Scratches

Easy project-heh

2012-01-28T20:52:00.004Z

Today was the day to troubleshoot the landline phone connections in advance of installing a new--and likely our last--landline system. Things to keep in mind about this project.

When the phone line to this house was installed, Alexander Graham Bell was probably still living. There's hardware that allows one to work around antiques of this nature without having a new line brought in. Try explaining a problem of this sort to the typical eager geek in Radio Shack or any similar establishment: Blank stares.
In theory, the Navy taught me how to wire low-voltage communications systems. However that was over 40 years ago, and I wasn't very good at it.
The average do-it-yourself site or book rates this sort of project as "easy." So it is, in principle. What was seriously lacking was any sort of decent documentation. After a dozen or so tries with the hit-or-miss method, I succeeded in getting the router line hooked up, then hunted down worthwhile instructions. Guess what? With proper instructions, it is easy.

At any rate, we have phones and Internet again, and I didn't need a trip to the gym for the stair climber. I did about 60 stories on this project.

We'll discuss today's other project, removing cat barf from rugs, another time.

Straight flush?

2012-01-27T00:18:00.002Z

Nothing's sacred. Now, in Ohio, we have hoodlums (allegedly) stealing automatic toilet flushers. Crikey, turn your back and they steal your pipes, your wiring, even your penny jars for copper. Geez, who needs gold?

It did bring back a concept I used to observe in the IT world. I called these things geek traps. Geek traps are minor mechanical blips in the ordinary world that manage to attract an inordinate amount of attention from people who are well paid to do far more sophisticated things.

I well recall half a dozen software engineers standing around a toilet flusher--mechanical, I think it was. It had fallen prey to the ailment common to all such devices: once it began flushing, it wouldn't stop. This problem exercised over half a million dollars worth of IT talent for close to half an hour.

More recently, I've wondered if there are geek traps for surgeons, orthopedic surgeons in particular. The line between orthopedic surgery and This Old House can be vanishingly thin. Dentists too appear vulnerable to geek traps. In short, the smarter the male, the more likely he is to forget what he's paid to do and become a little boy in a sandbox.

Possibly this, as much as the scrap value of the toilet flushers, is what explains the appeal of this form of larceny.

A small profile in courage

2012-01-23T00:38:00.003Z

Let us offer a bow to Gabrielle Giffords, who has had the courage to resign from Congress to concentrate on her rehabilitation in the face of a year of media marshmallow fluff. Let us also give her a pass for holding onto a resolve to return to Congress. It will keep her going.

The odds are that she won't. I don't see the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) as closely as my daughter, who as a clinician deals with it daily. I just push the paperwork. My kid said once that the hardest part of her job was sitting down with families and explaining that their loved one would very likely never be the same person again. You have to deal with TBI to see past the hype, to understand the odds. A high-calibre bullet in the left hemisphere is a grave injury; today it takes exceptional surgical skills to save the victim of such a wound. Giffords' rehab has done wonders as well, to give her the skills she already has. One must keep trying, of course, but if this is all there is for her, it's far ahead of what many TBI patients can achieve. For me, the party of her successor is secondary just now.

This week we're presented with the full spectrum of TBI expectations. Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke has died of her brain injuries. Giffords has achieved an impressive range of skills, including the wisdom to resign from Congress. American competitive snowboarder Kevin Pearce is back on his snowboard.
That's what you can expect. It depends on a host of variables, not the puffery of broadcast journalists.

Here's to James

2012-01-21T02:06:00.003Z

We should declare January 21 James L. Petigru Day in South Carolina. For those who forget, Petigru was a South Carolina congressman who, in 1860, responded to secession with the words "South Carolina is too small for a republic, and too large for a lunatic asylum."

This comes back to the notion that Newt Gingrich's serial infidelity, with oak leaf clusters, seems to be working for the speaker rather than otherwise. I'm hardly the first person to observe that evangelical family values come to a screeching halt when it comes to marital fidelity, divorce and such-like.

So we have the rednecks cheering on Newt's infidelity, whilst they curse Captain Brylcreem's Cayman Islands bank accounts. Meanwhile the palaeo-Republicans, who have long since regretted the day they courted the evangelical nutters, are all for Mitt's offshore money and not too keen on Newt's industrial infidelity.

Petigru, wherever he is, must be laughing his arse off. His shade will be sorry when the clown circus moves on to Florida.

All at sea

2012-01-17T15:45:00.005Z

Some years back, I was active in the US Power Squadron*. Among the excellent courses I took were Piloting, Advanced Piloting and Cruise Planning. The focus of the first two was coastal navigation, and that skill also figured in the third. Each of these courses taught traditional methods of finding one's way at sea, as well as electronic tools. There was a consistent message in all three: don't become so dependent on electronic devices that you forget to see where you really are. (This is the nautical equivalent of always looking out the window as a last check on the weather.)

Evidence is growing that the captain and bridge officers of M/S Costa Concordia forgot this fundamental of modern navigation. Worse, they forgot it at the worst possible moment: when they were hotdogging a 114,000 ton ship through a narrow, shallow channel. It appears they had done this before. Apparently fishermen and others with local knowledge had registered protests of some kind, saying that the channel was too dangerous for a ship of that size.

It's in the worst nautical tradition to disregard local knowledge. Sooner or later your luck will run out. Apart from my own small-boat misadventures of this sort, I was once on a large ship that made its own rules entering Salem Harbour. We were a delegation of local reps who got to ride up from Boston aboard a modern British frigate that was part of an OpSail escort some years back. As someone who sailed these waters frequently, I had (and have) a pretty close knowledge of the approaches to Salem. There are three principal channels: one enters southerly, turns sharply to the north, then turns toward Salem again. This is favoured by big ferries, tour boats and tugboats. The second runs in to the port along the north side of Salem Sound, more or less straight. This is the preferred route for big ships.

The third enters between Childrens' (or Cat) Island and Baker's Island, and joins the southerly channel midway up the sound. Straight, yes, but very shallow, and not much used since the days of sail.

I assume and hope this ship, of 3000 tons or so, had a local pilot aboard. If so, he may have been hotdogging, may have wished to avoid the sharp turns in the southerly channel or the extra time needed to reach the northerly one. At any rate, whoever was on the bridge took us in by that channel, giving a splendid view of the ship to summer residents of Baker's Island and to the young campers on Childrens' Island. Concerned, I took a quick look at the ship's specs on the handout we all had, saw the draught, and went on deck.

It was close at that stage of the tide: close as in one lobster trap in midchannel would have snagged the ship's bottom. We were also going fairly fast; the slightest miscalculation would have torn out that ship's bottom and given the audience a show they didn't expect. The one difference between us and the Costa Concordia is that someone seems to have been looking where they were going.

This sort of idiocy happens all the time in recreational boating. It happens more than one would expect in commercial navigation and navies. It's instructive how fast both the ship owners and the authorities came down on the captain. Possibly the complaints generated by his previous recklessness had landed on fertile soil.

All one more reason I have no plans to take a cruise to anywhere in this universe.

*AKA the United States Sail and Power Squadron. If you recreate on the water, check them out. They have a basic boating course that's open to the public. Advanced courses for members attain very high skill levels for those interested.

Biology, comedy and politics

2012-01-14T17:20:00.005Z

It's my fervent hope that some life will remain in the GOP primary circus until March 6, when I can put my secret plan into action.

We lost what may have been the best political act since Dan Quayle when Michele Bachmann pulled the plug, or rather when someone powered her down. The item here does its best to be magisterial, but consider this quote from it:

The New York Times' Trip Gabriel reported, "People close to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mrs. Bachmann is often influenced by the last person she speaks with on an issue rather than maintaining discipline in communicating a message."

Commenters are occasionally spot on, and one thoughtful reader said that no matter what gloss you put on it, this and other revelations in the article could be summed up with the word idiot.

Lovers of political comedy now have two candidates to follow. Thanks to urban street talk, one of the funniest things to do on the Internet just now is to Google the word "santorum." It has been difficult at times to distinguish between the former Senator and the place this product originates. But the Interwebz has a life of its own, and the more hits santorum gets, the more entrenched the two meanings become. The comedy, while unintended, is certainly self-inflicted.

Close behind is newt. This candidate seems to have more tech-savvy supporters, for one begins to detect efforts to draw an online distinction between the candidate and a rather icky salamander of the same name:

I'll leave the zoology lessons for those better informed, for there's a simpler way to tell these creatures apart. The little salamander has principles.

If your day is looking dull, hit this newt link a few dozen times and frustrate the efforts of the Gingrich geeks to stay on message.

Well, sorry, but

2012-01-14T01:25:00.002Z

There's a reason for my negligence here. It's the usual one this time of year. The last time the subject came up was this afternoon, when I was feeling good enough to venture down to Boston for a beverage.r

Alas, I'm home and Mr Beast is being a nuisance. My brilliant narratives will have to wait for the next time my health and my leisure coincide. Cheer up, readers, for things could be worse.

You could have trigeminal neuralgia

Well damn it all

2012-01-08T01:45:00.003Z

Once again, Ms MA has struck a nerve, mentioning The Blogess, whose work I should have known before. Quite a while back on MA's site, I admitted my secret that shouldn't be a secret: that I spent much of my last two months in the Navy on a psychiatric ward. There: I said it. If you're the sort of sneaky shit who works in "human resources" and skulks around looking for dirt like this, you have it. Never mind: you weren't going to hire me anyway.

Everyone in shrinkdom likes labels. After a recent chat with my town veterans' officer, I dug around and found that I do indeed still have my medical review from those times. It's many pages of psychobabble that amounts to "crazee." Today, we'd call the chief diagnosis compassion fatigue, or something like it: anyway, the result of seeing too many burnt and broken bodies in too short a time and not understanding why you also weren't burnt and broken. In the broken logic of our world, reacting negatively to such experiences makes you mentally ill.

In theory, when the armed forces gave one a crazee label and a discharge to match, the VA was also supposed to give one a modest disability pension. As if somehow $130 a month (then) would compensate for sending people back into the world with a scarlet letter slyly inserted into their discharge papers. But most crazy Vietnam veterans didn't even get that. We got the curse, all right, but no benefits. Even so, we had to go through the procedure. A Corpsman on that psychiatric ward bluntly told us, "right now you'll get 30% (disability) if they cut off your head." That might be why a third of the country's homeless are veterans...but I digress.

In addition to the Navy's determination, I discovered I still had the VA's from 40 years ago. It made up in brevity for the prolix pomposity of the Navy, saying pretty much "no." And why? Because one's problem was "nerves."

It is interesting how that 19th century dismissal is still troubling. Today, the VA is trying to wipe out some of those primitive findings and do right by veterans of my time, who have joined the Korean war vets in the ranks of the forgotten. The veterans' officer brought this up as part of this effort. The question is whether I could go through all that again, so many years after. Yes, it might get me some degree of health care, but the first experience left me with a lasting humiliation and a suspicion that the emotional cost of that care might be too high. I don't think I'm enough of a hero for the cause of mental illness to do all that again.

I don't exactly bay at the moon, but I leave the skylight shade open when the moon brightens the night. She keeps depression and madness at bay. Perhaps it is for her that somebody chose silver as a ribbon for those who do what they can to keep mental illness at arm's length: otherwise those ribbons would be black.

Another sign of age

2012-01-04T00:57:00.002Z

If one is of a certain age, one recalls when there was a lot of chrome-plated steel on the outside of cars. Especially bumpers. (One also remembers when bumpers actually protected cars, but never mind for now.) Chrome-plated steel bumpers, being close to the road, lived a hard life in northern states with salty winter highways.

At that time, urban legend had it that Coca-Cola could be used as an agent to dissolve the rust that bubbled up through the chrome. I never tried this, but I thought of it when i read Pepsi's defence of Mountain Dew.

It's an ingenious piece of lawyering, suggesting that the plaintiff couldn't possibly have found a dead mouse in his Dew because it would have been dissolved into a substance very similar to, say, bear snot. However I'm with the author of the linked story: this doesn't increase my already limited interest in drinking Mountain Dew.

What I want to know is if Dew can clean chrome?

Concerning Wegman's

2011-12-29T23:47:00.005Z

For lo these many years, longing for Wegman's has been the emotional state that distinguishes those raised in, or educated in, upstate New York. When my daughter first went to college there, it was over two semesters before I got a hint what this was about. We asked and she brought us there.

For lunch: a good lunch. This would make perfect sense if one did not know that Wegman's is a supermarket. A huge supermarket. A squeaky-clean supermarket with employees who look like they enjoy their work, and good groceries at reasonable prices. In upstate New York's larger college towns, students hardly have to leave their Wegman's except to attend class. Some hardly do.

From the time I saw the Ithaca Wegman's, I knew New England supermarkets were in deep shit if the New Yorkers brought their concept here. They have and they are.

The first one is in Northborough, MA, and that's the worst I can say about it. The location is cool if you live anywhere from Framingham due west to Worcester, unless you're westbound on Route 9 and have to do a five-mile u-turn to get to the exit. Also it's over ten miles from the nearest college, so unlike the New York uber stores, the Northborough one isn't open 24 hours a day.

In their native habitat, Wegman's stores come in a variety of sizes, from maybe Super Stop & Shop size to something about the size of a small New England town. (When my kid was in grad school in Rochester, she and her peeps varied their shopping to take advantage of this variety. She also swears there's nothing in CA to match it.)

The Northborough store falls into the small town category. Just for starters, it has a produce section nearly as large as the whole Salem Market Basket: large, fresh, varied. Excellent meat and produce section...even fish...although I'm the sort of seafood snob who thinks Northborough is too far inland for fresh fish.

The typical giant Wegman's has at least two delis: one or more for the deli food you're going to eat in the on-site restaurant (unless you go for Italian, Asian or vegetarian, each of which has a separate line) and one for take-home. And, oh yes, there are groceries of the more conventional sort, all reasonably priced. Obviously, the profits here are in volume.

And, OMFG, there's a package store! It's bigger than the best packy in my area. I can only suppose this happens in Northborough because there isn't a lot else of the sort out there.

So, now when the kid comes home, she won't have to drive to Syracuse to satisfy her yen for a Wegman's sub. Word is the chain is eyeing a Chestnut Hill location for the next MA store. This may be one of the normal-supermarket size ones, so the process bears watching. If you're a stubborn New Englander who insists that supermarkets must smell like country stores, you may not like Wegman's. If you want to see what this business can really be, you will.

Well, isn't that interesting.

2011-12-18T13:22:00.002Z

Over the last eight days, the score is Beast 6, me 2. Good news is that I've still had only one episode a day. The bad news is that the symptoms are definitely changing and not for the better.

For one thing, I've come to appreciate the clinical description, "lancinating pain." I still think it is not so much an electric shock sensation as it is that of having a nail driven into one's head at three-second intervals. I've had electric shocks and nails driven into my limbs during my career as clumsy do-it-yourselfer, so I have a basis of comparison.

For another, the distribution of pain can be different and random. I had one episode in which the pain concentrated in the temporal region and grew more intense, instead of diffusing. This would be fine except that the pain level was in the 7s and approaching 8. In another, at the same level the pain appeared in the Gasserian ganglion and diffused downward into the trigeminal root, the main highway of the nerve to the spinal cord. This used to happen before we had properly adjusted my meds,, but not since. Pain in the root is rather unique.
Otherwise it's been same old same old.

The adventure continues.

Quick comments

2011-12-16T23:52:00.002Z

OK, the Beast has been winning this week. Things have been shifting over the last couple of years from triggers fired off by cold breezes to triggers fired off by chewing.

Before Tegretol, people starved to death from trigeminal neuralgia. I begin to understand that. It's tough enough when you have drugs that take the worst edge off it. Tonight I tried eating: bad idea.

And of course, I have to go pretend to have a good time at Christmas festivities.
Let's hear it for egg nog.

TN notes 2011

2011-12-10T14:14:00.004Z

As with some similar items in the past, this one is mostly for me, and interested parties, to track the progress of my trigeminal neuralgia.

This year, the preliminaries have been different. Beginning in August or so, I experienced the usual warning pains pretty regularly, at a 2-3 level*. Now, however, I'm getting isolated stabs usually associated with Typical TN. That is, there would be a sudden attack of lancinating pain that lasted a few seconds, then subsided. This would happen one or twice a day, twice a week to start with, more often as fall went on. No doubt a relatively mild fall has helped. These attacks were confined to my chief trigger location in the temporal branch of the nerve. Probably about 4-5 on the pain scale, though they never lasted as much as 30 minutes. Had they done so, I'd rate them higher. Responded well to 0.5 mg of Clonazepam (I've left the 0.25mg dose far behind).

The first real episode as I've known them before was Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving. This was the first to follow my past pattern, with initial pain descending the temporal branch to the Gasserian ganglion, but no further. This reached a 7. Since I had the day off, I was able to retreat to bed. Required 1.0 mg of Clonazepam to get the Beast caged. For the next fortnight, it rattled the bars more insistently, with the isolated attacks. I've begun all the defence mechanisms--spending most of my time indoors, being careful what and how much I eat, drinking little, etc.

Yesterday (12/9) a full-blown episode appeared, inconveniently, at work. By full blown I mean the attacks repeated about once every 10 to 15 seconds, blowing past the Gasserian ganglion, descending the maxillary and mandibular branches, and threatening the trigeminal stem. Pain level 7 to 7-plus. I weighed up pain vs disorientation and went with the latter, taking 0.5mg Clonazepam. I figured--correctly--that this would contain the breakthrough whilst allowing me to function, since this was a half-day. The pain returned at home as the Clonazepam wore off. Took another and spent most of the afternoon in bed.

Before last winter, one benefit of Clonazepam had been that while it sometimes took as long to contain breakthroughs as breakthroughs naturally lasted (30-45 minutes), the drug left one fairly pain-free. Last winter, this often didn't happen, and so far it's not happening now. My exacerbations, untreated, are followed by a pain hangover lasting hours, usually until the next episode. It's much the same with Clonazepam now. One drops from a pain level of 7 to a 3, but one is only pain-free when asleep. Sleep usually resets the dial, and the day starts, at least, with little or no pain.

At any rate, the Beast is getting out of hand again, pretty much on schedule. This is a fascinating disorder. It helps to catalogue the signs and symptoms, because I'm long past the point where whining about it does anything useful.

As a side note, I was a skeptic about "seasonal affective disorder" almost since they named it. The coincidence of short dark days with my dueling this nasty disorder may alone account for my black moods, but I'm willing to be open-minded now about SAD.

*Note: one measurement most pain scales apply is whether NSAIDs and other mild analgesics relieve pain at a given level. When applying the scales to TN, it's well to remember that NSAIDs bounce off it like cannon balls off Old Ironsides, and that opiates might as well be sugar pills for all the good they do. Even Clonazepam's benefits have a predictable lifespan, as do those of the other mainstays I take, Tegretol and Neurontin.

This n that

2011-12-04T14:03:00.007Z

The most interesting part of the Cain "suspension" announcement was the view of his wife in the background. That brief flash of teeth wasn't a "good wife" smile, I think. That was the smile of a woman who now has her husband's cojones in a lock box.

Loved Jeff Jacoby on what a nasty man Barney Frank is. Once again, when reactionaries turn crybaby, I'm reminded of an old playground taunt: "you can dish it out, but you can't take it." Barney certainly dished it out, but he could always take it.

Note to Bob Kraft. Now do you see why it would have been smart to help Foxboro get its electricity back at the same time you got the juice on at the stadium after Irene etc.? If Greater Boston is going to have one of these damfool things, I'd like it at Suffolk Downs. Get all the yeggs in one basket, you might say. The neighbourhood can't get any worse, and everyone already has a talent for dodging bullets.

It gets different

2011-11-29T02:44:00.003Z

My co-worker, who is taking courses toward a health care certificate, asked me to help choose a disorder for her next paper. Naturally I chose trigeminal neuralgia, since I'm already rather well posted up on the subject.

And a good thing, too. It's made me go back and review a number of clinical papers I've bookmarked. I had shoved to the back of my mind the progressive nature of the disorder, and now I'm reading that stuff up. Those not interested in med-speak can tune out now.

Yes, I had a "relatively" mild period of exacerbation last winter. On the other hand, I haven't been entirely pain-free since then. That has included unexpected, momentary attacks of lancinating pain. Mostly, I'd just been thinking of how much worse they would be without meds.

The day after Thanksgiving brought the first crumpling episode of the winter exacerbation. Today brought a second: not too bad but you wouldn't want it.
Now my homework, in behalf of my fellow worker, reminds me that these indications suggest intensification. That is, the meds aren't working as well; I will soon (like tonight) need more, and I will soon be at the threshold where efficacious becomes toxic. I also got to re-read the disturbing shortcomings of the surgeries meant to relieve (but not cure) this disorder.

Hobson's choice. I will be happy to share this literature with all those who think it's just wonderful that my generation may get to live another 30 years. Batshit.

Why do they do that?

2011-11-27T21:44:00.007Z

This is a small item compared to some things of the same stripe. We were leaving our Turkey Day venue (in Maine, if it matters). The lobby here, which is close to the water, sends a blast of cool air into a warm interior any time the door opens. Just the thing for someone with trigeminal neuralgia triggered by such breezes. Bitter experience has taught me to wrap up far from the door here, no matter the outside temp.

So, I'm buttoned up with parka and bomber hat, flaps down, before turning the corner into the wind tunnel. Behind me, a middle-aged woman brightly chirps, "well, you sure look ready for this winter weather!"

I turned around and said, evenly, "unfortunately, I have to cover up like this due to a neurological problem." Then I turned and went out without waiting for the reaction.

What prompts people who appear otherwise civilised to volunteer such stupid and insensitive remarks? I know at least one member of the audience here has had more than her share of such comments.

I remember an even worse display from my Revere House days. We were having a staff seminar on dealing with people with disabilities*, and doing it whilst open to the public. I had asked the presenter how difficult it was to navigate a wheelchair over Boston's quaint brick pavements. He suggested I take the wheelchair and try it, which I did. I turned into public view, and a female visitor came up and started gushing at me about how brave I was to take on the Freedom Trail. So help me, she was talking baby talk.

Inside the adjacent admission booth, watching the whole display, was a staff member who herself had some mobility problems. After the woman had spent all her store of gush and went inside, the staff member came out of the booth. She said "I didn't really think this programme was necessary. Now I do."

I didn't understand the condescension then and I don't now. For the record, the Beast didn't arrive to spoil Thanksgiving again. Paid a visit the day after.

-----------------------
*I have my share, so let's call a fucking spade a spade, eh?

more bias

2011-11-23T12:20:00.003Z

The CBS news crawl just told me that the Occupy Movement has cost local taxpayers "an average of" $13 million. How is it we have never heard how much Tea Party demonstrations, which come complete with armed second amendment "defenders" cost local taxpayers?

This doesn't even touch the meaninglessness of the word "average" in this context.

Laugh, or cry?

2011-11-22T23:28:00.001Z

This one will die a quick death as topicality swings its scythe:
Herman Cain visits with Jesus?

OMFG

Thoughts I thunk

2011-11-21T23:59:00.002Z

I commented over supper that campus police, such the geniuses of UC Davis, are the bottom of the law enforcement food chain. I've reflected that isn't totally fair. Armed mall cops and similar security guard types are lower. The rationalisers are doing their little dance about these Weight Watchers dropouts being "surrounded." It's clear they spent more time on donut patrol than on training for nonviolent protests, so perhaps they did find it challenging to simply step over a rank or two of kneeling protesters, or fit between the standing people behind them.

That argument evaporates on the reflection that during the Occupy movement, we've noted two things. First, that today's cops seem to get orgasmic pleasure in dressing up in their riot gear. They'll put it on to put a parking ticket on your grandmother's car*. Second, they'll reach for the bear spray (that's what this is, friends: bear spray) with no provocation at all. The UC Davis Keystone Kops are just the latest to fall to these weaknesses. I have stayed away from nonviolent protests for several years, ever since I discovered that dealing with reactionaries at short range now makes me violently angry. But the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, and my daughter has taken a few shifts with her city's Occupy demonstration. One is equally proud and apprehensive.

Speaking of Occupy, isn't it interesting that Mayor Bloomberg's police have had Jose Pimentel under surveillance for two freakin years, and they simply just had to arrest him now, a week after cops wielding pepper spray descended upon Occupy Wall Street? When Deadeye Dick Cheney ran the White House, we used to call this a Weapon of Mass Distraction. Apparently the lesson isn't lost on Hizzoner.

Late news has it that the Not-so-Super-Committee has, in its ineptitude, advanced the cause of Social Security and virtually guaranteed the death of the Bush tax cuts the Republicans were so desperate to protect This bears watching. Oft evil will shall evil mar. Or, ROTFLMAO.

-------------------------------------------
* If it was my grandmother, they would have needed it.

Now that is living history

2011-11-20T23:44:00.003Z

Back when I worked at the Paul Revere House, one of the frustrations we frequently encountered was explaining why the house was the sole survivor of 17th century Boston. The shock line was to point out that when the Revere House was saved, it wasn't the only one.

Tourists--and gullible house buyers in olde New England towns like mine--seem to think that 17th century houses exist under some sort of protective bubbles. There isn't a whole lot of thought apparent about the risks houses face. Some visitors asked about Virginia. Yes, there buildings in Virginia older than in New England: made of brick or stone. The wooden structures mostly were eaten by termites. There are also older buildings in New Mexico. But let's get back to New England.

Of all hazards, fire and obsolescence tie as hazards in New England. Much of 17th century Boston had either burnt or been replaced with more fashionable (and durable) buildings by the time Paul Revere moved to North Square in the later 18th century. This is true in much of the early settlement area of New England. The assertion of a real estate broker isn't enough to date a house. Only a fraction of the dwellings bearing a 16-whatever date on a plaque or chimney really deserve it.

Plimoth Plantation, which has been pushing the envelope of first-person historic interpretation for over 30 years, has now shown the gullible that there was no bubble. We gather that when one of their buildings caught fire yesterday, the causes were purely accidental...but an accident that replicated those of the 17th century with nice precision. Props to them; they reopened as soon as it was safe. I hope, I expect, that they are incorporating the accident into their interpretation. A windy day; a fire that throws sparks into a flammable roof: that and the dictates of fashion have all but obliterated the built environment of early New England.

Ze bun is ze lowest form of wheat

2011-11-17T00:21:00.002Z

Wordplay as it crosses my mind.

I thought I'd found a really stable job, but then I discovered I was allergic to horses.

But now, to other news....

2011-11-16T00:19:00.003Z

Bloggers the world over are exercised over Herman Cain having hired someone from Rick Perry's strategy team to help him bone up on foreign policy. They are micro-dissecting Mr Sandusky's aptly-named denial statement to Bob Costas. There are numerous other profound questions to discuss.

With the blogospheric minority, I'm watching the Adventure of the Downing Street cat. P.M. Cameron is coming nobly to Larry's defence in the face of the characteristic idiocy of the British media. I would say he's resisting the pressure to throw Larry under the bus, if that metaphor weren't nastily literal in the case of hoomans and kittehs.

The problem? Larry, brought on staff as a mouser, apparently had his paws full. The 300-or-so-year-old Prime Minister's house seems to have A street kitteh by trade, Government expected he could stay a mouse invasion on his own. Staff verified three kills. But the mouse that cause the stir was one he missed: which was spotted at a state dinner.

Oh the outrage (real or feigned)! Was Larry asleep on watch? Well of course he was: he's a cat. He needs his 16 hours of catnapping. There are rumours of a girlfriend. Well, if no one clipped his kitty bollocks, and if there's a lady cat within hail, of course he has a girlfriend.

As a cat person currently afflicted with a notoriously inept mouser, I'm proud of the P.M. for sticking up for Larry. Let's give the kitteh a break...and maybe some reinforcements.

Oh God

2011-11-13T00:39:00.003Z

So, God told Herman Cain to run for President. But, he also told Rick Perry to run. And Michele Bachmann. And who knows who is next?

We're told the incredible shrinking evangelicals all understand this kind of talk. However, the nation's first Republican reduced this rhetorical flourish to its essentials:

"In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time."

Of course, God could just be doing this for the same reason many people are following the Republican campaign: for laughs*.

-----------------------------------------
* Like the Onion did.

Veterans' Day Grumpiness

2011-11-11T23:42:00.003Z

Must have something to do with going out to hoist a couple with the Harrumpher.

It's Veterans' Day: the second day of the year on which it's now practically required to salivate over Our Heroes. The other 363 days you can ignore them (specially if they're not veterans of the current conflicts) or come up with the latest clever excuse to avoid giving them such props as day-to-day dignity, jobs, recognition of the after-effects of war, etc.

At the behest of my local veterans' officer I opened up my military file to see whether I had my medical board and original VA determination. I do. The latter still makes me flinch and avoid re-opening the case. "Nerves." Isn't that a nice 19th century diagnosis? Do I want to go through that again?

Look, it's too late for me. But it just breaks my heart that we have to have the same damn shit dished up to today's veterans that was being dished up in my time. Today's veterans aren't just figures on a screen to me: I've met some of them. We have more in common than not.

So thanks for the thanks...40 years late, but thanks. Just don't call me a hero.

The Penn is mightier than what?

2011-11-10T23:13:00.004Z

I have to polish my blog creds by commenting on the miserable child abuse scandal at Penn State.

1) The University Trustees will be saving a packet by firing Joe Paterno. Imagine how much pension has accrued to someone who has been on the payroll since the battle of Gettysburg. I haven't heard the Trustees say a word about channeling those savings to something like a fund for the victims. What? I SAID, A FUND FOR THE VICTIMS....

2) Other people for whom life could suck in the aftermath of this dirty mess #1: the 90 percent or so of Penn State students who did not riot, throw rocks at reporters, overturn news trucks, etc. Look carefully at the video of the riots. Note the darkness in the background where the crowd ends. I looked, because I've been there for this sort of Tonypandy. It must be very humiliating to be a non-rioting Penn State student.

3) Fortunately, I believe it's a few weeks ahead of the dreaded Early Decision date for high school seniors. It would truly suck to have committed to Penn State, then have this sleaze bomb explode. One wonders what this will do to next year's Penn State admissions generally.

In unrelated news, I can't even watch Rick Perry's senior moment without cringing. It doesn't matter how much I dislike him and all of the clowns on that bus. Meltdowns like that unite everyone of a certain age.

War of the Worlds

2011-11-09T23:59:00.003Z

We have all survived another fortnight of comedy posing as news. The best, one might say, was saved for last: today's "emergency test alert."

Someone must have done much costly homework to determine what is obvious to almost anyone familiar with broadcast and cable media. If you want to test an emergency test alert, the best time to do it is Wednesday at 2 p.m. Today, there are almost certainly more viewers at 2 a.m. on Wednesday.

It follows that the endless drumbeat of warnings was utterly necessary, because the viewing (or listening) audience on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. is about as clueless as audiences come. During my numerous periods of employment hiatus, I once occasionally turned to afternoon TV or radio for useful items like news or weather. One can find both on radio, but not TV. It's a miasma of soap operas, wannabe talk shows, and infomercials, especially those targeted at people over 80. It's hard to imagine an audience more vulnerable to panic. I haven't taken advantage of any media very much over the last few days, so if the social networks were as swamped with "only a test" messages, I may have missed it. And yet, as sources said in the link, it makes as much or more sense to push such tests out online.

One would think that some of the geriatric audience would remember the lesson of the original "War of the Worlds." One could reasonably expect that many of the denizens of social media have no idea that a thing ever happened. They can hardly doubt that it could happen. One might say the Mercury Radio Theatre went viral.

East vs West

2011-11-03T01:05:00.008Z

When we first went to Yosemite, we heard an experienced hiker comment on the chief difference between Eastern trails and Western trails. In the west, he said, trails wind up steep mountainsides in a series of switchbacks. This happened because of the amount of mule traffic, necessary because when you climb Western mountains, you're likely to be climbing a long, long way. In the East, especially the Northeast, the trails are good Protestant ethic trails that frequently go more or less straight up the mountain, regardless of terrain. Sort of like this:

Likewise, Eastern trails are likely to go straight down the mountain, disregarding whatever's in the way, like this:

Mules frown on this sort of terrain. It is only humans of a certain temperament who walk over this stuff voluntarily. This, said the hiker at Yosemite, is what makes a big mountain out of a small one in the East, and helps to make Eastern mountains good training for Western ones.

Now, this guy was hitting on an attractive woman when we overheard this, so he did skip a few items. One is that a climb from 1500 feet above sea level to 3000 feet above sea level, which we were doing on this Mount Monadnock hike, allows one to catch one's breath and recover one's base heart rate fairly quickly. Not so when climbing, say, from 7000 feet to 8500 feet. I know there are devices that allow athletes to duplicate high-altitude conditions when training at low altitudes, but they don't seem to have shown up at my gym. Nevertheless, that travelling hiker's observations allow us to take an optimistic view of our preparations for the next Yosemite adventure.

New spin on an old protest

2011-11-01T22:47:00.006Z

The farce that is the so-called Super Committee is lurching in predictable directions. That's to say, we can't possibly tax the rich and end foreign military adventurism, and bring the deficit under control where it spun out of control. Instead, they say, let's do what the private sector has been doing for 30 years: treat commitments to older Americans, to which they have contributed all their lives, as mere scraps of paper.

Let me put one thing on the table. I have no problem with edging up the retirement age. (Mine is 66, not 65, because it's already happened. D'uh.) I see no impediment either to continuing to move up the maximum contribution level, or even (horrors!) eliminating the ceiling. There I differ with AARP, which has rather muddied the distinction between continuing a steady reform process and trashing the whole system. Trouble is, it sounds like all the talk of dumping Social Security and Medicare has infected the Super's deliberations.

The "die-in" has a longish history, going back to the Vietnam era. Properly stage-managed, it has always been an effective form of protest, typically aimed at wars and such.

My modest proposal is for the generation that began by going out to end war and stuff to check out in the same way. If the Supers effectively eliminate Medicare and Social Security, then let's think. Without Social Security of Medicare, most of us won't be able to afford health care and many of us won't be able to afford food, clothing and shelter. We can't work full-time, or beyond the clerical or retail level, because the age bigots don't want us in the office.

The capitalists and their Republican lapdogs want those of us in this fix to go out and die in the nearest ditch without frightening the horses. Suppose we don't. Suppose we hop a few buses, go to Washington, and die on the Capitol steps. I mean actually die. No too hard. Without health insurance*, if my meds run out suddenly, I have two or three days to live. That's enough time for the bus ride, to get out a press release, and to choose a photogenic spot on Capitol Hill. Time also for a terse, effective sign to explains what's up. Multiply that by 10,000 or so and you have quite a demonstration. Are the Capitol police up to removing 10,000 bodies?

In saner times, one would expect that even the threat of thousands of citizen deaths as a consequence of insane political posturing would cool a few jets.
I'm not betting on it. I think I'll take the train instead of the bus: so far no one has suggested eliminating Amtrak's excellent senior discounts.

If the Committee is indeed Super, somebody needs to get the kryptonite out of the meeting room.

*
---------------------------------------------------
Already, I've discovered that Medicare Part D doesn't cover my dernier resort, Klonapin. I won't die suddenly when it cuts off: unfortunately.

When I was a boy and other dull stuff

2011-10-31T22:36:00.003Z

Where I was born and edjumacated, they had 22 inches of snow over the weekend. I won't say "that's nothing: when I was a boy we had to trick or treat on July 4 to keep from getting snowed out." Because it ain't true. My town was the flatlands by New Hampshire standards. It was cold on October 31 evenings more often than not. It did snow once or twice, but nothing like 22 inches...nothing like two inches.

Watching the blundering utilities try to spin their third inept response to emergency in eight months does raise an intriguing question or two. First, is this their idea of lobbying against reforms that would enable communities to run their own municipal utilities? Second, is this supposed to be a GOP demonstration of the always-superior efficiency of the private sector? Or third, should we just say "thanks for the yucks?"

Speaking of yucks, there's Herman Cain's denial du jour. But seriously, I think the denial is more plausible than his tax plan.

In just a few minutes, I can ethically turn off the porch light and pig out on the remaining candy.

Deja news

2011-10-27T23:25:00.005Z

More and more, I've noticed that coverage of the Occupy movement is a step into the WABAC machine. Destination is, say 1968. So is the coverage...status quo prejudices and all.

I make almost no exceptions to the observation.* I follow Tom Wolfe in thinking that nearly all media exist to defend the established order. There is a spectrum of sorts. Media that wear their conservatism on their sleeve (q.v. Fox and the Boston Herald) are obvious in their contempt for Occupy's challenge and its people. (The Tea Party, of course, has been exempt from such negativity.) Centrist and left-leaning enterprises have been more guilty of benign neglect of the story, and to some extent of retailing stereotypes of protest.

We'll see what happens. It is a world where McLuhan's observation has been eclipsed. The medium now is all. On the other hand, it's a world where the rage of the people has, in the past year, shown a promising capacity for outrunning and embarrassing the media's cultural strictures. That is the newer phenomenon and my money's on the new.

* I followed a Facebook link to a Mother Jones story and got severely stuck in a loop demanding I subscribe. Capitalism has its tentacles eveerywhere.

Slow output

2011-10-26T00:56:00.002Z

The actual hiking is interfering with writing about hiking. Since I'm way behind, I'll satisfy myself with the observation that sending John Lackey for Tommy Johns surgery is an adequate, although expensive, way to keep the SOB out of circulation next year. Both that, and Theo's inauguration in Chicago, come on the the 25th anniversary of the Buckner Ball. If you want to make something of that, you're too late.

I want to know if the Cubs are going to feed Theo stewed kid as a reminder to go after the goat.

Once in a while...

2011-10-12T23:11:00.003Z

,,,I find myself on the side of the online commenters. The tale of the witless family who became so panicked in a seven-acre cornfield maze that they called 911has elicited actual humour and wit from a segment of the population chiefly known to grunt. That is nearly as astounding as the story itself.

I'll cut only a small bit bit of slack. Maybe one has to be country-raised to be able to walk into a cornfield at dusk and know how to walk out again: namely, pick a direction and walk. The easy walk, of course, is between the rows. It can also be the longest way out. Most farmers up my way plowed and planted the long way, so it was nothing to have a cornfield 200 yards wide and two miles long; even in New England. However, this is a seven acre field: that's about 500 by 600 feet, about half a city block. From the middle, one could walk five minutes in any direction and be out. Anyone could, that is, but people who might well get lost in their own living room. (Be sure to follow the link and take note of where in the field these people actually were.)

Here, next door to hysterical Salem, it is already the crazy season. Danvers, where the cornfield maze lies, is not only equally infected by seasonal nuttiness, it's where the witchcraft delusion actually happened. Hmm.

Those old names

2011-10-11T00:21:00.007Z

Somewhere in these musings there may be some snarky comments about the origins of some so-called old Native American names. The name in play today has no such pretensions. The Wapack Trail, and the range it follows of the same name, is a contraction nearing its 90th birthday. The features run roughly north-south. It begins in the south, from Mount Watatic in Ashburnham, MA, to Pack Mount Monadnock*, in Peterborough, NH. One way, it's something over 21 miles, with a couple of thousand feet total climb (one goes down as well as up). From a distance (Monadnock) and a slightly higher altitude it looks like this:

So the name lacks ingenuity. It was coined in an inn in the 1920s. Ken Burns notwithstanding, we'll assume they had nothing but coffee to lubricate their creative faculties during Prohibition.

Although this is on my spouse's native sod, we've never done the Wapack. Its chief appeal has always been to hard core hiking and back country skiing groupies. However, last week we said "yes" to Em's proposal that we go back to Yosemite. Since we have a mere 11 months to get into shape, it seemed like time for an alpha test. We chose the Wapack section running south from NH 101 in the general direction of New Ipswich.

When one is on a one-way trail, the art of back-timing becomes very important. Recalling a Yosemite occasion when back-timing didn't go over so well, I got ironclad commitments to stop when we could still get back.

If one bones up on the route from something like Maptech Mapserver, one encounters a bright shining lie. Somewhere along the line, they moved the damn thing. The trail once went merrily up the slopes of the former Temple Mountain ski area, then followed valleys and contour lines along the ridgeline for several miles. Now the trail climbs each rise on the ridgeline, including two considerable peaks. Fortunately, everything is well marked, with blazes as well as the sweat of its hikers.

It's no wonder the groupies kind of keep this thing a secret. It's a lovely walk in the woods. The added climbs somewhat add to the delight. The tourist toys are totally absent; so are the privies. Despite the somewhat brutal peak climbs, hikers share the trail with mountain bikers. There seemed to be adequate mutual courtesy.

That was the weekend before last. Obviously we survived, ready for more, because yesterday it was back to Monadnock. Here we have another allegedly and perfectly apposite translation, which has morphed into a technical geological term: also the holy mountain of southwestern New Hampshire.

But this was not an occasion for my spouse, reared in view of the mountain, to worship it. We were there for a conditioning climb with an elevation gain of 1500 feet. (not much, you say? Go thou and do likewise.) We went up our standard route, the Cascade Link to the Pumpelly Trail. We were warned at the base that the Link was "wet." Well yes: actually, it seemed as if the mountain was leaking.

Observe the scenic flowing brook to my spouse's left. That is the trail. The State Park encourages hikers to stay in the trail no matter what, to avoid environmental damage, but there were moments that called for exceptions.

All of the lower sections were sodden, and all but the highest of the trail's six scrambles more nearly resembled waterfalls. This confirmed us in our choice of return routes. We'd never been on the Red Dot and so fulfilled our curiosity. It's busy, ledgy, and this day was also wet.

This was also no day to linger on or near the summit (we stopped about a quarter mile away and 200 feet below the summit), even though it was one of those legendary days on which one could see from Boston to central Vermont. The price of admission for that was temperatures hovering around freezing and a Force 8 gale. As we ate lunch I saw the inevitable naive young person clambering up in jeggings and a royal blue tank top. I supposed her skin would match her top in a few minutes.

Satisfactory trip. Our total height gain was nearer 1600 than 1500 feet, and we covered 5.2 miles in just under 5 hours, breaks included. And we're (sort of) mobile. If the weather cooperates, we should either do a slightly longer trip of the Wapack variety or a 2000 foot climb before winter drives us to his and her Stairmasters. Then we have to pick it all up again in spring and get ready in earnest for the Big Yo.

-----------------------------------
* If "Monadnock" means "mountain that stands alone," how does one account for Pack Monadnock, since it stands not alone, but at one end of a range of hills over 20 miles long? Monadnock may actually be Abenaki for " that big hill over there." Pack Monadnock might be "that other big hill over there."

Guess I can't do this

2011-10-07T23:03:00.003Z

A couple of days ago, Mass Equality asked for people to share their school bullying stories. So fine, I have a corker. I thought about it and started to offer my story.

It's still in my drafts file because, so far, I haveon't been able to tell the story as it should be told in this context. I've told some of it before, some of it here. But never all of it. It's one thing to summarise what happened. It's another to reveal the very loaded nickname stuck on one by the bullies. And it's another to admit to the barely controlled rage that I live with more than half a century after the fact. I had a vivid reminder of that today. Three of us leaving a modest collation were unwillingly drawn into a street confrontation that didn't involve us. In such situations, my brain automatically identifies an aggressor in such a situation as a bully, and prepares me to respond very, very violently to the provocation. It may be fortunate that the would-be aggressor in this situation backed off.

I would like to tell my story, simply because it might help some young person to bear up under treatment that is, indeed, unspeakable. It just doesn't seem possible to muster the necessary separation.

Centre of attention

2011-10-05T22:00:00.003Z

Time and more to add my flood tale to the mix.

Lucky me: Tuesdays I work afternoons, so I just rolled over when the thunder and lightning showed up. When I finally got up, the worst was over, but my spouse pointed out the roof leak in the back bedroom. This defect is something of a weather prophet, since it only leaks under extreme conditions. Thus we knew, before anyone announced a figure, that we had had four inches of rain in under two hours.

The cellar was not so bad. We have one corner, yet untiled, which is the habitat of useful junk. There was just enough water to turn some of the useful junk into useless junk.

But now we turn to my workplace. Although the office sits atop one of Salem's highest hills, the file room next to my office has always shown a talent for attracting leaks. I arrived expecting the worst, but was pleased to find my carpet dry and the leaks not so bad.

Except except except.... Early in the morning, there was enough leaky water to interrupt power very briefly. That short interruption was enough to set off the backup battery alarm.

The backup battery is a noble idea for networks. Trouble is, many of the associated alarms don't have the mother wit to SHUT UP after the emergency is over. The geeks who build these things seem to take a fiendish delight in pitching the alarms at the outer limits of human hearing. Our backup battery alarm was running when I arrived at work early yesterday afternoon. It was running when I got there this morning. It was still running when I left. It is still running in my head, with tinnitus that is becoming quite impressive. It will probably be running when I go in tomorrow, unless someone takes the battery out and shoots it. The tinnitus may last longer.

This probably doesn't rank with the lake at Peabody Square, and the ponds in many other places, but I submit that it is collateral damage.

Just so much material

2011-09-29T23:11:00.004Z

Good side of the Greek Tragedy in Yawkey Way: The heat's off Bill Buckner and Grady Little. Yes, fans, it is Greek tragedy in the clearest sense, with the 2500-year-old theme of the penalty of hubris at the forefront. Let us learn from this.

Moving on to unimportant matters, as we have said here before, in the "war on terror," the gods are on the side with the fewest idiots. It is al-Qaeda's curse that it seems even better than the GOP presidential primary race at attracting idiots. The terrorist idiot du jour seems unclear on the difference between flying a remote-controlled jet about the size of a riding mower and flying a balsa-wood airplane with a rubber-band engine. He seems shaky on the idea that it is one thing to dream of blowing up the Pentagon (a building slightly larger than Rhode Island) with a few pounds of plastique, and another actually to do it. Ferdaus seems also to be one of those charmingly naive people who have made the underside of the Internet, and especially Internet commerce, all that it is today. "Oh, I'll need some explosives and technical advice. Let me just Google that and I'm sure I'll find reliable sources." Heh.

All this does begin to resemble the U.S. Communist party in the late 1950s, when FBI agents in the ranks were said to outnumber Leninists by about 50 to 1. We can but laugh.

Concerning Muffins

2011-09-22T13:22:00.001Z

Down at the local muffin shop this morning, I made sure to check out my unit cost vs. what the Justice Department appears to have paid. It's $1.60 per muffin here, or $14.60 a dozen.

The reason I can't generate anti-government outrage is that the Justice Department, whilst stupid enough to pay these prices, didn't set them. The private sector did, specifically the Capitol Hilton. The Republicans ought to be applauding the initiative of the free enterprise system in maximising its profit at the expense of a gullible customer. That's capitalism in its rawest form.

I shared the story with the local proprietor, a hard-working guy who hadn't heard it. I admit there was a gleam in his eye.

A manufacturer said during the Civil War, "you can sell anything to the government, for any price you've got the guts to ask." We might add that you'll get away with it, because the media and the public will blame the buyer, not you.

Concerning class warfare

2011-09-20T23:17:00.003Z

The lapdogs of the ruling class are at it again, whining that the outrageous idea that people making $1,000,000 a year* should pay their share of taxes is "class warfare."

I have something to say about class warfare: I'm for it. As long as it's directed at the rich. It also seems like about time, since the rich and their Republican lapdogs have been conducting class warfare against the middle class for about 30 years...and winning. That, apparently, is all right.

The people who can't figure out why the largely low-income foot soldiers of the Tea Party are out there defending the privileges of the rich weren't in my pol. sci classes. One hypothesis has merit: since America is the land of opportunity, those who have not are eager to defend the privileges of the rich, because they expect to become rich.

True, but we're also looking at one of the West's oldest political riffs play out. Ever since the middle class lurched into existence in medieval Europe, the aristocracy waged war on it. Figurative war, most of the time, but actual war now and then. And who do you suppose were their eager supporters? Why, the people at the bottom of the food chain, serfs and rural peasants. On the one hand, if a peasant were going to move up in the world, sense and experience said they would move into the middle and professional classes. Their chances of moving into the aristocracy were absurdly remote. Nevertheless, the peasants generally aligned with the bejewelled rulers against the middle class. Their motives may have been envy, or the innate conservatism of peasantry worldwide, or simple arse-kissing. But they were the chief ally of kings and princes against the people who were slowly accumulating wealth and power.

They still are. Scratch a tea-bagger and you'll find a peasant eager to act against his/her own interest, somehow believing the opposite.

*
Not so long ago, a "millionaire" had capital worth a million dollars or whatever.
Today, one can collect the interest on $1,000,000 and still be eligible for food stamps. Do the math to figure out the capital one now needs for an income of $1,000,000 a year in a world of two to four percent interest. Then feel the outrage.

Concerning forts

2011-09-17T16:28:00.007Z

A friend and colleague, although a long-time resident in these parts, is in his heart of hearts a New Yorker. Recently, he visited Fort Warren in Boston Harbour, and interpreted its existence as a symptom of Bostonian egomania. Boston, he reasons, is less important than it thinks it is. Well, that could be true of most cities, and quite a few nations.

However, forts on the East Coast are not so much relics of bygone civic pride as they are relics of bygone military priorities. Many of them are archaeological layer cakes, because what was a good site for a fort early in the 17th century remained a good site until the dawn of the nuclear age. Materials changed: the earliest ones were earthworks. They were succeeded by stone, then brick, then more elaborate stone (such as Fort Warren), and finally earthworks again, but revetted with concrete. The forts with the longest history contain traces of every occupation, from the 1630s to the 1950s. Some are still in use, and in unlikely places if the measure of importance is Manhattan.

By the time Fort Warren was built, New York had eclipsed Boston as the East's premier port. However, that had been true only for a generation or so, and a sizable part of the nation's GNP was still collected at the Boston Customs House. Protecting such a port made good sense at the national level.

It made even more sense to a nation that generally preferred investing in forts to investing in a navy. American policy hated and feared navies, as it had in the War of Independence, until very late in the 19th century. Forts were the thing. They were palpable and accountable, and government could put them where they seemed to be needed. They could even be brought back cheaply from extreme states of neglect.

Locations were equal parts national politics and sound strategy. Boston generated large customs revenue and had a navy yard. Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME had customs revenues, had (still has) a navy yard, and stood at the gateway of an inland sea tailor-made for invasion, so it was fortified. Maine's Kennebec River, far from any city, produced an enormous percentage of the nation's merchant marine tonnage, so its mouth was fortified. And so on. That all three points might better have been defended by one offshore naval squadron was lost on Jefferson's administration, and several succeeding administrations through the 1800s. It was also lost on most Americans. Voters could see forts. They made voters feel good. You could never tell what those aristocratic naval officers were up to, out there over the horizon. Up to a point, the voters were right: any good harbour that was undefended was likely to be a target just because it was undefended.

Generals and politicians were still thinking like that in the Cold War. Greater Boston is ringed with the remnants of antiaircraft missile batteries called into existence by MIT, Raytheon and other interests with the ear of the Eisenhower administration. So are most American cities once within range of Soviet bombers. Like all forts, they ceased to exist not as a matter of local vanity, but because newer weapons (ICBMs) made them obsolete. The ruins of the missile batteries are not as picturesque as older forts. If they were, we would be more aware of them, and the motivations behind a Fort Warren would be less abstruse.

The dumbest question

2011-09-14T22:35:00.002Z

Well, the dumbest poll question. "Is the country (this one) headed in the wrong direction?"

Why is it dumb? Because our brilliant cadre of pollsters has been asking exactly the same question for the past 19 or 20 years. The great American pollelectorate has dutifully responded 'yes' by large margins every time. The pollocracy have hung this albatross on the necks of four successive administrations, representing both parties equally.

It would not be such a dumb question if the pollsters looked in the mirror for a bad guy. It would not be so stupid if the polls also asked why, instead of leaving the answer open-ended, enabling anyone to infer any possible answer. Of course, asking why would expose the question as bullshit, because it would elicit about 110 answers from every 100 people polled. If that happened, one would have to dismiss the question as worthless, and cast into doubt a generation of self-important punditry.

I've never been polled. I'd insist on crafting my own answer. Its chief premise would be that any wrongness to the direction has less to do with politics than with the epidemic of galloping idiocy afflicting the public.

See this

2011-09-11T23:36:00.004Z

Only one media moment in this weekend of obsessive mawkishness actually got it. It's no surprise that this Sunday's Doonesbury was it. If you haven't seen it, follow the link and see it now.

There's something else, which doesn't make much sense unless you've lived it. Those primarily caught up in any tragedy, whether one day's horrors or years of war, do live it forever. Even when they come to terms with their memories, it's still there. September 11 and the invasion of Iraq also happened before the eyes of people who had experienced the traumas of recent, and not so recent, wars.
When that's you, you at least do what B.D. is doing in this strip. If it's successful, you simply lose yourself in your thoughts. If it isn't, you go numb inside. Wiser, or at least more professional, heads than mine have warned me against the numbing. The warnings may be true, but numb gets you through the day when engagement will put you in a straitjacket.

I remember being moderately freaked when the Iraq war began. I came out, if you will, at my company as a collateral participant in the Vietnam festivities. Although I discovered that I was that firm's only veteran, one woman came up to me and said that her significant other was likewise freaked. He had been in the Gulf War and helped clean up "the highway to Hell."

Holy shit.

There are reasons this coverage doesn't rock for everyone.

Stupid dog tricks

2011-09-10T11:16:00.004Z

Segments of both "ends" of the USA's rather short political spectrum possess certain shibboleths that they cannot set aside, even when it is in their interest to do so. Those of us who lean more or less to the left can recite many of the other side's obsessions, whilst being blind to our own. I've commented several times on a couple of those articles of faith. I won't belabour them now. This comment is about the small group of the Brookline faithful working to ban the pledge of allegiance from classrooms.

I'm not outraged by the idea. I'm not incensed. I'm just shaking my head at the obstinacy of an (apparently) tiny group of people whose primary objective seems to be picking a fight with conservatives and reactionaries. Their actual motives seem unclear, perhaps because the objectives vary with the personal agenda of the supporters.

As I recall it, the pledge was a mindless morning ritual, and would probably remain so for the kids if adults would just keep their hands off it. I'm old enough to remember when "under god" was added. I was in first or second grade, and my chief reaction was resentment at having to add a new phrase to something I'd learnt by heart.

My advice to both sides is to stay off these energy-wasting bombasts. Either pick real fights or lay the fights aside to help the one country out of this mess. If you don't, there'll be no question of "love it or leave it," because more than likely the country will be leaving you. "One nation indivisible" is more a pious hope than a reality just now.

And now, a recipe

2011-09-06T23:56:00.003Z

I may be repeating myself, but here is a bare-bones version of a New England country stand-by for the colder months, Yankee red flannel hash.

First, either take the afternoon off, or have a supply of leftovers in the marked [*] categories.

Ingredients (six- eight servings)

Two medium to large chopped onions. Haydn Pearson's recipe, on which this is loosely based, called for "authoritative" onions, which is about right. Native yellow onions are best.

Three large beets, or equivalent in smaller beets. Cheaters can use canned beets.

Four large boiled potatoes,* not bakers, just large bulk Maine spuds, or equivalent in smaller ones. With or without skin, your choice.

12 oz. of ground meat.* Leftover beef or pork roast put through a hand grinder is traditional, but it works with anything ground, including veggie burger. (Add a bit more meat for a meatier texture. Not too much, though: what makes this hash stand out is that it's chiefly vegetables, as a traditional hash should be.)

Black pepper

Butter or oil for skillet.

Wash the beets and boil until the skin rubs off easily, usually about 30 minutes. It's a nice touch between skins that slide off and beets the texture of shoe leather, so be careful. Good beets make or break this dish. Reserve a cup or two of the liquid.

If you don't have boiled potatoes on hand, prepare and boil (or steam) the potatoes whilst the beets are cooking.

When the beets and potatoes are ready, chop all the vegetables together in the instrument of your choice. Unless your instrument is large, it may take a couple of passes.

Heat the butter or oil in a large, heavy skillet. Be generous: this stuff sticks.

Put the chopped meat in the skillet, followed by the chopped vegetables. Mix thoroughly, until the predominant colour is beet red. A little white is acceptable, hence the name red flannel.

Cook over medium heat until the mixture is cooked through, adding pepper to taste. Watch out for scorching: a little adds to the flavour, but too much and the whole mixture will stick to the skillet. Use the reserved beet water, no more than 1/4 cup at a time, to maintain the texture.

Serve very hot. This is traditionally a one-dish meal, but use your imagination for accompaniments.

I'm not a huge beet fan, but there's something about the mixture of flavours in this hash that makes it (IMHO) the prince of comfort foods. It also lends itself, obviously, to communal preparation.

This seems to be a close relation to a Welsh hash called bryn teg.* Those who care to compare that recipe with the Welsh translation may wonder if there's some irony in the name. Give me the beets and onions: you can keep the parsnip and cabbage.

If you Google the name, you'll discover about ten thousand variants on the recipe. This one works best around here and lends itself very well to local fall produce.

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*How the author of this link made this name Irish is beyond me, but the recipe is representative.

Social Security and the age thing

2011-09-06T14:17:00.005Z

In theory, I think raising the Social Security retirement age is one good and logical step toward getting our house in order. After all, anyone my age already reaches full retirement age at 66, not 65. (It is a constant surprise how many younger people don't know that.) In practice, I have reservations, to wit:

1) Can we trust the lap-dogs of the people who have spent the last 30 years cheating--yes, cheating--their workers out of the pensions that they relied on for their retirement? Any tinkering with Social Security has to come with defences against this sort of thing. Putting Congress on Social Security is a good place to start, but it may need more. I've worked for the very rich. I know how they think, and in general they have no problem with older Americans dying by the roadside, as long as someone sweeps up the corpses so they don't frighten the horses. Cut the deck before starting this reform.

2) Living until 90 is a statistical construct, subject to many variables. Depriving the older poor of retirement income and health care is one of those variables. The more the reactionaries get their way, the more likely it is that "years left to live" (a more accurate statistical term than life expectancy) will decline, not increase. Don't make changes based solely upon this one, vulnerable measurement.

3) During my time of un- and under-employment, it has become clear that in the near future most "careers" will run from age 25 to 45. Age bigotry is entrenched in corporate America. If present mindsets are allowed to persist, the nation will have an entire generation greeting customers at Walmart between 45 and retirement age. This just at the time we have made the retirement age a moving target. This too introduces a factor that is likely to cause life expectancy to decline. What if anything will reform do to adjust corporate attitudes and keep people over 45 working?

4) Finally, remember that all those jolly age projections may work for the elite and professional classes, but they aren't realistic for the working class, now. For anyone in the sort of physical occupation praised in TV truck commercials, 66 is a stretch now. Age 90, for men at least, is absurd. I see this every day I work. Time to get out and see how the other half lives before dicking around with anything in the social safety net.

I'll save Keynesian rants about the benefits of deficits for some other time.

Screw waiting for the big idea

2011-09-05T23:18:00.003Z

Backstory. A couple of weeks ago I bought a used kayak, of a make and model that has enchanted me since I tried out a new one a couple of years ago. What I bought cost half what a new one does, and has all the features I loved at first sight, and for which I've managed to set aside a few bucks a week ever since.

Nothing is easy, getting into the details of the new machine included. The bad part of the deal is that I probably paid about $50 too much. The good part is that the kayak has idiosyncrasies. A number of these completely buffaloed the earnest libertarian type who sold me the thing. I'm resolving these one at a time. The Internet only helps you if you know how to research.

Nothing is easy. Kayaks have three types of steering systems: none at all, rudders, or skegs. The uber-purists go for none at all. Everyone else chooses the rudder, which moves and with which one can actually steer, or the skeg*, which merely simplifies steering by paddle. One would think that a sport a benign as kayaking would have mellow ways to resolve these differences.

Not.

I had (still have, actually) a rudder kayak, whose chief benefit is that it came free. I'm moving to a skeg kayak, which in some circles is tantamount to defection. There's a lot to learn about the thing.

Nothing is easy. There are two types of skeg mechanisms. One uses a metal cable (cyclists can envision a really really long rear derailleur cable) to raise and lower the skeg. The other uses a small diameter rope.

The kayak I bought has a rope skeg, which requires some tuning. But it turns out that the cable skeg people and the rope skeg people are barely on speaking terms. This makes it very difficult to get accurate, objective information on tuning and using skegs. So I'm faking it to a degree.

Something, though, is easy, and that is using the kayak. It's shorter than the old one, so slightly slower, but spectacularly nimble. It has already shown its stuff in waves and surf around here, and I'm looking forward to using it on my favourite rivers and marshes.

I'll drop in just one random thought among many rattling round my head. I want to be sure that all the states getting a piece of the tropical depression formerly known as Lee enjoy it, and notice that we in the northeast always want to share the love. I'm also waiting to see whether Rick Perry's prayers succeed in steering any of that rain toward the dust bowl formerly known as Texas. So far, it ain't working, Ricky.

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* What is called a skeg in kayak-land is more like a centreboard in sailboat-world. Nothing indeed is easy.

To keep in mind

2011-09-03T01:49:00.002Z

Some CNN pundit said this week that the GOP has enough candidates. He said, stop already, and let's move forward.

Well for openers, don't forget that the only direction Republicans don't move is forward. Further, the entertainment value of the present clown caucus can only be improved by having more candidates. They should go on declaring until every member of "The Base" is running for President. Then the only way they'll get a candidate is when someone votes against him/herself.

Now it's September, and the end in theory of the news silly season. Someone should remember (but they never do) that being the first candidate standing has little value. What matters is being the last candidate standing.

Was it a bust?

2011-08-29T22:20:00.003Z

Apparently, Irene was a failure, as viewed from the exalted perch of media anchors, because they themselves are still alive and Wall Street is negotiable by taxi instead of boat.

Bullshit.

In the first place, the death toll is somewhere in the twenties*. Katrina was in a class by itself and warps our sensibilities. Irene's harvest is in the medium range of casualties from tropical storms. The New York media, with their city's limited experience of tropical storms, seem not to appreciate this.

Then there's the physical damage. It may not be impressive to the anchorfolk, but it is if you're in Bennington, Brattleboro, or Woodstock, Vermont, or Campton, NH, Westport, MA, or East Haven, CT, or any similar number of places further south. I mention these because I've been in them and can appreciate the damage. Many of them haven't seen tropical storm damage in over 70 years.

Here in New England, we also have an experience that is becoming normal during and after storms. Hundreds of thousands of customers of private power providers have lost electrical power, and are being told they won't get it back for days, maybe weeks.

By contrast, I live in a town with its own municipal light department. They buy most of our power in good times, but are capable when necessary of generating electricity. Public entity it may be, it has an eye on the bottom line. That may influence the speed with which the local light department responds to outages. The longest outage I can remember in the last 20 years was three hours. Granted, the light department's customer base is a tenth or less the size of that of a private power companies. But shouldn't the private companies' outages be in proportion? If it takes our guys an hour to bring a grid back on line, it should perhaps take private enterprise ten or twelve hours, not ten to twelve days.

So much for the efficiencies of capitalism.

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*As I published this, I heard the toll had risen to 38. No, it's not a bust, especially if you knew one of the victims.

Storm day

2011-08-28T17:28:00.003Z

There are only two parts of today's storm I haven't enjoyed.

1) Speculating on which part of our lot will be splattered by our neighbour's oversized Norway maple should it decide to fall. In a tropical cyclone, odds are that it will fall this way if it does. The chief question here is where to park my car to avoid the tree.

2) Microwaves have one crowning virtue: their ability to reheat leftover coffee without having it taste like, well, reheated coffee.

The crowning (pun intended) moment of our obligatory storm walk to check out the beach was the tree that fell just over a block in front of us. At first I thought the noise came from behind us, so I whirled around. My wife was walking without glasses (and so could see more than ten feet away) and spotted the tree. It sounded exactly like an auto collision.

Our town's position relative to the storm should spare us northeast winds. The harbour is only open in that direction, so the brunt of the weather is landing on the beach. Surf's definitely up, but some spoilsports with blue lights are out there keeping everyone--surfers included--off the beach.

It's too bad more Americans aren't educated in the Beaufort scale of winds, because it's perfectly suited to a day like this, with variable velocity. When we took our walk, it was about Force 8. Typically, it takes Force 10 to uproot trees, and since trees have definitely been uprooted we may have had Force 10 gusts.
It seems to be a little stronger now, but the rain's stopped.

Enough. Pause now in case we lose power again.

Ghoulish meterology

2011-08-26T22:30:00.003Z

Some years back, I took a weather course. The instructor had a good friend with the NWS, then in Boston. He arranged a tour of the facility, showed us the synoptic charts tracing the development of the Perfect Storm, then our latest and greatest weather disaster. The best moment was when he looked at that day's synoptic chart, showed us how it could presage a blizzard and how it probably wouldn't. Then he got a purely evil look and said "but I LOVE it when things fuck up!"

So do I.

It is much easier to view weather disasters with equanimity when one grew up with electricity and running water as seasonal luxuries. In this house, we keep a fair supply of food around, gas lanterns, batteries, etc., because hurricanes are just one of the amusements Mother Nature throws at us on the coast. The only thing that makes me sullen is that I can't find the kerosene lamps, which are in the proverbial safe place. Bad idea, that.

Hurricane Irene has as its best feature that it's smacking New York and Washington around. Let's recall that Manhattan, which has been destroyed on film a couple of dozen times, has experienced just four (or is it five?) hurricanes in the last 160 (or is it 200?) years. In that time Gotham has become the media capital of the universe. Now the disaster is--potentially at least--on the medias' doorstep. This makes a difference in the quantity (if not the quality) of coverage.

The odds of an evacuation order here are vanishingly slim, but we ain't going in any case. There's too much to see, for one thing. For another, Miss Annie, at age 23, has made it very clear already that she's not going. We can't leave the old lady behind.

Once upon a time, local boaters exercised an admirable freemasonry in the face of disaster. According to reliable (but single-sourced) report, that is no more. Yesterday's report was that boaters stacked up at the town's sole state-of-the-art launching ramp were fighting over who had what priority to haul out. This is what happens when you put the price tag of your toy ahead of the goodwill of your aquatic neighbours.

Stay tuned. We wait for the fun.

A bright idea

2011-08-20T11:57:00.002Z

Every week, it seems, another Republican runs for President. Each one has only to open his/her mouth, and they become the front-runner...for the week. But so far, only one (Pawlenty, in case you lost track) has dropped out. As the crowd grows, the process favours the candidate who can make the most extreme and absurd statements, to get coverage from a broadcast media corps as ignorant as the candidates.

With over a year before the election, there is room for at least 50 more Republican candidates. It makes one wonder whether, if the extreme right gets over-populated, one of those candidates might decide a centrist position would be unique.

In case you forgot, the week after the 2008 election, the pundits' best bet for the next Republican presidential candidate was Bobby Jindal. We've not heard a whiff from him, even though he has an actual achievement to his credit, courtesy of BP Oil. One wonders why. Aside from his disconcerting resemblance to Alfred E. Newman, one wonders if his staff took the temperature of Republican primary voters and decided that they couldn't stand the idea of another person of colour as a serious candidate. They already have Herman Cain, who has about as much traction as a Zamboni with bald tyres. Oh right, there's also Jimmy McMillan, who seems to be there to make even Michele Bachman look sane. Jindal, besides being smart himself, has a smart staff.

Neither pundits nor candidates have learnt anything from the farce that is the American presidential election process. Being the first candidate standing means nothing. The trick is to be the last one standing.

Moments of Achievement

2011-08-15T22:48:00.002Z

Today was round two of me vs platelet donation. This round went to me.

First, this business of hydrating heavily for three days before a platelet donation does seem to help the blood vessels. It is less kindly to the bladder of someone my age. When giving platelets, one is skewered in place by each arm. When the bladder fills before the process is done, there's no choice but to hold it. I was flanked by male donors more or less my age, who made it through: I took that as a sign. Having plenty of time to reflect, it did seem I might have overdone the hydration. One should have the balance right next time.

I discovered that it's possible to move and shift one's arms a little in this. This relieved some guilt from the first failed effort, when I was sure I'd screwed things up by moving an arm. As it happened, I had to move the pumping arm quite a lot to keep the pump primed. Once I realised I could see, and interpret, the screen, I got up a pretty good bit of biofeedback keeping the flow rate within acceptable limits. Now that required a fair amount of arm moving.

At any rate, it worked, and I'll be back next month. It's worth doing. A pint of whole blood can provide platelets for three people, and one can give it only once every 56 days. The platelet product of one such session can help up to 18 people. And there's still just one source for these blood products: other people.

Cambridge street life

2011-08-14T12:19:00.003Z

At first glance, this bit of weekend news only shows why Vermonters are so mellow in their native habitat: they come to Massachusetts to act out. However, this is only a tiny slice of Cantabridgian amusements available nearly any day. I live hardly three miles from the epicentre of the Halloween capital of the world. Salem is high-grade street theatre, but as a rule they have to work at it. Cambridge, on the other hand, is people-watching nirvana any day of the year.

Just the day before the incident in the link above, I took the T to the Peoples' Republic for a libation with friends. To ensure a little exercise I rode to Central Square, even though the gathering was near Kendall. Of the many treats I had en route, the best was a "born to be wild" gentleman riding round the block. The rider was vintage biker boy: heavy, heavily tattooed, wife-beater shirt, chromed Nazi-style helmet. But he was riding a motor scooter of mediocre horsepower.

This being Cambridge, the only question was whether the parody was intentional or not. One hopes it was the former.

The bears are winning

2011-08-12T23:41:00.003Z

Latest news from Yosemite is the 14th death, again on the Mist Trail. (Or is it 15th? When last I looked, last week's fatal fall from Half Dome was number 14.)

Meanwhile, the bear death toll appears to be holding steady, and one set of survivors are about to enrich a "consultant," and soon a lawyer or three, to prove that their loved ones have no responsibility for their own stupidity.

I invite you to read the second link closely, and ask this: if a "flimsy railing," the sight of a 700 foot waterfall a few yards off on the left, danger signs, and the warnings of numerous bystanders were not enough to keep the Vernal Falls victims in a safe place, what the hell would?

Fortunately, the National Park Service has quite a bit of experience dealing with this sort of bullshit. Consider Grand Canyon, whose death tolls dwarf those of Yosemite. Lawyers have advanced similar arguments there: a railing exists, defining safe from unsafe for all but the thickest visitors. There, the "flimsy railing" (much the same design as in Yosemite) stands between the safe path and a drop one mile deep. Somehow, such railings and such warnings work for about 99.5 percent of National Park visitors. Exactly how dumb does the dumb-down have to be?

Repeat after me: the wild world is not a mall. It is not a theme park. It is a place where you must pay attention to warnings, heed your own cautionary vibes, and above all take responsibility for your actions. If you can't grasp that, you don't belong in a wild place. The bears, clearly, do. At this moment in Yosemite, the human-bear death ratio has risen to 2:1, so the numbers speak for themselves. Bears seem more able to adapt to human intrusions than some humans are able to adapt to wildness.

To keep a certain type of human safe in a place like Yosemite's Mist Trail, we would need to erect concrete block walls 25 feet high, topped with electrified razor wire. Not only would such measures keep the wild places away from the people able to responsibly enjoy them, they wouldn't be enough. People would be killed or injured trying to scale such a wall, and their relations would complain that those measures were not safe enough.

Perhaps we should keep all humans out of national parks. The half of one percent or less who deliberately put themselves in mortal peril can succeed in shutting everyone else off from the wild. And the bears would live safer lives.

Or perhaps we could send a message to the consultants and lawyers who feed off the misery that the half of one percent leave behind them: take a flying fuck at a rolling football.

I'll try to be nice about this

2011-08-10T21:58:00.004Z

Over the past few days , I've been following the reactions of Americans to the riots in the UK. Some are genuinely astonished, because all they've ever been fed are royal weddings and Brit-coms to give them a flavour of life in the UK. Others (choose any comment thread) blame Britons for their own narrow-minded, stereotypical image of the UK and its inhabitants.

It's wake-up time, mates. Social unrest has lurked just under the surface of British life for centuries. This is an island about the same area as Wyoming, which started out in 1066 as home to six, count them, six different national groups: Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Welsh, Cornish, Lowland Scots, and Highland Scots. At least. Then the Normans came along and either subjugated the lot or gave some added muscle to the Anglo-Saxons: choose your interpretation. The people who won (the English) got there by being able to persuade the rest of an offer they couldn't refuse. If they did refuse, then the winning side had no compunction about shooting down the losers. This doesn't even take Ireland into account.

If Americans didn't have such short attention spans, they could remember just what happened in Northern Ireland when both local sides had no truck with the English. That happened in the media age. Why is so much of Scotland empty? Because the House of Hanover depopulated it after the uprisings of 1745. Why is there a Welsh province in Patagonia? Because tens of thousands of Welsh moved as far away from the English as they possibly could, rather than surrender their language and culture.* If lower-class life in the UK is so splendid, why in hell am I in this country at all?

Now and then, one will see the original English flag, the St George's Cross, fluttering about in this area. This is a fabulous example of a conquering minority pretending to be a downtrodden minority. It's no accident that this emblem of conquest has also become the emblem of English fascism. The English are great at flying the Union flag when they want something--usually blood--from the people they either conquered on the island or dragged there on the tails of empire. Now, when they want something for themselves, we're back to St George's. And everyone is supposed to like it.

So, when English police shoot somebody, this seems incredibly unusual to Americans. However, for a lot of residents of Great Britain, it's more of the same old shit that goes with 1500 years of conquest and repression. It's helpful for American history lessons, too: just in case anyone wondered why the War of Independence created so much ill will.

Now the water cannons are coming out. The next cannons may not shoot water.

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*I was fascinated that American media found a spokesperson for the rioters who seems, from his name, to be Welsh. Given the right push, Great Britain could make Yugoslavia look like Disney World.

And then, there's the prudes

2011-08-03T22:48:00.007Z

Throughout adolescence and young adulthood, my daughter was regaled with stories of her infancy and toddlerhood by people who were adults at the time. The tales always came around to what a pain in the arse she was when it came to sleep. She was. For example, my wife worked one night a week, and I had to plan out that evening like a Cook's tour to get her to sleep. Not until she was well up into toddlerhood would she go to sleep for me at all, except in the car. So I planned out car expeditions that left home soon after supper and followed every byway of Essex County, arriving home simultaneously with my wife.

Her former Infant-Toddler teachers told even more harrowing tales of Em's agitation--in the political sense--at nap time. Other babies were quite content to nod off and nap for an hour or two in the afternoon. As far as anyone can remember, Em never napped at all. She could be persuaded at times to lie down, but mostly she sat or stood in the crib and tried to get other kids to wake up and play with her. Sometimes she succeeded, and pandemonium broke loose.

At one point in her acutely sleep-deprived years (from about 14 to 24) she thought about these stories and said "God, what a damn fool I was!" More recently, she took it on herself to make certain that the parental units were aware of the latest thing in parenting lit, Go the F**k to Sleep.* For Em, parenting is a spectator sport, so she finds the book hilarious in the abstract. However, she relates to it very deeply in the context of those tales from her early childhood: as in deeply, hysterically funny.

I suggest this is one in yo face for that species of self-important prude who feels called upon to protest every bit of self-reflective parenting humour. The more insightful and self-revelatory it is, the louder they protest. This is the opinion of a young woman who caused this sort of trouble as a toddler, is delighted about it, and doesn't mind turning things around for a laugh. Most of the critics would find their attitudes proscribed by the Consumer Products Safety Commission were they inanimate objects. Then there's Eric Metaxas, a christian who is garnering some un-christ-like free press for his book. (Forget about that co-author/illustrator person, Nancy Tillman.) Sorry, Eric, parody is protected speech, for one thing: unless you're a christian possessed of a certain level of self-importance. For another, It's Time to Sleep, My Love belongs to a sub-category of children's books that is, to be nice, heavily cross-pollinated.** Others have made the same observations about Nancy Tillman's oeuvre, minus the self-righteousness. One can't parody the genre without engaging in the cross-pollination process.

Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, mercilessly skewered the hypocrisy of the American media about American family life. We see this in the (so far) failed effort to make Go the F**k to Sleep "controversial" instead of funny. Perhaps with that effort running out of gas, Good Morning America has inflated a new prude balloon: young mothers, getting together (terrible!) and having a glass of wine (utter horrors!)

Those even passingly acquainted with my wife know that she drinks about two glasses of wine a week. She may not have much taste for the vine, but she is acutely sensitive to double standards. Why is it, she asked, we haven't heard the same complaint about dads bringing their toddler children to the ballpark and hoisting a few beers?

Lest one buy into the idea that this is the end of civilisation as we know it, consider the good old days about a century ago, as related by my maternal grandmother. Then, similar city occasions meant that mom dragged her brood to the local saloon, got shit-faced, and probably quieted her little darlings by getting them drunk as well. Probably helps explain the life expectancies back then, but it's hypocritical crap to suggest a parallel.

Enough: I'm going the fuck to sleep.

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* I'm not censoring. That's what the f**k it's called.

**Much of childrens' lit is disturbingly derivative, more a lack of imagination or nerve than any case of plagiarism. If you want to read stunningly original kid lit and see what can be done in this genre, I suggest Fernando Krahn's books for children.

Chickens,worms and snakes

2011-08-02T22:52:00.005Z

Over the past two-plus years of un- or underemployment, I've been astounded by the degree of social regression that these hard times have brought on. This began with the epidemic of "career counselors" infesting the Internet, dispensing the same advice such people have been dispensing for 60 years. Whether for this reason or for others, gradually the worldview of people in business began to regress 50 to 60 years. It is true of employers, workers and unemployed alike. Those who haven't taken part in "self-help" groups for the out-of-work have not fully experienced the timidity, yes, the cowardice, of a large number of those out of work. And what do the "career counselors" do about this? Most of them enable gutlessness.

The item that especially vexes me is the growing mania over "no unemployed need apply" notices in help-wanted ads. This began with a pair of ads for blue-collar or no-collar jobs more than a year ago: right, just two. What may have begun as the aberrant behaviour of a redneck personnel manager then got pumped up by CNN and other media. One can scratch around and find anecdotes of the attitude of this loutish hiring manager and that. When one challenges the panicky unemployed and the enabling counselors to document their claims, they fall quickly back on the heart and soul of the urban legend:
"I heard it from the friend of a friend," or its infinite variations.

Bigotry against the unemployed (and especially the older unemployed) exists among certain people, and always will. To elevate a near-urban legend to this degree aids no one. It enables fear among the fearful, vindicates clueless counselors, and encourages employers to think such bias is a good idea.

Show me. Save these ads. Publish images of them, including the names of the employers and the date of the offending ad. But I forget, don't I? We have relapsed into an era in which the relationship of Dagwood Bumstead and Mr. Dithers has become representative, at least in the minds of too many people out of work. All the same, show me: fear makes repression possible.

When there is no news, send rumors

2011-07-24T13:24:00.002Z

Our text today was provided 150 years ago by a newspaper editor, who sent the instruction that forms the title to one of his war correspondents.

People today forget that 1860s journalism operated during a time of significant technological change. The telegraph made it possible to obtain information in a few hours that had previously taken a week or more to reach the paper. Although the Atlantic cable laid in 1858 had failed, and would not be restored until war's end, telegraphic connections to easternmost Canada, coupled with steamships, meant that news could come and go from Europe in seven to ten days, instead of three to six weeks. At the same time, the invention of wood pulp paper and machinery to produce it meant that American newspapers could readily cater to a large and increasingly literate audience. Circulation was primary; facts became incidental.

We are now living through a period of similar change, in which the speed and cost advantages are even greater. Being first is again vastly more important than being accurate. Out of many candidates for our attention this week, the leader must be initial coverage of the late violence in Norway. Even before this episode had attracted the inevitable claims of credits, Western media speculated that these must be Islamist terror attacks and presented their speculations as fact. All the while that we were being treated to these rumours, the confessed perp was in custody. Islamist? Home-grown terrorist? Not exactly. Breivik was a person of, shall we say, extreme right-wing views, conflating liberalism and Islamism and seeing mortal threats in both.

Sound familiar? Uh-huh. Those whose attention span is longer than a couple of news cycles may recall the anti-Muslim rants that followed the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, the embarrassed silence that followed the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, and the obstinate refusal of some talk radio hosts to acknowledge their own complicity in the disaster. As long as noise substitutes for discussion, and as long as the beat beats acuurate information, we'll have more of this, because some people will think the noise is information, not entertainment.

At least the count is even

2011-07-21T00:43:00.003Z

I went to Yosemite last year rather well schooled in the innate stupidity of homo turistus. I was pretty much brought up in the business and had at least collateral acquaintance with it for the first half of my life. It was, then, no surprise to learn that, as of late August last year, motorists had killed 13 or so bears that season. It was also no shock to see happy campers dodging past fences and "keep out" signs to dip in their overheated bodies into the 55 degree water of pools just a few yards upstream of waterfalls 100 or more feet high. That was at the end of a parching hot summer, even by Sierras standards, that had lowered flow rates and raised water temperatures throughout the valley. These show Vernal Falls from top and bottom at its most benign. (There were people swimming within 50 meters of the top of the fall.)

Eleven months later, the Sierras haven't yet disgorged the snowmelt of one of the worst winters in a century. Skiing has slowed or stopped not so much due to lack of opportunity as sheer ennui: I have that from the offspring. She also reported that her group's attempt on Mount Whitney on Memorial Day was turned back by blizzard conditions, near-zero temperatures and a selection of routes that varied from near-vertical to vertical: something like Nordwand set in California.

All this means the waters of Yosemite are enthralling to look at this year, but at their malevolent best at disposing of h. turistus. Thus we hear today that this season's death toll due to Yosemite drownings has risen to six. It appears (surprise!) that tourist negligence was the chief factor in these deaths.

The news sent me to the Park's Web site for a tally of another sort. This year to July 9, motorists in Yosemite have killed six bears. There must be a sort of ursine schadenfreude in the notion that the score is now tied.

(Mr. Hobbes tweets to ask, "now who's the jackass?")

Mr. Hobbes' long-delayed debut.

2011-07-13T22:59:00.005Z

Last summer, I entertained the masses with reflections on our trip to Yosemite. Among its stars was Hobbes, the opinionated critter I drew for our mule ride.

This week, Em was back for a visit, and finally brought back her pocket camera, the one with the mule ride pictures. Whilst I've dropped his noble profile into its proper place, I'll provide it here as well.

Meet Hobbes.

Here, I think he is wondering how a steel hitching rail might taste, since that was surely the way his mind worked. The distance shot below shows the two jackasses together. It is neither his best side nor mine, but this is how we looked before we warmed to one another.

Which, then is the bigger jackass?

Silver Linings

2011-07-06T23:30:00.005Z

The first silver lining on the programme is that by being behind in one's musings, one is freed from the necessity of making topical comments.

Last week, we were on holiday in somewhat northern parts of Vermont. The objective was kayaking, not uncommonly late spring skiing. We had hoped that by taking off before July 4, we would avoid vast family crowds and hordes of motorboats. We didn't expect to avoid motorboats and their bastard offspring, "personal watercraft," almost altogether.

We have the prodigious spring floods of Vermont to thank for that. Although the flood stage moment has gone by in most places, there is hardly a body of water in this part of the state that has got down to normal. We were on Lake Champlain proper once, and another time paddled two of its tributaries. Water level was two to three feet above normal. Launching ramps, beaches, and one large pier were still submerged. A good part of the day-use facilities at Burton Island State Park were more or less in ruins.

Those who haven't been around a flood of long duration may think that the water just comes and goes. Oh no: especially not when the flooded lake is so large that it has a visible horizon line North and South. There are waves on that flood water, which extend the damage well above the official flood stage line. Three or four weeks under water is enough to permit all sorts of marine life to gain a foothold. In some places, small isolated ponds full of fish were stranded by the receding waters. This was a blessing for the seabirds, foxes, cats, and carrion feeders of the area, but they were untidy eaters. To walk along the newly-freed waterfront property was to stroll over marine slime and partially-devoured fish.

As usual, the inhabited areas most exposed to flood damage were those whose residents were least able to afford disaster. The camps of the affluent were mostly well above flood stage. It seems that many of the flooded dwellings had long since ceased to be seasonal. They were, instead, homes for people with little choice but to take a chance. They lost, in this year of 500-year floods.

The floods also left behind a vast amount of driftwood, especially in the smaller ponds we visited. Few motorboaters care to be banged about by floating objects ranging from the size of baseball bats to that of fence posts. Fewer were attracted by the smelly ruins along lakes and rivers. Thus the public waters generally belonged, by default, to human-powered vehicles.

We went bear-less again. Part of our troupe stayed in a campground, not in a cabin, and were once escorted back by a juvenile moose. We shared one lunch spot with a trio of otters. (Judging by size they were an indifferent father, a helicopter mom, and a clueless and accident-prone juvenile.) Our chief companions were birds, ranging from swallows to herons and snowy egrets, plus several ospreys and an eagle.

Final silver lining came after we arrived home and I found my cell phone missing. I began the motions of reporting a lost phone, which came to naught because my daughter owns the account. She was spending the weekend communing with condors in the California boonies, far beyond any cell phone tower. At this moment my wife opened her phone and found a message from Grantham, NH. A couple there had found the phone by the roadside. (We determined I had lost it during a brief driver swap on the way home.) They left their number and arranged to send it back. I have it now. This is a valuable corrective for a cynical old fart with a low opinion of most of my fellow primates, and I suppose I should get myself out and pay this forward. There is all the more reason for doing so, in that the people who returned the phone were themselves paying forward a similar gesture.

Finally, a tangential comment on current affairs comes to us from Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Google and ponder that, if you will.

A thought before vacation

2011-06-26T00:34:00.005Z

This year's vacation, by the bye, won't be so grand, but I may make a few remarks.

Meanwhile, I'm actually going to say something nice about a media outlet. It's not remarkable that it's a newspaper, but it is amazing that it's The Salem Evening News. A couple of dog's lives ago, when I was in PR on the North Shore, my relations with that paper were, well, uneven.

One of the dead weights that keeps Internet news from achieving maturity is the anonymous comment column. Done, I suppose, in the name of open access, it has really set journalism back 175 years, to a time when most news was anonymous.

Not long ago, the comments in the Salem News online edition made Fox news comment forums smell like free sample day at the perfume counter. People with something thoughtful to say would sooner dive into an open sewer than post a comment to this private club of garbage-mouthed trolls. In my professional relations with the paper years ago, their ethics had sometimes seemed a bit situational. But now they've put on their white hats and gone riding out with the posse. Posts to the comments column must now have a verifiable name and address attached, just as letters to the editor have done for over a century. Good on you, Salem News: the air already smells cleaner.

Guess what? The comments have all but disappeared. The little club of trash-mouths, none of whom could have spelled or defined byline, suddenly found they had nothing to say that was worth putting their name to.

This intelligent trend, although it reinvents the wheel, is getting some momentum. More and more media have noticed that the trolls set back discourse rather than enhancing it. They've seen that monotonous rants and cliquish behaviour are the common threads of all news comment boards. The rage of such people is both predictable and boring. All but the most incompetent news editors or producers want to avoid both. The solution is reasonably simple. If you want to play in the pool, either sign your name or dig your own pool. (Here, I've preferred the second course.)

Where this reform has happened, the initial silence is astounding. We can hope that those who have both the courage of their convictions, and courage, will begin offering their signed thoughts in public online forums. That, and not the anonymous courage of the mob, is what democracy should offer.

How I was introduced to broadcast media life

2011-06-16T22:18:00.004Z

There is no truth to the rumour that, when I was a college freshman, we got our news by telegraph. Teletype yes, telegraph, no. In those long-ago days I edited UPI news feeds (when they were literally fed from the teletype) and read news for the college radio station.

My first exposure to the shortcomings of broadcast media was during the Northeast electrical blackout in November, 1965. During this nearly-forgotten crisis, pretty much all of the northeast media was struck mute. It was barely three years since the Cuban missile crisis, and any amount of speculation about nuclear holocaust was plausible. While we were off the air, our speculations were our own and harmed no one else. Bit by bit, news came through. The college got up some emergency power. Wiser heads at the radio station used (landline) phones to poke around until they found people with information. The situation would have dissipated sooner had the media we contacted not also been giving vent to baseless speculation.

Fast forward to the following May. The featured performer for the spring concert was to be Pete Seeger. The folk movement had been sufficiently homogenised at that time for the administration to consider him a benign elder-statesman folkie. Hence the college's imprimatur.

Seeger, of course, had never been that benign, and by the spring of 1966, the peace movement had grown in proportion to the war in Vietnam. My college was barely ten miles from an Air Force base. The local peace movement scheduled a picket line outside the base the day Seeger was to arrive. They recruited Seeger's participation, and after the demonstration at the base, the whole party walked to our campus. There were about 30 people in the party, most of them local talent.

All this was well-known; we had reported on it ourselves. This was a fairly conservative campus, especially in those remote days before almost everything that defines "the sixties" in popular myth had happened. The frat brothers vowed to give "the commies" a warm welcome. Cynical broadcasters that we were, we gave right and wrong little thought, but concentrated on setting up a live remote to cover the expected confrontation.

The demonstrators arrived in town and walked peaceably up Main Street to the student union, where they planned a brief statement. They were outnumbered about 20 to 1 by the frat boys and other loutish riff-raff of the student body. At the bottom of the hill where the student union still stands, the demonstrators halted and faced the hostile crowd, at least half of them drunk on this Thursday afternoon: nothing wrong with their courage. There were local and state police present, quite impartial but just as outnumbered by the the crowd.

I was stuck guarding the equipment and didn't see clearly what happened next. Someone amongst the demonstrators began to speak (unaided: no wireless mics back then). Rumour later said it was Pete Seeger: I think now it was more likely one of the faculty demonstrators. In response, the crowd surged forward, hurling epithets and rotten eggs, intent on mauling "the commies." We then had a good demonstration of how the mere presence of a couple of dozen police can cool a crowd's jets. The jets were decidedly cooled. The leaders got no closer than 20 feet to the demonstrators; eggs vanished into pockets or fell to the ground ("not mine, Officer"). There were more speeches and, at some point, Seeger did speak. The would-be defenders of American freedom simply got bored and steadily drifted away.

We were not the only news crews there. They began to drift off as well, whilst we stuck around to the rather tedious end. This was a mistake. By the time we got back to the station, in the basement of the student union a few dozen yards away, the teletype was going berserk, carrying stories about the "riot" in Durham. Our senior announcers hit the phones, calling the wire services and all the major news media within 300 miles, offering eyewitness accounts of what actually happened. It was no go: the slinkers had beaten us and the "riot" was established fact. The best we managed was to get one of the wires to modify its lead to "peace has been restored to Durham after a wild night of rioting..." a couple of hours after we started damage control.

It is easy to recall this formative episode today, in the aftermath of Vancouver's sorry riots, which show the opposite: how a few hundred drunks can quickly get the upper hand over law enforcement. It also shows the same, now old, story, of how today's media become enablers, letting the few hundred idiots control the narrative for a city of over 600,000. During morning errands and en route to work, I heard and read breathless narratives about how the natives of Vancouver were burning their city to the ground in inchoate rage. (That is only the thinnest of exaggerations.)*

Fortunately I have other sources. Years ago I worked remotely with a man from Vancouver, a devoted Canucks fan who is also able to keep sport and life separate. We've enjoyed a good-natured repartee about the Bruins and Canucks for most of our association. Even before I had encountered the worst of the post-Game 7 media hysteria, I had read B's courteous email of congratulations.

Later, I saw more from him and his other friends, from Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada. So far from torching the city, they were suggesting dumping the perps into a nearby (shark-infested) creek. There's disappointment in the outcome, of course. The anger is directed at the people who have spoilt the memory of the Canucks' very successful season and again sullied their city's reputation. Other shoes will drop, I'm sure, but that's their business, not mine.

Most people who get their news in the usual ways don't have my good luck. They don't have friends in Vancouver, and their view of the broadcast media wasn't permanently warped at age 19. What will they think?

-------------------------------
* The highest comedy of the morning came from Boston online commenters who said (so help me) that we wouldn't have rioted in the streets had the Canucks won Game 6 here; wouldn't have booed as they were presented the Stanley Cup in the Garden; would have all been good little boys and girls and gone home. Umm, what are you smokin', mate?

Well, sort of

2011-06-13T22:16:00.003Z

There are those who make a career out of "close enough." Take Harold Camping, for instance. The world didn't end on his schedule (neither did his bank balance, by all accounts) but it appears that his personal rapture has caught up with him. Those who are of a believing sort might consider this stroke a subtle reminder from the deity that second-guessing him is a really bad idea.

Then we have California treasure hunter Bill Warren, out to find bin Laden's body in the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean... to prove he's dead. (Never mind that al Qaida says he is.) This certainly plays very well in Islamabad, and also on Fox, which is oblivious to the former. That is, however, a powerful big piece of water, much of it very deep indeed. It also has an awful lot of marine life that likes to feed on dead bodies. As usual, these are little details that elude boradcast media.

People like Warren don't break wind without a clear profit motive. They also know what the odds of success are for any given venture. Warren probably knows his odds of finding bin Laden's body are about the same as his winning the lottery twice in the same week. If Fox isn't making this worth his while, who is? Donald Trump?

I'd be a fan of Julian Assange if he included con jobs like these in his ministrations.

"Close enough" has caught up with Camping. When will Warren (or his backers) declare "close enough?"

Running out of limbs

2011-06-10T23:28:00.003Z

Some debts are paid--gladly--in blood. So, for many years, I have given mine to square accounts. Both subtle hints from Red Cross, and prodding from a former supervisor, finally got me to step up from whole blood to platelet donation.

Given the medical amusements of the rest of the week, it would seem to be an inauspicious time to try platelet donation. However, blood donors insensibly fall into a life cycle of 56 days (the interval between safe donations) and my moment had come. I had an afternoon on my hands and so tried a walk-in platelet donation.

Disclaimer: anyone looking for an excuse not to donate blood has come to the wrong address. I've been deep in this business, and whatever you have heard, synthetic blood is way in the future. Also, whole blood has become a comparatively primitive way of making your donation. Each pint of whole blood, or its equivalent, can be divided and redivided to help more than one person. At the cost of a larger time commitment, depending on what you do, you can extend the benefit of your donation severalfold. There are all too many legitimate (and a couple of dubious) reasons not to accept blood. Here, we don't accept being scared of needles, et al., as legitimate excuses.

That said, platelet donation has a learning curve. For one thing, not everyone qualifies, which makes it that much more important for those who do to step up. There is also, I've learnt, insider knowledge that makes the process go more smoothly. Hard-core whole-blood donors like me can pump out a pint in less than ten minutes: the bulk of the time commitment is the paperwork before, and the recovery after, the donation. Platelet donation takes two hours, plus paperwork and recovery. This works best if one plans ahead, makes an appointment, and otherwise makes ready. OK, lesson learnt.

Another feature is that while whole-blood donation, and some types of apheresis donation, require only one arm like whole blood donation, I was doing the two-arm method. Put crudely, the process pumps blood out of one arm, splits out the platelet cells, and pumps the remaining plasma into the other arm. This requires that a) one keeps one's arms quite still for the whole two hours or b) failing that, one knows when to ask for help with certain activities of daily living, such as rubbing one's nose.

Things went quite well for an hour or so. Then, I felt a twitch in my left (incoming) arm, followed by the chillin' sensation that tells the hard-core donor that all is not well. I was making contact with the techs at the same moment the machine began redlining. Yep, sure, the incoming vein had misbehaved and plasma was merrily pumping into the surrounding tissue. End of donation. I felt rather bad about this until they said first that I had given a usable donation, and second that this shit happens.

It will be late tomorrow before I'm doing any lifting worth mentioning. Since I already have one leg at less than 100 percent, I'm feeling a little short of limbs.
Fifty-six days from now I will be back at this, with my accumulated knowledge. Because I am eligible and because this is one debt that will never be fully paid.

Adventures in defensive medicine

2011-06-09T13:27:00.005Z

Nearly two weeks ago my right shin began to hurt. I manned up, decided it was only a shin splint, and toughed it out. I chose poorly, for several reasons.

Last Saturday I slipped just a bit on the back stairs and came down hard on my right leg, which objected loudly. After spending the rest of the day on ice and ibuprofen, and not sleeping much at all, I dropped on my PCP Sunday morning.
It was the duty physician--no slouch, one of the founders of the practice--who suggested compartment syndrome. He had me doing more ice, more elevation, and as much Ibuprofen as I could tolerate. If, said he, the leg is still uncomfortable in two days, go directly to the ER.

It was and (reluctantly) I did, not without wondering why we didn't instead try an orthopedist. Emergency Departments always have an element of black comedy about them. In my view they are places to avoid unless one is actually bleeding out, has about six fractures, or both. People with mystery issues should stay away, House notwithstanding.

The sole bit of good luck this visit was that it wasn't very busy when I got there. Dr. S's hint of compartment syndrome was enough to get me through registration and triage fairly quickly. But EDs, like the military, operate on the "hurry up and wait" principle. Having hurried through the first two steps, I waited. I had brief visits with an RN, a PA (who dosed me with Vicodin), and a very young physician, and waited some more. The cubicle TV was set to Dr. Phil, and he was the only doctor over 25 within ten feet of me all day.

The upshot of all this was to send me for ultrasound. Dr. S had already ruled out fracture by palpation, and by the fact that while I could only put weight on the limb with pain, I could put weight on it. I'm not endorsing this Dx, just reporting it. The limb only swelled when I tried to use it. I had been in cold storage for nearly an hour when Doogie Howser saw me, so the swelling was reduced. With all this my position on the triage scale was degrading, and it was some time before the transport person arrived to schlep me to Radiology.

I'm not remarkably tall, but my feet hung over the end of the gurney (cost cutting?). If you've ever made a gurney trip in a hospital, you know that transporters usually open doors by ramming them with the gurney. The prospect didn't appeal, and I tucked my legs up after the first near miss. We did make it to radiology without incident, where I--wait for it--waited some more. I figured by this time that my triage status was worse than that of a dog with a cold nose.

When the rad tech did show up, he was friendly and cooperative, indulging my professional curiosity by angling the ultrasound screen enough for me to watch. We looked, as it happened, he looked in detail everywhere but where the pain centred. Techs aren't supposed to diagnose, but this one said he saw neither clots nor vascular compression. Again, I'm just reporting here. He finished, we shook hands, and he wheeled me to the corridor...to wait for the return trip.

Through much of this, everybody I encountered was worried that I was cold. Actually, the temperature was very pleasant. What I was was bored...and hungry. Wanting to be ready for anything, I hadn't had breakfast. It was midday by this time, and we had arrived at the ED before 9. This got to be a preoccupation, because medical staff with lunch were strolling past the gurney.

The transporter eventually showed up. I hauled in my feet and he wheeled me back to my cubicle: only to find it wasn't mine anymore. There was a moment of confusion, whereupon the nurse said, "take him to 7 1/2."

Room 7 1/2 is, in that ED, a stretch of corridor wall between Room 7 and the john. I took this as a measure of how far my triage status had fallen. Eventually the RN dropped by to say that I was awaiting the radiologist's interpretation. Note the word "wait."

In a perhaps misguided bit of humanity, the staff went out and fetched my wife. "Room 7 1/2" had no chair. She had had breakfast but not lunch, and so was beginning to share my preoccupation.

Located just inside the trauma entry to the ED, "Room 71/2" made up for its lack of amenities with a considerable amount of traffic. One reader has commented elsewhere about the one thing that modern hospitals lack: peace and quiet. He was in a room: try it in a hallway. Actually, I thought it fairly peaceful as hospitals go. Had I not been obliged to carry on domestic conversation, I would have dozed off.

Eventually, the RN showed up with the radiologist's interpretation. I know a little bit about the nuances of medspeak. I observed that the interpretation carefully avoided anything resembling a declarative statement. After six hours in the toils of emergency medicine, the closest thing we had to a diagnosis was my own. Thank you, Einstein. But I was free to go, clutching my Vicodin scrip.

On my health plan, the co-pay for all this theatre is $50. The Vicodin does what Vicodin does best: blunts pain, rather than relieving it, and adds its side effects to the amusements.

We'll figure it out eventually, right? House always does, after four or five false starts. Heh.

Another Daily Double

2011-06-08T00:04:00.002Z

Once upon a time I worked--I'm blowing my cover--at the Paul Revere House. This was Bicentennial era, when the employees were mostly earnest young radical historians like me. Some of us arrived with chips on our shoulders set there by debunkers for cash; others were products of the new history that looked not at Great Men but at ordinary people. Some of us were both. Either way, we became fascinated by Revere and we loved to take on the snarky debunkers. Nothing made one's day like letting a wannabe debunker rant, then quietly walking to a drawer, pulling out Revere's own depositions about April 18-19, 1775, and reading them aloud. The wannabes would slink to the exits. Today, as I have heard it, the Revere House has returned to lying for dollars*, so the Grizzly had no opportunity to be exposed to evidence.

I do know where her followers came from. I suppose they were the same people who, as hyperactive snot-nosed brats, employed their time at the Revere House setting off fireworks in the courtyard. Changing history to suit their agenda is bred into their inbred little minds. It is a comfort that so many candidates are going after the same small percentage of psychotics, heedless of the fact that whomsoever wins will have to weasel back to the centre, or at least to sanity.

About the leg. My next opus will reflect on today's adventures in defensive medicine, in which untold thousands and six hours were spent to confirm the patient's own initial diagnosis. I would do that now, but I did get Vicodin as a party favour and I'm about thought out. Peace, dudes.

*
In those days we were wholly evidence-based. When tourists asked where the barn was or the name of Paul Revere's horse, we told them there was no evidence he even owned a horse until after the war.(Despatch riders didn't need to own horses.) Not long ago, a friend's family was assured that the perennials in the courtyard were planted by the patriot's own hand. Not: I helped the boss plant them myself in 1976...and that courtyard was the adjoining lot until well into the 20th century. If there is a difference between that lie and the lies the Tea Party has tried to throw up on Wikipedia to change history, it eludes me.

Confused, I am

2011-06-07T12:16:00.002Z

Congressman Weiner's 15 minutes of stupidity is the second time this year I've encountered the idea that the upper male torso is lewd. OK, if it's my torso it's merely gross, but lewd in a general sense? What kind of prigs are we becoming?

But still....There are those among us who first met in, um, another place, where male nudity of another sort appeared with regularity: tiresome regularity. There seems to be nothing that will convince men of a certain mindset that the unclad male body--no matter what part is unclad--is not an automatic turn-on for women. Nay, quite the contrary. I am reliably informed that a shirtless and totally buff male may be interesting eye candy, but falls somewhat short of erotic. (The floor is open for contrary opinions.)

In any case, men named Weiner ought to behave with exceptional discretion.

The Daily Double, etc.

2011-06-05T17:31:00.005Z

I am late putting in my oar on a couple of things (reason coming below). One is this tornado in Massachusetts business. It has somewhat more impact in this house than elsewhere in eastern MA, since my spouse's family all hailed from that part of the state. Most are dead or scattered now, but it still "home" in a sense that few people in eastern MA comprehend. We know all those places and feel the loss acutely. That is in addition to the fact that being within 100 miles of a tornado gives me total shit fits.

Moving right along to the main lesson, provided this week by the competing drivers of the GOP clown car. It is hilarious that two people who are most anxious to prove themselves common folks found it necessary to eat pizza with a knife and fork...in front of the cameras. Perhaps, as some say, neither is well-acquainted with pizza. The Donald is surely more of a filet mignon guy and the Palin presumably chews jerky she made from her own wildlife kills...but does she eat jerky with a knife and fork?

The tale brought me back to going on a trip with my mother and brother to the Maritimes when we were in high school. The expedition featured many errors (my mother became a more seasoned traveler later in life) but the one that cut the deepest was our lunch at a very haute restaurant in Halifax, NS. My brother and I were 1960s teenagers. We wanted hamburgers. They actually had them on the menu, presumably having run into obstinate American teenagers before. But my mother, clearly intimidated by her surroundings, insisted that we eat them with knife and fork. There were scowls. There were whispered exchanges that descended into threats. We ate with knife and fork. It was many years before either of us forgave my mother for this imposition.*

The point is that my mother's moment of social anxiety may have a lot in common with the Donald and the Grizzly. Common sense says that when you don't know how to eat something in strange surroundings, you either ask or observe those around you. Insecurity dictates that you fall back on the highest social level in your experience. It seems fair to conclude that the Donald and the Grizzly possess more than their allowance of insecurity, and less than the normal allotment of common sense. But we knew that.

I write this from a recliner, with legs propped on pillows. The price of enthusiastic exercise when sun returns is overuse injury. After a week contending with a sore back, sciatica, and shin splints, my physician has me aggressively treating a sore leg, hoping to keep it merely a sore leg. I have two days to set it to rights. Otherwise, this is possibly compartment syndrome. No, I had never heard of it before either. The short news for cyclists is to take it easy on the hills first time out of the barn. It becomes surgical in a miserably short time. At any rate, I'm trying to follow orders without dying first of boredom.

*My wife reminds me of her first encounter, in France, with escargots. A classmate set to with knife and fork, instead of the proper instrument, sending the snail and its trail of butter soaring across the room to hit a faculty member of the head.

Memorial Day, 2011

2011-05-30T23:18:00.003Z

First, today's fall from grace award goes to the anonymous hackers who attacked various PBS Web sites because Front Line had dared to broadcast a show on Wikileaks that fell short of adulation. This is precisely why my contempt for Julian Assange and his minions remains strong. Freedom of information means nothing if its self-appointed defenders pick and choose what information shall be free.

The local Memorial Day show followed much the same script as in past years. This town has a three-stop parade. The first stop is the harbour, where the town remembers those whose gave their lives at sea, navy, merchant marine and privateer: there are long memories here, and it wouldn't do to leave the privateers out of our thoughts. The main event, which I take in, is at the Memorial Park downtown. This is the one dominated by a sombre Civil War obelisk, which bears more names than all the other memorials combined.

This the beginning of the Civil War sesquicentennial. If we manage to get through the next four years without starting another one, perhaps we can use the time to recognise the seed of what the war started, and to settle some things that were far from settled at the centennial.

Against this background, I was disappointed in our keynote speaker, a young Marine reserve officer raised in Marblehead. There is a lot of material to draw from here. We did not especially need a political sermon strongly tinged with Tea Party rant. Although that the town has a decidedly Republican cast, I detected an uptick in shuffling and shifting in the crowd. Not the place, old man.

Forty years ago one would not have predicted that veterans' organisations would have been inherited by veterans of my generation. Then, I would have predicted that those organisations would wither and die rather than treat Vietnam veterans on equal terms. I have never forgotten or forgiven that. I will show up at such events but that is as far as I'll take it. But here we are, old men and women, and the older men and women of World War Two and Korea are dying at a prodigious rate. We are the old ones: may the fates grant us one insight denied to veterans of "the greatest generation." What Holmes called "the incommunicable experience of war" unites us all. We are related to the deeps of time, far past Thucydides, before Marathon. May we be fair-minded and generous to those who are behind the guns today.

Potpurri

2011-05-26T23:48:00.003Z

The sole benefit of living near the high school is being able to hear the outdoor band practices this time of year.

A biggy-size-it toy I detest is the "SUV stroller." Entitled suburban mothers already take up enough room, what with their obsession with breeding and with always walking side by side. Why add to that with baby conveyances the size of a Deux Cheavaux...then try to roll them in tandem into a small shop?

There will be more thoughts presently about Tyler Hamilton, as the other shoes drop over his--and others'--cycling confessions. My first immediate comment is addressed to those who took issue with my earlier defence of the homeboy: you were right, so there.

My second comment is to hope that this scandal has no effect on recreational and transportation cycling, now that both have at last gained some credibility in the auto-obsessed US of A. Past disturbances in the chi of bicycle racing have had negative effects on the use of bicycles at less exalted levels. For once, one can hope that public cynicism will do some good, and allow us to slough off the latest obnoxious pro sports drug spectacle.

Don didn't know it all

2011-05-25T22:30:00.004Z

Donald Murray, teacher and mentor to two generations of writers at the University of New Hampshire, was full of advice. One of his favourite tips was that freelance writers should acquire a skill that has nothing to do with writing and that takes little creative power. He was not a friend of the starving artists school of thought, believing that want saps creativity rather than motivating it.

Being smartasses of a certain generation, we were inclined to ask if that was why he had made his living as a reporter, then an editor talented enough to get a Pulitzer, then a teacher of writing. His calm answer was that if he had it to do over again, he would follow his own advice. He recommended piano tuning as an occupation especially suited to writers. The schedule was irregular, he said, but the work fairly steady and well-paid. It put one in touch with another sort of creative people as well.

I've been getting progressively deeper into my own version of this, and I'm not sure the advice was so good. The schedule is erratic, not irregular. The work seems prone to dwindling, and one's human contacts are more exacting than creative. And alas, a skill which looked appealing at the outset shows signs of being, well, humdrum.

Possibly I chose poorly. The result is that it is rather hard to start the engine at the end of the day, even when one's mind is churning with ideas. This too, presumably, shall pass, but I think it may be better to do as Don did, not as he said. Writing begets writing.

Solly

2011-05-24T22:13:00.004Z

Twenty fricken days! I'm dreadful! I'd say I'm in a funk, but any time I do, I remember a college friend who would inquire, to that statement, why so and so was in a funk, not an MG.

I suppose I've been in the one and not the other. Which is too bad, because there have endless opportunities for literary levity in the world at large.

There has been this other thing, peculiar to my little town, the yachting capital of the world/the nation/New England/Essex County. Our universe has been shrinking, but there are still enough fools who believe it to make a Marblehead harbour mooring rather more valuable than our real estate.

I have such a mooring. The odd thing is that the holder of such a mooring no longer actually owns anything. He/she simply has rights to use a buoy, rights to pay a permit fee, and the privilege of paying a licenced maintenance firm a hefty amount of money a year. (Once upon a time if you had a permit, you actually owned the buoy, the chain and anchor, but no more.)

A few years back, we sold our boat but, in the usual local fashion, kept our rights in the mooring. We did this basically to give a lift to our small fleet of small sailboats. While in theory we also got the right to use the boat, our interests were moving away from sailing. We used it very little. In addition, our co-owner was a thorough mariner, both born and bred. He did much better than we ever did.

Suddenly, this spring, he got a new job in the Midwest and sold out the boat. If you ever feel friendless and unwanted, for an antidote try having one of these 5x8 bits of paper with no boat on the mooring. You will have many, many friends in a very short time. If you give up the mooring, you will make one anonymous person very happy, and earn yourself many unfriends. If you keep the mooring, only one of your friends will be truly happy.

If this isn't complicated enough, add a Left Coast child who has suddenly rediscovered her interest in sailing. This would be innocent enough if she were to remain living in the desert. However, there's a high likelihood that her next career move is to the Bay area, thence back to this coast. So, as all this unfolds, daughter says "Don't give up the mooring."

No pressure.

We caved.

Our new arrangement is with the person we thought needed a chance at a mooring most. Just to show how diverse we are, he's a Republican. Nowadays, doing this sort of thing is far from simple. Papers: many many papers. Hoops: many many hoops. It is unclear as yet whether we've acquired unfriends from all this, because they haven't called. At any rate, the deal is done. At last.

My brother-in-law, hearing all this, suggested that getting moorings in Marblehead is like getting season's tickets to the New York Giants. I think the Giants tickets would be easier.

Hoist by his own Johnson

2011-05-04T11:23:00.008Z

Mr. Wayne Johnson's bid to save his house from his self-destructive urges was "indefinitely postponed" by a 2-1 margin last night. Those unfamiliar with the art of open town meeting politics, as practised in the Massachusetts towns still delusional enough to have open town meetings may not understand this reference, or the back story.

The town's Finance Committee vets the list of action items, called the warrant, before meeting. They publish their recommendations which are approve (we can afford it), don't approve (we don't think we can), no recommendation (it doesn't cost anything so we're not competent) or indefinite postponement. The latter is generally recognised as a sort of local politics limbo. It is possible, though not likely, for an indefinitely postponed item to resurface in its present form. Such measures usually undergo serious tweaking before they show up on the warrant again.

The present zoning ordinances, which set a variety of lot sizes but which do frown on narrow-fronted (or "pork-chop") lots, were set by town meeting a couple of decades ago, years before Johnson decided to ignore the law and build what he pleased where he pleased. Although most town meeting articles pass by simple majority, zoning articles must pass by a two-thirds vote. In a town in which it is close to impossible to get a two-thirds vote favouring anything, this ensures that zoning ordinances command as close to universal assent as the town is ever likely to go.

The question, then, was settled law to just about everyone but Wayne Johnson, who makes his laws up as he goes along. It is before the meeting now only because our hero discovered that the Commonwealth's courts were unimpressed by his poor little rich kid pouting act. Faced with the imminent threat of demolishing his house, Johnson did what every red-blooded American millionaire does. He hired more lawyers and discovered a loophole that allowed Town Meeting to stay the courts' decision by retroactively changing the zoning.

It took two nights of nail-biting suspense for Johnson to reach his turn. Alas, his personal article came during a meeting preoccupied with

a) Accessibility for the Old Town House, one of the nation's oldest public buildings (1727)
b) Changes to the Town Dump
c) Capital expenses for a large elementary school.

All we would have needed was any article concerning dogs and the meeting would be sitting until mid-June. Any one of these topics generates hot air in inverse ratio to its level of importance and/or controversy. We have in addition a relatively weak-kneed moderator. His late predecessor knew town meeting procedure inside out, and showed no hesitation about shutting off anyone or anything to keep things moving. With all this, it took two nights and around six hours to do less than three hours' worth of business. When the end came, poor Wayne was sent packing, despite his crying towel.

Indefinite postponement does Johnson little good, for this warrant article was a last, desperate throw. The questions remaining are whether courts and town can at last show the backbone they have failed so far to display, and who's going to pay to take the place down?* The emerging buzz seems to expect that Johnson, who has laid out every sob story he has, will hunker down and wait to have the house torn down around his ears: which might happen.

Negligent as town officials and courts have been in enforcement, we should not lose sight of the central fact in all this: Johnson's pre-adolescent hubris. He knew the lot was non-conforming, but he bought it and built on it anyway. Although he could have built a more modest, better-sited house, and avoided most of the pitfalls awaiting those who build on pork-chop lots, he did not. He built a McMansion so sited that it was deliberately in yo' face to neighbours and town officials alike. Sixteen years of "no" from neighbours, town offices, town boards and the courts was not, and perhaps still is not, enough to convince him that they meant it. He was voted down not only for his hubris, but because wiser heads understood it was not all about him. Johnson expected to do as he damn well pleased, then change the law to ratify what he had done after the fact. Marblehead should be pleased that he pursued this pleasant line of reasoning in a relatively benign field like zoning and not in, say, homicide.

---------------------------
*The irony in all this is that Johnson could have moved his house on the lot, or altered it. The courts made it clear that they found demolition a distasteful solution. So far had Johnson lost his reason that he never seems to have considered either option, and they may now be closed to him.

Show me the picture!

2011-05-03T21:28:00.006Z

Some years ago, some academics with lots of time on their hands demonstrated that the most hazardous sort of stupid people are the ones who are so stupid that they don't know they're stupid. There were plenty of examples at the time. Today we have so many more, chiefly found in the comments section of any online news story.

These are the stupid people in the West who latch onto any conspiracy theory, such as the one that runs "Osama ain't dead because I ain't seen the pitchers."
Never mind that another significant group of whack jobs, called al Qaida, accept that death as fact.

DNA evidence is extremely hard to fake. Facial recognition matches are hard to fake. Photographs? Child's play, even before PhotoShop. Let's drift back in time about 75 years, to a seminal conflict unknown to most Americans today: the Spanish Civil War.

The photograph below, by Robert Capa, became the single most representative image of that war.

In the 1970s, British journalist Phillip Knightley examined the entire tale of the
"moment of death" photo, as it was called, and concluded it was faked. His evidence is persuasive, and the followup (at the link) is interesting. Here, we encounter the idea that the public, not Capa, was responsible for the legend of the photograph. In his initial discussion of the photo, Knightley made the point that is relevant to the "proof" that the imbeciles demand today: context is all, especially context provided by captions. Had this photo's caption said "Republican soldier slips during training exercises," it would have been forgotten in a heartbeat. But this is what the clown class considers evidence.

If, or when, we see the pitchers, we'll see an image of a human head hit at short range by a high-velocity projectile. It may not look enough like the innumerable file photos to satisfy those people too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. It is a pitiful commentary on today's media that we must act to make our own fools happy almost ahead of any other consideration.

The evidence--especially that offered up by al Qaida--tells me the sonofabitch is dead. I am perhaps un-American, because I am ambivalent to find myself happy over the death of another human being, no matter how vile. I recall the words of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so."

Disorientated

2011-05-02T21:40:00.002Z

Don't ask me what I think about the bin Laden news, yet. My days of dancing in the streets are long past. One thing I do know: I'm tired to death of conspiracy theory nutjobs. The evidence is appearing in due course, but the basket cases would only accept bin Laden's head on a pike. They are as medieval as al Qaida.

There's plenty else to deal with. Tonight I'm being dragged (yes, kicking and screaming) to our chief local annual farce, ye open town meeting. I'm bringing reading. There's only one thing I'm there to vote on, and it's the proposal of one entitled bastard to change a half century of zoning laws. And why? So he doesn't have to tear down a house he knew was illegal. I don't see why, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, we can't yet watch the meeting at home and cast our votes remotely.

Speaking of comedy, I happened to see that the latest thing in diets is "the Viking Diet." In fact, it features cabbage, rye bread, root vegetables and fish: yes, lovely. My first reaction to the name was that I'm already on the Viking Diet: Pill-age.

OK, more profound thoughts later.

The beat goes on

2011-05-02T00:19:00.003Z

Nickelodeon fans in the 1990s will remember the animated series Doug. As the parent of an adolescent interested in animation, I had more than the usual share of exposure to this and other Nick toons. What's relevant here is that the script had a running joke, more of an idee fixe really, about beets.

The weekend's festivities at the Vatican have themes relating to beat** on my mind--or beet, if one is hooked on phonics. So the object here is to play with this charming word, syllable, or what have you.

First in my mind is the political turnaround involved. When the saint-to-be John Paul was a young priest, a Polish priest was more likely to beaten by a Hitler Youth than beatified by one. Yet here is Pope Benny, presiding over the festivities as if such a thought never crossed his youthful Teutonic mind.

I was also taken by the business of exhuming the late pontiff so that the faithful could pray at his coffin. Is it that the Miracles Verification Unit is a little short of this prerequisite for sainthood, and someone is hoping that the blind obligingly see and the lame walk during this act of the production? Even a sainthood candidate so obviously in the political express lane should have a good portfolio of miracles.

The church is on Facebook and Twitter, but they've missed a bet by bringing John Paul VI's remains back to centre stage with sombre Vatican piety. They should have produced a YouTube video, coffin raising up through the centre of the altar, with the sound track playing "The Beat Goes On," (with cuts to the "I Vas Not A Nazi Polka" whenever the camera panned to Bennie). The video could have a heartwarming closing, with beatific Father McFeeley taking a choirboy into the sacristry by the shoulder. I leave the rest of that dialogue to reader imagination.

But surely, there must be other plays on this theme out there. I'm beat...and I think I took too many snarky pills today.

Write first, add links later

2011-04-27T23:14:00.004Z

Now I've added the links. Write if you want more.

The rising generation only gets the full impact of Phil Ochs if they happen to find his concert album from 1966 or so. In his spoken intro to "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," he defines his subject as "ten degrees to the left of center in good times...ten degrees to the right when it affects them personally." I have always enjoyed that as much as or more than the song. I've adopted it as a description of some people in my life, whom I speak of as "Phil Ochs liberals."

Alas, I've found that I'm married to one.

One of my spouse's leading hobbies is jurisprudence, especially criminal law. This hobby often tempts her to be rather judgmental toward people who don't rise to her high standard. The objects of her scorn presume suspects' guilt. They have no problem with officialdom throwing over little details like probable cause, or the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. These bad habits get my spouse into a rare snit.

Except.... In this case, the exception is the story making the rounds of the Interwebz this week, about an unfortunate man in Buffalo, NY. The man in question was, shall we say, not tech-savvy, but was an otherwise upstanding US citizen. When he bought his wireless router, and failed to set up a password after a few tries, he said "fuck it." Well, more or less, but he gave the matter no further effort or thought.

That is, he didn't until he heard his door smashed down in the middle of the night and found himself pummeled to the floor with the rifle butts of, of all agencies, the I.C.E. After interrogation, which seems chiefly to have consisted of ICE agents calling him "filth," "trash," and "pervert," he figured out that the agents thought he was a child pornographer.

I asked if my law-junkie spouse had a) heard of the story and b) perhaps thought the law enforcement response was over the top. She scowled and snarled that the man was getting what he deserved.

Umm...due process? Probable cause? Presumption of innocence? Or is it "ten degrees to the right when it affects them personally?"

Back to the story. Somewhere along the line it occurred to one of these law enforcement geniuses to examine the arrestee's computer and peripherals. He had no kiddy porn, or any evidence that he had ever had kiddy porn on his computer. What they did find was that wireless router without password protection. Did they at least express regrets? Nooo. They are now evidently mounting a PR blitz to convince the world that when they smashed into the man's house in the middle of the night, smashing not only his door but several clear protections of the Bill Of Rights, it was his fault. Because he couldn't enable password protection on his router. This is known in most circles as PYA. I don't hesitate to call the schmuck a schmuck, because evidently he isn't throwing the lawbook at his tormentors (on the advice of counsel, Atty. Schmuck). That is schmuckdom.

Despite the I.C.E. obsession with blaming the victim of this obscene excess of force, someone in law enforcement had brains enough to wonder who was dealing kiddy porn from that IP address. They managed to bust a neighbour who did have kiddy porn on his machine, before he skipped town laughing at the law. That fool had days to skip, and it's clear the law got him only because he was the dumbest dumbass of all. Left to their own, these latter-day G-men only get their man if someone else ties him up and throws him in their path. Righteousness, like happiness, is a warm gun.

As part of their collective arse-kissing of the Justice Department, the news media has pushed this solely as a cautionary tale, warning you that you should protect your router: which you should. They don't ask what penalties should face geeks who build wireless routers that do not make security enabling so easy your dog could do it. They don't ask why this investigation of a U.S. citizen requires a law enforcement agency that is supposed to chase drug runners, illegal immigrants and terrorists, and why they feel empowered to smash down any citizen's door at night on slim suspicion and without probable cause.*

Why bother with due process when even law geeks like my spouse are ready to presume guilt and applaud the law when the charge is socially reprehensible? Before the applause dies down in such cases, smarter perps than the one in Buffalo will bolt for the border or the Idaho woods, not to be found for another half lifetime. As the Great Gonzo said, "rats don't understand these things."

But then, I'm not ten degrees to the right when it affects me personally.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* This legal excess does strike close to home because, as it happens, there is only one wireless address in this tech-savvy neighbourhood that isn't password protected. One member of the couple in question is bipolar, and I don't like to think what might happen if I.C.E. smashed their doors down in the wee hours.

Ambitions for the afterlife

2011-04-21T23:53:00.004Z

Heh. One of them would be never to stall for ten days without writing anything. My rather odd work schedule (half-day, full day x 2) has led me into a rhythm for writing, and over the past few days that rhythm has been interrupted. No, make that torn down, spat upon and trampled. It does make one reflect that scheduled time to write, no matter how oddly achieved, is fairly important to the craft.

Among the distractions has been redoing the kitchen vinyl tile. Why uncool vinyl, you ask? Why not ceramic? Because

It's an old house with lightly-framed floors and the weight per square foot of the vinyl is less than half that of most ceramic.
Period kitchen floor covering for a vernacular house of this age (c. 1895) is linoleum. I go with tile because one can do the job in sections, which is impossible with linoleum, or I should say sheet vinyl.

I did manage to inflict a variety of damage on my crumbling body even doing as much as I did, and shall likely do that again at intervals until the job is done. This led me to a reflection on mortality.

All winter I've been watching the back yard symbiosis between the feeder birds and the crows. The former don't come out of the bushes to nibble and bathe until the latter give the all-clear. This is necessary because one neighbour's cat lives mostly outdoors, and shows an excessive interest in the birds. We also have picked up a sharp-shinned hawk. The hawk is of a genus (buteos) that by nature doesn't chase a lot of small live birds. But, absent the accipiter hawks that do, buteo (or buzzard) hawks are opportunists.

The feeder birds, especially the sparrows, are what the poet had in mind when coining the expression "bird-brain." Left to their own devices, they go merrily into harm's way, even if the cat is watching from below and the hawk from above. Not so with crows. I've watched them from boyhood on, and have developed a deep respect for their collective intelligence and survival skill.

Watch a murder (that's what it is) of crows to see this in action. There will not be a single bird in sight. Turn away, then turn back. A scout crow will appear if there is any food to be had. In our neighbourhood, the scout perches at the topmost end of the highest branch of a large oak at the end of the street, swaying nearly 100 feet up. When the scout is satisfied that serious predators (read cats and hawks) don't pose a problem, it will caw.

Then one or two crows fly into the target area, swoop over it, and perch in medium-height branches of nearby trees. They're the close support. Not only can they warn against predators, but they can attack them. Hawks, with their binocular vision, are vulnerable from behind. They can be chased off by birds much smaller than crows. Cats--at least this one--seem nonplussed at being buzzed by birds nearly as large as they are, and most retreat when crows show up.

Once the crows have established their perimeter, the rest of the family arrives, and everyone (or nearly everyone) gets a turn at the goodies, be they a bird feeder or a pizza carton in someone's trash. There is always a scout, and there are always close support guards, and they seem to take this by turns.

In the case of our feeder, when the crows arrive, the feeder birds pitch in, secure amongst the bigger, more alert cousins, who don't seem to mind the little birds. The crows do object to sharing with squirrels, who generally wait for their chance under cover. Then, at some crowish signal, the whole circus melts away, to repeat the same act elsewhere.

Should there be anything in reincarnation, one could make a good case for coming back as a crow. There's something to be learned about cooperation and learning. Like cockroaches, their ancestors were around long before ours--and probably ate some of our ancestors after their incessant conflicts. The descendants of both will probably outlive our self-destructive species by many millennia. The cockroach may be more durable, but the crows are smarter.

WTF K

2011-04-11T20:56:00.007Z

In yesterday's Sunday Globe, Jan Freeman was commenting on the numbers of people made irate by the Oxford English Dictionary recognising LOL as an expression, at least. Freeman pointed out that the OED's* task is to keep a finger on the pulse of the language, not waggle a finger in the air when it sees something meriting disapproval.

Once again I was a bit disappointed to see no recognition that many of the abbreviations that people associate with the Internet are much older than that. From my own education, I can attest that they have existed as long as wireless radio. They're usually three letters or less because it's very quick to send three letters in Morse code: think SOS. I haven't researched it, but I suspect that many go back to landline telegraph.

I don't recall LOL being in the Navy's CW** vocabulary, but WTF sure was. Because there is no code for question marks, one would key either:

WTF K

"What the fuck... over", with the question implied.

If one wanted to make the question absolutely clear, one would send

INT WTF K

"What the fuck? Over."

But not very often. Obscenities on air were frowned upon, even if you weren't George Carlin and weren't actually saying the seven dirty words.

That is a very digressive beginning to my WTF of the week. By now, we all know that responsible dog owners bring along plastic bags into which they scoop the poop of their beloved pet/companion. Now, I bet you figured that the logical outcome of these socially responsible acts was that the dog's human would carry the bag of dog shit either home or to a socially responsible receptacle for disposal. As Mr. Spock would observe, that is logical.

Not necessarily.

Since the warm weather began, I've been walking several times a week along "the Path," the local reclaimed railroad right of way. Somewhere in the past here I commented on the slovenly habits of the entitled youth of this entitled town along this route. What we now have is a steadily increasing number of dog walkers who drop their bags of dog shit along the Path.

Let's be fair: are these accidents? I think not. Each of these lovely parcels is nestled carefully in the grass or brush along the way, discreetly set up to look like ordinary litter. As one of the people who makes an effort to take out not just what they bring in, but a little more besides, I can't help thinking the entitled dog walkers would like me to include Fido's faeces in my ministrations.

Dream on: other peoples' dog shit, packaged or otherwise, and used tissue are over the line for me.

I might have thought this sort of arrogance was unique to my town, where arrogance is practically an industry. But last Saturday, my spouse and I opened this year's hiking season with a five-some mile warmup in the Blue Hills. And there they were: neatly tied plastic bags of dog shit, coyly hidden here and there beside the trails.

OK, maybe there's some excuse for the arrogance along our path, which nips behind various Mcmansion back fences, if not for the stupidity. Would these people really wrap up their own puppy's stools in plastic in their back yards? No, forget I asked, because they might. But the Blue Hills? One of the best pieces of urban preservation anywhere? Christ wept.

(Since we were speaking of idiots, I came downstairs this morning to hear Good Morning America announce that Sarah Palin is backing Donald Trump's run for President. How nice: this is a good start to getting all the clowns into one tent. Mitt? Paging Mr. Romney!)

_______________________________

* Nobody seems to object to OED. LOL.

**CW (continuous wave) is what you call broadcast Morse code if you have ever done it. Real manly-type CW operators pretend they don't even know what Morse Code means: talk about arrogance!

The lost art of headline writing, part 312

2011-04-08T00:33:00.002Z

"Stocks fall slightly after quake."

Truly, words fail me.

Slightly related (in the sense that both involve proto-literates pretending to do news) is word the Glenn Beck is (sorta-kinda) leaving Fox. This leaves some pundits stretching for explanations. I think it's obvious. Someone had sold Beck first-class seats on the Rapture and he didn't want to miss his flight over a deadline.

Around this time

2011-04-03T20:54:00.008Z

My memory is littered with impressions of rural New England from a time long before my own. A prolonged rural stasis, followed by the Great Depression, had preserved many of these features in New Hampshire long after their natural lifespan. But there was only one in which I was a participant.

Perhaps the strangest habit, or ritual, in my village surrounded the annual sucker run. No, this has nothing to do with tourists: they came later and mostly blew by us to the lakes and mountains. I refer to the fish. After checking up on this, I'm pretty sure it was white suckers that filled Mill Brook every April. And every April the young manhood of the village sharpened their fish spears and joined the hunt.

Yes, spears: usually the five-pronged variety like this. For, in spite of what much current information says, these were usually big fish for fresh water, 15 to 20 inches as a rule.

It was also a carnival of wanton waste. The Merrimack, whence they came, was in those days too polluted for it to be safe for humans to eat the fish. However the local cats, crows, and dogs were in heaven, gorging themselves silly on our catch. For reasons best known only to them, the dogs took the orgy one step further, happily rolling in the piles of dead fish lining the stream banks. There might have been abuttor objections, but the fishing portion of the brook ran through a group of houses we'd call "low income" today. It seems likely that some of the abuttors slipped out at dusk and scored the more edible part of that day's catch.

There were of course no adult referees in this strange activity: the protocols and the good places were passed down kid to kid. It was generally understood that one had to be nine, or eight at the very least, to take part. Mechanics played a part in that, since one had to be tall enough to handle a fish spear five or six feet long, and strong enough to actually be able to spear a fish with one. It's much harder than it sounds. Also the brook was in full spring spate, fast-running and bitterly cold with fresh snow melt. Boys needed to be old enough to understand the risk and to stand a chance of rescue if they did fall in.

Inevitably, the rule was bent, then broken. Someone's five-year-old brother tagged along and, unnoticed in the frenzy, fell in and drowned. In the time before 24/7 news, helicopter reporters and helicopter parents, the adult world quietly compassed the end of the sucker ritual without a single TV story or irate mass meeting.

Despite the slaughter, it seems we didn't make much of a dent in the population: the white sucker is among New Hampshire's most abundant fish species. There were at most perhaps 75 boys spearing suckers in that village in any one year. While a few of the big kids ran up impressive scores, most of us felt lucky to spear a dozen in the fortnight's run. The suckers, on the other hand, numbered in the thousands, and were bothered only in the quarter-mile or so below the old grist mill dam, and only during the few hours a day that boys were turned loose on them.

Now the river is clean, the village is gentrified, and I suppose only those few of that generation still living there remember the ritual. That's a pity in several ways. My recent reading tells me that spring-run white suckers make excellent fried fish and chowder fish, a fact probably unknown to everyone in the village.

Also, whilst I speared few suckers, I grew up to get history degrees. When I came to study my state's early history, I began to recall the sucker run and wonder how it started. Here's my hypothesis:

Until the second half of the 19th century, most farming in New Hampshire was subsistence farming. The chief winter occupation, besides logging, was hunkering down and trying to starve to death as slowly as possible. The village was settled in 1728; the brook was dammed for the grist mill the next year. I know enough of other upland towns' economies in the hard months of the year to be sure the first settlers observed those suckers. But when they lined the banks to spear them, it was no ritual: it was a deadly earnest effort to bring home fresh food. Most of the township was either land-poor farmers, hardscrabble farmers, or labourers until a generation or so before my own.

If anyone had probed the business, they would probably have found that sucker-spearing was a food source for a portion of the village until river pollution put an end to it in the 1920s or 1930s. If we as kids had asked around, we would surely have found numbers of people for whom the sucker run as food source was a living memory. In April, the only alternative was trout, which are much smaller and harder to catch. That memory may also account for the adult tolerance that accompanied the ritual until little Bobby drowned.

Days like today--breezy and in the fifties--generally brought the fish upstream to spawn, hence my recollection. I wonder what would happen if I showed up in the village now with waders and a fish spear. The actual, and ritualised, links to the rural past are mostly erased, but the suckers are still there.

R.I.P. Bob Slate's

2011-03-28T19:41:00.003Z

Saying goodbye to another Cambridge institution wasn't at first on the programme when my wife and I went into Cambridge yesterday. We had decided to go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, then try to find cheap eats someplace without a national brand on it. The Slate's visit was an add-on, when I mentioned the store and my wife said, "Oh, did you see the Globe column?"
Slate's is going, going, soon to be gone. We visited the Mass. Ave. store in its final flurry. My Rhodia pads were gone, gone in every style: someone had beaten me to it.

Crap: another step in the homogenisation of Harvard Square. I was a very late comer to Slate's, having been in Cambridge rarely most of my life. I was taking refreshment with the Mass Marrier some months ago and mentioned my frustration at being unable to find an old-fashioned long, skinny reporter's pad. He suggested Slate's. I found what I wanted and became a convert. I usually put this curse only on restaurants I like.

This news has its analog in the trouble I have finding the notebook. Slate's was damaged by Staples, then done in by the Internet. The specialised pads I like never had much of a market beyond writers in general and reporters in particular, so the Staples of the world can't be bothered with them. In any case, reporters don't take notes anymore. They record. This certainly makes one techno-savvy and cool, but I still remember what someone told me long ago. People may become more cautious, more guarded, in what they tell you when you record them. In our world that seems more real and more threatening. The pad? It's just a notebook: what harm is there in that? Perhaps that gambit is obsolete too, given how many people self-destruct via Facebook and Twitter. If reporters were still taking the pad and gathering facts, it might be different, but so many are simply making the story up as they go along.

All right: I'll hobble off to my rocker now and play with my skinny little pads. And I won't say where we got lunch: Putting no curses there.

Jumping the shark

2011-03-28T16:56:00.004Z

By now, we all know about jumping the shark. Over the last few days, media of nearly every kind (at least those which can broadcast images) has worked itself into a feeding frenzy over "man in kayak approached by 30-foot shark." God, a shark! let's all panic and run away from the beaches, even in Montana. One might say I'm showing my bias by linking to Fox coverage of this terrifying episode, but there's a point to that. The least terrified parties to this episode were the guy in the kayak (who jumped in to the water to get a closer look) and the shark, a basking shark.

After the initial frenzy, if you get your news from one of the few media sources that still has ethics, you might have read that the kayaker's nonchalance was based on knowing that it was a basking shark and that it was not dangerous to anything bigger than krill. (It's such a bitch how facts can get in the way of a good story.)

Our worthy Fox source doesn't give up hysteria without a fight, saying "he [the kayaker] says he wasn't scared because that species of shark usually only eats krill and plankton." Emphasis on the editorial addition, which implies that the shark might vary its diet with people.

It can't. It has no teeth, and is what's called a filter feeder, ambling through the water with its mouth open, as it were grazing on plankton and krill:

At the back of that big, filter-lined mouth is a not-so-big throat. Most species of shark have more to fear from us than we from them, but this is especially true to the basking shark and its larger cousin, the whale shark. Around here, numbers of these harmless creatures, and several porpoises, were wantonly slaughtered back in the 1970s by Darrell Dumbshits acting out Jaws fantasies and attacking anything with a big dorsal fin. A couple of years back, a basking shark was foolish enough to cruise for its supper about 300 metres off our beach, which drove hundreds of panic-stricken bathers onto dry land and brought up more news helicopters than we'd seen since our last high-profile homicide. It ambled away before some jackass stuck a harpoon in it.

We can hope that cable news has jumped the shark.

See, I told you

2011-03-23T22:11:00.003Z

Or at least some of you. Welsh cuisine has moved far past leek soup. For some reason, this is my favourite confection shown by the Welsh National Culinary Team:

That would probably work out to Tim Cenedlaethol Coginiol Cymru if you're interested. (That's short a couple of accent marks I can't find here.) If you follow the link, you'll see that the team is whipping up something or other for wot's-'is-name and wot's-'er-name wot is getting hitched next month.

Adventures of two little saps

2011-03-22T23:54:00.006Z

The Harrumpher recently wrote about an expedition to the Blue Hills Reservation for a maple sugaring event. I commented there, from experience, that this is definitely a "don't do this at home" sort of activity.

We were relative newcomers to the still-rural village where I grew up. We had not been there long before we noticed, and took part in, sugaring on a couple of nearby farms. It was a logical step, in ten-year-old logic, from that to pestering our parents to let us tap our good-sized stand of maples. It took a year or two, but we wore down the parental units. I think my father caved in to teach us a lesson. My mother, who already did a fair amount of canning, seemed to think it an interesting challenge.

We didn't have the outbuildings my friends' farms had, but we plunged ahead anyway. There were no elaborate arrangements of plastic tubing connecting trees to a common collecting point, for us or anyone. One went out in the woods with buckets, a manual bit and brace, a hammer, nails, and a quantity of galvanised steel spigots ("spickets" in my neck of the woods). Buckets in that town were usually improvised from coffee cans or any other large metal food can, so we had to spend several weeks in advance of the first season collecting cans, punching holes in them, and twisting stranded wire through the holes to make bails. It was probably the only season in which our elementary school cook was popular, because everyone who sugared would kiss up to her to get a few institutional food cans.

Thus prepared, we chose trees large enough for the operation and at the time indicated by the local sap gurus, went into the woods: calf-to-knee-deep in snow, for starters. We drilled our holes, angling slightly upward as we drilled into the tree. Then we drove in the spickets and added a nail if necessary to hold the wire bail. (We didn't put out the buckets until the cry of "sap's runnin'" was heard in the land.) Then we did it again, and again, and again. Our little sugarbush had 30 to 40 trees, no big deal. Moreover, they were swamp maples. Their roots in soft, wet soil guaranteed a low sugar content. One of the nearby farms also tapped swamp maples and took the results philosophically. If my father was trying to teach us a lesson about hard work, he was succeeding.

It got more successful. That little sugarbush produced an amazing volume of sap at peak. We had to get up before school and collect sap, then we rushed home from school to collect it in the afternoon before the buckets overflowed.* Since the trees were in a swamp, the transition from knee-deep snow to knee-deep mud was surprisingly fast.

When we had a reasonable quantity, we began to boil: in the kitchen.

And boil, and boil, and boil, and boil. When one is boiling in a relatively confined and civilised space like a kitchen, as the product becomes more concentrated, the sugar content of the steam increases. This means that the condensate, on every exposed kitchen surface, leaves a scum somewhat like spillage from a soft drink. We urchins tried valiantly to get out of our share in the removal of this sugar slime, and failed. We didn't do a great job, though, which meant that the kitchen was bedeviled with ants as soon as the weather turned warm. They did a very good job of removing any scum we'd missed, at the price of sometimes having ants fall into the baked beans.

We did get usable maple syrup. I don't recall that we ever tried for maple sugar, which essentially doubles the labour in the kitchen and can smell reaally nasty if it burns. This effort lasted three years, as I recall, when our minds turned to other things.

Despite the work and the mess, we did learn a little about the work involved and the sort of quality control needed to produce a worthwhile product. The lessons stayed with my forester brother more than they did with me. When he moved a good deal further into the woods after marriage and the Marines, he set out in earnest to build up a professional-grade sugarbush and a modern sugar house. He joined a cooperative, and so exchanged better prices on necessary equipment for maintaining strict quality control. His operation covers many acres now and provides (most years) a cash crop.

I'll either go to the store, thanks, or pester him for a quart or so.

-------------------------------------

*One local kids' dare was drinking sap. Apart from the sanitation issues, unless you've grown up to this sort of thing, you probably don't know that maple sap is a potent diuretic. This activity gave new meaning to "yellow snow."

I wasn't going to comment, but...

2011-03-21T12:21:00.003Z

I've just crossed the line about that viral video of the Australian bullying victim smacking his tormentor down. As someone who experienced bullying on this scale and above, I'm all for the kid that did the smackdown. If I'd ever been able to catch the bully-in-chief alone, I would have done the same. But they traveled in a pack, and the only time I was able to swing back, I was the one who got in trouble.

What drives me to comment was Monday morning's interview, on The Early Show, with another in the endless line of fatuous "experts" on bullying. Her take was that the victim should have walked--or run--away and gone to the principal.

Bullshit.

Has she ever tried either tactic? I doubt it. For one thing, if you walk or run away, the bully will likely chase you down. Second, if you walk or run away, the bully wins the round on psychological points. Third, and most important, the "expert" had a naive faith in the willingness of school administrators to intervene.

They won't; they're gutless. They were gutless 50 years ago, when this happened to me. From all I've seen, the majority today are still gutless.

If we mean to be serious about smacking down the culture of bullying, let's start by fact-checking experts and pundits who don't know what they're talking about. Oh wait: fact-checking isn't in the vocabulary of contemporary journalism, especially the broadcast variety.

The payoff for safety

2011-03-21T11:57:00.002Z

Although the people advocating changes in child safety seat use have science and kids' health on their side, I'm glad this wasn't happening when Em was at that age: for several reasons.

Consulting the growth chart which is still on one of our door jambs, I notice that she was 11 before she hit the magic 4 feet 9 inches, when the safety experts say the child should stop using a booster seat. My heart goes out to those families who decide they are going to pioneer that effort, because there is little doubt that booster seats for kids past the age of seven or so will put a considerable strain on the parent-child relationship.

The other part of this has been on my mind ever since the safety experts, again with good intentions, banished all children to the back seat. When Em was an infant, we didn't have a back seat: we had a pickup truck. She rode backwards, according to the rules of that day, until age two. When we finally got a car (a 1969 Fury!) she was in the back when we went somewhere en famille. Often, it was just a parent and a child, and the seat was in front.

At an early age, the conversations started. First, they were the sort of stream-of-consciousness discussions that toddlers are capable of. As Em grew older and moved first to a booster seat, then to the seat itself, the talk became more articulate and wide-ranging. When my mother was still living, Em and I would often go to New Hampshire when my wife had her working weekend. We'd have some seasonally appropriate father-daughter recreation, visit my mother, and talk coming and going.

When adolescence came, Em put up the usual barriers between herself and the parental units, but the barriers came down when we were driving somewhere. Em was in USA Swimming by then, and those trips were often just the two of us. (From toddler-hood on, the requirements of a two-income household had meant that she often was with one or the other of us when we were working evenings or weekends. A colleague once remarked how I never talked down to her, but treated her as an equal partner in any discussion.) In the car, with no other audience, Em got to expand on that equality. Her insight and the breadth of her interests grew and grew, and never ceased to astound me. She grew up unimpeded by the shyness that has crippled both her parents.

I know what part our automotive symposia played in that, because she wrote about it. (I used to edit Em's papers from middle school on, under one standing rule. I told her I wasn't going to write them. I was going to do what a good editor does, to bring out her ideas and help her present them in the best way with suggestions and observations.) As a high school senior, she had to write an essay on one thing growing up that had been a formative influence. She wrote about our discussions and debates in the car.

How much development of the whole person are we sacrificing in a search for safety? That search is ultimately an illusion, for we live on an unsafe planet. A century ago it was chiefly the well-off who were able to isolate and insulate their children. Now, with SUVs with two rows of TV-equipped seats , several feet behind the parents and beyond any reasonable expectation of interaction, children living in McMansions and already isolated from their parents will be isolated even more. They will perhaps be safer in the car than they once were, but what kind of adults will they become?

The dying art of headline writing

2011-03-18T22:34:00.003Z

To be sure, the headline caught my eye, and drew me in to read a fairly serious story. But once upon a time, we learned that it was better to leave no room for the double entendre along the way.

"Decades-old toxic gas threat lifts from West Virginia town" carries a sombre message in the story, but it could just as well have been a spoof announcing the closing of "Freddie's Franks and Beans Cafe." If such a threat was ever there, it may well survive.

Two nations...

2011-03-17T23:32:00.003Z

There have been a fair number of Japanese in my professional life over the years. Neither comparative calm of those most affected by the present disasters, nor the departure from that calm by individuals overwhelmed by loss, surprise me greatly.

It is instructive, though, that the calmest people in Japan are those most directly affected. The inclination to panic increases in proportion to the distance from the crisis. Shift the scene several thousand miles across the Pacific, and you find Americans ready to drool with fear at the thought that their radiation exposure might go up by a milliroentgen, and find the usual American panic-mongering industry ready to play into their fears.

Much of this has to do with choice. In my day job, I see the example of people who find it essential to have every radiological examination known to medicine. They usually get their way by whining and pouting and threatening lawsuits.... Oh wait, that's by "threatening lawsuits, whining and pouting." American medicine, in a display somewhere between pure mendacity and passive-aggressive hostility, is likely to expose these anxious souls to a normal lifetime's worth of radiation in a week simply to avoid having them put their lawyer on speed-dial. (These noble sufferers are doubtless out there writing Congress to repeal health care reform and to keep the gummint outta Medicare.) Those who get used to doing this grow addicted to it. After a few such encounters, they must save a fortune on electric bills, because they have to glow in the dark. However, they choose this response to panic, so it's OK by them and they are insensitive to the risk. They don't choose the risk of getting as much radiation from Japan as they get from that old radium dial analog alarm clock by the bed. That risk, remote as it is, becomes an anxiety for fear dealers to whip into pink froth.

What gets lost in the panicked stampede is perspective. Quite possibly, perspective is what keeps the Japanese caught up in this disaster on a more even keel than an American cable news junkie.

Is the American panic a Cold War holdover, or something proving how many of us were born after the Arms Race? I think it's the latter. Those of us who were junior Cold War warriors already know how to handle excess nuclear radiation. We simply crawl under our desks and wait for the All Clear signal.

Why just beat the press?

2011-03-16T23:05:00.005Z

OK, it's mostly press, but what the hell.

For a while, I was taking names about this observation, but it's bloomed so quickly that it seems unfair to single out just one broadcast "journalist."

Ladies and gentlemen of the broadcast news media, the adjective that applies to the energy catastrophe in Japan is pronounced NOO-klee-er. Evidently you were living under a rock during the recent shrub presidency, when our tang-tungled leader made NOO-kyuh-ler infamous and hilarious. Dictionary.com tells me that NOO-kyuh-ler is an example of metathesis. The lexicographers' definition, of mere transposition, is very polite. (So are most lexicographers, until you get a few drinks into them.) I like the candour of the chemical definition of metathesis: double decomposition. I don't see why we shouldn't apply that to NOO-kyuh-ler as well. Incidentally, tang-tungled is also metathesis, but I suggest that transposition for the sake of humourous effect differs from transposition in a serious news item or speech.

Speaking of metathesis, pity the poor morning news reporters. The get up about 3 a.m., drive in theta state to the studio, grab a handful of copy and read it. (Can you tell I've been there?) However, Rule 1 for broadcast news is to pre-read your copy. That is, you get wherever you're supposed to be talking, and read it to yourself at about the same speed you'll read it into the mic. Rule 2 is to concentrate entirely on the task. These rules used to be subtly reinforced by colleagues who punked announcers in various ways. One might have pornographic selections slipped into one's copy, all the copy might be replaced with stories very much like the leaders from The Onion, or a person of the opposite sex might begin to strip in one's field of vision but off-mic and off-camera.

Alas, a radio announcer this morning failed to observe this rule. Thus his listeners learned that the con man Christian Gerhartsreiter has been charged with murder in the 1994 disappearance of John and Linda Sohus, and that John Sohus' remains had been discovered in 1985. I assume that Gerhartsreiter will be charged not only with murder, but with unauthorised time travel.

I also assume that the announcer was so wound up about correctly pronouncing Gerhartsreiter that he muffed the dates (he muffed the name too). I challenge anyone but a native German speaker to pronounce "Gerhartsreiter" correctly at 7:30 a.m. My sympathies.

Finally, a confession. I am personally responsible for the stock market tanking, as I have been for every dive it's taken in the last two-plus years. It happens every time I begin to take steps to move the remnants of my once-respectable portfolio out of cash funds (our era's equivalent of stuffing money in a mattress) and back into investments. There are many excuses, but I'll take the responsibility.

Live from Lexington NH

2011-03-13T13:55:00.004Z

Funny: just the other day I was wondering whether the teabag bigmouths are stupid enough to believe what they say, or if they're just feeding various lines of crap to their undoubtedly stupid followers.

Thank you, Michelle Bachmann. Now I understand that you, at least, are really stupid enough to believe what you say. The "apology" was a dollar short, being on the lines of "Feh! No big deal."

Not around here. It's no surprise to residents on either side of the MA-NH border that there is a certain degree of friction between the two states. Conflating the two, then disregarding the pride of the respective states, is right up there in the list of dumb things one can do in a primary campaign. New Hampshire may not make candidates, but it can sure as hell break them. Step right up! Who'll be next to prove their idiocy?

Speaking of idiots: The Japan tsunami arrived on the left coast as a series of four-foot high swells. Having been out there, I know that most people with boats don't moor them, but float in marinas. Fine. 'Tis a big ocean, the Pacific, and it seems reasonable to suppose that four-foot swells would be routine. They certainly are on the ocean down my street. Nevertheless, many marina docks don't seem to have enough slack to compensate for swells, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to boat owners to tie up loosely enough. These oversights apparently caused $55 million in damage. I move we send marine surveyors from the East Coast to assess the damage, and have them tell the boat owners and marina owners that the $55 mil can come out of their pockets. I'm not minded to pay for Californian stu---err, oversights.

Barking up the wrong tree

2011-03-10T15:12:00.004Z

I'm breaking my rule about not discussing job stuff, but this observation has been shoved in my face once too often.

There are many reasons that my choice of late-life career is a mistake—and this is no surprise to some of my friends. The chief one relates to my librarian spouse's observation early in her career.

In that field, some two-thirds of the professionals are women. However, two-thirds of the directors and librarians in senior or more technical fields are men. Not too surprisingly, the women notice this and resent it. There is less of that today, but the memory remains.

The same is true of my new occupation. The overwhelming majority of coders are women, but a majority of health information managers are men. This has not changed as much as in library science. The result is that men, and especially men with degrees outside of coding, must overcome the suspicion that they are only blowing through the coding office on their way to a management job. Notwithstanding all those "earn big money--become a coder" TV ads, gender is one of the major hurdles prospective coders must leap. If you have a penis, it will absolutely get hung up in the hurdle.

Men with coding education can sometimes--eventually--get sorta-kinda coding jobs, such as what I now do. These are jobs that require coding knowledge, but to the Elect, they don't make you a "real" coder. You could do these jobs for 30 years and in their eyes you would still not be a "real" coder. This strikes me as self-fulfilling prophecy. The Elect close ranks and don't admit men to the sorority, so the men take their knowledge and previous education, bypass coding altogether, and wind up in the management ranks. It's a lot like a phenomenon known to all Navy veterans. No matter where you are, you'll hear that "this isn't the real Navy. When you get to ABC, then you'll be in the real Navy."

But you never get to the real Navy. Likewise, I wonder if men ever get to be real coders.

There are other hurdles which cut across gender lines. One is that the Elect have a settled prejudice against hiring graduates of any coding programme. They want their coders to come up the good old-fashioned way, starting as file clerks and working their way into a coding desk. Trouble is, there are fewer and fewer openings for file clerks because there are fewer and fewer paper files. There are also fewer and fewer high school graduates interested in coming up that old-fashioned way: they want into the express lane.

All this is going on against the backdrop of forthcoming huge technical changes in medical records, which will make much to the Elect's hoarded knowledge obsolete. Those changes will increase the demand for new medical records people fourfold. The response of the Elect so far is to circle the waggons and cloak themselves in denial. So in two or three years, when you the consumer can't get even a semblance of a straight answer about your bill, remember the Elect and their stranglehold on medical information.

I think I should turn back to my original objective: to obtain medical knowledge and wed it to my technical communications background. Then I can contribute to the one logical outcome of this impasse: computer applications that make the closed circle of coders entirely obsolete. It's good to have a goal.

Signs of Geek-dom

2011-03-08T00:37:00.003Z

Now of course, the merits of the signs it depend on what kind of geek you are. I am certainly an unrepentant LOTR geek, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that I spent Sunday afternoon, evening and well into the night a consecutive showing of the three films. This takes 10 to 10 1/2 hours, if you're counting, and we had a couple of intermissions as well. In this case you're a geek if:

You think Peter Jackson skipped the entire Tom Bombadil episode (three chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring) because he wasn't up to the creative challenge.

You think that while the film of The Two Towers succeeded visually with the Ents, it came rather close to slandering their commitment to the war. You also find it inexplicable that he didn't take on the Huorns.
You can distinguish between original dialogue and film dialogue without having the books in your lap. I confess to having read LOTR 43 times including back matter.

Speaking of back matter, there's another, new test of literary geekishness. The first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain appeared last year in hard cover. This is a tome of over 700 pages plus index, of which about 250 pages are actual autobiography. The rest is a lengthy introduction and a body of notes quite as long as the autobiography. I approach introductions and footnotes with the bias of one who began life as an academic. I love this stuff, but I maintain that these notes make the autobiography more complete. They include more of Clemens own writing, but also contemporary views of the man. From the whole one sees why Clemens insisted on having this published 100 years after his death.

When I finish the notes, I'll read the autobiography again... and probably go back for LOTR 44.

Two of the oldest shell games

2011-03-05T01:12:00.002Z

This business of victimising public employee unions reminds me of two of the oldest cons perpetrated upon the working class by the ruling class.

The first is the little trick of setting one working class minority against another. My spouse, with roots in western Mass. industrial cities, and a fondness for rose-coloured glasses, scoffs at this. She maintains that the various groups in those cities were all one big happy family, who showed their mutual love by strolling to one anothers' churches on Easter. She is of course a generation or two removed from the reality of the thing.

My grandmother had another opinion. She spent several of her formative years in Lowell early in the 20th century, and maintained that one ethnic group would visit the churches of another only if they were carrying brickbats and torches. More intellectual sources have told me that the Lowell mill owners deliberately fomented ethnic conflict to prevent the proletariat from organising.

This game has been going on at least since the Romans.

The unions have, perhaps too late, grasped the theme of "war on the middle class." That is a riff that only dates to the emergence of the urban middle classes in medieval times. Then, the ruling classes convinced the rural peasantry that they had a common cause, hostility toward the nascent middle class, and probably delayed the decay of the medieval aristocracy by several centuries. The ruling classes' war on the middle class is a very real phenomenon. Marxist rhetoric notwithstanding, few things have so much delayed the advancement of humanity so much as the unnatural alliance of aristocracies, born or made, with a reactionary rural peasantry.

Once again, we should hardly be surprised that in reactionary eyes, there really is nothing new under the sun.

Agreeing with Alito, and so on

2011-03-03T16:39:00.006Z

I hate it when I agree with conservatives: in this instance Justice Alito dissenting in Snyder v. Phelps. The nature of the Supreme Court is that it can't say "we're sorry," for example, for a succession of blatantly pro-business and pro-reactionary decisions over the past year or two. Some observers have seen, in the Court's recent decisions, a reaction to justified criticism that the court had moved too far to the right. Now, they are inhaling helium, apparently.

OK, we get it, you're sorry, and you don't have a case involving corporate campaign finance or the Second Amendment that would let you overturn the previous decisions and stay on topic.
But Alito is right: the speech of the Westboro scum isn't free speech or protected speech. It is "fighting words" under the laws of many states, Massachusetts among them. That is, it's a verbal provocation so strong that when someone swings on the provoker, the provoker and not the provokee is liable to be charged with assault.

I can testify that Westboro deals in fighting words, and screams, and flying spittle, because I have been close enough to them to experience all of that. I had to leave the final Beacon Hill gay rights demonstration in 2004 because of it. Because I had crossed the line into blind, red rage, which really is nearly blind and very red. Had I had to listen to it for one additional minute I would have done my damnedest to kill the nearest one to me. I wish this was an exaggeration.

This group has stated that they are emboldened by the decision. I don't think it will be long before the Court gets the chance to regret this overreaction, because it will not be long before the fighting words have their intended result. If so, may it be in a "fighting words" state. The stock Westboro defence has been to threaten to sue any community if they are subjected to violence in it. But if they are found culpable of uttering fighting words, they may be the ones out of luck. I'm taking bets.

Have you seen the details of the hilarious Texas immigration bill? Hypocrisy is the common currency of reactionaries everywhere, but it seems like the pee--er, tea-- party is out to monopolise the commodity. Texas state Rep. Aaron Pena, a Republican, said of the bill's gaping exception, ignoring those who hire unauthorized immigrants for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence, ''With things as they are today, [Republican state Rep. Debbie Riddle's] bill will see a large segment of the Texas population in prison."

And the problem with that would be?

Score: Good news 2, bad news 2

2011-02-26T23:44:00.003Z

Let's be uncommonly perky and start with the good news.

Over the past week our DVD player has grown increasingly cranky. It's been a while since I used the lens cleaning disk: found it fallen out of its jewel case, and in a state that would do more harm than good. So I popped for new cleaning disk for about $9, and voila, it worked! No need to rush out and spring for a Blu-Ray player...yet.

Next, having done my homework I went out and bought new hiking boots to replace the Yosemite disasters that I left with my kid in California. She brought them to a nearby Goodwill store, and told me to consider that the illegal immigrant harvesting my produce was possibly wearing my boots. May they do better by him than they did by me.

What I bought are Timberland Mudslingers:

They meet all the advice I have found about what Morton's toe owners should do before they see the podiatrist. They're a half-size bigger than usual. They have major footbed support and steel toes. They're work boots, not recreational models: the thinking is that boots for people who wear them for 40-60 hours a week get more design attention than those for weekend warriors. So far, I haven't taken them off, like a kid, and so far they're comfortable. Hiking next. Also, I bought them at Pennyworth's in Lynn. They offer the rare distinction, these days, of having a competent person who actually fits your footwear to you. What a concept!

Now the bad news. I rarely mention work here, and I still won't give the place a name. However, my part-time job there is steadily becoming more part than time. This renders the second vexation more serious: a red-light violation.

I have my doubts about this one, but moving violations are like NFL penalties: there must be sufficient evidence to overturn the penalty. My sterling character and good intentions are insufficient. Not only have these things become more expensive ($100): they are, like speeding tickets, gifts that keep on giving. Remember insurance surcharges?

Drat...but I have hopes for the boots.

Well well

2011-02-24T01:00:00.004Z

Just now I was reading, elsewhere, that one should not conflate the unrest in the Middle East with that in Wisconsin and growing list of Republican states. The grounds for this, we are told, are that comparing the unrest of the prosperous against their duly elected representatives with people fighting for life against tyranny. We are told that the comparison is naive and facile.

(Pause to adjust my historian's robe and hood.)

Wrong. That may be the popular notion, but the brutal fact of sudden political change is that unlettered masses don't accomplish it, and those who do don't achieve it out of nothing. It is accomplished in the first place by learned people who understand that there can be something better. Reaction is the fuel of revolution. Its tinder is the ressentiment of people, once prosperous in their own eyes, who perceive that their comfort and prosperity is being taken away. Revolutions that don't draw upon such ressentiment generally succeed; those which do not generally fail.

In my younger days, I earned my bread and pursued my principles in the then-new field of public history, which concerned itself with the lives of common folk, not great men. One such figure who got much of my attention was Paul Revere. (That no doubt surprises anyone who knows nothing of the man beyond the words of 19th century poets and 20th century debunkers, both mythmakers in their own way and with their own intentions.)

The myths have little to do with the man. He was of modest, somewhat comfortable, means until very late in life. As a silversmith, he was very much a creature of the age of mercantilism (silversmiths were integral to a colonial society with little or no capital) and on paper had everything to gain by supporting the status quo.

Instead, he became one of the prosperous expressing their unrest against the duly elected government of the British Empire. When following this modest career, it occurred to me that when the British lost Paul Revere, they had already lost.

My spouse, a public employee of modest means and many years of conscientious service, has inhabited the sidelines of political life for all those years. Tonight, her union called to invite her to a conference call in solidarity with the unions under attack in other states by the forces of reaction.

Tonight, she answered the call.

Keep the red flag flying

2011-02-22T23:52:00.003Z

Such were the lyrics that my grandparents sung at Welsh labour meetings in the 1920s. And even though Fox would blow a gasket, it wouldn't be a bad libretto wherever American labour is trying to bring the global revolution to life in this reactionary country.

The protesters seem to have realised the need to trot out new lyrics, because the case is much broader than it may seem. Wherever it began, it is no longer about privileged public sector employees vs. the public. Public sector unions are the last bastion of a much-beaten and bloodied American labour movement. Pull them down, and all workers finish the march back in time to the 1870s, when working people had no rights at all, serfs struggling at the whim of their employers.

Why do you think the republicans are working so passionately to do just that?

Watching the signs in the demonstrations, I'm seeing a shift in labour's message in the right direction. One of the best simply said "end the war on the middle class." The American middle class, distinct from the traditional European bourgeoisie, exists because of unions. Rather than being a bourgeois entity, it's more properly a prosperous and autonomous working class.

Is this flippant or trivial, compared with the struggles in Egypt and Libya? Not exactly. Employment and eventual prosperity in those nations is ironically dependent upon sustaining prosperous working classes in the developed world. Take away the latter, as the republicans and business so want to do, and the global economy falls like a house of cards. Then the revolutions of this winter and spring will look like playground games by comparison.

We are backing the Middle West uprisings in this house, just as we support those elsewhere in the world. Such global stirrings have happened before, and we can only hope and do our part to see that these, unless some in the past, don't end in defeat and repression.

Senatorial surprise

2011-02-21T21:02:00.003Z

Why does this story not surprise me? It may surprise our brilliant junior Senator, who has already been surprised by public response to his revelations of childhood sexual abuse. He is surprised, and angry, that some people compare his story with his support for Jeff Perry and find hypocrisy in the contrast. Sucker-punched you on that one, didn't they, Senator?

He seems surprised that the revelation has become the tail that is wagging the dog of his autobiography. I'm not sure I can attempt reading any political literature these days, but in the interest of fairness I may try this on: Just to prove my hypothesis that, apart from this nugget, the autobiography will take the genre to a new level of somnolence. The brilliantly original title sets us up for what to expect. Who in hell was his ghostwriter, Horatio Alger? It's been done, Scott.

I bet Brown will also be surprised that his former summer camp "came forward." Come on, Senator, once you start the gravy train of professional victimhood, everybody will want to jump on it. It's only a matter of time before we have the biography of the offending counselor. Camp Good News, indeed: Victimhood is big business.

Disclaimer: I know whereof I speak, save only that my life story is rags to rags. Letting the monsters out of the closet is one thing, if it does you internal good. Making money or political capital off them is another. Whatever Brown's motivation here, if he's into surprises he'll find plenty as the hangers-on jump onto this little engine.

Actual sexual abuse is one thing that isn't on my resume, but the exposures of the past few years put a name on one unsettling episode from my childhood. By some odd chain of events a friend of mine, whose family weren't practicing Catholics, got lined up for a recruitment visit at a prominent Catholic boy's camp in New Hampshire. He was encouraged to bring a friend and chose me. We were somewhere around ten to twelve at the time.

Our day trip happened on a cloudy, drizzly day that did nothing to put the place in its best light. Counselors showed us around the place, which had all of the usual amenities. I lingered behind the group at one, and the chaplain appeared out of nowhere and began to ask me questions, and crowd me a little. At the time I took them to be hard sell for the camp: now I wonder.

This priest served in my home town, and had the unfortunate (or at least apposite) luck to have a name that included two nicknames for the penis. I wasn't quite old enough to share the adolescent hilarity that arose from these names. All I felt was rather crowded, so I made my excuses and caught up with the group. I had never had any intention of going to this camp and only went along to keep my friend company.

This business got shelved in long-term neural storage. I was never quite comfortable around this priest thereafter, but once I moved away and had other things on my mind, I forgot about it. When the clergy sexual abuse scandal broke out, I recalled it. This priest was long gone when the scandal erupted. It is possible that his intentions that day were indeed no more than a hard sell for the camp. Thinking about it, and now reflecting on Brown's misfortune, it strikes me that the memory—with all its opera buffa trappings—opens a window into how easy it was and is for a person in authority to hit on an impressionable child: however innocent the first steps may be, they lose their innocence very quickly.

Senator Brown may be about to lose his social innocence if more people and institutions leap to share his victimhood. Meanwhile, I shake my head. Of course it was a religious camp: one begins to think pederasty was on the curriculum at seminaries of every variety of religion. Although secular camps with a specific focus are one part of the solution*, I think we need some atheist summer camps, to point kids in the right direction without the molestation.

*Eventually I went to one of these and enjoyed myself hugely. No groping there, either.

TGIF

2011-02-18T23:19:00.004Z

The commentary is likely to spill over into Saturday, especially as Blogger.com observes Zulu time.

First political thought for the day:

Q: what's the difference between a republican and an anarchist?
A: a trust fund

Second ditto. Why is it that when the rest of the planet appears to be moving to the left, that any nation whose chief language is English seems determined to move even further to the right?

Third: tonight's news seems to be equally divided between coverage of unrest in the Middle East, and unrest in the Middle West. Considering that the Republicans have been making noises generally supportive of autocratic reactionaries, whatever they get in this country from those objecting to their domestic policies is just what they deserve. The punditocracy doesn't have enough spine to bring up an awkward and ever-more-obvious fact. The conservatives in the USA are the Democrats. The republicans are reactionaries of a particularly noxious stripe, who deserve to be treated exactly as Middle Eastern reactionary autocrats are being treated at the moment. Reaction of this sort has, in the past, led to only one outcome: revolution. It is much to the credit of the Middle Eastern revolutionaries that they've accomplished what they have so far without resort to the guillotine. One wonders what will happen here as long as our home-grown reactionaries keep their feet on the brakes.

And then we have the horrors (?) of men wearing skinny jeans, quite as if men had never worn skinny jeans. Let's crank up the WABAC machine and drop in on any moment between James Dean and the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. We will find men wearing skinny jeans in profusion. We will find sartorial reactionaries trying to ban them. What I remember most fondly is that the reactionaries insisted on banning blue jeans. Levi Strauss, never one to miss an opportunity, began to market skinny Levis in colours from pale khaki to white. "White Levis" were a contrarian badge for several years before bell bottoms. Jeans of a cut evidently acceptable to today's fashionistas were the emblem of dorks.

When the whites come back, I'll know the wheel has turned 360 degrees.