Hissy fits at the Killeen corral

So, score another one for the 24/7 news cycle. Now, we get a pissing contest about who shot Hasan.

By a curious twist of fate, this appeared the same day as some overdue reflections on the merits of fact-checking in journalism. Never mind, they'll get over the remorse by tomorrow. Possibly one of the morning shows will resolve the problem with a showdown between the respective police sergeants. I mean, it's Texas after all.

Speaking of, the media can't be serious when they wonder how Hasan managed to get his guns. Jeeze Louise, it's Texas! All he had to do was choose his weapons and pay.

People whose pain I do not share

I'm missing a link here. There was an interesting bit online yesterday about some banking exec who couldn't adjust to being unemployed and not making a paltry $200,000 a year. He and his privileged family have maintained the same burn rate they did when he had a job. They didn't bother to save more than $100,000 of his income during the seven (or whatever) fat years . Our banker hasn't lost the ability to count, and he estimates the family will hit zero within six months. This sounds suspiciously like the plot of Fun with Dick and Jane.

If that were not enough, we have the tear-jerking story of the guy who was (let's see if I have this straight) 1, driving near a salt marsh when he was; 2, distracted by a large bird causing him to; 3, drop his cell phone, which of course he had to try to pick up without stopping, so that; 4, he drove his $1 million Bugatti into the salt marsh.

We get a few idiots around here, every year, who manage to submerge their cars in salt water. Trust me: after that happens, you have the most expensive pile of junk in the state.

Cry me a fucking river, dudes.

Wandering mind

A good part of today went to telephone/email tag with a recruiter over a gig prospect. This ran far enough into the day that I missed philosophising with my usual group of writers over brewed beverages. The outcome was satisfactory, if not great: client likes my stuff, but client is out of town for a week. Fine; I can't afford to fly after the client, so I'll possess my soul in patience. This news is positive enough to rank as progress.

Also in the progress department, when I began swimming regularly again in mid-July, I could eke about 400 yd and 20 minutes out of my sorta fixed shoulder. I can now keep at it over 30 minutes and do 850 yd. While this is bupkis—the average age-group swimmer can do as well at age 8—it represents an advance for an old person.

Grumpy thought of the day. I would like to locate and lock in a closet the next person who says, or writes, without irony, "something is the new something." Something a) is typically the trend of the moment, and something b) is actually quite safe. Half a million iterations ago, when this was an ironic riff off the shallow speech of the fashionable, it was slightly amusing; not now.

My rocker is busted, and that's why I'm off it.

Kinda glad they're in Charlestown

If the yuppie scum are flexing their pallid arms in Charlestown, then the millennium has come.

I'm delighted to see that some other Charlestown residents are preparing to demonstrate in behalf of USS Constitution's morning and evening guns. The purpose of the guns, by the way, is to signal the daily raising and lowering of the colours: everyone within earshot is supposed to face the colours (if visible) or the sound and render a hand salute. It's a ritual observed on military and naval installations around the world. The ritual was at least 100 years old when Old Ironsides fired her first morning gun. The controversy is a pretty little fight to have the week of Veterans' Day, and I congratulate the condo owners behind this for their monumental lack of tact.

In my venerable town there are five, count them, five yacht clubs. They do not observe morning colours but they do observe evening colours, every night from late spring until their waterfronts close in October. Due to the imperfections of both timepieces and firing mechanisms, there is an interval between the first gun and the last that suggests skirmish fire rather than ritual.

I don't have to ask how the yuppies like this (at least the ones not in the yacht clubs) because they have complained, and have received the old Yankee version of "sod off" as a reply. Yacht clubs contain many more lawyers than public relations people (though they have both as members), so when they say "sod off" they mean it.

With the yacht clubs come yachts, or at least watercraft of every size and description; around 1500 of them at last count. Some yuppies have complained that a) there are too many boats in the harbour, which spoils the view and b) that the boats make too much noise just sitting on their moorings. The larger and tonier yacht clubs began admitting non-sailing members some years ago as a money-raising venture, and these Thurston Howells very soon began to complain because their yacht club tended to get cluttered up with (wait for it) yachts—and sailors! I present all this as evidence that yuppies eat their young.

Numbers of those commenting on the Boston Herald piece cited above proposed that USS Constitution double-shot the guns and aim at the condos in question. Please, people! Those guns are irreplaceable antiques, and this is Charlestown, noted for its warm hospitality and directness when dealing with any alien life form. If I owned one of the affected condos, I'd be putting plywood over my windows before the ship's supporters demonstrate.

An unfinished conversation

One thing about Veterans' Day events is that one's brothers and sisters come out of their silence and make some connection.

At the North Shore Community College Vet's breakfast today, for example, I learnt that Wayne Burton, president of the college , served in the Brown water navy at the same time as Sen. John Kerry; indeed close enough to see Kerry earn his Bronze Star. This piece of the Vietnam-era navy interests me greatly. Had I been slightly more competent as a radioman in service school, I would have gone to the brown water, along with the bulk of my graduating class. That was somewhat later in the war, when brown water sailors had a much-improved chance of survival. However, I was a bumbling radioman, and so was relegated to being part of the task of chasing Soviet submarines around the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. Just what that says about naval priorities I leave to the imagination.

Interesting as that was, the college president's remarks cut short a conversation at my table that looked like it was going someplace interesting. A young female student-veteran next to me had just commented to a female faculty member-veteran that it was still hard to get across to students that it was possible to support the needs of people in the military and still oppose these wars. the faculty member sighed and said that she thought we might have succeeded in making that point by now. Unfortunately, the speeches started then and we lost the thought.

I can't help but flinch whenever I hear any argument that blames those who have been cozened into fighting anyone's war, having heard all too much of it between 30 and 40 years ago. Whenever I hear the assertion, I immediately recall Donovan's Universal Soldier. I wonder how many people who went out of their way then, and go out of their way now, to disparage soldiers, sailors and Marines, and not the politicians, would think to do so had Donovan not provided the tinder and match for the behaviour.

It is impossible not to go on and recall Henry Adams' remark that Robert E. Lee should have been hanged. If one substitutes Donovan for Lee when reading the comment, the parallel becomes clearer:

It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm.

Donovan's little ditty has been doing harm in that way for over 40 years, will probably go on doing harm for 40 years more, and neither it nor its pious adherents will do one damned thing to end war where it must be ended: with the politicians and demagogues. All they will do is add to the confusion, pain and hurt of people more directly harmed by war.

Silver linings...sardonic reminiscence

I begin to think there may be a small bit of good to be derived from the horrors of the Fort Hood shootings.

Ever since the Naval hospital experiences I've noted here and there in this oeuvre, I've been aware that the experiences of military caregivers are a ripe target for those people who feel obligated to minimise the horror of all but certain narrow classes of military trauma. For the Vietnam era generation of caregiver (and people like me, who were just batboys to the caregivers), this has meant a lifetime of clamped-down silence about sights and sounds and smells that could freeze the blood and darken the soul. One can't discuss it, because most people don't understand or don't want to hear and some, as I said, will go out of their way to say the experience is nothing and to get over it.

I cannot imagine any of the caregivers I was associated with, who heard and saw as much or more as Maj. Hasan, doing what he is alleged to have done. (I suppose we have to grant him the alleged.) I can easily imagine suicide as a response to what happens to caregivers in military hospitals, but not murder. The excuse, in my book, has no merit at all.

In the aftermath, I am hearing all sorts of psychiatric diagnoses that did not exist 35 or 40 years ago. Then, caregivers (and batboys) who showed the symptoms we now call secondary trauma were judged to be "non-hackers;" to have "immature personalities" or more significant personality disorders (to the uninitiated, that means "crazee"). No therapist bothered to ask why all these people were crazy; they just blamed the victims and left it at that.

I gave up silence in 2003, when this idiotic war started. I've come to believe silence just enables people who think war is any kind of solution to anything. Apparently silence also enables excuses for people who think mass murder solves anything. But back to the small bit of good. The discussion that is following this despicable act has torn the curtain off, and I hope for good. War is toxic for everyone, including those who try to heal the minds and bodies torn in it.

It's that time of year

In our back yard, we have the mother of all catalpas. My estimate is that it is 73 feet tall (a very big catalpa is 40 feet tall) and is 11 ft. 3 in. in girth. When we give it appropriate food and water, it can be a very pretty tree. Its leaves are enormous, almost the size of tobacco leaves, so it provides a very dense summer canopy. Around July 4, it flowers out very prettily.

Fall is not its best time of year. Catalpa leaves don't offer a grand show of foliage colour. They just turn grey-brown and fall. As a flowering tree, it produces seed pods: large seed pods, resembling something like a long ethnic cigar. The stuff falls apart quickly and mulches nicely, otherwise it'd be an uninspiring mess. All this is on my mind because I spent part of the day raking, and another part joining the scrum at the town dump's leaf pile.

It had been my impression that native peoples smoked the leaves, much like tobacco. This may still prove true, but my evidence to date suggests that they smoked the seed pods, and that the seed pods are somewhat hallucinogenic. (Note: you have to drill down pretty far at this link to find this information.)

So, it's just as well this town frowns on open burning. If I set fire to a good-sized pile of catalpa leaves and pods, chances are that I'd get the whole neighbourhood stoned.

Five hours later

Warning: geek topic for self-reference.

A chore I saved for the end of the afternoon was to move the wireless router to the same room as the desktop machine. This allows us to do one-stop troubleshooting and to be extra green (and secure) by powering everything down at the end of the day. Going to take under an hour, right?

Right?

Yeah, right.

Once again, the culprit is our new HP printer. When I installed it, I followed the path of least resistance (it seemed) and selected the option of connecting the printer via a USB2 port. Nice but. The first but is that the printer is as possessive of its assigned port as a two-year-old is of a blanket. Second, XP does not care for printers being connected via USB2 ports and it too can become sulky.

I made a space for the router, decided which outlet to use, tested the phone line, and moved the router. That took about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, I had also to change CAT5 cables to a new and shorter one. That meant I had to disconnect the printer cable—because my fingers are too large to change CAT5 cables on this machine unless I unplug the adjacent USB2 cables.

This is the point at which I expected the printer to have the sulks. I was not disappointed. HP 6400 series printers come with built-in troubleshooting, but the troubleshooting logic doesn't function well in the case of a cable disconnection. Two reboots later, I had persuaded the troubleshooter that the printer was indeed connected.

Then I turned my attention to XP, and to persuading it that this was the same printer it has happily hosted for several months, and not some strange piece of hardware implanted by aliens.

In fairness, I did interrupt the process to cook and eat supper, so the time was probably more like 3 1/2 hours. Bruised and bloodied as I am, I'm emboldened to attempt the next step, which is changing to a wireless configuration. In theory, it should avoid these pitfalls.

Hmm...I seem to remember a Far Side cartoon that touched on this subject.

Elections, chiefly local

I have no comment about the alleged nationally significant stuff, other than that we have more proof here that the 24 hour news cycle generates its own news, just like certain geological formations generate their own weather.

I happened to be in Boston yesterday, and after repeating "non-resident" to poll solicitors for the 20th time, I would have paid generously for a button that said so. Apart from that, the benefit of living in a town when the area cities have their elections is that one gets to treat the whole thing as a spectator sport. I don't have a dog in any of these fights.

One area city is the most fun after the election, or used to be, because the city councilors adjourn to a particular local restaurant. There they continue the argument in a lubricated state, and someone is sure to throw a punch. It would be a shame if that tradition was lost. We should televise it and call it "ultimate extreme government."

Thoughts for the record

It helps to have pushy friends. The payback for the time I spent last year on a community college advisory panel is some aggressive promotion of my good self by such a person also involved in the panel process. This is good, since aggressive self-promotion isn't my forte.

Now here is a medical breakthrough that could have applications beyond its original clinical intention. Depends upon whether it deals with rejection that occurs outside the body or not.

The moon we have this week is the full beaver moon, and Sadie Hawkins Day is coming up on Saturday. Feel free to place those in your file of useless information.

I don't care what the weather forecast says, we do not use the S-word before its time around heah.

Good news of the day. I went to the unemployment office to file for my extended benefits, and the process took less than ten minutes. This adds 33 weeks of modified anxiety. If things don't improve, there's a state extension beyond that, and if Congress squares away, 20 more Federal weeks. And by that time I will be ready to be a Walmart greeter or assume some equally responsible position. This dreary prospect is why I continue to try on the retired label. Yech.

Opportunity knocks

I do believe I scent one of those career choices that are supposed to appear in hard times. We have speech writers and lawyers and spin doctors. What the world needs now, obviously, is a consultant in cover story management.

First we had the NWA pilots with the story a day gambit, until they fessed up to the worst possible sin: deliberate violation of regulations by using their laptops in the cockpit. They clearly needed help with their cover stories, and advice on coming up with one that would shift the blame off them. Although I have my eye on this career path, if you read the comments here, you'll see one suggesting carbon monoxide in the cockpit. Now that is an A-plus cover story!

Now we have the South Carolina assistant (or whatever) attorney general, age 66, caught in a car in a cemetery with sex toys, Viagra and an 18-year-old-stripper: in broad (if you'll pardon the expression) daylight. The cover story consultant would tell them to be sure they were paying their respects to (fill in the blank). The need only note the name on the nearest headstone and use it to fill in the blank, then describe the departed as a dear friend. Get that one down pat and it's end of story when the interruption happens.

Needless to say the woods would have been a much better choice for screwing around, but for that they will need the services of a choice advisor. Catbert, move over!

The indiscreet deceptions of job hunting

The alarm of my job-hunting compeers over the fact that I express opinions here would be cubed if they also knew that here, among other things, I

• discuss in detail a chronic disease that I live with, in ways that I hope could be clinically useful to somebody
• admit to being over 40; considerably so

Twice in the past, in interviews, I detected and ignored warning signs of age bias in interviews for freelance gigs, bias that took very little time to appear. The most immediate, and subtle one, I call "the look." This is body language from the interviewer that says they clearly expected someone at least 20 years younger and that they do not want an older worker.

HR departments and hiring managers read the same articles that older job-seekers read. They want neither a bad reputation nor a followup phone call from the interviewee's lawyer. Also, they may be under immediate pressure to fill this particular position. They don't ask the giveaway questions that we're all coached to answer, and you, the job-seeker, give suitable answers to the questions they do ask. You're hired, and life in hell begins as soon as you get your cubicle.

Companies afflicted with age bigotry (that's what it is, pilgrims) are unlikely to get as far as this blog. All but the most basic HR departments now have a background check subscription, through which they run everybody. When they do that, the second piece of information they find is age. If they're age bigots, the story ends there. All of the clever little dodges job-seekers have learnt to use over the past 25 years are useless. They don't need this information; they're not even supposed to ask for this information until they've hired you. It doesn't matter, because all they have to do is key your name into a security screening search engine and they have your age, right there between your name and address. I'm not making this up: I tried it recently.

Between this revelation, and those two uncomfortable gigs that wasted my time and the clients', I've reached one of my defining conclusions. Up to a point I'll play the hiring game but, if anyone crosses a line by word or by action, I'll be in their faces. Yes, I'm old. Suck it up, because I have. Yes, I live with a chronic disease. I have taken less sick time in the eight years I've had it than most people half my age. Unlike most of them, I know how to work through pain and be reasonably productive in spite of it. Unlike people afflicted with bigotry, I'm not sick all the time.

One of the three best bosses I've ever had was on a job I began about four years ago. When we started work together, he was 29 and I was 58. It is not age difference that is a barrier to understanding. I do not think timeworn formulas about cost and seniority and sickness are anything but excuses. It is that in some essential part of themselves, age bigots have not grown up. They are afraid of what seems like an upside-down relationship with older subordinates. Most of all, they see older workers as an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality, a thing to fear. Like most humans, they lash out at what they fear.

My 29-year-old boss did none of these things. We both knew my compensation related to my time with the company: my age meant nothing. He could see for himself that sick and well, I produced, and that I took less time off than my younger peers. Above all, he had enough confidence in himself to define the relationship purely in terms of supervisor and employee. I was never some sort of surrogate for his older relations or remembered authority figures. He wasn't afraid of his own mortality, so did not have any fear to project on to anyone.

It may be too much to expect the same thing in another job, but I hope not. As a boss, JB was the antithesis of age bigotry. If he could do it, there's no excuse for anyone else.

In this contest, at least a portion of us hold the upper hand. First, age bigots must, if they do not die, get older. By writing their fears into corporate conduct, they stand a very good chance of being treated as we now are treated...and not far in the future, either. Second, all busts end. The demographics, and the damage wrought to retirement incomes, both dictate that older workers will be a significant part of the workplace within five years. Age bigots will be obliged to face their fears sooner or later. Third, I just crunched some numbers at home. If we both retired tomorrow (which would be involuntary) there would be enough in the piggy bank to support us. No Caribbean cruises each winter, but we wouldn't be eating cat food either. In my experience age bigots tend to be assholes in other aspects of their management style. The reality of older workers with other income sources means that I and others like me will be calling a lot more shots when it comes to work-life balance. It's much harder to bully people who don't need your job to survive, and it will place a higher premium on imaginative and collaborative management styles that allow everyone to give the best they have to offer. And don't forget that a good part of our often maligned generation made life very miserable for Authority when we entered the stage. Many of us are prepared to be just as troublesome when we leave it.

The age bigots can enjoy their moment, but they should either change, or be preparing for future careers as tailgunners on dump trucks.