and-quiet loving… prey. Yes, my dear, sweet innocent student body senators, they wound up having their peaceful happy little agrarian communities or states smashed and ravaged, burnt and sacked, and themselves and their families murdered, raped and/or enslaved by every robber gang, army or larger, more un-socially aware human organization… unless the community, state or kingdom which they happened to find themselves resident in had the ability and the will to prevent this from happening.

4. Yes, my dear innocent students, peace is not the natural happy state of humankind… it is a rare and dear-bought commodity, purchased in blood for, and sometimes by the citizens of the state or city in which they lived. The first, and most original obligation owed by the free citizens of ancient Greece and Rome was their duty to defend their polis, their city, their community and their fellows and families with arms, as soldiers, according to their means. This, alas, was a necessary duty, for people who just want to live in peace and quiet, with their families, communities and livelihoods all secure. If you don’t believe me on this, just check any of the recent news stories about Darfur. Just because you are not interested in war, does not mean that war is uninterested in you.

5. Of late, in this age of specialization, we have tended to farm the job of military defense of the polis out to those who are truly interested in doing it, and who have a natural skill. There are, and have always been people who do not mind going into danger, and in fact rather enjoy blowing stuff up. They are good at it, for the most part. Warriors, like war, and the poor, are always with us; wishing it weren’t so won’t make it all go away. The whole purpose of a military, as I have written before, is to kill those designated as our enemies. Think of our warriors as another blogosphere essayist did, as they are our sheepdogs, protection against the wolves, the wolves that always threaten any community.

6. Yes, I can see why Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington would not exactly be the beau ideal of your pretty little campus: he was crude and rude, an unrepentant killer; a rowdy, undisciplined and brawling menace; a drinker and alleged wife-beater, cheerfully willing to go to China as a mercenary… not exactly anyone’s notion of a model citizen. He lived fast and recklessly, and was probably the most surprised of all that he lived long enough to die within a breath of old age; No, Ms. Miller, he would not have been your set’s cup of tea at all. Very probably in some vast imaginary late 20th century dictionary, there is a picture of him, next to the entry for “Politically Incorrect.”

7. And yet… there you go; he had a certain set of skills; as a pilot, a leader, and a warrior. For whatever his reasons, he served, in China and in the Pacific. He and his ilk kept the wolf of the moment from the door of the peaceful, the harmless and the inoffensive, in such security that they could begin to think their shelter owed everything to their own honest good will, and not the blood and dedication of those who secured such for them at such cost. For all his faults, and in company with his peers, “Pappy” Boyington might have done more to protect the defenseless than all the college senates and interest groups ever convened.

8. Frankly, I am enjoying a mental image of a statue of Colonel Boyington coming to life and delivering a good old-fashioned and profane Marine Corps ass-chewing. Such might be a truly educational experience to a student body which, lamentably appears to be a collection of sheltered, spoiled, candy-ass yuppy puppies… and one which seems to exist in ignorance of the means by which they can continue to be sheltered, spoiled, etc cetera.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom.

(Link courtesy of The Belmont Club.. BTW, Cpl/Sgt. Blondie points out that most USMC Medal of Honor awards were made postumously)

Memo: Free Press

11. February 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Free Press · Categories: European Disunion, General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game

To: Major Newspapers, Broadcast TV News Channels, NPR and especially (but not limited to) the ever lugubrious Daniel Schoor (What? He is still a practicing journalist? Who’d have thought it?)
Re: “Free Press” & The Affair of the Danish Cartoons

1. As far as American newsprint and broadcast television is concerned, the phrase “freedom of the press” is from this day now enshrined in my favorite set of viciously skeptical quote-marks. The affair of the Danish Cartoons, and their non-appearance in all but a handful of newspapers has put the lie to every bit of lip-service ever paid to the notion that the American people had a right to know… had an absolute right, enshrined in the foundations of our very Republic to know… well, whatever it was that would goose the ratings, or boost circulation this week… A right that every journalist would fearlessly defend, with every fiber of his principled, journalistic being. Oops, there seems to be a little contradiction there. Principled… journalist… now there is a concept worn to tatters by this little international imbroglio, especially after Eason-gate, Rather-Gate and all the other tedious-gates. It’s pretty obvious that in this case, especially, mainstream media couldn’t defend the concept of a free press against a troop of marauding Brownie Girl Scouts, not when the threat is something a little more substantial than a couple of rabid letters to the editor and maybe a dozen or two cancelled subscriptions, some yanked adverts and maybe… in the case of a really egregious offense… a consumer boycott.

2. Thanks for all the ringing endorsements of principle, though — they made inspiring reads when a journo went to jail to protect a source, or a loud-mouthed bully of a politician ran off at the mouth. And to be fair there were just enough brave, and risk taking journalists who lived up to it, and sometimes died for it. It does look like they were the exception; most of the journalistic crowd seems only able to cope with jail food for a couple of days, and go on the Today Show to bask in the warm glow of peer approval for weeks afterwards.

3. My own hometown newspaper has a rather schizo take on it all: the two local cartoonists are riled and indignant, and very much in favor of publishing the original twelve Danish cartoons, but the paper has also rolled out two members of the local Muslim community to lecture us all about sensitivity and insult to Islam and otherwise wrap us in the inoffensive warm swaddling quilt of the whole multi-cultural experience. Dear no, the great unwashed general public must never be offended or upset, never given a chance to look at the facts and make up their own mind, and the ever-seething Muslim Street must never be given an excuse to torch another street full of cars, or a handy embassy. Not even if enough people without internet access are now curious about what in heck the fuss is all about. No, no, no; the cartoons are too vile, to insulting. Mustn’t be seen, musn’t have the delicate sensibilities be offended… just take our word that the 12 cartoons are that horrible!

4. 4. Funny, that: the tender sensibilities of Muslims taking offense at something or other, twice a day and three times on Fridays over matters that run the gamut from the real, through the exaggerated and terminating in the completely imaginary. However, this well known and often demonstrated propensity for over-the-top outrage didn’t stop any Western newspaper from publishing the Abu Graib pictures, or the bogus Koran-flushing story. All that sent the Muslim Street onto high seeth mode for simply months, without shaking a particle of our mainstream media’s devotion towards the general public’s right to know. Repercussions from this adherence to principle landed on everyone else but the gentlemen of the press. One might be forgiven at this point for suspecting that press deference to Muslim sensibilities in this case is directly proportional to a well-established tendency for the offended to directly underline their unhappiness with sharp knives, exploding garments, creative arson, and fatwas, along with the more customary threats of lawsuits and consumer boycotts. It all depends, as my mother used to say, upon whose ox has been gored, and on this occasion, the major media’s ox has been well and truly gored.

5. Myself, I have begun to wonder if major media’s almost hysterical insistence on the original 12 Danish Cartoons being so vile, so insulting and hurtful as to be unworthy of print space or airtime isn’t a trifle self-serving. I have seen them, (and linked to them and put up one on this website) as has practically anyone who has internet access, a bit of curiosity and the ability to do a simple search. It’ll be very hard for an old-line news organization who has stuck to the party line about the offensive nature of them to actually put them out there, in print or on the air, and have all those people who still take them seriously realize in actuality, they are pretty mild… about one half step more cutting than “Family Circle” or “Dagwood & Blondie”. There would be a great many people reading the morning paper, or watching prime time news in that case, scratching their heads and thinking “That is what they got so upset about?” A dozen bland little sketches, only two of which had any satiric bite at all— all the fuss was about that? Oh, no best keep the cover locked into place… after all, the public doesn’t have to know everything. Best let them go on believing that main line media does really believe in freedom of the press.

6. Unless believing in it really means a bit of real danger and risk. Myself, the next time I hear someone pontificating away on the awesome responsibilities involved in upholding the “freedom of the press”… and they are from a newspaper which refused to run the Danish Cartoons, or a television station which refused to air them, citing “community sensitivities” or “deference to religious feelings” or whatever the sad excuse du jour is…. I shall laugh and laugh and laugh.

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

The First Time I Disobeyed a Direct Order (and almost peed myself a little)

11. February 2006 · Comments Off on The First Time I Disobeyed a Direct Order (and almost peed myself a little) · Categories: Memoir, Pajama Game

Note: I’ve stripped this and changed some of the details in order to ensure that OPSEC is maintained. I know one of the Presidents declassified most of this but old habits die hard. Shrug. Most of this happened the way I put it down here as best as memory serves.

So it’s in the late 80s and I’m part of a deployment “somewhere south of the Mexican border.” I’ve got all of two stripes and I’m mostly typing out message traffic on an old manual with OCR font built right onto the strikers when I’m not filling sandbags or rearranging rocks. No, I didn’t do anything wrong, that’s just what most of the support folks were doing. I’m mostly there to support the Lt Col who’s in charge of the base but he doesn’t have a lot to do either so we mostly kept as busy as we could to make the days go by. I don’t care if you’ve summered in Alabama; no place has ever been hotter or muggier than this place. It’s the kind of place where mosquitoes are rumored to have stolen small children right from their parent’s sides.

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Adventures with the Lesser Weevil, Part the Second

09. February 2006 · Comments Off on Adventures with the Lesser Weevil, Part the Second · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

The Lesser Weevil is, to put it plainly, a very attractive and fine-looking figure of a dog, and a great many charmed people have said so, as she frolicked up towards them, and bathed them in the affection of her regard. A lovely light golden brown in color, with a white blaze on her chest, and around her nose (otherwise darkly masked), the toes of all four feet tipped in white, and a little white flag on the tip of her tail; her eyes are dark gold, and very intelligent. She is sociable towards all humans and most other dogs, save for those former who are coming as strangers up to the house, or the latter, who are barking in an otherwise hostile fashion. She loves to meet other dogs and their humans, and is unflagging in her attempts to get the cats to romp with her; she has also taken to being an indoor pet with a great deal of zest and enthusiasm. As I opened this progress report, she was blissfully asleep on the den sofa, keeping Blondie company during “Antiques Roadshow”.

Other progress has been made, towards grasping the concept of controlling bowels and bladder inside the house; she comes into my bedroom in the early morning and stands beside the bed, whining faintly, and nudging my arm. At these moments, I keep visualizing a small but well-behaved child, shifting uneasily from foot to foot, and pleading, “Ma’am, I hafta go pee…I really hafta pee… Ma’am, I really, really hafta go pee, pleeeeeeese let me out, I hafta pee!” Really, it is quite intelligent of her to come and wake me up directly, rather than go through this performance at the sliding door into the back yard (at the other end of the house, take note) in the hope that the fuss might wake Blondie or I up. This morning, I opened the slider door, she went out briskly, trotted around the corner to the “Designated Puppy Pooping Precinct”, did her business efficiently (to judge by the rustling of the leaves) and came back to the door where I was waiting and let her in again. Five minutes, if that. Both of us were curled up and asleep again in a matter of moments… But in separate spaces.

Really, I am not that so far-gone that I would let her sleep on my bed, like one of the cats, although that has not stopped her from trying to climb onto the back of the armchair. The cats curl up on it, why not she, or so she appears to think, happily ignorant of the brute physical fact that she outweighs Henry and Arthur by about forty pounds. She does live in hope of enticing any or all of them to frolic with her in a happily ecumenical manner, but so far only Percival and Sammy show any signs of responding. Percival allows her to lick his ears and nudge him, and he cuffs her nose and nips lightly at her ears until he gets tired of it all. Morgie and Henry stalk off in offended dignity, and Little Arthur hisses like a leaky teakettle. (How that cat can keep a prolonged growl going without taking a breath is a marvel- wonderful breath control, he should be an opera singer.) None of them seem to be in the least afraid of her; rather the opposite. She does keep a wary distance between herself and Arthur, who is the master of the drive-by clawing. And Blondie has observed Arthur actually stalking her, or laying in ambush.

We bought a couple of the different smoked dog-bones which seem to help with the chewing problem: the small ones barely lasted a day or so, the large one is now in two pieces, but she’s been working on it for a couple of weeks. I bought a bottle of the bitter-tasting spray compound, which might have induced her to let the porch furniture and the garden trellis alone, but alas for the plants not killed by the December frost. The backyard is pretty well devastated…. In the spring I will have to come up with some dog-proof landscaping. I’m afraid that large rocks and a lot of gravel will feature heavily.

The halti-harness/restraint worked out after a some false starts: First, she chewed through the safety strap that links the halti to her collar: off to the hardware store for two sprung rings and a short length of chain. And one morning, she took off after a squirrel, like a rocket accelerating. The leash with the patent reel ran out all the way and then snapped, and she kept going. Well, at least she came back after the squirrel shot up into a handy tree, and there weren’t any cars on the street at that hour of the morning. That flimsy leash is replaced with a chain leash… gnaw on this, Weevil! She has caught on to that whole “heeling” concept quite splendidly, and paces along at a trot, with her head just by my left knee for most of our morning run, although the first block or so is taken up with the puppy-wrestling match. She takes an end of the leash in her teeth and pulls vigorously, dancing at the end of it like a dervish. This used to last until the top of the hill, now she minds her manners and falls into the proper mode after the first block. I suspect she might be a little older than we first thought, and that someone, early on, had begun training her. She is bright enough, but no dog Einstein, not enough to have figured it out between one day and the next.

(To be continued)

Kinda, Sorta 9/11ish

05. February 2006 · Comments Off on Kinda, Sorta 9/11ish · Categories: European Disunion, General, GWOT, Pajama Game, War, World

All this last week I have been returning, almost obsessively to certain blogs for continuing updates on the Danish cartoon story. It is a marvel of jaw-dropping proportions of how a dozen fairly innocuous sketches, published in a comparatively small national newspaper, in a small European country have gotten the goat, so to speak, of seething mobs a good few countries or continents away. I rather suspect some of the rioters are only vaguely aware, in a kind of trivial pursuit/jeopardy question obscure factoid sort of way that there is a Denmark, and even fewer could find it on a map, but there they are, howling away and waving weapons and signs— invariably neatly lettered in English, how curious is that?!… and burning flags again… where the heck did they get all those Danish flags— is there some sort of “Flags R’ US” big box chain store serving Damascus, Jakarta and Gaza with all their banner barbeque needs?

It’s the fabled Muslim Street again, at a full roiling, furiously bubbling seeth, parked in front of an embassy, intimidating and threatening diplomatic staff, business interests and free-lance do-gooders, all alike. For more than two decades America (AKA “The Great Satan”) pretty much had a lock on that gig, as a focus for the Muslim ire, and it is initially passing strange and going into Outer Limits territory to see it happening to some other national interest, especially to a tidy, comfortably inoffensive little country like Denmark. The original action is so minor in comparison to the snowballing reaction—it’s rather like seeing the Animal Regulation people backed up by a tactical SWAT team go after the neighbor down the street on account of a unlicensed and unleashed teacup Chihuahua. You just keep scratching your head and wondering ‘what the f**k brought all that on?’ Or alternately, ‘what the f**k doesn’t set off the seething Muslim Street?’Or daringly, even ‘Since anything and everything sets off the seething Muslim Street, may as well publish and be damned!’

I personally confess to a great deal of appalled sympathy for the Danes, and the Norwegians, and all those other Europeans and Britons who see this issue clearly, just now. The whole issue of intellectual and press freedom, and open discussion of anything and everything, won for us with such great struggle and with so many setbacks, is a central value. All the previous little kerfuffles, all those spats about artist-poseurs smearing themselves with chocolate, or a canvas with elephant dung, or some tiresome leftist with a captive university audience, or some writer-pseud striking a daring pose by sticking it to the bourgeoisie; All that before was just a pose, a trivial and momentary diversion; this now, this is for real. Are we now willing to publish, or write about, or talk about an issue that might have permanent and fatal consequences, over a principle that we have had so long been accustomed to? Now that a threat has been issued that we must perforce obey the dictates of a religion, a religion alien to most of us? A dictate backed up by threats of murder and violence?
” Nice little country you got here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”
The demand, couched as a seemingly reasonable request to be “respectful” and understanding of a particularly belief is put reasonably, counting on us to be reasonable, courteous… but the implications are huge and only just dawning on those who have been not been following this, admittedly in a desultory way, for the last four months.

If we value the soul of Western democracies, of a free press, of being able do discuss anything at all in the media, old and new, print and TV, in the halls of universities and governments, in coffee shops and around office water coolers, without fear or favor, we cannot yield on this. Because being once constrained by Moslems, under threat, there is no reason to deny it to any other special party that may raise a complaint, backed by a similar threat. Once debate can be shut down on the grounds of “being respectful” to one belief, once criticism can be howled down on that ground, it can be done on behalf of any other religion or party, or group… and then what you have is no longer free. It may be something… but it is no longer free. Once the exception is made, we are pretty much lost, as much as the media outlets in the Mexican border towns are, when it comes to publishing anything about narco-trafficking , or independent Russian media is, about anything to do with the oligarchy.

And this is the realization that suddenly, and with a great deal of horror, that a lot of people in Britain and in Continental Europe may have come to this week, of how close they stand to the abyss, and how easily they may be struck a near-mortal blow, a blow at the intellectual heart, rather than the physical one struck on 9/11 to the US, for nothing more than being who they are in the eyes of Moslem extremists, rather than anything particular that they might have done.

Die Gedanken Sind Frei

01. February 2006 · Comments Off on Die Gedanken Sind Frei · Categories: General, GWOT, Pajama Game, Politics, War, World

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

So this is where we stand, with Voltaire’s noble words about intellectual freedom and the right to contemplate and openly discuss orthodoxies and heresies of any sort, with an eye towards seeing that they stand or fall, strengths and weaknesses dissected and revealed. A former President of these united States, whose grasp of the concept of intellectual freedom is as apparently as shaky as his grip on marriage vows, appears to interpret belief in it to mean that a certain favored class of adherents to a particular orthodoxy are free from ever having those beliefs challenged, criticized, mildly mocked, or even having their feelings hurt. Such is the state of their tender sensitivities, this class must be treated with special regard, their core beliefs never questioned – or as it turns out, illustrated.

One might, with a great deal of experience and cynicism, suspect that a large part of this exaggerated deference is mostly due to the very high probability that self-styled representatives of the offended orthodoxy will show up at the door of the affronting party, singly or in force, wielding sharp weapons, explosive items, fatwas, lawsuits, serious armaments, or merely shrill accusations of racism and prejudice, according to the inclination, location and experience of the offended parties. One might also suspect that not a few intellectual, political and cultural establishments might have already made a quick calculation of the risks and benefits and preemptively rolled over, and quietly began self-censoring themselves. Speaking truth to power might really have some risks, best be sure that the power spoken to is either defanged or merely rolls its’ eyes derisively at yet another dreary polemic by Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone or John LeCarre. Best not say anything at all about the “religion of peace” lest the gentlemen with sharp knives be forced to demonstrate their imperfect acceptance of the Western tradition of open debate and dissent.


Mohammed Cartoon #5

There is an old saying, to the effect that the most binding chains are the ones we put on ourselves. And the most insidious and effective censorship is that kind that we also put on ourselves, the censorship that strangles the question before it can even be asked. And that might be one of the points raised by the editor of the Jyllands-Posten all these months ago; that thoughtful people, earnestly wishing to be polite, tolerant and sensitive of others, began moving down that path that eventually ends— if we are not aware— with our wrists humbly held up for the manacles of imposed censorship to be firmly snapped on. A drift that began with good manners ends with limits imposed by maladroit legislation or a baying mob, maybe even both, and all the important issues of the day, which ought to be discussed— vociferously, noisily and with all the thrown crockery at our disposal— are removed from the arena where they ought to be, to fester and simmer away in odd corners. What has been more insupportable in recent years, is that our courtesy in this respect is not even reciprocated: the vilest sort of caricatures and insult imaginable regarding Westerners, Christians, Jews, Americans and others too varied to mention have free and frequent circulation in Muslim and Arab-oriented and funded media.

One does wonder about a religion and culture so sensitive of insult, yet so free about dealing it out wholesale and by the bucket to others?
Is this Prophet and belief set so fragile that the merest whisper of non-adoration, of criticism and caricature will shatter it, irrevocably? Are its dutiful defenders secretly in such fear of that shattering, of the doubt that might be raised by any breath of irrelevance in a country which pays allegiance to another tradition, that the doors of dissent from orthodoxy must be slammed shut on parody, criticism, literary hyperbole, and scholarly analysis?

Umm, no. I think not. Not here. Not now. The strength of the West is in that very noisy disputation, our freedom to put everything on the table, to question, to non-conform, and by disputation and argument, make our beliefs even stronger for having all the idiocy knocked out of them. As such has been our custom, and in the reported words of Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms: “Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason–I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other–my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.”

Everything is on the table. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. These are the cartoons, here is a good link, curtesy of Samizdata. (Later: More discussion here…. oh, and buy Danish!!!!)

Air Taxi

29. January 2006 · Comments Off on Air Taxi · Categories: Good God, Pajama Game

The automotive industry throughout the late seventies and into the eighties underwent a major shift in it’s supply practices, outsourcing many products and services that it had traditionally built and performed in-house. One consequence of this was that the suppliers were required to attend frequent on-site meetings at various auto maker facilities, many of which were located in steel belt cities such as Detroit, Toledo, etc. This presented somewhat of a logistical problem for our company, which is located in the corn belt, over 100 miles from the nearest major airport. Not only was the travel inconvenient, but fielding the appropriate number of troops (believe me, numbers mattered in some of these meetings) was not inexpensive when considering airfare, lodging, etc. Another issue was that glitches in the then-new supply chain management technique of just-in-time delivery often meant that delivery of critical components was needed in a matter of hours to avert a line shutdown. A friend and local entrepreneur earned a pilot’s license, leased some ground for a small airstrip, and bought two or three Piper Aztecs to provide the solution to these problems.

The Piper Aztec is a twin engine (five passenger + pilot) plane that, although not terribly fast with a cruising speed of around 180 knots, was virtually indestructible and could fly even when considerably overloaded. Our pilot, we’ll call him Charlie (not his real name), was a partying sort who often flew on just a few hours sleep (I know this for fact; we often closed the bars together). Generally, he would take off, check all of the instruments, set the autopilot, and take a nice nap until we got about 30 minutes from our intended destination – he had a pretty remarkable internal alarm clock. Charlie also viewed weather advisories with a grain of salt, leading to a number of rather interesting trips with often some spectacular views of major storm cells in close proximity. Believe when I say that a cloud formation that rises to thirty or forty thousand feet, when viewed at ten thousand feet altitude and only a mile or two away, is very awe inspiring. Being sandwiched between two of them is downright terrifying.
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The “I Peed Myself a Little” Story

28. January 2006 · Comments Off on The “I Peed Myself a Little” Story · Categories: Memoir, Pajama Game

Okay, so you guys want more military memoirs, here’s one I’ve threatened to tell since I got here and never got around to it.

This is mostly from a letter I sent home from the end of January, 1991. Thanks to Paddy for saving it. The rest is from memory, and you know how that goes. And I make no apologies for the rough language, it’s the way I talked back then.

Operation Desert Storm, January, 1991. Southwest Saudi Arabia, Team Stealth. F-117s in the hangars and surrounded by Arabs.

As is always the case on a deployment, the cops are overworked and getting a little crispy around the edges because they’re working, they’re trying to eat, they’re trying to keep their uniforms somewhat professional looking, some of them are trying to keep their PT up, and oh yeah, when there’s time left, they try to sleep through all the prayer calls. Cranky cops are okay for a little bit but you don’t want youngsters with guns with bad attitudes wandering around a foreign country…especially Saudi Arabia where the locals are a bit more…sure of themselves…have a healthy sense of self-esteem…oh fuck it…where the locals are the most arrogant sons a bitches you’d ever want to meet. And I know from arrogant, I used to think it was a positive character trait instead of defect.

Back then when the cops got a bit over-worked, we augmented them. By that I don’t mean we attended traffic pattern safety school and put on an orange vest and got RSD from waving cars in the gate, I mean we grabbed a gun, flack jacket and helmets and we sat posts or rode patrols and we basically did what the cops did. We watched, we reported, we told the locals, “Stay away from our airplanes.”

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Adventures With the Lesser Weevil- Pt. 1

23. January 2006 · Comments Off on Adventures With the Lesser Weevil- Pt. 1 · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Well, I took the advice about the kong rubber toys last week: somewhat mixed results on that. Lesser Weevil has two of them now, but she keeps misplacing the damned things, once she has sucked the peanut-butter/kibble filling out of them… I don’t suppose there is a clever invention thingy to sort of attach them to her, the way that babies have their pacifiers attached to them by way of a short length of ribbon and a safety pin? No, I didn’t think so. And I think that the peanut butter gives her the trots.

The other announcer at TPR (on duty in the news/information station at the same time that I am on duty in the classical music station) who works as a veterinary technician advises making available those monstrous whole bones, which are sold at local grocery chain, in the pet products aisle. They apparently are cow shin bones, although they look like mastodon bones, something that Fred Flinstone would throw to Dino for a good crunch and munch. She says her dogs take a couple of weeks or so to reduce them to atoms… and they do polish their teeth nicely, as well. We tested this out with something alleged to be a pig shin-bone, which she has been happily crunching away on for the last 24 hours, and seeming to ignore everything else. I have painted everything left in the garden that might be a chewing temptation with a spray-bottle of stuff that is supposed to taste even worse than bitter apple. So we shall see, and now on to the mastodon bone, hopefully before she has quite demolished the current bone to the sub-atomic level. My friend the vet tech and radio announcer says it takes her dogs a couple of weeks to demolish one, and it has the added benefit of keeping their dear little destructive teeth gleaming and shiny white.

The halti-collar, which I bought and tried out this morning, did not work quite as well— she managed to scoop it off her face whenever I slacked off of it. On the other hand, she was not pulling like a tractor at the other end of the leash; it may yet have some benefit in a training situation— not on the morning run, however. This week we were working on the fine technique of walking or trotting on a close-hauled leash, at my knee, which works well sometimes, and at other times only as long as I am chanting, “Heel Weevil, heel, dammit! Good girl, dammit, heel!”, and have the leash doubled around my fist and holding her in position with bodily strength. Perhaps I should just consider this as an upper-body workout—she weighed 47 pounds when we took her to the vet before Christmas, and she has filled out a little since then; say fifty pounds and strong with it. The book about boxer dogs that Blondie bought on sale says that they tend to be very clever, quite willful unless strictly schooled, and very, very powerful for their size.

It is clear from the pictures in the book, though, that Weevil is definitely not within a country mile of pure boxer breed. She has the color, the temperament and the intelligence, but at least half of her genetic makeup is something else, something taller, leggier and leaner. She has an interesting whorl, or cowlick in the fur on the back of her neck, and on occasion, her fur nearly stands straight up, all the length of her backbone— so it does with most dogs, when agitated, but a couple of neighbors have commented that the whorl is a characteristic of Rhodesian ridgebacks… and there are a couple of the breed in the neighborhood, so there is something to make a comparison too.

She is making up to some of the cats: Sammy the Gimp, the three-legged white cat who moved from across the road upon falling deeply in love with Blondie last year, and Percival, the shy and semi-feral little grey catling whom I tamed and moved indoors to a life of privilege the year before seem to be the closest to breaking down and being best buds. She will break down and chase them when they loose their nerve and run away, but they don’t actually seem to be afraid of her. Sammy will sit on the back of the armchair, and Weevil will boldly and repeatedly nudge him with her nose:
“Run! Play with me! Run!”
In response Sammy will bop her on the head with his good paw, claws barely sheathed.
”I do not care to run.”

And this will go on until both of them are quite tired of it. She tries this with Percival, too— Blondie says he nipped her on the ear this morning. Of the other cats, only Little Arthur is hostile: Blondie has observed him stalking Weevil, and she is quite properly terrified of him. Morgie and Henry are magnificently indifferent, apparently feeling that the dog has her place… and it is well beneath their lordly notice.

Redball

22. January 2006 · Comments Off on Redball · Categories: Air Force, Pajama Game

I don’t know about launch procedures in other USAF commands, but in the now defunct SAC it was a special experience. Each maintenance squadron would assemble members from each shop waiting for something to break on a plane due to fly that morning. Generally speaking, telling the crew that they had a broke-dick airplane so just call it a day was akin to airbrushing a penis on Curtiss LeMay’s portrait where his cigar should be – and under certain circumstances such as a real mission or a SAC operational readiness inspection it was impossible.

Mostly it was boring and, in the below-zero winters of northern New York, very cold. The back of the van (which never had a working heater) was a pile of airmen from the Radar, Radio, Fire Control, Doppler, and Bomb Nav shops, stacked not unlike cats in a barn. To this day I can sleep under almost any circumstances as a result of that experience, and to this day I’d bet that the radio call “31 – Control, we have a redball for the radar shop on aircraft [fill in tail number for Broke-Dick Airplane]” would have me fully conscious in a matter of seconds. Early pre-flight problems were fairly easy, but when the aircraft is sitting on the apron ready to go, it could get very intense.

Aircraft maintenance under any circumstances can be a dangerous business, but with radar and engines lit, and a crew anxious to go, it often got downright scary. My worst nightmare was always an APN-59 radar system failure on a KC-135. Sometimes we got lucky and it was either a navigator or copilot display, but it was usually the antenna or receiver/transmitter. To replace the antenna one had to first roll a scaffold to the front of the aircraft and remove the fiberglass radome. That was a fairly routine drill that, in and of itself, was fairly straightforward. The problem was that, with a new second lieutenant navigator, it was not a question of if but rather when they would decide to fire up the radar or set the antenna rotating – with people working on it. I was convinced that I was sterile from the microwave consequences of these breaches of red tag etiquette until Real Wife got pregnant 16 years after the last exposure. Replacing the receiver transmitter was also a joy. It weighed, as I recall, between 80 – 90 lbs. Nobody did it by the book – that took too much time. The real procedure was to straddle the hatch in front of the nose gear and muscle it in and out of its nest. In the day I weighed all of 150 lbs – it was not an easy feat.

The other one I loved during launch was what I recall to be a transponder system of some sort (Joe Comer, help me out – the R/T in both the BUF and KC-135 sat in the tail right next to the stabilizer trim screw, with the antennae in the vertical stabilizer). This was another nearly 100 lb. marvel of vacuum tube electronics technology. It was fairly accessible in the BUF, being just aft of the rear belly hatch. In the tanker, however, one had to climb through a very small hatch into a VERY claustrophobic area just aft of the fuel tanks. The danger in either case was a crewmember checking the stabilizer trim while you were in there (again, not a matter of if but rather when). The stabilizer trim screw, which was several inches in diameter, would move very quickly when activated and could easily impale or otherwise disfigure the unwary technician. Yes we had trim locks with red tags, but aircrew officers seemed to truly believe that they were more of a suggestion than a prohibition.

Being good at dealing with redball situations led to being assigned to more frequent launch duty, probably not unlike taking point in the Army. I do believe that it built self confidence and the ability to quickly assess and act like no other experience I have had before or since.

Radar

Relics

17. January 2006 · Comments Off on Relics · Categories: Domestic, General, Memoir, Pajama Game

One of the first things my youngest brother Sander said to me after Mom and Dad’s house burned in the Paradise Mountain fire, two years and three months ago in Northern San Diego County was “”Well, that solves any dispute between us over who gets what!” Because there is now pitifully little of the “family things”, the accumulation of this, and that, bits of china and knick-knacks, furniture and linens— all those tangible records of our ancestors’ taste and purchasing ability, all those familiar things that were just always there, in Granny Jessie’s or Granny Dodie’s house, or in Mom and Dad’s. When Blondie was still my parents’ only grandchild, and looked in a fair way to inherit the entire accumulation for good or ill, Mom remarked once, “Well, I hope she likes dusting!” Their house had lately become full of things that Pip, JP and I had been used to seeing at our grandparents, in addition to all sorts of things that had always been there— the red Naugahyde upholstered club arm-chair, the India-brass coffee table with the blue iris bowl on it and a fan of magazines and books arrayed around it, the spiky and uncomfortable teak Danish Modern dining room table and chairs, Mom’s wedding-present silver place settings— all those things that had moved from Rattlesnake Cottage, to the White Cottage, to the Redwood House and Hilltop House and their eventual resting place in the house Mom and Dad built together, the house that burned to the ground, all those things reduced to a pile of rubble and ashes, scraped up from the concrete pad by a bulldozer blade and carried away to be dumped… but not before the ashes had been combed and sifted by various volunteers, family members and neighbors.

The house is mostly rebuilt, now— Mom and Dad moved in several months ago, happily abandoning the RV which they bought to replace the one loaned to them by friends. The veranda, and solarium were still incomplete, the area around the garage was still piled with gravel, roof tiles, and squares of terra-cotta saltillo tiles, but the main house was completed, and all the stored furniture (nearly every scrap of it second-hand and gently worn) moved out of where it had been stashed for the last eighteen months… all the linens and clothes, bric-a-brac, bedding and kitchen things put away, and Blondie and I went around for a day, armed with a hammer and picture hangers, and deployed pictures in pleasing and eye-catching formations on certain of the walls. This iteration of Mom and Dad’s house is much more comfortably arranged for visitors, and for entertaining, with a lovely and generous kitchen arranged around a wood-topped central island and stocked with all the cleverest recent developments in storage— a pull-out cabinet with two trash cans, a drawer with a sliding cover for crackers and bread, a shallow drawer especially for cookie sheets and racks, and a spice shelf with an array of smaller hinged shelves tucked inside of it. Clever and ingenious as it all is, we were constantly going to the wrong cupboard for the commonly used things— mugs and silverware, glasses and plates. Invariably, we would first go to where they had used to be, in the house before. What used to be Mom’s studio is now a sort of entryway and secondary living room, which can be closed off with sliding wooden doors to make a second guest bedroom, and the guest bathroom is much larger, with a tall wooden linen closet built in, and a dressing area.

Besides hanging pictures and clearing the last of their things out of the RV, Blondie and I took on another dispiriting chore that I think Mom and Dad just didn’t want to deal with; the last of the remains salvaged from the ashes; six or seven heavy boxes consigned to the shed, filthy with ash and grit from the fire, and disgusting from having been nested in by mice.
Neighbors, friends and family had gone over the site with hope and enthusiasm; some of the things— mostly china, metal and glass— were wrapped in newspaper. Plain white kitchen plates, fairly undamaged, a rectangular enamel casserole which used to be turquoise blue, now it was greenish, and the enamel bubbled and crazed… a set of eight fragile demitasse cups and saucers, the pastel colors of flowers and leaves mutated by fire, but otherwise whole and un-chipped… a little china bulldog chasing it’s tail, also un-chipped but slightly blackened with a deposit of soot and crud from the tarpaper. A silver cigarette case, and a pocket-watch, a little tin box full of cut and unset gem agates, another of coins… about half the pieces from the blue iris bowl, not enough to reconstruct….two handfuls of corroded silver-plate spoons, knives and forks, a kitchen-knife with the wooden handle all burned away. Two irregular conglomerations of smashed wedding china stuck together with melted glass… one of them with the remains of a serving fork imbedded in it. A couple of heavy cut-crystal decanter stoppers, slightly deformed. The antique teapot with the curious lid, an ornamental platter painted with birds on a cactus plant, and a green and blue ewer with a silver-plate lid, not much damaged, as Mom had put them in a bathtub full of water, not realizing that the roof tiles would smash down on top of it all— but at least all the pieces were in one place, and only a little of the soot and tar crud on them. Those three can be repaired, Pip and I will see to it. It was fascinating, in a faintly gruesome way, sorting out what things actually were, and wondering in some cases, how they had survived in a recognizable form.

But all the rest reminded me of nothing so much as the cases of relics dug up from Pompeii, all laid out carefully under glass, with little labels pinned to the fabric on which they lay: the fragile glass and the corroded spoons, fire-blasted pots, with blobs of melted sand stuck to them, the humble and prosaic, the occasional small luxury, all gritty with soot and a dusting of ashes, but more imperishable than memory.

Mere Doggerel

11. January 2006 · Comments Off on Mere Doggerel · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Oh, good lord, after 20+ years of dedicated cat ownership (having freely acknowledged that a cat or cats more or less owned me as their human-hot-water-bottle, their provider of companionship, clean litter-boxes and finest gourmet cat kibble) I have descended—as Morgie, Henry VIII, Little Arthur, Percival and Sammy would see it— to ownership of that lesser form of companion-animal life, a mere dog. Yes, a mere dog, in the form of the Lesser Weevil, chosen for me by Cpl/Sgt. Blondie. Owing to a small spate of petty crime, or attempted crime in my otherwise fairly regulated neighborhood, my daughter issued an edict; that as I generally live alone, I should have either a dog, or a gun. I chose the dog as the lesser of two weevils. Not only is it rather harder to kill someone by accident with a dog, but one of the local patrolling SAPD officers cheerfully noted when asked for his opinion, that he had oftener been chased out of a back yard by a dog than he had been by a gun. The initial expense and upkeep, training and licensing, plus ammunition or food and vet bills may work out to about the same amount, in the long run. And a dog is generally more charming and affectionate… and the Lesser Weevil is all that… charming, happy, affectionate, quite intelligent as dogs go (some of my parents’ dogs were certifiable idiots), and rather attractive… again, as dogs go.

She is mostly and obviously boxer, with a quarter to a half of something else; what that something else might be is a mystery for geneticists, but her resulting general appearance is of a leggier, slender boxer. She is fulfilling the basic requirement of being a watch or alarm dog, in that she does bark at strangers coming to the door, or crossing the green belt too close to the back fence, but displays a pleasingly intelligent discretion in that she does not bark endlessly over trivial or distant provocations, and stops barking once Blondie or I tell her to stop. The bark is evidence of some other ancestry; a deep sonorous bay, reminiscent not of Jengiss-Khan, but something more like a bloodhound or beagle. She is intelligent, in that she has caught on to the concept of “sit”, “stay”, “get in the car”, “behave”, “on the right, Weevil!” and manages mostly to obey, and to not pee inside the house too much… well, only once or twice in the last 48 hours. We started letting her inside the house after we came home from California: she was allowed inside there, and spend nights in the guest room with us, so it was just too cruel to banish her to the yard again.

The cats are handling this thing very well; they have the upper hand inside, and they know it and she knows it. Touchingly, she seems to want them to play with her. I have observed her often crouching down, tail wagging, just inviting them to a romp, but only Blondie’s cat, Sammy the Gimp (who was raised with dogs, albeit much smaller ones!) is interested in accepting the invitation. Percival and Morgie are distantly interested, Henry VIII is just disinterested, and Little Arthur is the only one actively hostile— he snarls, hisses, and makes a barbed one-paw swipe at her at every opportunity. But none of them are afraid of her, really. This evening, she was sniffing at Henry, who was his usual bored and languid self, sprawled half on his back in the hallway, hardly a defensive posture. All he did was bare his teeth and hiss; somewhat crushed, she let him alone. I don’t really think she sees cats as an alien species to her, just some sort of odd, non-barking and snobbish dog, who mystifyingly, do not want to play with her.

And she is a friendly and open-natured dog. Hostility from other dogs freaks her out, and then she displays a overwrought tragic and woebegone countenance that would do Sarah Bernhardt proud. At a rest-stop beside the highway near Ft. Stockton, she was snapped at by a bad-tempered poodle while Blondie had her on the leash in the pet area and I was in the restroom. When I came back, Blondie was sitting on one of the benches, with an utterly distraught Lesser Weevil gathered up in her lap… if Weevil had been a small child, she would have been sobbing uncontrollably.

And lest this seem like an utter paragon of a dog, there are some small considerations to hold against her. The veterinarian guessed her age at anywhere between 6 and 18 months, and at this point I would tend towards the younger end of that sliding scale. She tends to be over-excitable, especially when Blondie and I come home after a time away from the house, and the first half-mile or so of my run in the morning is a prolonged wrestling match with a rowdy puppy, pirouetting like a maddened dervish, until she settles down to a steady reliable trot… there was an accident on the rug not twenty minutes ago… and she chews things. My god, does she chew things. A partial list of casualties so far includes all three pillows off the porch furniture, two of the wooden outdoor chairs, a plastic garden sprayer, one garden hose, my gardening hat (which was practically trashed anyway), the bottom of the trellis gate arch, a bamboo outdoor table with glass top (she knocked it over and the glass shattered on the stone pathway) a rose bush, a butane lighter kept on the back porch to light the oil lanterns with, her own leash, and a pleather handbag of Blondie’s forgetfully left in reach.

My neighbor Judy advises me that this will go on for another year or so; I only hope I have some garden left at the end of it.

On the Road With the Lesser Weevil

02. January 2006 · Comments Off on On the Road With the Lesser Weevil · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Among her favorable canine qualities (sweet nature, high intelligence, compact size, overall good health and relative freedom from behavior problems stemming from the circumstances which inspired my daughter to rescue her from a very unfortunate situation) highest among them is the one which became most apparent over the last week or so. That is, the Lesser Weevil is an excellent traveler. She readily jumped into her travel station in the back seat on command and spent much of the journeys of the last three weeks curled up sleeping there, qualities which can best be appreciated by anyone who has gone on a very long road trip with a dog… which if the evidence of my own experience at rest stops along the highways between San Antonio and San Diego this last holiday week are any indication, may include a large percentage of the traveling public. Most of our stops, up and down IH 10 and 8 coincided with those of other travelers armed with leashes, at the other end of which was one of the canine set enjoying a leisurely poop and pee in the designated pet section of the state-designated rest area.

And, oh, how those rest areas were welcomed by the weary traveler. It would be hard for some of my European friends to visualize how vast and how empty the western United States can be, nothing but two lanes of blacktop with a wide median in between, spooling endlessly across a great basin towards a jagged line of distant blue mountains. On either side of the road, nothing much but adobe colored dust, and low scrub bushes… taupe and pale green, pale gold tufts of bunch-grass, dark green mesquite, and saguaro cacti with uplifted branches…. And that is all there is, for miles and miles. The only other signs of human traffic are the other vehicles on the road, coming and going, their lights at night like a sliding string of diamonds and rubies, perhaps a long freight-train loaded with containers moving toy-like in the distance, and a couple of jets scribbling a feather-stitching of contrails in the blue bowl of sky overhead. Only twice did we drive through cities of any size— El Paso and Tucson— all the rest are places like Yuma and Fort Stockton, or even smaller still, like Sierra Blanca and Junction, just a couple of square blocks of houses, and sometimes not even that. We breezed past an off-ramp with the name of a town on it, which seemed to be made up of a gas station, a house and a scattering of rusting trailers, and Blondie wondered out loud what makes a town? Isn’t there some sort of minimum requirement? Or was there once a substantial town which has dried up and withered away in the fierce desert heat? How lonely it must have been for the first settlers, in the late 19th century, to live so far over the edge of civilization. I remembered an account from the wife of one of the early Texas cattle barons— Mary Ann Goodnight, I believe, who came out to live on her husbands’ ranch several days journey from the nearest small town, the only woman for a hundred miles in each direction. One of the ranch hands gifted her with some chickens, and she was so desperately lonely that the chickens became beloved pets, rather than dinners. Driving past one of those tiny, solitary houses or trailers sitting in a small clump of trees fifty miles from the nearest town, I can now understand how that happened.
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