Yucca Flats

Topolobampo

2012-01-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Wherein Reloj and Chico decompress from a trip south.

Reloj - Tremonius
Julio's courtyard
1968

When we passed Cotulla out on the freeway, Reloj said, I'll start. He hadn't spoken since the border, but I knew what he meant.

Okay, I said, I'll fill in some history.

We always stopped by to see Rosamaria on our way back home from Mexico to that flat lifeless prairie village we were born into and perpetually burdened with. She was our decompression chamber; we tested our sense and sensibility, even our consciousness, by bouncing stories off Rosamaria. Is this right? Does this sound logical?

She had a Masters in Sociology and was close to another in Archaeology, or the other way around. If Rosamaria said it was so, we could make book on it.

We earnestly hoped she would validate Da Informer.

She was very sweet and pretty and welcoming and she had the greatest patience with us. We stayed on usually and when we finally continued on up the road she always seemed sorry to see us go.

We had met her on a trip down the central Highlands one year. She suggested we could not call a dog down there in ingles, and she proved it. "Ande," and he did.

First she wanted to know how Da Informer came to be called that.

He's an injun, said Reloj, a Huematlana, from the escarpment south of Los Mochis. He waits on tables at Julio's, always wears a torn shirt. It's faded purple or green but always it's torn in front. We call him that because he will trot out his font of knowledge for us. He speaks five languages, he tells us, "Mira," he will say, then ticks them off on his fingers.

Sometimes it's German and sometimes Italian but always English and never Spanish.

He will quiz us. Ask us how do you say "camisa" in German. Wait. We'll guess, Shazzein?" He'll shake his head. No, no. Always the first fake guess he shakes off. "Arbrowshein?" and he'll nod, smile, pat us on the back, well done! "What ees `escoba' een alemania?" So we sang

Sveepinbrum Sveepinbrum a dat ist un Sveepinbrum

He quickly agreed, nodding, patting us on the back.

"See, we engage only with street characters in La Republica, and we pretend we're in thirties gangster flicks. The one who carries the lottery tickets is Da Ticket, the one walking about with a portable AM receiver is Da Wire, the one called Da Head has an enormous hat size. It goes on. The idiot kid who tries to figure out Cat's Cradle on Morelos is Da String."

Da String

Rosamaria is fascinated. We warm up now.

Julio's 1968

There is a dogleg in Julio's, so Da Informer is out of sight behind the restroom when he services the tables at the back. He keeps his stash of customers' unfinished drinks back there, and swigs from it whenever he can. It's a highball of whatever they were drinking; beer mostly, but sometimes whiskey from under the bar.

Julio's. A "gentlemens" club, in fact that's what's enscribed on the frosted glass door of the john you see in the drawing by Chico: "gentlemans." Inside was strange graffitti: "Claw of Fis." We never figured that one out, but we're still remembering it all this time after, which is what literature is all about, ain't it?

Javier Solis, Reloj, Chico, Tremonius
Julio's Courtyard; 1968

You say he's Huematlan?

Yes, see, that's the story. Da Informer tells us he has been everywhere; England, Italy, Europe (he thinks it's another country) and Germany, and you ask him when, he'll always say, "Een 1938." He worked on a rancho in Montana for five years once? When? "Een 1938." We Figure that was his annus mirabilis, 1938.

It's also the year he went to work for La Logia.

The tribe, he tells us, speaks no Spanish. Only, as we know, Da Informer is multilingual. So when they hired the Indians, he became their chief, El Jefe, because he could translate from Spanish for them. What they didn't know is, he spoke German.

Why would he need to know German? And what's La Logia?

I'm getting to that, says Reloj. This was an elaborate cavern carved from the rock in a cove of the sea. It's well hidden, of course, and you will see why this is so. You drive down the coast where no road is and then you park and you walk where there is no path and you come upon a clearing. In 1938, according to Da Informer, there were cablecars on wires, two of them, which descended to the mouth of the cave, alternately, a hundred feet below, and back again. Huge winches run with rare electricity. Down there was an entrance to the cave below sea level but guarded from the surf by a rocky ridge. The rock itself opened for you once the car touched the rock.

Inside La Logia was a very large system of corridors. One wing led to an undersea U-Boat ramp. That's right; the Germans had established a secret hidden port to trade information and goods with their allies.

Reloj paused to let that sink in. Rosamaria had that beatific expression of hers. Noncommittal.

"Topolobampo," said Reloj -

You must cross the desert to the north in order to reach the coast, for in those days no highway transited the Sierras in the north. You enter the Republic at Nogales then drive to Hermosillo for the climb over the mountain called Dorsal Diablo (Devil's Spine). Your objective is Guaymas, but you might turn west as you head south along the coast, at Los Mochis, for the run to a rocky high isthmus, Topolobampo. There is no reason to do this, but if you do, you will travel over the high prairie of the Huematla.

We saw that the last trip, to Mazatlán. We were bleary with dirty red and it rained, but we saw Topolobampo.

On screw-top vino?

Yes, yes, very effective research aid.

And which of you first mentioned Topolobampo in Julio's?

We did; that's what prompted Informer to tell his story, the coincidence. We had made a run out to the coast from Los Mochis the summer before. Now, I said, here's what I know, not by seeing, only by hearing from Da Informer

You come to the end of that prairie like an escarpment over the sea, and the road dips down and plies a narrow path to what would be a knobby island but for the thin finger connecting it with the mainland, an isthmus, then, and the road bends to parallel the mainland, and a meadow sits there over a grim and dark bay, and after the country rests for a moment, the road turns west again and climbs a sheer route to the high point.

There was a church there once, like a lighthouse out on the barren prominence, and it isn't there now, and that's another tragic tale for another time.

But were you to follow the mainland south from the isthmus, past the unspeakable dank swells where the surf whips around dark boulders way down below, and still you would climb, a hundred feet above the sea, and when the road stopped, so would you, and you would then go where you hadn't thought of going, where you had no need to be, and you would end up in a clearing visible from no other point on the trail, and you see it then.

"Okay," I said.

In 1938 there was a cable housing, with a sort of roundhouse, and the business lowered and raised two cablecars down to the base of the cliff, a haven, a cove behind a ridge of great boulders to keep out the sea. And only when you have ridden the car down to the cove far below does the mouth of the cave open for you. You descend, and you enter the cave, through steps over ground which, from the time when you stop at the brush along the mainland road, you cannot see the way either forward or back, where you have been or where you are going - you pass into a massive cavern, part natural, part excavated, without any coordinated pattern, or even a suggestion of its purpose. You go there because you know of the secret of La Logia, and no other cause or accident even would convey you over that desolate country.

The Grutas Garcia in Nuevo Leon are larger, but not so ornate. The setting for La Logia was a monster labyrinthine cutting into solid rock which ran for miles. A portion had been machined so that with heavy glass you could gaze up from the bottom of the bay. From the way Da Informer described it, La Logia was a palace under the rock, with carpeting and cut glass and even ornate tapestry on the walls.

"And what was the purpose of this La Logia?"

A secret meeting for Germans. It's no secret the church was always looking for nasty allies to protect their holdings. Some 68 years before, they had conspired to place that French puppet on the throne, you know. At the time of the Revoluccion, the church held over half the land in Mexico, you know. They only wanted property and power, then as now. They played very nice with the fascists and Nazis when their time onstage came about. And it's reported that one Calles, the Presidente deposed by Cárdenas, was not above secret conjurings to restore himself to power.

Lázaro Cárdenas was the current president in 1938; an ardent socialist, some say Stalinist, and he nationalized both the oil and railroad industries. He welcomed refugees from the Spanish Civil War, as well as Trotsky. It was a grand time for socialists.

All these forces converged at La Logia.

Inside the dining quarters, a large globe of a room with high ceilings of glass from which you could lean back in overstuffed chairs and gaze at sharks and skittery glittery fishies, Informer and the crew were serving a typical table of a fat priest and two German U-Boat officers. They were laughing uproariously at a story told by the priest, who had observed during a flash flood in the hills south of Monterrey a pelado who had no legs, caught by the storm. The poor one navigated by means of a small cart he propelled with wood blocks, and he had no means to escape the sudden swells, as the rains are infrequent in Nuevo Leon and drainage is thus not a bother. The poor one looked in panic at the priest, who shrugged.

"I should carry you?"

It was a very funny story, as they all agreed it is useless to waste time and effort on one who could not do for himself.

Some weeks after this event of the laughing priest and the Nazis, with the same visitors again around the big table of La Logia, with two federales in attendance, a sudden and severe bump rattled the cavern.

The lights went out. In the confusion, Da Informer grabbed the nearest lantern and led his crew of Indios down the corridor to another cave mouth and out into the sunlight. It was very quickly this was done.

The cablecars hung lifeless on the wires. It was very still, except for the Indios, who filed up their own switchback trail in the rock. (The Huematla were not allowed to waste the power of the cablecars, of course.) In their white uniforms, they looked like smoke ascending out of the bay. They had lived on this land for many generations and they knew what was coming.

Before Da Informer had made it twenty feet above the cave, the priest burst out onto the sand, blinking in the sudden light, then gaping at the retreating peasants with great distress.

"Hello, my children! Are you going for help? What are you doing?"

And Da Informer called back, "I should carry you?"

Informer told us his feet were sloshed by the surge which had brushed the ridge out of way far down below like pebbles, then sloshed back to storm the cavern. Today the ocean stands guard at a depth of fifty feet where late the mouth of La Logia had been.

We waited.

The description of the Nazi uniforms, I added. They were quite exact. How would an illiterate Indio ever find images of old WWII uniforms unless he had seen them, just as he said?

“Maybe from old movies?”

"C'mon, old movies. What old movies?"

"Well, there was a series beginning in the forties, called Diabolique. It carried an important semaphore of the culture; the evil snake of the world lurking under the ground, the giant eagle to attack it from the air. One version posed a wife and mistress conspiring to off a cruel and brutal husband. It's central to Indio mythology."

"Yes, we read all that in Kerouac even."

"And one of those movies has a plot that is on all fours with the one you just laid out for me."

We sat stunned. Blinking. Not moving.

"And, also ... I know it was a bleary day and you were not as alert as I've seen you when you visited Topolobampo. The city is on the Bahia de Ohuira. Large bay, however, not, alas, an ocean. When you arrived there, you were still about fifty miles shy of the coast. Freshwater. Any fifty-mile long underground tunnel to the Sea of Cortez would've affected the ecology, I should think."

"Oh, and, the Huematla? They lived in Chiapas."

Rosamaria made it a point to radiate sadness at our going.

Driving home now, across the flat wastes. Country laid out like acres of manure come planting time. Long highway runs to the horizon, and it looks like a pool just before sky, but you drive all day and you never reach it.

Everything is all about same. Each minute designed like every other, a web of diamonds … or coal, rather.

"Sure good to be home," said Reloj. We laughed again then, for the first time in miles.

@JohnCleese, 12/14/11 9:46 AM

2011-12-20T19:17:00.001-08:00

John Cleese (@JohnCleese)
12/14/11 9:46 AM
I see Yoko Idle's been moaning (again), about the royalties he had to pay the other Python's for Spamalot. Apparently he paid me "millions"

Tim Bowden is twiddling his thumbs on his iPhone 4S!

Celluloid Solidarity

2011-11-18T08:57:00.001-08:00

Meet John Doe. Mr Deeds Goes to Washington. On the Waterfront. Every Molly Ringwall flick. Titanic.

All Hollywood movies are populist. In a newsgroup, I once asked for a title of one feature in which the villains were proles and the stellar characters were plutocrats.

La Cérémonie was the only one we could come up with, and it's a French film made from a British novel.

I once watched Z in an El Paso theatre. The crowd hooted joyfully when the colonels were routed by a Democratic upsurge. And then left the movie and continued voting for facsimiles of the fascists.

It's rare that dream sentiment is transferred to the street. The sixties, say, and now.

Tim Bowden is twiddling his thumbs on his iPhone 4S!

Ornithology

2011-11-15T13:43:00.001-08:00

We stop on the trail when we hear the clamor of crow.

When there is a bustle and squawk in one cypress, it means Hawk; lots of times it does.

There he is! Him just sitting there on his branch, looking all innocent. What's all the ruckus? He seems to ask. The crow dive bomb him, coming as close as they dare, two or three do, while the rest keep up the alarum.

They will haze the hawk all the time he is in their region, and harass him as he leaves. Why do they hate hawks so? Not just crow, but gulls, even jays. I have seen a hawk high up hounded by a single towhee.

It's because the hawk attacks the hatchlings; the chicks are easy prey, or would be, were it not for the community. They aren't really sophisticated, these flighty communities; they aren't Catholic and don't belong to any sick crackpot child-abusing cults and, to them, Pen State is just more fly-over country. They just cannot be corrupted, by profit, prestige, or perversity, into protecting child predators.

So set up a bird feeder in your yard. After all, our flying friends have much to teach us about genuine civilized behavior.

Barbarian Nurseries

2011-11-15T13:21:00.001-08:00

"The best books tell you what you already know." - Ezra Pound

The first best book was Day of the Locust with its revelations I was just discovering about the nature and practice of the refugees to the Golden Land, which numbered me.

Those desperadoes from Bayonne and Dalhart fully expected to shake off their limitations with their previous existences back home, and assume among the blessed immortals their separate and equal station in utopia.

However, their limitations followed them out, not being strictly speaking geographic, and eventually they grew weary of the oranges hanging on the branch and them waves flopping in all day long, and sought a deeper meaning in superficial searching.

Cooking kills, as death comes from ingesting the dead. Your constipation results from blocked energy, and illness means a stumped chakra.

Next they morphed into a more dangerous animal, as any beast will so short of satisfaction. If I'm not all I should be, there's a conspiracy afoot.

The Barbarian Nurseries continues the parable into today. This is a tale much like that of the Wallendas, caught in a human pyramid under the big top way up on a high wire when it slipped.

The slippage in the present case was the recession, which brought down the lucrative start-up which had planted the Torres-Thompsons way up on a high hill in an exclusive gated community overlooking the Pacific.

They didn't take it well.

They fought; they withdrew into private enclaves, each believing the other had been left at home to mind the children. But only the maid was left with the two children.

After four days, the groceries were gone, as were the maid's options. None of the numbers on the fridge worked, as the palace was an insular enclave, and calling the police was not an option, as she had not the legal justification for being where she was.

So she leaves the house when the groceries are gone with the children. The sad white relics see her, those who rember a white utopia ruined not by their own vices and lack of resources, but all these Others moving into the pristine neighborhoods of their false memories.

Those who do the work, the gardeners and maids and field hands, the handymen and menials, they understand how the privileged set must blame them for their own neglect and self-centered agonisties. They know it, all right.

It all makes perfect sense to everyone involved, if you remember the principals are not really a part of this movie except as actors in someone else's screenplay.

Bob Steele and the Pony Express Mount

2011-10-16T07:27:00.001-07:00

You learn how to walk and talk young so you can do it automatically. It's called pre-conscious. You have it so deeply ingrained by age 20, according to William James, that a settler can move to Manhattan at age 21 from Germany and retain that Teutonic accent for the rest of his days.

It's why I look funny mounting my bicycle. It's on accounta Bob Steele.

He was an authentic B-western cowboy who would set his horse off at a gallup while holding onto the saddle horn, just hanging there like a sack of potatoes. He'd thrust those boots forward and hold 'em there for a dramatic moment. Then he'd swing 'em down to bounce off the ground and spring into the saddle.

I draw funny looks when I giddup my cruiser like Cowboy Bob used to, but I can't help it. It's ingrained. I could no more swing my leg over the top tube at a standstill than old' Bob could ride side-saddle.

Inside Jobs

2011-10-13T13:51:00.001-07:00

In the 11-11 Atlantic is a bit on insider trading which reports how well certain Senators did during one period studied. They cleared 20% profit above professional traders, that's how well they did. Pretty good for old dumb clucks who know nothing about the market. Of course, knowing a certain product is due to be recalled or a large federal contract awarded doesn't hurt.

So what? is the theme of the article. Who's hurt? After all, those who out of ignorance bought defective goods or sold assets due to drastically increase in value had already given their brokers orders to sell or buy.

This is utterly incomprehensible to me.

Return with me now to those thrilling days when Mickey the Gimp traded a '53 Pontiac to Blast for a two-stroke Triumph. It was a straight swap; Blast did not want to spend another winter blowing in a blue norther and Mickey sought the excitement two wheels would mean. Other inducements were not disclosed.

Insider information not shared by Mickey was discovered after the sale when Blast, realizing his new ride was low in the radiator, filled it with water which he soon noted was spilling on his boots. The Pontiac had a busted block from one long winter without antifreeze.

Now, the Gimp could not claim Blast was not harmed by the insider information, although both sides of the bargain were adults in more or less full possession of sufficient faculties sufficient to tie shoes and drive Pontiacs. So what Mickey the Gimp would claim as they prepared to go to court was, he had divulged all information, including about the busted block, prior to the sale.

It was a lie, of course, but what else could he do? Blast had gone along with his daddy to break into the barn where the mortobike was stored and so nullify the trade. Daddy was busted, and the case due for trial, and Mickey (and I, for some reason) were set to testify before the Grand Jury.

Another witness with nothing to add was the Gimp's lady, Petunia, who backed up her man, declaring he had fully reported the deficiencies of the Pontiac prior to the swap. "Oh, yes," she righteously chirped, "You always tell everything about what you're selling!"

That was too much for one jurist.

"Hon, I'm sure there's a whole lot you learned in school, but apparently none of it was hoss trading."

So who's harmed by insider trading? It helps to remember the market is not just casting confetti to the winds and hoping for the best. Someone sells because someone buys. And one who knows anything about goods sold which, were it known to the trading partner, would affect the price, is just another Mickey the Gimp.

Oh, yeah. Blast's daddy was acquitted on a technicality, that being he was a manager of the sheriff's filling station and the Gimp was just a punk kid, like me.

Rubaiyat on Lake Texoma

2011-10-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

Once there was a playground made by a dam of the Red some miles upstream of our little village, and it was our own riviera. Mostly it was just a big puddle and not particularly scenic, but the water was cool on a hot summer day and it had a muddy verge which passed for a beach in our zone.

Now, Reloj and I were on one of those verges a summer day with the great Gina Delight. On occasion, most any occasion, Reloj would draw cartoons. I have a collection of them and they are effective and charming captures of moments and moods, as here.

Creating this drawing riffs on a play of the famous loaf of bread sequence in Omar Khayyám, in composition and text. Reloj did these very quickly and then passed on to something else. Gina and I did something, too, but I have forgotten what was my contribution.

Everyone, I realize, will not realize the import of that moment in time out on the verge. I am, in that regard, perfectly unique.

This is an accurate current depiction of what Lake Texoma never was.

Let's Talk iSomerhing!

2011-10-07T20:52:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Let's Talk iSomerhing!

Preliminary sales figures. Can't find live stream; following live blogs. Using both iMacs, but updates are sluggish everywhere because of the volume.

iMessage - pushed to all your devices. We're talking iOS5 now. Reminders - location based. "Remind me to pick up laundry when I'm in the neighborhood."

Deep integration with Twitter. Better quality photos & better ways to edit on device.

Keep it coming!

Reader on Safari, which bookmarks pages to read later. I use it on the iMac. Love it!! When Cloud launches, all devices synced automatically. Take a photo, shoot a video, it's already home waiting on your iMac when you're there. Locate family & friends also with new Find My iPhone.

Now iTunes Match ... The iCloud ships on 12 Oct & iTunes Match sometime this month.

Break promo - iCloud @ 10:45. 10:50: iPod touch?

Cloud has to ship?? It's already "out there." available to use and sync on the 12th?

Probably. Figure live-action thumbing on-site.

Now iPod break. IPhone! iPhone 4S - Retina Display. Same design with metal band. I'm hoping this is the overseas market the 4S is intended for. A45 chip, like the iPad. 7x faster graphics. Talk about games. Something called Infinity Blade 2 available 1 Dec.

Battery life for the 4S. 8 hrs 3G talk; 10 hrs video.

Dual antennas. Better call quality & faster data: 5.8 up, 14.4 down. Rivals claim those numbers for 4G.

CDMA & GSM unified into 'single world phone.'

New camera system. 8 Meg sensor that shoots 3264 x 2448. Backside illumination (sounds like Repug debates) adds 72% more light. Hybrid IR filter for better color accuracy. 5 element lens offers 30% more sharpness; f/2.4 aperture. Face detection & better auto-white balance. Significantly faster camera. Shoots 1080 HD video. (Applause for that.) Video image stabilization.

AirPlay mirroring to the iPhone. Voice. Siri, the "best feature yet."An Intelligent Assistant. Talk to your device like you would a secretary. "Do I need a raincoat today?" "Sir, it looks like rain." Siri understands the concept of raincoat. "What's the time in Paris." Verbal answer with clock image. "Wake me at 4:30 AM tomorrow." "How'a the NASDAQ doing?" Verbal reply with graphic of the board. (This is a live demo, understand.)

Partnered with Yelp for restaurant reviews. Ask Siri: "Give me directions to Coit Tower." Siri will read your text messages. Text while driving with Siri! "Remind me to call the wife when I leave work." Siri sets up a geo - fence around you and reminds you when you go through it. "Search Wikipedia for Neal Armstrong." Dictionary searches, calculations. "What's the exchange rate on the Euro right now?" "How many days until Christmas?" Siri takes dictation; is both conversational and contextual.

Just sent two screen grabs, the second with the prices. Had to go to the iMac to do it because iCloud ain't here yet.

The 4S available on AT&T, Verizon & Sprint. Pre-orders begin Friday; ship date the 14th, in accordance with rumors. The 64GB is $399. (This phone I'm now holding will be free!)

Tim Cook returns to sum up. Apple puts all the leading components together in one package. And nobody else can do that. That's it!

Do you copy?

Float Fanaticism

2011-10-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

Lonesome kayaker

A glacier lays on the side of Muir Pass, with something terribly violent underneath. Through a break of a hundred feet or so in majestic ice we glimplse a raging river burst forth like a giant snake and then lapse back into its lair. It is fierce and furious, and makes even the Bruce Lee video at the Come In And Eat restaurant with the excellent sandwiches Adan turned us onto seem tame.

We throught of kayaks.

They are sometimes on these rivers, although I never understood just where they put in and how they could survive the class XXV rapids we saw. What do they do, and how do they do it?

We're breaking below Dusy Lakes when one comes up the trail, walkiing. It isn't your ordinary slimline jobby, neither, but a broad fiberglass model about the size of a funny car in drag racing. It has legs underneath, connected to a very stoic individual who plods and smiles briefly if at all and has heard every possible comment on the subject of carrying a Buick from nine thousand feet to nearly twelve thousand and then six miles down to South Lake. His backpack is latched in the cabin of his craft.

Now, Lady Kale and I, we've tried kayaking on a couple of occasions, and I have to say I have yet to disover its charm. But I'll tell you what, it is not humanly possible to derive satisfaction from riding on water to sufficiently compensate you for hiking over Bishop Pass with your boat.

The Players in the Game

2011-10-03T09:47:00.001-07:00

It is very interesting to me when literature or film prefigures events, like in Network, where an amorphous amalgam of impotent rage was channeled by a madman on tv.

Or, Double Jeopardy, featuring the luminous Ashley Judd as a wife whose husband stages his own death so that she is sent up the river so he can run off with his mistress. In a call to her child from prison she discovers the slimeball is alive, but any attempt by her to convince the prison authorities of the fact will be seen by the parole board as a lack of remorse. She must play the sorry shuffle, like celebrities whenever they're caught - but is informed by a knowing cellmate that she could blow her creep husband away in Times Square at high noon and never be charged due to the eponymous law which holds she cannot be charged twice for the murder.

Reality, as we know from following politics today, doesn't really matter very much.

Doc Daneeka

Take Doc Daneeka in Catch 22, another tale of how large be our shadow on the ground, how puny we are beneath the stars. Doc was on the manifest for a small plane which went down in the Mediterranean with all hands during WWII.

And so first was the casualty report, then the transfer of words and orders towards Central Command, then the grim notice to the next-of-kin, a Death Certificate, the processing of the life insurance to the widow, the ginning up of the Death Compensation checks, the color guard at the grave site, the notices and memorials and testimonials and dedications -

- none of which was Doc Daneeka himself, who protested from the first he had in fact missed that flight and was actually standing before the cadre on the scene from the first moment of the travesty of the tragedy, able to derail, or even hinder.

His wife contacted the War Department to report she was very comfortable now, thanks be to all, however, if they might stop some madman who kept bothering the family with claims of actually being her deceased husband, which lord knows they missed terribly but were quite well provided for otherwise, she would be even more grateful. The War Department intervened. The Doc eventually gave up.

in recent times, a rightwing zealot on the "Supreme" Court offered the opinion that all the process and practice and procedure of court review is a theatrical presentation, a shadow show, a production.

“This court,” Scalia pointed out, “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

The Supreme Court has never held that due process in death sentence appeals, if they be conducted in accordance with judiciary standard and held out regally by august guys in long robes in stately mien, is in any way affected by actual guilt or innocence.

In other terms, performance is all, and life and liberty not even a player in the game. This point, that the Court has never given any weight to earnest realtime guilt, was confirmed by a more sober head than Scalia - Jeffrey Toobin, professor and author, recently on CNN.

it is not whether we win or lose, pass or fail, live or die, but is that pleading double-spaced in 10-pt Times New Roman?

Ah, the more it changes,
The more ... it stays the same,
And the hand ... just rearranges,
The players ... in the game.

Nostradamas; Al Stewart

The Snows of August

2011-10-03T08:49:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

The Snows of August

My idea of camping is to settle into a community, meet the neighbors, maybe check out local schools. However, the prevailing notion seems to be along the lines of the itinerary of a very nervous narco boss; that is, we never slept in the same spot twice (although, like turtles, we did carry our housing with us.)

What manner of critter migrates over great heights with barriers of snow fields, raging streams, boulder paths, to sleep on the ground with whatever bedding he can provide, feed on what he can carry, wash by plunging into frozen lakes, and hide his offal in the woods? A resident of Devil's Island maybe, or a Zen monk? Yes, and also backpackers.

We go to a section of country, the Eastern Sierras, in order to hike mountains providing spectacular scenery caught in glimpses while treading gracelessly (me) or agile (our guides) amidst mighty boulders and swift streams and great fields of snow. It is not the place for stumbling.

Briefly, like in basic military training or your average cult, you empty out everything that has meant you previously. You are different now. You splash into icy lakes in the high country. You cross over snow fields and racing currents. You sleep on pads on the hard cold ground. You can't find service for your iPhone.

Mostly you are very tired.

We are utterly amazed how pristine are the mountains. No graffiti, not even a gum wrapper on the trail. It is not easy to arrive in this environment, so everyone is most respectful. Contrast the lower section of Arroyo Seco.

Lady Kale and I are standing at a crossroads. Which? I follow one path with a sign marked 'TRAIL.' That seems a good bet.

The other is fifty feet from the parking lot, visible through the brush around South Lake (the most splendid view of the entire journey), so obvious our guides who have with great patience and vigor have ushered us through the long days have not seen the necessity of pointing out these last few feet of our journey.

We really aren't very good pathfinders, especially when we're so very weary. And yet the first plan for this hike called for us to traverse Bishop Pass and down to the lake, a distance of 11 miles, all alone.

We'd still be up among them rocky crags had not good sense prevailed.

Flung Gravel Chime

2011-09-22T18:50:00.001-07:00

EXTERIOR - DUSK

Clouds, dark, moving fast and low over a seaside village as seen from above. ominous rumbles in the sky. Three figures can be identified moving up the hill towards a parapet in the foreground. A statue of Zeus in his might is visible as we track back for the approach.

They are in raingear; a British machintosh. There are two young blades and they're obviously contending for the attention of the striking lady, who is apparently used to it all. She has the radiant expression of one eternally amused by human folly.

The rain hits sudden now, and hard, and they hurry under the awning of the pantheon of the library. Other statues are scattered about the porch, copies of great noble Greeks. The boys make use of their environs for their seduction rite.

"Shall gods be said to thump the clouds
When clouds are cursed by thunder,
Be said to weep when weather howls?
Shall rainbows be their tunics' colour?"

One mimes cowering before the weather with an arm about Zeus.

"When it is rain where are the gods?
Shall it be said they sprinkle water
From garden cans, or free the floods?
Shall it be said that, venuswise,
An old god's dugs are pressed and pricked,
The wet night scolds me like a nurse?"

The rival takes the other side and they grin at one another past the god between. They are so very clever, by their own estimations, with just the right pitch of irrelevant homage to the classics, so very effective in high school.

"It shall be said that gods are stone."

She shoves, and Zeus falls face forward onto the concrete he stood upon. The blades leap in some alarm.

"Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground, flung gravel chime?
Let the stones speak
With tongues that talk all tongues."

During her speech a siren grows to a shriek up the hill. The boys become conscious of it and they scatter like leaves.

Bright red lights swirl. An auto door opens. The torches shoot here and there. Light upon the flung gravel. The faces of the cops turn this way and that.

Athena behind them with a radiant wry countenance stands in a brown mackintosh where late the immortal stood. She has the ironic expression of one who knows the dance.

Finding nothing out of place, the cops move off, leaving the gods of the Parthenon as they found them.

Dominos Nabiscum

2011-09-06T15:53:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Dominos Nabiscum

There is somewhere a fancy by C S Lewis about a gentleman in the Reading Room of the London Library, or somewhere like it, who idly sets himself to contemplate the Almighty for the next few moments. Satan is nearby, of course, and endeavors to thwart our boy, naturally, and the objective is accomplished by the simplest and most elementary of expedients.

The Evil One implants the notion of lunch.

Outrageous fraud, depending as it does on the ridiculous notion that careful contemplation leads one to accept into reality some gory fables from a vicious tribe of ancient vagabonds.

Consider the logic of one called St Thomas, known as Acquinas. He wanted to make his Christian mum happy, so he sat one night in dreadful contemplation. There were any number of obstacles to belief, of course.

And so he lines them up, like dominos. If I tip the first one, the one that says Jesus is God is Master of All, then just look how all the rest, the Virgin Birth and the Assuncian and the Holy Eucharist and the other sacraments, fall into place. If there be any question about any domino, you can easily explain it by the one that went before, but about the first there can be no question. If #45 falls. See #44. Easy as $π$ .

it was good enough for Thomas, and his mother was elated, although it wouldn't have convinced your average fourth grader.

In an online forum some years back I mused on the Council of Trent and their proclamation that the holy wafer and wine of communion do not represent, stand in for, or indicate Christ, but he is "really, truly, substantially present." If that is so, thinks I, then a very interesting DNA sample might result from a number of Sunday stools.

It does not mean what tthe words say the Eucharist means, offered a Catholic. He went into a DaDa spiel to demonstrate black is really white in case of official embarrassment.

He threw in some Aristotle, for good measure. They like to do that. Old Thomas wanted to bring the gospels into line behind the Greeks. But, he was told, Aristotle said the world ever was and ever shall be. And we say god created it. Well, said Thomas, both are true, for did not God create honky tonk angels? And are they not immortal?

The argument ends there, for in the mind of anyone who has contended with the great Christian theologian to this point occurs such terms as "fire" and "stake."

It has always been the last domino in theological discussion with the Holy Hierarchy. It is brutal, it is final, and absolutely no part of it is derived by logically musing on great matters before lunch in the London Library Reading Room.

Riki, Don't Lose That Number

2011-08-30T20:17:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Riki, Don't Lose That Number

We sat hours at Denny's that year because we were poor and the waitresses talked to us and coffee was cheap. We took not a step beyond the day.

We were in El Paso because our older responsible brother was there, but he had had quite enough of us and his wife a bit too much. So we had my $45 weekly UI and Reloj's $10 playing drop-in sessions at Lynette's Lounge and rent was $70 monthly and we were depressed sometimes, not often but it dropped on each of us like rain.

We had met a ski bum who worked in a nursing home and he had moved in with the young sweety he didn't treat right and so we took over his apartment and we needed to call him this afternoon, but what was that number again?

I remembered the last four digits but what was the prefix again? Oh, I know! I'll look at prefixes in the phone book and see do I recognize the one I want. That's easy.

I go to the alcove and open the directory. Can't be that many; El Paso had a population of 350K in 1972.

Oh, here it is! 354. That's it. But wait a minute. The rest of the number is following along!

I am looking at the complete number I want, under a Maldonado listing. I am so amazed by this.

We tell the crew who lives with the ski bum of our discovery. I wanted to jostle my memory about your prefix, but look what I found! Your number is listed under somebody named Maldonado. It's the most amazing coincidence! There must be some amazing spectral connection somewhere, ey?

A roommate went to report the listing to Ma Bell. She later told the others she didn't believe me, but her version was even more unlikely than the actual story.

It was a sign; that's what it was. I don't have it deciphered yet, is all.

Kissing Zelda

2011-08-25T19:32:00.001-07:00

“Every mind is a museum wherein is stored under glass various moments to represent features, foibles, fallacies which must be forever retained and shouldn’t be.” - Temple Grafton

One evening in a Soho loft, or an Upper East Side apartment, during a wild and raucous party, or rather on break from the tumult inside, a certain young man in fast company was having the time of his life. Out on the fire escape, he was kissing Zelda Fitzgerald.

The time was the decade after the first Great War and the flu pandemic following hard upon perhaps as a consequence of the psychotic slaughter of untold millions. But this was the era of celebration for the survivors.

Zelda was probably the most famous flapper in the world; at least, she became so. Her husband was a writer and would figure among the grand Lost Generation expatriates who would inhabit the Latin Quarter in story and song from that time forth. Zelda would go mad and die horribly in an asylum fire.

But this night was sparkling with promise of a new day coming with splendor and accomplishment and maybe more kissing. The one who kissed Zelda was probably a stringer for a new poetry magazine or a writer for an out-of-town paper, could maybe be detected should you care to look up the name in snapshots of the lions of the Left Bank in various memoirs. I don’t remember his name and frankly don’t care to try and find it; the job of memory after all is to shape events to purpose and dreary old records tend to dilute good stories rather than enhance them.

The morning after the kissing of Zelda our young frog was a prince striding on W 65th toward the Broadway bus stop, presuming there was a bus running there and he was headed to it. And a commotion ahead caught his eye.

For who was this but the famous F Scott Fitzgerald running for a bus. Our prince quickened his step, not to catch the bus, which had been on point of leaving, but simply because he was now part of the literary set represented by the one who just managed to halt the transit and cause the door to slide open for him.

And then, even before he recognized the regal figure nonchalantly following along behind her husband on the walk, the prince was at a gallop.

“ZELDA! ZELDA!” he screamed as he raced on.

The princess, upon obtaining the last step onto the conveyance, magisterially turned around to see who was shouting her name. Gazed full upon the prince, sprinting towards her from 3/4 block away.

Turned once more to the dark interior, entered, the door swung shut, the bus left.

The frog stopped hopping then. There was no hurry. No further buses could be expected for quite some time.

Frowning all the Way

2011-08-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

I remember the day it happened. Leroi was up at Plaza Drug and Willy snickered, said,

"Welp, I reckon Leroi brung 'im home some bargains last Satiddy."

Then he snorted that laugh of his.

Leroi paused in placing his napkin on his saucer under his cup. Froze a moment.

This was back in the Frantic Fifties, when a small Texas prairie town, like others, was struggling to remain upright in the winds blowing from the north. There were TV antennae going up in every neighborhood, which meant a strange brew of foreign obstacles to community serenity was steeping in the very air. Aliens were everywhere, and throughout my school years, nobody had moved in nor left of any account down all the days.

And now here come Gibson's.

Commercial enterprise was not capitalism as you see it in textbooks or on cable channels today. It was an agreement among neighbors rather than free-form competition, resembling less the Silicon Valley of today than East Germany in the USSR. Clayton's represented three generations in one store, but they would no more venture south into the territory of Dilly Herndon than they would steal corn from Willie's crop. Everyone had a place in life and it was respected, and no one evinced the slightest case of ambition, which would have meant he was dissatisfied with his lot.

Exceptions were marked down like a lame pony here. Those out-of-towners who set up a small grocery store directly across from Clayton's were watched like they drove foreign autos with California plates, and the plate numbers taken down of anybody who ventured over there. The competition didn't last long, but the resentment did, as did the Clayton anger at those who had entered that foul domain. Traitors.

Mrs Brady taught English at the high school, and her husband was the photographer who shot the photos for its annual, the Coushatta. So the year Waldo the science teacher next door opened up his own photography studio on the side was when bad blood on the top floor broke out forever. She would carp about Waldo's encroachment to her students, and he would cook up rancid concoctions in his lab to stink up the top floor. (In some sort of poetic justice, in our realm, Waldo lost his job one year thereafter for taking nude photos of high school girls in that photo shop of his.)

As a kid, I would wonder about old Mr Clayton chatting amiably with a customer he was charging for beans more than they cost, but everyone seemed okay with it, so it went on. Everyone should be able to make a living, we were told. Okay, I said.

Gibson's was the first big-block general store on our horizon, placed between the closest big cities to our west. You bought goods in bulk there and you paid less and you took 'em back if they didn't properly suit. You could take your bicycle out of Western Auto for $25 or from Gibson's for $15. A drill press from Joe Britton Hardware might run you $65, or $35 at Gibson's. It went on like that.

And so you had the pull of economics on the old neighborhood. You were lured by better prices and accomodating return policies and even better service, and restrained by the object of putting good neighbors out of work. It was every family's pocketbook versus a due regard for the citizens of the community we had all been born and raised into for generations. A hard call.

It wasn't even close.

Leroi finally said,

"You mighta seen me over there, Willie, but if you did, you saw me frownin' all the time I was shopping."

The Snows of August

2011-08-20T18:36:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

The Snows of August

Mostly you are very tired.

Lady Kale and I are standing at a crossroads. Which? I follow one path with a sign marked 'TRAIL.' That seems a good bet.

We'd still be up among them rocky crags had not good sense prevailed.

Law South of the Red

2011-08-05T10:51:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Jurisprudence

Up in a room over creaky old floorboards behind the main (and only) courtroom up on the square is where the laws of Clovis County are laid out and sliced up like raw tripe at Clayton's Grocery. It is informal and there is no prolix posturing or excess verbosity or grandstanding at all, because none be needed. There is a certain economy of scale when three folks in any community have the whole county as their exclusive province.

Mildred Baker is a stout lady, steely in appearance yet jovial in mood, slow-moving but quick-witted. Buster Cole is a stately gray eminence suggesting that wonderful term, shabby gentility. He has a large house behind that row of elms on Ninth Street, and his family has always been in the county. The judge nominally in charge of this little conference is Choice Moore, who doesn't have a law degree exactly but, as his lovely wife Miss Ruby the daughter of a circuit judge says, "He inherited all daddy's lawbooks."

Mildred always carries her knitting with her. She wears a conservative blue dress with wide pockets in front, and she might have a code or an opinion or a sweater in there. Woesong remember one time a two-week trial, which is long for our country, was decided while Mildred was knitting. "A perfectly adequate mechanism, I think," was all she said, and Southwest Pump was placed in receivership on that account and everybody gathered up stray papers and went home.

I better give you some background about jurisprudence in our county. Ol' Yachtie Albright backed out of his parking slot down on the square quite early one morning and was rear-ended by Rush Catron. They commenced a yellin' and it all ended up before Judge Moore. Now, this is from the actual transcript.

Yachtie : Judge Moore, he just flat out runned over me!

Rush : Ain't so 'tall, Judge. He backed out right in front of me!

Yachtie : Well, you ain't got no bidness downtown at 7:30 in the morning noways. Keene's don't even open afore 8:00.

Judge: Yeah, Rush, what the devil you doin' out that early?

The law of Clovis County never leaves the personal.

Judge Moore now intones - for he does have a voice for the job, all sonorous and sententious, and he has the square jaw for it, too.

"Mr Beane (County Attorney) ain't gonna file no charges. He says the exit of Mr Dark from the premises followed too hard upon the illegal entry to fortify a charge of breaking and entering. So I guess we're left with your civil case, Mildred."

Mr Cole speaks up grayly here: "Damages usually are assigned to compensate a victim for loss of livelihood, which Mr Dark ain't got, or to supplement a negative impact on his social or family life, which he ain't got neither. I can't see where the loss is, Mildred."

Mildred, she don't even look up. She don't hurry, neither. "The loss is that the man can't walk."

"Well, now, if there's anything at all within reason my client might do to alleviate pain and suffering by Mr Dark, rest assured we are more than willing to meet him half-way. Short of admitting to wrongdoing, of course."

Mildred, she ain't in no hurry, just like I said. "I sat with the boy in the hospital last evening. Just sat with him; you know he don't talk. I think about what it might mean for a kid to lose the use of his legs at an early age like that. I decided that one doesn't have to be an upstanding, if you'll pardon the expression, member of the community in order for that to hurt. For that to hurt real bad."

They all waited. Judge Moore made a squeaky turn in his rolling swivel to peer theatrically at the clock on the wall behind him, but he may as well have just sat still.

"Mr Dark will shake the hand of all parties and settle this here matter for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars American."

That's all she said. It sure was quiet in that little room, with some blinking by the judge and Buster. That case was joined, right then and there. Mildred, you gotta hand it to her, she just sat there serene as you please, like she didn't know she done set off the biggest war our poor county has ever been able to afford.

€

The incident in question - and there is much question, in or out of the courtroom - involved the entry of one Bo Dark, either a half-wit hobo or at the very least a strange mute, to proceed with an incident of breaking and entering into the very bedroom of Temple Grafton. About what caused the sudden expulsion of Mr Dark from said premises there can be no doubt: a 12-gauge shotgun, set as a booby trap.

There was a general understanding (which, like most such, is subject to question) that the occasion of the booby trap and subsequent costly court sessions were all the work of Sweet Willie Stark, the former partner of Rogue Grafton, father of Temple.

But just how Sweet Willie set about conspiring to induce Bo to climb through the window and setting up the shotgun to expel him, none could say, or wouldn't, depending on whether you believe Bo Dark's aphasia is organic in nature or just pathological.

So there matters stood.

€

You should know something about the law in our county before we go too much further. It is as inflexible as the law of gravity, though it differs substantially from true physics as it does give due consideration to the weight of falling bodies. My first experience in the law of the land should suffice for you as well.

Me and a buddy were out on our Harleys when we were little more than kids. Agnew runs north and south, and Russell runs right into it and stops, coming from the east. We were heading north on Agnew, across the top of the T if you were looking at it from above and aligned with Russell.

A station wagon made a small-town left turn onto Agnew from Russell and flattened my buddy. Just cut the corner right into his lane. "Podnah, I'm sorry, I just didn't see you," was the apology at the time and place.

Now, when Bowdoin's Finest arrived on the scene, my buddy had already been carted off by the ambulance. But they had him identified. And the driver also, who was a whiteshirt, actually white labcoat, working in the lab of the local wire plant, General Cable. My buddy worked for the city water (for which read, sewer) department, was the son of a dirt dauber, a guy who drove a bulldozer for a living.

The law saw all this soon after they entered upon the scene, even before their serious investigation. They had their report. All they had to do was make the facts fit the narrative, same as any detectives anywhere.

They looked at that there T, and the longer they looked at it, the more it looked like a +. See, with a little judicious squinting and an eye towards future development, that footpath almost coinciding with Russell heading west could be seen for what it might be one day, a continuation of Russell past Agnew. Therefore, what we had here was a simple failure to yield, with my buddy not allowing the auto from the right passage through the intersection, as state law clearly prescribes.

My pal was blinking open-jawed in the hospital, still suffering from a concussion, while ol' Uncle Ben from the Bowdoin PD attempted to present him with a ticket for failure to yield to the gentleman from the Cable. He didn't understand any of it, my friend didn't. Neither would most folks, unless they had spent time in Bowdoin.

Oh, yeah. It's many years later, and Russell still ends at Agnew. But the idea has long since served its purpose.

€

Now, neither Buster Cole nor Judge Moore had any reason to be overly concerned about forms. So there was no opposition at all when that reporter for the only liberal newspaper in Texas, the Midlothian Mirror, began asking questions around the courthouse about the lack of blacks in the jury pool. It was the same as when the question came up SOME YEARS AGO about why there were not more black faces in the Daily Favorite. Mildred simply went down to East End and Tank Town and shot some photos. Nobody really argues about cosmetics in our town.

FIRST COLOREDS SEATED ON COUNTY JURY

TO HEAR VAGRANT SHOOTING CASE

FIFTH AND FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT TO CLASH IN BOWDOIN COURTROOM

NATIONAL COVERAGE OVERWHELMS SLEEPY PRAIRIE TOWN

PROPERTY VS PERSONAL RIGHTS IN TEXAS

WHO IS BO DARK?

Those are some of the headlines running in the big city papers. Not in the Favorite. During this time, a sampling of our headings:

Four Ribbons for High School 4-H at State Fair!

Mrs Williams Takes Spanish Club to Tijuana

Warriors Roll over Grand Saline!

First Meeting of the Road Commission

Ma read the entire collection of letters arriving at the paper on the topic of our famous trial. They didn't run, of course. Too controversial.

Mostly, there was outrage about a man not being able to protect his property. They ran in other newspapers, all over. They ran, all right. You'd think a jury would be saturated with it, because in Texas it isn't wise nor healthy to run against the grain.

I think the shot that appeared on the front page of the Times Herald got it just exactly right for this phase. It was one of them selective exposure numbers, with Bo Dark looking blank and blurred in his wheelchair in the foreground and spotlighted to his right, behind in the shot, was a jury box featuring one Lady Maybelle Fuller.

Maybelle was formidable. She was a stout lady, black as midnight, and she had a voice which reared up like the hand of God hisself. She raised that booming somber basso mostly at church, but she was legendary, even beyond Tank Town. She was righteous and she was implacable for the cause of godliness and she was alert as the last day here in the courtroom.

Nobody thinks the thoughts of nobody else. That's the trouble. I could tell what was going to happen, were I the sort to pay attention, but I didn't see the possibility of any denouement which would surprise the likes of Plague Grafton. Never in our lives or history had there been any such surprises reported. We dozed through the trial, laughing at the city boys who always missed the beat. We saw how Mildred played her hand; she actually turned his unwillingness or inability to testify (you have to talk on the stand or else you're not much good up there) into a credit. She described for the jury someone who was simply not able to talk, and now because of such extreme callous disregard, he was also unable to walk. She brought forth Etta to describe how the boy was fed. She conjured up black folks who had been kind to him, seeing him as very much one of their own, yet of a slightly lighter skin tone. She brought all manner of officialdom into the court to bolster her contention that in the annals of Clovis County not the smallest harm had ever been caused by the one known as Bo Dark.

But that wasn't what done it.

You can imagine Lady Maybell in the jury room when they finally had the case after three days. She is sitting there while they're going through the silly ritual, and we're a town of silly ritual built around the obvious, of discovering who should be the fore(wo)man, and you can imagine her rise up like a volcano and her voice welled to the rafters so that if you had been in the courtroom or if you were lounging like the old spit-'n-whittlers out on the lawn or even if you were cruising around the square in your automobile, you would know, just as did they all, just as the eleven of them were told and understood until they knew, just as might be an announcement from the almighty, you would hear and you would know, though she might drift like a heavy cloud cover over to Seventh Daniel and the lion's den, and she wept and bitterly reproved and prayed for cleansing, and all shouted with her, and she raised them all up in glory, and none dared remain, and they all came back into the courtroom and delivered the sermon to the clerk, saying, that boy shall be compensated.

And he was..

But that wasn't it, either. Not all of it, it wadn't

George and Leroi over at the Donutte Shoppe, they are in their chuckling leering murmur, and Etta comes with the pot and hears George ask, how long was she gone that time? And Leroi answered, about a year and a half, if memory serves, and George said, yeah, well, a lady does need some time in privacy to birth a brother, and Etta came up then and asks, pleasantly, George, would you like another cup? Or would you rather have the whole blessed pot down your scrawny neck?

See, now, where Temple was concerned, there was one eerie suspension of the usual resentment both women and men hold for a superior critter, that being a woman of unalloyed charm and great beauty. The one will most likely be plain jealous, and the other will feel the aching loss of his want never returned, his vague but manifest lack to her credit. Temple was ours, she for all the county was who we might be at our best. You could never really laugh at any community which could produce a Temple Grafton.

But it let you know what folks were thinking, both in the jury box and without, anywhere there were homegrown citizens alone or in groups. Without any proof or any understanding even, it was believed that Bo Dark wasn't just some tumbleweed blowing down Main Street.

What happened over at that Thistle Dew place? It was unseemly, incredible, and yet it was believed, without proof, without even report, not even a witness, but it was reported as the clouds are, as the Blue Norther is every blessed fall. Something which don't happen to ordinary decent folk. If it did, it might happen to anyone.

€

You expect them to be moving out with the trial ending and all, but the out-of-state rentals were lined up at the Ranch Motel still. There was even one additional Fiat in the mix.

She was striking and well-dressed and she came with a camera crew. Hoyt would not let her film in his office, but she came with her notebook anyway. She was finding it hard to score on-camera interviews generally; which is surprising, given how folks will kill to be on the tube these days.

Hoyt set about his usual southern charm, which owed more to the office, like most, than any personal favor. He was leaning back in his chair and preparing to render up the imitation of a Texas Ranger and she was very still, she had no nervous habits, he remembered, and then she came right at him.

"Sheriff, can you tell me why the evidence seized from Mr Dark is still under seal, despite there being no criminal charges filed and the civil suit over with?"

Hoyt stopped his stretching and looked at her right hard the way you would a wayward youngster. But she didn't move a muscle. The question hung there for longer than it ought, if one wanted to deflect attention from it. And he did. So did we all.

€

Ma went to talk to Buster, just goes over to his office and sits down. He works right next door to the Favorite on Center Street, so it's not even an expense-account trip for her. He'll come out and talk because he knows Ma, knows she's not gonna print what shouldn't be printed.

"Hey, Buster, where's Plague at nowadays?"

"I reckon he don't find the air too healthy in this county lately. I suspect he may not come back to town, if the truth be known."

"I 'spect you'll be gearing up for an appeal, ey, Buster? Three quarters of a million ain't much to ol' Plague, but it still might be a mite irritatin', even for him."

Buster dresses like he hadn't got around to it yet. Shirt unbuttoned, tie on a hook behind the door.

"Ain't the funds for it."

Ma sits up to listen now.

"What you mean? You mean he won't spend the money for appeal? I reckon it won't cost anywhere near what's agin' him right now."

"I mean he ain't got it. Lots of folks have the wrong idea about the Plague Grafton of today. He ain't got it. Ain't got the settlement, either, though, so I guess you might say he's what they call judgment-proof."

Ma waited for him to laugh, though he ain't the joshin' kind. He wasn't joshin'.

"Well well well. I have to say, I'm livin' right next door to the story, and I missed it clean. Some matters, like the sun come up and hard rocks fallin' down, you don't have to question. Like Plague Grafton's wealth…"

"They's a whole lot folks don't know about Plague Grafton," says Buster. "Seems Sweet Willie done him more damage than he let on. Now I gotta get back to work. We may be commencin' a Chapter 11 action in the next few days."

"I reckon they's a lot of the Sweet Willie and Plague story we ain't heard."

"Yep, that and a habit of gambling of many years duration."

We don't like surprises in our town. To us, the conventional, expected, is the way to long life and a reasonable blood pressure. But sometimes, like 'skeeters in the summer, you just can't keep 'em out.

€

Film Credits

2011-07-04T10:59:00.001-07:00

A son inherits the gang from the Godfather and attempts to make his own bones in the desert, sending his soldiers out on a search and destroy mission to extend empire while he hides safely in church. The Corleone and Bush sagas. A marshal stands alone against outlaws in a cowering town. High Noon and the US Blacklist.

Movies have a way of explaining us to us. Indeed, somebody probably said it is not possible to recognize narrative lest it be p-re-figured in film. So what film does up the current Murdoch scandal? Perhaps The Front Page, with its obsctruction of justice in a murder for a scoop? Or, how about this one.

A young pretender to be The Man in five card stud is accosted by a heavy working for Evil Eye Slade, the lord of the realm. The kid says he has no time. The goon says, be a big mistake to think like that. Believe me, he says.

The big man seeks, through extortion, to cause Mr Shooter, the dealer, to provide an occasional helpful hand to the kid in his contest with the sitting Man, cause Slade don't like the big guy. (The dealer has a wife with an embarrassing past which Slade would out were the dealer uncooperative.) The Cincinnati Kid is about the resistence of an honorable guy to the corruption of power.

It's easy to see Slade in Murdoch, but where is the solitary virtuous contender?

That role hasn't been cast.

Sent from Tim Bowden's iPhone

The Thirds

2011-06-21T16:14:00.001-07:00

Three-Part Harmony

Jimmy Johnson may figure he was the first to phase into Stage 2 of the Thirds when he cracked up in La Baja, but that progression was marked out by one Neal Cassady long before. (In fact, the Cassady autobiography was entitled The First Third based upon that very premise.)

Cassady became a student of midget auto races, and he noted how young drivers came out flying with skill and daring - until they hit the wall for the first time.

Then they moved into that second phase, where daring was supplemented to skill. They pushed themselves to the limits of their abilities, and no further.

Most remained there in the middle, Prufrocks, able to start on the pole off the main circuit, maybe win a race or two at county fairs, run in the top ten at Darlington "if God dropped everything else." Journeymen.

Some very few combined superior skill with superb judgment - they knew where the wall was and were able to push their ride to the limit of speed just short of disaster. That's the Final Third, and those in that category are the ones we read about in the race reports, and in the pages of Newsweek.

The Fifth Rider

2011-05-10T16:25:00.001-07:00

In bike racing, the team time trial clock is clicked when the fifth rider of the team crosses the line, no matter how quickly the first four complete the course. Team sports can be lost when the weakest link breaks down.

I was actually glad the first time I read a snippet of Erica Jong. She marked a signpost along the way for women writers. I don't think it's remarkable for a George Eliot or a Jane Austen is published, but equality is reached when you can write as badly as Jack London and still see print.

For a time, Barrack Obama was exhilarating, to all the earth he was. Finally we had as a powerful leader one with great sense and fine sensibilities. It didn't last because of the flatted fifth rider.

There was a time when low-mentality insipid drool was only dripped in fitting environments, such as those okie cinderblock beer joints of my youth. You could hear the most outlandish racist rubbish in such establishments, and be reassured it would never escape its hermetically sealed storehouse.

At that time, there were three TV networks, and the news consisted of one solemn gent from each intoning the facts of the day as they were digested and packaged for a phlegmatic public. There might be contentions in cafés on any Monday, but the arguments never left those premises either.

Some of the opinion was ill-informed and hateful, but it was tailored for local consumption. A bleating bigot would not raise blood pressure in my town simply because he was preaching to the choir. We were a community of nodding heads. We did not have to think about the subject of the day except to marry our opinion to convention, which was the nature of our private thought and public discourse.

TV, and especially the Net, brought in thinking of quite a different nature, which involved theories based upon premises which might be falsified, like constructing a house. Many voices, many rooms This was very troubling to us, as our houses were made of straw and set in sand.

And so did the bilge rise, with ever more stations and wider access and general bedlam, until the level of discourse was diluted into pure sludge, the way any mob can dispel thought and drown out reason.

Because the noise of the noissome nuisance is so obsteperous today, the President must take a break from his real and earnest accomplishments in order to show his papers, same as anyone of color passing through our town back in the day. In our land, the Fifth Rider is a complete ass, and no race can be won under such a handicap.

Stick Hill Billy

2011-04-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

Peej rebuilds our spiritual home on the beach.

David Vest: Billy Graham, Nixon and the Jews

2011-04-26T14:08:00.001-07:00

Someone to Gertrude Stein: I can forgive, but I don't forget.

Alice B Toklas: I don't forgive, but I do forget.

Do neither. Sic semper holy hucksters.

http://www.counterpunch.org/vestgraham.html

Sent from my iPhone

The Last Time I Saw Daddy

2011-04-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here is where it happened.

You go through that front door, and you're in the living room, looking at the dining room (window by the drive), and beyond that wall is the back porch, converted soon after we moved in (1949) into another bedroom. The house was incredibly tiny for a family of five. (No Bowdens left after 1965.)

It was a TV moment; 25-FEb-1962. Scene was the back bedroom, where the TV was. A 21" CBS Columbia, I think it was. The Bowden family is sitting and watching. This is a special. It is execrable. Truly embarrassing. They thought they could sell it through star power, I guess, or because there was no real competition in the Dross Era. Milton Berle. Red Skelton. Red Buttons.

I found it again, after all this time, through the magic of YouTube. Soon after the beginning of the broadcast, I stood and walked. My Daddy chuckled, "You leaving?"

In those days, there were three channels, and all of them came through an antennae the guys in the neighborhood, in the last of the barn raising occasions, helped set up. I remember ours was minus a section, so it was shorter than the Cotham's or the Standsbury's. My Daddy saw the advantage when came a blue norther. "Shorty'll duck 'em."

The moment I had enough was during a sequence in which both the boys played up to Judy. They were gonna sing, see, and they told her to wait for them, and she promised, and they sang, then she came back, and they did it all over again with the next guy. Hideous, I thought at 18, and I ain't gonna watch it again to see has my taste for dreck loosened over the years. Help yourself, if you have the stomach for it; there are a total of six episodes from this disaster on YouTube.

Reason I remember so much about it is, it's the last time I saw my father. He keeled over in his dry cleaner shop the very next day.

The Old One with Rheumy Eyes

2011-04-14T14:46:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

The Old One with Rheumy Eyes

"No, it isn't like that at all, you see," he said. "Not at all."

Somehow our rambling conversation had lit upon religion. The old one with rheumy eyes became quite avid on the subject. He now discharged himself of his own peculiar New Testament reading.

"The topic was dreams. The fishers, you see, had particularly frightening sleep terror. It was ever so with lives based upon mere chance and grim danger. The women were awakened in the night by the horrors of their menfolk, and they sought advice from the teacher."

It made as much sense as any other reading I had heard, and I told him so. He seemed pleased. Anyhow, he was more interesting than many you might meet in a coffee shop.

"The teacher could not make the nightmares go away, of course, at least not immediately. So he put them to work."

He had that habit of leaving you with a question while he slipped up to the counter for more java. That ensured you'd be there when he came back.

He resumed. "All of the parables of the rich with their earthly rewards and the poor having a serene and blessed forever? That was about the bad dreams. For if you suffer in the night, it cleans your day of trouble and woe."

The old one nodded dramatically as punctuation. "And in the fullness of time, the day be clear as well."

Then he stood and shuffled out of the shop.

Over the next few days, a rolling discussion was sparked by the old one's theory.

"It's sort of a cleansing. You work out your troubles at night so they aren't there the next day. I remember studying way past midnight and just not being able to memorize a poem for English. Then I'd sleep on it, and it would click in place for me come dawn."

"Yes, but it's an attitude, and not an agency. It's only a matter of how you feel about the day. Certainly it doesn't make gold out of dross, or princes out of fishers."

"The Stoics tell us we can only change what we feel about anything, and not the forces of nature. So we'd best be attuned to natural events and accept the results. Contentment was the measure."

"Didn't Kant believe we are allotted only so much hours to sleep, and that's the true measure of existence? He had his man wake him promptly after 8 hours, so he wouldn't oversleep and shorten his life."

"Once the old one told us the night would control the day, and serendipity must follow if you sleep well. The object is serenity during the Big Sleep which closes all. A worried man remains so throughout eternity."

"Yes, that's so; he said it. When he finishes a paragraph he gives that nod with his floppy hat brim bobbing. Pretty effective."

Over the next two weeks the room just naturally divided into three parts. One held that the dreams, properly understood, actually made your day better, and your lasting sleep as a result. Another was of the opinion the whole matter was one of mind control, a positivist affirmation of hope and satisfaction unbound by fate or consequences, just another newage nostrum like you see on Oprah. A third and smaller bunch thought the whole of it was the bunk.

The three groups began sitting apart together, without any stated disagreement. Always now the three parts of the coffee shop crew came together to sit only with their cohort, like at a sporting event.

About three weeks after I had met him, the old one with rheumy eyes looked in at the door of the coffee shop, held up one finger, called out, "I'll be right back!" and nodded in that definitive way he had. Then he was gone.

None of us ever saw him again.

The Stickman

2011-04-06T18:11:00.001-07:00

They were like the weather in that ward, drifting like dark clouds, day and night. From where the sun now sets, there is no way to arrive there from the magnificent manors of Turtle Creek, although they were not that far apart as the crow flies. The crow didn't fly over that ward.

On the first of the month, the checks came, and there was a gathering at Boudreaux's parking lot. It was said fifty cases of plum wine were sold on that day alone.

They didn't have names. Once there was a western movie called The Man With No Name. We are given names, even titles, to identify us, but if everyone has a name, then no one is truly distinguished except the nameless one. But in this neighborhood, none had names.

Two of them associated, as they would. They didn't agree, they didn't even discuss it, they just moved off across the lot in the gathering dark and over to the levy. One was a man and the other a woman but
that didn't matter either. There was really no gender in this region, other than for basic identification, like "short" and "dark" and "bald."

The man used a walking staff. He was the one with the staff, alias, The Stickman.

The houses were slipshod, falling down, like the citizens, and not all of them had power. There was a lot of plywood where windows should be, but there was no graffiti. There were no kids in this ward; those
were everywhere else in the city but none came here, and none were born here. There were televisions here and there, some of them left on, but nobody sat and watched them. There was therefore no sense of
another world piped in, therefore no aspiration for a better life or resentment it wasn't available. There was nothing in the ward with no name out of which to build a grievance group.

The two came through the brush and the scrub oak and the weeping willow over the levy and they moved upriver. The direction was not a decision, or if it were it was as mysterious as the flight of birds.

They encountered another. Something was said, by that one, or by the other one, and feathers were ruffled. The immediate denouement was a swing of the staff and the stranger falling heavily and rolling down the embankment towards the river.

The other two continued the march, unhurried. In fifteen steps, they could not have told you what happened back there. It was just a matter of pride too close to the surface, like the roots of hearty
plants in granite.

They moved about and others commingled and then separated and drifted in other assortments. It did not stop, this random association, day or night. Sometimes some one or two would disappear into one of the
dilapidated frame houses in the neighborhood, and you could watch them, if there was clear glass in the windows, standing and looking, at nothing.

Someone with a name, and also a title, in another part of the city, this one with no broken windows, was observing the police blotter one morning soon after. Ah, he thought, here is something we might be able to use.

In days to follow, you saw this one's picture in the paper, and his image on local news. He was fulminating about a possible hate crime over in the other ward in his parish. Then there were agencies with names, or at least initials, represented in the press by officials who were standing at microphones and looking grim in other photos.

The one who had rolled off the levy was black. This had nothing to do with anything that had happened; it was just another description. Nothing which mattered in the parish without plywood in windows had
any application where the ones with no names lived.

Police were in the parking lot of Boudreaux's now, every day and some nights, asking questions. There were splinters found in a blunt trauma bruise on the head of the victim, they said, and the residents
of the parish blinked, stared. (The coroner had declared the cause of death the fall into the creek, but the blunt trauma was a better source of investigation.) Anyone you know carries a club? was asked, and someone thought of The Stickman.

They found him in the church, or what had been a church but was now a soup kitchen. On this particular night, four nightingales were singing to the lost souls, hoping to save them. Nearer, my god, to thee. Shall we gather at the river? The stew was in an open vat and open to all.

They surrounded The Stickman there. They recognized him because he carried his trademark with him. One of them grabbed it, as if he were Little John or somebody, and might turn on these Robin Hoods. The Stickman, when he understood what was happening, simply stood and waited. His expression, or lack of expression, never changed.

They took the stick to the precinct, which forwarded it to the FBI lab, together with lab slides from the corpse. It became a point of pride in the neighborhood. None of this sort of expert technical attention had ever been performed in the ward before. It was, after all, not unusual for bodies to turn up along the levy.

The Stickman sat in a jail cell. The detectives were unable to commit him to a motive. He did not even remember the event. He scratched his head. What was that again? They became very exasperated with
him.

There was word passed around about a woman. What was her name? the police asked. No one knew her name, but she had been there on the first with The Stickman, shore 'nuff. The detectives went looking for
her.

Most in the mob which congregated at Boudreaux's on the first of every month were solemn, soggy men. It should not have been difficult to find a woman there.

But she learned they were looking for her. Boudreaux himself asked, weren't you the one with The Stickman when the black man was rolled? She blinked, confounded. She had no idea. Well, the police are looking for you, said Boudreaux.

She hid out now in her squalid quarters behind plywood, only going out for single packages of soup mix and plum wine. They were circling her position, like buzzards. Why did she not run away? Why did she still only stay there?

There was knocking, then silence, then a door being forced in the next house. She pulled her ragged shawl around her. They would find her soon. Tonight, or tomorrow, they would come through her own front door.

A reporter interviewed The Stickman in jail. He thought perhaps they might sell papers with a human angle, maybe the abused accused number.

"Do you have any complaints? Have the police been fair?"

The Stickman did not understand the question. The reporter did not understand the answer. It was played more profoundly in the press than it merited, sort of like Pilate's musing on Truth, but to The Stickman, it was like asking a fish if it was too wet.

"What's `fair'?" wondered The Stickman.

____________

The Rich Are Very Indifferent to You and Me

2011-04-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

Here's the story: 1% of the humans in the US receive nearly a quarter of its income, plus they control 40% of the national wealth. This inequity gap is larger than any country in Olde Europe, and a high school male has seen his income do a minus-12% in the last quarter century. You're being robbed, America!

The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves.

This is feudalism, it's why the Mideast is in an uproar right now. They have their own, these 1%ers; why should they care about you? Wake up, America. As Marx say,

"Gardners, demand a Christmas bonus!"

Quotes from the Vanity Fair article linked above.

My Book Report

2011-03-26T17:42:00.001-07:00

Never had much schooling so my reading directed further books and music. I began with On the Road, which promised the sad grind of grim adult slogs was unnecessary. This was good news for boys unrestrained by ambition and good sense. Road was wild and juvenile and self-indulgence and a mother always there in the flesh (in the novel Kerouac always went home to his 'aunt'; in real life his actual mother) or in the guise of 'wife.'

So I read parts of Mysteries of Paris because that's what Denver Roy did while driving Sal and Dean around town. Listen to Billie Holiday especially Lover Man after Sal sang it to himself out in the field waiting for Terry, and Saroyan when Sal watched an old Armenian walking by the tracks in Fresno.
Of Mice and Men came from that same few days with Terry the paisana, lying on the green doing the lines, 'What'd you do up in Weed? You won't tell me what you did up in Weed, willya? What'd you do up in Weed?'

Read one each Thomas Wolfe because of 'That's Wolfean romantic posh and absolute b ...' during the basement Dakar Doldrums sessions, Dean and Carlo Marx. Made a start with 'Dean's high eternity in the afternoon Proust' but advanced not very far beyond a kid's anxiety about his mother kissing him goodnight for pages and pages.

Read Burroughs because he was a character in Road, the same reason I read The First Third. Have Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray's The Hunt because that was the jumping bop number on the record the little girl broke over Dean's head at Sal's urging.

Dostoyevsky after Remi Boncoer remembered Sal's telling him he was the one who put newspapers in his boots and a stovepipe in his hat, an exaggeration. Went to New Orleans at age 18 with my road buddy Chico, hitchhiking because it happened like that in Road; crossed the river to Algiers and Graetna because that's where Old Bull Lee's farm was.

Traveled in Mexico because of that rhapsody of the Road, plus it was the nearest exotic elsewhere to slip into unnoticed. Finally, dropped my innate inertia and took off for Los Gatos to live with Neal Cassady's wife Carolyn, and that was all Road inspiration, of course.

So my life here still on this coast where I remain these 37 years after, in fact the great upsurge of chance and contentment from dreary deadend doldrums is due to forever following that one book I read in high school, plus others it opened up for me.

I'm a better person for reading On the Road. That's my book report.

Tanhauser on Ice

2011-03-23T19:08:00.001-07:00

Note: You will not be able to see without hearing the soundtrack.

Image.

The Camp

A raven, perched and intent.

A lovely leg thrust into the air, spasmodic, trembling.

A sudden hirsute and haggard face, rising to listen, alert.

By a fire, over a campstool, a costume. It is Spiderman! And there are ice skates below.

A stick is thrust from a bush to nestle under and lift the costume. A hand takes the skates as well.

The black bird lifts away, and through slow and heavy wingbeats she bounces on air. Spidey appears upon a frozen river, sinuous, hidden by high thicketed banks. A long glide left to right and Spidey sweeps down the river. The raven passes in tempo across his trail.

Wonder Woman gestures from ahead. She is impatient. Perhaps she has been awaiting him. He closes to her. She is stunning. She takes his hand and they now form a duet, sliding the width of the river. They synchronize into a single unit as the raven watches.

A man nude, exasperated, rages and thrashes a pile of ragged and soiled clothing onto the frozen ground. Behind him his partner hides a smile as she struggles into her costume. She is Nyoka, Queen of the Jungle, and she skates away down the river, leaving the guy with nothing to do but dress in the rags.

The Hunting Camp

It is a cabin just off the river. A campfire There are bottles about, and rifles stacked by the door. Spidey and Wonder swoop without any agreement at all up to the cabin. Hands snatch the rifles, stack arms over the fire; wood is tossed onto the embers by the skaters circling the fire. The flame bites up along the stocks as the two skate away.

There is a hunter at the door to the cabin. He has thrown on a jacket and stepped into boots; he is not otherwise dressed. He is staring hard at the weaponry burning right before his eyes. He cannot believe this can be real.

Nyoka sweeps into view now. The hunter notices her. She passes from right to left before him. She does not even glance his way. The hunter is practically snarling as he watches her disappear. In his mind, she is connected to the destroyed artillery.

A shot ring out to break what passes for his train of thought. One of the rifles, at least, was not unloaded.

The Train

It slows, stops. The hobo approaches from below, on the hill leading to the tracks. But the train has not stopped for him. We recognize the hunter with two others step up onto one of the cars to speak to the conductor.

The hobo mounts the caboose.

The River

We see Wonder and Spidey glide right and left down the river. They are having so much fun, and they are ever so graceful.

They pass under a bridge over which passes the train behind them. The two skaters pay it no mind.

The train slows to a stop and the three hunters dismount. The one we saw first brings a pistol out of a pocket of the jacket, works the breech. The three of them stare up the river.

Around a bend of the river, Nyoka skims. She is not visible to the three hunters because the brush is closer to her. She is watchful of what's ahead.

The three wait. We watch them from in front as they watch the river. Nyoka appears beyond the bridge behind them. She warily keeps an eye on them as she disappears down the river.

The three wait.

The Lodge

This is a well-appointed country club just back from where the river breaks near the bay. There are many about in all matter of clever costumes. The train comes into view behind, stops at a station close to the lodge.

The hobo bashfully dismounts. Others see him and admire his costume. Everyone is laughing and gay. Except for the hobo, who looks all about him.

Up the river, around the last bend, approach Wonder and Spidey. They are dancing now, and she winds up into his arms, and spins out of them across the ice. When she stops spinning she is alone on the river.

Wonder Woman is confused. Down the river is the lodge. She peers in that direction, trying to detect a Spiderman costume in the crowd.

Very rapidly she digs back up the river.

On a narrow tributary, Spidey is moving very fast now.

A Laundromat

A bored gent enters and waits by a dryer, chewing on something. It stops. He reaches in to retrieve his laundry ... and brings out a Spiderman costume.

He just stands and alternately stares at the suit in his hands and looks all around for some explanation. There isn't any.

The Train

It pulls into another station. The three hunters are aboard, grim, unspeaking. when the train leaves, we see walking along the tracks the haggard one from the first campfire scene. His expression is stoic, silent, the sort of sadness you find way beneath mere mood.

The Lodge

Nyoka has joined friends and is laughing with them as they move into the club.

Down the river once more skates Wonder. Stepping gingerly on the snow of the lawn, the hobo comes to meet her. He has a salesman's smile spread wide and shallow across his face. She is very confused and most pensive, and what she is thinking obviously is not cheering.

She skates right past him and continues past the lodge and on down towards where the river breaks. She is very thoughtful. The Raven reappears, seems to be keeping time with her.

End

The Dvorak Keyboard

2011-03-20T20:32:00.001-07:00

It was because of his teeth, he said. Nobody will hire you if you have front teeth missing. So he stayed at home working his wrath online through various local chat sites. He was most bitter and acerbic.

He had been fired for, he claimed, asking for a raise. He figured he was worth as much as a stockboy, although he was not trained or educated for the tech support job from which he was fired. So he spent his days fuming.

His wife was lovely, talented, and clever, and it must've been a dull small town in Arkansas she left for him. She babysat for a rich family and that was the family income. They lived in a motel room where you kept the doors locked and barred.

He discovered the Dvorak keyboard. The original typewriter was intended to slow down the typist, you know, so she would not jam the slow keys. That isn't necessary now we've advanced past the sluggish
carriage. So the Dvorak was designed to place the letters in a more accessible arrangement. You could, using this method, speed up past the train of thought clear on into intuition.

So he did not touch a standard keyboard anymore because he was in training. He did all his keyboarding at home in his motel room. If they went to see others of their online network, she would type, if it came to that, and he would stand behind her, giving instruction. He was some sort of Arthur Miller then, hoping his Marilyn did not embarrass him among his peers.

It is very hardy, this self-delusion; it's impervious to evidence, indeed it was designed that way. Everybody has the potential to be a winner if you only believe. There are no losers; only quitters, as we learn from the Grand Ole Oprah.

Somewhere these twenty years and more after there is a Dvorak keyboardist who thinks he isn't where he deserves to be because he cannot afford dentistry, or perhaps due to Philistines holding to their archaic QWERTY keyboards. It isn't a bad line of reasoning, pragmatically, and I use it myself and recommend it to all as vastly superior to most reality, except for that of the lovely little lady from Arkansas, who has not the need.

A Great Deal of Something

2011-03-13T16:37:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

A Great Deal of Something

Remember the one who mouthed "That's not true!"? He also attends meetings featuring the sort of dingbat who wear headgear from the work of a French sculptor and sells access to her husband, a silent simmering automatic vote for whatever's furthest eight. Yeah, that one, Associate Justice Alito.

I agree with him.

At least, here I do.

There is a feature like tectonic plate movement in human aging. You begin boisterous and young, screaming out in the night and expecting to be attended, and you drift to the point where you prefer to be left alone.

I arrived at that juncture quite early, actually. I simply have never bought the illogic which holds that, in order to have Jane Austen you must allow that anonymous vulgar broily boy who tracks up your chat group.

Now, just exactly why is that? Are the juvenile bleaters like the bacteria in your intestines which make childbirth possible ? If so, I would be very glad to learn the biology of attention-grabbing obscenity in political, or indeed any other, discourse.

Other lands seem to field their artists without allowing in the dark disturbance. It is illegal to deny the Holocaust in Germany, and the UK is so protective of public reputations that delicate souls the world over hie there with their slander suits.

An example might be the Elliot Gould part in the sixties film Getting Straight. Harry had come back to graduate school after his stint in the Civil Rights wars. He only wanted his Masters and be a teacher. But revolution was happening all around him; the campus was in revolt, and the stoonts sought him out.

This is important, they said.

You act like it's Selma, said Harry.

You weren't at Selma, scoffed a kid.

I was at Selma, said Harry.

Isn't our cause just?

Sure, said Harry, just go do it.

Superman Was Here but he left early

2011-03-05T14:15:00.001-08:00

When I was young, I used to wonder why WWII took so long with Superman on our side. I guess he couldn't be everywhere.

And then I learned (to learn is to generally hear said) that, in fact,
Superman is everywhere, and the fact he no longer performs heroic
deeds is that the agency charged with performing the public acts we as a nation have in consultation one with the other decided should be done is actually blocking the way of progress. Instead of our
collective conscious affecting deeds, we should be, as the popular
title tells us, waiting for Superman.

I was all set for that delay in 1969. I and plenty of other young guys
were blown free like electrons in the harsh cold draft to energize a
hot war declared by old men in order that their own public images be braced by accordance with popular jingles of the day, involving the Domino Theory and fighting them Over There rather than Over Here. (The jingles have a way of recurring.)

Where were the noble champions of less of that broad giant of collective consent called Government in those times? I could have used them then, and I can see no more desperate occasion than the shanghaiing of boys for death, destruction, and derangement in foreign wars, or to keep them imprisoned for two to four years on standby.

It turns out those who today are the most anxious to throw fistfuls of kids into that fire and steel cauldron on behalf of noble nouns were mostly avoiding such hazardous duty back in the day. Their commitment
to Freedom and America extends only as far as you and your children.

And they do ever and anon declare an opposition generally to federal government, although their animus does not extend to the state (unless that state gets wrong ideas, such as Medicinal Marijuana, Gay Marriage, Environmental Defense, Control of Firearms, etc).

I wonder about that. Oh, I know the reason: the Repugnants, who represent wealth, must bamboozle the bourgeois or below, because they are far outnumbered by the commons. And so they divert the rabble to
their own prejudices under euphemism ('illegal immigrants' is a stand-in for racism, as is 'state's rights' itself) just as cattle are herded into the branding pen. If you descend far enough, you have the
simple democracy of the lynch mob.

There are other inconsistencies. Where is there in an anti-government scripture the right of old men to govern every womb in the kingdom? Shouldn't that be under Private and Individual?

And what of the nature of the complaint bleated out by a preacher with celebrity pretentiouns about a certain movie star expecting and unmarried? He would insist she supplicate unto the state for a license
and certificate in order to sanctify the union and legitimize the child. Isn't this just another means of succoring Big Government into our most private and personal connection? Must everyone seek the
headpat of Big Brother in order to form what we understand is the most central cultural unit, the family?

Another anxiety of mine from days of yore has played out in various comics and movies since. What if Superman, when he finally shows up, is no more sensible nor virtuous than we? It would be necessary for us all to band together to furnish out of our collective conscious a
solution.

In other words, form a government.

Sent from my iPhone

Asocial Nitworking

2011-02-27T09:31:00.001-08:00

We are informed that the modern habit of electronic communication degrades our human contract, and we of course believe it. There is value, after all, in millions of iterations per minute of "How are you?" and nodding heads to the concept of expecting rain. This is social interaction which might be translated into the digital realm, but something of the value of nodding and smiling is irretrievably lost.

A spoken conversation is an abstraction which leavens civil discourse with 'you know' and 'and-uh.'. It's true the wonders of robot mimicry allow humans to keyboard online the vapid vaporings of our neighborly chats, but again something of the human element is lost.

I once witnessed a conversation utilized an iPhone as a prompter. There was also thought, and by those who were familiar with the practice, and there was continuity, so we were able to witness how elements refracted through other minds.

As always happens, the pinball topic tilt ran from Shakespearean apocrypha to resentment in academia to Dr Brinkley. The phone was used to instantly seek data underlying each element of the conversation.

I do not, however, recommend you try this at home, nor at your neighborhood coffee shop. It applies a certain strain in public generally, and affords no safety valve for resulting stress. What do you say when an existing tribal talisman, such as welfare chiselers being behind that season's killing frost, is easily disproved by reference to Wiki? You'd be run out of Texas, for one, for cognition in accordance with its object, let alone saying it out loud.

Technology is a real danger to society, there can be no doubt. Best to keep to topics which won't alarm the citizenry, such as the weather, and to utilize prose that will not stir resentment, as "It ain't the
heat, it's the humidity.'

As our pre-text troubadour sings to us:

All except for Cain and Abel
And the Hunchback of Notre Dame;
Everybody's making love
Or else expecting rain.

--
"I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved." - tweet by Warren Gamaliel Harding, back before the fall, when language meant something!

Platform Pratfalls in History!

2011-02-23T14:03:00.001-08:00

John McCain accepts the Republican party's nomination to be its presidential candidate at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Projected behind him on the 51.6 by 30 foot video wall is the Walter Reed Middle High School in North Hollywood.

Not enough attention was paid this monumental blunder. Here on the stage was the runner-up for the highest office in the land standing before a projected image assumed to be Walter Reed Army Hospital, but actually is a middle school of similar name.

His staff, given the assignment of finding a backdrop which read Hero for this aging weathervane, obviously grabbed the first Google result. Interesting, also, the old fool himself never caught it, but then he doesn't catch much, except for that bankroller bride some years back.

Whatever else, rememember this old bitter fool and his doxie sidekick were contenders to lead the US in the same direction as their party. Shudder for America.

Featherbedding

2011-02-05T17:31:00.001-08:00

I am writing by means of a gadget I can hold in the palm of my hand which contains an extensive library of books and music and also will enable me to locate myself on the earth and navigate upon that sphere, as well as consult the web while entertained by a sound track of my choosing. Among many other tasks, it also will send and receive voice calls.

Now, I am a conventional sort, possessed of great inertia, who has spent plenty of times in libraries in his time. However, I am flat unable to defend further the practice of demanding public funds, in these hard economic times, be diverted into those several museums dedicated to a technology fully implemented in the sixteenth century.

I refer to libraries, which, in this day and age, should refer us all back to those shilling days of yesteryear, when the railroad engines were converted from steam to diesel, and yet for a time were retained members of those crew whose sole job it was to stoke a fire which was no more.

Sent from my iPhone

Mr Superb and Christmas 2010

2011-01-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

Ants and humans and other frantic creatures, real and imagined, follow the same patterns.

Peej with a rapt audience works some magic with hanging figures, and one of them suggests a question.

In which Mr Superb chooses not to ruffle the pretty esthetics of Christmas morning.

Uncle Will discusses the next step on Christmas morning on finding presents under the tree. PJ is opposed to disturbing the pretty packages, the only kid in history of that mind.

Samson's Dandruff

2011-01-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

The features of the firearms lobby are really quite simple. By the numbers:

A province of the least-evolved, lower order of beings (the south and its graveyards in the southwest) is violence. This is because they are unable to hold their own in discourse requiring thought or activity involving complexity. You will see among them simplistic solutions to self-worth anxiety in their taste for auto wrecks (NASCAR), wrestling, boxing, fighting, and hunting.
The herders (Repugnant Nativist Conservative, Naive Repugnant Allies) of this mad menagerie must use sing-song sagas to lure in the cattle. One of the major provocations is the notion that the Delilahs (those who think) will shear the magical locks of all the simpleton Samsons: firearms.
As the cattle are actually a sizeable minority, and anxiety among them is strong, then dues flow into the herders at a right god pace. The NRA is well-funded and threatening.
Those who are settled into legislative and other government seats have as their primary concern protecting those royal trappings. Thus they are attracted to where the most bribes be stored. As there is no hedge fund backing an opposition to the NRA, no member of Congress is bold enough to inject sanity into any discussion on the slaughter resulting from the great rivers of artillery polluting this nation above all others.
The oft-stated "principle" of the NRA is simple: a) "Freedom" means the right of a citizen to commit treason by murdering such agents of the government as the shooter sees as a threat, to include AT&F, the Post Office, and Democratic members of Congress. b) Killing harmless animals for fun is worth the by-product of slaughtering forty thousand humans a year.

Whenever a diseased argument fit only for mental defectives prevails, then that's a general failure which bids ill for all of us. But our members of Congress are concerned only in maintaining their status, and so throughout this lone and lonely land, nothing else is heard but the weeping.

The Big Ditch

2010-12-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

Rock climbing is an activity calling for steady nerve and hardy strength and a certain assurance and planning. The theme is No Fear.

The prospect.

My own theme is

No risk.

This is not the philosophy of one Hurryin' Hugh, who we first met somewhere above Indian Garden on the Bright Angel Trail. He was proceeding insanely fast on that rock-strewn path. I asked him in passing how long he figured it would take him to arrive at the river.

About two hours, he grinned, through relatively straight teeth. Then he hurried on, actually trotting to the curves.

Cut to Indian Garden, at 4.6 miles and nearly 3,000 feet from the ridge. Here is Hugh again, with his right foot stretched out and bandaged. "It snapped," he said, then explained how a boulder had attacked him on the trail. "I'm surprised you didn't see it," he amazed, anticipating that we hadn't. Another couple nearby asked, "You fell again?" So it was at least his second fall. He showed how his front teeth were impacted by the rocky faceplant.

A muddled park ranger was attempting to answer a question about where the chopper would land in a declarative sentence, but having no luck. His nose was running without notice. (My son Will, who has been in roles of authority since single digit ages, sprang to mind as someone who would give great confidence to everybody in such an emergency. We talk about that.)

We figured Hugh was trying to shift blame from his own idiocy to an act of nature, perhaps avoiding the med-evac fee (variously reported in hearsay as $3-5K) in the effort, or perhaps supporting a possible tort claim against the park. If there was ever anyone who should pay for his stupidity, here he was.

There is below the Garden a ridge overlooking your most comprehensive view of the down trail, at the foot of which you cross six streams. There was a gent standing on the downward spiral of red dust, waiting. Down at the last crossing was his wife, who was suffering. She crossed the stream and stood breathing heavily. She had been just over three miles, with twice that to go, and the climbing had not yet begun. There is an excellent view from the rim which should suffice for many folks (indeed, we were told seven years ago that fewer than 15% of Grand Canyon visitors ventured below the rim, and current estimates are much smaller than that).

At six miles you come to the river.

Amble along the upper shoreline for three miles and you're past Bright Angel Campground and to Phantom Ranch, our destination. But first the bridge happens.

This is a silver suspension crossing for Bright Angel Trail, and you can step up onto it with full confidence. It's only a couple hundred meters across. You begin.

Notice how the sections seem to rattle as you step from one to the next. This is, you're thinking, because the minimum wage trail builders were left to finish the job after the engineers had left. What's it made of, this bridge? Heavy metal. Or aluminum? Tin foil?

You begin to bless engineers, like our son Casey. So much of our blind faith is invested in them. You ride elevators and roads and bridges because you trust the experts. You think of that now, as you reach for the railing. Did it just crinkle in your grasp?

Way below the large-knit fishnet webbing underfoot rages the Colorado. Don't look down.

Now, nobody in this forsaken land would choose bridge-builders based upon which it would be most comfortable to have a beer with. However, a growing dry-rot in this nation would forbid the evil "government" from interfering in holy enterprise with such nonsense as safety for humans at the expense of corporate gods. Someday rivets might be calculated as not worth the expnense, especially as the corporations need not walk these bridges. (The Palin Parrots for Plutocrats will, but they're much too dumb to realize that.)

There is an expression in French called pensées d'escalier, or something else. It refers to the thoughts you have about a recent conversation in which you would've triumphed had you utilized the arguments only occurring on the stairs as you leave the ball. Grim contemplation of the future based upon just such recent memory might be referred to as pensées d'pont.

Somehow, the end of this thousand meter crossing nears.

Phantom Ranch is a series of cabins and diner on the Bright Angel Creek just north of the Colorado. We stay two nights, and have breakfast and dinner there. There's veggie chile and cornbread in the evening, scrambled eggs and flapjacks in the morning. They go for volume, not variety.

The company comprises other hikers and some mule riders, so it's more social than many diners. There are often groups there, and they might be a mite insular, but you meet someone on the paths around the cabins and they most likely speak. After all, we're all in this together, although many are thinking of getting out. Not that they're not having a good time, but there are either 7 or 10 miles nearabouts to travel some morning with nearly a mile elevation gain, so it's something to think about if you haven't done it before.

Our first day after coming into the country we hiked up the slot canyon carved by Bright Angel Creek. We are particularly fond of this section of the North Kaibab. It is the essence of the marvel engineered by time and the elements and the river on sandstone and even granite. This is the sort of engineering that will be here when the last human signposts are no more, and the main reason for its being is the river at 2,480 feet wants to be at sea level.

So we rose after dawn on the third day and set out just after 7 AM. Kaibab is a more concentrated climb, which is why most select Bright Angel as the gentler slope if longer route. The rim at South Kaibab is at 7,260 feet, whereas Bright Angel summits at 6,785. We have seen ice at the higher elevations of the Chimney, the switchbacks just below the summit, but along Bright Angel there have been snowbanks only in the shady cover between 1 and 3 miles from the rim. The area saw two feet of snow two weeks before our arrival, we're told.

This was our third trip to the Canyon, and our favorite as far as our conditioning and the weather. We just stepped up the trail in just under five hours, with only some soreness the next two days for the strain. The signposts were familiar by now; the Tipoff at the Tonto Trail crossing, with the restrooms; Skekleton Point to Cedar Ridge, the heart of the climb; and then from that wide open view, the main stop for day trippers, there is the Chimney, 1.5 miles of switchbacks to the trailhead.

Almost all photos and video furnished by our amazing iPhone. Film at 11, just below.

The Slot Canyon at the beginning of North Kaibab

The Tipoff.

The Halfway Point

Lady Kale dances at Cedar Ridge

And the Lady reaches the trailhead.

I Learned It at the Movies

2010-12-07T16:50:00.001-08:00

I was once told that not only was there actual weight and heft to thought, you couldn't think anything unless it was or was to come. Well, I said, I don't think anything can be done unless it's
prefigured in old movies.

There's a story in the papers recently about a huge criminal with a hurting shoulder, or so he said. He had a violent history and was due to go up for a long spell with his last conviction. He was 6'7" and
270 lbs. My shoulder hurts, be said.

Okay, the sheriff said, but you can't go alone. They sent an officer with him, a woman about the size of one of his legs.

In the day in which this movie I will tell you about was running, maybe 80% of the entire population
saw a movie at least every week, and all of them knew what to expect when Wilmer the Gunsel strode down the corridor a little bit ahead of Sam Spade. Looking serious and deliberate and not particular conscious. Everybody knew Spade would jump and disarm the Gunsel who was supposed to be escorting him under guard to see a big heavy about a Maltese Falcon.

People are no longer smart. It's because the movies today aren't educational. We've become a nation of Gunsels.

Go back even further. King Kong has a sore shoulder. The commissioner agrees to send him for an MRI. But he can't go alone, of course. Not with the big guy's history of violence.

So they send Fay Wray with him.

The Children's Hour

2010-12-07T10:40:00.001-08:00

There is a crazed quality in the defense of the dubious. - Hobbes

If you spend no effort, the soggy basement grows mold and dry rot. Likewise, the mind loses its focus and function in torpor, so that in place of rigorous essays of a Thomas Paine we have -

- what we have, which is a candidate on the ticket for the highest office claiming to be blindsided by a reporter asking serious questions. After all, said the candidate, we both had young children, so I thought we would talk about the children. Such another, a handler for that campaign, was of the opinion this failed candidate should have expected to discuss genuine topics because the interview had been staged with the UN Building as a backdrop.

To give her gravitas in foreign affairs, they posed her in front of important structures, such as the UN and Henry Kissinger.

Indeed, the sharpest mind in the campaign on either side sought to radiate states(wo)manly partnership vibes once in office by sitting down with a notorious kleptomaniac and allowing the photographers in.

When you tell children there is no Santa, or talk to Christians about their silly fairy tales, you will incite more rage than were you to simply trash-talk the home team. Because that team has a record which anyone might consult and none can deny. The Niners do suck, and no one by the Bay can offer a counter argument.

Now comes a vast trove of documentation that the children's bedtime story with the big abstract nouns about Freedom and Democracy were not really what the parents were talking about late at night in the kitchen, after all.

So we have another hysterical outrage, not about the lies and the waste and the many dead, but against the intrepid reporter who showed us from their own record the dastardly dishabille of the prancing potentates.

Run, Wiki, run.

Sent from my iPhone

Progressive Pantheon

2010-11-27T09:18:00.000-08:00

The face of progressive hope in the US is that of the vapid gargoyle from Alaska. On no other head can progress be possible, and those who favor humanity over corporate cliques, which means everybody not Repugnant, the continued presence of this annoying ninny should be cause for celebration by us, even as she so distresses the sensible Repugnants (both of them).

But wherefore say we not her pander, slander and lies be a great harm to the republic? The answer is in the Bokononist revelation of the Wrang-Wrang.

Sent from my iPhone

In Praise of Folly

2010-11-18T11:50:00.001-08:00

folly,
originally uploaded by woesong.

We have now been invited to contribute to the great effort in Texas, the Lazarus Liberry, in order to help exhume the reputation of their hideous favored son, who is responsible for upwards of a hundred thousand dead plus economic ruin in service to his corporate masters and various neocon nutjobs. So I contribute as I'm able by posting this commemorative plaque with my utter amazement at the incomprehensible incompetence of the fundraising fools on the cretin's committee.

The Summer Before the Fall

2010-11-07T10:08:00.001-08:00

I remember cartoons that summer. In one of them, an ordinary couple is driving down a residential street with a common sign in a yard inscribed with: VOTE FOR MORGAN - on observing which the driver declares, "That does it; I'm voting for Morgan!"

It was funny then, as ever when cartoons presage actual events. (Did you ever see the satire which became a documentary Network? You should.) It is considered a great advantage on behalf of any candidate to have vast sums behind him, and the purpose of spending in campaigns is to buy teevee advertising, the equivalent of great numbers of signs reading 'VOTE FOR MORGAN.'

There was a summer, back before the fall. There was this campaign, see, for US Senator, one hundred and fifty two years ago, which featured two who spoke atop wagons and makeshift platforms in small towns for three hours between them, elucidating and suggesting issues both profound and petty, but in language, not image, and yet were they raptly followed by an engrossed audience ... which could not even vote for either, as the senator in those days was selected by state legislatures.

But is it possible that the electorate today, who after all must be adults before they are enfranchised, would allow themselves to be called to the barn like cattle by the mere ringing of horns and the flashing of light? Consider.

Palin, the infamous Quitter on Twitter, is, alas, rather dim. She whines that she was booby trapped by the interviewer Katy Couric into a conversation in which the candidate for the second highest position in the land was asked actual questions about her qualifications, or their lack. Sarah thought the topic would naturally be their children, for both she and Couric were mothers of youngsters.

Now let's elevate to the lobbyist back of the McWeathervane campaign on this national stage. They refudiate Simple Sarah's saga by reminding us that the setting for this interview had been picked by the Repugnant handlers themselves: the UN building. The stage was set to showcase Palin's foreign policy cred.

Do you follow? "I have foreign policy gravitas because you can see clear to the UN behind me in this video!"

Upon crossing the stage before the vice-presidential debate, the simple one asked Senator Biden if she could call him Joe. This was to set up a line fed to her from an old Blacksox-era baseball story: "Say it ain't so, Joe." (She added the equally insipid line from Reagan: "There you go again ..." which in 1980 inspired the string of vapid vocals which will not die; as witness from the same campaign of '08: "If you wanted to debate Bush, you should've run four years ago" which was duly picked up by the news business and promoted. I heard wiser rebuttals on my elementary school playground.)

Our Kangaroo Kourt has delivered us to corporate greed, the Frankenstein's monster of our time, and that means great gobs of pander, slander, and lies with grand dollops of 'VOTE FOR MORGAN' banners electronically transmitted forever and forever amen ...

We can take solace in my own state, in which a feckless eBay robot spent over 141 million of her own dollars to saturate the media with idiot ads insulting her opponent, only to be blown away by twelve points in the general election, proving not all provinces are cow pastures. Small victories.

Frankenstein, Act II

2010-11-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

The creation of the monster is only the opening act in all horror movies. Next comes the rampage, then the struggle against it.

The problem in politics is ever the same. There are the plush plutocrats, born to wealth and privilege, for which they must depend on the docile aid and dopey assistance of the impoverished proles. Hey, look here, might be one inducement. You all must sweat and groan under your beastly burdens in order that we may flounce and flitter in sumptuous splendor, now have you got that?

Not a compelling argument, is it? Something else is needed, and that something, in a democracy at least, is miraculously supplied by glitches in evolution.

The stupid gene.

Whenever a minority of nobles seeks to manage a mob of minions, it must enlist Judas goats from the great army of the unranked. To do that, they simply flatter them, like children, by telling them ignorance is common sense and god is great and guns is good and the innate racism and chauvinism of their kind is a fit response of the unaccomplished and the dim, or superpatriots, when their natural place at the head of the march has been unsurped by traitors.

This do make for some odd bedfellows. Like, Oswald Mosley, the WWII era Brit fascist, carried himself with sufficient pomp, but the circumstance of his struggle required the use of herds of low-grade street thugs. His elegant wife Lady Mitford was asked if, after the revolution and the fascists are in power, she intends to continue her association with the brownshirt brutes.

"Certainly not!" was her impetuous if impolitic reply.

This was the epoch of the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler caused to be dispatched an unknown number of loyalists, including his old comrade from way back in Munich Putsch days Ernst Röhm, who believed the Socialsim in the nazi title should promote he and his band of grubby proles in the SA over the Prussian nobles who ran the army, whereas the little corporal saw much more utility in the latter than the former. In this man's world, you don't dance with the one who brung you.

In our time, we have the Attack of the 50-Foot Moron, a quitter on Twitter who is threatening the nefarious plans and self-serving strategems of the master drovers of the hardscrabble hordes. What to do? Already, knives are out and missives are dispatched and Jeeps driving through the rain into the dark night.

Another thrilling episode of an old familiar drama,.

Sent from my iPhone

The Lines in her Pace

2010-10-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

The front window of our office is covered with acetate, which means it reflects back the light from the brighter side. During the day, that means we can watch pedestrians on Front Street without their notice. It's a two-way mirror.

A certain lady rushes from the bank parking lot on one side of our office to the Post Office on the other. It is just after 11:00 AM, most every weekday.

She is always in a tennis dress.

The lady is no longer young, but I wouldn't call her middle-aged. She is petite, slender. Actually, her age is a guess, for she never slows to allow me to study the lines in her face.

She is always in a hurry.

I wonder of her schedule is always so tight she must hurry like the White Rabbit. Why the eternal rush?

Must there be always a match at the club so close to lunch? Maybe a traveling pro only has that spot open for students. Or she may feel like the bank parking guard will only allot her a few moments to dash to her mailbox before he will have her Lexus towed.

Perhaps there is one who bought her that Lexus and also paid for tennis lessons with the understanding she display her form to nobody else but him, which agreement might be abridged, of course, if she is in a rush.

Or, it's only just possible, she wishes the world to see the fine shape she maintains and that isn't really exhibitionism if in fact she is in a hurry with no time to change into more discreet streetware.

The Post Office is right at the head of our pedestrian mall. It's the site in our town with the heaviest concentration of idlers with nothing better to do than gaze at petite ladies in short tennis dresess, even if these ladies are no longer as young as before.

For which of us is?

E-Ling's First Stillies!

2010-10-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

Meimei and the family, minus Ma and Grandpa, who will be added as the gallery continues, I'm sure.

Typos in the service of Protest

2010-09-26T15:58:00.001-07:00

Letter from Reloj (circa the 80s)

2010-09-25T17:44:00.000-07:00

A letter came, long ago ...

The Old Stations

2010-09-24T10:49:00.001-07:00

My hometown movie palace in its ruin

We had some spare minutes while PJ was napping and our daughter-in-law asked if I'd brought a book. Why, yes, in fact I'd brought an entire library, with practically all my music, along with various reference materials and tools, off- line and on-, and all of it in my pocket.

Through that device, I learned Blockbuster is bankrupt and the recording and broadcast industries are sneaking lobbyists in the back doors of Congress in the attempt at requiring that the makers of smartphones install an FM receiver into every unit. There is some shakeout in print as well; newspapers and magazines are not doing well at all, except for the fat and glossy. This all suggests that the olde industry which formerly sold our own culture back to us in discrete packets is in trouble. All the old stations, as Waylon sings to us, are being torn down, and the high-flying trains no longer roll.

And, just as when those railroad engines began running on diesel, maybe it's time once again to talk about featherbedding (formerly, paying a fireman to stoke an engine that is no more). With schools and human services bleeding all across the land, can we really afford, for the sake of nostalgia, to retain, maintain, and staff public libraries as monuments to the old days?

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From Both Sides Now

2010-09-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

One side of the question ..

Meet Woesong. He is an office worker. His boss is a simpleton named Bill. Bill is portly, and maybe that's why he is receptive to an applicant for the receptionist job who is obese. Her name is Lucy. Hi, Lucy!

She is also crazy. She has that malicious loon habit of laughing while she causes trouble, mocks, scorns. There are quite a few of these and Woesong knows them when he sees them. But not, apparently, simple Bill, who hires her.

When trouble inevitably ensues, Bill is warned by Woesong and another worker in the office that the time to move is now, before Lucy's probation is over. Bill sits like a frog in his office and time ticks away and now Lucy is a full-time permanent employee. The trouble increases.

Bill admits he's not good at moderating conflict. He offers the latest newage sewage from Human Resources to apply where his leadership should be. How about all the three employees going over to the Personnel division for sessions on Conflict Resolution®? That would leave Bill to sit alone in the office, which is fine with him.

.. and another.

Not so the employees. Look, they say. This is not an argument of two equal sides over a legitimate question. This is a trouble-making nut, and you denigrate the rest of us by pretending we all have a share in Lucy's lunacy.

Well, says Bill, there was that time you said something impolite to that other lady some years back. Maybe you have problems with women, Woesong?

But Woesong only has trouble with malicious loons, and with bosses who shirk responsibility. Eventually, it all works out. Bill leaves for a more peacable life somewhere else and Lucy deteriorates to the extent she is finally and sumarilly fired by Bill's successor.

Woesong has an empirical parable now whenever he hears talk about how we all should listen not only to the very reasonable and fact-based presentations of a Keith and a Rachel, but the delirious screeching lies and slander from the Repugnants. It's like squawking back at crows; they have their own language and nothing is gained by offering them a seat at the conference table. There simply is no equivalency between Faux Noise and any sensible source.

Lucy, of course, might not agree. I believe I saw a picture of her on the news. If so, she was wearing a broad-brimmed hat with teabags clipped to it. If it wasn't our Lucy, it was one just like her. As Woesong knows, there are plenty of them to go around.

Notes: Microsoft has been playing ball with the KGB in clamping down on ecological dissidents in Russia under the cover of software piracy busts, but, like all public entities caught offbase, they recanted and offered to do penance.

Also I read here: "The Recording Industry Association of America and the National Association of Broadcasters are going against the Consumer Electronics Association in a battle that may affect the capabilities of the next electronic device you own. " What these forlorn dated agencies of expired music methodology want to do is force smartphone aps to carry FM receivers. That's right, git gumint off our backs, except in cases where we need to force the consumer to protect a passe business plan.

Jacks or Better to Open

2010-09-13T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is the capsule background of the making of One-Eyed Jacks I wrote for Wikipedia.

I cribbed it from Brando Rides Alone by Barry Gifford.

Rod Serling, already famed as the creator of the Twilight Zone series, wrote an adaptation of the novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider (1956) - which was itself simply a novelization of the career of Billy the Kid relocated to Monterey, CA - at the request of producer Frank Rosenberg. The treatment was rejected and Rosenberg next hired Sam Peckinpah, who finished his first script on 11 November 1957. Marlon Brando's Pennebaker Productions had paid $40,000 for the rights to Authentic Death and then signed a contract with Stanley Kubrick to direct for Paramount Pictures. Peckinpah handed in a revised screenplay on 6 May 1959, and all was set.

It didn't stay all set. First, Kubrick didn't like the screenplay. Brando fired Peckinpah and hired Calder Willingham, but he and Brando stalled, so both Willingham and Kubrick were canned. Guy Trosper became the new screenwriter, who worked on the story with Brando, who hired himself as director.

The movie as it runs today has very little resemblance to the Neider novel, and what remains has much more resonance with history than fiction. At various times, the two credited screenwriters and the uncredited Peckinpah have claimed or had claimed for them a majority of the responsibility for the film, and Karl Malden has answered the query about who really wrote the story which became Jacks thus: "There is one answer to your question - Marlon Brando, a genius in our time."

Dad and Rio, up on the ridge

The major addition in the film was the betrayal on the sand. The two surviving bank robbers lose one horse to the pursuing rurales and are left up on a ridge, deciding future prospects with one horse and the posse circling their position.

Hey, says one, let one of us ride for new mounts at that little jacalito back down there a piece. Okay, says the other, but which? W
ho stays, who rides? They shake for it. Bullet rides. And so one takes off with the gold and the plan to return and rescue his compadre.

Only, while he's strapping all that gold onto the new horse in that corral, the rider's motions slow as he appears in deep thought. The object is perfectly clear: back there on the ridge there is a tight scrape with a mere chance at escaping with half the booty. Just past that low-lying treeline in the other direction is certain freedom with no shooting and all the gold.

The movie follows the progress of the revenge of the one left on the ridge, and you'll understand the Freudian trappings of the story when I tell you the one who rode off with the treasure was named Dad, and the vengeful follower was called The Kid.

It's an historic movie, to me, although not a particularly good one, and my two compadres and I discussed it from all angles and in some detail. None of us knew from where came the vengeance motive. And so sometime during the 80s I wrote to some of the surviving principals.

Letter from my penpal Calder

I wrote also to the credited screenwriter Guy Trosper, and had a nice note from Guy Trosper Jr, who told me he was quite sure his daddy created most of what we know as Jacks, but Hollywood apparently was not overly grateful, as they had not dealt rightly with the family of the writer of not only The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Birdman of Alcatraz, but Jailhouse Rock!

I have a notion of where the central motive force in the movie came from. Mexico. A generation or so before the events of this movie, there was an event occurring, as they must, down south while we were enjoying our hideous civil war. It seems a foreign power was attempting to implant its own form of government in this primitive land, to the benefit of the home country. I'll leave you to guess how that worked out, but a portion of that saga regarding his Excellency run to ground by Jurarez and associates resonates with the two desperadoes up on the sand dune in the movie, and I'll quote it as I found it in Maximilian in Mexico, by Sara Yorke Stevenson, who was present in Mexico for the last attempt to plant a monarchy on the American continent.

General Marquez, when the republican forces closed in upon the doomed empire, was sent from Queretaro with General Vidaurri, under an escort of cavalry led by General Quiroga, to raise supplies and reinforcements. He was vested with supreme authority as lieutenant of the empire, and had pledged himself to return with relief within twenty days. The Emperor wearily counted the hours as time went by; but, like the raven sent out from Noah's ark, General Marquez found enough to occupy him in the satisfaction of his own greed, and was never again heard from by him who sent him.

Could this be the event which suggested the trajectory for the movie?

But, frown you when you but recall the conundrums of Jacks? Here is it itself, marred, as you see, by overacting!

The Tarzan Yell, as Interpreted by the Backyardigans and PJ

2010-09-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

The PJ version:

And the original:

The Snoop Saga

2010-09-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

While my Lady and I ride bikes on West Cliff, I'm able to continue my lifelong scientific surreptitious survey of humans and how they account for themselves. It is a double-blind study in that the participants never know about the study and I myself know not much more about such matters as statistics and surveys. Plus, it's peer reviewed, as I write it here and only I read it.

I was able to determine, with an accuracy rate +/- 110%, the precise nature and ultimate consequence of any and all personal encounters of whatever sort under whichever circumstance. This is admittedly a bit of a load for stray snippets of overheard dialogue to carry, but I hope the breadth of the evaluation will stand in for the sprinkling of individual samples.

The anectdotes of each speaker in turn throughout all recorded (by my memory) history always and forever formatted the speaker as the protagonist in profoundly correct and ethical contrast with an evil or misguided other who was invariably at great fault. The setting was often a workplace, slightly less frequently a social occasion, and involved as the foil a (former) lover or friend, sometimes, but most often a boss.

The event under discussion was not a work in progress in that we should not expect the protagonist to ever become less virtuous, or her opponent more so. It is thus always a parable, and never an equal contest, as the speaker always wins.

"He asked me (dopey falsetto): `You know we have to bring the budget up to date' and I said (firm and sonorous): `We ain't me unless you mean to bring in the numbers' and I just left it thataway."

We are invited to imagine a transgressor standing stock-still in the office like a polled steer.

It appears there is some need at self-validation in humans. They do not often display the chutzpah of superior bearing, yet they must develop an essence above average, and they do this by telling their tales. Everyone has some dog to kick in his own conceit. This must be healthy, because everyone does it. The sickly sort must atone for their unworthiness by ascribing a conspiracy involving various sinister combines utilizing dastardly means to undermine their just deserts and shortsell their pitiful plaudits, rendering them as lorn and loathsome hateful left-behinds (aka "teabaggers").

This study stands above idle eavesdropping, as history itself consists solely in such reports, with accepted versions only rising like scum on a cesspool as a consequence of disconnected victories in far unrelated fields. Thus Mark Twain, a southern boy, helps Grant write his memoirs, although Lee might provide at least as much truthiness. And the suspicious myths of Ulysses the sole survivor of a long adventure have only himself for credit.

That Summer in Paris

To Them Death is so Romantic

2010-09-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

Some troglodyte or other is deploring payments to war vets based upon exposure to a known carcinogen for disabilities not so well understood to result. Some say there is no direct, clinical evidence of any correlation between the dousing of Agent Orange and diabetes, say.

They're right.

Epidemiology (as I read at the time in 1991 when the formula for rating disabilities was working out) is, essentially, statistics. Are Vietnam vets suffering from lung cancer at a rate higher than civilians of their same age group? Yes, slightly. So lung cancer is ascribed into the Agent Orange column, and vets collect for it, even were they lifetime smokers. There is no nexus between the ailment and the agent proven otherwise. It's all conjecture, based upon pure numbers.
Perhaps a general understanding of the era, and Agent Orange as an issue, is helpful. There were maybe three great veterans benefit firestorms in our history, and the other two (Full Funding and the Bonus March) happened before there was a Veterans Administration. In the seventies, the news business ignited the question of this chemical saturation of segments of jungle in Vietnam and its potential consequences before the VA was ready for it, and so it blew up in their faces.
There was a furor, and the VA was instructed by it, thusly: "You want us to spend more of your tax dollars quicker?" Okay, they said. So they ran with Agent Orange, and were way ahead of the curve when PTSD ballooned in the same decade.
A helpful side-effect for the VA was in the vast increase in the census for treatment at VAMCs and clients to be served through the Regional Offices, with consequent increase in personnel and budget. It was actually a windfall, as they were suffering, it was reported, loss in their largest pool of customers, WWII vets, at the rate of 1,500 per day.
The Repugnant party will push the review of such expenses, though they be trivial in contrast with other waste, because, while they are most anxious to send others into harm's way, Repugs are notorious for ducking such service when it's their own worthless keesters in question. The Chicken Hawks have no conception of what it means to be in combat. It is inexcusable for anyone who takes from public funds for preening in his patriotic plummage to claim that someone forced into the most grievous proof of true patriotism is over-compensated.

The end of the Bonus March; 1930

Best If Sold Yesterday

2010-08-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

There are four of us in a field across from my house with Halloween coming on. A green four-door Buick glides to the east along Evans, a half block to the south.

"Hey, Nickie!" says one. Nickie is am voluptuous classmate who lives in the next street south. We all gallop over, yank open three doors in greeting.

Mr Dobson, at the wheel, is no Nickie. He is a bit unnerved.

"Whatta you boys want?"

Sorry, we mutter variously, and shut his doors.

Now, left to my own devices, I would have recognized Mr Dobson, uncle of the Hembrees, who lived precisely at the location where be was stopped when we accosted him. He also, needless to say, drove a 4-door Olds, identical with the one Nickie drove.

But I substituted general knowledge for my own private empirical sense.

This habit of hanging the rip cord of your thought processes up on a community static line is common, and it can be quite useful to those with anything to sell.

Recently one of those nasty pinch-beaked parrots in the Texas legislature informed an intrepid interviewer all about them immigrants, and their nefarious terrorist plots, and "it's common knowledge" that 82% of the births in a Houston hospital are to one of 'em.

Another sample of what is called 'argumentum ad populum' came up on the Rachel Maddow Show, when she pointed out the logical flaw of a buffoon on Faux Noise responding to a claim by referencing his audience numbers, as if he must be righter the more fools who watch his program.

And I have seen it, yes, plenty of times. There was an old technique utilizing a key ingredient of online chat groups, that being, invisibility, to declare during an argument that "countless" have privately written to him in support of his position but they were too afraid of his opponent to say so publicly in the group. He had cornered a high percentage of abject cowards, and reckoned that as giving strength to his argument.

The need for making such points is simply that he has no other.

Sent from my iPhone

The Blessing

2010-08-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

There is a story of a Zen monk I'll call Han-Shen. He lived way up in the hills in a cave, and he spent his days and nights meditating, and watching the shadows climb up one cliff wall, and down another.

Han-Shen was amused by the sun turning, turning in the heavens above and slowly sinking into the hills and then rising again in the sky, no different for the journey.

A delegation from the palace of the Patriarch approached the cave of Han-Shen one spring morning, bidding the monk behold the newly-born son and heir. The child was duly blessed by Han-Shen.

And so the shadows continued to climb and fall, and the sun to rise and slip and slide, and Han-Shen to laugh at the whole immense comedy.

In time there again appeared a delegation from the palace, and they informed the monk that the old Patriarch had passed on, and his son had taken on his duties as ruler, and had sent his servants to secure
the blessing of the noble monk once more, that he might govern the province with wisdom and grace.

Han-Shen refused.

The ambassadors of the new Patriarch retreated back down the hill in some confusion and dismay. But Han-Shen only laughed at this latest joke.

For how could a province be ruled by a mere infant?

Sent from my iPhone

Hallowed Be Thy Strain

2010-08-17T15:15:00.001-07:00

PROSPERO

Aside
They are both in either's powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

Were it sufficient unto a monument it would demonstrate profoundly in kinetic energy the dark void he leaves inside us. It would depict not just emptiness but the great weight of what was but is not.

Not in text because he spoke none and only valued a few words, and not in pretty borrowed sentences for hire, and not in pursuit of any model, because there are none.

Okay, then make it a mighty labor over two days, and make it so no stranger shall know what is there. Maybe it's just some form of cairn. But is it enough?

No.

But is it the best you could do?

Yes.

Sent from my iPhone

The Wisdom of Clouds

2010-08-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

Me and my BFF Scoobie

I remember the satisfaction whenever I said anything wise, and it was easy to know when that was. All I need do was speak in accordance with my Daddy, because he represented knowing, and a simple way to do that was simply to quote him. So I did.

Pony League is just a notch older than Little Leage, under 12s, and we had a coach in those years we called, to his satisfaction and ours, our FAB manager. He figured quite naturally it was the diminuitive of "Fabulous," whereas we knew it was an acronym, the only letter I'll flesh out for you being "Fat."

Anyhow, as it happened the boys in Little and Pony leagues were taken to an exhibition game in the NFL preseason at the Cotton Bowl, and after one such I, varying my references, quoted my older brother Joey about what great spirit the pro teams maintained.

"Yeah," snorted FAB. "Every block, every tackle means more money for 'em." And then he extended his remarks; "It's the niggahs keeps up the spirit."

I told that to my Daddy. Now, he was a racist, as was every white adult in our town, I suppose, but he was not one to credit FAB. "Oh, that's what they thought years ago ..." he muttered.

So I quoted Daddy to the boys, who may have wondered just how it came to be some kid would know how anything was any number of years ago.

I left off using Daddy as my authority one summer day over in another town where he operated a dry cleaner shop. The occasion was old Yachtie Albright's ancient canine Dunk. Old Dunk was blind, mostly, and couldn't hear very well either, and so on those accounts in that region Yachtie had much pressure brought to bear to put old Dunk down, which he would simply not allow.

Pat Bailey was another senior character in that town, and he liked old Dunk, in fact was of the habit of coming by Yachtie's store up on the square and taking Dunk with him across the courthouse lawn to the post office and back. Only one day Pat did not bring Dunk back.

Yachtie, he knew the rhythm of that town from many years watching from his perch in a lawn chair leaned back against the doorjamb of his store, which sold various goods, mostly plastic, mostly neither needed nor wanted. Yachtie knew what was up. He hurried over to the neighborhood vet office to stop the killing of Dunk

And so thereaftre Pat Bailey would come up to the square from his furniture store (which doubled as a funeral parlor; I'm not kidding) a block away and ask Yachtie if he could take Dunk to the PO. He'd be curtly refused and head off across the lawn, head down, crying in the sun.

My Daddy took Yachtie to task. "Why in the world you want to keep that mangy old hound alive ..."

Yachtie said, "Wouldn't kill you just because you were blind."

Daddy sputtered; "That's different ... I can talk!"

I mark that place in my days with an asterisk. Talk? You mean that mouthwash too quick for profit and too dull for patience, the means by which lies and insults be conveyed? This is the golden heaven-sent gift which distinguishes us from all other beasts of field or air? Talk? Why, all my growing days I never encountered any boy with the sense of a Caledonia Crow, and yet they all talked plenty.

I began to wonder about primacy, and the moral license for it, and whether in this universe there was some franchise delivered unto those who talked like my Daddy.

I decided not. And I to this day have never heard a useful counter-argument to Yactie's very honorable stand with Dunk.

In the Twilight of Steam

2010-08-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

I am reading a classic by Edith Wharton, when I detect a faint music tone. Hey, my book is ringing.

Hello?

Sunday's on the phone to Monday,
Tuesday's on the phone to me.

The game is Musical Chairs. You are sitting with others, waiting for the music to begin. When it does, all the players are supposed to rise and march around the chairs, one of which will have been removed in the meanwhile. There are never enough chairs for all the hopeful sitters, so if you don't find one when the music stops, you're out of the game.

A liberal is one who wants ever more chairs brought into the game. A conservative insists on remaining seated, no matter how many unfortunates must leave the stage each round.

Ancient authors retain their early habits; insist on working out their prose in ink by hand, eventually passing the script along to a secretary to transcribe for today. Some dictate text to recorders or recording devices, others hold the line at typewriters, still others do work with computers but print their copy for editing. Everyone who has had a comfortable seat has the tendancy to remain where she is, especially as the only reward for standing and marching is another chair much like the one she just left.

Once it was the color of compiling print into volumes and shipping them to buildings where they were stored and meted out to a thankful reading public. In the library there are many chairs, but not nearly as many as there was a while ago.

Some who are wiser than the rest compile our best wishes and fondest hopes into plans, programs, projects for us, and we should be grateful. It's how private general will becomes public policy. These public servants direct our tax revenue to the good and the useful, based upon a history of how those noble terms were once defined. We travel in fast transit machines because speed was ever of the essence, despite we leave thousands dead on the road. Our tradition holds that liquor and tobacco which leave millions of dead per annum world wide are either ennobling or at least tolerant, whereas a peculiar weed, which kills none except in its suppression, is not.

A community would best show enlightened culture, and those better educated than we motley know that opera and ballet are good for us. (Education is, as Mark Twain defined it, that particular intelligence which tells you the music of Wagner is much better than it sounds.) And, of course, every evolved society must have libraries, which are the essence of literacy.

I now carry a rather large library in my pocket, and, if that isn't sufficient, I can seek out additionns from some 600,000 options without leaving my chair, plus I can play music from the same implement without pause and at will. From my reading device, I can plot a course, surf the web, exchange email, do weather and stock reports, consult any news source online, and define most any word I come across by simply placing my finger on it. (My vocabulary over the years sags under the weight of all the words I meant to look up.)

I know you have often wondered about that surly screed written by one Robert Greene which is the earliest mention we have of the Stratford gent, referred to therein as an Upstart Crow. It's called Greene's GROAT'S-WORTH of Wit, and you might go down to wherever they stock books and ask for it. Or you can simply read it online, as I did.

There comes a time when the public, just as the old railroads in the twilight of steam, can no longer afford featherbedding. In those coming times, maybe the faithful librarian will be thanked for her years of faithful and trusted service, and excused from further duty, much as was the fireman aboard those newfangled diesel engines of yore.

Is it possible that a public agency which diverts treasure into huge structures which are no longer necessary may be guilty of misuse of the general fund? Must, in other words, the music begin again and all of us be forced to rise and march, and seating only provided to the quick and the useful? Is it, not to place too fine a point on it, forseeable that the vernerable and beloved librarian shall one day be forced to rise from her seat behind the reference desk?

Don't know, but I do hear music starting up from this wonderful devise I carry.

Scoobie

2010-05-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

Scoobie was born 6-Oct-2000, and we found him sometime before September 2002, at the Santa Cruz SPCA. We had not long before lost my beloved Max, a Golden Medley, thus I did not want to go into the Animal Shelter because of the sadness. But my Lady went, with son Will, and she came back to the car to tell me, you have to see this guy, he's just a big oaf.

I went into the meet-'n-greet cage, and dropped down to my knees. Scoob came over to me, placed one paw on my left thigh, another on my right, and kissed me right in the smacker. Immediately he retreated to on end of the area to watch for a ball toss Lady was preparing.

I never knew him to do anything like that again, and I was with him most every minute from the time we took him home until we lost him. Rarely was he out of my presence.

He was very loveable, and also majestic, and beautiful, but don't take my word for it. We would be waiting somewhere, anywhere, and some would come over just to stroke him and tell me how lovely he was.

It was rare I passed by Scoob without stroking him. Mostly I would just place a hand beside that massive jaw while he lay in one of his beds. No matter what furniture we were carrying, I never once prompted him to move out of the way. He would move, in time, and I figured he'd been moved enough.

He'd been surrendered to the pound twice, in fact. His mother was a full-on Pit, and his father straight Rottie, and his owners from birth were sorry as we could imagine, from stories (we happened to run into the owner of his father, who told us about him) and from the fact that, when he was new, anytime I reached up over him, he cringed, as if expecting to be hit.

The owner of his father told us about his first owners. They were neighbors of hers and lived on Bear Creek Road, and Scoob was allowed to wander, and someone who owned a shop in Boulder Creek would find him out on the road somewhere and take him with him to work. He'd call the owner, and she would show up to claim him, sometimes four days later.

I was always very tolerant, too much so, according to the family, which spent a lot of effort in convincing me he should be treated like a dog. I have evolved considerably from my callous early days, however. I have trouble recognizing that barrier between families of animals, and more justifying it.

He had three spots to bed down indoors. There were a couple of huge pillows in the teevee room, and a full bed in front of the fire, and one upstairs in the computer room. Scoob seemed to like spelunking; his first bounding around the property sent him under the house, so we had to screen the opening. The computer room bedding is under a corner formed by the eaves.

One early time he went to Big Sur with us, and we were lounging just outside the Phoenix shop, on the Nepenthe grounds, and a busload of girls from the UK swarmed him. He is used to that. He rolls onto his back and allows stroking as long as they like. I wanted his picture, so I stood and took two steps to my right with my camera.

Instantly Scoob jumped to his feet and came to me. I think he was anxious about being left once more. It broke my heart.

Lighthouse Field is open, with some brush and cypress, and Scoob was sniffing there when we were newly together, and he lost sight of me. I went around the brush to look on the other side, and here he came in almost a panic, looking for me.

Lady would be off on her bike down West Cliff while we cavorted with other pups and sniffed brush, and Scoob would be delighted and excited when he saw her come back. There were words, like "Mama" or even "Look" which triggered the same reaction. Scoob had a workable vocabulary.

When we walk, if the group straggles apart, Scoob ties it together. I see him often, settling into the space between two groups, glancing back at the one trailing.

When he greets, he is most excited. Some fear it, a bustling hunk bounding about, but I love the show of affection. He loves who he has known, and always and forever deserves more of them.

I have been sitting on the grass across from the medical clinic where my Lady goes, and lots walk in and out. Suddenly, Scoob bounds up, tail wagging. The lady I do not recognize, then I do. She is one of them who has a black lab mix at Its Beach and Lighthouse Field. How in the world did Scoob know her? He is placid always until he recognizes an affection for such as he, but this was genuine personal knowing. I will never know.

At the field, we go for off-leash hours. He runs on the beach with the other pups. Sometimes there is trouble, often, there is. He is aggressive with the little ones, and fast enough to overtake them, roll them, hound them. I try and grab him but he has the trick of dancing around in a circle, and I'm always alone. (My Lady rides her bike along West Cliff.)

Twice I am wounded. Once a Great Dane in snapping at him in defense but brings the blood through my hand. Another time I try and grab his harness and his momentum tears the ligament from my phallange. I have surgery for that one.

When he meets a willing stranger or a passel of them, he will turn and sit, on their feet, if he can, while they stroke him. He has never grown weary of the stroking.

He is limping after runs at the beach. He has torn a cruciate ligment, and we haul him to UC Davis for surgery. When we go to pick him up, he comes running down the hall, his toes clicking, his surgeon and an aid trying to hold him. One day previous, he had major surgery, a withdrawal of his femur and replacement, which usually means they are "toe-touching" the floor in a week. He is running in a day.

My Lady has brought home a companion, Maya. She has had a hard life, but that's another story. They are fine most of the time; she gives way to him about toys and the best place by the fire. But she would not be alive were she to give over in the matter of grub, and when we mistake to set bowls too close, and he shows aggression, she flies at him. She is at 54 pound half his size, but it's him we have to take to the vet to close the gash over his eye.

He weighs 94 pounds when he is new to us, about a year and a half, and very soon he has put on thirty pounds. Everybody blames me and my stash of cookies.

We enter him in three training classes over the years. We want him to come when called, and leave the little dogs alone when we say so. The classes are sit-stay-walk. He mugs a Pit female youngster on the beach and we take him up to Bonny Doon for a trainer who is recommended for large hounds who show antisocial traits. It's just more sit-stay-walk.

We stop allowing him on the beach and the field unleashed. West Side Whiners have sued to prevent off-leash canines in the park. There is opposition to everything in this county. But we would not go with Scoob into the park without a leash again. There is his other ligament, which the vets tell us is vulnerable (most who have the surgery done on one side need the other within two years) and of course his bullying.

So we walk through the park and along West Cliff Drive, and he goes with us on our hike through the neighborhood each morning. We pick up the paper and loop the up road.

There are connections, family, in Santa Barbara, five hours away. Once we left Scoob in a kennel, but only once. I still remember his look when the door wouldn't open and we were in the waiting room and he within the compound.

Then we found sitters for him; one who was marvelous and another who was scary strange. Then our son Will moved down to Santa Barbara, and he did not mind Scoob joining us. (Our other son has Peej, twenty seven months old as I write this, and the Scoob and Peej in the same quarters make me, and only me, very nervous. For Scoob has shown aggression towards rampaging young kids before. I don't allow Peej and Scoob alone in a room, which causes much anxiety on my part.

When we drive up beyond Berkeley to see the Beans, Scoob isn't invited, so we have to just close the gate and leave him. It is my most anxious time. Sometimes there is no trouble, other than his habit of showing us his displeasure, or asserting his authority when we aren't there, by taking something of ours, like packaged grub from under the kitchen counter, and burying it in the garden. Once he just went into our bedroom upstairs and brought down a stuffed bear that has been there forever and left it on the floor downstairs.

Twice he ate the gate.

We come home and it's dark. We go for the day, mostly Sunday, and in the winter it's dark when we return. Scoob is bounding around the driveway in the dark. He has forced his way through the front gate. So I repair it. The next time we are not back by dark, he has eaten 2x4s and is out again. We have to do more extensive repairs; rebuild the gate; stack the barbecue as a barricade before it. That seems to work.

On the road come one morning in the spring, Scoob is panting. Drastically. He moves off the road into the brush behind a redwood and plops onto his belly there. The light is not full up yet. I have called to Lady but she thinks I'm talking to him. (Her back is such that she cannot handle the leash and so she goes on alone up the hill.)

So here I am, like Roland, calling to the main party, but sitting with my boy, in the brush. Will she return? I cannot carry him.

At long last, she does. I tell her he is down, and she goes for the auto. It is some time before it comes down the dark road, and Scoob recognizes it. He is up and we have him aboard.

The vet, Tammy, think it's his arthritis. We had known about some of it in his right shoulder, but now it's in his left and lower back. She thinks he was reacting to the pain.

Another morning soon after, he is very sluggish. The Beans are here, but he's on my mind. I go up to where he has settled, in Peej's room. He rises, comes over the sit by me. Then collapses.

I sound the alarm. Scoob tries to move, collapses against the door, settles down. His ears are up, he is alert to something new in his world.

They cannot handle him on the weekend at Harbor Vets, so Tammy refers us to Pacific, which is emergency care and round the clock. They take him in. We've borrowed a stretcher from Harbor; he's been carried from Peej's room all the way here.

A large mass around his heart was detected by the ultrasound, and he was "a candidate for surgery," meaning, it may not have spread. It had. The hemangioscarcinoma was diagnosed after the operation. We were informed a day after he had been released to us.

16-May-2010.

A Condensed Course in History

2010-04-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

I took a course in political philsophy once. Of course, the instructor, a CP (Condensed Philosopher) was unaccredited, and it was an ad hoc mentoring for no credit during two or three session in a bookstore. I was merely monitoring the course.

A Condensed Philosopher is one whose lessons are based upon a select two pages of learning from such as Readers Digest or the NRA magazine. This particular brand of education must be impervious and hardy, in that it must not shrink from the twin killers of most such notions: logic and facts.

There was a single shallow groove running like a hairpart beneath the scalp of our CP, and every marble placed in that head eventually rolled down that very narrow corridor. He was like a playful pup in the park, running away with every single topic or mention into the narrow fields of his own obsession. A certain author is play-acting as a politician, or vice versa - "Well, if he's elected, which I hope he ain't, he'll try and take my guns away."

This is bad, this is. Because, you see, without the protection afforded us stalwart citizens by the Second Amendment, this nation would be ground into dust by the grievous autocracy of our elected officials. Now, CP did not himself profess patriotism, but some of his ilk do, and it's perplexing.

Our own system of a public weal carrying the private will, i.e., democratic election, is usually the base of our national pride and the world's own due homage, as it once was. It meant that the most honorable means of, as the mayor says in Our Town, helping those who need it and not bothering those who don't, is the mean pioneered by the Founders. Yet the CP and his militant minions declare that the sole province of a nation is in its citizens being allowed to freely shoot to kill whenever their own estimation of Free Will be challenged.

You often see these traitors so enthralled by treason that it's their only goal draped in a very oxy-moronic American flag.

Anyhow, my own experience with a CP taught me lessons about Switzerland.

Do you know why the Swiss were able to retain their neutrality during WWII? It's because every boychild among them has been for centuries taught the care and feeding of firearms. Everybody in Switzerland has at least one rifle and knows how to use it. "Boy, Hitler know'd if he'd invaded the Swiss, he'd have a bobcat by the tail!"

This CP was also against registration of firearms. The nazis, when they invaded Poland, only had to "drive by city hall and pick up the registration papers and go disarm the citizens out at their houses one by one."

Now, you probably thought the neutrality of the Swiss was honored by the Germans because they were such grand honorary nazis that they turned back desperate Jews at their borders and then cheerfully fenced the stolen goods, including gold wrenched from the teeth, of those same victims. You probably have in mind the immense spread of one hundred and ten Wermach divisions along the eastern front, around three million troops, with slightly fewer Russian forces opposed, in Operation Barbarossa, the bloodiest battlefield in history, and wonder ust how some lunatic willing to incur those costs (which meant eventaully the war itself and his own worthless hide) would be afraid of a pitiful bunch of yokels in the Alps with their squirrel rifles.

But true CPs are not harried by reason, as I say, only the humming of mosquitoes inside their own heads. For which there is absolutely no pesticide.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

2010-04-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

This is probably my favorite scene of all time. It features three dead men, barstool cowboys set on killing mustangs in order to avoid working for a living, and the one solitary pacifist who dissents from the slaughter of the most noble critters in the picture (uncredited). It marked the first time in my movie-going experience that the passive and sensitive (woman) stopped the dread carousing mindless violent (male). Give Peace a Chance is the very best manner of living but it can make for dull movies.

Marilyn had just about chewed all the sweetness out of the gum of her marriage to the playwright who had written the story and film called The Misfits by the time it was filmed, and she dismissed the scene you just watched. That's what he thinks of me, she gloomed, winning with hysterics instead of logic.

Well, okay, then, how about Ida M Tarbell? She shut down another occurance of heartless mercantilism, and she didn't use hysteria neither.

Once upon a time in America, the market was a wilderness, where the big animals scored all the game. One of the very biggest was named Rockefeller, and he was set upon owning the world with his Standard Oil. He would pay a premium for railroads to carry his goods and block competitors from doing the same. They would need to bring oil to customers, but Rocky bought up rail they needed to cross and blocked 'em. We would now be the United Standard of Oil, were it not for Ms Tarbell.

. . . Until the people of the United States have solved the question of free and equal transportation it is idle to suppose that they will not have a trust question. So long as it is possible for a company to own the exclusive carrier on which a great natural product depends for transportation, and to use this carrier to limit a competitor’s supply or to cut off that supply entirely if the rival is offensive, and always to make him pay a higher rate than it costs the owner, it is ignorance and folly to talk about constitutional amendments limiting trusts. . . So long as the Standard Oil Company can control transportation as it does to-day, it will remain master of the oil industry, and the people of the United States will pay for their indifference and folly. . . .
. . . We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class. . . .

You can see how the argument played out, and I recommend it, right here. The short answer is, due to and as a consequence of Ms Tarbell's non-hysterical and very cogent reasoning, the Sherman Antitrust Act was applied. Here's what the Supreme Court said, back before it became a corporate subsidiary and actually performed quite nobly sometimes, as in STANDARD OIL COMPANY OF NEW JERSEY et al.* v. UNITED STATES 221 U.S. 1 (1911):

We think no disinterested mind can survey the period in question without being irresistibly driven to the conclusion that the very genius for commercial development and organization which it would seem was manifested from the beginning soon begot an intent and purpose to exclude others which was frequently manifested by acts and dealings wholly inconsistent with the theory that they were made with the single conception of advancing the development of business power by usual methods, but which, on the contrary, necessarily involved the intent to drive others from the field and to exclude them from their right to trade, and thus accomplish the mastery which was the end in view. . . .

Now, this was all a hundred years ago nearabouts, and Standard Oil is no more, nor is the premise the tycoons can own the market and the horse it rode in on, so I was just reminiscing today of The Misfits, and Ms Marilyn, and the stupendous screaming out in that Black Rock desert which, for a brief time, brought humanity into play where grim inhuman commerce loomed.

Sorry I can't think of any modern application for the parable, but the movie is good, and the sentiment is first class, and I hope you liked it.

Old Mitch, the Bankers' Bitch

2010-04-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

I am interested in how every nefarious opportunity might offer a thin layer of noble motive. Back home, the icon of heroic self-destruction was encased in the single word, Alamo. Republic, said Big John, the sagacious simpleton,

`Ah lak the sound of the word; it means people can walk free, talk free, come or go, be drunk or sober, however they choose.'

And then along comes Vonnegut to explain for the first time ever in my reading the motivation of the Texians, the Founders of Texas: slavery. They wanted to bring along their slaves, and Mexico would not allow it. Walk free, says Big John, Talk free.

In Steinback's Sweet Thursday, two campesinos sat upon a hillside, watching it all come down in harmony. They had two bottles they were saving for a friend for his birthday, and as they sat there, they began to consider the harm of offering two bottles of vino to this particular compadre. Perhaps they should only give him a bottle and a half. It's like falling on a grenade for your squad, this removing of temptation. Or one bottle, even. They knew his character, his habits, and so the faults in the offering expanded during a long afternoon while the content of the bottles diminished. Of course, by the time the intended giftee was around, the gift wasn't.

The most rancid offal is but fertilizer, after all. Or, as Steinbeck himself writes:

It is astounding to find that the belly of every dark and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.

Sir Thomas More is the poster boy for great and noble sacrifice, for he gave up his life in defense of his holy calling which conflicted with the lust of a malicious monarch. He presents many fine and profound sentiments in A Man For All Seasons to defend the proposition that no king can declare on matters of conscience. It is all very wonderful and inspiring, except ...

Sir Thomas was defending the most dictatorial and deadly menace on earth at that moment, being his established Church. More was the pitiful protector of the Inquisition, in support of which as Lord Mayor of London he had gleefully condemned many to the flames who were considered by Mother Church heretical. That's right, this icon of personal religious preference was but a tool of the most horrible torture and mass murder.

But he used good diction, like our own Bard when he extolled the patriotic heroics of imperialism. Unlike little Mitch and the current Repugnant chorus, who read from a blatantly fake script which is reduced to one term in our newage consiousness (which itself shrinks by the generation like a Campesino's sacrament): Bailout. That's all, just say the word, it's the new Repugnant mantra. It is utterly and provably false to anyone who reads, which excludes the core audience of Old Mitch, the Banker's Bitch.

You Will Have Wolves

2010-04-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

My high school science teacher, Waldo, understood that if you wanted to prevent rats, you kept a clean house. So if he caught some kid gazing fondly at the work of a smarter neighbor during a test, he would take five points from the score - of the victim.

A shepherd has known forever that sheep begat wolves, as the night follows the day. And so one had better be prepared for the wolves.

There are a range of remedies for this of the sheep and the wolves. One theory was, with sufficient carrots, then the lion and the little lambies will lie down in peace. Another premise ran, you had better build ever stronger barricades to your corrals with ever greater sticks.

I am reading two fables on the foibles of the fenceless foils. One is about perhaps the serial killer with the most victims in US history name of Brinkley, who met that raging male anxiety of impotency by the novel technique of inserting gonad of goat into the human scrotum. It is astonishing he grew wealthy and continued so long, but the chief ingredient in wolves is the sheep.

The other story is on the first bank failure in America, brought out in the early 19th century by the mechanism of allowing banks to simply print greenbacks. That's all. A bank was chartered and then it pressed its own money and scattered it to the winds. Eventually it was discovered that the confidence of the public was all that prevented the paper from a value above waste paper, and then it no longer did. The purveyor of the fraud escaped town before the whole structure came down around the ears of the investors.

Sheep's a chance, as the philosophers say, but wolves are sure.

It is necessary to encompass great crime with a structure of our own building. This reassures us. Were it not for this easily adjusted abstraction, then the terrible tragedy would've been averted.

Were society to provide more educational opportunity, then gang murder would be no more.

If we build more prisons, we can lock up all the ciminals, then there would be no more crime.

Were we to make everything legal, then there would be no crime.

If we but do this, say the Catholics of today, then we shall have everlasting that. The topic of the day is pederastry, and its slimy priestly practictioners, and the criminal gang which aids and abets the crime and hides the criminals. The problem say the defenders is celibacy. Or disallowing women in the priesthood. That's what quite naturally some morning takes Father Jonahtan and leaves a revolting predator who molests children. Were it not for this, then there would be no that, and we can go on as before, happy as larks.

This is utter and incomprehensible delusion. If you create and maintain an organization which welcomes pedophiles and allows them a respected and holy access to the children of the flock, and further if you will hide the perps when word of their crimes go out, and pay off the victims and ship the perverts to a safer parish, you will have wolves.

If there be great insipid gullable gluts about in the land, then there will be Nigerian gold, and paltry Palinoscopy Limbo lowering, and teabag parties for twits, and mighty militias for morons.

The Con Science of a Conservative

2010-04-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. - John Stuart Mill

Somewhere south of Aguascalientes, on Highway 45, we stopped for the night and slept in the Veedub, my brother Reloj and me. We were on my grandest tour of La Republica (Reloj had been all over Mexico many times) in 1971. And in the early dawn we stepped out and noted we had camped near a rancho de toros, and there was one of the noble beasts over in the pasture, very close beyond a skimpy-looking wire fence. He looked at us, and we at him.

The bulls are captive of a most stunning cruelty perpetrated by the Spanish races, and it is inexcusable, and yet what of us who once followed it? The one we were watching was peacable looking, and indeed it is reported the herders move freely among the fighting bulls in the pastures without harm nor hindrance.

They become dangerous only when removed from their environment. It's a particular trait of all animals, and especially this most gregarious of beasts. And in their rage and frenzy in the plaza de toros they can be easily decoyed by a simple magenta cloth.

Think of the cattle.

They were driven up the Chisolm Trail in the nineteenth century by drovers who only wanted to pen them up in Abilene and Hayes and Dodge until the trains could carry them east to the slaughterhouses. They go willingly, these cattle, unless frightened or rustled.

Now, humans are not cattle, we can gratify ourselves, and yet - imagine if the cattle were to stampede the corrals of Southern Pacific and Katy in Wichita, demanding cheaper rates for their owners, or to overrun the offices of the barons who buy them by the head, bellowing for a higher price. Now we are approaching the mind of the conservative.

I grew up in the land of the Common Man. He was steady if not provoked, peacable until drunk, calm unless roused, and never ambitious, for that would reflect dissatisfaction with his state, which is defensible on no other account than his acceptance of it. While never presuming on qualities above him, he stashed beneath him symbols of who he was not . Minorities (various ones, depending on geography) were shifltess and lazy and stupid and dependent on gumint. Women were deferential and loving helpmates with charm and obedience. Any self-doubt induced from frustration or failure could be allayed easily by drinking, race jokes or beating on his woman.

These common cattle were discovered by political drovers around 1964. They could be enraged beyond reason by simply removing them from their safe and synthetic environment. Goldwater's Southern Strategy began that year. A Black man enrolled in the University of Mississippi, and those who had dropped out of high school joined a riotous mob in Oxford. Little children enrolled in a white school in Little Rock had been assaulted and insulted by these raging cattle every step of the way. Blacks who sat in at lunch counters or marched on the streets and were set upon by police and their dogs.

It has not gone away. Today a provoking of the cattle is simply sending out fund-raising mailers with the name Pelosi, the head of the House who is Woman, or pointing out a Black man in the White House. There will be ranting and chanting which makes about as much sense as the bellowing of the bulls in the arena, but the frightening center of the storm means only: if these are not who or where I have placed them, then where or who am I?

They must be delighted today, these Repugnants, by their good fortune in so many cattle who can be herded into a pasture by thinly-disguised shills for the insurance industry to bray about Socialism and Hitler due to an attempt to extend health care, which covers all of the milling herd, to 38 million who lack it.

One prime spokesman for the common cattle is Patrick Buchanan, who openly wails about the waning of the wrinkled old white bigot under the onslaught of other races from other lands. He asks us to worry with him that future generations will resemble not him

but Jessica Alba.

We can only hope.

Conservatism is suspicious not only of innovation, risk, and adventure, but of reason. It prefers incomprehensible traditions to reasonable innovations. Conservatives tend to deprecate the rationalist spirit, and are particularly distrustful of philosophy. They reject reason in favor of "the wisdom of the ages," which is how they designate traditions whose rationale is all but totally lost, or customs that they cannot explain. It is no wonder that John Stuart Mill dubbed conservatism as "the stupid party."
- Leo Strauss and the American Right
by Prof. Shadia B. Drury

And, finally, that classsical clash of the old and the new; Birkin visits Brangwen, the father of his intended, Ursula, from Women in Love.

"And I don't want to see her going back on it all," he said, in a clanging voice.
"Why?" said Birkin.
This monosyllable exploded in Brangwen's brain like a shot.
"Why!" he repeated. "Why don't I? Because I don't believe in your new-fangled ways and your new-fangled ideas - in and out like a frog in a gallipot. It would never do for me."
Birkin watched him with steady, emotionless eyes. The radical antagonism in the two men was rousing.
"Yes, but are my ways and ideas new-fangled?" asked Birkin.
"Are they?" Brangwen caught himself up. "I'm not speaking of you in particular," he said. "What I mean is that my children have been brought up to think and do according to the religion I was brought up in myself, and I don't want to see them going away from that."
There was a dangerous pause.
"And beyond this - ?" asked Birkin.
The father hesitated. He was in a nasty position.
"Eh? What do you meant? - All I want to say, is that my daughter - " he tailed off into silence, overcome by futility. He knew that in some way he was off the track.
"Of course," said Birken, "I don't want to hurt anybody or influence anybody. Ursula does exactly as she pleases."
There was a complete silence, because of the utter failure in mutual understanding. Birkin felt bored. Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.

Perfectly Natural

2010-03-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

Han-Shen was ambling on the banks of the River Po when he became aware of the distressed wailing of one who was attempting to forge his way upstream in a small boat by use of a long pole.

"Help Me, Master! If I withdraw the pole for another stroke, I will be carried on down the stream!"

"Yes, of course," replied Han-Shen.

"Yet if I remain here with the pole planted, I will be here forever!"

"Yes, of course," replied Han-Shen.

- A swimmer is one who swims, and eventually she will look like it.

- Yes, that is so.

- Same with an NFL defensive tackle or a basketball forward.

- Quite certain that is.

- The game itself will begin to resemble those who participate.

- I don't understand.

- Well, you will have hoops up a certain distance, and swim distances within the range of those who play the game, is this not so?

- Yes, clearly it is so.

- And so it is with economics. There is the human element which may be assigned as critical to its design. I mean by that, the wants of the one and the desire of the other to profit from that feature are complementary, and the game accomodates those two, the buyer and the seller.

- I see this is so.

- It is a mechanism, human in nature, which has evolved into quite a complicated process from the days of barter with wampum, is this not so?

- Very true.

- And so, with this added complexity, as humans have seen fit to organize around laws and enforcement of same, the buying and selling must also be controlled, is this not so?

- I cannot agree. For the system by which goods and services have been traded have proven to be a machine that runs of itself.

- Even though such a grim brutal sport as boxing, little changed since the Neanderthal, has a referree, you see no need for such an enforcer in the marketplace?

- None whatever. For it is proven that one who oppresses will be met by another supplier, another marketer, who will sell better goods cheaper.

- But surely someone at the outset had to create this wonderful Deus Ex Machina?

- Unnecessary, for the very nature of humans brought forth the means by which necessities be exchanged, and with that the checks and balances to ensure the game continues.

- I see. This is interesting to me. So this organized sport, economics, created itself?

- Surely, this is so.

- And we need look for no originator? No guide? No overseer?

- Certainly not, for the thumb of the butcher only muddies the clear water of the stream.

- And that current is the desire of the one and the profit of the other?

- Certainly.

- Then I can continue with the assumption that the human himself is likewise evolved without a creator or overseer.

- I ... do not see the connection.

- We have said the practictioner tends to resemble the practice, have we not?

- In swimming and football, yes.

- But is not economics carried on by humans as another game?

- That is so, but ...

- Is it likley that a buyer will pay more than he is able? Or that a seller will undersell himself?

- No, but then humans are a much more complex organism than sports.

- Yes, but at the center of them, humans want to propogate. This is the sole purpose of life, do you agree?

- I have heard so, and have no reason to doubt it.

- A very simple motivation. And the results are, she who resembles a survivor, by simply lasting into the next generation, will determine her own progeny?

- Yes, I remember my first-year biology.

- It is a simpler drive than Adam Smith's invisible hand, is it not?

- Perhaps.

- Do you not find it strange indeed that a creation of an imperfect being is perfect?

- I ... had not thought of it. And I do not wish to think too closely of it now.

- Of course. You are poling your flatbottom skiff against the stream, and if you withdraw your staff, you lose your purchase in the current. It is perfectly natural.

Orwell's Pigs

2010-03-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am walking a long corridor in a New Scientist thought experiment. The setting is a space station, and the scene is dark, Gothic and mechanical, like modern sci-fi movies. I see the hall disappear into gloom straight ahead as I stride forth in that direction.

Something catches my eye as I pass. Hey, I remember this. It's a book from a noted social philosopher of two centuries ago, a citizen of Geneva and then the world, Jean-Jaques Rosseau. In this book, the most famous philosopher of his generation has some handy tips on child care.

Which is maybe a little ironical, as Mr Rousseau has forced his paramour to dump maybe five of their illegitimate offspring into the Paris foundling hospital, where the mortality rate is fifty percent. But that isn't the only irony in this story.

Jean-Jacques, as he is familiarly known to the poors, has been much aided and abetted by nobles and other prominents in his life. He has turned on each of the lords and ladies who assisted him in favor of the commons who didn't. He was, after all, an extreme paranoic who saw stealth and menace behind ever smiling face, unless it belong to a farmer or a tradesman.

And they returned the favor, overturning King Louis and slaughtering him and his queen and the court and the landed gentry then the moderates and then the radicals and then the by-standers and whoever else happened to be available to fill the queues at the guillotine during what became known as the Reign of Terror.

And at the end of it all, tiptoeing over the desolation and the dead, a vain Coriscan picked up the pieces and fitted them into a crown. And so for all of the terror and woe and the vast numbers in their graves, the noble commons had exchanged a king for an emperor and they were off to wars throughout the known world.

In the carousel of time, more such bargains were struck. The Russians traded out an emperor for a Stalin, and the street-level grubs of Wiemar overcame their overlords by pumping up a sick little Austrian corporal. And then the US overcame a warlord LBJ in exchange for a Nixon.

They shoulda known. After all, the little sect of the carpenter known as the Prince of Peace who preached the meek would inherit and turn the other cheek and blessed are the peacemakers and woe to the wealthy and suffer the little children and phorget the phony Pharisees became on ascending to the mighty throne the most devastatingly cruel tyrants of blood and spoil the world has known as they ushered in the Dark Ages.

Which all means, while the urge to purge unhealthy scum at the top is comendable, it is also doomed. Nothing will prevent a recurrence of the old sad tragic pit of despair. Orwell's pigs remodeled their platform against the biped farmers which had been "Four Legs Better than Two Legs," into: "Four Legs Good; Two Legs Better" once they were in the catbird seat and were striding about exactly as had their predecessors.

The corridor in which I walk is actually a space station in the shape of a giant wheel, within which I trundle along. It is designed to fit along the border of the Event Horizon of a Dark Void of a collapsing star, within which all material and waves and even light disappears forever and ever. This has some effect beyond its immediate range, so that anyone traipsing along the periphery will have the sensation of progress. This is always and forever illusion.

But, wat! What's this on the floor of my hallway? A book? I remember this.

Battle in Plato's Cave

2009-12-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

The only full-motion models of human behavior I had growing up was in the movies, most often B westerns. We were a provincial and insular community.

These westerns had common elements. There was a tinsel hero, and a pretty girl to save, with a crusty cantankerous father who had a ranch he would be hornswaggled before he'd let Ryker, the subtle pinstriped three-piece suit in the buckboard, have, and horses, and plenty of riders and shooters. The girls were supposed to be pretty, and they were, and the horses were there to run, and they did, but the rest of the production was not quite so authentic.

The takeaway intended from these cultural icons was in the expediency of violence to solve problems. Sometimes the hero would take vows of peace - Randy Scott or The Fastest Gun Alive or Dylan as Alias Anybody sweeping out a store (the most peaceful enterprise for a man was sweeping out a store apparently)- but they got better. This was the frilly feminine philosophy, this serene passive passtime, and the Man of Action always won out. (The period was WWII and Korea, so there was utility in the message, plus a film would be pretty boring if it comprised mostly sweeping out stores.)

I believe it was "Allan" Rocky Lane, but any of them might do. Ryker has the boys carting gunpowder into a cave. It runs right under the old man's ranchouse, and the objective is to blast him out, thus freeing up the land for commercial interests, which means Ryker's interest.

So the guys are one after the other shouldering a barrel of the fierce item and carrying it into the cave. And Rocky, he's watching from behind a tree. Then a turn of the cave.

Then he's spotted, and jumped! The bad boy must leave off his powder transfer job to fistfight with Rocky. He does this so suddenly that the barrel he has been carrying drops. It doesn't blow, but the barrel is wounded. As it rolls back towards where the rest of them have been stacked, we see on closeup it is leaking a train of gunpowder. This may have some import later, as we know from closeups in other movies.

Now, you are wondering, how do the guys see where to stack the barrels? That's easy. There's a cardtable set up in the cave at the point where maximum illumination will be cast both back to the mouth and fro to the ammo dump from a Coleman lantern set upon the table. This is smart figuring for the owl hoots, once you jump over the logic of lighting a cave where you're storing gunpowder with a kerosene flame.

Sure enough, Rocky and his nemesis crash over the table, and the lamp falls, and - guess what - the train of powder is ignited. So the fight is to be interrupted occasionally so we can catch up on the flickering fuse on its lonely way towards kingdom come. (Many years later, of course, I learned this is the precise means of conducting business in the Outside World. I was taught this by such as newscasts where we are rapt by the illiterate rantings of teabagger twits in the park one moment and then perhaps jump away to watch great walls of ice fall near Prince William Sound the next.)

I may not have been ten years old when I observed this movie moment, and yet even then I wondered about the logic of continuing a petty parochial discussion when there was a much more devastating ecumenical problem at hand. I pondered this, or most likely forgot about it until much later, like I do, as I exited the Best Theatre, and continued my reverie of becoming a boxer and a quarterback, even though I had a weak arm and could neither punch nor avoid one. While I was discovering this closure on career goals, a delayed process in a small town, others were preparing for the day when daydreams no longer were primary. I just never was able to wake up to that morning.

Oh, Rocky delivered the obligatory knockout and rushed to the flickering powder train and scuffed out a disruption in its progress and the day was saved for another adventure. Everything always worked out just fine in the movies when I was young.

Up with the Union!

2009-12-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

When I began my career as a gamma minus public servant, it was in a county with a very weak local SEIU represantation. The union president would send out newsletters bewailing the lack of participation. "We are approaching decertification!" he said. No one seemed to mind.

Perhaps we saw the futility of flexing muscles we didn't have, like Barney Fife. For how do you win a strike, if it comes to that, in which you must present the paying public with the wish the county athorities pay more of their taxes to you? There isn't a winning method of making that argument. You could stand out on the grounds of the county building and yell at traffic, "Honk if you like us!"

Besides, we were working in a very scenic environment, and saw no reason to cause trouble for a few pennies more.

I can imagine Mr James, the union leader, and his secretary, Enid, sitting in the office with fresh pastries laid out and the two of them on folding chairs and watching a clock which had already passed the starting time for the meeting. "We'll give them a few minutes more," said Mr James. "Some of them have to drive from South County," suggested Enid.

And so, during negotiations for the new contract, it came to pass that Mr James scored a coup ... for he and Enid, at least. They asked for a provision for a closed shop. The county negotiator shrugged; it wasn't her would be paying any dues.

And so with one fell swoop of the pen, every county worker became a dues-paying union member. (Oh, you could opt out. It wasn't fascism, after all. You could opt out of the union, but dues would continue to be deducted from your pay as if you were still a member in good standing.)

It was a multi-thousand percent bonanza for the union in our county. But Mr James was still not satisfied. Immediately, he put forth a request that the dues be raised. At a meeting, Enid wailed about her sluggish and ancient typewriter.

The problem for he and Enid was, there was a national SEIU requirement that the membership must by popular vote approve any raising of their dues. This presented a snag, especially when the election went up and came down with a solid rejection.

Mr James did not give up. Out came another poll. It was worded differently, however. "Would you rather have your dues raised 14% or 7%?" The county workers duly opted for the lower number, thus fulfilling the requirement of National, and Mr James and Enid had their raise.

It was very educational, this series of events. I learned never to accept terms from an opponent in any argument. Of course, with the level of public debate nowadays, that principle is evident to anybody above the level of the guy holding the sign.

OBAMA
HITLER OR STALIN?

Invidiocy

2009-11-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

I'n in bed with my first wife. It's not very exciting, which is why she has a number.

We are reading. See, I have little formal education, so I try and keep up with Esquire (it's the sixties) and a dictionary. Out of this practice my vocabulary, such as it is, evolves.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

My beta is reading a mystery. She asks out of nowhere: "What's `invidious' mean?"

And I very cavalierly reply, "Likely to cause resentment, due most often to false comparison."

She says nothing. Were she impressed, we were alrady to the stage where she wouldn't show it.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

- Wittgenstein

It is the most remarkable coincidence of my life. See, I had myself not moments before come across that very term, and had looked it up. Had she asked in a week, I maybe would have fumbled the test.

Comparisons are odious.

- Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–1476)

To Seek a More Credible Herd

2009-10-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

When that Jinglebob herd come up the trail one day in the late seventies, instead of slowing for the approach to Wichita, the herders fired 'em up with rebel yells and gunfire, and they all commenced a stampede which overran the Katy station and some of the holding pens besides. Ol' J T Jinglebob lamented, and said to the station master, I try and talk to them cows, but they're so upset about the high freight rates to the east, there's nothing to be done with 'em.

And then Bill Hickock strode down Allen Street, said to J T, cattle are sure unpredictable, right as rain. But any one of them standing on railroad property come sundown belongs to me, and the station house and pens of Katy will be good as new before a single head be shipped. You savvy?

J T, he savvied. Then he consulted with his trail bosses. Boys, he said. We need a more credible brand o' cow.

Towards the turn of the century, the new Jinglebob was named Rockefeller, and he commenced corralling all the oil bidness on the eastern seaboard, then branched out, like they do. When an upstart rival dared present an oil line to rival the Standard, Rocky refused rights to run it across his land, of which he owned considerable, adding more and more every day. So the pretender took to carting his oil in barrels down the track, whereupon Rocky simply moved his own cars over his interceding tracks to cut 'em off.

We were in progress of becoming the United Standard of Oil, with subsidiaries involving everything else. That's how capitalism works; that's how it goes.

But a single lady rose up.

. . . Until the people of the United States have solved the question of free and equal transportation it is idle to suppose that they will not have a trust question. So long as it is possible for a company to own the exclusive carrier on which a great natural product depends for transportation, and to use this carrier to limit a competitor’s supply or to cut off that supply entirely if the rival is offensive, and always to make him pay a higher rate than it costs the owner, it is ignorance and folly to talk about constitutional amendments limiting trusts. . . So long as the Standard Oil Company can control transportation as it does to-day, it will remain master of the oil industry, and the people of the United States will pay for their indifference and folly. . . .
. . . We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class. . . .

That was Ms Ida M Tarbell, rest her soul, writing in a series for McClure Magazine which ran from 1902-4. (See the interesting parlay here.) (Funny how women have stirred up trouble for magnates in that era - remember Abe Lincoln referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe as "the little lady who wrote the book which caused this great war." )

Then some more words were written, this in STANDARD OIL COMPANY OF NEW JERSEY et al.* v. UNITED STATES 221 U.S. 1 (1911):

We think no disinterested mind can survey the period in question without being irresistibly driven to the conclusion that the very genius for commercial development and organization which it would seem was manifested from the beginning soon begot an intent and purpose to exclude others which was frequently manifested by acts and dealings wholly inconsistent with the theory that they were made with the single conception of advancing the development of business power by usual methods, but which, on the contrary, necessarily involved the intent to drive others from the field and to exclude them from their right to trade, and thus accomplish the mastery which was the end in view. . . .

Standard Oil was held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and broken into pieces. But the spirit of old J T Jinglebob lives on. We're now in Money, Mississippi, circa 2008, and the organizers are herding onto a platform for study certain bovines hand selected from the community. There is a jack gadget which levels the stage, using not a plumb but simply equalizing the drivlets of spittle down both sides of the yaps of the test group.

"Now, see here, I ask you first off, say there is an insurance company, and your child needs expensive care. That insurance agency is either private, which means what it pays you it cannot hold for its executive board, or government, which has no pecuniary interest in the transaction. Now, why would you not want your insurance overlord to be the government?"

L G: "Why, cause that's socialism! Hitler smokin' Pol Pot! (turns to his neighbor) Ain't that right, Lem?"
Lem: "Reckon so; that 'r communism, one ..."

The Birther Death Panel Teabaggers are branded and herded into the Pox Noise machine. They moo and shuffle and graze and create incoherent rumbles and much methane. The difference from the Jinglebob herd is that these can talk, after a fashion.

They wail about socialism and they bring their weapons and their placards, and then the suits who pull their strings slide into the studios and proclaim, "They are a natural grass-roots uprising protesting the dread crimping of corporations after Sarbanes–Oxley with resultant loss of incentive, innovation, and capital infusion."

AT&T would like to be the new Standard Oil. If you remember your Tarbell, control of the course of business is key, and the railroads are now replaced by the Internet. The new Rocky will block Skype from your iPhone because they want to sell you something else. They do this by dragging a boxcar across your line.

And they feed their cattle. This is from TheHill.com about consideration of the new rules on Standardizing the Net:

More than 400 letters were filed with the FCC over the past week, including letters from South Carolina-based entities such as Claflin University, Allen University and the Cherokee County Development Board. The letters included the same line: “Thousands of South Carolinians have jobs and millions of investment dollars are in this state because of existing government policies that encourage competition in telecommunications while assuring open access to the Internet.”

Imagine the FCC struggling to accept that the line fed the herd spontaneously combusted in all their four hundred skulls at once. Four hundred South Carolina skulls. Nevertheless, the FCC jumped the boxcar and continued down the track to consideration of keeping those lines open.

But remember this. Rocky is much more powerful than Ida unless the public is paying attention. So pay attention.

Thanks for paying attention this far.

Teddy Roosevelt, as Hercules wresting with Stadard Oil, from Puck (1906)

Family Secrets

2009-09-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

In our town, in those years, before teevee, carnivals came around some summers. There was a circus or two, also, with an old toothless lion and one littletop, but mostly it was carnivals; cheap pony rides and a row of booths to grift rubes with phony games of mischance.

My brother Joey told me of one he remembered. He went with our daddy, Hut. Joey must've been very young, because I didn't go, and I'm only a year and a half younger than him.

George happened to be working the box office for this particular show. He took Hut's coins and pushed back the tickets. Not a word was exchanged, but none was really needed, as it was a standard transaction, very common in any town for traveling shows.

It sort of worried Joey, though. Something seemed to be wrong.

George was, you see, his grandfather, Hut's father.

There are secrets in every family.

Photos are from old photocopies, representing, in order,

(1) Granny Amelia, daddy Hut, uncle Bush, and grandpappy George, in June 1937
(2) George Edgar Bowden (1867-1951)
(3) George and Amelia, old undated family photo
(4) The house in Direct, TX, where Hut was born.

A closer view results if you just click on the photos.