Maybe; Maybe; Maybe

For Several Days I have been hearing agitatedly exercised pundits farting and moaning about a number of things, which turn out to all be the same thing once the only slightly differently camouflaged outer husks have been stripped away. They are: unconnected dots, unshared information, faulty, lacking or non-existent intelligence, dueling data bases, non-communicating data bases and the human race's general and persistent inability to communicate across anything remotely resembling a divide or difference.

I couldn’t help but wonder. “How is it that the Iranian People are in the process of conducting a possibly successful revolution without any of the powerful facilities and functional capabilities that, even though we have them at our disposal, we can’t seem to stop one guy from taping some plastique to his crotch and board an airplane with intent to destroy it? How can they be possibly succeeding without any co-ordinated data bases or massive amounts of money and technology and manpower in support of their aims?”

After a little thought I remembered that they have Twitter. And with Twitter they have the capability to function like a hive of bees or a massive flock of birds,wheeling in inexplicably close order unison as they hurtle through the air. They can keep one another constantly aware of whatever it might be that one another might need to be kept aware of. Like the developing world and its adoption of cell phone technology which has allowed that developing world to leapfrog its richer land line based superiors, the Iranian Opposition has cracked the code: drop all that old bullshit and just communicate. And then act. That viewpoint, added to the facilitating power of a burst mode instant messaging system is a whole new paradigm. And it is a paradigm that looks to the future and embraces only the pragmatic and useful things that have most recently become available in the areas of keeping the most important information constantly available to everyone. They don't need data bases. They ARE the data base. They don’t need some omniscient power to connect the dots for them. They ARE the dots.

Compare that paradigm to the turf war ridden morass of paradigms extant in the United States: “this data base doesn’t talk to that data base” and “this agency doesn’t like that agency” and “we’ve got our best people working on it” and you just may be seeing something of a silhouette of what the future is going to look like. And we may not be in it. Maybe we ought to look at how Twitter facilitates rather than – as does our current mélange of systems - hinders the exchange of vital information. Maybe we need to realize that waiting to learn whatever it will be that the next bomber hides his bomb in (we’ve had shoes and underwear so far) and then making everybody getting on an airplane take that item off is not a winning strategy. It’s not even an acceptable tactic. It is a cretin attempt to look as if we are doing something when everybody is just pretty happy collecting their paychecks.

The Iranian Opposition actually gives a shit. Unlike the people in charge of our anti terror operations who are doing whatever it is that they think they are doing in support of keeping suicide bombers off of airplanes, the members of the Iranian Opposition don’t get a paycheck every two weeks no matter how they perform, no matter what they do. It doesn’t all pay the same for them. And sometimes their payment is their life.

Maybe…

Another Four Letter Word

I wrote this in an email responding to an email I received from a long lost acquaintance - her family is alluded to in Screen Saver - and when I re-read it I thought "this is a better Blog than it is an email". The first paragraph is a response to her question: "So tell me….what do you do when you go to France and what made you start going there in the first place?" Rather than just ignore the question or blow it off with irrelevancies I attempted to really give an answer, starting with the fact that the real answer is in Screen Saver.

But here it is.

What made me go there in the first place and what I do there when I am there are some of the story lines in Screen Saver. Briefly, I went there because some friends were going and Mysti decided to go and I decided to test a life long pillar of personal knowledge: France and the French suck. How wrong. When I'm there I rent apartments in Paris and just blend in with occasional stops for wine, espress or onion soup.

Mysti and I have taken a couple of self directed bike tours, one in Languedoc and one in Entre deux mers. Those put us out on the back roads of rural France where we stayed in tour provided gits and ate local food and drank local wines with local people.

We also took five weeks in Brittany. On that one we picked up our rental car in Rennes and just took off. We didn't have any reservations. We just took a map and found towns that looked interesting and stayed in them when we could get ocean view rooms. We were always able to get ocean front rooms because it was in September and October, so the Season was over. We usually stayed in a town for four or five days and made side trips every day into the adjacent country side to see what we could see. In that manner we found Pont Croix which is a little town several miles inland from the Atlantic which lost its significance eight or nine hundred years ago when the port silted up. But it was a fascinating little place.

The high point of that trip, I always thought, occurred on an evening in early October. We had gotten a room in a lodging place in the vestiges of Merlin's forest and had, naturally, retired to the bar. After several wines and a convivial and animated discussion with a number of our fellow drinkers, one of the men turned to me and said, "so what the fuck is the deal with this Bush?" That was in 2005.

I bought the guy a drink.

The proprietor herded a bunch of us out of the place at about 1:30 am, all singing, as best we could, Milord. I'd rather be in France than any where I know of. But at least now I know that the word "know" is a four letter word and, therefore extremely dangerous. A lot of damage has been done under that banner.

Gross Domestic Product

One morning on my way to Spokane I looked across the median strip of Interstate 90 at the apparently endless mass of automobiles that were parked there. I have seen that scene for years in myriad places from Seattle to Atlanta, from Portland to New Jersy.

But on that particular morning I had a revelation which was preceded by a question. “How much do these traffic jams contribute to GDP?” I asked myself. There was no answer to that question, but there was a revelation:if we were to eliminate such daily burning of gasoline there would be a significant dimunition of our GDP.

And that would not be good.

Invisibility

I first noticed it when I was about 45 years old or so. At the time I hadn’t even begun to think of myself as old. I was so busy being, as I saw it , young, that it hadn’t occurred to me that I had at some point, already passed, become old. At least I think it was “old” that caused the invisibility. When I had been, previously, at some point in time, “young” I had been consistently visible.

But on that day when I must have been forty five or so I was in line waiting to approach the young person of undetermined gender who would be responsible for transmitting my request for a Big Mac to whomever or whatever it was that disgorged such culinary masterpieces to people such as I who requested them.

As my turn came I became aware that the young person was looking through me to the other young person of undetermined gender who was in the line immediately behind me. “May I help you?” the undetermined gendered server person who couldn't see me said. “Big Mac, large fries and a small chocolate shake” I said. I was assuming that I was imagining my state of invisibility.

As if from a tandem tape recording, I heard the person behind me order a cheese burger and a coke. Its voice perfectly overlaid mine.

And, momentarily, a cheeseburger and a coke appeared.

I thought of yelling, but I chose instead to remove myself from the venue.

From that point on I lived in a nether world from which I could not be seen by members of that cadre of persons of undetermined gender who lurked at the counters of every source of service that had been invented to date by the highly lauded service economy of the United States of America. As time went on, invisibility became the lesser of two problems. I gradually became aware that I didn’t speak the language that was apparently evolving from the mass of those individuals of undetermined gender. So whether I could be seen really didn't matter any more.

But what the hell.

Staying Power Chapter Two: Drawstrings Again

Very near the end of my time as an employed person I had a job that required me to go most days to downtown Seattle to a large multi-story office building. I resisted going there as much as possible, preferring to work in my home office. My boss was in Denver so I was as close to him if I needed anything from him in my home office as I was in downtown Seattle: I had broadband internet and several phone lines and a full complement of computer equipment, including the one provided by my employer. But it was not considered good form to indulge in extended periods of absence from the office, even though when there, I was substantially less productive than I was in my home office. There wasn’t a water cooler around which everyone gathered, but “everyone” was, nonetheless, quite creative in indulging in work-like activities that could waste vast quantities of time. I spent as little time at that office tower as possible, but I spent substantial time there nevertheless.

One of the benefits that flowed from being downtown, having nothing to do with the needs of the business for which I worked, was the variety and quality of places that could be chosen for lunch. One of those places I had discovered, and it seemed odd that it was in a department store, but it was, was the restaurant at Nordstrom. I ate there often.

One day when I was eating at Nordstrom I thought of my long rag-bagged flannel pajamas.

“I wonder” I thought to myself, “if they still sell those things?” After lunch I went to the men’s department and asked. They did in fact still sell those things. But it was February when I had asked the question and they were all sold out for that pajama sales cycle. They got the pajamas in September or October and sold them until the last pair had been purchased. And that last pair was usually purchased long before Christmas. I learned from this post lunch query that I wasn’t the only person in Seattle who prized those pajamas. They were exceptionally popular.
So I made a mental note to check in when September had arrived.
And I did. And the pajamas were in. And I bought five pair. And all was once again right with the world. Or at least all was right with that part of the world that I was part of during my sleeping hours.

As with my previously possessed single pair, time wended its way forward: the shortest day merged with the longest; the chestnuts waxed, waned and disappeared; the mountain ashes scented the early spring air and then disappeared until that magic autumn day when they leapt forth from their anonymous green raiment with massive flashes of orange. And those chestnuts, and those Mountain Ashes joined all the rest of those things that I had gradually begun to notice were marking the passage of time , and marking the swiftly accelerating passage, of my life. One day the drawstrings of the pair of pajamas that I was wearing on that day began to disintegrate. Then so did the next and the next and the next as their hosts were put into service. And then all five were bound up in the death spiral of breaks and knots and lumpy congested attempts at still utilizing them for their intended function; and all were rapidly descending into unusability.

But this time the disintegration was confined solely to the drawstrings. The reason that I had bought five pair of pajamas had been to give four of them an extended break from wear and tear in each wearing cycle. That concept had proved to be a valid one with the pajamas themselves. They showed absolutely no sign of wear. But as the drawstrings began their descent into disintegration I was, I began to believe, apparently going to be confronted with the need to dispose of five perfectly good pairs of pajamas once the imminent lapsing of their drawstrings into un-usability had been completed.

But then I had an idea. I took a pair of the failing drawstring bottoms with me to my cleaners. I also took some suits and shirts and sweaters to cover the real purpose of the visit.

After the always pleasant acknowledgement of how much I enjoyed the Chinese pop music that was always being played, and after the interesting if incomprehensible discussion of why the statue of Ho Ti was facing the opposite direction from the last time I had been there I pulled the pajama pants from the pile of cleaning and laundry and showed the lady the problem and posed the question, could she make new drawstring. She had done some minor zipper work for me previously and had performed major and successful surgery on a rip that had occurred in my Facanable jacket resulting from my stumbling into a sharp door handle on rue de Grenelle, so I had a lot of faith in her abilities. The Facanable repair had involved some pretty tricky opening and re-sewing of the lining of the jacket’s sleeve, so I was pretty sure she could figure out how to get into the enclosed trace that housed the drawstrings and detach them from their moorings, build their replacements and repeat the whole process in reverse. If only she would.

She looked at me. I looked at her. Neither of us said anything. She took the pajamas away to a place out of my sight. Time passed. And then she re- appeared. “Fifteen dollars” she said. “Do it” I said.

A week later I picked up my cleaning and before leaving, I inspected what she had done. I had brought the other four pajama bottoms with me in the event that it looked as if the lady had been able to solve the problem.

Inspection revealed that she had solved the problem. The pajamas possessed perfectly installed, perfectly functioning new drawstrings. Where their predecessors had been slender quarter inch strands of flannel rolled and sewn closed I now had inch wide pieces of double layered and double sewn cotton material whose probable primary function prior to being redeployed as draw strings had been to be used as backing for material needing reinforcement and stiffening. But they fit in their traces and they were fastened firmly to the interior of those traces and they worked. The pajamas could be cinched up smoothly and the strings could be tied and there was no resistance or sluggishness in their opening or closing; they worked. They were a marvel of over-engineering, but they worked.

So I flung the other four pair on the counter and said “these too.”

Now I have a new and philosophically interesting situation: those drawstrings are, I believe, as close to indestructible as it is possible for humanity to produce from cloth. They will far outlive the garments for whom they serve. The pajamas are still showing the wisdom of my decision to have five pair, thus allowing mostly off duty time. They are still not showing any evidence of disintegration. But the Chestnuts are flashing by with increasing temporal velocity and it is inevitable that the soft, warm flannel will at some point shout “uncle” and begin to descend into the rents and frays and fuzzes of their single predecessor. But those drawstrings seem to be destined for immortality. They will surely outlive me. They will almost as surely outlive this century, even allowing for its current extreme youth. They may even nearly outlive the planet. I can easily imagine them among the final physical things that finally burst into flame as the earth is incinerated, or leap into nothingness as the earth slips with dramatic silence like some spherical version of the Titanic into its predestined rendezvous with its previously assigned black hole, or are called to final judgment in the event that such an unlikely thing actually occurs.

Staying Power Chapter One : The Drawstrings

A number of years ago my wife gave me a pair of flannel pajamas from Nordstrom. At that time in my life I slept in my underwear. I had decided somewhere along the line that sleeping in one’s underwear was some sort of statement of resistance to something that should be resisted. But the point in time at which I received that gift of Nordstrom flannel pajamas was also that point in my life when various chemicals in my body had apparently begun to atrophy causing the cold that often accompanies the sleeping hours to begin to invade the curtilage of my soul, to say nothing of my body. So pajamas seemed a suitable solution to the cold. So I started wearing them. And then I couldn’t stop. They were so warm. They were so soft. Except for the inevitably necessary bouts with the washing machine, those pajamas were never away from me when I slept. And time passed. And time, as it so passed, was not kind to my pajamas.

The first to begin to go were the draw strings. They just began to fray. They just began to break when drawn. They just seemed to be pointing to the doom of those garments which had become so indispensible to my warmth and comfort when sleeping or preparing to sleep. I tied those drawstrings back together again and again and I figured out ways to keep the irregular girth of those knot-bulked draw strings from hindering the performance of their draw string function. But they continued to deteriorate and I continued with my knotting counter measures. I was determined to continue using those pajamas.

But then the pajamas themselves began to develop rents and holes and massive fissions in the fiber.

And then one day I had to face the fact that they had turned to rags. And as rags they were consigned to the rag bag. Sad is not an adequate word. But sad is the only word at my disposal to describe the pall of gloom that descended upon my life, at least the pre/during/and-immediately post sleeping portion of my life that was affected by that ragbag consignment. Luckily for my happiness this story has a sequel.

Folk Song

In my various discussions in Screen Saver of my development of musical ability and ultimately of starting and developing a singing group – The RF Trio – I mention various songs. Those various songs, the ones mentioned and the myriad not mentioned, were the result of either writing efforts or never-ending listening to and searching for material. To that end, a long time ago I bought a Burl Ives album. It had about 25 tracks. Here is one of them.

I recorded this in the living room of Doug, one of my fraternity brothers. Doug was the guy from Screen Saver who fixed my 1955 Plymouth at the Winter Carnival the night that Barb had taken – justifiably – leave of my life, and Tom and I had gone off to see what sort of adventures it might be possible to have in Bend Oregon in the winter of 1964. The song was recorded in 1973.

The video was shot in the Paris Aquarium in 2007.

SOS

SOS

In Screen Saver I mention that on a fuel stop at Clark Air Force Base in Manila on the trip to Vietnam I went into a cafeteria type of place where there were vast steam tables with a lumpy, viscous substance that was apparently being offered to the troops as food. I subsequently – after some time in Saigon – learned that the substance, which was also on offer in the Officers' Clubs where I ate most of my meals, was called SOS. I guess that stood for shit on a shingle. Even later in my tour, one of my fellow officers started waxing poetic one day about how good the stuff was. He waxed so poetic that I had to try it, no matter how awful it looked. I soon found myself also waxing poetic about it. It was really good. I have never seen a recipe for it, but I have been able to duplicate it with a fair degree of accuracy.

Ingredients

8 ounces of ground beef

2 or 3 garlic cloves

Olive oil (just a little)

1/8^th cup of flour

Whipping cream

Lea and Perrins

English muffin

Cooking

Use a garlic press to get some garlic in a cast iron fry pan. Put in a little olive oil. Put in the ground beef and blend the oil and the beef and the garlic into a kind of uniform paste. Turn the gas up to high (if you are cooking electric, let the element get red before you put the pan on it). Cover and let cook for a few minutes – 3 to 5 minutes. Remove the lid and there should be a mass of beef and garlic that is partially cooked and is kind of like a beef patty with garlic laced into it. Break it up some, but leave it in lots of chunks. Don't break it down to the size of the grind of the beef. SOS is supposed to be lumpy. Turn the heat down to medium. Turn the chunks a few times until they are done and put the flour in and mix it up with the meat with a wooden spoon. That should yield a bunch of beef and garlic chunks coated with flour. Brown those a bit. Then add some whipping cream. At this point you are turning the mix into a sort of country cream gravy. It will thicken and need some water to thin it down a bit. When it looks like sausage gravy put the mix on your previously toasted English muffin halves and eat.

My Pig Illustration

When I was in Brittany in 2005 I was in a great little town called Point Croix. At the market there was a farmer's truck with a pig logo on it. I took a picture of the logo and recently, using Adobe Illustrator, made an illustration of it. So here it is.

If you came here from the future, you might want to go back to "The Joys of Illustrator, Part One".

Pink Dunes

See, they really are pink. I guess it is because there is a lot of sandstone in the area – all those big rocks with holes in them and all – and red becomes pink when it gets ground down to sand sized particles. Or so it would seem.

COIN War

COIN – counter insurgency – is not an acronym that has just been recently invented by some sprightly young Washington pundit. We used that same acronym back in the last century. We used that acronym mostly in relationship to the Vietnam Debacle. It was not named the Vietnam Debacle at the time we were using the acronym though. The name Vietnam Debacle came into being after we had declared victory after eight or ten years of thrashing around diplomatically and militarily and had gotten out. I was never sure what year that exit had occurred because by the time it had occurred I had spent my pre-requisite year in the "war effort" (we called it the "war effort" then) and had, after another subsequent year spent in a sub basement of some building at Offutt AFB in Omaha gotten out of the Air Force. Once out of the Air Force I had stopped paying any attention to what was going on with the war effort. It was my version of post non-combat stress disorder. But apparently it (getting out) had occurred because not long after the time it must have occurred the guys that we had been fighting while we were thrashing around had come into South Vietnam and had set up a government. My disorder never allowed me to know, or care, when that had occurred but it must have occurred because I am told that there is a country called Vietnam. I guess we like to trade with them. I guess we need their rice. I never knew.

But back to COIN.

What I learned when I was in training at Lowery Air Force Base in Denver being trained to be an Intelligence Officer was that there were very few – really only one – examples of successful COIN operations on the part of Western Powers. The one example that our teachers – one of whom was an RAF Flight Lieutenant (there was an "F" in there somewhere, but I know not where) – could reference was Malaysia. The British had conducted a successful COIN operation in Malaysia. And it had only taken thirty years. In fact the key take away from the example of Malaysia was that if a country signs up for a COIN operation, that country had better be ready for a long slog, of thirty years or more.

But all of that is just background information.

I heard today that the republicans are all saying that we can't afford a trillion dollar health care reform bill. I keep hearing, but it is probably all lies, that that trillion dollars is paid for in a variety of cost offsetting ways. Anyway, the republicans are, on the other hand, pretty enthusiastic about war in any form and the one in Afghanistan in particular. That may be because both the Afghan Debacle (is it too soon for that name?) and the Iraq Debacle have been conducted off budget. Apparently that allows the trillion or so that those two Debacles have cost to date to flow straight through to the aggregate national debt without stopping off as a part of any annual deficit. Adding to the deficit would have been pretty annoying to the American people, so our leaders of all stripes and colors just let it flow through to the debt. Since that debt is something about which we rarely speak – probably due to its enormity – the whole war financing method is pretty good politics.

The republican's enthusiasm for the Afghan Debacle, should, I would hope, but I may be assuming where I should be verifying – those guys are pretty slippery – include the fact that they accept the hundred billion a year price tag. Again, even if they accept it they are really off the hook because, unlike health care which needs to be accounted and paid for, the twin Debacles are just paid for out of some magic purse full of foo foo dust.

So what I am about to say is already, even before I say it, trumped. But I have to say it anyway.

If I take thirty years and multiply it by a hundred billion - not counting the post war costs of veterans' medical benefits (we learned from the Walter Reed Debacle – there is a mounting number of Debacles here – that we really don't intend to offer much in the way of veteran's benefits anyway), inflation and related nuisances - I get three trillion dollars. And that is three trillion that, although it is off budget it does go to the aggregate national debt. Last time I looked that aggregate national debt was about eleven trillion. Good thing that interest rates are so low.

I guess three trillion not budgeted and not paid for compared to one trillion which is to be budgeted and paid for is a much better deal.

Of course the crowd to whom that appears to be a good deal mostly believes that the earth is six thousand years old.

 

The War Surtax

Everybody has been assuming since Sunday that tonight – Tuesday 1 December - the president is going to announce a significant increase in troops to be sent to Afghanistan. See my November post "Re-Run" for how I feel about that assumption which is apparently about to become fact. But life moves on.

Moving on, therefore, I am curious about something.

I heard just a few moments ago on NPR's "Morning Edition" that the number of troops to be sent is thought to be going to be about thirty thousand. It is also thought that the cost will be about thirty billion a year. Apparently all those Goldman Sachs' bonuses have cut into the Federal budget so much that even thirty billion seems like a lot of money. Various among our elected representatives even have been heard in public utterances occurring during breaks from their meetings with their various lobbyist sponsors that they are not at all sure that we can pay for thirty thousand additional troops in Afghanistan.

So they are suggesting that we probably will need to impose a one percent income tax surtax to pay for the endeavor. The last time we had one of those was to help pay for the iteratively incremental inflow of troops into Vietnam. And that worked out well.

One of the advantages, those lawmakers are pointing out, to such a surtax is that it would make all of us feel more of a sense of ownership of the action in Afghanistan. We need to pay for all the war we are getting they assert.

In a previous post, "Potpourri", I discuss the current persistent use of the debating error "begging the question" in most current discussion of various important issues. The assertion, above, that we need to pay for what we are getting is yet another example of this phenomenon. It is elliptical – the proof being offered that is in itself unproved – is not stated ("you all want to fight a war in Afghanistan") but it is there nonetheless. And it "proves" that we need to pay.

So where do we have any evidence that we all want to fight a war in Afghanistan? Where does it say that we all want to go through the motions again of thrashing around for some currently un-determined number of years and then declare victory, get out and watch whoever it was that we thought we were fighting take over after we leave?

One percent of my annual income tax bill is not a life threatening amount of money, but I have no interest paying it for fighting a war in Afghanistan. So can I send my surtax to Goldman Sachs?

RF Trio Redux

One of the multiple story threads in Screen Saver is the genesis of the RF Trio. Joe and Dave and I really wanted to make a living as entertainers and we gave it as good a go as college kids were able in the early 1960s. But circumstances – Vietnam being the biggest – mitigated against that happening. As time and our lives wandered forward we would upon occasion get together and try to sing again. It was usually pretty sad. Luckily we had lots of beer and good humor to cover the fact that the songs just weren't there anymore. One in awhile, though, there would be the exception, or nearly so. This is one of them.

The video sequence is from images captured on the trip to Paris – originally it had been for three, but it had become for two by the time we went – that Betsy and I went on in 2006. That was the trip in which I realized that the tree on Avenue Rapp, the street which was the home of the residents of the quilt, was a giant fig. The images in the video are from le Musee d'Orsay and l'Orangerie.

Lady Bugs in December

I liked this one so much that I'm re-posting it in the new month.

A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped at an attraction on the way back to Seattle from a bile trip in the Santa Fe and Taos region. The attraction was called the Pink Dunes National Monument. The place was amazing. Everywhere one looked there were pink dunes. That was probably why they called it the Pink Dunes National Monument. There were some hiking paths indicated and we set out on one of them. Almost immediately the pink dunes were full of interesting and beautiful plants, most of which I had never seen before. In the process of photographing one of the ones that I had seen before – yucca – I noticed that it was alive with lady bugs. Closer examination showed why. The yucca was also alive with aphids. There were a great many more aphids than there were lady bugs and that was good for the lady bugs because aphids are sort of like cattle to lady bugs. I've never been clear about what it is that lady bugs do to or with aphids, but it has something to do with food. The lady bugs either eat or milk, or both, the lady bugs. I could visualize the lady bug eating an aphid, but I had a lot of trouble picturing the lady bug milking an aphid. I didn't even know where the aphids' udder and related equipment might be located. I wasn't even sure whether they had such equipment. And that was, in substantial part, why I had such a problem with visualizing the milking process, if indeed such a process actually existed. In any event I saw neither eating nor milking while I was observing the creatures, but I got some good pictures and when I got back to Seattle and took a look at the pictures I had taken, I discovered that, due to the fairly dense pixel depth of my pictures, I could zoom in on them with Photo Shop and extract fairly intimate pictures of the lady bugs farming their aphids. Here is one of them.

More Lady Bugs

Due to absolutely no interest and demand from nobody I am add ig some more lady bug pictures.

Lady Bugs

 

A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped at an attraction on the way back to Seattle from a bile trip in the Santa Fe and Taos region. The attraction was called the Pink Dunes National Monument. The place was amazing. Everywhere one looked there were pink dunes. That was probably why they called it the Pink Dunes National Monument. There were some hiking paths indicated and we set out on one of them. Almost immediately the pink dunes were full of interesting and beautiful plants, most of which I had never seen before. In the process of photographing one of the ones that I had seen before – yucca – I noticed that it was alive with lady bugs. Closer examination showed why. The yucca was also alive with aphids. There were a great many more aphids than there were lady bugs and that was good for the lady bugs because aphids are sort of like cattle to lady bugs. I've never been clear about what it is that lady bugs do to or with aphids, but it has something to do with food. The lady bugs either eat or milk, or both, the lady bugs. I could visualize the lady bug eating an aphid, but I had a lot of trouble picturing the lady bug milking an aphid. I didn't even know where the aphids' udder and related equipment might be located. I wasn't even sure whether they had such equipment. And that was, in substantial part, why I had such a problem with visualizing the milking process, if indeed such a process actually existed. In any event I saw neither eating nor milking while I was observing the creatures, but I got some good pictures and when I got back to Seattle and took a look at the pictures I had taken, I discovered that, due to the fairly dense pixel depth of my pictures, I could zoom in on them with Photo Shop and extract fairly intimate pictures of the lady bugs farming their aphids. Here is one of them.

Opportunity Lost

A guy named T.R. Reid has written a really good book on healthcare around the world. Specifically, he has written about how five of our kindred modern industrial democracies provide for health care for their citizens. He discusses the pros and cons and the variances in approach between them. He compares all of that to how we are doing it – or how we think we are doing it. He points out a lot of things that everybody has heard before; he points out much more that most of us haven't heard before. He has also made a really good documentary which has been aired on Public Television about all of this. And he has gone around the country promoting his book. That has often caused him to be interviewed in depth by Public Radio. I have heard him a couple of different times and have been impressed by how much he knows and how useful that which he knows could have been to our elected leaders as they went about trying to implement health care reform; or, in the case of the out of power party, as they went about trying not to implement health care reform. My net net reaction has been that Mr. Reid has learned a great deal of useful information, and that if he could learn it, perhaps all of us Americans could learn it. Perhaps even our elected leaders could have learned it. Perhaps all that learning could have produced a rational national (poetry intended) discussion about what can be done about our health care system. Perhaps we could have learned a great deal from discussing what many other successful and intelligent democracies in the world have been doing. Perhaps we all, citizens and leaders alike could have learned – jointly – a rational and effective way to improve a system which is clearly broken, from a cost viewpoint, from a results viewpoint and from a coverage viewpoint.

But we didn't, or at least we haven't had that discussion. Instead some of us all got together in public meetings and turned red in the face, shouted, followed the redness with purpleness and shouted some more. It strikes me as interesting that the people indulging in this simian sort of behavior are typically the same people who advocate teaching intelligent design. But that aside, we had some loud shouting and some sloganeering and some not so very well veiled racist assaults on our president and little else related to one of the most important issues facing us. And the republicans have just said no. I guess that's the best to be expected from America.

Too bad – it was an opportunity lost.

The RF Trio

The trio plays a prominent part in the tale that unfolds in Screen Saver. Unfortunately, from my viewpoint at least, there is no video of the group and damn little audio. Here is a half baked production which uses the one recorded-in-a-studio song and the few still images that can be found.

La Seine

This is an excerpt from chapter ten of Screen Saver.

"The Seine was a being. It had personality. In the spring it was high and brown; in the summer it was more subdued, still brown. In the winter it was high and brown and intertwined with an occasional maelstrom of seagulls all whirling and chanting their raspy calls to the waves. In the autumn it was a shattered mirror of infinite glinting flashes; it was bounded by the brilliant yellow poplars wandering its banks. It was the home for an endlessly interesting parade of barges and boats. There were the working barges thrusting themselves furiously against the current, laden with gravel for some upstream dumping point. There were the barges that had become homes for river dwelling Parisians. Although those barges floated, they never left their mooring; they clustered instead at points along the river, where the cobblestone riverside quays widened enough to allow pedestrian access and traffic. These tiny water-borne sub-arrondissments were bedecked with tomato and pepper plants in the summer, cascading chrysanthemums in the fall and Christmas trees in December. "

Re-Run

I've seen this movie before. I didn't like it the first time I saw it and I don't like it any better this time. The basic plot of the movie involves the iterative increase of hoards of American military personnel who get sent to some country that nobody in America except those who are in the process of being iteratively sent in ever increasing increments can find on the map; a sub plot is that nobody except those who are being sent have any clear idea about why they are being sent. For example, a while back my brother in law, who spent a year in Iraq, told me over a friendly martini that he had spent that year in Iraq defending the American Constitution. I lacked that sort of clarity about what our purposes had been in Iraq, although I had had some memory of there being vast numbers of nuclear and biological weapons stored there for use against the United States. I suppose if those weapons had been used against us it would have been a bad thing for the American Constitution, so perhaps my brother in law was correct. I can't remember whether we actually got any of those weapons, but since we are still physically intact I guess we did.

The first time I saw the movie I was among the iteratively increasing hoards. We were all being iteratively and increasingly sent to Vietnam. When we got there (we called it "in-country") we all learned where Vietnam was. That was because we all wanted to know how to get back from it, so we needed to know where it actually was on the map. If we had stayed uniteratively increased I suspect we never would have known where it was. And that probably would have been good. Anyway, when we got there some of us got sent "up-country" and some of us stayed in Saigon.

If one was sent "up-country" (some of us were actually sent "down-country"; there were places like the Rung Sat Special Strike Zone – I never knew how to spell it - that were distinctly south of Saigon; I think John Kerry spent a lot of time "down-country") one got to get shot at quite a lot. All that shooting was one of the key contributors to the interatively increasing requirement for hoards of additional military personnel. One of the advantages of all that iteratively increasing need was that it provided employment opportunities for vast numbers of young men who might have been otherwise unemployed, and that was good.

If one stayed in Saigon one spent most of one's time saluting the vast hoards of senior officers who all had flocked to the "war effort" to further their careers. "It may not be much, but it's the only war we've got" was a commonly heard witticism. When not saluting one probably spent most of the rest of one's time dodging large Cadillacs with starred flags affixed to them as they hurtled around the city. Occasionally one had to dodge a large limousine Mercedes that hurtled around with Nguyen Van Tiu in it. Nguyen was the president of Vietnam and he needed to hurtle around the streets a lot. H e couldn't let the American generals out hurtle him.

That movie turned out really well. I just didn't like it. But that's probably because I have always been pretty hard to please. After eight or ten years of thrashing around militarily and diplomatically the United States declared victory and the iterative hoards all went home. Not long after the hoards had left the guys who had been shooting at all of us formed their own government. I had always thought that we could have achieved the same result by just cutting out the iterative increases and the thrashing about and the shooting and just let those guys set up their government. They seemed to be somewhat of an improvement over the government provided by the guy in the Mercedes limo, but I was never sure. Apparently whether it was better or not was moot; we just left after spending a lot of money and sending home a lot of coffins.

But all of this is based on memories, and memories are at best phantoms.

Stasis

I have been beyond the range of the Internet for several days, thus my silence. The nice thing is that, since I know that I am talking to no-one, or to no-one other than to myself, my silence just doesn't matter; although that silence may matter to me, since its presence is yet one more reaffirmation of my gradual slippage into oblivion, in the great scheme of things it matters not. But, now that I have emerged from Lopez to the WiFi zone, here are a few thoughts.

It should be obvious to anyone who pays any attention to anything that the legislature of the United States has evolved since 1994 into a form of government that has no purpose other than a game in which the out-of-power party keeps anything from happening so that they can blame the in-power party at the next election for getting nothing done. Neither party can or will support the best interests of the country because to do so might allow something positive to happen on the watch of the in-power party, thus making them look good and allowing for the possibility of them being re-confirmed in power at the next election. This situation closely resembles the state of affairs that developed in World War I after the initial thrusts and parries had stabilized into an impasse which lasted until the United States added fresh blood on the side of the French and British and tipped the balance in their favor. It would not appear that such a third party exists in United States national politics, so it would appear that the game of keeping the in-powers from accomplishing anything that will help the country is going to continue. Ultimately, it would seem probable that the game will be broken, but it will probably be broken by the breaking of the country.

The only exceptions to the don't-do-anything form of government that have appeared are things that either should not have happened at all, or should have happened differently: under the threat of a McCarthy-like reign of terror from former president Bush and the republicans the democrats all buckled and voted for the Iraq invasion. Driven by a form of mass hysteria caused by the fear of a looming depression Nancy Pelosi was able to force through a trillion dollar list of all the half baked ideas that had been on her spending list for a long time. Rather than trying to act as a productive and protective opposition and forcing deliberation that would create a plan to spend what was probably somewhere near the right amount of money in a manner that made any sense, the republicans just went along.

And the icing on the nightmare cake of misgovernment is the influence of lobbies. What little does happen is the result of that nasty expedient for re-election, the expedient that both the ins and the outs need equally: money from the lobbies.

Les Chastaignes

In Screen Saver the annual cycle of the chestnuts plays a major role. If the book were a novel the chestnuts would be one of the characters, and a complex one at that. But that annual cycle is not a phenomenon confined solely to the United States. That phenomenon also occurs every year in France. It occurs in le Jardin du Luxembourg. And le Jardin also plays a major role in Screen Saver. And like the chestnuts in America, le Jardin would be a character if the book were a novel. But there are significant, and beautiful, differences between French and American chestnuts. And a description of that beauty would have been an important, if tiny, addition to the text of the book. Those words did get written, but they didn't get included. So, blogs being the ultimate menders of all things needing fixing, those words are offered here.

They were horse chestnuts but their flowers were pink. They were not creamy-tan like their American cousins. They had the same dark maroon throats, but the rest of the petals were of an intensely pink brilliance that when seen seemed impossible to describe and equally impossible to ignore. In spring their vertically pruned branches formed huge spatulate palates spattered liberally with foaming globs of their intense dark pink flowers. The spinal paths of the center of le jardin were lined with them. They marched down from just beyond l'orangerie all the way to the formal orchards where in autumn the persimmons shouted out with their joyous deep orange in contrast to their barren, winter-scoured limbs.

Genesis

One blustery December afternoon in 2006 I was walking back to my apartment in Paris. The last leg of that walk, no matter where I had been coming from, almost always involved walking along Avenue Rapp. When that was the case it always included my passing of two guys living on a quilt on the sidewalk and back into an alcove of the Post on Avenue Rapp. I had been seeing them there for two years. They were always there. I always saw them. But on this day something different, something additional happened. What was different was that when I got back to the apartment I got out my constant companion, my yellow tablet of lined paper, and started writing. "We were no different, those two and I …"

Were these, I wondered, the seminal words for the book that I had always believed I would someday write? If they were so to be, they remained as the solitary seminal start for the balance of that visit to Paris. But they remained. They existed. The tablet returned with me to Seattle and all of its pages, those written on and those blank remained attached. I used those tablets in the same way that others use spirals. So they weren't gone. But they weren't growing.

Then in January of 2007 I revisited those words. I re-read them; I savored them; I pondered them. Then I worked and expanded them into a little tableau.

That little tableau became significant: it did constitute a spark for what became Screen Saver; they weren't seminal, as in being the beginning, but they were motive. I am including them in today's post, because they became what ultimately turned out to be chapter nine, and then later on toward the finish line, chapter ten of Screen Saver.

"They are two guys living in an alcove doorway of a post office on Avenue Rapp. They talk to passers by, sometimes with significant animation on both sides of the discussion, and with apparent respect on many occasions from their passers by guests. They drink quantities of an amber colored liquid purveyed in large, probably litre plastic bottles. One would assume the liquid to be alcoholic in nature, helpful in creating the numbness necessary to live in a doorway, in the cold of a Parisian December, and with little or nothing to do except the occasional talk with passersby. Their meals appear sporadically and mysteriously, apparently supplied by some of the passersby. The meals are usually good looking sandwiches (hard to get a bad one in Paris) or bread or pasta. Always they carefully monitor a shallow, small cardboard box lid on the sidewalk in front of them. Over time coins appear – centimes and infrequent euros – and these constitute the gross daily financial input to this tiny island of near-the-edge human civilization."

Chesapeake

In Screen Saver I tell a story about one of my three times in Wyoming. That story was about the first time I was ever in Wyoming and the story doesn't have much point to it except to set up my assertion that there didn't seem to be much there and getting in and out of it as soon as possible had always seemed to me to be the best way to think about Wyoming. All that had been to set up the fact that on my third time in Wyoming I had had an experience that had totally belied the accuracy of my former beliefs about the place. But the real point of interest in that first experience, if not the story itself, had been one of my hunting companions. His name was Glen, and I mention in that first-time-in-Wyoming story that he had grown up on Chesapeake Bay and probably should have been a waterman rather than being in the US Navy which was where he was which was how I had met him. We were both officers, I in the US Air Force and Glen in the Navy, at Lowery Air Force Base being trained to be Intelligence Officers so that we would have something to do when we got to Vietnam. Glen had set the stage for events on a subsequent trip with the story he had told of the day, when hunting on Chesapeake Bay, he had shot a goose and it had gone down far out in the water. It was dead and it was far out in the water. Glen didn't have a dog and the bird was too far out for him to get it, even by wading. So, he told us ("us" not "me" because we were accompanied by another Air Force officer named Gerry) he did the obvious. He played the dog. He disrobed, swam out and retrieved the goose.

That had made a good story and filled some of the dead time that had hung heavy on our hands that day on my first time in Wyoming. We had gone up there – just outside a town called Chugwater - from Denver for the day to hunt for the, we were assured by a recent article in the Post, hoards of cottontail rabbits that were thronging around the Chugwater area. Time had hung heavy on our hands because we never saw a rabbit. But I had heard Glen's story and on a subsequent hunting trip that story was to turn out to be mildly prophetic.

It was a cold overcast mid-morning somewhere north of Denver. The three of us, Gerry, Glen and I were wading in slightly deeper than knee deep water that had impinged and surrounded a copse of some kind of deciduous trees. But it wasn't as easy as the description sounds. The bottom of this forested pond was ankle deep mud. The surface of the water was a crust of half inch thick ice. So wading through this icy soup involved crashing a foot through the ice, letting the boot - we were wearing waders – settle into the mud until it got sucked solid and then rotating the other foot forward and backward until it could be broken loose from the sucking muck and lift it out of the water, crash it through the ice and repeat the whole process again. In this manner we were walking through this treed slough looking for ducks. We each carried a shotgun.

I said it was cold. It was bitterly cold. I had known prior to leaving home how cold it was going to be so I was well layered with warm clothing. I was so well layered that I looked several sizes larger than I actually was.

We had been crashing and mucking for about half an hour without seeing anything to shoot at when, from behind us, the air became filled with large numbers of mallards. They swept by to our right from back to front and skidded into some water ahead of us that was free from ice. And more followed them; and more followed them. It looked as if we might get some ducks. And it was going to involve a classic form of duck hunting: jump shooting as they flushed ahead of us.

We edged closer to the outer edge of the trees where the ice was somewhat thinner; the muck on the bottom remained the same but not as much noise and effort were necessary in the thinner ice area.

As we moved into range some ducks leapt into the air and the three of us drew down and fired. Gerry dropped one just to his left a little deeper into the trees where the ice was thicker and the duck dropped with a thud to the ice. I had similar luck and my duck hit the ice not far from Gerry's. Glen's duck hit the open water to his right and about thirty feet away. Glen started walking toward it and was about half way there when an amazing thing happened. Glen disappeared. Then he re-appeared, but he was sputtering and flailing about as he assumed a swimmer's posture and, fully winter-hunting clothed, swam back to shallow water. It turned out – and it was something that had completely eluded all three of us – that the water was open because, unlike the water in the trees, it was deep. It was deep and it had a fairly swift current. It had a fairly swift current because it was a small river or a big creek and it had overflowed its banks from the winter storms into the trees that in more clement times lined its banks.

Glen hadn't gotten close enough to the duck to retrieve it, but he had dropped his gun which was now somewhere at the bottom of a deep body of moving water.

Then Glen did something that would have appeared irrational if he hadn't previously told me the story about the goose on Chesapeake Bay. He took off his clothes down to his underwear. And he went into the water and dove, doing one of those bend at the waist and go straight down surface dives that we all used to do in the swimming pool. But we all did it in the swimming pool in the middle of sunny days in the middle of the summer in pools filled with crystal clear tepid water. Glen was going down in an icy coffee- colored soup of uncertain depth. And he was going to be looking for something that probably had been moved along by the current, just as he had been moved, giving him a starting point with three unknowns: where he had been at the point of his plunge and where the gun might have been dropped in relation to that plunge, and where it might have been moved to in the interim.

I gave the endeavor no chance of success. I was actually pretty concerned about the chances that I would ever see Glen again in living form. But after a long time in slow motion movie terms he surfaced, with the gun and got to the shallows, handed the gun to me and swam back out and retrieved the duck. Once the duck was safely placed in the crotch of one of the trees reality began to manifest its ugly face to Glen. He commenced shivering with his teeth chattering at such a rate that I feared he might come apart at some heretofore non-obvious set of seams. He was not a very tall man and what height there was of him had no excess flesh on it; there was no fat; there was no insulation. And we were a long walk from the car.

It suddenly hit me why I had worn all those clothes. It hadn't been because I had been aware of the coldness of the day and had prepared for it. It was because the great god of the Chesapeake had called out across the country and had told me to prepare to be the provider of a change of warm clothes for one of his children.

So Glen and I climbed into a tree and I peeled of a layer or two of my garments and Glen donned them, tying them in knots in many places to accommodate the fact that I was about half again as big as he, and he and Gerry and I spent the rest of the day harvesting our fair share of the duck population of the locale. We stayed away from the open water however.

Screen Saver: Was Anybody Paying Any Attention?

Sixty or so years seems a long time. It seems so until one gradually begins to notice that years are becoming months, months are becoming days and days eye-blinks. And once one notices that phenomenon one becomes aware of a key property of the phenomenon. The interval of the animated gif we call life is set to variable-accelerate. At the point of that realization markers that have long been a part of one's life begin to become one's life. The other key property of the phenomenon is that the markers are retrieved randomly. If they were laid sequentially end to end they would tell a story that would be the story of the years they represent. But they aren't sequential; they are random. And that's where it gets interesting.

My sixty or so years have put me in the middle of several of the significant events that occurred during that time. I have a bronze star from Vietnam. I am a retired IBM manager. I survived the Roman Catholic education system. I hunted when hunting was still something one did. I water-skied until I got too affluent to own a boat small enough to throw a water skiable wake. I ran until one day in le Jardin du Luxembourg a sharp, pointed piece of flint finished off one of my toes. In the wake of the toe incident I even survived being a member of Group Health Co-operative and escaped to the outer world where real doctors practiced.

But those things and many more are just facts. How I survived the year in Vietnam, having drawn the conclusion early that the endeavor was the biggest waste of life and wealth that the human race had ever embarked upon, and how I prevailed
working for a corporation when I was the least likely candidate for corporate life extant at the time, and how all those years were filled with people and events - perhaps less obviously consequential than those noted above - but weirdly funny and entertaining - When told non-sequentially become a fast paced movie-like mélange of a story.

 

Myth

I was watching the NFL on Fox while I cooked breakfast today. Every few minutes it seemed that the Dodge component of Chrysler/Fiat was pounding at us viewers with a couple different, rather long commercials. At least I think they were commercials. They could also have been leftovers from Reagan's morning in America campaign. One would think that if a car company, particularly one which had only recently come out of bankruptcy, would want to present a concrete value proposition with a concrete call to action if it were going to spend all that money on expensive air time. Ford is certainly doing an effective job of presenting compelling messages about cars that look to be of a type that lots of people – not just Americans – might want to buy. GM is trying, but not to any level of effectiveness. But at least they are trying.

Dodge it would appear has decided to take the approach that if it reminds Americans of their long lost and probably mythically unfounded greatness – images of smokestacks long gone, flashes of workers long since de-unionized, and horses running free ( I have no idea what that is all about) - that they can sell a bunch of trucks.

The thing that bothers me about that is not that it appears to be a stupid waste of money. The thing that bothers me is that the images and messages being presented by what was once a great American corporation are suggesting that America should retreat into a dream world of a might-have-been-greater-time for us. The thing that bothers me about that is that it looks to be a great way to let the emerging twenty first century world steam roll right over us as we retreat into a haze of a romantic nineteenth century during which we must have been great and that we will again be great if only we return to those days: imbedded in the acceptance of that viewpoint is the implicit belief that we are losing because nobody is playing fair rather than facing the fact that we are losing because everybody else is playing smart; imbedded in the acceptance of that viewpoint is the implicit belief that not knowing anything about the rest of the world is not only acceptable it's deeply patriotic; imbedded in the acceptance of that viewpoint is the implicit belief that not graduating from high school, or not knowing anything about anything if you do so graduate is an understandable and acceptable state of affairs, and that state of affairs absolutely precludes our ability to play smart like the other guys.

The Day After The Day Before

The thirteenth has come and it has now gone. The scallops offered in sacrifice to the celebration of the passage of time- the passage of another, the sixty-seventh, year - are mostly gone, although some wait in refrigerators hither and refrigerators yon for their ultimate – one would hope- inclusion in Sunday omelets or Sunday scrambles. Whatever their ultimate fate, they are certainly gone from the immediate arena, of the immediate celebration of the immediate passage of yet another immediately-gone year.

And before the dawn, even though the fourteenth is a Saturday it will be a Wednesday and then almost without noticeable boundary it will be Thursday and the recycling trucks will be forwarding and the recycling trucks will be backwarding and there will be the crashes of glass and the interludes of silence and the interludes of the bells. And soon it will fade to Wednesday again. And the shortest day of the year will be imminent; and it will almost immediately fade to the longest, and then the shortest, and then the longest. Who knows for how long, but it is certain that the days will so fade, and will so fade until they stop. And what then? Indeed. What then?

And the cycle of the chestnuts and the cycle of the mountain ashes provide the flashes of silent wallpaper-like color for the motion of the days and the sounds of the trucks and the bells and the silences. For silences, we have been told, have sounds.

And the pictures on the variously abandoned drivers licenses rattle their arrangement – oldest to youngest, youngest to oldest, back and forth, back and forth in the panic drawer of my life and the panic drawer of my bedroom and in my field of vision.

It seems to continue rather than to cease, so who am I to judge its merit or its value or its meaning, or even its actual existence? Who after all am I? Indeed.

Food Fight

Food fight is the name of a blog Joe and I are going to initiate in the near future.  Its ultimate purpose will be to evolve into some sort of weird on-line mix of political discourse and diatribe, jokes, observations and the most disgustingly eclectic collection of food preparation methods, ingredients, processes and results that is currently extant.  I am excited because it will evolve into a latter day descendent to the still-born Lake Oswego Cookbook.  See Screen Saver page 491 for more.

How Many More?

Today I became sixty seven years old. I have been sixty seven for at least six months now, because I round up on age, but today it is irrevocable. To celebrate I had one of my favorite breakfasts after 23 miles on the trainer in the garage; the weather was so typically Seattle that riding a bike outside at my age could have been life-threatening; the breakfast was Eggs Benedict and a Bloody Mary (two bloodies, actually). For the recipes go to HTTP://www.noelmckeehan.com/foodx.html

Anyway, after wolfing down the eggs, bacon and Hollandaise, I was washing the dishes that are not appropriate for the dishwasher. As usually happens when I am washing dishes I began to build up a head of emotional steam resisting the need for or even the existence of the process in which I was, up to my forearms-in-water involved.

"How many more of these (dish washing incidents) do I have in me?" I heard somebody say. When I had recognized the voice as my own, it caused a degree of introspection. It cause introspection because I have been hearing my voice saying that really often recently.

There were the DTRs from Comcast. Earlier in the year when I was trying to install a replacement, higher speed, router for my home network I had had to call Comcast to re-discover the exact order of events that needed to occur between me and my cable modem to allow the new router to access the internet. I knew what I had to do; I just couldn't remember what the order of events needed to be. In the process of that fairly painless encounter the nice lady at Comcast had asked me how many TVs I had installed. I couldn't remember, but I offered what seemed to me a plausible number. She said that in the near future Comcast was going to vastly improve their service by doing something that would eliminate my access to any channels above channel 30, and that if I wanted to continue to have access to any channels above channel 30 I would need to install some devices that Comcast would be glad to provide.

The devices – two of them – arrived and sat on the dining room table for several months. I looked at the directions a couple of times and heard the voice saying, "how many …."

And then one day, having reached the masochistic need to see what the answer to that question might be, I opened the boxes, installed the devices, called Comcast and did whatever it was that I needed to do to activate them – that process is long lost in the mists of the recent past – and on the two sets that are their host, I have access to channels above channel 30. Since I seldom go beyond the Lehrer News Hour on channel 9, I am unsure why I did that, but it is done.

Recently the voice has sounded forth related to an all-in-one HP printer, a USB turntable, a Vista 64 bit ThinkPad a new web site (I had one in the 90's for which I had to teach myself HTML before anybody had a web site, but it stirred up so much disinterest and personal expense that I abandoned it after several years) and two blogs; this is one of them. In every case I had fairly quick and successful resolve of the process. In the case of 64 bit Vista, I had trouble with the network because Microsoft apparently decided that they wanted to return to making network access easy rather than impossible as they had made it in 32 bit Vista. As I struggled with the newly provided straight forward simplicity I managed to re-name my "Desktop" "Everyone", but I ultimately lurched into having my new machine on the network.

Maybe the answer to the question, "how many more of these do I have in me?" is answered in chapter 25 of Screen Saver.

 

 

Potpourri

When I was in high school and college I did a little bit of formal debating. Debating is a little bit like fencing, albeit with words, rules, protocols and logic instead of foils and physical moves. One of the rules – the need for proof to support statements meant to carry the day and win the argument – resulted in a named error when the rule was violated. That debating error was called begging the question. I guess it is a sign of something lost that one now hears the term begging the question all of the time on the never ending torrent of words emanating from various of our well known opinion leaders: "that begs the question…" or "those circumstances are begging the question… ". Wandering syntax and grammar are vital signs of a living and growing language. No matter how painful "me and my friend went…" or "between you and I…" or "there is many things to consider" and their vast tribe of syntactical and grammatical kindred may be, to my ear, at least, they are the sign of a living and evolving language and as such they are the future of the language until they in their turn get mangled into something else.

And a cousin of evolving grammar is the inventive use of a word or phrase to mean something else.

Sometimes the new meaning causes the forgetting the old meaning. Sometimes not. In those cases where forgetting has occurred there is probably little or no damage done. In the case of the debating error once know by the name "begging the question" it appears that forgetfulness has indeed occurred. And its occurrence appears to be causing a great deal of damage. How else would it be possible for the religious right wing and the Republicans to keep carrying the debating day by saying things like "the argument against gay marriage is that if allowed it will destroy the sacred institution of marriage"?

In a similar vein I recently heard a right wing Republican decrying illegal aliens for:

1. Not paying taxes, and
   
2. Having a social security account.
   

So which is it? It probably isn't both. It's probably more likely B.

What are they really saying when large crowds of angry white people yell at our president "keep your hands off our kids"?

It seems to me that the existence of large irate crowds of ill informed people who like to gather and shout about gay rights, immigration and health care reform point to the fact that an alarmingly large and possibly increasing segment of our fellow citizens are mean, selfish and stupid.

I did learn something of worth the other day on NPR. Warren Olney presented one of his multiple viewpoint sessions on the subject of the Catholic Church's – the Roman one – recent statement of the viewpoint that revelation and science - evolution even – can certainly co-exist fraternally. The two are merely two different dimensions of the boundless truth of the universe and the universal god, or some such sort of thought process. So Warren had a Catholic theologian, a Protestant theologian, a secular scientist and a member of the religious right on the show. The two theologians pretty much agreed with one another. The right wing guy started with the fact that creation is six thousand years old – he had high praise for Bishop Ussher – and pretty much went downhill from there.

But back to what I learned: Warren asked him if the world is only six thousand years old why does carbon dating point to a much older world. The guy said carbon dating actually proved the six thousand year age; it was just a matter of getting the process properly calibrated.

That's a concept that could have widespread and revolutionary application.

The Picture For The Blog One Slot Down

The Ethics of Road Kill

In Screen Saver there are a number of stories that have bird hunting with Blitz and Brown – two wonderful German Shorthaired Pointers - as their background milieu. These stories inevitably talk about various aspects of hunting, shooting, preparing, cooking and eating various upland game birds: pheasant, chukkar, Hungarian partridge and quail.

What I didn't realize I was omitting during all the writing and editing of the book was that I completely neglected to mention a key adjunct to the hunting of birds. Being out in the wheat fields and sugar beet fields of Oregon and Idaho inevitably brought Jack and me into contact with a physical phenomenon and an associated dilemma. Pheasants like to fly into the path of oncoming cars. Sometimes they make it through unscathed. Sometimes they don't. When they don't, they often manage to limp and flop to the edge of the road where they die not much worse than for the wear and tear of a ruptured heart or massive concussion resulting from contact with the car. This caused the phenomenon: lots of possibly edible game scattered hither and yon along the roadways and byways of many beautiful autumn afternoons. Which led to the dilemma: is it ethical to re-harvest any or all of that previously harvested game?

Jack and I decided that, if we had seen the game being harvested the answer was a definite yes. If the incident of the bird's demise had not been personally witnessed by us, and, if upon stopping and examining a victim, rigor mortis had not yet set in, the answer was a slightly less enthusiastic yes, but yes nonetheless. If the victim was stiff as a tray of ice cubes the answer became hunger dependent.

Recipe to follow.

The Price of Fame’s Lack

On toward dawn late in December in 2007 I was in Paris and had been reading because I had awakened and couldn't get back to sleep. Every couple years during my times in Paris I read A moveable Feast. On this particular morning, as I was about to complete the book something that Hemingway said set off a chain reaction of thoughts and ideas that I had to write down. Since I had taken my computer with me to Paris, I jumped out of bed, turned on the ThinkPad and hammered out a few paragraphs. Then I got another glass of calvados, another book and went back to bed.

 

I read what it was that I had written after breakfast later that morning and was pleased to discover that, unlike virtually all of the apparently inspired things that I have ever been known to write on toward dawn, what I had written this time hadn't dissolved in the interim into mindless drivel.

 

That notwithstanding, I didn't draw any deep conclusions about the existence of the small document; it just felt good to have written something in an apparently inspired moment and have it stand up to the light of day.

 

Then something happened that gave it more immediate importance. Patty, my sister, sent me an email that sounded as if she had read what I had written. Her thoughts were eerily parallel to mine.

 

So I responded and attached the Word document that I had produced and asked her opinion. Being, I suppose, a loyal sister, she replied that it was good and had left her wanting more. Specifically, she wanted to know where my opening few paragraphs might ultimately lead.

 

So did I.

 

A year later, again in Paris, the thing had become 19 chapters of a memoir. By the following May it had been finished at 25 chapters. Since then I have put it through five revisions and have self published on lulu.com.

 

But there is more.

 

Suddenly possessing something that I had always believed I could produce, but having never gotten beyond drivel, I needed to engage the publishing establishment. During the majority of my life in which the existence of a book to be offered for publication had remained a pipedream, the publishing step had seemed a no-brainer. Over the last several months I have learned in depth the untruth of that belief.

 

That untruth can be distilled into one word: "platform".

 

Here is what I have been told about "platform.

 

"Platform" is what famous people have. If they can manage to put something on paper, or get someone else to put it there for them some publisher will publish it. "Platform" is also what experts in various fields have. "Platform" is what captains of industry or scions of the educational establishment have. "Platform" is what one who has had the bad – or good – fortune to be the pilot of a plane that has just flown through a flock of geese has.

 

 

"Platform" is what numerous agents and various publishing industry hangers-on tell me that I lack. And that lack makes what I have written by definition of no possible interest to the publishing community. "If you had written about vampires, perhaps; but a tale spanning the last sixty years, and you with no platform? Not possible."

 

"But", they say, "one can try to remedy that problem. To build platform get as many followers on Twitter as possible. Have hoards of friends on FaceBook. Be a blogger. Have a Web site. Write and submit learned articles to learned publications."

 

Does anybody really pay any attention to Twitter? Do the hoard of the self-absorbed who post their ongoing inanities on FaceBook ever read what anyone else except their proprietary inner circle of fellow cretins post on the site? Is a person with absolutely no platform going to have any better luck getting published in learned publications?

 

But I have a book and I am going to get the attention of the publishing community or go down in flames trying.

 

So I am on Twitter and FaceBook and I have brought up my Web site – noelmckeehan.com. And I am employing what amounts to guerrilla tactics by self-publishing. I have purchased a distribution package that includes distribution, not only on Lulu.com, but also on Amazon, BarnesandNoble and Ingram.

Thoughts on Health Care

I have spent more than a year in France over the last 10 years. Inevitably, even though I am really healthy, I have had a few encounters with their system.

The first was in 2002. I got a bad cold which turned into a sinus infection as they always do, and rather than put up with weeks of misery I always make an appointment with the doctor and get a prescription for amoxicillin which gets rid of the infection. I called a friend and got a reference to a doctor and called and made an appointment - he could see me that afternoon. He was an expatriate Brit who had been there long enough that he spoke English with a French accent. As we went through the examination his English began to lose its French accent, I assumed due to the influence of hearing his mother tongue spoken with a non French, albeit American West Coast accent. He seemed to be enjoying talking to another native English speaker, so I engaged him in conversation. Note that he had the time to choose to let me engage him in conversation. I asked him why he had decided to practice in France rather than England. He had a lot to say on that subject, but the net of it was that he didn't like practicing medicine in a socialized system so he moved to France which had a system that was both vastly superior and not socialized. He said that the government involvement that did exist in France created an excellent system that guaranteed superior healthcare for everybody at an acceptable cost and that made the environment for the practice of medicine much more enjoyable than that of England. I asked him why, as long as he was pulling up roots, and since he spoke English he didn't move to the US. He said that as far as he was concerned the only worse place to practice medicine than the UK was the US. He said that we had the highest cost, worst outcome, private insurance company dominated system in the world. He marveled that Americans would put up with it. He only knew that he didn't want to play in that sort of game.

That office call, that I was able to make and execute the same day cost me 35 Euros. That was max cost possible because I didn't have coverage in France. Later I learned something else. I didn't need to see a doctor at all. I had made the appointment because in the US if you need a prescription you have to see a doctor. So you make an appointment wait a few days, see the doctor, beg for the prescription (after all, what do you know about the state of your heath?) and be charged a couple of hundred dollars for your office visit which will be adjudicated by the insurance company, if you have insurance for several months, after which your doctor's practice will get some portion of what was billed. All of that just to get a prescription. In France the pharmacist is the first line of medical services delivery. When I need a trivial prescription such as amoxicillin I go to my local pharmacy talk to the pharmacist and get a prescription. There is no service charge and the pills cost about 4 Euros.

The second encounter I had was an aberration, but worth noting. I had a severe case of stomach flu and after several day of staying in bed I put my raincoat over my pajamas and went down my four flight of stairs and out to the street to the pharmacy next door. I bought some Tylenol and went back into the apartment and was climbing back up the stairs when I woke up with my head down the stairs about two flights up hearing someone saying in French accented English "'Allow, is anyone there?" I answered, got up and then woke up again, head down in roughly the same place as I had awakened the first time. This time there was a man, even older than me, standing over me and helping me up. He and his wife lived one flight down from me and he had heard me fall the first time. I had no memory of anything except starting up the stairs. He was a retired doctor, but he worked every day as a volunteer physician. He took me into his apartment, examined me, told me I was dehydrated and suffering from a bad flu and gave me some medicine and escorted me to my apartment. That was about 1100 in the morning. He said he'd be back at about 4 to check in on me and did I need anything from the store. I could see that I was going to run out of toilet paper. When he came back at 4 he had a huge package of toilet paper. None of this cost me anything unless you count the bottle of cognac I took to him and his wife a few days later when we got together for a glass of wine and some conversation.

The third encounter was two years ago when I got another, milder case of the stomach malady that had felled me on the staircase a couple of years before. This time I just decided to get a doctor to make a house call - they do that in France. So I called and a couple hours later a doctor showed up, examined me and gave me a prescription for whatever it was that I had. I had to go out to the pharmacy, but I was only up one flight this time so I didn't pass out when I returned. That doctor house call cost me 70 Euros, again, the maximum possible due to the fact that I have no health care coverge in France. Once a person becomes some sort of officially resident non French citizen he or she is covered, but I was still a visitor.

So now to what I heard this morning. Actually, I keep hearing it in various forms; it just finally put me over the edge this morning. Some Republican was decrying the possibility of a "public option" because it would be socialized medicine, just like France (remember what my Brit Doctor friend said?). He also said we couldn't afford it (I guess since the current wonderful Insurance Industry controlled option is the most expensive in the world he assumed that any change would cost even more. It might have been useful for him to have been aware that France's system is not only not socialized medicine, it costs way less than ours and provides generally the best or nearly best "outcomes" in the world - the US is somewhere in the thirties in world rankings for outcomes). And even someone who doesn't pay into the French system - me in the examples above - can benefit from superior service (same day appointments, house calls within a few hours of request) and low cost - 105 Euros for my entire medical needs from the system, not counting prescriptions.

But then he really delivered the coup de grace. If we have a public option, he said, it will kill off our great American Market Driven and Provided approach to the requirement. He said that 120 million of us would sign up for the public option. So how stupid are we? If the public option is so bad, why would i20 million of us all sign up for it? What kind of forked tongued rhetoric are the Republicans dishing out? But the lobbies can apparently keep dinosaurs going for years, to the detriment of all of us, including the dinosaurs.