The Sound Of the BP Claims Line

There is a sound that goes with making things right in the Gulf.

Bugs

It doesn't take a whole lot to entertain me.

The Face

The Hazel Nut

A few years ago I found a very small hazel nut tree – actually it was a hazel nut with a sprout coming out of it – precariously perched at the edge of our front rockery and buried in pine straw under the shade of two decorative medium sized pine trees and already, even at its small size beginning to be entangled with the mesh of the cyclone fence.

I decided to rescue it from what I assumed would be an entirely unsatisfactory life entangled in the fence and fighting for sunlight with the pines. So I planted it in back in an area that I was trying to shape into some kind of low maintenance woodland sort of niche. I was trying to create a niche where birds would want to spend time.

The little hazel nut grew pretty well for a couple of seasons. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed happy enough and I felt that it would probably grow into a contributing member of the bird sanctuary. Then it almost got eliminated. Various cats decided for some reason that the hazelnut occupied the exact spot where they liked to dig and it was almost killed. But it wasn’t killed; and it recovered; and it continued to grow, albeit slowly.

Then last year it suddenly got really big.

Then this year it got even bigger. And this year it has decided that it needed to produce some nuts.

A Remembrance Of Things Lost

If one were to go to the “Black And White” section of my web site and if one were to click on the “A Fish” tab, one would see a picture of me, my mother and a 20 or 25 pound King Salmon. I wasn’t in the boat when the salmon was caught. That honor was reserved to my father and my mother’s father, my grandfather, Bobby. But by the time I had awakened that morning and the three of them had returned with my mother’s fish, a family legend had begun. The tale of how the fish was played and landed – the reel fell off the pole at one point among other near catastrophes – started that morning and grew in family significance over the intervening years.

I wasn’t in the boat that day, but I was in the boat the next afternoon when I caught one of my first fish, a ten or eleven inch trout shaped creature that Bobby referred to as a “salmon trout”. I have thought in years subsequent, when I had learned that it is illegal to keep salmon smoults, that “salmon trout” was a class of fish that Bobby invented on the spot to justify in his mind letting his grandson keep what was, from his grandson’s viewpoint, quite a nice fish. As we were approaching the giant rail ramp that would drag the boat back into the boat house, and I leaped up brandishing my salmon trout proudly to anyone at the boat house who wanted to see, Bobby might have momentarily had second thoughts about the wisdom of his invention, but nothing bad came of it. Only great good came from it. “It” in fact became the beginning of a gallery of memories, of smells, and sights and sounds and feelings and emotions that were incremented every time I found myself on something resembling the open ocean.

The salmon trout incident was in the San Juan Islands in the very early 1950s. The gallery of “it” is populated with additional content from the San Juans; that gallery is populated with material from the North Pacific off the coast of Oregon; it is populated with material from various bays and estuaries which indent the coast of Oregon; it is populated with material from the beaches of Oregon; it is populated with material from the Mid Atlantic off the coast of Florida near Boca Raton. The gallery is an accretion of individual incidents, occurrences and impressions. But they all add up to one unified thing. I call it “it” because I lack a word that describes it beyond that two letter reference. But keep it in mind because it plays an important role in what I am ultimately trying to say in this post.

One need not be catching fish to feel maximally fulfilled when on the ocean. There is too much going on for not catching fish to be a problem. In fact once one lapses into the intense enjoyment of all it is that is going one, one contemplates whether one wants to catch fish anyway. They might just take one’s mind off all the other things that there are to savor.

In no apparent order here are some of those things.

Some jelly fish look as if they have muscles, or something like muscles, because I have seen big semi transparent white ones seem to move rapidly off to the right or left of the vantage point of my place in the boat by seemingly undulating themselves and shooting off in whatever direction they appear to have chosen. Whatever the truth of the matter, hours can pass as minutes when the white jelly fish are swarming around the boat shooting hither and yon and yon and hither and then back again.

On the other hand, being in a vast hoard of red jelly fish, which don’t seem to manifest any ability at locomotion can be equally mesmerizing. They are usually big, the size of an adult human head and they have long, long tendrils of – I guess – stinging cells trailing along beneath and behind them as they flow by with whatever tidal current is in motion.

Kindred in form with the swarms of red jelly fish, although obviously completely different in genetics are the birds. I don’t know much about sea birds. I know a lot about their land based relatives, but not sea birds. But one doesn’t need to know what kind they are to savor a huge never ending flock of some kind of highly aerodynamic pigeon sized bullets streaking past just above the water, probably drafting on some uplift from the waves; they seem to be never ending when they are there; and then they are not there and one wonders if they ever were there; and then they, or some tribe of replacements are there again. They pass in massive liquid swirls.

Not everything that flies by on the ocean is a bird.

The first time I was in a boat on the Atlantic off the coast of Florida I asked if we were likely to see any flying fish. Absolutely I was told, lots of them. “What do they look like” I asked. “Just like a silver pencil” said one of my friends.

That was a perfect description. In fact, without that description, I doubt if I would have known what I was seeing when the first silver pencil sailed by. At times the air was filled with them. At other times there were only a few. Sometimes there were none; and there were silver pencils again. And they came in several sizes. Their size ranged from creatures actually about the size of a pencil through several larger gradations of size and culminating in fish about the size of a salmon trout.

But it need not be alive to be a contributor to the aggregate “thing” gallery of the sea.

Smells abound. There is just the sea smell itself which varies depending upon the temperature, wind, geography, proximity to land and, I suppose, myriad factors which somebody may know, but I don’t.

It is not uncommon to pass through one color of water to another color of water. That water may be quite blue, quite green or depressingly gray. It may just be foamy and white, or at the place where it touches the sand of the shore, it may be foamy brown. And in the water there are all kinds of colors from the white jelly fish through the red jelly fish to the brown kelp to the bright yellow air filled pods of seaweed whose name I have never known.

The water has texture. There are places where several tidal currents get in a fight and an area of amazingly choppy and dangerous water results. These rip tides seem to gather food at their edges and are therefore good places to fish. These rips are not good places for a small boat to fish inside of. The texture of a rip is like the teeth of a bastard file. The texture of some full-fledged waves created by the battle between the fresh water rushing out of a large river like the Columbia and the salt water of an ocean such as the Pacific can produce a texture that resembles the Rocky Mountains. Or that same stretch of water under different tidal conditions can have the texture of the frosting on a maple bar.

To avoid giving the impression that all of that which has so far been described can replace the intensity of feeling that accompanies the catching of fish, the last non-living factor that comes readily to mind from my aggregate gallery of the sea is a sight – the intense spray that a filament of fishing line throws off when being hurtled through the water by the freight train like run away from the boat of a King salmon that has been hooked. That spray is also a sound: I swear one can hear a hiss as that spray flies into the air angling madly off into the distance, but away, always away, from the boat and the fisherman.

The “catching” can be of fish such as the King after the spray has finally run out. It can be of small silvers when one is lucky enough to realize that a school of them has for some reason started chasing one’s boat. When that situation ensues, one puts the motor in neutral stops trolling the herring and starts jigging it off the stern as if fishing for fresh water crappie. A limit of eight to ten pound glittering silver rockets can be the result. Or they can disappear as quickly as they appeared having abandoned any interest in the herring dangled to entice them. Who knew why either occurred? Who even really cared? The adrenalin that got pumped on account of the brief encounter serves to keep the moment fresh for quite some time. And when the King gets finally boated the adrenalin causes the right leg to go into a spasm with the foot tap, tap tapping madly on the floor of the boat.

The “catching” can be of fish of a the species thought-to-be-lesser-than-salmon: the rock fish, the ling cod, the sea bass, or even, when hoards of them are running, of silvery herring that will strike at empty hooks as they stream by the boat. It is possible to catch several herring at a time if one deploys a multi-hooked rig. Since sea bass, cod and rock fish inhabit the depths of kelp forests it is necessary to poke one’s boat into the middle of such a forest and drop one’s herring to the bottom with the impaled bait streaming at a ninety degree angle to the drop line and its terminal pyramid of lead. In the old days hoards of willing victims fought to be the first to be hooked. In more recent times those populations have been depleted, but there are still times when the kelp will yield some kind of highly desirable multiple-pound-weighing thing that isn’t very pretty but that makes a great dinner, lunch or breakfast.

And sometimes the kelp forest harbors something else, something that I have never seen, but something with which I have done battle to unsuccessful conclusion more than once. Not ever having actually seen one, but having felt their power and force and pull more than once, the people and I who have had the privilege of trying to catch them have named them the “Great Something”. I have been told that they are probably halibut. I prefer to keep them as the “Great Something”.

“Catching” sometimes isn’t really catching at all. Sometimes it is digging. That is how one gets a bucket of butter clams. They are dug like potatoes. Razor clams, on the other hand, are different. Although a shovel is used in pursuit of them, they are not dug. A razor clam lives in the sand that is usually under the waves of the North Pacific. Only the lowest tides ever expose them to something resembling dry sand. And even then, that sand is so seldom and so briefly exposed that even when the occasional low tide does make them accessible by somewhat dry land the sand is still more of a liquid than is it a solid. And the razor clam is built in such a way that they somehow motivate through that liquid like sand at amazing speed. The act of harvesting one is like Wayne Gretzky’s approach to hockey: figure out where the puck (razor clam) is going to be and intercept it. That is why the razor clam shovel is a specialized instrument. It is short handled because the digger is going the be bending at a ninety degree angle in the initial thrust and is on his or her hands and knees in the follow through. What the shovel lacks in handle it makes up for in blade. The blade is about half the length of the handle and is narrow. It is designed to be easily thrust into the sand just ahead of the retreating clam – the clams always rush back at forty five or so downward thrusting angle to the surface back to the safety of the waves – such that, if the Gretzkyesque calculation has been successful, the clam runs headlong into the blade. Since even if that level of success is achieved it is at best only momentary, and since the only way to find out if one has, in fact been successful – because the clam is really smart and he or she will feint to the side and be gone in a moment if the digger tarries even a moment – the digger’s next move is to hurl himself or herself to the sand, rotating the handle of the shovel on the way down and thrusting his or her hand into the cavity briefly exposed feeling for, he or she hopes, the razor clam’s shell. If such a feeling ensues, the battle commences. Even if so felt, the clam is moving toward the sea at an amazing speed. At this point the digger needs to try to take advantage of the sand’s liquid state and force his or her hand through that medium down and out toward the ocean, hoping to keep pace with the clam and, ultimately grasping it. Depending upon how deep that capture occurs dictates whether the digger concludes that he or she has the clam or whether the clam has him or her.
Catching can also be more like entrapping.

Dungeness crabs live at the bottom of the near-to-the-coast Pacific Ocean and its associated bays and estuaries. There they wait for food to drop down to them.

In the olden days one deployed a crab ring to harvest Dungeness crabs (rings have in recent times been replaced by foolproof traps; my gallery is populated with events surrounding the use of rings). A crab ring was really two rings, a big one and a smaller one. They were joined as one by a net. They had a triune rope-set tied to the big ring which were, in turn, all three joined to a fourth rope whose length was dictated by the depth of the water in which the crabs were to be pursued. The end of that rope farthest away from the joint with the triune rope set had some sort of flotation device – like three empty Purex bottles – attached to it. The bottom ring – the small one – had a mesh of wire strands woven into it to act as a porous bottom for the crab ring which provided a substrate for holding the meaty fish skeleton that one wired on top of it to act as bait, and which also was of dense enough weave to keep any crab of legal size in the ring once it had been lifted from the bottom.

“Once it had been lifted from the bottom.” Therein lies the trick. Just as with razor clams, nothing involved in the process of “catching” Dungeness crabs with crab rings was ever easy.

The most common hunting ground for the Dungeness was one of Oregon’s or Washington’s bays – Tillamook Bay for example. All that was need was several crab rings, some fish skeletons a small boat with an outboard motor and two or more people to crew the boat.

It turns out that Dungeness crabs don’t just sit evenly distributed all over the bottom of the bay where they reside. They have special places that they like and lots of places that they never go to. The first order of business in being a successful crabber was to know those places. That knowledge usually occurred through trial and error. Nobody was willing to tell anybody else where the crabs resided any more than mushroom hunters are willing to tell anyone where the morels are. But once the trials and the errors had passed through the lives of the incipient crabbers the quarry could be pursued on a fairly successfully iterative basis. Except that the state of the tide also plays a major role as to where the crabs might be at any given time. So that whole process of trial and error needed to be traversed multiple times.

Once that additional process had been traversed all the crabbers needed to do was to utilize their knowledge of the migratory patterns of the crabs and propel their boat to the various locations as time and tide dictated, drop the baited rings into the water – either leaving them in place marked by their floats or tied to the gunnels of the anchored boat – and wait. After the appropriate waiting period had passed – there is a whole mythology surrounding what that length of time ought to be – if the boat has been anchored the next step was fairly easy. All the crabbers needed to do was to, one by one, and only one at a time, lift the rings up to the gunnel of the boat, having been exceptionally careful to have made the initial lift off the bottom as swift and as vertical as possible. If the ring was bumped and allowed to settle and then brought up, or if it was brought up at a very acute angle the crabs, or at least most of them, and for sure the legal ones – they needed to be of a certain size and be males (I actually know how to tell the difference) would have all escaped the ring. Assuming nothing bad had happened and assuming that the lore of where the crabs were supposed to be at the time of the retrieval of the ring had been accurate, the final act was that of measuring and classifying the catch and releasing all those that were not legal.

If the rings had been left in the bay on their own marked by their floats the retrieval process was more like a contact sport. The crabbers needed to identify their floats from all of the floats that were on the water. They needed to approach the float from down current and needed to intercept it just as it passed the very beginning of one side or the other of the craft. And once intercepted the boat needed to continue in a direction and at a speed such that the slack in the rather long rope – one virtually never was in water so deep that the float was directly over the ring – (the more common occurrence was that water was massively deeper than the length of the rope and the float was nowhere to be seen, except at the trough of any occasional waves that might have been present) can be taken up at a speed and efficiency that caused the ring to be initially lifted in a manner similar to that described for the lift of rings attached to the anchored boat. If the slack didn’t come up smoothly and rapidly there was an initial bump with an inefficient subsequent follow-through and the prey was back on the bottom by the time the lift was re-initiated.

The co-ordination required for the free floating pickup was significant. There needed to be a person in the bow directing the person in the stern at the tiller of the outboard motor. The person in the bow shouted directions – “to the right, slower, now a little faster, to the right, now left, no straight, faster, slower” – to the tiller person. Since the bow person needed to be looking forward to draw conclusions about what directions to be shouting, the bow person usually shouted directions forward, into the wind – there was a wind created by the boat’s forward motion, and it was usually augmented by the wind that inhabited the water without any help from a boat’s forward motion. The result of shouting directions forward into the wind was that the directions disappeared into the wind making the tiller person look to be a goon, always shouting “what?” or “where?” while the boat careened about with no apparent relationship to the needs of retrieving the float and its rope and crab ring. Numerous friendships were strained to the breaking point by maneuvers related to retrieving crab rings. Given the even more fragile nature of many marriages, the divorce courts of the North Pacific region teemed with refugees from what had been planned to be a happy day of togetherness and crab ring retrieval on the water.

These are a few of the screen saver-like flashes of personal memory related to fishing, catching, traversing or just being on various portions of the salt water of our planet. In aggregate they add up to that “thing” for which I have no better name. But it is profound and deep and intense and it is satisfying in a manner transcending most other satisfactions of which I am aware.

Since I am, except for the few occasions that I have spent time on the oceans, bays, estuaries and littoral immediately adjacent to the waves, a land dweller, and since my livelihood has never been achieved in any manner that wasn’t completely and exclusively land based I have no idea what the life of a fisherman, oysterman, crabber, or waterman must be like. But I have to assume that a large part of it must consist of the “thing” I have attempted to describe. A major part of the act of going out on the water every day to earn ones living must consist of savoring the reservoir of that “thing” that has been accumulated up to the beginning of each new day. It must include the savoring and the looking forward to the inevitable but, until they occur, unknown increments that will probably occur with each new day. It must be a wonderful way to exist and earn a living. In Fact it must be a great deal more than just earning a living.

And then one must consider the added dimension that many if not most of these ocean dwellers are second, third or nth generation practitioners of their activity. The fact that the current generation not only has the exhilaration of living in the constant state of that “thing”, whatever it may be, and the fact that that it is an accumulation passed from parents and grandparents and from the current generation to children, and perhaps on and on to generations as yet unknown must be a condition bordering on the mystical.

All of this must be true because the life being described is far from easy or safe or necessarily particularly financially rewarding. So making it one’s life work must have a lot to do with that accumulated mysticism.

It is this viewpoint that should provide perspective to one aspect of the monstrous scope of the catastrophe that has been unleashed by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. BP has put an end to a way of life. And that way of life will never return because filling an ocean with poison – oil and dispersant – with no apparent end in sight can have no reasonably expected outcome except extinction of every form of life that had been the carefully husbanded crop that made that way of life possible.

There is no amount of money that can repay for that level of damage. But anything less than whatever amount of money those fishermen and oystermen and all the other men and woman who have had their ways of life abruptly and permanently terminated need to try to start over is an amount that cannot be accepted by this nation, if we desire to continue to have the honor of being called a nation.

The Long Thought

There is a Tweet-like saying that was coined long ago, anonymously as far as I know. In fact it appeared long before Twitter or even the Internet. It is:

“Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”

That should have been a Tweet that I co-opted to express those thoughts, when, a couple of years ago that view of the plight of my existence began to increasingly intrude upon my conscious and intervene in my reverie. I should have just keyed it as a text message, hit @twitter, and gotten on with things.

But I was unable to so-express myself. I could not, that is, so-express myself publicly and with apparent seriousness, or so-express myself as the final lasting verbal monument of what I might have thought that I had been all about.

Today I learned why. I am a victim of a malady known as the “long thought”. I heard a guy at Wired magazine use that term today. He used it to describe what he considered to be the legitimate (seriously, there actually is a legitimate alternative to the Tweet) opposite means of expression from the Tweet.

It turns out, I have learned from the foregoing, that Screen Saver is the Tweet that couldn’t be done in 140 characters: it is a long thought.

I Love Pileated Woodpeckers

Photo from the Great Smoky Mountains Web Site

I love pileated woodpeckers. We have them here in the North West, in fact in a woodland a couple of miles from our house. But the point to this story is that I had them on the place where I lived in Missouri, which was 10 acres of walnuts, hickories, oaks and red buds on a lake eleven miles from Jefferson City.

One day at the office I was mentioning to one of the guys who worked for me how much I was enjoying seeing quite a few pileated woodpeckers. Since he was quite a naturalist - in fact that was probably why I even mentioned it to him in the first place - I was surprised when he asked me what a pileated woodpecker was. When I had finished describing the bird -"a big woodpecker about the size of a heron with a huge long sharp beak and a red Woody Woodpecker topknot" - he told me I must be hallucinating because there wasn't any such thing in Missouri.

As luck would have it, he and I stopped at my place to get something one afternoon on our way to an appointment in Columbia. As we were leaving the place, which involved going down the quarter mile of gravel hill I called my driveway, off the side a pileated woodpecker burst out of the trees and landed on a tree trunk in plain sight. "My companion said "what the hell is that?" "That's one of those things that there aren't any of in Missouri" I responded.

Making Things "Right" - Right?

Recently I wrote the following in an email to our local NPR morning talk show: “I voted for the president firmly believing that he was first and foremost a leader, and an aggressive, far sighted and decisive one. What I have seen so far in relation to the Gulf Catastrophe has been instead an apparently competent mid-level bureaucrat.”

That description of our president needs to be changed post haste.

We are all standing by watching an entire region of our country, along with its economy and its way of life being permanently destroyed. And the sociological, economic and psychological implications – all horrible – need to be addressed immediately, and ameliorated as best as is possible.

And that amelioration can be summed up with one word: money, lots and lots – billions of dollars with no known calendar end date – of money.

And that money needs to come from the culprit who has caused the destruction of a significant piece of America, and that culprit would be British Petroleum. No problem, you might be saying to yourself. BP has continually, consistently and constantly said it would make everything right; they would pay, they would clean up they would make it right.

Right.

They are a corporation. Corporations don’t make things right; the closest thing they ever do to making things “right” is that the most astute of the species spend lots of money on public relations campaigns telling everyone that they will, are, have and will always continue to make things “right”. But ask the victims of the thing or things that is supposedly being made “right” and you will always discover the same answer. “That is just corporate bullshit.”

That answer is a summary of what Exxon did for the victims of what is now a puny predecessor to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Those victims got basically nothing. That is unless you think that twenty years of litigation and, ultimately a Supreme Court decision removing even what ridiculously small financial compensation had trickled out of the litigation amounts to “something” – amounts to making things “right”.

But that is what is on tap for the victims in the Gulf. BP is running a fifty million dollar Tylenol look-alike campaign in tandem with constant statements of their limitless intent to make the situation in the Gulf “right” for all “legitimate” claims. The entry level requirement for “legitimate” claims is paperwork, copious quantities of paperwork. And it is paperwork whose content is probably not documentable by the mostly cash based businesses that are typical in the Gulf region.

So in one neat fel swoop BP has made the fulfillment of its commitment to pay for all “legitimate” claims a very easy thing to do. The "proper paperwork and data requirements" can and will make the number of "legitimate" claims few indeed. And any that burn through the the paperwork firewall will only do so after the victims they represent will have manifested endurance beyond what is normally thought to be possible.

Add to that a regimen of never-ending litigation and we have successful endgame. Successful, that is, for BP.

The Gulf region which is left holding the empty sack of an economy permanently in shambles and a way of life rapidly receding into distant memory cannot be expected to consider the situation to be a success for them. They cannot consider the situation to have been made “right”. They cannot be expected to concede that their claims must not have been “legitimate”.

But that is what they are going to get.

That is what they are going to get, that is, unless someone intercedes.

I can’t help but think about Abraham Lincoln. It was necessary for him to sneak into Washington the night before his inauguration and to attend a brief meeting with his tearful predecessor – James Buchanan – a man for whom the presidency and its challenges (Buchanan's challenge having been the beginning of the beginning of the disintegration of our “more perfect union”)had proven overwhelming. They met with Buchanan telling Lincoln how glad he was to be getting out of town. Then Lincoln moved to an undisclosed location to wait for his inaugural dawn.

If I had been there and, had I known the situation, I would have wondered why anyone would have even been remotely willing to walk into the job that Lincoln was walking into.

But he did so walk. And immediately, confronted with an unprecedented disaster for which there were no known guidelines or procedures he did what great people do. He saw what the only acceptable outcome for the disaster could be allowed to be and he then set about doing all the things necessary to achieve the outcome that he saw to be the only acceptable one. And he had to invent an amazing number of things, including interpretations of the rules under which he governed – the Constitution – to achieve for his fellow citizens that only-acceptable-outcome.

So a moderately competent bureaucrat is not what we need. What we need is a Lincoln or FDR: someone who sees what is “right” and who doesn’t allow any charades, threats or feints to stand in the way of making things “right”.

Easy to say; hard to do.

Magic And The Bike Computer

I have two bikes.

The newer, lighter, faster, more challenging one is used only outside on some routes in Seattle or on the roads on Lopez Island. It has a computer. I have just over two thousand miles on the odometer portion of that computer. The only problem I ever have with that computer is changing the batteries. Actually changing the batteries is easy. The problem arises once the batteries have been changed. Once changed there are two things that need to be done with the computer. It needs to have itself put in communication with the sending unit – the piece of electronics that receives the cadence and speed sending units’ electronic signals; and it needs to have the time re-set. Neither of those activities is very challenging once the pre-requisite amount of time and profanity have passed. It is just that those two things do need to have passed prior to the proper setting of the signal from the sending unit and the setting of the time can be effected. A smart person would be able to read the directions, follow them and set the two electronic factors necessary for the proper functioning of the device. But I am not that smart. Even a stupid person, once having achieved success would be able to remember the process from battery change to battery change. But I have no memory.

So I substitute random button pushing spread over interminable time accented with colorful expletives.

The older, heavier bike – the first bike I had owned since the demise of my knee action Schwinn fifty five or so years ago – and the bike that got me back to being a rider, has been relegated to infrequent use on non rainy days on the streets of Seattle when the Roubaix is in the shop, or for trips to the Lopez Village Market on Lopez Island. That bike is a Rocky Mountain Whistler 50. Unlike the Roubaix, it has saddle bags and can carry a fair load of wine and groceries. Like the Roubaix, the Rocky Mountain has a computer. I have just over twenty six thousand miles on that computer. On rainy days, either in Seattle or on Lopez Island I ride that bike for a couple of hours inside on a trainer – a “spinner. Two hours every day can mount up to a lot of stationary miles it turns out.

I have the same problem with the computer on the Rocky Mountain at battery changing time as I do with the computer on the Roubaix. I use the same technique for communication with the sending unit and setting the time as I do with the other bike.
But the computer on the Rocky Mountain has another problem. It jumps all over the place on the speed reading. The same cadence can deliver speeds of zero, ten, eighteen and other variable miles per hour. Obviously there is something wrong. I have adjusted the gap between the sending unit and the speed transmitter; I have tilted the computer on the handle bars at an acute angle to bring the computer itself closer to the sending unit; I have even attached a wire to the bike frame and to the metal part of the wine rack I keep in the garage to see if some kind of static charge could be attenuated.

But the variability remained. But it seemed to only happen when I was on the trainer. On the streets or roads it always worked properly. Or maybe I had less time to spend watching it.

But then recently I was riding it on Lopez Island, having left the Roubaix in Seattle and it started being as creatively variable on the roads of Lopez Island as it chose to be on the trainer in the garage in Seattle. Worse yet an odometer cross check against Mysti’s computer showed that the odometer was reading short.

This probably could only have been of importance to someone who hasn’t got enough to do. But it was a major weight upon my overall sense of well being. Worse, there was a distant feeling of déjà vu. But I couldn’t get it focused.

And then focus began to emerge. In a distant previous life I seemed to spend most of my time hauling various boats hither and yon. Frequently at hither, and almost as frequently at yon, the trailer lights would for no apparent reason stop working. Somehow, early in my experience with that phenomenon I discovered how to fix it. For no apparent reason that I was ever able to remember, one time I just soaked all the connectors with WD40. The light immediately started working. And that remedy never failed. (WD40, it turns out, is a sort of wonder drug of the mechanical world. It can remove tar from your hair; it can free frozen bolts; it can enable electric circuits.)

The idea occurred to me as I was driving back from Lopez Island to Seattle. By the time I had gotten to Seattle, I had, of course completely forgotten about it, but when the computer began to variably misbehave on the trainer the next morning, I dismounted, got out one of the several cans of WD40 that lurk like talismans in various nooks and crannies of the place where I live and I pushed the little plastic tube into the Abplanap nozzle and sprayed the face of the little sending button which was mounted on the spoke.

The computer has worked properly ever since.

The Great Patent Debate

A court recently decided a case in a manner that, if I had known that the case had existed and had known that it was being heard, I would have thought to be the only obvious way to decide. The issue before the court was whether a company could patent a gene. In the case in question the gene happened to be human, but the heritage of the gene wasn’t at issue. The issue was whether patents could be taken out on genes.

I would have assumed the answer to be no. I would have assumed that to have been the answer unless the applicant for the patent had a provable theological origin. Perhaps the creator of it all, if he or she ever chose to show his or her face in a manifestly tangible manner, show up in court and say, “look, before I took a rest on the seventh day I invented all of this shit, and I want to patent some of it” might have that right, but I had trouble with the logic of a piece of what was trying to be patented trying to patent itself.

Apparently so did the court.

But the hue and cry that always follows anything not continuing to hand the world on a platter to American business appeared to be in the offing: the court decided that genes aren’t patentable.

The shrieking of amazed and hurt protestation from business is always the same. “We can’t compete; this is not a level playing field; we will have to fire everybody; we will cut our R&D budget; we will move to Jamaica” – and more.

And so it has been in the gene decision.

But I did hear a different approach from one of the lawyers representing the losing patent holder. His approach will apparently be central to the appeal. It goes something like this.

"We acknowledge that things of nature obviously can’t be patented. But the thing in question is not a thing of nature. It is a thing my client invented in the lab. Yes it came from a gene, a thing of nature, but it has been brewed and stewed and screwed such that it is different in manners that can’t really be described but nonetheless exist. It may look just like a gene but it’s different in nuanced manners that make it not a gene at all."

I am seriously planning on using that logic to take out a patent on whipped cream.

The Republican Heritage

One of my friends - a vicious Democrat - used to be, before I knew her, a Republican. That was many years ago. However, even though marriage exposed her to a different set of ideas – her husband also was a vicious Democrat – and pragmatism probably smoothed the way to her acceptance of those new ideas, she nevertheless retained a degree of respect and admiration for many of the members of the party that she had abandoned. In fact her husband readily shared that admiration and respect; it was just that he didn’t, nor did she, vote for those people.

I have always been on the shaky side politically speaking. I have not always, until recently, voted a straight Democratic ticket. But I have always been pretty much a believer in the Democratic Party. Like my friends, however, I always had respect and admiration for the Republican Party. I just didn’t very often vote for any of them.

The admiration and respect that I have alluded to, from all three of us had a lot to do with some names: Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Tom McCall, Everett Dirksen, Dan Evans and William Buckley come immediately to mind. I know that there are many more, I just can’t remember them. But those names set a tone and tell a tale.

The tale is short: I can’t think of anyone in the current “just say no” crowd that would ever be mentioned in the same breath as those names. And the tone is the difference between a symphony and a cat fight.

And a new, but never-ending source of personal merriment is imagining a conversation – not a debate, just a simple conversation – between William Buckley and Sarah Palin.
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Two Novembers

So now Michele Bachmann (by her own admission AKA Nostradamas) has taken the position of lead hound in the pack that are snapping at the heels of our President. Given the nature of the pack that she is currently the head hound of, I think we should try to remember two Novembers. This is an excerpt from my book Screen Saver.


A few days before my Thanksgiving departure for San Francisco with Jim, the not very stable world had wobbled even more precariously on its axis.

I was in my History of American Thought and Culture class. Someone had pulled the pull-down screen down far enough to allow a man’s hat to be tied to the pull. The class was allowing itself to be amused by that fact as we waited for Mr. Frazier our instructor to arrive. Time ticked by. Mr. Frazier was late. That was unlike him. Finally, just before the fifteen-minute limit that protocol reserved for late instructors he appeared. He came in, took one look at the hat and took a swing at it as if in anger. That was really unlike him. He was a laid back calm sort – a graduate of Reed College - who just didn’t let anything bother him. He had our attention. He turned around facing the class and said, almost accusingly, “well, I suppose you have heard that they shot Jack Kennedy.” As a matter of fact we hadn’t. We had been sitting there looking at the hat and waiting for him to show up. All I could ever remember about that moment, other than what exactly Mr. Frazier had said was wondering who “they” were. It turned out that we were never to find out who “they” were.

Taking what might have been an action of some significance, but as things were to turn out, apparently wasn’t, the first person I sought out was Barbara. We went into the Park Blocks, out of the buildings, into the open air and walked, hand in hand. Everybody was out there. There was some kind of device or there were multiple devices that were filling the air with updates on the president’s condition. We had stopped where a group had gathered, among them my fraternity brother Tom. The words “John F. Kennedy is dead” insinuated themselves into the air like a malevolent spirit. Barb dropped to her knees on the grass. We all stood, or knelt – there were others on their knees – frozen and looking like the statues of the victims of the Irish potato famine that I would see many years later in Christchurch. It seemed as if the world was in the process of fading to black. I had looked at Tom and said, “thank God Lyndon Johnson is Vice President”. Tom nodded his agreement.

Many years later another event occurred that had somehow seemed to be inextricably intertwined with John Kennedy. Mysti and I had gone around the corner to the Olympia Pizza Restaurant early so we could get back by seven and watch the election returns as the polls began to close from the middle of the country westward. We knew that the east would be closed by then and we knew that any bad news would begin to show itself - if there were going to be any - among those eastern results; but we had felt that there was still going be a story unfolding from St Louis west.

After returning from Pizza it looked as if no bad news had cropped up yet, but it was still anyone’s election. But good things kept happening and more states were turning blue than were turning red. There came a point where the electoral count was not 270 blue but it was close. I had looked at the map to try to get some kind of idea what might be going to happen. The entire pacific coast had no color yet. The obvious suddenly flooded upon me in a form that can only be described as joy. “He’s got it,” I said to Mysti.

A few minutes later the West Coast turned blue and the City of Seattle erupted. Everywhere people poured into the streets. We were on Capitol Hill. As we entered the courtyard we encountered people we barely knew or didn’t know at all. We all hugged one another and made loud joyful sounds. People were streaming into the streets and up to Fifteenth. The rest of the night was a massive party of people in and out of the bars and coffee shops to the street and back again. Cars full of joyfully shouting people with the windows down paraded up and down. I had never thought that the magic of having a leader that stirred a feeling of pride and joy at being an American would ever be given back to us; but it appeared on that night as if it had happened.

Good Work, Sarah

Back when Sarah burst on the scene in an aureole of ignorance and stupidity she just seemed pathetic. Now, however, she is being taken seriously by the most dangerous faction of the republican party: the assassins. Her current “crosshairs” promotion, involving a “call to re-load” with crosshairs on 22 Democratic members of the House of Representatives is frightening enough. But the fact that her preface diatribe against our President – which feeds the Tea Party Fascists’ view of a conspiracy of socialists trying to take over the United States is REALLY troubling.


If the Tea Party people – or Sarah – had ever been to France, or Germany, or Belgium, or Britain, or Ireland, or Spain, or Italy, or Poland or … they would have been hard pressed on the streets, or in the bistros or in the pubs to have found anything resembling the grey pall of socialism that they invoke without even knowing what some of the advantages of what Sarah calls socialism – others call it a social contract – might be. She is so taken up with killing members of the moose community from the air with a fool-proof, scope enabled high powered rifle that she doesn’t really have time, and for sure not the intellect to know about anything but her narrow little world of kids fucking kids and lying to the press.


But, back to the point. Sarah calls for “reload” complete with crosshairs.


I doubt not that some of her cretin cadre will take that as a command to kill.


My larger fear is that, since her Tea Party Movement followers have a well documented, as seen on national news, problem with “niggers” and “queers”, one of her “targets” - our president - may join the casualty list.


Good work, Sarah. I was alive the last time – 22 November 1963 – and I NEVER want to have to go through that again.


I especially feel that way if one of the greatest men we have had the privilege to call a fellow American is to be brought down by the inane bleating of a mindless cipher.

The Great Broadband Competition Hoax

Competition is great. That’s why we have such a good health care system. All the health insurance companies compete with one another and we all benefit by getting the lowest possible rates for the best possible health care. There are a few little aberrations around the edges: the health insurers have special anti-trust immunity, like MLB, so they can kind of agree to fair and reasonable rates. And just to make sure, we are not allowed to buy insurance from companies outside of our own state, but in general there is a lot of competition in the health care business. They all compete to employ the best lobbyists.


Broadband internet service is another good example of competition. For example, in the Seattle area there is vigorous competition between Comcast and Qwest. Both offer "high speed internet”.


You can choose 5mbps from Comcast or you can choose 2.5 mbps from Qwest. Comcast costs about $50 a month. Qwest costs about $25 a month. Since there isn’t a third choice – Qwest and Comcast say they couldn’t continue providing such good service at such competitive prices if they had competition - you need to choose between these two highly competetive options. Two are plenty competitive they say. Just look at our advertising campaigns. You can’t get much more competitive than a tortoise.


Does the math of this ménage à deux bother anybody? I have two choices; I can choose 2.5 mbps for $25 a month or twice that speed for twice that money? This is an equation that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner must love. It is nicely congruent with our competitive health care system.

At The Beach

Today on the local NPR station I heard an author being interviewed about his latest novel. Apparently the story is an indictment of war packaged as a replay of the Illiad with a – perhaps – immortal – hero named Hector, who is a janitor at a munitions plant. I was just thanking my good fortune that I was riding on my Rocky Mountain hybrid bike on a spinner and could allow the exertion to take me elsewhere. Just before going completely elsewhere, however, something the author said seeped into my fleeing conscious: “you read about explosions every day - they're just numbers..”; this was in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.


I had to react:


Really not.


I think all of us, especially those of us who will become or previously became embroiled at one time or another in one of our various "war efforts" have just given up. We used to think that we had some say about what our great deliberative democracy does, but we actually hear a constant and pervasive drum beat: "you don't; you don't".


Ultimately we just give up and go to the beach.

Financial Farce

A few weeks ago on Bill Moyers’ Journal he had as guests two correspondents from Mother Jones. He gave them an entire hour. The net of what they had to say was that, although at some point in the near future it might appear that legislation making a serious attempt at putting an end to the out of control nature of our banking system - including its periodic need to collect on its socialized risk positions - might be promulgated, anything that might appear will be a sham.

The reason for that fact, these two men said, complete with pretty detailed and compelling documentation, is the fact that it matters not which legislative branch one considers, which of the two parties one submits to scrutiny, or specifically which name of our elected representatives one might examine, one overarching fact controls what happens: if you are talking about anything to do with the financial system, that system owns the governmental apparatus intended to regulate it. That system also owns the human components of that governmental apparatus, lock, stock and barrel.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when today, the first day of the new law protecting all of us from the credit card industry, I heard on NPR that that new law is again, just a sham. Various obviously unacceptable practices - having been exposed over time in much the same way as the practices of the food industry were exposed several generations ago - have been made illegal. Even the fully owned minions of the Banks ultimately couldn’t stand up to the pressure and scrutiny that 24% interest and bank-induced penalty charges brought to bear upon them from the electorate.

But wait, I thought I heard someone say. The Industry, the financial industry cries, can’t sustain itself without those charges.

Where one might want to interpret that as the fact that the banks had a predatorily faulty business model, they assert that they have been unfairly singled out and denied their just and due pounds of flesh. And they are already way ahead of us.

NPR told me this morning to be on the lookout for a wave of new, capricious and most likely unannounced fees, much like the airlines various new fees.

Look for higher annual fees. Look for fees for inactivity. Look for fees for minimum acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for higher than acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for having been in a foreign country and not using your credit card. Look for fees, for sure, for having been in a foreign country and having used your credit card. Look for fees for having visited an airline web site that sells tickets for travel to foreign countries. Look for surcharge fees predicated on the fact that you have in a given time period (one calculated by a new variable time usage algorithm) accumulated an excess number (from the banks’ point of view) fees.

And there is no law against any of this, and there won’t be until the din from all of us who live in the mudsill of our society begin to make the lives of our “elected” (or is it “elect”) representatives uncomfortable enough to perpetrate another sham.

And so it goes.

Johnnie Reb

I learned this song from Lavine. I talked about all of that in Screen Saver. That also included some discussion of the Nick Manoloff chord wheel.

If the video is unavailable try this link to my web site. If you go to this link, you will need to hit "pause" on the player for a minute or two to let the download get ahead of the player.

One Thing Is Always Constant

In previous posts concerning the latest round of our national and ongoing air travel security debacle I have noted that those people who work for the intelligence apparatus – as was also true in the case of the project manager for the Columbia, who just didn’t want to hear that bad news one of her engineers was trying to tell her about the fact that the shuttle couldn’t get back through the atmosphere – are all getting their paychecks every pay period and are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

Now we have the Toyota accelerator debacle. I just heard some musing about “where was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its oversight of this problem?” The problem, after all, dates back to some Lexus cars in 1999. But until Toyota finally had to buckle in the face of an avalanche of incidents and 19 deaths, the silence has been deafening.

I think we can without a doubt say that those people – the NHTSA – have all been and are continuing to get their paychecks every pay period, are accumulating their retirement funds and are getting their high quality health care.

How nice.

The River

I have spent a significant part of the last two years getting something “off my chest” and “out of my system”. When I was finished, I, at least, was pleased with the result. That effort had become the book that I always said I was going to write, and it got named Screen Saver.

But I had forgotten. Bruce Springsteen had accomplished the same thing with elegance, and he only needed to use four minutes and fifty nine seconds:The River.

Sadness

When I left IBM I was too young and too poor to retire. I waited until later when I was older and too poor before I retired.

In the first phase of my post IBM life I didn’t get very far from IBM. That was because the only post IBM way of earning a living that I was able to find in the short time that I had available for that discovery process was to be an IBM Agent.

Being an IBM Agent was something like being an Agent for an insurance company. The similarity was that, like an insurance company, IBM was a huge international corporation that wanted to reduce or eliminate as much direct sales expense as it was possible to eliminate without losing some semblance of loyalty from that replacement sales force.

For years that had been a work in progress. In Screen Saver I recount a number of stories about that ongoing process, including the time that I spent getting on a plane at LaGuardia or Newark every Sunday and returning from Atlanta every Friday. The week that that traverse allowed to take place in Atlanta had been filled with work on a three person task force which was trying to figure out how to sell new business solutions (small value-added computer systems) through some channel other than card carrying IBM employees. It was odd that the answers that the task force came up with ended up being my third-to-last IBM job and my first post IBM way of earning a living. Those answers were two things: independent businesses to be constituted as IBM Agent Firms and a new IBM function called the Complementary Resources Manager – an IBM employee whose job it was to provide for the care, feeding and IBM interface to those Agent Firms. I was the first CRM in Spokane and I later became the IBM New Business Agent Firm in Seattle.

As things turned out, the Seattle endeavor probably would have been successful, both for me and for IBM if IBM had not perceived itself as being in the process of going out of business. That meant that the expense of nurturing a brand new business long enough to become successfully independent was not an option and what probably needed to be a three to five year transition plan became an aborted one year. IBM tried to dress the abandonment of the Agent Program in its best go-to-meeting clothes, but I had worked for the company for too long to fall for that artifice. So after a year of being an Agent firm with four employees I went to being a loosely affiliated IBM ally with no employees who made more money from consulting and technical writing than I made from the IBM relationship. Ultimately we migrated to being soley a consulting and technical writing firm.

But during that start up year, the full twelve months of the non-diluted IBM Agent relationship, I had a lot of support from IBM. That support included office space for me and my employees in the IBM building, a monthly non-recoverable stipend for each of my sales territories, a variable payment for just taking the responsibility of the territory and commissions for whatever IBM goods and services we sold to our customers.

All of those payments added up over a little time to a surprisingly significant monthly payment from IBM. Those payments came to me in the form of a monthly check from IBM. For whatever reason, it seemed like a good idea to have my business bank account close to the IBM office. The closest bank was a small branch of US National Bank – at that time still a Portland business, and as an almost native Portlander I had had a US National Bank account in my previous life – so it just seemed natural to do business with them.

The branch was in a quaint, old, not many storied building that had somehow evaded the all too prevalent downtown Seattle wrecking ball. After US National, for whatever reason moved from the location it became a Starbucks. It was on the corner of 6th and Seneca.

I had two contacts. One was a dithering young woman who was, she assured me, my Personal Banker. The other was the Branch Manager. I didn’t have much contact with the Branch Manager, but since I was the CEO of a member of the small business community, a new customer, and it was turning out, a fairly significant depositor, my “Personal Banker” had made sure that I had been exposed to that level of executive bank contact.

The Branch Manager was a quiet-spoken, rather slight of build African American. In my little contact with him he seemed to care about his customers, know a lot about his business and how it might be of service to people like me and was credible when he said that if I ever needed help beyond what my Personal Banker could provide that he was ready to serve. I believed it and that was a tribute to his credibility. There are a lot of glad–handers in positions such as his; I felt that he wasn’t one of them.

But that is all told to set the stage for my short, sad tale.

One late mid afternoon I needed to go over to the bank to make a deposit. I left the IBM building and crossed over to the bank, tried the door and found that it was locked. The bank was closed for the day.

The sidewalk, being in the middle of down town, was fairly busy. As I turned to go back to IBM, and as I brushed by a few bustling passers-by I became aware of a person a little farther away from me than those that were immediately around me as I turned from the bank doorway.

I didn’t really look at him, but I must have glanced in his direction. Because I formed the immediate impression that he was a he, not a she. Somehow, because it was downtown and he was coming directly toward me, I formed the immediate impression that he was begging.

As the word “no” was forming for articulation, one additional random piece of data was added to my fairly amorphous grasp of the situation. The guy was African American.

Before I could say my incipient word he spoke. “We’re closed for the day, but the branch down two blocks is open until six.”

“Hey, thanks” I must have said. I never really knew because in that split second I recognized my “Personal Banker’s” boss, the Branch Manager of the bank.

As I walked down Sixth Avenue to the other branch I was unable to stop the instant replay of the whole just-completed encounter. And it always ended the same. And before long the only thing that remained, playing over and over and over until I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and not come out until it stopped playing was the same thing.

The only thing that remained, the only memory, the only real and tangible image being flashed by my personal screen saver then, and even now as I write this, was a look of utter and profound sadness.

This Will Be - Mercifully - Brief

Here are two things. They are related, at least in my mind, probably in no one else’s mind, but related for me. Call them threads in a larger, much more heavily threaded cloth of tragedy; call them key elements in the “decline and fall”; call them what they are: stupidity and cynicism. Whatever you call them there is a stench rising from them, although, to the cultured stench detecting nose, they differ slightly.

Abject Stupidity: A majority of Americans have no idea what the larval health care bill contains – as neither do I – but they are “agin” it. I’m not “agin” it.

Cynical emulation of being principled: The republicans have found nothing in anything the new administration has proposed that they can favor. So they say. The facts are, they have a super minority with which, armed with the blanket threat of filibuster, they can bring down a presidency. They hope to then replace it with one of their own.

How nice.

The Bath At Cluny

There are a number of Roman ruins spread around France. Among them are the remains of a coliseum at Bordeaux and the still-being-used coliseum/bullring at Arles. But my favorite is right in downtown Paris. It is the Bath at Cluny. It is on Boulevard St-Germain not far from where Boulevard St-Germain bends to cross the river at Pont de Sully and becomes Boulevard Henri Quartre.

The Romans built it sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium, and, after they left it was turned into a monastery or convent, I never can remember which. Actually I can’t remember whether it was turned into either of those things. But it was turned into something other than a Roman bath, and that something – whatever it might have ever been - caused the then residents to install stained glass windows. I really like stained glass windows, which is odd because I don’t have any affinity for churches or religion.

Actually I have developed a great deal of affinity over the last few years for the cathedrals of Europe. Except for London and Brussels the only cathedrals I have ever actually seen are all in France, but it sounds more impressive – to me at least – to claim affinity with the cathedrals of all Europe rather than just those of France; and cathedrals, I have been told, are churches, although they have no similarity to the down-at-the-heel things that are called churches and are on offer in the United States; and I really like the Cathedrals’ stained glass windows. Even though Cluny has stained glass windows I don’t think it was ever a cathedral.

So that is what is imbedded in the beginning of this little drop of drivel.

I really wish that Blogger would let me, or I could figure out if it does let me and I am just too stupid to figure out how, to put my pictures where I want to put them.

But I guess campared to the implications of the new republican super minority in the US senate, or the bothersome realization flowing from the fact, that, thanks to the strictly constructionist five judges on the supreme court, we won't even get to choose who to send back to Washington to get bought by the lobbyists, my problems are really trivial.

The Joys OF Adobe Illustrator: Part Two

Recently my son sent me an email with this raster image – it was a bitmap (bmp) file. He asked me if I could work any magic that would improve it. At least that was what I interpreted his email to say. Emails from Joe are always terse to the point of incoherence. But that is what I interpreted him to be asking.

Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.

So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.

With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.

In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.

Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.

Here is the finished product.

The Joys Of Adobe Illustrator: Part One

A number of years ago, for no apparent reason, I decided that I needed to enroll in a certificate program at Bellevue Community College. Actually I had a reason, but I really didn’t realize it at the time: it wasn’t until some years later when I had the time – time be damned; it was the inclination – to reflect on what I laughingly have refered to as my life, that I realized that I had been subject to the subtle influences of “they”. You know, “they” say that one needs to network; “they” say that one needs to have a number of different resumés; “they” say that one needs to keep getting additional education – and all of that “they” stuff.

Somewhere I had heard that Bellevue Community College had a really good multi-media authoring certificate curriculum.

I had no idea what multi-media authoring might be. In spite of that fact it just sounded good.

This had occurred at a time when I was in the midst of teaching myself HTML, with the help of Laura Lemay and her amazing how-to book for HTML 3.2. I was fascinated by it. I had never encountered anything that resembled computer programming that had such an immediate positive or negative reinforcement component. Having completed a chunk of HTML code – using MS Notepad as the editor – all I had to do was save it as HTM or HTML, click on it and get an immediate “it works” or an immediate “what were you thinking?” back from the browser. I used Netscape in those days since MS Internet Explorer was so rudimentary that it shouldn’t have even been called a browser. (The distance Microsoft travelled in almost no time from that Explorer to the one that they unleashed on the market shortly after the morning that Bill Gates must have awakened and realized he was about to lose the whole game if he didn’t turn his company on its axis, was nothing short of amazing; but the Explorer available when I was in my HTML-coder days was a joke.) Anyway, I was having more fun than it ought to be possible to have building my first web site from scratch. I was otherwise employed as an entrepreneur running my own IBM Agent and Wholesale Distribution Consulting and Technical Writing business with my wife, but I had plenty of time – sometimes until three or four in the morning - to pursue the HTML wil-o-the-wisp.

Somewhere during that time I heard about the curriculum at BCC. Under what must have been the influence of “they” (“they” say that multi-media authoring is the next big thing – perhaps) I decided to look into it.

In almost no time I was attending the first night class of what was going to turn out to be one of the three classes that I had signed up for that quarter. Before I finally became a community college drop-out I had accumulated almost sixty credit hours, had an almost four point GPA, and had learned a lot of stuff that was going to prove to be a fortuitous addition to my life as I entered unemployed – some call it retired – old age. I had learned how to make movies with Adobe Premiere, how to invent my own world with Adobe Photoshop and, I wasn’t really sure to invent what, with Adobe Illustrator.

Premiere and Photoshop, each in its own manner – Premiere with aggressive abandon and Photoshop with a passive-aggressive turn of character – deal with raster files. Think of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s paintings and you know what a raster file is. Raster files are goldmines of possibilities: they can be cloned; they can be flipped; they can be warped and woofed and reflected and distorted; they can be gray-scaled and they can be RGB’d or CMYK’d; they can be overlaid with varying transparencies to reveal their inner meaning; they can be selectively cut and pasted. If they happen to come with sound and thirty frames per second they can be cut, overlaid, titled and faded to black or white or in some inventive flow of imagery be rolled over to; those are called movies. The possibilities are apparently endless. But they always end up being in some way or another, just a subset of what all those pixels were when one started to manipulate them. And that is the point. A raster file has to already exist to be dealt with.

But Illustrator is different. Illustrator generates vector files. Think of Albert Einstein with a black board full of equations to understand what a vector file is. Because each line, shape, color, font, line thickness or drop shadow exists only on the basis of its co-ordinates on their page and on the basis of the mathematical characteristics that have been told to tag along with those co-ordinates. With Illustrator one can start with a blank page on a blank art board and, with various tools, keys and drop down menus, create a world from one’s mind where only blankness had existed moments before. To do that, of course takes artistic talent.

Lacking that one can trace things. That’s what I do.

But even tracing takes some talent and some imagination. Illustrator gives one more brush strokes, line segments and polygonal possibilities than it is possible to absorb in one, or even many, sittings. So, as one stares at the template of some raster file that is about to be traced to its eternal improvement, the choices of how to do it become something of an exercise in itself. And once the choice for any particular piece of the tracing has been made, the actual execution of that choice can become a career in itself. Making just the right curve – a curve that perfectly overlays that which is being traced – with the Bezier curve tool (called the “pen” tool because if you can make the thing do your bidding it produces lines that flow as if they had been produced by the quill of an old fashioned ink pen) can take many tries and require one’s entire cache of colorful expletives.

In the world of vector based artistry, the world of Adobe Illustrator, one can swear and draw, swear and draw, and swear and draw. But in the end, if one perseveres, one can produce something almost from nothing.

And that is a good feeling.

Ultimately the raster-based world has the last laugh, however. The World Wide Web only understands raster files, and of those file types only a few of that large family of image file formats. Chief among those are the JPEG and the GIF.

So, if one wants to promulgate the work of an afternoon’s (or a month’s) vectorizing to the Web, one ultimately needs to bite one’s vector-based tongue and export the masterpiece to one of those formats that the Web understands. Then it can be uploaded.

Here is the first major tracing that I ever did.
Several Years later I did this one, which I posted last year on this blog.

The Pipeline Is Dry

The Economist constantly points out that the US has the best University system in the world and that there really isn't a country in second or third place. In an annual survey by the Chinese (they are trying to figure out what they need to do to get to best of breed status, and they are moving forward with vigor) on the top 20 list they are all American Universities (I can't remember whether Harvard was first or not) except for Oxford and Cambridge which were both in the top ten. No French, nor German, nor Japanese were on the list. The U of Washington was number 20, interestingly enough.

Anyway, we - the United States of America - are imminently in position of pissing that advantage away. If the kids entering the system can't read, write, think or talk coherently, and don't know math and have no idea about where anything is in the world or what has happened in the world over the last three or four thousand years, (unless Bishop Ussher's statements which are believed by many of them are taken as valid history) the system won't last very long. And it takes years to fix that problem. An empty pipeline is probably going to be a major contributor to our undoing.

The Tombstone

Ruth and Noel and Joe and I went to Moscow Idaho one Autumn weekend. If you read Screen Saver you know that Ruth was my first wife and Noel and Joe were our sons. If you didn’t read Screen Saver, Ruth was nonetheless my first wife, and Noel and Joe were our two sons.

We went one time to Moscow to visit Jack and Ted. Again from Screen Saver, Jack was a close friend whom I had met in high school and who remained a close friend for a significant portion of the rest of my life; Ted was his roommate for awhile during their time in law school; Ted is still my friend.

We went to visit the site of their being roommates, a beautifully finished daylight basement apartment on Moscow Mountain, not far out of Moscow; Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho and the law school that Jack and Ted were attending.
The daylight basement apartment where they lived was the lower level of a recently built house belonging to Doctor Tenny, a professor in the English Department at the University. Doctor – inevitably he was called behind his back “Doc” – lived in the upper rest of the house with his wife.

The day we arrived we met the Doctor before we had found Jack and Ted. It was late mid-afternoon on a beautiful blue and gold shimmering October day. Doc Tenny was in the rather large driveway terminus that doubled as a parking pad directly in front of the windows of Jack and Ted’s apartment. Doc Tenny greeted us with almost courtly welcoming courtesy. The majority of that attention and courtesy seemed to be directed to Ruth, but that didn’t particularly surprise me. Ruth was thought by many people to look like Ingrid Bergman – I wasn’t one of them – and I assumed that the Doctor, a man in his seventies, didn’t often have attractive young blonde women as his guest. I quickly felt as if I were a hindrance to something, but that was a fleeting impression. One of the things I learned before leaving was that Ruth was certainly not of a scarce or unusual genre at the Doctor’s abode. He conducted an honors upper division literature class consisting mostly of young women not much different from Ruth, and part of the potential advanced credit curriculum involved visits to the Doctor at his domicile on the Mountain for in-depth literary analysis.

As a part of the welcoming pleasantries the Doctor gestured vaguely in the direction of what appeared to be an automobile. It must have been a 1957 Dodge, but it was somewhat hard to ascertain its exact lineage because where there once had been fins and fenders and lights there were dents and holes and bumps and roundness. Not long in the future from that October day the snows would come and, being on a mountain, the ice would follow. The garage and driveway during that time of the year became a place requiring caution, and caution was a thing that the Doctor, it seemed, lacked. Old Overholt apparently made a bad time of the year for driving not seem so bad at all; apparently due to that spiritual influence, the Doctor’s car had gradually become a shapeless lump of dented and rounded sheet metal. Jack and Ted said watching him get the vehicle out of the garage and launched out of the parking apron, down the mountain-trail-like driveway to the main highway was an experience not to be missed; the return, they said was equally exciting. The essence of the fins could still be perceived, which is how I knew that it was a Dodge; it was a well used vehicle.

The gesture to the lump-like automobile was accompanied by a running dialogue in something resembling drunken Elizabethan (or at least not contemporary American) English. “Behold yonder stands the noblest of steeds. She carries me unto battle and victory over the stanchions of evil.”

Noel and Joe were beginning to pay attention. Ruth didn’t know what to say. Nor did I. With murmurs from the two boys – murmurs of something between admiration and caution – and silence from Ruth and me, he continued. “I gainsay those who call her a cheval qui a la coeur brisé. She is merely reaching her threshold of greatness.”

With that he lurched toward the steps leading to his portion of the domicile. “Join me, children, in the curtilage for an imbibement. “ And up and in he went.

We were just looking at one another, wondering what to do next and wondering where our friends and hosts were when they appeared.

“We saw you coming and saw him out there and decided the only proper entrance for you – since such an opportunity was available – was for you folks to get a shot of the Doc unfiltered. You would have thought we were making it up otherwise,” said Ted. He was something of a poet. “He invited us in, and that isn’t an invitation to be taken lightly,” said Jack.

“What dost thou desire, fair damsel?” boomed across the large great room-with-massive-fireplace. Ruth being the only damsel present, I assumed the Doctor was addressing her. “Gin and tonic?” she asked. “Your every wish shall be granted,” rejoined Doc Tenny. And he set about making one.

As we all sat around talking, and drinking - Jack and Ted and I had helped ourselves to beer from the refrigerator, and the Doctor had poured a large tumbler of Irish without ice – time just seemed to pass. In spite of the awkwardly surreal nature of the encounter to that point, I had to admit, and I assumed the others had had to as well, that the Doctor was a good host and terribly entertaining.

After some time and some drinks he began to speak in a more contemporary manner. “ I have a treasure in the trunk of my car that I rarely share with others, but for this august group, I would like to make an exception.” Ted and Jack just looked at one another. I saw a flash of something pass between them, but I had no idea what it might be. “Yes, after our next re-fill we must go out; we must go out before darkness settles upon us, and I will show you my treasure.” And then we did another round.

Once out on the twilit parking apron, the Doctor moved to what must have been the rear of the amorphous mound of metal that was his automobile, and with a flourish withdrew a key, shakily thrust it in the direction of what was most probably the trunk and a piece of flattish metal popped up at a forty five degree angle.
In the waning light one could see a mass of things, but there was one thing of note. It was the biggest thing in the cavity: it was about three feet in length, eighteen inches in width, was curved on one end and was flat on the other end. It appeared to be made of stone. It was a tombstone.

“I found this in the woods several years ago, and I want it to adorn my grave when I’m gone. It sums me up better than I could have ever contemplated doing myself. I doubt even if Marian would have done as well.” And he, with grimaces and grunts – it was, indeed made of stone – horsed the thing out of the trunk and leaned it against his leg so that all could see. In the rapidly waning light it was still possible to read the chiseled words: “He Was A Good Woodsman”.

Thinking about this story and then telling it as I just have completed, from the vantage point of all of those intervening years has caused me to ponder what might be my exit line, my epitaph. And, I think I have it:

He Nearly Accomplished Quite A Number Of Things

No No Fly List

I couldn’t have been more disappointed.

Today, 7 January 2010, the president spoke to the American people. This President, unlike his predecessor, has an intellect and usually applies that intellect to the things that he says – snippets or speeches.

His predecessor lacked that sort of intellect, so there was nothing to apply to the things that he said – snippets or speeches. He was pretty good at speaking, it was just that what he said was what someone had told him to say. His pronouncements were always the words of a ventriloquist’s dummy, although he stood alone rather than sitting on the lap of the ventriloquist.

Today, at least from the viewpoint of the message delivered, the ventriloquist seems to have come back. Because the message was identical to what would have been expected from Bush; as such it was just plain wrong.

The President said that the system failed.

The system didn’t fail. The system doesn’t work. In fact that which the President says has failed isn’t even a system. There really isn’t any system. What there is is an organization. It is an organization that is set up like a corporation. It is not organized like a corporation such as one finds among the successful businesses of the 2000’s, it is a corporation such as one found at the turn of the nineteenth century. It has many levels of command control and information passes slowly through the semi-porous membranes that separate the various layers.

And worse yet, it isn’t just one multi-layered corporate-like structure. It is multiple such entities. They all sell the same product: useable intelligence information. But their manufacturing process is slow. And there really aren’t any standards as to what the finished product might need to look like. As a result, they aren’t really manufacturers at all; they are job shops producing infinite numbers of one-of-a-kinds that they think up to fill their time. And they never are really sure what these individual one-of-a-kinds ought to look like, or how they might be used, or who might want to buy them. In any event, even if they did know, many of the components that they would need to make something if they ever figured out what it was that they ought to be making are in the hands of their competitors, the other manufacturers.

In spite of these challenges, the manufacturers employ really talented, imaginative employees who are really skilled at their craft. They produce a lot of very useable product in spite of all the problems.

But the product doesn’t get distributed on a very broad basis.

That is because the distributor is small and has limited product expertise. It is called the no fly list and it only deals in absolutely known problems. Those problems – the product of the manufacturers – are few in number because no matter how skilled the employees of the manufacturers might be – they don’t know all the possible combinations of use that could be made of their product, so they only ship the product that their limited, albeit highly skilled, knowledge tells them has a market.

But the market is huge. And the customers in that market, in aggregate, know vastly more about all the combinational possibilities of use of the manufacturer’s product, a product that when viewed in this manner is really a monstrous tool kit of components that could be used with great success by that vast market of customers, if only those customers could get that tool kit. But they can’t. The distributor is too small and limited.

So the answer isn’t to try to make the existing multiple competing manufacturers more efficient and more accountable and bigger. The answer is to totally re-organize those manufacturers into a single level – get rid of the layers; look like a modern corporation - processing entity, taking the raw material and turning it as rapidly as possible into useable components, putting them in a gigantic tool kit and sending the kit on a constantly updated basis to all the customers who can use the components each in their own way, having completely eliminated the distributor.

There would be no no fly list. There would just be useable information real time, on line available at all times to those who need it to make the decisions that should have been made in relation to the crotch bomber.

This is a systems problem, not an organizational problem.

There is more on this, including a flow chart for the suggested system at “A Modest Proposal for an Intelligence System” and “Intelligence System”.

A Modest Proposal for an Intelligence System

Preface

A number of the story lines in Screen Saver revolve around the fact that I was an Intelligence Officer in the Air Force for four years, including a year in Vietnam and several months in Japan related to the Pueblo Crisis. So I feel as if I have some platform from which to make the following observations.

For all the money we have spent on TSA, and for all the inconvenience, all the shoes removed, all the grandmothers and cripples who have been frisked, all the totally legitimate items that have been expropriated: jeweler’s screw drivers, finger nail clippers, and vieuve clicquot, we have apparently apprehended two would-be suicide bombers. And both of them were apprehended in the act. They got through security, got on the plane, and after the plane was airborne they attempted to detonate. Fortunately they both were duds.

"But that can’t be right", I thought I heard someone say. Surely there have been many, many, many apprehended in the act of trying to get through security.

If so, why haven’t we heard about them?

"Because those many successful apprehensions have all been kept strictly secret", I thought I heard someone say.

"Oh. Then why haven’t we kept the two actually almost successful attempts strictly secret?" I thought to say.

"Because all the passengers on those planes knew about it and it would have been impossible to keep them all quiet", I heard that voice again pipe up.

So, in all the vast number of successful apprehensions that have been nonetheless kept absolutely secret there were no people around. Those successful apprehensions all occurred when there were no other passengers in the check in line? Or, alternately, given that indeed the likelihood of no potential witnesses being in line is zero, in all that vast number of TSA successes, the would-be bomber didn’t talk, didn’t resist, didn’t even twitch? Didn’t even shout "Allah akbar"? That sounds like the plot of a Dean Koontz book.

But ultimately whether there have been two very public failures accompanied by vast numbers of successes or just two failures, the fact is that we are bringing our air transport system to its knees (and what happens when the bombers decide to go after trains and buses?) that we are spending vast quantities of money and are still not solving the problem – we just remove an additional item of clothes every time a new terrorist thrust succeeds – and look amazingly inept to the world of Islamic terror.

But I guess clearer heads at TSA are prevailing. It is obvious that the response to a guy hiding a bomb in his crotch is to ban carry-on baggage. That logic has a massive precedent: we thought that the 9/11 attackers came from Afghanistan so we invaded Iraq.

But assuming that somewhere there are people in our intelligence apparatus that are not cretins, how about we put an intelligence system in place that would go well on the way to solving the problem?

"Well you have to understand how hard it is to connect the dots", I thought I heard someone say. "It’s just too hard. And we have to avoid profiling. And the agencies have trouble communicating. And, anyway, it all pays the same. Whether we succeed or fail we get our paychecks, get our health care, get our government retirement. We’re working as hard as we can, but it’s just real hard."

I have a suggestion. See the post down in the stack after "End Game".

Christmas Day 2009

It was I nice day and I was there.

End Game

I got an email today that set me off. It was forwarded to me by a friend. It pointed out that the ten poorest cities in the US - Detroit, Cleveland, etc. - hadn’t had a republican mayor in many years. From that information they deduced the fact that the Democrats drive poverty.

I sent back a fiery response to my friend who hadn’t written the thing, he had only forwarded it to me; but I couldn’t get at the original sender, so I let loose on my friend. He replied with his typical equanimity and I fired back the following.

I admire your dispassionately detached viewpoint, and I am capable of taking that point of view as well.

But then love of country and fear for its continued existence boil up and I start screaming.

People like the one who put this diatribe together are not capable of balanced rational thought. Both of those are required for successful self government. If one starts with the assumption that people who are only capable of this quality of thought are in the majority (not a large leap of assumption- just watch Fox) add to that majoritiy's profile stupidity, meanness and selfishness and racism, and then top it off with their introspectively overwhelming prejudice of all viewpoints but theirs and you have fertile ground for a demagogue.

Then add the fact that WE may elect people, but the LOBBIES tell them what to do, then add the imminent decision from the Supreme Court that will allow CORPORATIONS to spend all they want in support of political candidates - which means that WE won't even get to choose the people who take orders from the LOBBIES; it will be, instead, the candidate of the ENERGY INDUSTRY versus the candidate of the MEDICAL/DRUG COMPLEX, or some other match up of puppets from leviathan alliances of corporations. You have END GAME.

So I have trouble being dispassionate.

Intelligence System

This flow chart shows how we could get ahead of the game and handle situations such as the crotch bomber. In that scenario we apparently had the information that should have caused someone to ask him some questions and check him out - maybe even do a good deep pat down. The system that I am proposing is unitary. All the data is in one data base. It is a kluge but it's one and its in one place, logically. Physically it's spread all over hell's half acre. The idea is to get everything, anything, even almost nothing in the kluge. World wide intelligence officers would have the job of analyzing the kluge, each in his or her own manner. Each in his or her own manner would sort/sift and decide what items, situations or people were off center from a terror avoidance point of view. If for any reason someone or something catches their attention they put it into a world wide Problem Data Base.

At that point - the assumption is that some sort of order would be superimposed upon that data base; I would aggressively consider a Google User Interface, or, perhaps a Google/Bing hybrid - it would be huge but not any more a kluge. Rather than spending billions more on body scanners and making the lines get bigger and slower with the need to remove more clothes and do more ridiculous things while trying to get on an airline it would be the responsibility of all affected worldwide entities, like airlines and embassies, but by no means limited to them, to enter the identication information of every person asking for service from those entities into that problem data base. Obviously that data base will need to have been installed in such a manner that it can be easily integrated into each entities' line of business systems. If the entry comes up a "hit" - the person is in the Problem Data Base - they would be taken off line for special and appropriate attention. And that would be long before the person got anywhere near a check in line.

This approach addresses the problem that we currently have two data bases that don't talk to each other, and only one of them is used to take the "special and appropriate" actions mentioned, above; and the one that is actually used is very small compared to the other one. So a huge data base of identified "likelies" sits in an untouched nether world unused until one of its inhabitants tries to blow up a plane or some accidental encounter between our various duelling intelligence apararati "connects some dots". And every time somebody beats the system we hear how hard those dots are to connect.

I am proposing that we ignore the dots and drive all the information that professional intelligence officers glean and gather straight to the people who need it to do their business and provide the first realistic line of defence against terrorists. I am proposing that we get rid of holding tank data limbos and all the middle men and all their god damned dots.