Itstheendoftheworld: Screen Saver

The Sound Of the BP Claims Line

2010-06-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

Bugs

2010-06-17T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

The Face

2010-06-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Hazel Nut

2010-06-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-11T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-06-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T17:00:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-26T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-22T16:03:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-25T10:24:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-24T18:00:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-24T08:27:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T18:25:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T17:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-12T23:06:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-06T22:41:00.000-08:00

It was I nice day and I was there.

End Game

2010-01-06T22:34:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

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.

The Hive

2010-01-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

Ten or twelve years ago I liked to pontificate to anyone who would stop long enough to listen to more than three words - and there were more of people who had that longer form of attention span at that time than there are now, but not many - that it seemed to me that the way the internet was evolving was going to cause the human race to adopt an organizational form similar to a hive of bees. I had no vision at the time of Facebook, My space and Twitter, but I did see the direction that email and AOL instant messaging seemed to be pointing.

I certainly didn't think that in ten years that observation would not only turn out to have been fairly accurate, but nearly a fait accompli.

With that capability - the ability to "know" what we are all thinking, doing, considering doing and likely to do - we don't need to travel as much, or perhaps at all. We can just commune with one another in real time; we can order things from on line retail - even from Starbucks - ad hoc, as the needs for those things arise and we can all sit at our keyboards and "communicate" instead of "travel".

The human race will begin to make maneuvers that, to those not plugged into the network, will look like the amazing close-ordered flying that one sees in large flocks of birds

The Economist recently had an article about a new generation of printers that "print" solid objects. It is possible to go straight from CATIA logic to the print button and end up with a finished item. Jay Leno owns one from StrataSys. He uses it to produce parts for some of the completely old and out of production members of his automobile collection. The parts for many of those cars are just not available, so Jay has had them redesigned using 3D computer design technology then he "prints" the parts.

Apply that logic to being at your keyboard, communing with the hive and ordering on line as the need arises. This printer trend seems to point to the possibility of having the item that you have ordered appearing at the solid state printer installed on your computer.

Probably not Starbucks

A Walk Through a Warehouse

2010-01-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

This is something I wrote back when I was starting my wholesale distribution consulting business. It has some entertainment value. In any event, having a blog drives one into publish or perish mode, which drives one into one's archives upon occasion.

Warehouse Automation

Introduction

There are over 325, 000 distribution centers in the United States. Currently less than a third of these DC’s are thought to have revenue structures large enough to support the investment necessary to acquire a Distribution Center Information System, but with the cost of hardware technology continuing to fall and the power of software continuing to rise, more and more of the 325,000 will be able to afford a system in the next few years. In fact, as the number of installations increases, the application of technology for logistics information handling systems will shift from being a LEADING EDGE application to a MANDATORY process, necessary to SURVIVE in the competitive game of being a Distributor. “Facing the Forces of Change”, the DREF Report, the Arthur Anderson study commissioned by the National Association of Wholesaler Distributors, refers to this transition as changing from being an “investor” in technology to being a “satisfier” in the use of technology.

With the exception of the few who have already invested in and successfully installed such a system, the rest are in the following situation:
1. Spending 10-40% too much on labor.
2. Spending too much on material handling equipment, directly related to the excess labor.
3. Investing 5-25% too much in inventory safety stock.
4. Constantly running out of space and either renting additional space or making expensive capital investment in additional square footage.
5. Losing significant money due to errors.
6. Losing sales due to errors.
7. Investing several days’ labor a year to physically count the inventory.
8. Not shipping product, and therefore losing revenue during the physical inventory count.

When the aggregate dollar effect of the above is effectively analyzed, the amount of money being invested in non-production and errors is sufficiently large to pay for an automated system which will reduce or eliminate these dollar-draining factors.

The intent of this article is to clearly illustrate the advantages of an automated warehouse information system by taking a walk through a hypothetical wholesaler’s warehouse and see how they are doing things now, function by function, and then have a discussion among ourselves, out of earshot of our hosts, of things that we have noticed about their current system. When we are finished with the walkthrough we will install and discuss a hypothetical information system, replacing the manual one we see during the walkthrough.

Scenario

Typical Wholesale, Inc. is a mixed-goods distributor. They generate $80 million a year in revenue and are growing at about 7% a year. They ship all of their product out of one 250,000 square foot distribution
center. The DC has 40,000 square feet devoted to bulk floor storage, 90,000 square feet devoted to pallet rack storage, 14,000 square feet devoted to hazardous materials and a 40,000 square foot, two-level mezzanine, one level for “repack” items, which are small items picked as “each” and one level for case and bulky items. The DC has 18,000 square feet devoted to receiving, with 10 receiving doors. They have 30,000 square feet devoted to shipping with 15 shipping doors. There are 125 DC employees working staggered shifts from 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM. They also distribute a significant number of lines from their original distribution center, a location that was supposed to be completely vacated with the advent of the new, recently opened distribution center described above. It hasn’t happened yet.

This company has a central computer system which has all the traditional accounting and management functions automated. Their systems are fairly advanced and have done a good job of giving Typical good leverage on their assets of inventory and accounts receivable. Recently they have invested in advanced buying system software which gives them the ability to forward buy, thus adding a new dimension to managing their inventory asset. All of their computerized systems depend upon the movement of paper through the organization, and nowhere is this more apparent than in their distribution center.

To get an idea of how the distribution center operates, we are going to take a brief tour or “walkthrough” of the warehouse facility. We have been fortunate enough to get as out guides through the facility both the warehouse manager, and his superior, the Vice President of operations. The descriptions we will encounter as we walk through are seen through the eyes of these two people and filtered by our own understanding of what they are saying.

Another thing to factor into the picture this walkthrough generates is the fact that this is a simulated walkthrough written on paper. In a real walkthrough you find yourself in a huge cavern of a building with racks towering 25 or more feet or more above you and with people and equipment flying in all directions. apparently all at once. Completing the overall environment in a real walkthrough, the lighting is marginal so you can’t always see with any degree of certainty what is really going on. The location by location description of this written account gives the inaccurate impression of quiet and calm, and organization; it doesn’t give an accurate impression of the fact that there are multiple people performing each of the operations we will “see”. So multiply all your impressions and observations by several factors and add a degree of controlled chaos to get a more real impression.

Receiving

Typical’s receiving operation emanates from the operations office, which is quite close to the receiving area and has large glass windows viewing the distribution center. In the operations office there are usually a number of operations and supervisory people milling around. There are also a number of computer workstations and printers which are attached to the central computer and which are used for a number of functions. The function that starts receiving is the printing of the receiving package for about-to-arrive inventory. This package includes a purchase order and a set of extremely clever, complicated and expensive sticky removable labels which serve a variety of functions in the receiving and putaway process. The person who “pulls” this package is a fairly senior warehouse operations employee, named Marv.

The receiving personnel pick up their receiving packages from Marv and they go to their receiving stations. Actually, the trigger for the receiving package was another activity performed in the operations office. That activity was the scheduling of the arrival of an inbound shipment at some pre-arranged time at a pre-arranged receiving location. So if things work as they should, the receiver, named Rick, goes to a specific receiving location and finds the open back end of a truck full to the brim with pallets of merchandise. A typical configuration of sticky removable labels, mentioned previously, consists of a group of rather small removable labels printed in typical small computer printing, and a group of rather large removable labels with very large letters, much bigger than computers typically print. Rick uses these as follows: using his pallet jack he moves a pallet off the truck and moves it into the staging area on the freight dock immediately adjacent to the truck. He removes one of the large sticky labels, one which accurately describes the merchandise on the pallet and puts it on the upper right hand corner of the carton occupying that position on the pallet. He then removes one of the small sticky labels, again, one which accurately describes the product on the pallet he has just removed and he puts that label on the purchase order next to the line item for the pallet he has just removed. This indicates that the line item, a full pallet, was received. Nothing ever being quite that simple, in this shipment there are two pallets that have mixed product, requiring Rick to disassemble the pallet and put a large label on each carton and a small label corresponding to that carton on each corresponding line on the purchase order. For this operation he ends up with a non one-for one relationship between the large labels and the small labels. There is one small label for each unique line item, but there are multiple large labels for each small label, reflecting the fact that the quantity being counted for that line item is a quantity greater than one. He makes a “tickie” mark on the purchase order next to the line item representing the case he has offloaded and labeled. When he runs out of cases for that line item on the purchase order he counts the “tickie” marks and compares that to the quantity ordered. If it is the same he initiates the same process with the next line item until he has unloaded the two non-homogenous pallets. If it isn’t the same, he circles the current line item and notes it as a short count, showing the total of his “tickie” marks. When he is finished unloading the truck he takes the receiving package back to Marv. Marv, when time allows, keys the results of the annotated and “tickied” PO back into the system so inventory and payables can be updated.

Things To Note

Several things. First, the paper that supports this system is labor intensive both in its production and in its use. It is also expensive paper, being special stock, weight and adhesive. It is really a system itself, ingeniously designed to assure accurate receiving both by count and by product type. The question is whether it is really accomplishing those two goals. Which leads to the second thing to not about this approach. If Rick forgets to make a “tickie” mark when he puts a label on the box he has created an error in the count that won’t be corrected until the vendor disagrees with a short shipment notification, and the inventory count will be in error, being corrected, if ever, only after the vendor has confirmed full shipment and somebody from the “error checker” department finds an extra case of the supposedly short shipped product in stock. Proliferate this sort of potential error and error recovery over the thousands of receiving transactions the warehouse has daily, and over the number of days necessary to recover and adjust inventory counts and you lead to the third, fourth, and fifth things to note about this system. Third, the inventory count is never really correct or dependable, and it is potentially understated, so, fourth, the buyers must use their intuition more than their information, leading to overbuying, and fifth there is an undue amount of ongoing labor being invested in supporting error correction for an already labor-intensive system. (Remember, Marv needs to re-key the PO, including any of Rick’s errors, back into the system.)

Putaway

As Rick unloads the truck he is building an array of pallets and cases in the area immediately adjacent to the truck he is unloading. This is by design; it is the staging area and is the point at which putaway starts.

A forklift driven by Betty, a long-term employee I this distribution center appears as the staging area fills. Her job is to take the stock that Rick has unloaded and put it into bulk storage. Bulk storage is the place where product is kept prior to being put in its picking location for picking and shipment. She knows where to put stock by reading the large labels that Rick has affixed to it. One of the things on the label is the primary putaway storage location. So Betty forks a pallet, looks at the location and takes the pallet to that location. As luck would have it that location is already full of product, presumably the same product type that she is now attempting to put away.

One of the reasons Betty has the putaway function is that she is a senior employee. This distribution center uses its best and most experienced employees for putaway for many reasons, one of which is to cover situations like we have just encountered. Although the primary location, the one indicated on the label, is full, Betty, due to her experience knows several other places that have the space necessary to store a pallet of this size. So she searches until she finds a vacant one and puts the stock in that location. Luckily for future pick location replenishment Betty has a photographic memory and always remembers where she has put stock. She goes back to Rick’s staging area for another pallet and another putaway.

Things to Note

In non-priority, purely stream-of-consciousness order, here they are. First, Betty’s memory, photographic though it may be, occasionally produces blanks, just like any good camera. She also has been known to miss work due to illness or to take vacation or personal time off. In her absence, the only known way to find stock that she has put in a location alternate to the primary storage location is to wander and look. Depending upon how creative she has been in her choice, that endeavor can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours. (It has been known to occur that only the annual physical inventory uncovers some of the most inventively chosen locations.) This generates the next thing to note which is pure and simple labor waste. Just because something can generally be found in a “reasonable” length of time, whether by the person who originally put it away, or some relatively skillful backup doesn’t mean that the extra labor necessary to support that kind of a system makes any sense. In a distribution center doing thousands of activities a day, a few minutes per activity can add up to hours or days of wasted time; and time is money. Another factor, related to this is that if the primary location becomes empty after Betty has chosen her own personal backup location, and a new shipment of that product is received, and the new shipment is put in the primary storage location, any chance of having a FIFO system has just been eliminated. The primary location becomes empty, the new stock is received, and since the primary location is empty the new stock is put there, and the stock that Betty put “somewhere else” stays “somewhere else”. In the distribution business of today, with constant change in products generating an actual decline in value or sellability of products as they age, a system that does not assure that the oldest stock is always the stock that goes out first is not acceptable. Instead of FIFO, the “Betty System” leads to an inventory strategy known as FISH (first in still here). Another factor ill-served by this sort of a system is that the stock not in primary locations is stored in a manner that has no consideration for the best use of space (cube) and it contributes to the ever present “need more square footage” syndrome faced by all distribution centers. This wasted square footage costs money either in terms of space rented to accommodate overflow or actual capital investment in additional square footage.

Picking

There are two distinct picking operations in Typical’s distribution center. One is for case quantity orders, the other is for broken case or “each” orders. They are called “case pick” and “repack”.

The vast majority of orders come in to the central computer in some type of electronic form. The central computer assesses the order, and depending upon whether it is case quantity or repack it does different things.

Case quantity orders cause the computer to generate “case labels” which are more of the removable sticky variety of paper stock that we saw earlier in the receiving operation. In this instance, case labels are 12 to a sheet, 3 by 4. The computer prints on these labels the item to be picked and its picking location. There is one label for each case ordered. If you are wondering how the number of cases ordered always matches the number of case labels on the form, they don’t. The form is a continuous computer form that has twelve removable sticky case labels per continuous form sheet (perforation to perforation) and if they don’t match exactly, the balance are discarded.

The other picking operation is the repack operation. This function fills orders for each and broken case items less than 30 inches in size. Again, the central computer initiates the process be receiving an electronic order that, instead of ordering by case, orders by broken case quantity, or each. In this instance the computer generates an extremely ingenious form. The top consists of multiple small removable sticky labels and the bottom is a pick list.

Actually, there is a sort of hybrid third picking operation. It is called the “hand stack area” and is the lower level of the two level 41,000 square foot mezzanine. This area has pallet racks that accommodate either cases or repack items that are bulky or longer than 30 inches. Certain types of garden tools are an example of bulky items.

In all cases the picking documents are produced on the central computer’s high-speed printer and transported every few hours by courier to the distribution center which is 8 miles distant.

Elmo is one of the case pick pickers. He drives a “tugger” with two small flat open trailers in tow. He picks up his stack of case labels from the shipping office and commences his pick run. The pick operation has been sorted by the central computer in warehouse location, and the warehouse has previously been organized in most to least ordered (A,B,C) merchandise order. As Elmo traverses the racks he stops, picks appropriate cases, removes case labels and puts them on the cases. Elmo has a supply of red sticky labels on the electric vehicle which serve as out of stock flags when he finds a designated pick location empty or when his order brings the pick slot to out of stock. The replenishment crew is responsible for assuring that these red label conditions are corrected as soon as possible. In theory there shouldn’t be very many of these out of stock conditions, because the inventory system and the order entry system on the main computer periodically monitor the inventory level relative to known order requirements. As the computer notes imminent out of stock conditions it generates replenishment advises for the replacement crew. But as we have seen in other areas already, theory and reality in a distribution center are sometimes different from one another. As Elmo fills his tugger with completed orders he offloads the cases to the conveyor system and continues his picking operation. When he has completed the picking operation he takes the remaining paperwork to Joyce in the shipping office.

The repack area is on the second level of the mezzanine and is designed to be a very fast pick area. Approximately 60% of Typical’s total numbers of lines picked come out of this area. Lorraine is one of the repack pickers. She obtains a stack of pick lists sufficient to occupy approximately half a shift according to the computer’s assessment of the number of lines compared to the going line per hour rate. She has a cart with shelves sufficient to accommodate several empty cardboard boxes that function as the containers for the orders. Since each pick list is a consolidation of several orders, one pass through the repack area results in multiple orders picked. Prior to the start of each repack pick shift the replenishment crew restock all the pick locations sufficient to support the load generated by that shift’s orders. This is done by a computer run after all the next shift’s orders have been processed and the inventory count known to the computer has been assessed for adequacy. If Lorraine encounters an out of stock condition, she uses the same type of red label employed by Elmo in the case pick operation. The replenishment crew is responsible for policing the repack area such that these out of stock situations, which aren’t supposed to occur are taken care of quickly. As Lorraine’s cart is filled with picked orders, she puts them on the conveyor for movement to the appropriate shipping door. The pick lists are sent to Joyce in the receiving office.

Things to Note

Not too much this time. The major item would again be the manually intensive nature of the system, involving the removal and attachment of sticky labels, and the intrinsic expense of the paper itself, including the cost of wasted forms. There is always also the chance of mis-picking inventory, meaning that the picker reads an item number, description, and location and actually picks from another location. This results in either a dissatisfied customer, if the item picked is not only wrong but of equal of less value than that which was ordered, or a monetary loss to Typical if the item picked is of substantially greater value than that which was ordered, and if the customer opts to keep the item and not lodge a complaint. It also results in another source of inventory error similar in effect to that which was noted from miscounts at receiving.

Conveyor

As the conveyable picked items are put on the conveyor system they are fed to a location where Ned has a duty station. Ned is sort of the conveyor commander. His job, requiring good eyesight, is to watch the cartons and cases as they approach him, read the two digit run number, which is printed on the label, previously attached by the picker, and key it into the keypad he is running. The conveyor system has a PC which reads the run number, and based on that input kicks the carton or case down one of the 15 spurs. This is the basis for the subsequent customer truck load work performed by shipping. The run numbers not only get the customer orders at the correct shipping location, they also dictate the load position for the order on the truck, getting first to be delivered orders to be put on the truck last.
Things to Note

Two things. First, there are machines that can read appropriately coded labels allowing the use of an expensive labor resource in more productive capacities. Second, these machines don’t daydream or have temporary optical malfunctions, both of which are characteristics of humans when they are employed in machine-like jobs.

Shipping

Cases from the case pick process, cartons from the repack pick process and cartons and bulky items from the hand stack area are constantly being conveyed to the shipping area. The various cases, cartons, and items are sorted by customer and put on carts. If the item, carton and case count on the cart matches the count on the bill of lading, the invoice and bill of lading are included with the shipment and the order is put on the appropriate truck for shipment to the customer.

Things to Note

Assuming that Ned has been reading the run numbers on the labels accurately and that Joyce hasn’t been letting her file of incomplete orders remain unattended for too long, there is nothing wrong with this function. It is dependent for effectiveness upon at least two “upstream” functions, invoicing and the conveyor. If their level of efficiency and accuracy degrade, the shipping operation loses effectiveness. It is interesting to note that if you automate those two “upstream” functions, the paperwork moves one function “downstream”, cutting both manual labor and shipping time. Also, a test of whether this is the best of all possible systems would be to go through the mental exercise of answering a customer question about his order status when it is in shipping. Or of the customer asking to add an item to the order once it is in shipping.

Invoicing

Joyce in the shipping office gets a constant flow of the paperwork from case label picks and repack picks during the day. If the order is complete she uses a workstation connected to the central computer to release the order. This results in an invoice and a bill of lading being printed. These both go to shipping. If an order is not yet complete, Joyce files it and periodically checks to see if the incomplete orders have been filled. When they are complete she releases them, producing a bill of lading and an invoice.

Things to Note

Except that this step substitutes human labor for computer time, nothing. The time between reviews of incomplete orders can also contribute to late shipment and dissatisfied customers.

Physical Inventory

Each year the entire distribution center closes down for 3 days to conduct the annual physical inventory. Every item is counted and verified to the computer count and all imbalances are accounted for and reconciled.

Things to Note

The labor spent on this activity is contributing nothing to sales and profit. The time spent on this activity is dead time, since no orders are filled or shipped during it. So for a large expenditure, no revenue or profit is generated.

Summary

The warehouse walkthrough should have given you a fairly good feeling for several aspects of how a Typical’s Distribution Center functions. Major things we saw are:

1. Labor Intensive - Although Typical Wholesale’s DC Manager and his boss, the Operations Vice President manage to labor standards, monitor efficiency and manage a DC employee incentive system based upon labor efficiency, they are nevertheless working with a system that is essentially manual with computer-supplied paper support in several key functions. Their key methodology is primarily to try to work faster, because to work smarter requires information, and they are dealing with “history” not information.

2. Isolated Functions - Each functional area we visited in the walkthrough is essentially an end in itself with little or no continuous flow relationship to the other functions. For example, when Betty had to get creative in putting away an item when the primary storage location was filled, she put it away, and it is her job to remember where she put it. She is a functional and informational “island” separated from the rest of the operation; when the results of her function need to be known it is always the result of a breakdown in the “system” (we can’t find item X) and those results are only joined with the “system” by a great deal of manual thrashing and wasted time.

3. Paper Intensive - Not only is there a great deal of paper driving a labor-intensive manual system, it is very expensive paper in its own right. The point here is, that the paper, with all its variety of shapes and adhesive functions is really an attempt at an automated system. In examining an alternative to this “system” it is important to offset not only whatever enhanced function the alternative might have vs. the existing system , but also to offset the basic costs of one vs. the other.

4. Redundant - Two extremely obvious examples of this were where Marv re-keys the purchase order information and where Joyce is continually sorting the pended picking paperwork to discover completed orders and then release them to print the bills of lading and invoices. This type of duplication is not only costly in labor terms, it slows down both the flow of information to the central computer and the actual flow of orders to shipping and on to the customers.

Automated Alternative System

Since all the information we have examined so far has been fiction, fiction heavily based on concrete reality, but, nonetheless, fiction, let’s take advantage of fiction and install an ideal automated alternative to Typical’s current warehouse system.

First, let’s put a computer in the warehouse. Let’s make it large enough to handle as many functions as we want to give it. And let’s make sure it has enough disk storage to handle a lot of information. Let’s give it a lot of workstations and let’s further give it the ability to handle radio transmissions so some of the workstations can be mobile.

Let’s install it just after the annual physical inventory has been taken and finalized so we start with an accurate inventory count. Also, let’s do something as we finalize the physical inventory; let’s tell the new warehouse computer not only the count of the product in all the picking locations, and not only the aggregate count of all product in storage, let’s also tell it what the storage location should be for every type of product in the warehouse, and the actual storage location for every item in the warehouse. Let’s also add the fact that storage locations picked were all selected after considering optimum use of cubic feet and that appropriate warehouse re-organization and re-racking has taken place in support of this.

Now let’s open the distribution center for business and take a quick walkthrough looking at the new system.

Starting in receiving we see Rick with a stationary workstation installed in his receiving lane. He keys his security code and a purchase order is displayed. He verifies that the purchase order accurately reflects the truck he is positioned to unload and pulls the first pallet. He verifies what line item on the purchase order this pallet represents, puts a pre-printed barcode label on the pallet, uses a barcode scanner attached to his workstation to read the barcode, and the line item on the purchase order is received. The warehouse computer has just been notified that the receipt has been made and the pallet is ready for putaway. Even though we can’t see it, this pallet has also been time date stamped, and we also know who received it.

Rick then uses his pallet jack to repeat the process on the next pallet.

As the staging area behind Rick begins to fill with pallets, Betty appears on her fork lift. The fork lift has a mobile radio frequency workstation mounted on it. The workstation has a small display that displays as much information as the larger, stationary one that Rick is using. It also has a full function keyboard. Betty parks next to the first pallet that Rick unloaded, uses the barcode label and reads the result on her display. The display directs her to a storage location, one that the computer knows has two characteristics. First, it is empty, and second, it is one of the storage locations specifically reserved for this type of product, based on velocity (A,B,C) and cube. Betty goes to that location, scans the barcode on the location, scans the barcode on the pallet and puts the product in the location. The computer now knows not only that the product has been received, but that it is in storage and in what location, and by whom it was put away, and when.

Back at the truck Rick is continuing his receiving operation. He has just encountered a pallet with several different kinds of item on it, one that needs to be broken down to be received. This pallet represents several lines on the purchase order. He breaks down the pallet, pulls off the first case, identifies what it is and puts the cursor of his workstation at that line item. Then he puts one of his pre-printed barcode labels on the carton and scans it. The computer receives that carton against the total count for that P.O. line item, but all Rick sees is the same cursor on the same line item. Since this is his first day with this new system, even though he has been extensively trained in its operation, he tries to move the cursor to the next line item, since that has been the routine he has built up with the full pallet receipts. The workstation alarm sounds and a highlighted statement appears on the screen saying item count incomplete. Then he remembers that he is doing a mixed pallet receipt and needs to receive the rest of the cases for that line item. He finds the next case, puts the barcode label on it, scans it and the purchase order screen reappears. He continues this process with the rest of the cases for that line item, and for the rest of the cases on that pallet. As he scans the last case, the only one for its line item, the alarm again sounds and a red highlighted comment appears: “special handling for backorder number 126945. Crossdock.” Rick knows that this means to set it aside where it can be quickly picked up. As he finishes unloading the truck, Clyde from shipping appears on a forklift with a mobile workstation mounted on it, and he asks where the crossdock is. He has been dispatched to pickup the case by the warehouse computer through the mobile mounted terminal. The computer was aware as soon as the case was scanned that it had been received and that there was a backorder to be filled by it, so it notified shipping. Rick shows him which case it is, and Clyde scans the case, puts it on the lift and takes it to shipping for delivery to the customer.

Meanwhile Betty is continuing the putaway operation. In her putaway runs through the warehouse she has seen various familiar old storage locations empty. Her years of experience have caused her to make nearly subconscious mental notes of them. She has just scanned the last pallet from Rick’s staging area, and received her putaway instruction on her mobile workstation. The instruction, based on what the product is and her previous experience doesn’t match with her preference, since one of the vacant locations she has noted has previously been ideal for the product she is about to put away. Lapsing to old habits, she goes to that location, scans the location and an alarm sounds from the mobile workstation. The display says, “not proper location”. She has been trained to know that in the case of such a disagreement with the system, she can hit a system override key, which she does, scans the location, scans the product and leaves the product in that location. However, the computer is aware of the discrepancy, and it notifies Marv in the operations office of an improper putaway. This initiates whatever management action is appropriate.

As we move to picking, we first go to the case pick operation. We see Elmo with the same tugger as before, but now we see that he also has a mobile workstation mounted on his electric conveyance. As he goes to each location directed by his workstation, he scans the barcoded location and scans the barcoded case and puts it on the tugger. At one of the pick locations, as he takes the cases indicated from the location and scans them, the alarm on his workstation goes off. The screen says “verify shelf count”. Elmo counts the number of remaining cases and keys that quantity into his workstation. The reason for this action was that when the computer was set up, among other things it was told was what the re-order point for that location should be to cover most potential out of stock conditions. Since the computer also knew the initial count, and in real time knows what the removal count has been, it keeps track and when the re-order point is reached, during the pick operation when it occurs it directs the picker to do a cycle count on the spot to verify the computer’s count (it doesn’t tell the picker what it thinks the count is) and if the two match it continues with the pick operation. If the two don’t match, it directs the picker to count again. If, after three tries the count from the picker is different from the computer count, the computer accepts the picker’s count and updates its file to reflect that count. In any event, if replenishment is in order, it directs the next available worker, via the mobile workstation to do a replenishment to that location. When Elmo completes his pick assignment he puts the cases on the conveyor.

In the repack area Lorraine has a new tool to use. It is a complete PC in a handheld package, with internal storage, a display, a keyboard and an integrated barcode scanner. She puts this device in a “cradle” that is attached to another PC which is attached to the warehouse computer. Putting it in the cradle allows the PC to download a quantity of orders, typically enough for a full day’s work by existing lines per hour standards. A pick list is displayed on the handheld screen and as she picks the items she scans the location once and each item from that location as she puts them in their separate cardboard boxes, after scanning the barcode on the box. The barcode on the box ties the items to the individual customer orders and gives the computer the ability to validate item count against each order as the picked orders are uploaded periodically during the day by putting the handheld into the cradle. As the orders are completed they are put on the conveyor.

If Lorraine encounters an out of stock situation she goes to a workstation at the end of the picking lane and scans the item number. This action dispatches one of the replenishment crew to validate the situation, reconcile the item count on the computer and replenish the picking location. This not only restocks an out of stock shelf, it accomplishes a cycle count. This situation will become extremely unusual as the new system becomes fully operational due to the new facilities it gives to the replenishment crew when they do their regular replenishment of the repack area. That operation is triggered prior to the beginning of each repack pick shift, as previously, but now it includes a cycle count of each location to be replenished. So every time a picking location is shown by the computer to need replenishment against the next shift’s picking requirements, a cycle count occurs. Conversely, any location which is shown not to have had activity within the last three working days is scheduled for a cycle count. After three of these in a row the computer notifies purchasing and operations of a slow moving item requiring attention. This attention will usually include a lowering of the safety stock, a relocation of the item’s pick location, and consideration of a “fire sale”.

The new automated cycle counting is expected to force a level of accuracy not ever seen in Typical’s inventory count with its previous system. The result of this is expected to be the elimination of the need for a yearly physical inventory.

The conveyor has had an interesting change. Ned isn’t there anymore. Instead, a 360 degree barcode scanner has been installed which reads the bar codes that have been put on the cases or cardboard totes. As long as the barcode label is not on the bottom of the box, the scanner picks up the number, which has been associated with the customer’s order and therefore the run number and spur and the system works just as it did previously. Any non-read items are conveyed to the end of the conveyor. At this location there is a sensor which, although it doesn’t read barcode, does sense the passage of the carton or case and it notifies the computer that an unscanned item has arrived. The computer selects the member of the replenishment crew who is closest to the end of the conveyor at that moment, who also has not got a current assignment and dispatches him via his mobile workstation to the end of the conveyor. When the replenisher gets there he finds the barcode label which is usually on the bottom, scans it and waits for the response on his mobile workstation. The workstation tells him which shipping location to take the item to. When he gets it there the shipping clerk scans the item and the computer treats it the same as if it had passed the conveyor scanner normally.

Invoicing is now interactive with the rest of the warehouse system, so as the items pass the scanner on the conveyor the system builds the invoice item by item. As soon as the last item necessary to the customer’s order has been scanned the invoice and the bill of lading are released to the computer’s print queue, ready for release by shipping personnel as they load the truck. In the new system a “ready for loading” function on the computer helps the shipping department. This system displays on the stationary display in each shipping lane. George, one of the shipping clerks, places the display cursor by one of the ready to load lines, indicating that he is loading that customer order. As he assembles the cases etc. he scans each one. When the last item is scanned the printer installed at that lane prints the invoice and the bill of lading. The invoice is included with the shipment and the bill of lading is retained with the others for this shipment, and they are given to the driver at departure.

Things to Note

There are less people. Ned and Joyce have been re-assigned because their jobs have been taken over by the computer. Not only that, but the results of what had previously been expedient, isolated “function” are now vital integrated “information”. The scanning of an item on the conveyor is not just a manually assisted input to the automation of a spur gate, it is a real time status update to the customer order system. It is also an incremental update to an automated part of a complete customer service system which had previously been an isolated manual paperwork sorting process that Joyce had performed between phone calls, crises and coffee breaks.

There is less paper. The only paper in receiving, putaway, picking, replenishing and conveying is the pre-printed barcode label. This is a standard-sized set of adhesive labels which have a set of pre-printed sequential numbers in barcode format. They have no individual significance until they have been attached to a moveable unit (pallet, case, carton, tot) and associated with a purchase order, storage location or customer order. If one is spoiled prior to attachment the only loss is the actual value of that label. Other than that, they are all used, in sequential order as their time comes.

The system is real time. This allows for activities to occur when they need to, such as cycle counts or fixing out of stocks. It allows for a high degree of customer service in the form of cross docking back orders and doing customer order inquiries or additions at any stage in the picking to shipping process. It allows for actual current on hand quantities of inventory to be accurately available, allowing quick customer service in exceptional order requirement situations. It also allows the system to track velocity, which provides a constant input to refining the warehouse stocking locations, with the most ordered items in the most accessible spots, and it allows the system to track usage, and check its accuracy, making the reduction or elimination of slow-moving items an ongoing system by-product. It allows the actual implementation of a location management system. Since it knows now what slot is the best slot for incoming inventory it forces such thing as best use of space and elimination of wasted time looking for slots.

The items are time stamped. This, coupled with the fact that the computer positively knows where everything is at all times, in real time, allows the system to be positively FIFO.

It is way more efficient. What you can’t really see from out walkthrough of the new system is what else is going on. Unseen is the fact that the new system dispatches putaways, replenishments, crossdocks, and case picks in the most efficient manner. The computer has been given a map of the warehouse and a standard time for each activity. Based this the computer optimizes labor efficiency. Coupled with the inherent efficiency of knowing positively where to put the next incoming item and where it is when it needs to be retrieved the computer’s contribution to labor efficiency is significant.

Quantifying the Business Case

After seeing the way that Typical Wholesale is operating the warehouse currently, and seeing a fictional ideal system, it is apparent there are some major advantages to an automated information system to run their distribution center. The next step is to quantify the business case.

Simply stated, that means to compare the cost of the new system to the dollars to be gained by doing it. If the amount to be gained is favorable when compared to the cost, it would seem reasonable to implement.

Unfortunately, the cost is the easier of the two parts of the equation to quantify, and therefore the easier of the two to focus on with the frequent result being confusion and lack of progress with the sale.

So the focus of this section of the marketing guide is quantifying the dollar results to be expected from an automated warehouse information system and the means of presenting an negotiating agreement to those results.

The base method is to examine every tangible feature offered by the system and state at least one business effect resulting from the feature. If the feature can’t have a one to three word statement of business effect associated with it, then it is not a feature worth discussing. Further, once a one to three word business effect is stated, if it can’t be quantified in terms of some form of measurable dollars, then the business effect is of no use. For example, if the feature is “cross docking” one possible business effect is customer service. Customer service can be stated in terms of some form of increased sales, which can be quantified in terms of expected profit from those sales. The only intangible in this case would remain what the sales increase might be. that can typically be effectively handled by creating a low, medium, high case, and quantify the dollars from each. Similarly, “location management” could be shown to have several business effects; “cube optimization” (reduce offsite rental requirements, do more volume for same capital investment, or delay capital investment for expanded square footage) “labor savings” and “inventory savings”. The purpose of this section and the planning sheets below is to give you a way to gather the necessary functional and financial information to support the investment. Not only can you describe your proposal as a way of doing business that is faster, smarter, better and leaner, you can quantify, at least within ranges, the dollar advantage.

Pogo Was His Hero

2010-01-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

Dave was a member of the RF Trio. The Trio was one of the major themes in Screen Saver. When Dave died a couple of years ago I wrote this memorial. His family preferred the "Dave was born ... Dave always liked ... Dave leaves ..." format. So I have finally decided to publish mine.

Pogo was his hero. Until or unless one reads some volumes of Walt Kelly’s stories of Okefenokee Swamp and its denizens, that statement seems somewhere between meaningless and ridiculous. After such a reading one joins Dave in acknowledging his hero, and acquires a sense of wonder at Dave’s grasp of the absurd.

Music was his essence. When one watches Yo-Yo Ma play the cello it is his face that becomes the center of attention. The contortions and grimaces that accompany (perhaps provide) the verging on heavenly sounds are amazing. When Dave played the banjo similar facial gymnastics were present. And the sounds, while not Bach or Beethoven were equally heavenly.

Versatility was his forte. He excelled at singing, magic tricks, story telling, writing songs, selling appliances, being a fireman, being a health care worker, being an executive administrator, being a father, being a husband, being a friend and being a confidante. He was about as complete as any individual human ever is.

Whimsical was his spirit. When much younger he named a group of neighborhood friends the Simpson Street Marauders. The group still exists.

A real life was his goal. A friend once observed that Dave wished “to navigate the sea of life in an inner tube of happiness while strumming the banjo”. Those of us who knew him think that he succeeded, and have a deep admiration for his success.

But that life has ended. With Dave’s passing, the other side now has two Simpson Street Marauders. That is joyous news for the other side.

Maybe; Maybe; Maybe

2009-12-29T18:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe…

Another Four Letter Word

2009-12-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

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

But here it is.

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

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

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

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

I bought the guy a drink.

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

Gross Domestic Product

2009-12-12T16:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

And that would not be good.

Invisibility

2009-12-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

And, momentarily, a cheeseburger and a coke appeared.

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

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

But what the hell.

Staying Power Chapter Two: Drawstrings Again

2009-12-06T18:11:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying Power Chapter One : The Drawstrings

2009-12-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

Folk Song

2009-12-03T13:18:00.001-08:00

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

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

The video was shot in the Paris Aquarium in 2007.

SOS

2009-12-02T16:16:00.001-08:00

SOS

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

Ingredients

8 ounces of ground beef

2 or 3 garlic cloves

Olive oil (just a little)

1/8^th cup of flour

Whipping cream

Lea and Perrins

English muffin

Cooking

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

My Pig Illustration

2009-12-01T16:58:00.001-08:00

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

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

Pink Dunes

2009-12-01T16:47:00.001-08:00

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

COIN War

2009-12-01T15:27:00.001-08:00

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

But back to COIN.

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

But all of that is just background information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War Surtax

2009-12-01T09:46:00.001-08:00

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

Moving on, therefore, I am curious about something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RF Trio Redux

2009-12-01T07:35:00.001-08:00

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

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

Lady Bugs in December

2009-12-01T06:25:00.001-08:00

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

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

More Lady Bugs

2009-12-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

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

Lady Bugs

2009-11-30T17:58:00.001-08:00

Opportunity Lost

2009-11-29T18:11:00.001-08:00

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

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

Too bad – it was an opportunity lost.

The RF Trio

2009-11-29T17:17:00.001-08:00

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

La Seine

2009-11-29T07:44:00.001-08:00

This is an excerpt from chapter ten of Screen Saver.

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

Re-Run

2009-11-28T17:01:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stasis

2009-11-27T14:30:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

Les Chastaignes

2009-11-21T07:53:00.001-08:00

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

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

Genesis

2009-11-20T13:37:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Chesapeake

2009-11-18T14:45:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screen Saver: Was Anybody Paying Any Attention?

2009-11-16T18:01:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

Myth

2009-11-15T17:09:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

The Day After The Day Before

2009-11-14T19:04:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Food Fight

2009-11-13T16:00:00.001-08:00

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

How Many More?

2009-11-13T14:01:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potpourri

2009-11-11T18:05:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

Not paying taxes, and
Having a social security account.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Picture For The Blog One Slot Down

2009-11-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Ethics of Road Kill

2009-11-07T10:04:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

Recipe to follow.

The Price of Fame’s Lack

2009-11-06T06:27:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

So did I.

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

But there is more.

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

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

Here is what I have been told about "platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Health Care

2009-11-05T17:56:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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