Spring in the Garden

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

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

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

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

Call it a Victory

26. February 2012 · Comments Off on Call it a Victory · Categories: Fun With Islam, GWOT, Rant, War, World

And leave. That’s the discussion going on over at Rantburg, today, where Steve White has laid out the case, here, (http://rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=339729&D=2012-02-26&SO=&HC=4)
and I have to say he’s made a strong argument. Oh, there are things that can still be done … like drop in a SEAL team or a Hellfire missile the next time a tall Taliban poppy raises his head, or gives support and shelter to a beturbaned goon with ambitions to knock down multi-story office buildings half a world away.

I honestly thought – and still think that there are workable solutions for the problem that is Afghanistan. But if we aren’t going to apply any of them – and it is very plain that under this current feckless, amateur-hour, drop-down-on-knees-and-apologize-in-heart-beat administration, will not – then perhaps it’s time to say so long and thanks for all the fish.

Consider the Michelles of the Field

21. February 2012 · Comments Off on Consider the Michelles of the Field · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Rant, sarcasm, Working In A Salt Mine..., World · Tags: , , , ,

…they toil not, nor do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Enough of that simile, since it’s pretty obvious that Solomon in all his glory was not spread all over just about every fashion and women’s mag for the last couple of years, accompanied by cutlines, stories and editorials, all drooling over how chic, fashionable and oh-so-modern and otherwise laudable the spouse of the current occupant of the White House was.

Yep, upon the apotheosis of the Empty Suit known as Barack Obama, to the highest office in the land, I could hardly pass the supermarket checkout stand, without being assured that his Significant Other was the best thing since Jackie Kennedy or sliced bread… so lovely, so tasteful, so chic, the very model of an ultra-modern First Lady. Frankly, the sycophantic chorus got to the point where I began muttering to myself something along the lines of, ‘Sister, I remember Jackie Kennedy – and you, darlin’ – aren’t no Jackie Kennedy. If Jackie Kennedy had ever dressed for a public event by raiding her daughter’s closet and the nearest Goodwill outlet, she would have at least made it look good!’ Frankly, if I never see another picture of Michelle in a boob-belt and too-small cotton cardy, or one of Laura Ashley’s more unfortunate evening dress designs, it will all be too soon. And I speak as one who does raid her daughter’s closet, the local Goodwill store and loved Laura Ashley, but then I do not see any fashion mags out there breathlessly lauding Sgt. Mom’s inimitable sense of style.

About the only mystery left unexamined regarding Michelle Obama’s dress sense is how on earth one can spend a bomb of money and still finish up wearing such desperately unflattering clothes, or clothes grotesquely unsuited for the occasion – or both.

So, you will have gathered that Michelle Obama annoys me. I would have been content to dismiss her as I did, yea these many months ago as “a seething pit of resentment in spite of two high-end degrees, a large income and a mansion; a BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement.” I might have been able, eventually, to blow off the fashion and women’s magazine going all full Pravda on us … but for the vacations.

The incessant expensive vacations to lavish resort locations annoy me. I don’t grudge rich people their amusements, knowing that they mostly pay for such excursions themselves, and that spending on them will trickle down to make a good living for the people who own, run, and work at such places – heck, I live in a destination city, although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a tropical paradise like Hawaii, or an enclave of the uber-rich like Martha’s Vinyard. I certainly didn’t grudge President Reagan, or either of the Presidents Bush from taking vacations at property they owned and improved, and even hosted VIPs at. (I did derive amusement out of the White House Press corps being dragged to Crawford, Texas, in August, though. Awwww, poor cosmopolitan urbanites, being dragged to the ass-end of nowhere in the most miserable part of a Texas summer!)

But at a time when ordinary working people are cutting back to a week or so, taking a frugal holiday here and there, or even not taking a vacation at all – Michelle Obama taking a lavish holiday every two months or so, looks very, very bad to the general public. And the White House must know that it’s going over about as well as a case of the chicken pox at a kid’s birthday party. That someone whose job it is to consider damage control can’t or won’t talk her into slumming it at Camp David instead is not a good thing.

The Unluckiest Ship in The Navy

19. February 2012 · Comments Off on The Unluckiest Ship in The Navy · Categories: General

Yes, it really happened – the details here, courtesy of Ace of Spades HQ.

Building a Better Tomorrow

13. February 2012 · Comments Off on Building a Better Tomorrow · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, Technology, The Funny

Tomorrow…

Found, courtesy of a comment thread on PJ Media.

Committee of Vigilance – 1856 – Finale

10. February 2012 · Comments Off on Committee of Vigilance – 1856 – Finale · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West, World · Tags: , , ,

Three carriages entered the square, and as they halted before the jail door, the ranks of waiting men presented arms. Half a dozen men descended from the carriages – William Tell Coleman and the other leaders of the Committee. They talked for a few moments through the wicket-gate … and then they were admitted into the jail, to speak with Sheriff Scannell.
“We have come for the prisoner Casey,” Coleman told him. “We ask that he be peaceably delivered us, handcuffed at the door immediately.”
“Under existing circumstances,” replied Sheriff Scannell, “I shall make no resistance. The prison and it’s contents are yours.”
“We want only the man Casey at present,” One of the other Committee members added. “For the safety of all the rest, we hold you strictly accountable.”

Casey was taken to the Committee headquarters – later, Charles Cora was also added to the Committee’s bag. Three hundred men guarded Fort Gunnybags, another hundred the jail, while the rest were relieved for the moment. The next day, Vigilantes patrolled the streets, and warned merchants selling weapons not to sell any such … for now. James Casey and Charles Cora were allowed visitors. On Tuesday, Cora was brought before the Committee and informed that he would be tried for murder. All the forms of law would be observed, and he would be represented by a lawyer. Who was one of the Executive Committee … Cora provided a list of witnesses, who would testify in his defense, and they were all sent for; none could be found.

That evening, word arrived that James King of William had died. Sometime that evening, both Cora and Casey were convicted and sentenced.

Thursday at noon was the time set for King’s funeral to begin. The nearby Unitarian Church where it was to be held was jammed to overflowing by mid-morning, and the procession with the coffin was said to have been two miles long. Mourners stood in the streets to pay their respects … and in the street before the Vigilance Committee’s headquarters there were also men standing; men in three ranks, in the pose of attention as they had stood in the square before the county jail on Sunday morning.

Just before one o’clock, the tall windows on the second floor of the building were opened; from two of them, a pair of small wooden platforms were pushed out, and balanced on the edge of the window-sill. Above, from the flat roof of the building, a pair of heavy beams was set into place, just over the platforms; a noose of heavy rope dangled from the end of each beam. Then … silence again, although those who waited in the street below could hear the faint music of a church organ. The music seemed to be a cue of some kind. Charles Cora, his eyes covered by a white handkerchief blindfold was guided out of the window, to stand silently on the little platform. A few moments later, James Casey followed; he was not blindfolded at his request, but his nerve broke, looking down at the implacable faces below. He babbled, pleading that he was not a murderer, he had done nothing, he only responded to insult … the words fell into grim silence.

In that silence, the commotion at the door of the Unitarian Church could be heard clearly; James King’s coffin was being carried out by the pall-bearers. From the steeple above, the church bell tolled a single note. Another church bell joined, and then another and another, as those men in the street presented arms. The platforms beneath the Casey and Cora dropped … and justice as it had been declared by the Vigilantes was done.

Postscript: the Committee did not disband, immediately. They went on adding members, conducting military drill, and doing business – one item of which was the formation of a list. Those on it would either leave, or be charged and tried under the ordinary rules of law. Only two more miscreants were hanged, and thirty banished officially, although it was estimated that at least eight hundred left town voluntarily. The Committee formally dissolved in August of that year, with a grand parade and an open house of “Fort Gunnybags.”
Many years later, a curious visitor to the city asked, “What has become of your Vigilance Committee?” “Toll the bell, sir – and you will see!”

Sometimes Love Means Letting Go…

10. February 2012 · Comments Off on Sometimes Love Means Letting Go… · Categories: General

That might be true today.

It’s hard to know where that fine line is between being ready to say goodbye to a much-loved pet, and giving up too soon. We’ve all faced it, or we will, if we haven’t yet. The gray hair creeps over the senior muzzle, eventually whitening the entire face; the eyes cloud over, the ears stop up, and the gait shifts from exuberant to hesitant. But still she eats, drinks, roams the yard (bouncing off the fence due to the clouded eyes), and barks imperiously when she needs your attention.

Then one day she just doesn’t get out of bed, choosing instead to sleep all day. You wake her up and carry her outside (if she’s carry-size), and when you set her down, she falls over and can’t right herself. She stands spraddle-legged, shaking from the effort of maintaining balance. You bring her back inside to her food dish because she hasn’t ‘t eaten since the day before, and she sniffs it and turns away. You take her to the water bucket, because she drinks water 20 times a day, and she sniffs it and turns away. You put her back in her bed, and she goes back to sleep almost immediately.

So you call the vet, make an appointment to have them checked out, and you worry. And you cry, because you realize that 16+ is a fantastic age for an iggy, and her paws are totally entwined all around your heart.

Meantime, you glance over and she’s standing up, getting out of her bed, hobbling to the water bucket and drinking deeply, and your heart smiles, thinking maybe it was a false alarm. You bring some BilJac liver treats to her bed, and she eats them with no hesitation. You pull the expensive lunch meat from the fridge, and give her a couple slices, breaking it up into bite size pieces. Your heart smiles again, thinking maybe it really was a false alarm.

You cuddle with her awhile, loving the weight of her 10 lbs gathered in your arms and resting on your chest, grinning when she rests her head on your shoulder, hoping she’ll fall asleep there. But she lets you know she’s had enough, and you gently place her back in her bed, in front of the little ceramic space heater that’s been running all day for her on this fairly warm day. You notice, as you rearrange her blanket before putting her back in bed, that the bed is damp, and your heart sinks again. The little one has never peed the bed before, to your knowledge. Maybe it wasn’t a false alarm.

At any rate, there’s nothing you can do tonight, so you make sure she’s warm and cozy, the water bucket nearby in case she wakes up thirsty, and you head to your own bed. Your other dogs curl up beside you and you find comfort in their presence and their enduring, unquestioning love.

You find yourself waking early the next morning, listening for the imperious, demanding bark of the senior iggy that always starts your day, and it doesn’t come. Then you realize you haven’t heard her bark since the previous morning, and she usually barks several times a day. Your heart sinks again, and you lie there cuddling the big dogs while pondering the little one.

What is the right thing to do for her? What is BEST for HER? It’s hard to say. She eats, she drinks, but the sleep-aggressive dog has to wear a muzzle 24/7 because she’ll walk into him while he’s sleeping, not realizing he’s there. She has to be carried into the yard so she doens’t walk off the side of the ramp. Once there, she walks in circles, like a canoer paddling on only one side of the boat.

You think about your friends who have faced this journey before you, about Giorgio, the IG who lost both is eyes to glaucoma and lived at least one more year, confined to the kitchen and carried in and out for potty breaks. You remember how you thought that was no fit life for a dog, and you remember hoping it would never reach that point for yours. Has it now? She used to have the run of the house. Now she has a portion of the kitchen and laundry room, and her bed in the office during the day. She lost her human bed privileges when she started pooping in her sleep.

You ponder the next 10 days on your schedule. The first three are relatively light – a Friday doing course development instead of teaching, and a weekend. But the next week is packed full with a tight schedule that would leave no room for an unescheduled vet trip, if one is needed. You remember the pain of letting your last dog go without being able to be there to say goodbye, because that was best for her, and you resolve to not face that this time.

You think about asking an animal communicator to talk to your little one, but remember when she tried to do that with another dog, and how she said the dogs were surprised you had asked her, because we all communicate fine with each other. And you realize that the little one *has* been communicating with you through her cloudy eyes, the unhappy droop to her head, her gentle snuggling the night before. And you weep as you realize you might be saying goodbye today to the best little iggy that ever walked the face of the earth.

Then you start doubting yourself. Maybe you misunderstood what you saw. Maybe she’s not that bad. She still eats, doesn’t she? Still drinks? Maybe it’s not time. We’ll let Doc tell us. Doc is good at knowing this stuff.

Having decided that you’re not making a decision, you get up and take hte big dogs outside. When you come back in, you go wake the little dog, and realize as you lift her from her bed that she’s soaking wet. Your heart sinks again as you realize maybe you didn’t misunderstand anything. You carry her outside and set her down, gently catching her before she falls over, and watch her stand spraddle-legged to keep her balance, head shifting from side to side like a snake, entire body quivering from the strain of standing. Your heart sinks again as you gently pick her up and bring her back inside to her bed in the office in front of the space heater. Since her bed is wet, you appropriate one of the beds from the big dogs and put that in front of her heater.

Then you go to your PC to type a post on GreyTalk.com and are interrupted by the sound of her toenails scrabbling on the kitchen floor. You bring her back and put some water in a dish. Because you love her, you hold the dish of water directly under her pretty little nose until she realizes it’s there and starts drinking it. Then you find the BilJac liver treats and feed her some of those for breakfast, becuase she ignored her food dish when you pointed it out to her in the kitchen.

And you doubt yourself again, because she’s eating and drinking, standing and walking, looking for what she wants and needs. To be honest, at this point you don’t know if you’d rather she be ok or not. You don’t know for sure how happy she is with her very limited life that would drive *you* crazy. So you email Doc and give her a status update, and end the email with: “Just so you know, if we have to let her go today, I’m ready.” And you try not to hate yourself for saying that, and try not to think about whether you’re saying that because it’s best for the little one entwined in your heart, or because you can’t bear the thought of watching her decline further over time and aren’t willing to do the heroic things that other friends have done with/for their dogs. You reassure yourself with the knowledge that she is a much-loved dog, and she knows that she is loved and will continue to be loved no matter what happens today.

And then you sit and weep because you have no idea how this day is going to turn out, and 11am is still so very far away.

Update: 11am came and went, and at 1140, I left Doc’s office alone, a tiny blue collar tucked into the pocket of my jeans, and a big piece of my heart lying on a table in Doc’s exam room. Run free to good health, baby girl. Your mama loves you more than she has words to say.

Committee of Vigilance – 1856 – Part Two

08. February 2012 · Comments Off on Committee of Vigilance – 1856 – Part Two · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West

The shooting of James King – political murder disguised as a justifiable response to a personal insult – inflamed the city of San Francisco immediately. King, shot in the chest but still clinging to life was taken to his house. Meanwhile, an enormous mob gathered at the police station, and the police realized almost at once that the accused James Casey could not be kept secure. He was removed under guard to the county jail. The indignant mob was not appeased, not even when the mayor of San Francisco attempted to address the crowd, pleading for them to disperse and assuring them that the law would run its proper course and justice would be done. The crowd jeered, “What about Richardson? Where is the law in Cora’s case?” The mayor hastily retreated, as the square – already guarded by armed marshals, soon filled with armed soldiers. The angry mob dispersed, still frustrated and furious. No doubt everyone in authority in the city breathed a sigh of relief, confident that this matter would blow over. After all, they controlled the political apparatus of the city, at least one newspaper, as well as the adjudicators and enforcers of the law … little comprehending that this shooting represented the last, the very last straw.
More »

Doggone It

03. February 2012 · Comments Off on Doggone It · Categories: General

We’ve done it again … come home with another stray dog, one which to date defies returning to whoever lost him. He isn’t from our neighborhood – since no one here recognizes him. We found him romping happily last Sunday afternoon in the empty field next to St. Helena’s Catholic Church, and he followed us home. There are at least three neighborhoods besides ours that he could possibly have come from, four if he galloped across Nacogdoches Road sometime in the wee hours last weekend. We’re going to go around tomorrow and paper them with fliers, but I am not holding my breath on being called by his owner any time soon.

It is possible he came from a good distance. In the past, we have found dogs and returned them to owners who lived a good few miles from our house. Big dogs can go a long way – especially if frightened out of their tiny canine minds by a thunderstorm, or 4th of July fireworks. Like those previous rescues, this one is a big dog, not a fifteen-pound pocket-puppy like Connor the Malti-Poo who could not possibly have come very far from where we found him five or six months ago. We were certain that Conner had strayed, and that someone was frantically searching for him, but no. Connor was dumped, and we fear it is the same with Muttley, as we have called him, purely for the convenience of calling him something. Muttley is a German shepherd and hound cross, about a year old, with a collar and no tags – he might have come from a neighborhood a fair distance away, but I registered him with fido-finder and find-toto-dot-com, without result. So we’re pretty certain that he was dumped also … which is a pity in a good many ways.

First – because someone house-trained him, and taught him to sit, stay, lie down, and shake hands – which is a heck of a lot of work to do with a young dog. He was very clean when we found him, he likes the cats, is agreeably subservient to the senior dogs, behaves himself indoors, and otherwise gives evitence of being a dog that someone took care with. The last couple of dumped dogs that we found were anything but – they were rowdy, undisciplined, destructive, and we were happy to find one lot some new owners (with a large and dog-proof back yard) and turn the other two over to the county Animal Shelter, which does all that they can with healthy and well-tempered animals.

The one thing that keeps us from doing the same with Muttley, is that he seems to have an old but healed injury to one of his fore-legs, or rather to his shoulder – scapula bone. He limps a little bit – and we’re afraid that if we do turn him over to the shelter, he will be immediatly euthanized because of it. So – if anyone knows of anyone in San Antonio who would like to adopt a nice, well-trained and affectionate larger dog … let us know. Muttley will be available.

Weekly Miscellany

29. January 2012 · Comments Off on Weekly Miscellany · Categories: General, Home Front, Media Matters Not, Politics, sarcasm, Veteran's Affairs

It’s been another one of those weeks, sportsfans; all kinds of odd things going on, some of them personal and some of them in the larger world. Kind of hard to see which of them are more important in the big scheme o’ things, and not many of them worth a full blog-post.

1. So King Barry I did his state of the union address this week. Meh … I didn’t watch, although we did catch a few seconds of it while channel-surfing. Just enough time to wonder why on earth he appeared to be such a garish orange color … seriously, he looked like a giant Cheeto with ears. I gather the speech was the same paint by the numbers blah-blah-blah. It must not have gone over all that well with the partisans, because I distinctly heard an announcer or a guest on a certain classical music program make a crack about it; something about a certain classical music performer getting more applause than the state of the union address.

2. Gingrich or Romney, Romney or Gingrich. I am underwhelmed. The sniping between the partisans is unseemly. My one wistful desire is that it were possible to take elements of all the candidates and mold them into one single candidate: Gingrich’s fire and take-no-prisoners attitude, Romney’s skill at organization, Santorum’s constancy to principle, Perry’s experience as a governor … but it isn’t, so I’ll just have to deal with the easy decision of who to vote for in November. Anybody but King Barry, of course, but I might give the Dread Cthulhu a look-in.

3. Working all week on an editing job; a novelette supposed to be a horror story, but in actuality it was what I call secondary guy-porn. Primary guy porn is what you think it is, secondary guy porn has lots of loving detail about weapons and vehicles in it. Secondary fem-porn has lots of loving detail about clothes and accessories. Hey, it’s a living. And it’s not the worst project I’ve ever edited.

4. The second edition of the separate books of the Adelsverein Trilogy has been uploaded to Lightning Source, the proofs are approved, and it should be listed on Amazon and the usual suspects by the end of the week – and at a price of a couple of bucks cheaper than the first edition. I’d always winced, looking at the retail price, and winced again, whenever I had to purchase a bulk quantity at my author discount from Booklocker. Here’s hoping that the Trilogy chugs along just as steadily as Truckee does – both e-book and print versions … and the German translation sells like hot-cakes.

5. Sigh. We found another lost dog. And no, we’re not keeping this one, as we did with Connor. German shepherdish, youngish, fairly clean and well-mannered, unneutered male, bouncing around in the empty field back of St. Helena’s. He followed along with us, all the way home; did not take well to having a leash put on him, so we deduce that he was never taken for walkies. Of course no tags. He’s already listed on fido-finder, and tomorrow we’ll go through the usual rounds. The other two dogs are freaked out by this. The Weevil has taken over Connor’s bed, wedged underneath my desk, and Conner has had to take the Weevil’s bed, which I moved over next to my chair.

And that’s been my week – yours?

No Ship Named For Murtha

27. January 2012 · Comments Off on No Ship Named For Murtha · Categories: Ain't That America?, Good God, In the Navy, Military, Veteran's Affairs, Wild Blue Yonder

It appears that a great number of veterans and relatives of veterans are increasingly incensed at the news that the late Senator Murtha may have a new Navy ship named for him. The late senator was famed for nearly being nailed in the Abscam scandal, lo these many decades ago, for sucking down absolutely mind-boggling quantities of political pork for his district, and last but not least, pre-judging the Marines charged in the so-called Haditha incident.

Those veterans and relatives feel so strongly about this gross insult to military honor that they have opened a website, and a means of communication their displeasure to the Secretary of the Navy.
This is the website –

www.nomurthaship.com

Go, therefore, and do your duty, with regard to their petition. That is all.
(sorry, means of posting embedded links has gone the same way as the ability to post pictures.)

My Bubble?

26. January 2012 · Comments Off on My Bubble? · Categories: General

How Thick Is Your Bubble?
View user's Quiz School Profile
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Score » 12 out of 20 (60% )
Result

On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 13 and 16.

In other words, you don’t even have a bubble.
Quiz School Take this quiz & get your score

More here.
http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/the-new-american-divide/

Turning Point

24. January 2012 · Comments Off on Turning Point · Categories: History, Media Matters Not, Military, That's Entertainment!, War, World

My daughter and I are watching and very much enjoying the period splendors of Downton Abbey, showing on the local PBS channel here over the last couple of weeks – just as much as my parents and I enjoyed Upstairs, Downstairs – the original version, yea these decades ago. Of course, the thrust of this season is the effects of WWI on the grand edifice of Edwardian society in general. The changes were shattering … they seemed so at the time, and even more in retrospect, to people who lived through the early 20th century in Western Europe, in Russia, the US and Canada. In reading 20th century genre novels, I noted once that one really didn’t see much changing in book set before and after WWII, save for the occasional mention of a war having been fought: people went to the movies, listened to the radio, drove cars, wore pretty much the same style of clothes … but in novels set before and after WWI, the small changes in details were legion.

England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia – they were the epicenter, seemingly – the place where it hit hardest, and afterwards nothing was ever the same. Of course, in Russia with the Red Revolution and all, things were quite definitely never the same, and Austria lost the last bits of empire … and the other nations were gutted of a whole generation of young men. In the American experience, the only thing which came close was the Civil War, where a single battle in Pennsylvania, or Virginia or Tennessee could be the means of casually extinguishing the lives of all the young men in a certain township or county… just gone, in a few days or hours of hot combat around a wheat field, a peach orchard, a sunken bend in a country road. The Western front (not to negate the war in the Italian Alps, at Gallipoli or the Germans and Russians) went on more or less at that horrendous rate, week in, week out – for years.

The marks of it are still horrifyingly visible, even though the numbers of living veterans of it can be about counted on the fingers of a pair of hands. Because it’s not only the survivors’ trauma – it’s the mark and void left by the fallen. So many that I remember a college textbook of mine – I think that it was a required sociology or statistics course – had the population breakdowns by age of various European countries. In all cases, there was a pronounced dip in the numbers of males who would have been of early adult age in 1914-1918. This is reflected again in the acres and acres of white crosses in Flanders, on the tight-packed lists of names carved on memorials large and small; not too much marked in the United States, but in the Commonwealth nations, and especially in Britain itself, that sense of loss must have seemed suffocating. Even low and middle-brow genre novels showed the scars that WWI left, especially if they were written by contemporaries to the conflict. Memoirs, histories, memorials and all… there was loss written large, by people who looked at the ‘before’ and then at the present ‘after’ with an aching sense of the void between, a muddy void into which friends, schoolmates, lovers, husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers and certain illusions had all vanished.

Nothing was the same, afterwards.

Although perhaps the war wasn’t directly the change agent, it pushed some developments already in the works farther along than they would have been. The war served as a handy delineating point for those who lived through it … electricity everywhere, motor cars ditto, airplanes as something more than a toy for enthusiasts, women voting and wearing short shirts and routinely forgoing corsets, half a dozen live-in servants in a big house which once had been staffed by three times that many … all that. The worst loss was something a little less concrete – and that was, I think, a certain sense of confidence and optimism. I like writing about the 19th century because of that very thing: generally people believed with their whole hearts and without a speck of cynicism, that the conditions of their lives were steadily improving, that conditions which had plagued mankind for centuries were fixable, and that their leaders were able and well-intentioned. All those beliefs were deeply shaken or utterly destroyed during those four years – and that is why that war still casts a long shadow. And makes for an interesting and evocative television show – like Downton Abby and Upstairs, Downstairs.

Following in Sgt Mom’s Footsteps…

22. January 2012 · Comments Off on Following in Sgt Mom’s Footsteps… · Categories: General

…but on a much smaller scale.

When I’m not working my day-job, or playing games on Facebook, I write short stories.  I finally have enough to compile into a small e-book, which I am publishing through SmashWords.com with a tentative release date of Feb 22, Ash Wednesday.  The date is tentative because it depends on my newly hired graphic artist getting a cover created for me by then. She’s confident she can do it, even though there are several people ahead of me on her project list. I have no graphic art genes anywhere in my body, so I’m trusting her.

Like you, I’ve watched and admired Sgt Mom on her journey from blogger extraordinaire to “real live arthur,” and I gotta tell you honestly, I don’t want to work that hard. I’m more of a dabbler.   My day job comes first and the writing is only a hobby, albeit a slightly more serious one than it’s been in the past. Short stories by unknown authors are hard to sell, which is my primary reason for self-publishing. I’m just glad we live in a time when the technology makes it possible.

Now, if you’ll pardon a little self-promotion… (clears throat self-consciously)

 Front Cover:

Their lives changed forever when they saw themselves

..and their God…

Through Love’s Eyes

 

 

Back cover (for the print edition, whenever it happens):

A chronically ill woman; a crazy man; a grieving mother. Only God could ease their pain, but would He?

 

You think you know their stories: you’ve read them since childhood. Read them again – it will feel like the first time. Mary Young takes you inside their heads and hearts, and shows you their encounters with the Christ through their own eyes.

Anyone who has ever doubted whether God would really help him or her will find encouragement in these pages.

 

I was originally going to just print a few copies and give them to friends last year for Christmas, but as I worked on perfecting the stories, I felt they deserved a wider audience. It will be interesting to see if I was right.

 

 

To the Lifeboats

20. January 2012 · Comments Off on To the Lifeboats · Categories: General

Pretty damned ironic, that the Costa Concordia disaster happened almost exactly a hundred years after the Titanic. It’s not all that often these days that a European/American flagged passenger ship becomes a catastrophic loss to their insurance company – although it happens with dispiriting frequency to inter-island ferries in the Philippines and hardly any notice of it taken in Western newspapers. The contrasts and ironies just abound; fortunate that the Costa was so close to land that some passengers were able to swim to safety, and that rescue personnel were at the scene almost before the air-bubbles from the sunken half of the ship even popped to the surface.
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A Little Humor to Brighten Your Day

18. January 2012 · Comments Off on A Little Humor to Brighten Your Day · Categories: General

Hopefully, you’ve never had to suffer through a presentation like this one. I’m confident none of our readers has ever been the perpetrator of a presentation like this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rHFNJnDPYY

Desecrations

14. January 2012 · Comments Off on Desecrations · Categories: Ain't That America?, Devil Dogs, Fun With Islam, GWOT, History, Rant · Tags: ,

It seems that there is a bit of bother on in military circles … or rather in the media circles which concern themselves with the conduct of the military … going on with regard to the Marines who were recorded some years ago pissing upon the bodies of some dead Taliban fighters.

The Taliban, like other gentlemen of similar Islamic persuasion in prosperous and peace-loving locations like Somalia, Chechnya and Iran are, of course, known the world over for their upright moral principles. They are famous for this, as well as their strict adherence to the practices of the Geneva Convention when it comes to captured military and interned civilians like Daniel Pearl, and their gentle and respectful treatment of female and child noncombatants. It seems like every other day or so, the Afghan and Pak Taliban are burning down another school, or throwing acid into the face of another woman whose appreciation of the charms of an individual enthusiast for the Religion of Peace is somewhat lacking.

Gosh, I just don’t know what got into our Marines. I clearly recall seeing WWII-era pictures of the aftermath of fighting in the Pacific, where a truck or half-track hood was adorned with a Japanese skull. Now, that was serious desecration. This? I am reliably informed that there are pervs who will pay good money to be pissed on by a professional. Well, the perv is usually alive and wearing a codpiece, high-heels and a ball-gag, but that’s a small detail.

Anyway – Bad Marines. Don’t let us catch you doing this ever again, or it’s no dessert for you for a week. And if you do, don’t take pictures of it for pete’s sake. And if you do take pictures for you and your buddies to snicker over … don’t show them off in public for about twenty years.

If, on the other hand, you want to piss all over Michael Moore, or that creep at the Daily Kos, or Bill Ayers or someone like that – feel free. Claim they were on fire, and you just wanted to do your duty as a good citizen.

In Translation

13. January 2012 · Comments Off on In Translation · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, World

Ever since I finished the Adelsverein Trilogy, I’ve wanted to have a German language version out there.

I’ve had emails from fans asking about it, and talked with native German speakers who assured me that Karl May (the German equivalent of Zane Grey) has an enormous and devoted Old West fan-base. This in spite of the fact that he shuffled off the mortal coil in 1912, and only visited the US once: on that occasion, he only went as far west as Buffalo, New York – but in book-world, his characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were in the thick of it.

In any event, movies, television and radio dramas and comic books based on Karl May’s version of the Wild West have continued to be madly popular in Germany ever since. I have made an arrangement with a freelance translator, Chicagoboyz fan and commenter Lukas R., who has provided a sample translation of a chapter. If you are fluent in German, take a look at it (here on my book blog) and tell me what you think. If it works out as I hope, the German-language version of Adelsverein: The Gathering would be available in about a year, as an e-book and print paperback edition.

(Crossposted at my writer’s blog and at Chicagoboyz.)

Books!

12. January 2012 · Comments Off on Books! · Categories: General

What happens in the bookstore, when everyone goes home…

These people have a real bookstore, and spent hours doing this. Appreciate it, and read a book, today!

One More Time

12. January 2012 · Comments Off on One More Time · Categories: Site News

Another unfortunate break in service – the hosting service for this blog didn’t tell me that the domain name was due for renewal until the day before it expired … and I couldn’t afford to renew until I got an unexpected check yesterday.

So, we’re back. And I am glad, because it would have been a bear, switching over to a new domain.

Killing History

28. December 2011 · Comments Off on Killing History · Categories: Fun With Islam, History, Technology, World

It sounds like a perfectly impractical and even risible notion – to remove the Pyramids of Giza from the view of the righteous by covering them with wax. Good heavens, what would happen on the first hot day of summer, assuming such a thing could even be accomplished? A vast puddle of melted wax, I am certain. Stick a wick the size of a Titan rocket made out of cotton string in the middle, empty in a couple of truckloads of essential perfume oils and you’d have a scented candle the size of Texas, the eighth wonder of the ancient world and something that could probably fumigate most of the Middle East.
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Merry Christmas!

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

Flash Mob in a mall food court sings Hallelujah Chorus

 

 

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

For Christmas 2011

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

One of my favorite Christmas carol videos –

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

Nork

23. December 2011 · Comments Off on Nork · Categories: Ain't That America?, Memoir, Military, N. Korea, World · Tags: , , , , , ,

I did a tour in Korea in 1993-94, which hardly makes me an expert on the place, seeing that I have that in common with a fair number of Army and Air Force personnel over the past half-century plus. Reading about the expected fallout from the change of régime-boss north of the DMZ I think of that tour now as something along the lines of being put into place rather like an instant-read thermometer: there for a year in Seoul, at the Yongsan Army Infantry garrison, where I worked at AFKN-HQ – and at a number of outside jobs for which a pleasant speaking voice and fluency in English was a requirement. One of those regular jobs was as an English-language editor at Korea Broadcasting; the national broadcasting entity did an English simulcast of the first fifteen minutes of the 9 PM evening newscast. I shared this duty with two other AFKN staffers in rotation: every third evening, around 6PM, I went out the #1 gate and caught a local bus, and rode across town to the Yoido; a huge rectangular plaza where the KBS building was located, just around the corner from other terribly important buildings – like the ROK capitol building. Once there, I’d go up to the newsroom – which was a huge place, filled with rows of desks and computers, go to the English-language section, and wait for any of the three or four Korean-to-English translators to finish translating the main news stories for the evening broadcast, correct their story for punctuation and readability, stick around to watch them do the simulcast at 9 PM, critique their delivery.

These various activities put me out and about in Seoul, and made me Korean friends and working acquaintances that had nothing to do with the military, especially at the KBS job. I got to know the translators fairly well. They were all native Koreans, whose education or life experiences had led to them being a fairly cosmopolitan bunch and fluent in English – translators, particularly Miss Min, since we would catch the same bus after work, heading back to the neighborhood of Yongsan, and the old elevated traffic roundabout. I think now, that was one of those times that I liked best – the bus ride; seeing the lights of the city reflected a thousand times in the dark-serpentine shape of the Han River as the bus went over one of the many bridges, back towards the Christmas-tree-topper shaped tower that crowned the Namsan Hill. There would be the scent of vanilla cake baking, when the bus passed by a certain place where there was a commercial bakery; even with the bus windows closed against the winter cold – and Seoul was bitter cold in winter, with a wind that came straight off Siberia – we could still smell vanilla cake.

I liked Seoul very much, at those particular moments, as much as I liked the Koreans that I worked with, and encountered on the subway or riding the bus: tough, jolly, out-going and hard-working people, possibly the most snappy dressers on the face of the earth outside of the Italians, but intensely patriotic. Someone once described them as the Irish of Asia, and that struck me as a fair parallel.
But all the time I was in Korea – being at an Army base – we couldn’t help being aware of the situation; that the DMZ was just a short distance away, that Seoul itself was in range of heavy artillery fire from the north, and that as regular as clockwork, the NorKs would indulge in a bit of sabre-rattling; Another internet commenter called this the “Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken” – every six months to two years there would be a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that the North Korean establishment was there, bellicose, somewhat relevant – and that there was some kind of concession to be extracted from the outside world. The old-time Korea hands that I knew and my Korean friends were relatively blasé about it all. Perhaps the Norks could level Seoul, if they wanted to – but Miss Min and the other interpreters doubted very much that any but the most well-disciplined and elite Nork troops could make it past the first well-equipped grocery store south of the DMZ, let alone Electronics Row … and the Nork military anyway hasn’t fought an all-out war for real since 1953. But figuring out what is going on inside North Korea anyway was a bit like looking at a sparse scattering of accounts from inside, and consulting a Magic-8-Ball. Riddle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma doesn’t even begin to come close. Will the Norks go out with a bang, or whimper? What does the Magic 8-Ball say?

What is pretty certain to me at this point – and I’m not nor ever have been any kind of intelligence wonk – is that North Korea likely can’t last very much longer. The dynasty of Kims and their allies are like an extended crime family, sitting at the apex of a structure that looks more and more like a country-sized labor and concentration camp. The place is stripped bare – even the mountainsides are stripped of trees for firewood. When it comes to food, North Korea isn’t even able to economically support itself, having nothing left to trade to the outside world, save possibly nuclear arms. How long have regular famines been going on? Twenty years or so – long enough to physically stunt the growth of ordinary North Koreans, as is evident when they defect to the South. Possibly even China is tired of the antics of their psychotic little pet, after having enabled them for fifty-plus years.

So, whither North Korea? Damned if I know – but I guess that it will probably not last much longer. My Magic 8-Ball guess is that it will implode, without much warning at all, in the manner of Ceausescu’s Romania; just poof-like that. How the ordinary people of North Korea will cope with such a suddenly revised world is anyone’s guess. I don’t think they have been kept quite so hermetically sealed away that it will take a good few decades to readjust and catch up. They are, after all, the same basic physical and cultural stock as the South Koreans – who have come an amazingly long way since my father was stationed there, at the very end of the Korean War. Your thoughts?
(Earlier post here on this subject: http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/korea-meditation-revisited/
Also – Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)

Miss Us?

20. December 2011 · Comments Off on Miss Us? · Categories: Science!, Site News, Veteran's Affairs

Apparently, we were hijacked by some spam-originator, which resulted in trouble with the host for the Brief … and what with one thing and another, it took most of the weekend to get it straightened out.
As if having to empty out a ton of spam every couple of days, now they’ve added injury to insult. Anyway, we’re back for now, although I’ve had to assign new passwords for the remaining regular contributors.

(Addendum: 8:45 AM – on the advice of our service provider, I am having to approve all comments, to prevent the hacker from doing any more damage to our reputation. We really risk beging taken down permanently, if there are any more complaints about ncobrief.com generating spam, so I do this, apologizing in advance to all the regular commenters.)

Remembering Spain

20. December 2011 · Comments Off on Remembering Spain · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Memoir, Military, World

This year, my mother has decided to break the family custom for Christmas and send an actual, delivered by UPS present, in a large carton which arrived on the doorstep Friday morning. We don’t know quite why she decided to do this, since the usual present for the last decade or two has been a check discretely tucked into a Christmas card. Maybe it’s because it will be the first Christmas without Dad. Possibly Dad was the one who thought just a plain unadorned check in a Christmas or birthday card was the most welcomed gift by adult children, and didn’t want to futz about with shopping or mail order catalogues – anyway, Mom sent is an awesomely lavish gift basket from this place, La Tienda – the foods of Spain, and we went through the basket and the catalogue enclosed with happy squeals of recognition. We came home from Spain twenty years ago, October –  after living in the city of Zaragoza, while I was assigned to the European Broadcasting Service detachment at the air base there. Which wasn’t an American air base, as we reminded people with tactful delicacy; it was a Spanish air base, and we merely rented a small, pitiful portion of it, a few discreet brick buildings and a scattering of ancient Quonset huts, going about our simple and purely transparent business, humbly supporting those various American and European fighter squadrons coming down from the clouds and fog of Northern Europe and practicing their gunnery skills at a local military range set up just to accommodate that kind of trade. Really, there was no earthly reason for anyone to hassle us … not like it had been in Greece. Still, we religiously abstained from wearing uniforms off-base. The local terrorists were mostly interested in blowing up the Guadia Civil; which I thought regretfully was hard luck for the Guads, but made things easier than they had been for American military stationed in Greece;¦ More »

Vader, did you know?

13. December 2011 · Comments Off on Vader, did you know? · Categories: A Href, Fun and Games, Geekery, General, General Nonsense

A Star Wars take on a popular Christmas tune.  Very ingenious, I think

 

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