Midnight Sun

Send the boys back

2011-12-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I wrote a piece on the withdrawal of the lastAmerican troops from Iraq. It was long,bitter, and angry and I decided not to post it. But it concluded with “we told you so,” and it’s a conclusion I standbehind. So then I published it anyway.

Michael Tomasky has written a better piece on why the rightwill soon start to publish accounts of how we actually won, and why it is Bushwho should get the credit, not Obama. It’s worth reading here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/16/michael-tomasky-the-republican-whitewash-of-the-iraq-war-to-come.html

Or, if things go bad, it’s Obama’s fault.

Personally, I think the campaign has already started. Iraq’s government is splintering, violence ison the rise, and people in and out of the country are talking about a new civilwar. And John McCain says its Obama’sfault. He should have left behind a fewthousand combat troops. In another nineyears, we can take another look.

Mary made me do it

2011-12-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

I had actually decided against buying another motorcycle,but Mary talked me into it.

The week before, I had a CT scan to follow up on a chestx-ray my family doctor had done as part of my routine physical. Also, I still haven't completely recovered from the horrible cough I got in Mexico. Although he was “absolutely comfortable” with what he saw, he wanted meto have the more detailed scan to determine if I might have lung cancer ornot. He saw something in the x-ray thatcaused him at least some concern.

I was never too worried about it, though I certainly had itmuch in mind as I reflected on my twenty-five years of heavy smoking and theoccasional relapse even now, twenty years after I finally “quit.”

Even when I started smoking in 1965, we knew we were at riskfor lung cancer and various other life-threatening conditions, but I did it anyway without a second thought.

I blame my parents. They were smokers, too, and statistics show that children who grow up insmoking households are vastly more likely to smoke themselves. I also blame my brother, who convenientlyleft packs of Pall Malls lying around so I could steal them now and then. This is probably why we haven’t spoken for almostthirty years. He was really pissed off aboutthose cigarettes.

I certainly don’t blame myself since I’ve always had lowimpulse control, which is not my fault. The devil made me doit, and if I had to have lung cancer, I didn’t want to carry around a lot ofguilt about it.

Anyway, it was a tense week waiting for the actual test andthen the results, and if I wasn’t particularly worried, Mary was. Shortly after we got the good news, she saidI should go ahead and buy the bike. Mightas well do it now rather than wait too long and have to put it on a bucketlist.

Thing is, I already have a large collection of things Idecided I should do now, including my recent trip to Mexico. The trick for us seniors is always to try toguess how long we’re going to live. Thegoal is to go broke the day we die and freely indulge all of ourbig-ticket-impulses up to that final minute. It would be just my luck to live ten years too long and have to actuallylive on my pension for all that time. I’mdoing my best to keep spending at a relatively high level so I won’t have toface that grim reality.

In the meantime, “no one knows what tomorrow may bring,” asthe old hymn reminds us, and for me, that’s an invitation to live like I mightdie tomorrow. Or preferably, some timeten or twenty years from now, but still with a couple bucks in my savings account.

In the meantime, “beat the bucket.” That’s my motto.

Welcome Home

2011-12-18T10:08:00.001-08:00

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Iraq yesterdayto say job-well-done to the last American troops coming home. President Obama met with soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentuckyand was warmly received as he thanked them for their service. I can only add my own humble “thank you foryour service,” though it always sounds hollow to me. Only “I’m sorry for your loss” might be moreempty and pointless to the families of the fallen.

Personally, I prefer “welcome home” to those who made it back. It was only a few years ago that a counselorI was seeing was the first person ever to say “welcome home” to me as a Vietnamveteran, and to my own amazement, I burst into tears. Forty years after the fact, I’m not lookingfor any thanks, but it’s nice that someone recognizes I was even gone.

There’s a deafening silence on this last day of our war fromthe likes of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the dozen or so otherneo-cons who pushed us into the abyss nine years ago. No claims of victory from them. Are they playing golf today? Are they ashamed of what they’ve done? “Possibly,” and “certainly not.”

I was so amazed at the time that still so soon afterVietnam, most Americans didn’t recognize the same mix of outright lies and grossdistortions of fact that got us into that earlier pointless, doomed-to-failure andfar-away war. Colin Powell’spresentation to the United Nations about “weapons of mass destruction” wouldnot have got a search warrant from a local district attorney and it failed toget an endorsement from the UN, but in we went anyway. I couldn’t believe this was happening again,but it was, and so few others seemed to see the parallels. The press at the time failed utterly toreport on the wealth of evidence demonstrating that the neo-cons’ case was ahouse of cards.

But maybe not utterly, and maybe not so few. There actually was a large and vocalopposition to the invasion, but it got precious little coverage and itcertainly never got equal time, let alone a full hearing. At least Oregon’s congressional Democrats votedunanimously against the invasion. Theyhad no effect, but it mattered to me and my friends and colleagues who stoodamazed as the Bush administration maneuvered public opinion over the course ofmonths to the point where they could say they had a majority of publicsupport. I have never in my life seensuch a distorted and intense propaganda campaign. At the time of the invasion, a large majorityof Americans believed we had an endorsement from the UN, although the best Bushcould patch together was a rag-tag “coalition of the willing,” many of thewilling being tiny, weak countries who depended on American foreign aid and whosent at best a handful of advisers then pulled them out a few months later.

Four-thousand, five-hundred Americans have died, tens ofthousands seriously wounded, physically and mentally. Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from overone-hundred thousand to one million. Inany case, lots and lots of dead Iraqis. Are the Iraqis better off now that Saddam is dead? Is the region in any way more stable? Have we “projected American powerabroad”? What a total fuck-up, the wholething.

And still, I feel enormous pride in our fighting men andwomen. They were over-deployed and borethe whole burden, about one-percent of Americans at war while the rest of ussat home and were never called upon to make the smallest sacrifice.

To those who fought the war, Welcome Home. Thank you for your service.

To no one in particular, we told you so.

The Tiger revisited

2011-12-17T10:09:00.000-08:00

1967 Triumph Tiger 650

2007 Triumph Tiger 1050

Two weeks ago I rode my Suzuki V-Strom 650 over to Hansen’sMotorcycles in Medford to buy a new hat. Somehow I’d recently lost most of my baseball caps and thought I’d getone with a motorcycle logo: Hansen sells BMW, Ducati, and Triumph.

I found the Triumph cap I wanted and also got into a chatwith the salesman about new bikes. I likethe line of Triumph 800cc triples but can’t afford the entry fee, so I told Russell I’d sure like tofind a used Tiger 1050. Then I rode backhome across the Cascade Mountains, seventy miles to my house in KlamathFalls. I was cold, but I had on goodgear and the roads were clear.

The next week I saw on Craig’s List a 2007 Tiger 1050 atHansen’s for $8,200. It was the onlyTiger I could find listed in the region, so I thought I’d go over and take alook. I took my checkbook just in case.

There was snow in the passes by now, so I loaded up myriding gear in my truck last Saturday and drove over. After an hour talking to the Hansen peopleand taking the bike for a brief test ride, I bought it for $7,900.

I got a good price: the bike has 24,000 miles and is inexceptional condition. It has hard bags,a custom Meyer saddle, heated grips, and Triumph tank and trunk bags. Non-ABS, which was a demerit, but I loved thebike. It’s general set-up is about thesame as my V-Strom, but it has an engine that just rips and an exhaust notethat makes the bike worthy of its name. It''s way fast.

About 4pm I started thinking about riding it home, and Craigsaid, “You want to take it home today?”

Well, yeah!

I’d accidently brought my summer gloves, so Craig loaned mea pair of winter ones. I had no way toplug in my electric vest so he installed a BMW accessory plug on theTiger. I was wearing light-weight socksbut I had some toe-warmers, which I put into my boots. Then I was off on the exhilarating butcoldest ride I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some very cold rides over the years.

I crossed the Siskiyou Mountains and headed south towardsMount Shasta, a much longer ride home but over lower passes. It was almost dark and the temperature wasjust above freezing. I was riding fasterthan traffic at about eighty-five, but I wanted to get home as fast as possible. Up to now I was cold in certain places butoverall comfortable.

Once I got across the mountains, I turned towards home androde up the east side of the Cascades. The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and I could tell my coretemperature was starting to struggle to keep up. Since this is a good road, mostly straightand wide with little traffic, I was now riding at over 100 mph in thedark. I did see one deer but figuredhitting a deer at 100 couldn’t be much different that hitting a deer atsixty-five, the legal speed limit. Ijust wanted to get home. I took mychances with the deer and the cops and was lucky.

I rode in after three hours on the road and headed up for ahot bath. Despite the cold introduction,I love the bike, although it has a few issues to sort out. Part of the fun of starting out on a new bikeagain is getting it set up just the way I want it.

This now brings me full circle. My first grown-up bike was a ’67 Triumph 650,and after a dozen or so other bikes over the years, I’m now back on a Tiger.

Triumph is now a completely different company as the oldTriumph went out of business in the 70s but was resurrected in 1984 by John Bloor, who bought the name and the old plantin Hinckley, England, which he gutted and refit with modern manufacturingequipment. Today, Triumphs are verycompetitive with Japanese bikes and completely modern. They make a line of retro-styled verticaltwin models, including the much-revered Bonneville, but also make a range ofmodern sport bikes like my Tiger, an inline triple that is designed for touringbut will almost hold its own against the fastest and best handling sport bikesout there. It’s a lot more comfortable than a full-on sport bike,and it’s plenty fast enough for me, At sixty-three, I didn’t want to end myriding years on a merely practical motorcycle like the V-Strom. I ride motorcycles in part because they getmy blood up.

I know I’m going the enjoy the new Tiger as much as I didthat old classic. And now I’ve got thebike to match my new hat.

In which art imitates life

2011-11-23T10:45:00.001-08:00

Last week Mary and I enjoyed the Toulenc Trio for the secondtime at our fabulous local theater, the Ross Ragland. I hadn’t remembered Toulenc from their firstvisit two years ago, but I slowly realized that I’d heard them before as theconcert went on. This is happening withmy brain more and more, and I’m keeping an eye on it, so to speak.

Poulenc is a woodwind trio made up of Vladimir Lande, oboe;Irina Kaplan, piano; and Bryan Young, bassoon. They’re based out of Baltimore and are more or less typical of what Ithink of as the first-rate second-tier musical talent we regularly get out ourway. Which is to say, for example, Youngis principal bassoonist with the Baltimore Symphony but probably wouldn’t makethe cut for New York or Washington National. Still, to our rustic ears, you’d never know the difference. In many cases, I’m not convinced there is adifference.

Poulenc started with two pieces from the late-Baroque andearly classical periods. I listened politely but failed to ignite. After intermission, though, they came backwith three pieces from the 20^th century, all of which I thoroughlyenjoyed: French composer Jean Francaix; excerpts from a filmscore byShostakovich; and two especially wonderful tangos by Argentinean composer AstorPiazzolla. Lande explained that theseare not tangos to be danced to.

After the concert, we talked with the musicians in the lobbyand bought a CD from them, Poulenc Plays Poulenc, which they autographed forus. I was especially interested in theamount of travel such musicians do, and Lande briefly rolled his eyes and saidhe was just back from a twenty-concert tour of Latin America in which heconducted Shastakovich. So immediately Ithought of Guanajuato, and sure enough, he had conducted there for FestivalCervantino.

Is this a small world orwhat?!

Regrettably, he said, he hadn’tbeen able to enjoy the city because he was off the next day to the nextconcert. Regrettably, I said, I hadn’theard his concert, probably because I was at one of the jazz concertsinstead. I really should go back oneyear soon and study the program more carefully, because every night during thefestival there are a dozen or more events worth going to see, and it’s limitingto stick to only one genre.

Still . . . .

So for some reason I felt a personal connection to Landeonly because we’d been in the same Mexican city at the same time, but it onceagain led me to ponder over what are the motivations and rewards to themusicians who keep up the travel schedules that are typical for thesetroubadours. What keeps them going? After traveling to twenty Latin Americancapitals in about as many days and conducting major symphony orchestras, Landeand his two fellow musicians (one of them his wife) set off on a West Coasttour for which, I learned, they landed in Sacramento and rented a car. From Klamath Falls, they were driving thenext day on icy roads to Moses Lake, Washington for another concert. If you’ve ever been to Moses Lake, you mightshare my amazement at this fact.

I chatted about this with bassoonist Bryan Young, and hesaid some of their best audiences are to be found in the smallest venues. He mentioned Coos Bay, Oregon as a concertthey still talk about. And I must say,they got a very enthusiastic reception here, although there couldn’t have beena hundred people in the audience that wintry night.

I suppose people like them have to perform and people likeme have to go out to hear them.

Art islike life in this way. It will dowhatever it takes.

Hogar dulce hogar

2011-11-10T17:30:00.001-08:00

Home sweet home. I'm backin Klamath Falls where it’s cold and dreary, with lows in the low-20s andanother storm coming in this weekend. Quite a shock from the routine mid-70s and sunny skies of Mexico.

Once the Festival Cervantino concluded at the end ofOctober, life in Guanajuato returned more or less to normal. By this time, I was hosting a bad andpersistent cold and cough and energy was down quite a bit. With no great concerts to tempt me out atnight, I usually got back up to my house by mid-afternoon and stayed in untilthe next morning. Mary was with me forten days, and she went home with a cold, too.

Still, she loved it there as much as I did, and was out andabout on her own while I was in school. She was also picking up Spanish at an alarming rate, mostly from herconversations with Blanca, from whom I rented a room. They hit it off like old friends, and Ilearned that Blanca actually spoke just a little English, although she onlyspoke Spanish to me.

By the end of week four after Mary had gone back home, Istarted to feel a little bored with my classes and the whole Mexico thing and wasmostly just waiting out the time until I returned home. How much more Spanish could I learn in aweek, anyway?

Fortunately, my attitude turned for the better for week five. November 2^nd is Day of the Dead, andthe Mexican students studying English at our school made an altar for asecretary who passed away last year. [See below] They prepared a littlepresentation for the rest of us in English, and we in return did the same aboutHalloween in Spanish. One of my Mexicaninstructors asked me what a witch hunt was, and I explained a little about theMcCarthy era to her and made it clear that witch hunts and Halloween aren’trelated. I was proud of how well I diduntil I realized my last words, “no son relajados,” mean “are notrelaxed.” Oops. I meant “relacionados,” but it was too late.

The altars and ceremonies are very formal, including, ofcourse, the macabre elements of skulls and dancing skeletons that we Anglosfind a little weird. I can only say I thoughtthe combination of reverence and playfulness was a refreshing take on the wholedeath thing.

I took Saturday as an extra day to get ready and make onelast, leisurely walk around the Centro of Guanajuato. I was being more careful about what I ate forthe last week, so I had a so-so lunch in one of the better restaurants. For really good Mexican food, I had to gointo the small, seedy looking cafés with usually only two or three cramped tablesand just pick something off the menu, even though I couldn’t understand much ofwhat I had ordered. I never regretted adecision. I also never had any stomach problems.

Sunday morning was sad as I finished packing up and thensaid goodbye to Blanca. Elias, a driverfrom school, took me out to the airport and we had a nice chat about this andthat. As long as a conversation partnertalked slow enough, I could follow pretty much whatever we were talking about. I still need a lot of practice on the realSpanish that all native speakers use among themselves, but even here I’mstarting to make progress. Soap operasand movies when I can get them are the best practice for this, although as Isaid earlier, I can only take soap operas in very small doses. Still, I made a huge language leap in fiveweeks, even though my Spanish can still only be described as limited andhalting. The challenge now, as always,will be in finding ways to continue to study in a town that offers little inthe way of classes. I’m meeting weeklywith two conversation partners, Leticia and Antonio, and they are very helpful,but it takes a lot more than two hours a week to continue to makeprogress.

Flying out from Guanajuato, I looked down on Mexico. What I know about the violence and brutalitythat are so common in most of the country was in such contrast to the friendly,genuinely happy demeanor of almost everyone I met or worked with. I don’t feel any particular desire to retireas an expat in Mexico or anyplace else, but if I did I can’t imagine a betterplace to live than Guanajuato. And yet,there’s that feeling that no place in Mexico can stay free for long from thekind of terrorism that has affected most of the rest of the country. I can only hope I’m wrong and things take aslow turn for the better rather than the worse.

Here’s the most important thing I learned in Mexico: Mexicans are proud of their country. They have so many reasons to be so. If I were Mexican, I’d be proud, too.

A few last pictures

2011-11-10T16:26:00.001-08:00

Highlights of my last week in Mexico include the Day of the Dead celebration on November 2nd and my "graduation" from school last Friday. Here are a few pictures.

Claudia and Edith award me my diploma. Despite Edith's Anglo appearance and first name, all the teachers were native Mexicans.

My friend David, a talented photographer and filmmaker. David is over 70 and was in Mexico for a semester to brush up on his Spanish.

My friend Mike, a librarian from Portland currently intentionally between jobs. After a semester in Mexico, he thought he might go down to Guatemala to study for awhile. He didn't seem to like the idea of plans, but he was sure he wasn't going back to the library.

Juan Carlos, who taught most of my grammar classes and who was even more fun than he looks in this picture.

Two burros just outside the door to the school. Burros are still used to carry heavy loads up the steep streets, much too narrow for cars. This load was a little too big for a single Mexican laborer, but I also often saw workers carrying up sacks of cement or propane gas cylinders which had to weigh well over a hundred pounds.

The altar made by Mexican students at our school in remembrance of a secretary who died last year. Everything on the table, including placement, had a practical or symbolic value for the spirits of the dead loved ones

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Street art produced by public school students for Day of the Dead. Materials consisted of various seeds, beans, flowers, and dyed sawdust and wood shavings. These were all gone the next day.

Ultimo dia

2011-11-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

It’s my last day in school. I’m taking Saturday to get ready at aleisurely pace, then flying out Sunday. I’m a little sad about leaving but lookingforward to being home. I guess thatdefines a good trip.

I have more pictures to post up, especially a few from Dayof the Dead,, which was last Wednesday. I haven’t uploaded them from mycamera yet, so I’ll probably only get to that after I get home. And I’ll probably write up a post-op.

And then a few weeks at home and we’re off in out trailerfor the Southwest.

Vagabundo.

Immerse or drown

2011-10-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

Since a few of my friends are planning to retire soon to Latin America, I thought I’d write a few comments on whatto expect and what I’ve learned about Spanish immersion programs. What’s good and what’s not so good:

First, it’s going to be very hard to survive anywhere in Latin America without atleast some basic Spanish.
Guanajuato is a university town that has an exchange program with Ashland. There are about 20,000 students here and allof them study English. Having said that,you’ll almost never meet anyone who speaks English, and especially not in theplaces you could most use the help: stores, restaurants, pharmacies, etc. Even more importantly, without a year or soof university-equivalent Spanish, it’s going to be that much harder to get started. At my school, there have been to a number ofstudents with no Spanish at all who take two or three weeks of classes thentake off for several months or a year of travel in Latin America.

Good luck.

There are some negatives about the program that I’m in,common, I think to any program like this, and all of them structural. You can start on any Monday and take as manyor as few classes as you want, including private classes. You can stay for only one week or as long asyou want. This is a great convenience,but it also makes good scheduling almost impossible for individualstudents. The mix of students changesdramatically every week, and trying to get every student in the classes they want atthe level they need is nearly impossible. I didn’t want to take any grammar classes since I need practice inlistening comprehension and speaking. Ican and do study grammar on my own, but much of it is more or less absorbedthrough the skin. Still, most weeks I’vehad two of four classes in grammar, and again because students come and go,there’s no coherence in the classes. Oneweek we’ll study one topic, the next week another. It’s only next week, my last of five, that Iactually have the right mix of classes that I’ve wanted all along.

That being said, the staff is without exceptionexcellent. At least they understand thegrammar they are teaching very well, and since all classes are conductedentirely in Spanish, it’s good practice just to be listening to the targetlanguage, even if I do feel that other classes would be more valuable. Generally, I think I’ve made huge progress inlistening comprehension and speaking, good progress in building vocabulary,and, ironically, probably little or no progress in grammar. I still more or less guess when to use thepreterit or imperfect past tenses, two tenses in Spanish when only one will doin English. Ditto between the two formsof the very “to be,” where English gets by just fine thank you very much withone. Don’t even ask me about thesubjunctive, which is evil and put there only to discourage gringos fromstaying for more than about two weeks.

On the other hand, living in Mexico, you quickly have tolearn all the other tenses to speak about the past, present and future, andthen the compound tenses, such as “if Ihad known blah blah blah, I would have blah, blah, blah.” Or the almost impossible, “If I [future]blah, blah, blah, I will have blah, blah, blah.” These don’t come readily when you need them,but in class where they are patient and wait for you to put a sentencetogether, you can puzzle it out.

Here, immersion means immersion. I pass four hours a day in class entirely inSpanish, and during breaks the intermediate students like me try to stay inSpanish as well. Living in aSpanish-speaking household, I start and end my day in Spanish. There’s very little homework since moststudents are here both to study and to go out drinking, but I can spend as muchtime as I want studying on my own. AndI’ve found one of the best tools to be television. I can almost completely understand someprograms, such as those on NatGeo. Lastnight I watched a program on modern ice breakers and had no problemunderstanding almost all of it. Wow, who knew about ice breakers? The narrators speak more slowlythan normal and they’re trained to enunciate very clearly. If only everyone would speak that way I’d befeeling pretty, pretty good (as Larry David says).

What I call street Spanish is a different story. Outside of the classroom, people speak very fast, and in Mexico they useso many idiomatic expressions that even if you can distinguish individualwords, you still won’t understand much of what they say. As a simple example, “Es pan comida,”translates as “it’s eaten bread,” but idiomatically it means, “It’s easy.” That one’s kind of obvious, which is thereason I understand it. There are abouta thousand more that are used every day that simply don’t translate atall. I have a list of a few hundred inSpanish/English and English/Spanish, but they’re a lot harder to learn thansimple vocabulary.

So in the end, there’s a lot of classroom and more formalSpanish I can understand quite well, but a lot more everyday Spanish that mightas well be Greek. One guidebook I have suggests the only way you’ll ever learnreal Spanish is to get a Mexican girlfriend or boyfriend. That not being an option for me, watchingsoap operas or movies at least helps me to process what I hear much faster thanI would otherwise. Unfortunately, mostmovies and all soap operas suck, so I can only stay with it for an hour orso.

Also: Mexican Spanishis what we learn in school and I’m guessing what is taught in programs such asRosetta Stone, but the language varies a great deal from region to region, evenin the same country. Columbian Spanish,for example, just drops many syllables, and you have to have a pretty good earto catch what’s being said. Still, witha little practice you can pick it up, and if you can say it in Mexican Spanish,they can understand you in any region.

Finally, this is a very inexpensive way to travel andstudy. My classes are about $120 a week,and my homestay is $27 a day including meals, although I still eat many of mymeals in town. If I do it again, I mighttake a room in a hostel just for the little bit of added privacy. I’m not sure I gain much from the simpleconversations I have in the home, but most if not all schools can place you ina hostel of some kind for a comparable price. The school I’m attending has a very nice hostel with private rooms andbaths, and I’d be very happy to stay there. It’s also close to El Centro,as opposed to the long walk downtown from where I live and the punishing walkback up the hill. Since I’ve been fairlysick with a bad cold almost the whole time I’ve been here, I always take a cabback. There’s also a bus which onlycosts five pesos, about four cents, but I haven’t quite had the nerve to try ityet. I worry that if I get on the wrongbus—easy to do—I might have a hard time finding my way back, and the cab rideis only about $2.50.

So, bottomlinewise, this is a great way to travel and a realjump start for anyone wanting to improve language skills rapidly. If I could stay a year, I think I’d beapproaching a level of proficiency if not fluency, but that’s way beyond my budgetand way more time than I’d choose to stay away from Mary and home. Too bad, because this is a great adventureand a wonderful experience. If I wereplanning to actually to move to Latin America,I’d definitely start it out this way. Atthe end of five weeks, you’ll be a lot more competent in the language anddefinitely know if this is a place you actually want to live.

........

Today is the last day of Festival Cervantino, and I’ll beglad when everybody goes home. I’ve beento several excellent concerts, all but one free, but last night was thetraditionalevery-kid-from-Mexico-City-comes-to-Guanajuato-with-a-sleeping-bag-and-a-lot-oftequila end of the festival, and the streets were una locura. I went downtown to eat and quickly turnedback to a Swedish restaurant that serves good meatballs and is almost alwaysempty. It’s a refuge when I don’t wantto be in Mexicoanymore, which happens from time to time.

Then I went home and watched some soap operas.

2011-10-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

Mary arrived Monday night ten days ago, and I happily mether at the airport with a very bad cold which had been coming on over theweekend. Despite the cold, we got out inthe city a little on Tuesday and had a good time exploring the many littlestreets and shops, but by that night I was really sick and worrying aboutthings like pneumonia. At the least, I was worried I’d be sick the whole timeshe was here and pretty much ruin her visit.

Instead, of course, she got sick too, so we spent our tendays together coughing and sneezing and hocking up phlegm. Not that it slowed us down much. Our only real concession is that we alwaystook a cab back up to the house and Inever had a chance to watch her nearly die climbing the hill.

Still, we had a great time together even if we were onlyrunning at about fifty percent.

While I was in class, Mary went out exploring on her own andmet me after school. We tried a numberof restaurants, from fairly expensive to the most humble. Generally, humble was better. We also caught some great concerts, includinga free one in a plaza by an incredibly hot traditional/modern group called Soldel Monton. I’ve got the DVD.

Yesterday was her last full day, so I skipped school and wespent our time downtown checking off a few of the must-see locations here inGuanajuato. Pipila is a statue of a heroof the Mexican war of independence against Spain, and although his most famousexploit, storming the gate of a Spanish fort in the middle of town, is probablya myth, there’s a huge statue of him on top of a hill across from ourhouse. The view from there is even moreimpressive than from my casa and it looks down on El Centro. Then we went to the Diego Rivera museum and from there on to ahistorical museum, including some pre-Columbian art. Guanajuato was founded in the mid-1500s, sothere’s a lot of history to cover in a few hours.

We also went on a tour last weekend to the pyramid atPeralta, about an hour away. It’s notTeotihuacán, but impressive enough in its own right. After that, the tour took us to the largesttequila factory in the world. Interesting in itself, although we had to pass on the tasting room. We miss out on a lot not being drinkers.

Today I stayed out of school again to go with Mary to theairport. Because of security, I couldn’tgo with her even up to the ticket counter, so we said a quick goodbye, and nowI’m on my own again back in our little room. I trust her flight got out okay and she should be back in Klamath Falls at 11pmlocal time. I’ll send off an email inthe morning and try to call later. [Shemade it without incident.]

There’s still a week to go of the festival, but like thelocals, I’m rather looking forward to its end. It’s not hard to imagine how crazy it gets downtown with tens ofthousands of visitors, a fair number of them students from Mexico City who comeup to drink and raise hell, and despite all the great, often free events, itwill be nice to have our quiet little city back again. I hope to spend the next ten days reallyconcentrating on my classes and studying in my spare time, though I’ll alsocertainly try to take in a few more events and do a little more exploring.

Time has passed quickly, and although I’ve sometimes missedhome or grown tired of living in Spanish nearly twenty-four hours a day, I’malready feeling a little sad about leaving. I met a man at a little coffee house close to school, and he was talkingobviously native Spanish to his wife. And then he turned to me and he chatted awhile in his perfectEnglish. Turns out he’s a Puerto Ricannow living in Denver,but he comes here every year for the festival.

“It’s kind of addicting,” he said.

Picture of the Week

Harley riders are the same all over the world

If you had told me a year ago. . . .

2011-10-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

that I would be sitting in an outdoor amphitheatre in Guanajuato, Mexicowith an American classmate and two of my Mexican teachers listening toan absolutely first-rate jazz big-band from Scandanavia, I would have said,

“Really? How cool isthat?”

But that’s where I was Wednesday night for the openingceremony of Festival Cervantino, a series of concerts, plays, and danceperformances, plus street performers ranging from Mariachi to jugglers, that officiallyruns the last two weeks of October.

Most of these could be considered world-classpresentations: Examples include theSaint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, The Oslo String Orchestra, and the ChineseNational Opera of Peking. The MexicanNational Opera is performing Il Postino, based on the wonderful Italian movieof the same name and written by the Mexican composer Daniel Catan. There are a total of five operas,twenty-something classical concerts ranging from full symphonies to stringquartets, and another twenty or so pop and jazz concerts.

Who knew there was a Norwegian blues band with an internationalreputation? I’m looking forward tohearing an Afro-Cuban jazz band that’s actually from Cuba,and a variety of Afro-pop and regional musics from Latin America. Many events areperformed at the same time at various venues around the city, so there’s no wayto see it all, but navigating the program is half the fun.

Festival Cervantino is the largest arts festival in Mexico, and I can’t think of anything of itskind in the United States. Maybe New York City on a slow day, but otherwise. . . .

Guanajuato is designated a “Patrimonio Cutural de la Humanidad”by the United Nations because of its plethora of well-preserved and restoredcolonial cathedrals and museums, including, for example, the Diego Rivera andFrida Kahlo museum in the restored house where Rivera grew up. (Been there.) Magnificent paintings by both, but unfortuneately, there are no Riveramurals in Guanajuato.

So anyway, here I am sitting in the amphitheater back in thefree seats, surrounded by mostly young Mexicans and listenting to one of thebest jazz concerts I’ve attended. I’dcompare the band to Wynton Marsallis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The music is complex, technically aboutimpossible to play, and a challenge to listen to. Just my stuff. About a third of the crowd backin the free seats left after three or four numbers, but their seats werequickly taken by people who were waiting outside.

The whole thing was magical. How could a thing like this happen in Mexico, a country whose reputationnow is almost entirely one of violence and terrorism, and how is it I happen tobe here? Life constantly throws suprisesat us, and sometimes they can turn out to be among the best moments of ourlives.

After the concert, there immediately began a long fireworksdisplay, accompanied by very loud recordings of stirring classical music: Handel, of course, and I think Brahms andBeethoven. The whole thing was sospectacular and emotionally stirring it made me cry. But then, cat food commercials sometimes makeme cry.

Afterwards, my classmate Eric and I went off on our own, andEric, being a true adventurer, led me to another one of those crowded bars and restaurants I neverwould have gone into on my own, where he threw back shots of tequila and I, ofcourse, had my usual Diet Coke. We ateabout a ton of tacos and the whole thing cost about four dollars. I’ve found and been told by other studentsthat the quality of food is usually inversely proportional to the cost. Among the best are the food stalls in thestreet, and I’m still happy to report that I’ve suffered no ill effects to mydigestive system. I have a little cold,though.

Did I remember my camera for any of this? No.

If there’s a downside here it’s that my days have been verylong and tiring between five hours of Spanish classes a day, trying to make itback up to my house for lunch with my Mexican family (the big meal of the day),homework (not much), and then back out again to explore and take in the variousevents.

Mary arrives Monday for ten days, and I’ll probably skip alot of classes so we can get out more on our own and concentrate on beingtourists. I’ve held back on visitingmany of the places I want to see until she gets here.

Enough for now. Morelater.

Saludos.

No, I don't ride a Harley

2011-09-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

I've been making some format changes to my blog, something I've discovered is fairly easy to do and makes for a more interesting and inviting look (I hope). I can't get it exactly the way I want yet, but I'm still working on it.

Since these are the first changes I've ever made, I got interested in my first post and went back and found it had the title I'm using again here. I still like the original post. The only thing that I would add is that the best question to ask if I say I ride a motorcycle is not "What kind of bike do you ride?" but "What do you like about riding?"

I notice that my blog is now a little over five years old. It's a wonderful opportunity to write about anything I want, whether serious or comic, and I enjoy the thought that single-digits of people are reading me. Actually, I can now track how many people are reading me and sometimes even who they are, or if they're only a web-bot out searching for prey. Turns out I get a lot more hits that I thought, although most of these are probably the result of Google hits when somebody searches, for example, for Guanajuato.

Still, I get the occasional email with a comment. Generally, I think most people don't like to add comments to the blog itself because, well, it's not their blog. I feel the same way when I'm on other people's blogs.

I can spend a remarkable amount of time on one of these posts and usually I never know if I've written anything of worth or not, what poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "constantly risking absurdity" (in the poem of the same name).

"What do you like about writing?" I'll have to think about it. Back to you in five years.

Language

2011-09-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

I often find it a little difficult to answer when people ask me why I've spent so much time and money studying Spanish over the last four years.

"Because it's there"?

Because I enjoy it. Because I find it fascinating. Because I don't particularly like crossword puzzles. Because achieving some level of competence in another language would be one of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of my life (the other being long division.)

Perhaps the most important reason, though, is that it's the best way for me to act out against the jingoist notion that English is the official language of the United States, or that the English-only movement will somehow make our culture more pure. This is not only racist at its core, it's just sloppy thinking. We could pass a law banning English, and it would have exactly the same effect on languages in our country: none.

So I was pleased to read this morning in Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac that much of Europe actually celebrates the diversity of language. Here's the full excerpt:

"Today is the official European Day of Languages, which is a yearly event begun in 2001 to celebrate human language, encourage language learning, and bring attention to the importance of being multilingual in a polyglot world. On this day, everyone, young or old, is encouraged to take up a language or take special pride in his or her existing language skills.

"There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe, which may sound like a lot but is only 3 percent of the world's total. Children's events, television and radio programs, languages classes and conferences are organized across Europe. In past years, schoolchildren in Croatia created European flags and wrote "Hello" and "I love you" in dozens of tongues while older students sang "Brother John" in German, English, and French. At a German university, a diverse group of volunteer tutors held a 90-minute crash course in half a dozen languages, like a kind of native-tongue speed-dating, groups of participants spending just 15 minutes immersed in each dialect until the room was filled with Hungarian introductions, French Christmas songs, and discussions of Italian football scores."

So today I take pride in my existing language skills, which are above average in English and a low-intermediate in Spanish.

How French is that?

World's Greatest Outhouse

2011-09-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

Escuela Mexicana

Somehow I lost my capacity to post an active link to my blog quite some time ago. Being a cyber dunce, I never figured out how to do it again, so any links I posted required you, the reader, to copy the link and post it into your, the reader's, browser.

Now, cyber-specialist my wife, Mary, has shown me the secret, so above is a link to the web page for my school in Mexico, Escuela Mexican, which means Mexican School. I chose this school because I thought I could remember the name.

By the way, the picture above shows the totally solar outhouse on Wizard's Island, smack in the middle of Crater Lake. I have no idea what the solar power is all about, but you can be sure they wouldn't put a generator out there. Now, let's post this sucker and see if it works.

Santorum

2011-09-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

I occasionally post a link to another site for various reasons, but I've never copied an entire column by somebody else and pasted it here. Until now. Andrew Sullivan does outrage so much better than I could in this case, I've decided just to post it here. When you finish reading, you can go here to see the actual video in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mguDdsmCylU

Apologize now, Rick Santorum
by Andrew Sullivan

I have become used to hearing gay people and our lives either ignored or stigmatized or demonized in Republican debates. It is a function of a political party becoming a religion. And so my skin is pretty thick at this point, and my outrage button eroded by two decades of learning to ignore this stuff and focus on the positive arguments we have to make. It's not that I didn't react at the time:

10.18 pm. Santorum claims bizarrely that repealing DADT means permission for sexual activity for gays in the military. This is a lie. The same rules of sexual misconduct apply to gays and straights alike. And a gay servicemember is booed by this foul crowd. Santorum keeps saying "sex is not an issue." But that's the current policy! This has nothing to do with sex, as Santorum surely knows. And again, the crowd reveals itself as hateful - even when it comes to those serving their country in uniform. This is one core reason why I cannot be a Republican. So many are bigots - and no one - no one - stands up against them. They're a bunch of bullies congratulating themselves on rooting out the queers.

But as I went to bed last night, the scattered boos for an American soldier in the field at any debate began to sink in. And Santorum's despicable lie in response - that repealing DADT somehow means license of gay sexual misconduct in the armed services - was intended to reduce that soldier, his life and work, to Santorum's obsession: the intrinsic evil of gay sex. Again, this is usual. Gays are used to being reduced to sexual acts rather than being seen as full human beings, like straight people, with sexuality sure, but a whole lot of other things as well.
But somehow the fact that these indignities were heaped on a man risking his life to serve this country, a man ballsy enough to make that video, a man in the uniform of the United States ... well, it tells me a couple of things. It tells me that these Republicans don't actually deep down care for the troops, if that means gay troops. Their constant posturing military patriotism has its limits.
The shocking silence on the stage - the fact that no one challenged this outrage - also tells me that this kind of slur is not regarded as a big deal. When it came to it, even Santorum couldn't sanction firing all those servicemembers who are now proudly out. But that's because he was forced to focus not on his own Thomist abstractions, but on an actual person. Throughout Republican debates, gays are discussed as if we are never in the audience, never actually part of the society, never fully part of families, never worthy of even a scintilla of respect. When you boo a servicemember solely because he's gay, you are saying he is beneath contempt, that nothing he does or has done can counterweigh the vileness of his sexual orientation.
And then I think of all those gay servicemembers who have died for this country, or been wounded in battle, or been on tours year after year ... and the fury builds. Even GOProud, the two gay guys who love Ann Coulter, issued this statement:

“Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology. That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done – put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.
Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?”
He can't. Apologize, Santorum.

Abrumado

2011-09-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

My departure date to Mexico quickly approaches, October 1st, when I leave for five weeks in Guanajuato.

Guanajuato? Careful readers will remember that I actually couldn’t think of the name Guanajuato when I decided to register and go to Mexico for five weeks, so I signed up for classes in Guadalajara instead. “Sounds like” often gets it for me.

It’s complicated, but never mind. Guanajuato is Ashland’s sister city, and its university is the sister institution to Southern Oregon University, at which I completed my nine-week intensive course in Spanish last summer. I might even meet some people I know from Ashland so I’ll have an opportunity to speak English and not have to suffer the humiliation of trying to get by in Spanish all the time.

My goal is to speak as little Spanish as possible. Off hand, I realize I don’t know how to say “off hand,” or “short latte,” or “Pardon me, but that’s my umbrella,” or “I’ve always been strongly opposed to American policy in Latin America. It’s not my fault!”

(Actually, I could say that last one now that I think about it, but it wouldn’t be pretty.)

Surprisingly, I’ve met and talked to a few people who’ve been to Guanajuato, and they said it’s their favorite destination in all of Mexico. We have a guide book, and of course, there’s plenty of information on the Web. I think I’m going to love this place. And Mary is joining me for ten days mid-month October.

Still. . . . Remember that the only good travel writing involves calamity. I’m sure I’ll be posting fairly regular updates here, so let’s hope I don’t have anything interesting to say.

I’ll be attending the Escuela Mexicana:

http://escuelamexicana.com/

Mamas, don't let your sons grow up to be cowboys

2011-09-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Republican candidates’ debate: Couldn’t watch more than about ten minutes of it, can’t really bring myself to write about it. Here’s a quote from Jonathan Chait over at the Daily Beast today which pretty well sums up how I felt about what little I saw:

“The media seems to consider Romney the winner. Pardon the condescension, but they’re not thinking like Republican base voters. Romney approaches every question as if he is in an actual debate, trying to provide the most intellectually compelling answer available, within the bounds of political expediency. Perry treats questions as interruptions. What scientists do you trust on climate change? I don’t want to risk the economy. Are you taking a radical position on social security? We can have reasons or we can have results. His total liberation from the constraints of reason give Perry a chance to represent the Republican id in a way Romney simply cannot match.”

The Republican id is a scary thing by itself, and Perry is a bully. His biggest applause line came when he bragged about his record of presiding over 236 executions as governor of Texas. His response both to Romney and the moderators when challenged on points of fact, “Wanna make something of it?”

I’m mostly staying off the news lately and a happier man for it, but as the election draws near, I’ll succumb to my addiction and start to obsess on every word and every development, and it’s not going to be fun. The actual thought of Perry as president turns my stomach, the worst of Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined. Times two.

I’m beginning to feel more and more like the kid who grows up in a crazy, dysfunctional family: I can’t possibly be related to these people. I must have been left on the doorstep by a band of Gypsies.

Two great books

2011-09-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

For $9.52, I just ordered from amazon.com the 50th anniversary edition of Catch-22 with a new forward by author Joseph Heller. I also went ahead and ordered The Catcher in the Rye for old-times' sake: $8.35.

No two books were more important to me, and to this day, though I’ve never reread either, these two books still stand out in my mind as the best expression of who I was and what I felt about the world as a sixteen-year-old kid. They had an enormous emotional impact on me. I felt as though if I had the words to tell it, this is what I would say to the world.

Make of that what you will.

Morris Dickstein has written an excellent retrospective review of Catch-22 here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/04/joseph-heller-catch-22-50th-anniversary-how-the-novel-changed-america.html

I just hope I don’t find the whole goddam thing too depressing and all.

Reefer madness

2011-09-05T10:08:00.001-07:00

President Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs in June of 1971, forty years now of a failed policy which cost the federal government fifteen billion dollars last year alone. And federal spending is only part of it. Add in the total cost of law enforcement at the state and local levels and you’re talking enough real money that it’s amazing Republicans haven’t zeroed in on the War on Drugs as just another failed policy of the federal government.

Except Ron Paul.

Also add in the cost to our legal system of arresting, jailing, trying and imprisoning millions of Americans every year just on drug charges. Your kid can do hard time and have a lifetime criminal record for possession of an ounce of pot. In fact, most people in jail for every possible crime from check fraud to burglary to armed robbery are there because they were trying to make enough money to feed their need for price-inflated illegal drugs. If pot were legal, prison populations and neighborhood crime would both decline dramatically.

Still, to appreciate the enormous damage the war on drugs can do to an entire country, you have to look to Mexico, where acts of atrocity and corruption barely make the news north of the border unless they somehow surpass the norm. You have to go a long way to surpass the norm in Mexico these days, which is why the Zeta Cartel decided to attack a casino in Monterrey—a bingo parlor, really—with assault weapons and then empty five-gallon cans of gasoline on the carpets and drapes and flick a match on the way out. Fifty-three people died, good enough to warrant a mention on NBC news the next day.

It’s at least thirty years past time to acknowledge that we’ve lost the war and need to start looking at what a successful peace might look like. For marijuana, by far the biggest cash crop for the cartels, the answer is simple: decriminalization, if not outright legalization.

The concern with legalization is that it will make pot more available and
lower prices so substantially that many more young people will try it and take their first steps down the path to meth addiction or worse. (There’s nothing worse.) This argument simply doesn’t hold up. I can get an ounce of pot in less than a half hour from this very chair I’m sitting in right now, and most of that time would involve getting dressed and combing my hair.

And enough pot to stay high for a month would certainly cost less than a cell phone plan, and I don’t see too many kids who can’t afford a phone. (I actually know one kid in the neighborhood who has offered to do yard work to pay for his. I think he might be the last kid in the United States who still realizes that work and reward are somehow linked.)

All of the arguments for legalization are old and obvious: we would control and tax marijuana. We would regulate its use in the same way we regulate alcohol. Kids under eighteen would face some legal consequences for using it. Providing it to kids under eighteen would be worse. You couldn’t drive while stoned. Your employer would still have the right to test and fire you for use, even off duty. The military would have a zero-tolerance policy. Airline pilots would avoid all brownies on the off-chance that grandma had slipped a little faux-regano in as a joke.

Legalization would take hundreds of billions of dollars away from the drug cartels and substantially reduce the levels of corruption and violence in Mexico, as well as law-enforcement, court, and prison costs here in the United States. The cartels would survive, of course, especially as long as meth and cocaine remained a lucrative source of fast, easy cash. But they would be weakened to a degree that Mexico might actually move to reduce corruption and effectively fight them.

Cartel leaders should fear legalization more than they ever fear each other.

It would be foolish to believe that legalization of pot would solve all of our drug-related problems, especially addiction itself. But it would allow us to channel a small portion of the enforcement dollars into treatment. Legalization of marijuana would provide a laboratory for decriminalizing other drugs, and in the end we would find what programs work best for individual, community, and national health.

Legalization doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. Like gay marriage, it will probably arrive by a series of small steps rather than one big initiative.

Still, forty years of failed policy might one day lead to changes based on simple evidence and logic. May the War on Drugs not live to see fifty.

Vamoos a Mexico

2011-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t even planning to go to the University of Guadalajara. I was actually trying to think of the name University of Guanajuato because it’s a sister institution to Southern Oregon University, where I took my nine-week intensive course in Spanish last summer. But I couldn’t think of Guanajuato and I was mostly persuaded it must be Guadalajara I wanted since both start with G and have too many u’s a’s, and j’s. It’s easy to see how I got the two confused.

It seems to be a happy confusion, though, because when I got to the Guadawada home page I found out they have a five-week Spanish for foreigners program that runs throughout the year. Guanawana only offers a regular sixteen-week semester, which I couldn’t afford in terms of either money or time away from home and Mary. Or money.

So after a few minutes’ thought, I took the online placement test to see which of ten levels I would be put in. I haven’t heard any results yet, but I didn’t feel like I did too well.

Then went to the registration page and filled that out. I wonder what they’ll think of me since I had to click on a year of birth and their earliest choice was 1950. I was born in 1948, so I lied about my age. Then I had to click on my year in college, which didn’t offer a post-doc option, so I clicked on senior. Then I had to pick a school where I am a student, but this one offered a write-in choice, so I said non-admit. Chances are good they’ll have no idea what non-admit means.

I had, however, no trouble entering my credit card information to pay the non-refundable $150 registration fee, so in the end I think I’ll be accepted and they’ll find a place for me.

I’m excited about the trip. I haven’t studied a lot in the year since I finished the program at SOU. It’s hard to study in a vacuum but that’s mostly what I’ve done in the four years since I first started at the local community college with a “conversational Spanish” course, which in no way led to any conversational skills beyond maybe ordering a chimmichonga at Taco Bell.

So after the four years since I began, I’m really only at a college two-year level, which is to say not much. Right now, though, I’m meeting with two native-speaker tutors who I contacted through an ad, so I’m trying to cram and be as well-prepared as I can be when I get there. I have to keep reminding myself that one goes into a program like this to learn Spanish, not because one already speaks Spanish.

And I’m also a little nervous, though not much. I worry that there will be a fuss at the border since I’ll carry in a two-months’ supply of my prescriptions, of which there are five, plus a dozen of so boxes of OTC medicines that I think I need to survive. Just because I’m something of a hypochondriac doesn’t mean I won’t get diarrhea. I worry I’ll miss the first day or five because I have diarrhea.

I’ll have to take a cab to the home of my home-stay Mexican family, which shouldn’t be a problem, but then I wonder what my family will be like. Then I’ll have to find the university and the right room in time for a Monday morning orientation, then I worry I might have some lazy and ill-tempered instructors, which is probably my most legitimate concern based on past experience with faculty in general.

According to the school’s website, Guadalabamba is “the cradle of Mexican folklore and the traditional culture that is most representative of the nation: mariachi music, charrería and Tequila.”

Great. I absolutely hate mariachi music, I don’t drink, and I can’t find charrería in any of my Spanish dictionaries. It might share the same root with “charrasquear,” which means either to strum a guitar or to stab a person. (I did not make that up.)

I did find a blog of one former student, though, and it seems the tequila was the source of most of her entries, with only a few brief comments about the actual school. She said that to really keep up, she’d like have to study like four hours a day or whatever, so that’s a good sign for me. I don’t see myself going out a lot with all my twenty-something fellow classmates drinking Diet Cokes while they get shitfaced on the local distilled spirits and dirty dance to the primitive polka rhythms of the native mariachi music

Speaking of getting stabbed, though, I take the U. at its website-word when it says it is located in a safe, charming neighborhood where I will enjoy the many restaurants, shops Starbucks and a Wal-Mart as long as I take cabs at night and don’t stray too far during the day. Do not approach large groups of idle young men with tattoos on their necks. Do not make eye contact with their women.

I’m actually not at all worried about security, despite Mexico’s well-deserved reputation for violence which in places like Ciudad Juarez can make Baghdad feel like Colonial Williamsburg. What can go wrong?

So, it’s “¡Arriba, arriba!” or “Up there, up there!” to Mexico, and I have to call the consulate in Portland to see if I need a visa and call my doctor since I’m sure I’ll need lots of shots. If you don’t need some shots to go there, it’s not an adventure.

I have lots of other things to do, and I leave in a month. I could probably be ready to go tomorrow, but a month will give me extra time to worry about details.

Real money

2011-08-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

Thank dog it’s over for now. If I learned one thing in this endless debate, it’s that a trillion dollars must be a lot of money. I’m old enough that I still remember when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The late Senator Everett Dirkson famously said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Now you’re not. Even a billion isn’t enough to get the country’s attention. A billion is the new million. Now, if you’re serious about being a Republican, you have to talk about a trillion.

Of course, I have no idea how much money a trillion dollars is. If you stacked hundred dollar bills on top of each other, would they reach the moon?

In our little town, even a thousand dollars is still a lot of money. The city has been up in our neighborhood the last few days repaving the street in front of our house. For three days, we’ve had heavy equipment rolling around, making enough noise to wake the dead and even me. Yesterday, I thought the backup beeper on the backhoe was my alarm clock and kept mashing the snooze button until I realized there wasn’t going to be any more snoozing. This was at six a.m., and I usually sleep to about nine. I keep late hours.

We’re really happy to see our tax dollars at work like this. Since we moved into the house twenty-seven years ago, there has been a gravel strip between our sidewalk and the road. Winters, the strip would turn to mud, and the next spring I’d have to bring in more gravel to build it back up. To get my motorcycle out of the garage, I had to roll it backwards down our steep driveway and cross the gravel strip and make that backwards turn to be facing the right direction in the road. It was always a little tense, and fairly often my foot would slip out from under me if I had to touch down in the gravel. Fortunately, I never fell. Now I can roll down backwards and play the game of trying to never put a foot down.

We were lucky to get this work done because the crew chief said there are hundreds of miles of roads in town that need repair, but there’s no money to keep up. Our street was seriously breaking up, but there are others in just as bad a shape, and even some which are still not paved at all. The money for the job came from federal EPA funds because we have enough dust and other particles in the air to be a health hazard, especially in winter when lots of people still burn wood to heat their homes. We hate wood burning and get hit especially hard by one stove from a house on the diagonal behind us, but for a lot of families, it’s burn free wood from a National Forest permit or freeze in the dark.

So a few thousand here and a few thousand there keeps a couple of crews busy doing badly needed road work. This is almost certainly a program that will be cut under the new budget. Republicans hate the EPA, and they don’t care about these small programs that keep people employed doing important work. Next year this time, half of those guys or more will be out of work, drawing unemployment and food stamps, and they’ll lose their health insurance.

Tough beans. We're the Republican Party, and it's not our problem.

A few thousand here, a few thousand there, pretty soon you’re talking real people thrown into financial distress and a big hit to the local economy. At least we got our road paved.

They will always be among us

2011-07-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

A new report from our conservative friends at the Heritage Foundation exposes the myth of poverty in America: shockingly, most poor people have refrigerators and microwaves! Not all of them, maybe, but lots of them also have X-boxes and air conditioning. Thus, I guess, we need to quit giving subsidies to the poor until they start acting poor by eating rancid food cooked on wood they gather from discarded pallets in those trash-filled yards of theirs.

They probably also have heaters and catchers’ mitts, but the survey didn’t ask those questions, nor did it ask if they can afford to run their air conditioners.

Oh, and you’re not homeless if you’re living in a homeless shelter, which might also suggest you’re not dead if you’re in a mortuary.

This is the latest reprise of the old Reagan myth of the welfare Cadillac, which he used to excellent effect to make substantial cuts on the anti-poverty programs of Johnson’s Great Society. But the big welfare cutter was that uber-liberal Bill Clinton, who succeeded in ending welfare as we know it by ending welfare as we know it.

Simply put, there are no poor if we give them food and housing and energy subsidies and they then spend some of their vast discretionary income on luxury items like toys for their kids. The survey, somehow, never asked questions as to whether the rich sometimes live beyond their means. I know the middle-class never does, which is why there have been so few foreclosures on McMansions.

What the study really shows is just how uncharitable the conservative movement is at heart. (Rich people have hearts, too!) In their minds, the fact that poverty programs—radically reduced in recent years and due to be cut even more in the debt-ceiling budgets of both Republicans and Democrats—have allowed some poor people to actually afford what most of us consider the necessities of life just shows that we need to cut back more on poverty programs.

I’ve always known this, but it’s refreshing to see a published report that makes it so abundantly clear: the poor don’t matter to conservatives. No more of this trickle-down bullshit. Let them eat cake!

Poverty in the United States is defined as an annual income of $22,000 for a family of four. I’d like to see the fellows of the Heritage Foundation live for a year on $22,000, even if they get food stamps and free health care, then come back and write a report on poverty in America. I’ll loan them a pencil.

More on this study here:

http://www.theshriverbrief.org/2011/07/articles/economic-justice/because-you-have-a-refrigerator-and-a-stove-you-are-not-poor/

A fine race

2011-07-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

Australian Casey Stoner makes the pass that would give him the lead over reigning champion Jorge Lorenzo. It was a fine race, and two other races in the other classes were also exceptionally exciting.

Mary and I took a ride into the mountains in in our aging but still classy Mitsubishi Spyder convertible and had lunch on the deck of a good cafe. The weather was perfect. Then back home to enjoy a lazy Sunday around the house while I watched races and practiced Spanish at my leisure.

It was an entirely above-average day.

(Notice how I'm not writing about politics? I'm not even thinking about politics.

Politics? What politics??)

Race time

2011-07-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

Motorcycle Grand Prix racing isn’t particularly popular in the United States. Worldwide, MotoGP ranks second only to soccer in popularity, with huge crowds at the races and television viewers in the millions. In Europe, Asia and South America, small, fast bikes have always been the favorites of riders and racers, totally unlike the Harley culture that dominates here. Today's race at Laguna Seca in Monterey will draw about 80,000 spectators, and part of the thrill of being there is just riding in with tens of thousands of other riders and seeing the hills covered with parked motorcycles, probably ninety percent of them sport bikes of one stripe or another.

Even without much background in this kind of racing, though, a GP Championship race should be exciting to watch. These are the greatest riders of their generation on the fastest bikes in the world, multimillion dollar thoroughbreds with full factory support. Top speeds on most tracks exceed 200 miles per hour, but the real excitement is in the corners, where riders achieve seemingly impossible lean angles, hanging off the inside of the bikes and dragging their knees on the ground, riding at 99 percent for the whole race and all-too-frequently making the small mistake or misjudgment that sends them flying in spectacular crashes.

Most regular viewers will admit that part of the excitement is in the crashes, but we don’t have to feel too guilty about this. Track safety improvements over the years mean that there hasn’t been a GP fatality in my memory, and although broken bones and dislocations happen, most of the time the rider jumps up and tries to restart the fallen bike to get back in the race. Even when a rider is down and can’t remount, it’s rare to be out with injuries for more than one or two races.

These guys are tough. American rider Colin Edwards fractured his collar bone this season and was screwed back together with seventeen titanium pins. His doctor said he couldn’t ride again until he could do some push-ups, so Colin dropped to the ground and put out two. He said the pain almost knocked him out, but he was back for the next race and finished third in the rain, a wet track meaning you have to slow down a little and ride with more finesse and smoothness, which makes the race a little less physical.

The real thrill, though, is in watching the close racing for the lead and epic battles back in the pack for spots as low as tenth or even lower. The best riders turn in lap times only a few thousands of a second apart on tracks that are typically between two and three miles long, and they race with an amazing consistency. If a rider loses a full second in a lap it usually means he’s made an error and misjudged a corner or got stuck fighting it out for position with another rider, which can force taking a defensive line through a turn.

I watched qualifying last night, in which riders have a full hour to put in their fastest lap, then go back to the pits to make micro-adjustments in the bike’s setup, then back out onto the track. The true qualifying laps come in the last ten minutes, when setup is as close to perfect as they can get it, and riders put their heads down to turn in a 99.9-percent performance to determine their starting position on the grid.

Pole position at Laguna was taken by Jorge Lorenzo, the Spanish rider who won the championship last year. Second is Australian Casey Stoner, off the pace by only seven one-thousands of a second. In fact, the first seven riders are all within seven-tenths of a second of each other, typical of GP qualifying. It amazes me to think that rider skills and bike development are all so close that less than one second over a two-mile track can mean the difference between a world champion and a distant also-ran. At these speeds, a winner with a two or three second lead over the rest of the pack will have a huge lead in actual distance. More exciting is when two or three riders battle it out and finish within inches of each other, the winner often determined by a well-planned pass in the last turn.

The races are most exciting, of course, if you follow the whole season and know each of the riders and how the standings have evolved over the last nine races, with eight more to go after Laguna. For even a first-time watcher, though, there should be enough adrenaline flowing to get you through the rest of the afternoon.

This is the second year in a row that I won’t make it down to Laguna Seca for the race. Last year I was taking an intensive Spanish summer course at Southern Oregon University. Although classes ran from Monday to Thursday, there was no way I could be gone for two or three days without studying. This year I’m recently back from two weeks in Washington, DC and a two-day bike excursion to Reno where I met up with several friends and got lucky at the blackjack tables, coming home up about a hundred dollars after expenses. In the end, I decided it was time to stay home for a few days straight.

Prior to that, I had an attendance record that was mostly unbroken for a lot of years; I can’t really say how many. I remember at least once leaving the track late in the afternoon after the last race and riding home straight through with only gas breaks, getting home well after midnight and then teaching classes the next morning. Usually, I’d just miss classes and ride home Monday.

Watching on television is almost as good, though, and actually even better for seeing the up-close battles that go on the full length of the track.

Racing is covered on Speed Channel, today’s race starting at 5pm Eastern time, 2pm out here on the Best Coast. There’s still time to set up your DVR.

Deus ex machina

2011-07-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

The people we count on to take reasonable care of us are letting us down. Like almost all Americans, I’m disgusted by our nation’s leaders’ handling of the debt ceiling crisis. The budget negotiations are where Congress fights out its taxing and spending plan for the next year. Raising the debt ceiling should be a routine procedural event that happens mostly out of public sight, a page 5 story at best. Instead, Republicans are using it as yet one more opportunity to pile on to President Obama just to make him look bad while they ignore our real problems, primarily crushing unemployment and millions of Americans living hand to mouth with little or no hope of improvement any time soon. Or ever.

And like almost all of us who voted for Obama, I’m disappointed in his performance. To give him credit, he’s trying to do what he said he would do when he came to Washington: create a new kind of politics that rises above party politics and special interests and instead engages in genuine problem solving. Still, it was at best an unrealistic hope from the beginning, and it was clear from even before his first day in office that Republicans weren’t playing by the same rules. Quite the contrary.

So now we have the Tea Party extremists holding enough votes in the house to defeat any compromise, even if it’s tilted heavily towards Republican goals. They hold such power because they’re crazy. Game theory points out that when one side appears completely irrational in its demands, the other side will always make major concessions. It also points out that when one side really is completely irrational, it will crash the system. You can only negotiate a hostage crisis if the bad guys haven’t already decided to get as much press as they can, then kill all the hostages anyway.

We’re the hostages.

All of this has been too depressing to write about again, so I’m glad to see in a poll published today that most Americans still give high approval ratings to at least one big player: God. A majority of fifty-two percent of Americans approve of God’s performance, though nine percent disapprove and forty percent are unsure. Only an even fifty percent approve of God’s handling of natural disasters, a surprising number since God causes natural disasters, but I guess half of the population thinks he does a good enough job cleaning up after Himself.

And a substantial majority of seventy-one percent approve of how God created the universe. I have to agree with them that the universe works very well indeed. I mean, look at string theory.

A majority of Americans still like Obama as a person, even though they disapprove of his performance. The poll didn’t ask if people still like God as a person, but apparently they do.

We sure need His help right now, some kind of "plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.” Deus ex machina.

What that could possibly be, God only knows.

Double-dog dare ya

2011-07-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

Obama’s warning to Eric Cantor—“don’t call my bluff”—was a misstatement overlooked by everybody I’ve read. Granted, the prez issued the challenge in a moment of anger as he walked out of talks on raising the debt ceiling, but I doubt he meant to suggest he is bluffing. Nor is Cantor, for that matter. It’s clear he’s willing to let the US default on its credit obligations, no matter the economic consequences, and then let the blame fall on the president,despite Mitch McConnell’s warning that default would bring irreparable harm to the Republican “brand.”

So branding is what this is all about.

What Obama meant to say was “I’ll call your bluff and raise you a trillion.” He’s willing to play a deadly game of chicken with Republican fundamentalists because he knows he’s going to win this one.

In any case, Obama is right to hold out against a short-term resolution which would put us back in the middle of this absurd debate two more times before the next election. Once the debt ceiling gets raised and fixed in place until after November 2012, I doubt it will carry any weight as a campaign issue. Most people have no idea what the debt ceiling is anyway, and come November plus one, the issue will still be jobs, jobs, jobs.

Actually, I’ve had a great impulse to write about all of this, but two things have kept my keyboard quiet: one is that everybody else is writing about it to the degree that there’s not much else to read, and I see no compelling reason to endlessly repeat the litany of dire consequences to arrive if we fail to act by the August 2nd deadline. Second, I keep waiting to see what will happen the next day, but the next day is always exactly the same as yesterday, and I haven’t seen an opportune moment to jump in.

Meanwhile, important news stories barely get mentioned, including the arrest of a woman who cut off her husband’s penis and ran it down the garbage disposal: “Catherine Kieu Becker of Garden Grove reportedly prepared dinner for her husband and put a poisonous substance or drug in his food to make him drowsy. While the man was sleeping, Becker allegedly tied him to the bed. When he awakened, Becker cut his penis off with a knife and threw it into the garbage disposal, turning it on as she did so.”

Clearly, Kate learned a lesson from the perfectly named Lorena Bobbit, who after cutting off her husband’s penis, drove off in her car and threw it in a field, where it was somehow magically recovered and surgically reattached. Lorena’s husband John went on to a brief career as a porn star, proving I don’t know what exactly except that modern medicine certainly has come a long way.

The message to men is clear: put the toilet seat down after you pee.

In the end I believe Obama will use his executive authority under section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Suppressing the tea party insurrection and rebellion is what this is really all about, after all.

Bright lights, big city

2011-07-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

Recently back from my caregiver responsibilities with Broschat in Washington, DC. I never gave a second thought to making this trip. When I heard he was going in for prostate surgery, I knew immediately that I would be going out to join him.

I find it hard to put the right word to this decision. It wasn’t a favor. It wasn’t a responsibility or obligation. It was simply what I was going to do. Our almost fifty years of friendship was certainly a big part of the decision. Friends help out friends when they can. And I was the obvious guy for the job. I had the time, being retired and having no important plans for a few weeks in summer, like going to the beach. I’d been through the surgery myself and knew what recovery looked like. And since I knew Michael would never let me spend a dime of my own money while I was there, finances were never an issue.

Actually, I became quite uncomfortable with his unwavering insistence that he pay for everything, but you can’t out-stubborn some people on some issues, and I knew I would never win this one. “I’ll have the filet mignon, and have room service send up more ice.”

The visit itself was mostly an enjoyable vacation. My real caregiving responsibilities ended after the first few days when he got the hang of changing pee bags without ripping out his catheter. Still, since I’d been through it myself only two years ago, I knew the first few days would be difficult to manage alone when you’re still foggy from the effects of anesthetic and nervous about having a tube coming out of your Weiner. I actually liked having a catheter since it allowed me for the first time in my life to sit through a whole movie without getting up to go to the bathroom, but it definitely takes a little getting used to.

We faced only one minor crisis, which didn’t feel at all minor at the time. After his discharge from the hospital, it became clear—I’ll spare you the details—that the catheter wasn’t catheterizing, and I had to put in a call to one of his urologists. The good doctor handled it beautifully, telling us to come back into the hospital and directly up to the ward Michael had just left, avoiding the blunt-force trauma of going through the emergency room. A quick (but obviously painful) flush of the system with saline solution and everything was back to normal. We went back home and I made the patient some broth from a can of chicken noodle. I ate the chicken and noodles.

By the next day, we were on solid foods again and going out for short walks. Despite his admission on his own blog that he was scared shitless, (pissless, actually, but never mind), Michael never showed any outward signs of emotional stress. He seemed to take it all in stride, which made my modest duties easy.

Within a few days I was completely in vacation mode, and it was a great visit. Two days in Colonial Williamsburg, where we always ate with only the best people and stayed on site in a converted something—a mill or granary or privy, I wasn’t quite sure which. Williamsburg has been restored to its condition of roughly 1750, and its many homes and other buildings, concerts on period instruments, and historical reenactments create in even a jaded historical revisionist like myself a swell of patriotic fervor. Nor did they ignore some of the dark side of our revolution against the British: One reenactment of the mob trial of a loyalist whose only crime was his not very prudent political pronouncements caused, I hope, conflicted feelings in even the most ardent jingoist when they started to tar and feather the poor accused. He was saved only at the last minute by a forced “confession” and a promise to get out of town, which meant back to England.

My favorite event of the visit was an outdoor performance of slave music and dance, which we attended after dark. No actual whippings, but I found it inspirational to watch the human spirit rise up in song and dance under the harshest conditions possible.

Later in the visit, we went to a baseball game, which the Nationals won, if only on the strength of two monumental errors by the Cubs in the first inning. I don’t even follow baseball, and I had a great time.

Plus a few drives in the country in the new Miata, with the top down, of course.

Overall, I recommend a visit to Broschat next time he has major surgery. Two weeks together in his small apartment and we showed no sign of getting on each other's nerves. He’s a wonderful host and a gifted story teller, and he has a great collection of DVDs. We watched a different movie almost every night.

Even though I loved Washington and environs, it’s good to be home. Yesterday, Mary and I decided to go for a drive and a walk in the country, enjoying a high temperature of eighty degrees, our dry climate, and a cooling breeze. We drove with the top down in our aging but still-satisfying Eclipse Spyder for about twenty minutes to get out of town, then through some lovely and largely empty country roads to the trailhead, where we walked for an hour without seeing another person. A typical outing out this way. This in contrast to the drives in the Miata through the madness of DC surface-street traffic and congested freeways, and walks on “trails” which we shared with scores of other walkers, wild-hare bicyclists, and rushing traffic just a few feet away. Enjoyable enough, but still. . . .

Bright lights big city have their charms, but I guess I’m mostly a country boy at heart, though it’s taken me about twenty years to realize and accept it.

Male readers take note: if you haven’t had this surgery yet, you have a even chance of needing it sometime in the next ninety days, so get your PSA checked and a caregiver lined up.

Buy a sports car. Get tickets to a ball game.

Paddycake

2011-06-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Since I didn’t have a root canal scheduled for last night, I watched the Republican presidential candidates’ “debate” on CNN. I use debate in quotation marks because it actually felt more like a gang rape, with almost every question to every candidate turned into an attack on Obama. If anyone tuned in had turned the debate into a drinking game keyed to the word “Obamacare,” participants would have all died of alcohol poisoning in the first fifteen minutes.

The best question from the moderator all night concerned the Bush tax cuts and deregulation, both of which failed to produce any measurable upturn in the economy and surge in job creation. No one answered that question directly, choosing instead to repeat the Republic mantra that the only way to jumpstart the current economy is more tax cuts and deregulation.

Candidates also chose not to direct any attacks against their primary contenders, which is what they have to do if they want to distinguish themselves from each other and win over voters in the Republican primaries. Pawlenty even declined to defend his earlier statement that “Obamacare” would be better called “Obomneycare,” instead once again going after Obama rather than Romney.

All the candidates came across as capable non-debaters, able to turn every question into a recitation of current right-wing Republican orthodoxy aimed at the tea party base. Still, there were some real bombshells. Cain refused to retreat from an earlier statement that he would never appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. Amazingly, Gingrich came to his defense, pointing out that one naturalized American citizen and convicted terrorist had explained that he had simply lied when he took his oath of citizenship.

And then, even more amazingly, Gingrich went on to defend earlier purges of Nazis and Communists, arguing that history had proven them mostly right. I’m not aware of any particular efforts to purge government of Nazis, but this was the first defense of McCarthyism I’ve ever heard from anyone who wasn’t a card carrying member of the John Birch society. Still, since he didn’t actually mention McCarthy, he’ll probably get by with that one.

There were calls to turn Medicare into a voucher system and reform Social Security by making it a voluntary program with an option to contribute to private retirement accounts. This should amount to painting a target on your chest, since the collapse of the stock market has wiped out the retirement savings of millions of Americans, but on stage with a line of fellow Republican candidates, no one ever questioned a suggestion that will inevitably be greeted with hostility from many voters, especially older Americans who are the most likely to actually vote in any election.

In fact, the inevitable answer to every question was privatize, cut taxes, and deregulate, red meat for the exclusively Republican audience that won’t always play so well beyond the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Still, the debate highlights Obama’s challenge in the presidential election. After now three years of Obama’s presidency, we’re still in the grip of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama’s defense of his leadership so far has been a limp assertion that things would be worse if he hadn’t intervened forcefully in saving what was left of financial markets and manufacturing jobs such as the auto industry. Those of us who believe he needs to stop taking jabs and instead start throwing heavy body blows against his critics will feel even greater urgency in his taking an aggressive stand. Sadly, after three years, it may be that we’ve seen he’s more comfortable lecturing in an attentive classroom than he is in the kind of cage fighting he needs to do to win reelection.

Still, it’s early in the game, and we saw in Nevada and other states that given a choice between an unpopular incumbent and a whackadoo opponent, voters will reluctantly reelect the incumbent. Harry Reid, a particularly ineffective debater, eked out a victory against Sharon Angle. Obama, with his far superior debating skills and his proven track record in running an effective campaign, might still mount a spirited offensive instead of always playing an anemic defense. He needs to take off the gloves and start throwing those heavy punches.

Only a fool like me would dare to call the election this early in the campaign. I take it all back. The most anyone can say at this point is it’s going to be interesting.

And I’ll continue to watch the Republican debates since in the end I can’t help myself and I don’t see any root canals in the near future.

A little perspective

2011-06-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or is the idea of a Broadway musical that satirizes Mormons more than a little offensive? I surfed by the Tony Awards last night, and though I’d vaguely heard something about The Book of Mormon, it hadn’t really caught my attention. Then I watched one big production number from the show and I wondered why there hasn’t been a surge of outrage about this. Imagine—it makes me shudder to think about it—a Broadway satire of Muslims called The Koran. We’d have Hillary Clinton flying in to New York in an NY minute to plead with the producers to call off the show.

Just the fact that somebody was pursuing such an idea would cause massive riots throughout the Arab world. Granted, Muslims could loosen up a little and stop killing each other because some cracker preacher in Florida decides to burn their book, but this isn’t just a one-man stunt for a little publicity. It’s Broadway.

The Book of Mormon was written by the creators of South Park, which has no notion of “going too far.” Then again, the opening number for the Tonys was “Broadway: It’s not just for gays anymore.” Was it before? I’ve never been.

Maybe musical comedy based on religion isn’t such a bad idea. As a born-again-and-again agnostic, I certainly take as much pleasure as the next guy making fun of religions. Nunsense makes fun of nuns, who have their own issues with underwear, I suppose. And I mean, Scientology? Come on.

Of course, Jews come in for plenty of satire, but mostly by Jews. For them, it’s a business, but when they get a musical, it’s Fiddler on the Roof.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: I was raised Baptist, sort of, who prohibit standing intercourse lest someone think they’re dancing. I still can’t dance. Other than that, there’s nothing funny about Baptists.

Has anyone done Anglicans? Gay bishops? A laugh a minute.

Jesus Christ Superstar offended a lot of people, but it wasn’t a comedy. It was actually quite a moving testimony, if you like Jesus, and it had some great songs.

Maybe we need a musical that satirizes all religions, Anabaptists to Zoroasters: God: The Joke’s On You.

Funnier to me is Republicans. Nixon has an opera, but I don't think it's a comedy.

Don't call me Ishmael

2011-06-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but the recent revelations about Congressman Anthony Weiner have led me to take the last step: I’m renouncing my gender. From now on, I will identify as “independent” on all official documents such as driver’s license and passport. I’ll leave blank any boxes I’m required to check for either “male” or “female” unless there’s an “other,” and then only if I can write in “independent.”

I will use neither men’s nor women’s restrooms. Unless there’s a unisex bathroom, I’ll hold it until I get home. This means I'll be spending a lot more time at home.

Not all men are assholes, but there are so many asshole men out there that I’m tired of being associated with them only on the basis of certain equipment we share in common. I’ve long resented that I can’t be overly friendly with the neighbors’ kids for fear of being thought a pedophile. Actually being in the house with a kid when the parents aren’t there is a clear invitation to being officially charged. And taking a neighbor kid camping is just asking for a lengthy prison sentence. Really, I don’t even like kids.

It’s not any safer with women of any age. When I was teaching, I never closed my office door. Never.

On a rare occasion, I’d have a woman student walk in and close the door behind her so we could “talk.” I always recognized this for the set-up it was and reopened the door immediately, then walked out into the hallway with my hands in the air. I kept the door equally open with male students, colleagues of all ages and genders, and even when I was alone for fear that someone might suspect I wasn’t alone.

I left it open when I wasn’t there. If the need ever arose, I wanted a whole slew of witnesses from my building who would swear that they had never seen my door closed.

Never.

Today’s Daily Beast online lists a rogue’s gallery of political sex offenders, concluding that Republicans hold a slim lead over Democrats. The article briefly profiles a discouraging sixty-three offenders, some old, some new, many I’d never heard of. I well remember Bob Packwood since he was an Oregon Senator when he resigned in 1993, but I’d already forgotten John Ensign (Nevada, 2009). I hadn’t heard of congressman Tim Mahoney (2008), a Democrat who campaigned on a very Republican sounding slogan of “Faith and family: Where I stand.” Actually, he apparently spent considerable time lying down with his mistress, whom he then paid $121,000 to keep quiet. She didn’t.

Mahoney replaced Republican Mark Foley (2008), who resigned after ABC released a string of salacious email he sent to male congressional pages. I remember that one. I love it when family-values, gay-bashing Republicans turn out to be gay sexual predators. This happens approximately weekly.

Of course, there are plenty of non-political offenders: Tiger Woods, PeeWee Herman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. These are not three guys you would otherwise name in the same sentence. And don’t get me started on fundamentalist preachers and mega-churches: Gay sex, prostitutes, meth. And this was just one guy.

I’m not ready to be charged as a sex offender (I’m not), or a philanderer (I’m not), or even just a salacious texter (I’m not).

So I renounce my gender. Call me Stacy, not Ross. Stacy happens to be my middle name, and although I hate it, it is gender-neutral and therefore acceptable. Call me Doctor Carroll or Professor Carroll. I don’t stand on ceremony, but Mister is no longer acceptable.

And finally, I did not have sex with that woman, and I will not resign.

Don't know much about history

2011-06-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Longfellow goes on for fourteen stanzas, concluding

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Sarah Palin

"He who warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

Five myths

2011-05-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

As part of the Washington Post’s “Five Myths” series, Paul Farhi today offers us “Five Myths about America’s Schools.” It’s not likely to change much in the American discussion about school improvement, but I’d guess that about ninety-five percent of all teachers, kindergarten through university, would agree with his assessment.

Among the myths: 1) Our schools are failing; 2) Unions defend bad teachers; 3) Billionaires know best; 4) Charter schools are the answer; and 5) More effective teachers are the answer.

My take on all this is that, contrary to everyone’s good intentions, there are few if any solutions to our education problems outside of the schools themselves. Certain kinds of assessment, in mathematics for example, are both valid and reliable and can tell us a lot about student performance, though not always so much about teacher performance. In my field, though, writing instruction, despite decades of trying, there simply isn’t any valid, externally verifiable way to assess student writing and improvement. This makes people outside of the profession crazy, but it’s something that we writing teachers tend to accept as a given. The same is true in most disciplines.

Think, for example, of the arts. Critics and the public might largely agree that a certain film is excellent and another is terrible: Say, Citizen Kane and Conan the Barbarian. Still, not everyone will agree. Mexican writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges thought Citizen Kane sucked, and so did I. Others thought Conan was a pop-culture classic. I didn’t, but there you go.

For all the films that fall somewhere in the middle, it becomes virtually impossible to make a purely objective assessment. Does good acting trump a mediocre plot, or do great special effects make an otherwise mundane plot in some way measurably better? Is My Dog Skip a better film because it features a Jack Russell Terrier than if it featured a cocker spaniel? (Of course it is.)

Likewise, it gets much harder when we try to assess competence in the roughly eighty percent of students who fall somewhere in the middle. Does a particular student write noticeably better at the end of a ten-week class than at the beginning? As an instructor, I believe I can assess that, but another instructor might read samples of that student’s writing and reach a completely different conclusion.

Is a particular excellent student more excellent after my able instruction? Is a terrible writer a little less terrible? Yes, but don't ask me to prove it.

Good writing instruction results from a vast network of intangible features of a particular school’s culture, including a good president or principal, a good department chair, a balance of shared expectations among the faculty and a lot of room for originality, a mix of students who are motivated and at least moderately competent to learn (which can vary greatly even from one class to the next), and the luck of the draw in the abilities of individual department members. There are many other factors, not the least of which are a student’s home environment and upbringing.

My answer then, which will never be accepted by politicians or the general public, is to give us some money and get out of the way. Teachers have been teaching with mixed results but generally reasonable success since at least Socrates, without benefit of standardized testing, merit pay, or charter schools.

And remember that Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn’t publish.

Departments tend to seek excellence, even if from the outside they look largely dysfunctional (my former department being perhaps the best example of this since the invention of the pencil). Bad teachers tend to get pushed into other jobs more suited to their abilities, such as parking enforcement. Good teachers tend to get a few pats on the back from both colleagues and students, which is mostly what motivates us to continue teaching and even improve if we can.

We're not perfect, but neither are truck drivers.

So my suggestion for genuine school improvement is benign neglect: Trust us; we know what we’re doing. Show a little respect. Quit blaming us for all the social problems you can’t solve.

You can read the Farhi five myths by copying and pasting this link into your browser. I could easily add five more, but this is a good start.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-schools/2011/05/09/AFunW27G_story.html

Instant dick

2011-05-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

I’ve been using an updated version of Internet Explorer the last few days, and I’ve just noted a new feature that I love. When I place the curser over a word, no matter what Web site I might happen to be on, I get a pop-up definition of that word. My Kindle does this and it’s a welcome shortcut from actually getting out a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words, which as often as not I don’t bother to do.

Who cares if George Will knows five words per column I’ve never encountered in my entire life? I've always suspected George makes liberal use of a thesaurus,anyway, (George Will and liberal rarely appearing in the same sentence together).

Now my computer unpacks George automatically. He seems to be saying exactly the same thing whether or not I can define a few unfamiliar words, but now I can be sure he's not putting one over on me. The scabrous jackanapes.

What I just discovered minutes ago is that this dictionary function also works in Spanish. I was on a Spanish-language news site, stumbling along as usual like a low-performing second grader, when I let my mouse hand drift the curser over the text, and up popped a definition, in English. Presunto violador means alleged rapist. Guess who that article was about? (Hint: Mike Tyson is old news.)

Actually, I could have puzzled out the meaning of that one since Spanish is so rich in English cognates, and after awhile one gets a knack for recognizing them, even if they are rather oblique. Still, I might have guessed wrongly that “desalentador” has something to do with desalination, rather than “discouraging,” which is what it really means. Although what desalination has to do with a presunto violador would have troubled me. Something that might come up in the penalty phase, maybe.

I love these new features of my digital life. My Kindle has always had this instant definition feature. Although I get by just fine without a smart phone or an iPad, meaning I have absolutely no apps in my life, these other developments are more than just gadgets. They change how I read. In a small way, they make reading a richer experience.

Now, why doesn’t Microsoft Word have this same feature? You’d think it would be a basic component of such an advanced word processor.

Maybe it is and I just haven’t discovered it yet.

Lucky shot

2011-05-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

President Obama was wonderful in his interview with 60 Minutes last night: calm and resolute; neither humble nor arrogant; just, well, presidential. And then, the next morning, he signed the legislation ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” another campaign promise he made.

Just another day at the office for this extraordinary president.

If you missed the interview, I highly recommend a viewing. A story and the full interview are available here (copy and paste into your browser):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/no-evidence-pakistan-knew-of-bin-ladens-hideout-top-security-official-says/2011/05/08/AFxXpNSG_story.html

So now Obama enjoys what I predict will be a growing bump in his approval ratings as a result of killing bin Laden. Gas prices are dropping and are predicted to be down by fifty cents a gallon by summer; job creation in the private sector continues to rise. Maybe killing Osama isn’t the end of al-Qaeda, and some encouraging economic news isn’t the end of the recession for most Americans, but things certainly look a lot brighter today than they did a week ago.

It’s still over a year to the 2012 election, but I have to believe that Republicans are growing increasingly nervous. The best they can come up with for now is a little sniping from the sidelines. First, they criticize Obama for making too many references to himself in announcing the death of Osama. Eight in nine minutes by my count, including some real whoppers such as, “Tonight, I can report. . . .” which could have been better phrased in the passive, “Tonight, it can be reported”; or “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation,” which might have be phrased as, “Today, that tall black guy in the White House launched a targeted operation. . . .”

But I don’t think this kind of petty denigration is going to play well anywhere but on the Rush Limbaugh show. Even worse for the Ree-Pubs, senior Bush administration officials are stepping out of the shadows to take at least partial credit for the kill and criticize Obama for stopping “enhanced interrogation techniques,” also referred to as torture except in the Bush administration. Rummy Rumsfeld said that early tips obtained through waterboarding led to Osama’s bloody end. "Trigger" Dick Cheney said the same and suggested that Obama has put the United States at risk by reaffirming our commitment to national and international law regarding torture.

And Cheney wanted to take the head shot since he has the experience, but that's another matter.

All this from the administration that, after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, got absolutely everything else wrong for the next seven years. I won’t go on about it here. For a partial list of absolutely everything else the Bush administration got wrong for the next seven years, email me privately.

Actually, I’m surprised that no one I’m aware of is making the argument that Obama acted recklessly, despite his fortunate outcome. He gambled his presidency and to a large degree the standing of the United States in the world on intelligence that he described as circumstantial and on an operation that had what he described as a 55/45 chance of success. He said he worried that the Navy SEALs would find only a “prince from Dubai” instead of the terrorist leader responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: “I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been some significant consequences.”

No shit. So it’s no wonder White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan described the decision rather ungrammatically as “what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory." The outcome, one way or the other, fairly or unfairly, would largely define how history would see Obama the man and probably his entire presidency.

The tall black guy in the White House rolled the dice and won. I’m betting that not the least important thing he won is his reelection.

Lucky shot.

Laughter, the best medicine

2011-05-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

I wondered how John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would cover the death of Osama bin-Laden because there’s certainly nothing funny about any of this.

Except there is. I should have had more faith. Colbert especially managed to pull off possibly his most hilarious bit ever.

It’s a good thing to gloat; it’s even better to laugh about it. Colbert’s schoolboy glee was pitch perfect.

If you missed the episode, go to Colbert Nation Online and navigate to the May 2nd episode. And then you might as well watch May 3rd too, but I came up with the piñata idea first.

Final respects

2011-05-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some Muslim clerics have objected to bin Laden’s burial at sea, declaring that it did not meet Muslim standards for a proper burial and was an insult to the faith. Actually, a variety of options were considered, and burial at sea was finally considered to be the most appropriate under the circumstances.

I have obtained a secret partial list of other choices that were ultimately rejected. Personally, I think burial at sea was about the nicest thing we could have done with his corpse considering his storied career.

Here then, the top ten possible options to “lug the guts into the neighbour room,” as happened to poor Polonius in Hamlet:

1. Burial at sea.

2. Strap him into a suicide bomber’s vest and blow him up in Times Square.

3. Chipper/shredder ala Fargo.

4. Cut off his head and throw his body by the side of the road. (An al-Qaeda favorite.)

5. Sell him on eBay.

6. Bury him somewhere in Afghanistan, then release a cryptic treasure map. (Pun intended.)

7. Strap him to a cruise missile and shoot him at Qaddafi.

8. Tie him to the back of a truck and drag him around Lower Manhattan.

9. Osama piñata!

and the last appropriately respectful way to lug the guts out,

10. Bury his ass at ground zero.

Of course, all of this would have been more fun if we'd taken him alive, but still: Good times.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, Utah

2011-04-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

Cliff dwellings, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

2011-04-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

RIP Opal

2011-04-01T10:16:00.001-07:00

Real life continues to happen even though we’re on the road. A few weeks ago, Mary got phone calls from various family members telling her that her step mother, Opal, was in the hospital with cancer and had been given only two or three months to live. Opal lived in Phoenix and we weren’t too far away at the time. When we called her step brother Jim, he told us that he thought Opal was failing and might have only a few days.

We dropped all our previous plans and traveled to Phoenix so Mary could be with Opal while she was still alive.

This was always an extremely difficult relationship for Mary; I’ll just say here that Mary experienced many years of verbal and emotional abuse from Opal, continuing even after she left home and after we were married. For many years, Mary has tried to maintain as much distance as possible while still trying to keep at least a cordial relationship, almost entirely for the sake of her father and to keep peace in the family with her brothers and step-brothers and sisters.

All of this made a final goodbye all the more difficult, but by the time we got to the hospital, Opal was no longer conscious, and it was clear that she had at best only a week or so left. Jim wanted us to stay around for the funeral that was to come soon, but we felt that things were too uncertain just to stay in Phoenix, which we don’t like, and wait for a death that would come in its own good time and not before. We ended up traveling to Santa Fe with the idea we could return quickly when it was time.

In fact, Opal lasted about a week longer without ever regaining consciousness, and with a few days’ notice about the funeral, we headed back to Phoenix for Mary’s one last great effort at keeping her other family relationships alive and healthy.

Difficult as it all was, we actually ended up enjoying the reunion, and surprisingly, the funeral itself turned out to be, for me at least, almost fun. Opal, who never believed it was possible to be too lavish, had planned an open-coffin ceremony in a casket that looked a lot like a Lincoln Town Car, not a bad ride to carry her into the afterlife. The pastor from her church turned out to be quite an elderly fellow himself and seemed to mostly lose track of where he was in the eulogy. At one point, he rather fell into an internal theological dispute about whether Opal was greeted in heaven by an angel or by Jesus himself.

First he said it was an angel, but then he said sometimes in a few special cases, Jesus himself actually greeted the Loved One in heaven, though he didn’t seem quite clear on what conditions would trigger the deluxe reception. It wasn’t something you could arrange with the funeral director, but probably you had a better chance on week days when things were otherwise kind of slow in Paradise.

In the end he came down on the side of Jesus. He managed to piece together a few Bible verses suggesting that death was only a passage from this life to the next, though he didn’t always seem sure exactly what his point was.

At least the whole service was blessedly short. After a drive out to the cemetery, the men among the mourners were informed we were going to be the pall bearers, which alarmed me because I’d never born a pall before and I was convinced the mostly old and feeble men in attendance wouldn’t be able to lift the Lincoln and Opal’s earthly remains and make it over to the grave site without tripping.

In the end, though, we were successful, with only a few alarming stumbles, and after a few appropriate words from Pastor, Opal was lowered into the earth for her eternal rest. This final moment made me decidedly claustrophobic, but otherwise, the service had been mostly enjoyable and sometimes amusing.

I doubt Mary saw it all in quite the same way.

We continued on to a fine Italian restaurant where step-brother Jim hosted an excellent buffet, and we all enjoyed spending some light-hearted time together. When we got back to our trailer, Mary was emotionally exhausted but content in having done the right thing and hopeful she could move on with her life now, free of some of the emotional burdens she’s carried all these years.

I wish her the best with that, but we both know that all of us carry stuff for as long as we live, and the best we can do is to try to live well with our stuff. Mary works harder and with more success at that than just about anybody I know, and it’s one of the things I most love and respect about her. Thus, some good comes from bad, and our stuff becomes in part the clay from which we mold our lives, we hope with some success.

Today we stay over one more day in Phoenix to handle the mundane chores of doing laundry, cleaning the trailer, and stocking up on food and supplies. We leave tomorrow for the canyon lands of Southern Utah and point our compass more or less in the direction of Klamath Falls. We might still stay out the final two weeks we had originally planned, or we might make a more deliberate drive straight through to get back to the comforts of life at home.

In any case, there’s a sense that this year’s winter travels are coming to a close. I’m looking forward to getting back on my motorcycle, among other things, and Mary is missing her horse and other good friends.

And weather reports from Klamath Falls suggest it might not be too soon to return. Spring is on its way. Rebirth and all of that.

Bisbee

2011-03-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

Bisbee, Arizona is a former mining town turned tourist destination and artists’ colony. As these things go, Bisbee is worth the trip from Tucson for a stay of three or four days.

The town is notable for several things: sitting in a steep valley at about 5,000 feet, it’s especially picturesque. Depending on where we were standing, the small, colorful houses rising up both sides of the canyon reminded us of either Santa Cruz, Ashland, or the town in the Popeye movie.

As a tourist destination, it seems to offer a higher quality of everything normally found in places like this. The restaurants are excellent, galleries offer art of a much higher quality (and price) than usually found in your typical tourist trap, and among the usual antique and curio shops, there are the occasional specialty stores you would expect to find in a large city. I went into Optimo Milliners, for example, to see if I could get my felt fedora cleaned and blocked. The guy was nice about it, but my hat is a piece of crap and I could buy two for what it would cost to have him do triage on it. And there’s a four-month waiting list. So I thought, well maybe I’ll just buy one of his fancy-ass hats, but that would be an even longer wait, during which I could work part time to come up with a down payment. He seems to have a worldwide reputation, and for all I know he makes the Pope's hats, though he specializes in Panamas.

But come to Bisbee for the mine tour, an absolutely fascinating hour and a half underground in a miners’ train. We went down 1,770 feet in a mine that went down8,000 feet underground and has an amazing 2,000 miles of tunnels. Or so the guide said, a former miner with a terrific dry sense of humor and a bucketful of facts, some of which I took with a grain of salt, even though The Copper Queen was not a salt mine.

The day shift reports for work

By about 1955, they figured out it was cheaper and easier just to eat the mountain and sort out the rocks later, so there’s one spectacular hole in the ground. When the mine reached the edge of the next town over, it just kept going. Don’t follow your GPS to any addresses in Warren.

This was a little bit of a pilgrimage for Mary since her father was born and raised here. He graduated from Bisbee high in about 1935 when it really was a rough and tumble mining town. We went to the museum and looked through some old records. Mary had thought her grandfather was a mining engineer, but turns out he was “Chief Clerk” for Phelps Dodge. We don’t know quite what that means but it sounds important.

Still, Mary doesn’t appear to be the rightful heir to anything here in Bisbee, so we’re moving on tomorrow, despite the many interesting things to see we never got to.

Maybe next year.

Scared north

2011-03-12T11:13:00.001-08:00

We’re camping again at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one of our favorite Southwest destinations. At six bucks a night and a three-week limit, it’s also a real bargain and a good way to save money compared to the $35 or $40 fees at state parks and private campgrounds. There are a lot of loyal visitors. The people across from us—possibly the nicest old couple you’ll ever meet—have been coming here for seventeen years.

Still, last year the campground was only half full, about eighty campers and tents on any given day. This year, the number is half that. What’s going on?

Certainly part of the blame has to rest with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona legislature, which have driven away millions of measurable dollars in convention business and probably even more in winter tourism. Not only have they alienated Hispanics, they’ve outraged lots of just-folks who have a low tolerance for intolerance.

But even more than any moral backlash, there must have been considerable harm done by just the rhetoric, highly exaggerated, about how dangerous the border region is. Organ Pipe borders Mexico, and the campground is a scant four miles north of the crossing at Sonoyta. The Fence is clearly visible during the daytime, and the lights of the small town are clear at night.

Brewer has repeatedly fixed on the murder of one borderline cattleman, even though it hasn’t been proven he was killed by illegals. But let’s give her that one. She also stated, though later amended, that there are thousands of headless corpses out in the desert.

Those headless corpses are in Mexico! What’s to worry!

Still, I can see how visitors who thought this might be a nice place to stay for two or three weeks might feel a little uncomfortable and decide to move on. The NatGeo program called Border Wars doesn’t exaggerate by much.

Here’s a sample:

The Border Patrol station in Ajo, about thirty miles north, has grown by a factor of ten in the last few years. They’re currently constructing an even-larger facility that looks about the size of a small prison, and I’m sure that’s partly what it will be.

Border Patrol SUVs are ubiquitous on the highways, sometimes feeling like about one in every three or four vehicles. Many of them pull trailers carrying quads for patrolling out in the desert.

There’s a Border Patrol checkpoint about ten miles north of the park. We pass through with just a few standard questions, but other vehicles get a careful search. It’s common to see vehicles parked on the shoulder before and after the checkpoint, and certainly some of them are picking up and dropping off immigrants and smugglers as they get around the checkpoint on foot.

It’s also common to see Border Patrol SUVs right in the campground, the agents parked and looking out over the desert to the south, slowly patrolling, or driving through fast. This is especially common at night when they also shine spotlights into the desert. Some of them carry tracker dogs.

Helicopters are routine, and a few nights ago one of them worked the desert no more than a mile from camp for over an hour, flying back and forth with dual spot lights playing over the ground. I could also see lights from SUVs out there.

Most eerie, just north of the park I watched one night last year as planes dropped parachute flares which cast a bright yellow-orange light creating an unnatural daylight. And not just one plane, but at least three. I watched almost hypnotized for the whole evening, one flare after another so that there were usually three or four in the sky at one time. This brought back a strong memory from Viet Nam—not to be confused with a flashback—because it was routine there, too, for planes to drop flares outside of the base where I was stationed, especially during the occasional rocket or mortar attack, the biggest difference being the lack here of .50 caliber machine guns firing tracers at the ground. It made a sound not like gunfire but more like the steady staccato buzz of an arc welder, and we called it pissing fire.

At least the runners don’t have that to worry about.

With the help of all the electronic devices which include conventional radar, noise and motion detectors, regular and infrared cameras and probably some secret technologies we don’t even know about, it’s common for agents to arrest groups as large as fifty, though smaller numbers are more common.

And still they estimate four to six get through for every one who is caught. Where they get this number I have no idea. The park superintendent estimates an amazing 1,200 runners cross the park every night. Again, I have no idea how they arrive at such numbers, but eighty percent of the park is closed to the public and even to park employees. Only the campground and a few close-in trails are open.

Still, we love it here and feel completely comfortable and safe. There are some magnificent hikes and drives still open, and just walking the dogs around the campground and looking at the desert and mountains is a pleasure. Actually, I’d rather like to see some runners, which is common, just like I like to see coyotes or javelina.

We didn’t bring passports because we have no plans to cross into Mexico itself, although we’ve talked to plenty of people who have and who say that other than the border towns, Mexico is still safe for tourists. Maybe so, maybe not, but tomorrow begins spring break for Arizona college students, and despite the alarmist pronouncements from their elected officials, tens of thousands will cross the border here and drive down to Puerto Penasco.

Out here in the middle of the Sonora Desert, the Pacific Ocean is only seventy miles away. Maybe next year.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

2011-03-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

As expected, the new Tea Party Republicans are going after federal spending with a meat cleaver, demanding $61 billion in budget cuts during the current fiscal year, which ends September 30th, and refusing to pass any budget for more than two weeks that doesn’t meet their demands. Mary and I were hours away from getting thrown out of Organ Pipe National Monument, where we’re currently camped and driving up the national debt with our six-dollar a night Senior Pass camping fee, which doesn’t even cover the cost of a howling coyote. Luckily, the two-week budget extension passed, which will cover our time here. After that, we might be reduced to parking in Wal-Mart parking lots again.

But good for the Tea Partiers. It’s what they promised and it’s what they should try to deliver to the voters who elected them. Voters are rightly concerned about the deficit and the reach and role of the federal government, so this is the debate we should have. But before we start talking about how to reduce the deficit and national debt, we should take a look at what did and did not get us into this mess to begin with:

First of all, virtually all of the programs targeted by the Tea Partiers have nothing to do with the current deficit. Public broadcasting did not cause the deficit. If it did, the fifty dollars a year I send to public television would leave me bankrupt. Proportionally, it’s a lot more than what the Feds spend.

Foreign aid did not cause the deficit. We spend less than one percent of the budget on foreign aid, and we rank 22nd in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. This makes us about the cheapest country in the world when it comes to dropping a dime in a beggar’s cup. Maybe a nickel, but really, get a job.

Aid to the poor for heating assistance did not cause the deficit. I allow my power company to round up my monthly bill to the next dollar in a program to provide assistance to those at risk of freezing in the dark, and those few cents are a much bigger part of my total budget than the federal program is of its total budget. Still, I totally don’t feel it at the end of the month.

The list goes on. Tea Party cuts address only twenty-five percent of the national budget—discretionary spending outside of the military—and focus their wrath on a few programs they’ve always hated, like research on climate change, the EPA, and virtually every program of assistance for the poor.

Curiously, they would also reduce border security, which will not be a big hit here in Arizona. I really don’t get that one except that it shows they truly mean business. But then, so do the Mexican cartels.

Their targeted cuts would do the most harm to the most vulnerable and, equally importantly, they would do little or nothing to reduce national debt in the long run.
It seems obvious that if we’re going to look at reducing the deficit, we need to look first at what caused it. There are three things:

First, a massive tax cut under President Bush that concentrated its largess in the upper and extreme-upper income levels: Not that we in the middle class didn’t get a nice piece of pie out of the deal, but really, nothing that in any way changed our quality of life. More like an unexpected Christmas present, appreciated but soon forgotten. A toaster, maybe, or new pajamas.

Any long-term economic benefit from these cuts failed to materialize. There was, for example, no measurable uptick in employment. Not even billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet wanted the money. “Really, we have enough already,” they said, but Congress and President Bush made them take more anyway. These silly rich people don’t even understand capitalism.

Second, the war in Afghanistan: Almost all Americans including me supported the president in the invasion of Afghanistan to annihilate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, once we had heard of the Taliban and what a bunch of medieval creeps they are. Ten years later, we’re still in the fight. These fighters are tougher than we thought. We should have asked the Russians.

And third,

The war in Iraq: A majority of Americans, not including me, supported the invasion, but then a majority also believed it was approved by the United Nations. Not to mention the whole WMD thing, but let’s not get bogged down in all that.

The really amazing thing about the Bush budget was that all of the expenditures for our two wars were off the books. They never showed as part of the annual budget. It would be like Mary and me saying all of our spending on horses, motorcycles was not included in our household budget. Things would feel pretty, pretty good until we got a note from the bank that we were overdrawn and now had a fifty dollar fine in addition to our empty savings account which used to have $127 dollars in it. This could cause us to seriously look at our spending on Brussels sprouts.

Maybe Obama’s recovery spending added to the deficit and maybe it didn’t. It saved a ton of jobs and almost certainly kept us out of a genuine depression. Lots of economists think he should have spent more, but I’m no economist, and neither are any of the Tea Partiers. At any rate, that spending is quickly phasing out and we’re even being paid back a lot of it from the banks and GM.

So if the tea party boys and girls want to seriously chop away at the deficit, they should go after the programs that caused it in the first place and that could make a significant difference in reducing it: bring the troops home from the longest wars in American history and end the Bush-era tax cuts, or at least reduce them at the highest income levels (exactly what Obama and congressional Democrats proposed for the current budget, but it was promptly shot down by the Republicans.)

In the meantime, I have to give Mary the bad news about the Brussels sprouts.

An island of sanity, sort of

2011-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

No sooner had I finished writing my somewhat-critical overview of Arizona politics than I came across the headlines of the local Tucson paper: “Pima County wants to secede from state.” Pima County being Tucson and much of Southern Arizona, which is generally considered more liberal than Phoenix and the rest of the state.

I use the word “liberal” guardedly.

This is not something that will ever happen, but the effort is serious, with a number of local representatives and county officials saying they just can’t take it anymore. Actually, one said exactly that: “we can’t take it anymore.”

Politically, such a move is possible but in practical terms, it’s impossible. Still, it’s a good sign of sorts that significant numbers of people in Arizona agree with the rest of the country that Arizona has mostly lost its mind.

Arizona Loco

2011-02-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

If you’ve been following the House Republican Follies since the Tea Party takeover, you might be forgiven for thinking that Washington has become the new rabid-bat-crazy center of the political universe, but you’d be wrong. With so much competition coming from the federal level, Arizona has decided to ramp up its claims to being not yet ready for democracy with a flood of new legislation, all of which is aimed at anything but its hopelessly out-of-balance budget. Arizona legislators have apparently decided if they ignore it, the budget deficit will go away—or maybe they could just bury it in the Grand Canyon—but in the meantime, there are a lot of issues more important than a silly operating budget, such as:

In light of its recent mass-murder tragedy, it’s time to do something about Arizona’s ultra-liberal gun laws; we need to make them even more liberal, so one proposal, for example, would allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus. I wish I could have carried a gun when I was a faculty member because it would have cut short a lot of student griping about grades.

And if Arizona students or faculty stop in for a drink after a tough day in the classroom, they can also take their guns into the bar with them, as long as they are not legally intoxicated. In which case I don’t know what. I wouldn’t want to be the bar tender who had to tell someone he was now legally intoxicated and had to turn over any guns he might be carrying. Here in Arizona that might be considered a completely unreasonable request. But could you call me a cab?

Also, Arizona will always resist federal efforts to curtail their gun rights, so they’ve passed a resolution not to comply with new ATF regulations that would require gun dealers to report purchase of more than two assault weapons in a given week. Lots of legitimate gun owners might want to purchase assault weapons for all their friends and family at Christmas. They make great stocking stuffers.

ATF is upset because thousands of assault weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities in their war on drug cartels turn out to have been sold in US border states, with some buyers making purchases in the hundreds. Arizona, with full support from the NRA, says it won’t comply because such reporting would be burdensome on gun dealers.

But what about illegal aliens? It’s been literally a couple of months since Arizona did something to crack down on illegals, so now a new law says that any illegal alien stopped for any traffic violation at all will serve one month in jail for illegally driving in Arizona. Also, they lose their car, confiscated and sold to help reduce the budget deficit. (See, I was wrong about the lack of concern over the budget deficit.) And only then do they get sent back to Mexico.

I assume all illegals are sent to Mexico, even if they’re from, say, Iceland. Let the Mexicans sort it out.

More on illegal aliens: schools are now responsible to check the legal status of suspicious students, such as students who speak Spanish or English with a Spanish accent or have skin darker than Jimmie Smits. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that schools cannot deny an education to any students based on citizenship, Arizona assures us that this law is only intended as record keeping. Although school administrators who don’t report suspicious students to Immigration are committing a crime. Maybe they could lose their car.

Speaking of varmints, a new law now allows Arizonans to shoot varmints at night within city limits, because, of course, most varmints only come out at night so you can’t shoot them during the day. Varmints include skunks, jack rabbits, coyotes and raccoons and the like, although since coyotes are the single-best population control for jack rabbits, it’s unclear if you can shoot a coyote while it’s actually eating another varmint. But safety is always the first concern, so you can’t shoot varmints within ¼ mile of a residence. Which strikes me as a little overly restrictive because most people bring their kids in before dark anyway, so if it’s moving around the neighborhood after dark, it’s probably a varmint.

How about those darn abortions? If a woman wants an abortion for reasons of genocide, the doctor must refuse or go to jail without collecting his two-hundred dollars. Genocide by abortion would include, for example, having an abortion because you don’t like your embryo’s race or gender. So doctors I guess would have to ask “What race would your baby be if it actually became a baby?” and then if the woman said maybe “Chinese,” the doctor would have to say “And how do you feel about that?” and if the woman gave the wrong answer the doctor would have to tell her she would have to have the baby after all and maybe try to adopt it out to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But if she said she actually liked the Chinese, which is how she got pregnant in the first place, but still wanted the abortion, then that would be okay.

Speaking of babies, Arizona has repealed birth-right citizenship by declaring that babies born on American soil are no longer automatically American citizens, but only in Arizona I guess because the Constitution still confers birthright citizenship on anyone born on American soil, although lots of people don’t like that. Thus, you might be an American citizen in Texas, for example, but not in Arizona. Then, if you got caught speeding in Arizona, they could put you in jail and sell your car to lower the deficit and send you back to Mexico, even if you’re from Texas.

You can see how this would be a good deal for Arizona. But still, there are all these burdensome federal laws and regulations, so Arizona has now declared that it no longer has to abide by any federal dictates it finds to be unconstitutional. Is it just me, or does this amount to about ninety percent secession from the union?

Which brings me back to an idea I first expressed here some time ago, which is that states should be legally allowed to secede. At first I thought we could revisit the whole civil war thing, but now I can see it should be on a state-by-state basis. Where in the Constitution does is say you can’t decide you don’t want to be a state anymore? After two hundred years you still can't change your mind? This is like the worst ever cell phone plan. No one would stand for it.

Seriously, I think we’d all be better off if a few states like Arizona and Texas and Alaska could just drop out. Then all the tea partiers who don’t like it here any more could move to one of the new sovereign republics and the rest of us could get serious about everything else again.

Stupid idea? Let’s float it in the Arizona legislature.

Tucson Blues

2011-02-20T19:15:00.000-08:00

Friday night, I had my second opportunity to see and hear Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in concert. I had high expectations and wasn’t disappointed.

Marsalis has won more awards, from Grammies to a Pulitzer Prize, than probably any other jazz musician living or dead, with the possible exception of Ellington. Opinion is divided among aficionados, though, about whether he warrants all the honors. I’ll just say that while he’s not my favorite musician, composer, or band leader, I’d never miss a chance to see him in a live performance. And the JLCO is comprised of fifteen of the finest musicians in jazz today, and together they put on a stunning performance of technical virtuosity and improvisational brilliance that leaves me dazzled and drained by the end of an evening.

The first time I saw them about two years ago, they performed a mix of jazz standards and a few compositions by different band members, but Friday night they only performed eight movements of Marsalis’ twelve-movement suite Vitoria, based on his experiences playing with various Basque musicians in Northern Spain. A Marsalis composition is generally very complex rhythmically and wickedly difficult to play, all the more impressive because he uses a lot of high-speed unison passages within his sections. I bought the CD set and have given it one listen. As always, a recording is a disappointment after a live performance, but I’ll give this one several chances. There are certainly lots of brilliant solos, even if the overall emotional effect can’t equal a live concert. And good CDs tend to grow on me, as they should.

Couple of interesting things: I saw the concert at the U of A concert hall in Tucson, where we’re camped in the desert a few miles out of town for all of February. We wanted to include a bit of an urban experience in our travels this year, and though a nice enough small city, so far Tucson hasn’t quite delivered on expectations. It’s no Portland (which is no San Francisco, which is no New York), but then Arizona is Arizona, and politically and culturally, it’s probably worse than you think.

The concert sold out, but I was surprised at the general age of the audience, which in and of itself constituted a drain on our already weakened Social Security System. Other jazz concerts I’ve been to have had a much more diverse audience. What’s wrong with the U of A student body? With small exceptions, this seems a decidedly less-than-hip college town. Basketball is big, though.

Another interesting note: I had dinner before the concert just outside the university main gate, and when I went outside onto the sidewalk, I was amazed to hear a very fine performance of Tuvan throat singing by two street musicians: a singer, also playing a guitar, accompanied by a young woman on cello. Talk about harmonic possibilities.

I had to leave for the concert but waited for them to finish a song so I could tell them how delighted I was to stumble on such an extraordinary thing in the streets of Tucson. I also bought their CD, which is nothing like I expected: either a very authentic folk music with which I am completely unfamiliar, or something very avant garde. Or both.

If you know even less about throat singing than I do, you can check out the entry on Wikipedia. Better yet, get a hold of the documentary film Genghis Blues about blind American blues singer Paul Pena, who discovered throat singing on a short wave radio and learned he had a knack for it. The film documents Pena’s trip to Southern Siberia to meet some of the native musicians and the warm welcome he received there. I got it from Netflix some time ago.

Finally: A total mix of weather here in Tucson in February: two nights in a row it got down to 17 degrees, and I thought we’d never left home.

Wind and rain. But mostly sunny and warm and wonderful on my old bones.

No snow here, but in the mountains around town a little.

Sixty-three

2011-02-04T19:06:00.001-08:00

Sometime this week (I’m not sure what day this is), I celebrate my 63rd birthday. I don’t know what life stage this puts me in. We can quickly rule out young and old. I am not sixty-three-years young.

I am also not old. Petroglyphs are old. Coprolites are old. Catfish can live to be one-hundred.

I am, though, no longer middle-aged. I haven’t been middle-aged for some time now, which is good because I never liked middle-age.

This leaves a short list of euphemisms such as “senior,” which I reject, and active-retired, which isn’t too bad. In the end, though, I prefer to just think of myself as sixty–three and not worry about a general category. I’m sixty-three, which is a lot older than I ever expected to live to and which seemed ancient when I was only middle-aged. I think of sixty-three as the age at which, no matter what the question, the answer is always, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Physically, it’s not a great age to be but it could be a lot worse. Wait for sixty-four.

For the last few weeks, Mary has been asking me what I want for my birthday. I try to be spontaneous and genuine in my answers.

-A tommy gun.

I get the stare.

Seriously. Every real man wants a tommy gun. I’m not talking about some girly assault weapon, probably a 9mm that folds up to fit in your pocket and which here in Arizona is more popular than rattlesnake anti-venom. I’m thinking more of one of those fine old firearms gangsters used to shoot at The Untouchables, .45 caliber fully automatic lettuce shredders you can fire in extended bursts and yell manly things like, “Eat lead, Ness!”

It’s clear I’m not getting a tommy gun, so I give it a few more days thought, and when Mary asks again, I say, “a Jeep.” Mary recently invented the word “jeeping” to describe the off-road fun lots of people have out here in the desert. I may not approve of such activities but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want one for myself. We could jeep around together. Also, with a second tow vehicle I could bring down a motorcycle, which I’ve been missing. Lots of guys find ways to bring down a motorcycle for the winter, but our configuration of truck with a canopy and a travel trailer won’t allow it.

I can see right away that I’m not getting a Jeep either.

Finally we settle on a pretty good present, above the arbitrary and capricious limit of one-hundred dollars that Mary originally set, but less than a year in Mexico studying Spanish, which was my third wish: we agreed on a three-day rental of a Gold Wing. Last year I rented a big Harley tourer. Since I can’t have my own bike here, I decided each year I could rent some other bike I never would buy but which I’d like to have a chance to take out once before age-related vertigo makes it impossible to ride and I have to switch to a trike.

This year, it’s going to be a Gold Wing, the Honda luxo-tourer which weighs in at over eight-hundred pounds and is so comfortable it’s reputed to be better than a massage therapist. I noticed that if you rent for two days they throw in the third day free, which should allow me to cross the country and return without ever getting off except to pee. (See above.) Mary said that sounded like a pretty good present, the extra day which becomes two, and I said I thought so, too. About $150.

So sometime next week, right around my birthday, we’re moving down to Tucson where we’re going to stay for a full month in a funky little RV park we found last year, and I’ll call around and see what color Gold Wing I can find to rent. I’m thinking red like the Harley so I can make a fair comparison.

I’ll need something fun to cheer me up, because this sixty-three thing is kind of depressing me. I’m determined to age gracefully, but I don’t have to like it.

Anza-Borrego

2010-12-18T13:43:00.001-08:00

For the most part so far, our trip has been distinguished by bad weather, or rather, probably normal weather which has often been less than pleasant. We left Klamath Falls in bitter cold and with a foot or so of standing snow on the ground. We had to have a tractor tow our truck and trailer out onto bare gravel so we could even get under way.

We had heavy rain our first two nights at Shasta Dam. When we got to Mount Madonna County Park in the redwoods between Gilroy and Watsonville it was raining again and wet and densely foggy when it wasn’t raining. In fact, so much water was incessantly dripping off the trees.

After two days of driving, we finally arrived at Anza Borrego Desert State Park in the California desert east of San Diego. It was a beautiful desert after noon as we were setting up, but in the late after noon, a wind came up that hit us without warning as if we’d stepped in front of a train. The wind lasted three days, strong enough rock the trailer and make it difficult to open and close the door. The noise was intense, and after hours and days of it, it felt like the trailer was being ripped apart.

In fact, only minor damage was done. I’d estimate the wind at about forty miles per hour, not that much in the comfort of your home, but in the trailer we began to feel we were adrift in a small boat. And three days of it. It left us ragged, right up to the moment just before bed last night when it suddenly stopped like a switch had been thrown. This morning I was up at dawn for the usual spectacular desert sunrise, and at the moment, I’m outside with the laptop and thinking it’s time to go back in for a few minutes to make a second cup of coffee.

Despite the initial difficult weather, we’re happy to be back on the road. We’re camping on private land about five miles outside of Borrego Springs, surrounded by mountains on three sides. There are about a dozen RVs out here, spread out over maybe a square mile. Our closest neighbor is over a hundred yards away, a nice guy from Idaho staying by himself in a small older trailer. Behind him sits Larry in his truck. Larry is one of the odd fellows you expect to meet in the desert. After him sitting up there for two days, never leaving the cab that I had noticed, I went up and introduced myself. Larry lost his mother and the apartment they shared about eight months ago, and he’s been living on the road since then, sleeping in the cab of his truck since he doesn’t even have a canopy on it. He talked for some time and twice mentioned suicide—in rather graphic detail involving a .45 caliber pistol—but I told him it would be a better idea to get a canopy so he’d have a more comfortable place to sleep and see how he feels then.

I’m worried about the guy but there’s nothing I can do for him.

We’re getting to know the wildlife. We were sitting outside our first afternoon here and had to lift our feet up to let a tarantula walk by. Brazen coyotes call to each other and hunt kangaroo rats just a few yards from our trailer. We have to be careful with our dogs, small dogs being a coyote’s favorite food. Rats are gamey, and rabbits are tough and stringy, and not that easy to catch.

If you look on Google Earth, you can see us here: N33.17.915; W116.17.011. Or not. I’m not sure how often the photos are updated and it’s been cloudy, but that’s where we are, and you should be able to get a feel for the terrain and see some widely scattered trailers, ours possibly being one of them.

The Great Escape

2010-12-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

Winter came early to the Klamath Basin this year, with record low temperatures and heavy snow in late November. We had sub-zero temperatures and plenty of packed snow and ice on the roads. The prospects for getting out of town with our trailer weren’t looking good any time soon. Finally, on December 2nd, we had a break in the weather; we finished packing and prepping the trailer, grabbed the dogs, and, like last year, made a break for it. And like last year, as soon as we got out of town, the weather improved considerably. Still, we were in Redding at a modest RV park waiting out a heavy rain and taking an extra day to organize things.

This roadside RV park is just one piece of evidenceof how bad the economy is. More and more, parks that used to cater to travelers have converted to mobile home parks that accommodate full-time residents, mostly in old trailers and beater cars and trucks. Pit bulls are the pet of choice. This park was still well-cared for, but with fewer travelers on the road and plenty of people looking for the cheapest place to live where they can still stay warm and dry and cook their own food, many RV parks make for a vivid snapshot of how real people are being affected by the economic downturn. Once again, Mary and I feel lucky to enjoy our good fortune and glad that we can be out there spreading our limited bounty around.

After we left Redding we drove down to Mt. Madonna county park in the coastal mountains between Gilroy and Watsonville. I’ve stayed at Mt. Madonna several times when I’ve come down for the Moto-GP races at Laguna Seca, and it’s a nice little park, situated in mixed redwood and oak trees. In the summer, it’s full of families enjoying the cool setting above the heat of the valley to the east and the persistent fog along the coast. In the winter, as is often the case, we have the campground to ourselves. With improving weather coming over the next week, we plan to enjoy some of the hiking trails and dramatic views of Monterey Bay. We’ll also visit some old friends in Santa Cruz and some of Mary’s family in San Jose. Then it’s on to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in SoCal just above the Mexican border.

I don’t really consider our winter travels to have begun until we actually get down to the desert.

Btw, as I’m writing this I’m sitting in the customer lounge of the Watsonville Dodge dealer while I have the truck transmission serviced. When we started up the long hill into the campground, I remembered from my motorcycle trips how steep and winding the road is. Of course, it’s a quick zip up on a bike, but pulling our 9000-pound trailer, even our Dodge Cummins Diesel bogged down to the point I was only holding at five miles per hour and not at all confident we would make it to the top. Had I thought about it, I would have shifted down to 4WD low, but I wasn’t about to stop and try to make the shift on that hill.

We finally made the top with the red transmission light on and the smell of overheated fluid. The light went out just like it should as soon as I pulled over and let the truck idle in neutral for a minute, but to be on the safe side, I’m laying out $300 dollars to tune up the tranny. Just one more opportunity to make a little contribution to the local economy.

(Oops: make that $350. The service tech just told me the transmission fluid looked a little dark from over-heating, so they're going to do a complete flush. If I stay around much longer, they'll sell me a new truck.)

Prudence

2010-12-03T15:51:00.000-08:00

Maybe tomorrow. . . .

God of Winter and the North Wind

2010-12-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

Last year, Mary and I planned to leave for our Southwest winter safari on December 15th. It seemed a safe bet since even if we got some snow before then, it usually doesn’t start to stay on the roads until sometime in January. Not that you can’t pull a trailer over a snowy pass—big-rig drivers do it all the time—but given a choice, I prefer bare and dry, even with our itsy-bitsy 10,000-pound trailer.

Of course, you can always chain up, but no real man would ever willingly chain up no matter what the conditions. I’d rather ask directions.

But winter surprised us with a series of early storms arriving back to back. I had the trailer at the house and the truck and trailer chained up, if only to get down our steep hill to the highways. But then we saw a brief break in the weather on December 12th, not anticipated in the forecasts, so we threw the dogs in the truck, took off the chains, and made a run for it. It was windy going around Mt. Shasta before we got to I-5, raining and the temperature only 34 degrees, but we had only wet pavement and made it out of the mountains on I-5 without incident and only moderately sweaty palms.

So this year we decided to get an even earlier start and leave December 8th to be safe, but again, Boreas surprises us with his early arrival, and we’re looking out the window at conditions like those in the picture. Nuts.

So it looks now like our best shot is tomorrow, the 2nd, with more snow in the forecast but daytime temperature forecast to rise to 38. By afternoon, there’s a good chance the pass will be clear down to Weed and I-5. (For some reason, highway 97 to Weed is often clear when 140 to Medford has packed snow and ice, despite them both being at about the same elevation, 5500 feet.)

If we don’t get out tomorrow, the forecast is back to more snow and temperatures at or below freezing. We might have to wait who knows how long, and I might even have to chain up.

Dammit. I’m thinking next year, November 15th.

Vexed!

2010-11-20T10:43:00.000-08:00

George Will has found another indication that—well, here he quotes Bill Buckley, who was inconvenienced one day by having to endure a train commute during which he suffered a long delay:

“Buckley, who was gifted at discerning the metaphysical significance of the quotidian, thought that he saw civilization tottering on its pedestal. He was not mistaken:

‘It isn't just the commuters, whom we have come to visualize as a supine breed who have got onto the trick of suspending their sensory faculties twice a day [they probably read a book or the newspaper] while they submit to the creeping dissolution of the railroad industry. It isn't just they who have given up trying to rectify irrational vexation. It is the American people everywhere.’”

Okay, a long delay on the train is now civilization tottering on its pedestal. What would George or Bill have done to rectify these irrational vexations? Would they have lobbied the government to invest more money in infrastructure? Insist that government get completely out of the mass transportation business so it can be privatized and run more efficiently by private enterprise? Buy a helicopter (the latter probably being the only real solution to this problem and available only to the super-rich, so I’m going with 3)?

George doesn’t say. He just knows he’s vexed.

Of course, George is writing today about the invasive new pat-down procedures at airports for those who refuse to go through the full body scan which allows screeners to see through our clothes.

First of all I’d like to say, it’s finally arrived! The x-ray glasses that allow me to see through people’s clothes, advertized in all the comic books and reputable periodicals like Mad Magazines I read as a kid, are here! Oh, how I dreamed of being able to look through the clothes of all my little female classmates in junior high school. (In grammar school I was still dreaming mostly about a new bike. In high school, well, in high school my sexual fantasies had evolved in directions I’m not yet prepared to discuss publically.)

Me, I can’t say about the pat downs. Apparently the threat of carrying on explosive devices taped to your penis or hidden in a lady’s butt crack is real, so the TSA is doing what it thinks necessary to keep us safe. Let’s face it: if someone gets through and brings down a plane, it won’t be a sign of civilization tottering, it will be just one more example of the monumental incompetence of the Obama administration. Remember, Bush kept us safe, at least if you’re not in the military serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, and he did it through a few noninvasive ways such as tapping our phones, screening our email, and waterboarding the occasional actual suspect.

The solution to the airport vexation, though, is obvious in three parts: get in the boarding line and either walk through the scanner or let some stranger of the same sex (damn it!) pat you down; turn around and walk away from the security checkpoint and stay home for Thanksgiving; or charter your own plane.

Again, for George, I’m going for 3. I'm staying home anyway.

For another perspective on the subject, Kathleen Parker today is more amusing and instructive than Will while being far less popinjay. And I'm with her, really. I'd rather fly and assume the small risk that another passenger has mastered the technology challenge of the TNT butt plug than have a complete stranger with no medical training check me for hernias and prostate cancer (although I can get a note from my doctor testifying that both have been remedied.)

But that's the trade off, and interestingly, the same people who found the Bush-era concessions to security to be reasonable and necessary find the same errors on the side of safety to be excessive under Obama. Something about black men with Muslim names wanting to put their hands on our white women, I suppose.

2010-11-17T08:14:00.001-08:00

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy on PBS when his show was on in the 90s. I don’t even like science, but his delivery was so entertaining that I didn’t care if the subject was asexual reproduction in newts or the birth of black holes, between which there is probably some connection. I even taped several episodes and took them with me when I went to Japan to teach English, expecting that Japanese students would think he was as funny as I did.

They didn’t.

So it was interesting to read just now that he still does public appearances and speeches at colleges. Yesterday he was speaking to an audience of hundreds at USC when he collapsed at the podium. He made it to his feet and even joked about it a little before he collapsed again.

The most interesting part of the story to me was that one student reported nobody went to his aid because they were all busy posting tweets about what was happening: “Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy just died!” Except it probably looked like, “BN SciGuy xxx!” I don’t actually speak tweet.

Thus does the next generation confuse digital life for what we used to call real life. Imagine what George Will would say since he first said that digital watches marked the end of civilization. Then it was the designated hitter rule. Then blue jeans. Most recently John Stewart calling Barack Obama “Dude.”

No report yet on how Bill’s doing. Can’t we get a tweet from somebody in the hospital?

And he died in a fiery crash. . . .

2010-11-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

My friend Broschat [ http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/ ] is buying a new Miata after fifteen years without a car. This is not a midlife crisis since we’re neither of us midlife anymore, (we're more like “zesty sexagenarians”: I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a sexagenarian?) And why put a negative spin like “midlife crisis” on a spontaneous exaltation of the life force? Not that anybody has, but just in case.

The second comment to his blog announcement, though, while well-meaning I’m sure, is exactly the kind of response I often if not usually get when I mention that I ride a motorcycle: “I think the closest I ever came to dying in a car [his respondee responds] was in a Sprite when I was 16. I wasn't driving. The throttle stuck and we went over the edge of a road with a 5' drop off. We ended up on top of and in line with a stone fence that was below the drop off. If the car had rolled we would have had our heads driven into the ground.”

People can’t seem to not make statements like this about motorcycles and apparently sports cars. It’s a curious, almost instinctive response. If I say I take frequent showers, nobody ever responds that showers are one of the most dangerous things you can do in your home. If I say I have to get out my ladder and clear out the rain gutters, no one asks if this scares me more than the thought of a home invasion by Islamic terrorists looking for evidence that I eat pork and read Salmon Rushdie. (Yes and no.)

So I just say something like, “I try to be careful.” I’m very superstitious, so I would never mention that I’ve ridden since I was seventeen without an accident or injury, which wouldn’t be exactly true anyway but too complicated to explain further. (Knock on wood.)

I don’t mention that my wife rides horses and has had numerous accidents, one serious enough to put her in a hospital and wheelchair, followed by months in a cast and on crutches. But no one ever says to her, “Oh, horses are so dangerous. My husband has been in a coma for eight years, ever since he fell off his horse and hit his head on a fence post.”

I never point out that when these folks pick the kids up in the minivan after school and drive them to karate lessons, they’re risking the whole family’s life and are at far greater risk of calamity than I am on my motorcycle. Not mile for mile, but over the course of their lives. Yet I think almost no one puts their kids in the car with a sense of impending doom. They’re more like, “I hope nobody says “Happy Meal” before we get to karate lessons."

Not to mention karate lessons.

None of these fatalistic responses to riding bothers me particularly; I just find them peculiar. But I would like the world to know that if I get squashed like a bug under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler, I’d rather it happen on two wheels than four. And that I consider horses to be four-legged killing machines, secret carnivores that will run you into the low branches of a juniper tree and feed on your broken corpse until the paramedics arrive, but I’m glad my wife rides and has so passionately enjoyed it these several decades. And I hope Broschat loves his Miata to death (I could have chosen a better expression here) and drives it safely without a scratch on either it or himself for a long as he can still pass the vision test when he renews his license.

But if the unthinkable should happen, I’ll feel better on learning that he was out driving a little too fast on a beautiful spring day with the top dangerously down, rather than getting jostled on the Metro platform and pushed in front of a train. Also, I’ll hope he was with a beautiful woman, no older than forty-two, and miraculously uninjured.

Now rock climbers, though, those people are fucking nuts.

No comment

2010-11-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

I have nothing to say about last Tuesday’s election. Nothing.

It’s all been said by the zillion pundits of the many media, including the blogosphere, and since I’m just a freelance pundit, I don’t feel a need to jump in.

Not one word.

(Bunch of assholes.)

??!!

2010-10-29T10:40:00.001-07:00

Back when I taught writing, I told my students to avoid nine out of ten of their rhetorical questions. They get annoying, don't they?

Also, give yourselves ten exclamation points for the rest of your life and use them wisely. Don't use them all up in your next paper! Never be wasteful and use two in the same sentence!!

So I don't know what's come over me. I need to take an oath. I need to get myself into rehab!

Lazy blogging

2010-10-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

I try not to post too many links to other stuff on the Web. People can find their own stuff on the Web. My job--which I take on with the utmost seriousness--is to publish my own content and make it available to my fanbase in an easily accessible format. Letters to the editor, I can't even get one for ten into the
Oregonian.

But here's a particularly good piece on immigration, which I mentioned in my last post some eight minutes ago.

My comments to Shumacher-Matos, other than you really have to do something about your name:

"My god! a rational critique of immigration policies, complete with concrete suggestions for workable solutions? Are you mad?

And then what would you do about all the Martians? Amnesty for Martians, too?"

Decide for yourselves here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102803904.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

The blur

2010-10-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Mary and I thought Barack did a terrific job on John Stewart last night: assertive about his accomplishments without being strident. Confident. Relaxed. Engaging. I think he knocked the ball out of the park with one of his core constituencies that need to be knocked on the head: younger voters.

I'd read two reviews of the interview before I even saw it. One was critical, saying the president lowered himself by appearing on a comedy show and sneering that Stewart actually called him Dude at one point. The other said mostly what I said above, but took his alloted 500 words to say it. I'm guessing the reviews pretty much reflected the author's previous attitudes.

Mary and I were talking about how unable Republicans and conservatives in general are to say anything the least positive about Obama. I absolutely can't stand George Bush, but we both recalled that we thought he put forward a very good plan for immigration reform. If anybody had bothered to ask, we would have had no problem saying so at the time.

I also thought he was unusually good at clearing brush for a president, and I wasn't afraid to say so. For a Texan, though, he looked decidely uncomfortable on a horse.

A large majority of Democrats worked with him on getting immigration reforms passed, but they were defeated by his own party. These days, though, it's political suicide for a sitting Republican to say anything remotely in agreement with Obama. Even some Democrats are running on how much they opposed his initiatives. I can only hope people will grow out of this all-or-nothing politics and get back to an era when cooperation and comity were considered to be virtues, not vices.

In any case, as the blur of the last four days before the election gets more and more crazy, Mary and I are heading out for a few days in our new trailer. (Built in Oregon and bought in Klamath Falls: once again, we're doing our part for the recovery, but do we get a huge tax break? No. Damn you Top Two Percent!!)

I'm glad we'll be missing out on all the news and commentary, though I'll miss the ongoing coverage of the various Tea Party crazies: Christine O'Donnel! Who needs parody?

When we get back, it will all be over but the year or so of post-election parsing. Then we can start the campaigns for the next election, including the presidential. Sarah Palin says she's in unless someone else wants it. Hell, make that two of us.

Can't wait.

(Eugene Robinson is very good today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102805899.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

)

Why Dinesh D' Sousa is a neo-colonialist

2010-10-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Talk about irony: Dinesh D’Sousa accuses President Obama of being anti-colonialist, his evidence being that Obama’s father was an anti-colonialist from Kenya. Never mind that Obama’s father deserted the family when he was two. In his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, Obama writes, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."

There you go.

Also, Obama's father wrote an article defending socialism.

We knew it all the time.

The result, says D’Sousa, is a president who evidences all the basic attitudes of the socialist anti-colonialst: “Do the views of the senior Obama help clarify what the junior Obama is doing in the Oval Office? Let's begin with President Obama, who routinely castigates investment banks and large corporations, accusing them of greed and exploitation. Obama's policies have established the heavy hand of government control over Wall Street and the health-care, auto and energy industries.”

Also, he wants to raise taxes on the rich.

Those of us not in the know might have confused these policies and attitudes with those of, say, a moderate Democrat coming to the presidency in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression—let’s call it the Pretty Good Recession—brought on in large part by the greed and lack of regulation on Wall Street. How this amounts to anti-colonialism, D’Sousa does not quite make clear.

I think the more interesting question is why, since he clearly opposes everything Obama believes and does, D’Sousa is such an advocate for colonialism, an –ism that pretty much died out in the mid-last-century when Britain and France lost the fight in places like Kenya and Algeria. The answer lies in the small italicized print at the bottom of his column in today’s Washington Post: “Dinesh D'Souza is president of King's College in New York City.”

King's College! Talk about a smoking scepter.

Also, let’s just ask ourselves how a native of India got the name “of Sousa” if he was not named for the famous composer of rousing pro-colonialist marches such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever”?

Coincidence? I think not. There's your irony.

If one of my students back in freshman comp had handed in an essay as logically weak-kneed as D’Sousa’s, I’d have required a rewrite that goes beyond Superman-scaled leaps of reason based on five or more of the logical fallacies covered in our textbook. In fact, I used to use D’Sousa himself as a good example of bad reasoning from a few crumbs of evidence found on the floor since his essay criticizing Rigoberta Menchu's’ book I, Rigoberta was the first selection in the anthology I used for the class.

Menchu, an indigenous Guatemalan, had written a book detailing some of the horrific crimes committed by the Guatemalan government during that county’s civil war from 1960-1996. American anthrolopoigist David Stoll discovered that a few of the claims in the book were dubious since, for example, Menchu said she never went to school when in fact she had finished 8th grade.

As it turned out, most of Stoll’s charges proved to be false, although Menchu did acknowledge that she fudged a little and included a few experiences of her brothers and sisters, a crime never equaled in the long tradition of “nothing but the facts, Mam” truthiness to be found in all previous autobiography.

D’Sousa regurgitated the claims of Stoll and wrote an essay claiming Menchu was a fraud and therefore none of the terrible things she said about the Guatemalan army were true. That’s why it were no crime that the U.S. trained and supported the Guatemalan army. The whole thing, D’Sousa said, was a cleverly constructed fantasy designed to discredit the U.S. and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United Fruit Company.

When the dispute was submitted to an independent fact-finding agency, it ruled in favor of Rigoberta and gave her the Nobel Peach Prize.

Wait. Typo. “Nobel Peace Prize.”

D’Sousa’s current essay first appeared as the cover story in Fortune magazine and was instantly trounced by just about everybody but Christine O’Donnell for its self-levitated reasoning, so apparently D’ thought he had to defend himself by saying the same thing all over again in a brief column that even the liberals over at the Post could understand.

Anyway, since I'm also named after my father, you’re probably wondering what clues can be discovered about my own anti-colonial bias. Here’s your answer:

"Ross

Gender: Male
Origin: Latin
Meaning: Red Rose"

Red rose!

A good day to get sick

2010-09-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

Most Americans have little or no idea what’s actually contained in the health care reforms successfully passed despite fierce and unanimous Republican opposition. Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation reviews a few provisions:

“Since the bill's passage, the Department of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a program to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; issued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the "doughnut hole"; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site, http://HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based).

“Several popular provisions take effect Thursday [today]. They include allowing adult children up to age 26 to be on their parents' insurance; banning lifetime benefits caps and loosening annual limits on insurance coverage payouts; prohibiting insurance companies from kicking people off of their policies when they get sick; and requiring that newly purchased insurance policies cover preventive services at no cost to patients.”

Individually, Altman points out, these provisions have overwhelming support among the public. Many other provisions don’t go into effect until 2014, a concession that was made toward controlling budget deficits. Most of those are also widely popular, the one exception being that most people will eventually be required to have insurance, even if they have to buy it themselves. But universal coverage is the greatest cost saver in the plan, and I can see no real difference between requiring drivers to have auto insurance and everybody else to have health insurance. Besides, the cost of such coverage will be keyed to ability to pay and in fact will be minimal.

Almost all of the voluntarily uninsured today are young people who never believe they can get seriously ill or injured. They’re almost right, statistically, but those who do quickly convert to a public liability when they lose jobs and go on unemployment or welfare and become eligible for Medicaid. In other words, all the rest of us are involuntarily subsidizing their health care in the current system. Talk about socialism.

Altman notes that expansions of benefits in the past, including Medicare itself, were widely unpopular at the time they were passed, but opposition evaporated quickly as the programs began to take effect.

The Republicans’ “Pledge to American,” released today, promises to repeal Obama’s health care reforms. Not a chance. And when we begin to ask specific questions about things like why they want to repeal the exclusion of preexisting conditions for health coverage, they’re going to have a hard time answering.

Look for lots of prevarication and a quick return to talking points:

Talk about socialism.

[P.S.
Liberal elite media watch:
Neither NBC nor PBS ran a story on the changes in health care policy which went into effect today. Both covered the Republican Pledge to America.]

Four thoughts of autumn

2010-09-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
John Donne
Elegy IX--The Autumnal.

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer

[There are so many fine versions of Autumn Leaves. An unlikely favorite of mine is Nick Brignola's, medium-tempo on a baritone sax, from his album Live at Sweet Basil.]

Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant

A few facts

2010-09-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

An article in today's Washington Post announces that for the first time, women are now earning doctoral degrees in greater numbers than men. We've reached this point in a trend that has been developing for decades. There have long been more undergraduate women than men. It just took a few years for the female majorities to move up the educational ladder.

It takes an average of seven years to earn a Ph.D.

Men are now underrepresented in higher education for several reasons: they are less likely to finish high school, more likely to join the military, and more likely to go to jail. Although at seven years, jail wouldn't be a bad place to earn a Ph.D. It's that or lifting weights.

Once in an academic position, women's salaries lag men's, mostly because careers conflict with having children. Pursuing tenure takes a full six years, and those are the prime childbearing years. (The actual pursuit of childbearing takes only nine months, which is well-known.) But while men are busy doing research and publishing articles and books, women are changing diapers, though I know a few women whose careers have left their male colleagues far behind.

The average salary for male tenured professors is $89,000. For women, $70,000. It's hard to persuade a public whose average salaries are closer to $30,000 that faculty are underpaid, but compared to other professions, many of which require less education, those salaries are on the low end. At Oregon Institute of Technology, where I taught for twenty years, it wasn't uncommon for new graduates just entering the workforce to earn higher salaries than faculty at the peak of their careers. I thought we should earn a small percentage of each graduate's salary for their first five years of employment. That would only be fair.

We should also get a company car. I always wanted a Porche but ended up driving a Mitsubishi. I mean, come on.

I never earned more that $50,000, a member of the lowest-paid department at the lowest-paid institution in the lowest-paid system in the nation. Still, I never felt much resentment about salary. In my field when I started, there were on average over a hundred applicants for every new position. I felt lucky to break into the field at all. Talk about landing on your feet.

Today, there are on average three applicants for every position, and two of them still have a year or so to go in jail before they complete their Ph.D. We try to hire candidates with the fewest felony convictions, though it takes more than just one assault to get seven years. Not to mention time off for good behavior.

Despite relatively low salaries, Mary and I were both able to retire at 55. Chances are high that this benefit will become completely extinct starting about next Tuesday, what with the aging population, worries about Social Security, and shrunken retirement savings resulting from the implosion in the value of investmens.

Again we were lucky based on a few happy circumstances, like double-income/no kids (DINKs). This is the quickest path to early retirement. For every baby you don't have, you can retire five years earlier. If you don't have only nine babies, you never have to work at all. And because of compound interes, the earlier you start not having babies, the earlier you can retire

Also, we lived in about the least expensive housing market in the country. When we moved here in the early eighties, they would just give you a house. You had to agree to keep the lawn mowed.

And we had a generous state pension system (Gone now: one of the reasons I retired early was to minimize major cuts in pensions that are now in place). Finally, modest personal savings that sounded like a lot of money at the time. Once you do retire, though, you remember that you have to divide those savings by the rest of your life. You realize it's not all that much money and start saying things like, "I'm living on a fixed income!" Most people would kill today to be able to live on a fixed income.

The main factor in a happy academic career is a congenial department, which means that few to none in higher education are all that happy. My own department consisted of two or three members with diagnosed major mental problems, including myself, and all the rest who needed to get to the mental-health emergency room right now but never did because they were convinced they were the only sane person in the department. Some of them were also convinced they could fly.

I've now been retired eight years, which amazes me to think about it. I'm glad I got out early, though. My remaining mental health required it, and my current condition has recently been upgraded to just "eccentric." I'm very happy, relatively.

Also, my former colleague Jim Etchison just died of a heart attack while on vacation in Maui. His wife was taking his picture and he fell over dead. Jim was sixty-two; I am sixty-two.

It saddens me. Jim was a sweet guy who was always laughing. If there's an afterlife, I picture him laughing at the irony of dying on Maui at age sixty-two while your wife is taking your picture. This is how I would like to go, too, but in maybe twenty years. Or thirty. I'll try to give Mary a heads-up a minute or two before.

If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing.

Yes I would. Who could ever say that? They must have bad memories.

Crater Lake Ride

2010-09-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

Mary and I took a ride today, met some friends for lunch, then rode up to the Crater Lake north entrance and around the Rim Road. It was a perfect day, cool up on top but still warm enough for a late summer ride. The lake was especially beautiful.

I like this picture because, of course, Mary looks beautiful, too, but also because I accidentally caught the lake in the bike's mirror.

And why not another. . . .

>

A day that will live in. . . .

2010-08-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone not living in a cave knows that today marks the official end of American combat operations in Iraq. In fact, the last of the designated combat troops left last week. According to journalist Richard Engle, who accompanied them, they were greeted by exactly two American soldiers, who saluted them as they crossed over the border into Kuwait. Of course, 50,000 troops still remain indefinitely, and five of them have already been killed by rocket attacks and roadside bombs, but never mind.

President Obama is giving a speech today to mark the occasion. He’ll express gratitude to the troops, point out that he met his promised deadline concerning the withdrawl, and express concern about Iraq’s future, like for example how it doesn’t actually have a government right now. But he’ll be optimistic for the long-term.

What I’d like to see, though, are some speeches by the original architects of the war. The only one still on the scene and mouthing off from time to time about how soft Obama is on terrorism is Dick Cheney. I wonder if Dick will have any words to say about how the war turned out, whether he had it right when he declared many years ago that the evidence for Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction was a slam dunk, or that the insurgency was in its last throes.

We should line them up like in a high-school speech contest and demand a ten-minute address: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Paul Bremmer. And from the lesser luminaries from the Project for a New American Century, now defunct, all of whom later became members of the Bush administration: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams.

We should demand an apology.

But count on it: We won’t hear a peep from any of them with the possible exception of Cheney, who will comment that Obama has made America less safe.

Credit, however, goes out to columnist Anne Applebaum, who wrote today, “I supported the invasion of Iraq, I think the surge was a success and I believe that an Iraqi democracy could be a revolutionary force for good in the Middle East. Yet even if violence abates, even if all American troops go home, we have still paid a very high price for our victory -- much higher than we usually admit.”

Never mind the word “victory,” she acknowledges that things didn’t go so well in Iraq. Here’s a look at her list of unintended consequences. Briefly, we seriously damaged:

“America's reputation for effectiveness.

“America's ability to organize a coalition.

“America's ability to influence the Middle East.

“America's ability to think like a global power.

And finally,

“America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.”

She expands nicely on each of these. She fails, though, to mention that the two major premises supporting the invasion in the first place turned out to be errors at best, outright lies at worst: That Sadam had WMD that threatened his neighbors and the United States, and that Sadam had ties to Al-Qaeda.

And she missed a few consequences: The invasion of Iraq destroyed any hope of a favorable outcome in Afghanistan, which seemed within reach when we turned our backs on that conflict, and it led most of the Muslim world to believe that the United States is at war with Islam. These two outcomes will haunt us for the next generation and more.

Bummer.

Anyway, even if we didn’t yet see all of the outcomes, millions of us Americans knew that the invasion was a terrible idea and no good would come of it. We said so at the time, some with more evidence and authority, some with less.

We were roundly criticized for it. We were all but called traitors.

And so, on behalf of all of us, as the Mission Accomplished banner, now badly tattered, goes back up, I’d like to humbly say,

I told you so.

Post parto

2010-08-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Spanish class is over for the summer. I was still enjoying class and working very nearly full-time-squared up to Tuesday, when I bailed out after our instructor’s fifth absence. I had only a brief oral presentation on Wednesday and the final exam on Thursday, and since I’m auditing the class, there was no reason to stick around to earn the points.

Despite the poor showing from the instructor when he showed at all, I count the class a terrific success and would sign up for another this fall if one were available.
The instructor was a likeable guy and generally used class time well, but he’s the worst deadbeat I’ve ever had as a teacher, and in the end I was mostly fed up with him.

Despite all the problems with him (a long list of which I just deleted because who really cares?), I loved the class and made a huge amount of progress, though I still consider myself a beginner in Spanish.

I’m signed up for a Spanish lit class this fall, which meets two days a week, so I’ll commute the seventy miles one-way instead of living over there. I’m also probably going to volunteer in a local school working with ELL students (“ELL” meaning English Language Learners and replacing all prior acronyms). For now, there’s plenty of work to be done around the house after being gone for so long, and after a few days of mental rest, I’ll get back to studying two or three hours a day, my goal to continue to make a little progress and not immediately forget everything I’ve learned.

It’s good to be back home, although I’m having a little trouble adjusting to the change of pace that comes with not having something I absolutely must be doing right this minute. That might be a drain after awhile (and it is), but it’s also a form of structure. Take it away too quickly and one feels a little adrift. At the moment, I’m somewhat adrifting but should adjust to things fairly quickly.

Progress Report

2010-07-25T10:49:00.001-07:00

We changed instructors at week four since the course is actually three consecutive three-week sessions. Monday was the 4th of July holiday, so it was already going to be a short week. I was a little concerned because we cover a chapter a week, and four days has been barely enough to keep up. I spend most of the weekend before getting a head start, so much of the homework, “tarea,” is ready to hand in and I’m reasonably familiar with all the content of the chapter. It’s been a full-time effort, but I’m keeping up and getting A’s on all the assignments and tests. Not really important since I’m auditing the class, but a good indication that I’m doing satisfactory work and making progress.

But Tuesday when the new instructor arrived, we watched the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which I had already seen and which is well worth watching again. After the film, the new guy assigned a composition, then said he wasn’t feeling well and was going home early.

Wednesday I arrived for class and there were only four other students of the fifteen or so still remaining. One of the guys checked email and found a message that had gone out the night before from the instructor saying he was quite ill but would get out an assignment sheet soon.

That night, the same message, so we had now lost a full week, and still no study guide. By Saturday night back home, I wasn’t sure we still had a class. I thought the instructor might have died at home and nobody even knew ityet. Or possibly he’d been able to contact the department chair who was looking for a replacement, but I know that during the summer, faculty disappear like cockroaches when the lights go on, and finding a replacement was not likely. There are only so many cockroaches. I guessed there was better than a fifty-percent chance the class would crash and my summer experience would be over.

Monday morning, though, our guy was there, and I learned that an email had gone out Sunday afternoon with a short study guide. I don’t have computer access in the RV park where I’m staying, so I didn’t get the message.

For the next two weeks, life was crazy. He had to cram three chapters into two weeks, and I was now working from behind the curve instead of ahead of it. We also had a new composition to write, a skit to prepare with a few other students, and a chapter test every two or three days instead of at the end of the week.

It was brutal. By the night before the last test, I had given up on anything more than a quick review of new grammar and readings that I didn’t really understand.

In the end, the test last Thursday wasn’t so bad. He included useful aids, such as a list of verbs to choose from and notes on when and how to use them, so I think I did reasonably well. The best part, though, is that this weekend I’ve been back to my usual routine, with only one chapter to prepare and a sense that I’m going to be ahead when we start class tomorrow.

More good news: Mary is down in Santa Cruz for a wedding I was able to beg off from; though it was the son of some very old friends, I generally don’t like weddings or funerals, and I was glad for the excuse. I’ll do the occasional birthday party.

Bad news: today is the Motorcycle Grand Prix at Laguna Seca in Monterey, and it’s the first time I’ve missed the race in many years. I’m watching it this afternoon on TV with a friend, so that’s some compensation.

I’m making good progress in class, but it’s slow. I know a lot more than I did before, but speech, such as it is, is still halting at best. Listening comprehension is getting a little better, but when I watch a Spanish-language movie, I still have to rely mostly on subtitles, catching only parts of the dialogue here and there.

Note: Sin Nombre is an excellent film, and I highly recommend it. It should be required watching for all the virulent anti-immigrants, though it probably wouldn’t change their thinking much. But still. . . .

So this morning I keep working for a few hours. Then I have to take the dogs to the kennel because Mary will be gone a few more days and I’m heading back to the trailer after I watch the race. There I’ll spend most of the afternoon and evening studying some more. Tomorrow, back to class for the last three weeks of the program.

I’m so glad I was finally able to do this, and I’m already thinking ahead to ways that I can continue to study when the class ends.

I have some ideas.

Laca laca laca

2010-07-02T07:53:00.000-07:00

I just wrote to Broshat that I’m three weeks into my nine week Spanish-intensive summer program, and it feels like Spanish boot camp. But a few guys actually liked boot camp because what are they gonna do, send me to Vietnam? (This was back when I actually was in boot camp and they did send everybody to Vietnam. I wasn’t one of those guys because this is a metaphor which starting getting away from me about three lines back. Who enjoyed boot camp? is what I’m saying. They did send me to Vietnam, and I didn’t enjoy that either.)

I am, however, enjoying my class very much, though it's taking it's toll.

I work mostly all the time the four days a week I’m living in our trailer near school. Weekends home I work about half-time and spend the rest doing a few things around the house and trying to spend quality time with Mary. The old “quality time" thing, which is what you call it when you know you’re preoccupied and being something of a pain in the ass.

We change teachers next week since it’s technically three courses in sequence. I liked Lady Vanderlip well enough, although over the last week she slipping into speaking mostly ingles in class, something I think would take great discipline not to do. Manipulation of body language and facial expression by students can get a teacher to do about anything including delivering lectures wearing a swim mask and flippers, so foreign language teachers have to accept that when they’re actually speaking the language they’re trying to teach, students will often look at them like they’re from what used to be the planet Pluto. Also, the three native speakers I’ve had as teachers seem to need to share a lot of detail about growing up in their native countries, which is certainly interesting but, hey, I’m trying to learn Spanish here. I’m not signed up to learn about growing up in Panama.

The new teacher starts next week and I understand he’s not a native speaker but almost never speaks ingles in class. I’m hoping the new drill sergeant will stay on-task.

I’m making good progress but still basically a beginner. When I overhear real Spanish, my reaction is “Hey, that’s Spanish!" but beyond that I’m mostly in the dark. Also, the subjunctive was invented during the Spanish Inquisition as a way to torture heretics and it somehow caught on. It’s complicated as hell and serves virtually no communicative function as far as I can tell. I’ll bet the first thing L.L. Zamenhof did when he developed Esperanto was dump the subjunctive. Esperanto itself, btw, in a very interesting story which you can find with a quick Wikipedia search.

“Laca laca laca” means “blah blah blah” I learned this week, so that’s become my goal, to be able to laca laca laca in a language not my own and which I started to study after I turned sixty. Also, btw, I’m the only student in my class over twenty-two, I’d guess, so talk about wearing a swim mask and flippers. They’d probably warm to me faster if I wore a burka, but finally the chill is wearing off and a few students have actually said a few words to me before class starts.

Laca.

A blog of note

2010-06-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

Mary (the wife) has started a blog. Initially intended just for her reading group, like all good blogs it has now expanded to include anything she feels like writing about. She writes real good for a science teacher, I told her maybe even better than that guy Stephen J. Gould, or Stephen Hawking, or even Stephen Darwin or Stephen Einstein.

I'm now a follower and you could be, too, by pasting this address into your browser since I never have figured out why I can't post hot links anymore:

http://kf-biblioblog.blogspot.com/

Week one progress report

2010-06-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

This is great: The Panamanian Drill Sergeant brooks no complaining: if you miss a day, you miss a week’s worth of material and your grade drops by one. One student asked if he could leave an hour early one day a week because of his job, and she said no. Just “no.” I used to get requests like this all the time, and I also said no, but I’d add a long explanation about how important class time is, and if I make an exception for one student. . . . I once had a young woman ask if she could finish the class two weeks early because she was joining the Marines and going to Officer Candidate School, which started before our class was over, and her recruiter told her if she didn’t make this OCS class, she might not have a shot at another one. I told her she should get a new recruiter.

And but anyway,

Class is four hours a day with a five-minute break at the hour: she doesn’t hesitate to switch to English occasionally to explain something (which was just not done when I took French at UCSC exactly one hundred years ago), but otherwise class is almost completely in Spanish. I can understand her quite well, though if I hear her talking in the hall to another Spanish teacher, I can’t understand a word they say.

I’m at just about the perfect level to start this course. It’s a challenge, but it’s the workload and not yet the material that is close to overwhelming. After class I spend three or four hours on campus using my laptop to access the Website which has all of our film and audio materials (my WIFI connection at the trailer park is slower than a constipated turd), then back to the trailer to study from the book and do other written homework. I go to bed feeling like I need at least one more hour of study to be ready for the next day, but I long ago made the vow that I would never miss sleep over work or a class. It’s worked for me.

The other students are all about twenty and seem to have formed circles of friends before I got there, so I’ve been a little isolated, but finally yesterday a young woman sat down and visited with me during the break. My kind of kid. She and her husband left Boise State where they were studying business and came to Ashland, known for it’s lefty orientation and whole foods ethic, to study international relations. Jobs? They’ll worry about after graduation, and I expect they’ll sooner or later find the kind of work they want to do.

The class has dropped from 25 to 15 in the first week. Now I’m home for the weekend, where I can relax a little and do some things other than study Spanish. Still, I have a lot of work to do to be a little ahead when we start week two on Monday.

You don’t finish an eight-week class like this fluent, or even generally conversational, in a foreign language, but at last I’m actually learning fast in a structured program, and if I take time to stand back and look at it, I’m really enjoying it. I have to find a way to also eat during the day, but that’s not so important yet; I’m thinking microwave burritos (“Little burros”; who knew? ).

What is the meaning of this?

2010-06-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I've always got a kick out of the question, "What is the meaning of this?" because it's like the worst essay question you ever saw on a test. Or your boss walks into your cubicle with a memo you just wrote and demands, "What is the meaning of this?" and you can only look baffled for a minute and then say, "What, so now I'm a philosopher?"

But it seems an appropriate title to the following excerpt from a wire service story
on the Web today:

MONROE, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds of sightseers drawn to the remains of a six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ that was struck by lightning and erupted into flames stopped Tuesday to snap pictures or gaze at the ruined structure.

The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m. Monday, Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.

Primero dia

2010-06-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

Off to a great start. My instructor is named Lady Vanderlip, which led me to expect some kind of Dutch Noblewoman, but in fact she’s from Panama and speaks Spanish like a native.

Class was just as I’d hoped. Most students are at or a little above my level. We had lots of practice in Spanish, often working with a partner. Tonight I have homework that would usually be due over the first week. Sacre Bleu!

Fortunately, I got the book and other materials last summer and am a few chapters ahead, so I think I’ll survive the first couple of weeks. After that, well, it’s all just from grins, right?

Unlike at OIT, all the students are twenty-somethings, which made me feel a little self-conscious for about two minutes until we got to work. The good news is no one pointed and laughed. The bad news is the little bastards have working memories I can only vaguely remember having.

Steel traps vs. the rusty bucket. Pero, recuerde la tortuga and el conejo ( but remember the tortoise and the hare).

Hasta la pistola.

Joe Hablo

2010-06-11T08:16:00.001-07:00

“No estoy seguro si es posible aprender una lengua nueva a mi edad.”
Or,
“I’m not sure if it’s possible to learn a new language at my age.” Probably with a few errors illustrating my point. (Just edited to correct a few errors even I could see.)

This comment was part of a short speech of introduction I made the last time I was in a Spanish class, about two years ago. The class was one in the first-year sequence offered at Oregon Tech, my former employer. Since all of the students except me were majoring in either engineering or one of the health professions, everyone was there only to satisfy a requirement. There wasn’t a lot of involvement or preparation by anyone else, and the overall quality of the class was poor at best. It ended up being a class in which we spoke about Spanish in English, kind of a Spanish Appreciation course.

Since then, I’ve studied on my own and managed to make some progress, though you can only go so far without instruction and opportunities to speak and practice. Not very far at all, really.

Today, I’m moving our trailer over to a little RV park outside of Ashland, home of Southern Oregon University, a liberal arts and teaching college with a Spanish department that has a good reputation. Monday, I’ll be starting an intensive Spanish summer program, all of year two in eight weeks. I’m a bit nervous that either the course will be way over my head and go much too fast, or that it will be badly taught with yet more unmotivated students and will prove of little value. My hope, of course, is that the reality will be somewhere in the middle and I’ll be able to make more progress in the next eight weeks than I’ve made in the last two years. We’ll see.

It’s hard to say exactly how my interest in this all started. At first, living in a bilingual and bicultural community, I thought it would be the least I could do to learn a few phrases, be able to say “excuse me” when I reach past someone in the supermarket, or “what a cute baby you have.” (A dangerous comment in Spanish since “mono” can mean both cute and monkey. “What a baby monkey you have!”)

Beyond my vague initial interest, I began to feel more and more that as an Anglo-American, I’m missing out on something important if I don’t at least speak some of the language I hear all the time around me. I reflected on the often-heard comment, “If you’re going to live in this country, you should learn English.” The corollary being that if you’re going to live in any bilingual community, you should speak some of both languages.

But I continued studying not because of some sense of a social imperative but because I became once again fascinated by the structure and astounding complexity of language, a complexity mastered with no study or effort by any average three- or four-year-old. Maybe in another year or two, I'll be able to have a meaningful conversation with a Mexican four-year-old.

And it gives a retired person who doesn’t play golf and stopped drinking four years ago something to do. Otherwise, I risk taking up shuffleboard.

This is all so exciting. I’ll be living in our trailer four days a week, studying as close to full time as I can, riding my motorcycle to school, and coming home on weekends. A perfect way to spend the summer.

Or maybe not. What if I can’t find my room? What if they all make fun of me? What if I can’t find the bathroom and wet my pants?

What, (my greatest fear), if the class is a dud and we spend four hours a day speaking English about Spanish?

I’ll post the occasional update here on my blog.

Mea gulfa, mea gulpa, mea culpa

2010-06-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

It’s taken Sarah Palin fifty days to figure out a way to blame me for the Gulf Oil Spill: we environmentalists did it. Because we blocked development of safer sources of domestic oil, such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and from oil rigs closer to shore and in shallower water, we forced the oil companies into the more risky task of deep water drilling farther offshore. It was an accident waiting to happen.

What a bunch of mooseshit.

Let’s be clear about one thing: The Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and unleashing the greatest environmental disaster in American history, for one reason and one reason only: BP malfeasance. Dozens of current and former BP employees have testified that BP cut corners, rushed deadlines and ignored warnings in their zeal to bring the well into production on schedule, which is to say as fast as possible. BP proceeded with insufficient data about safety issues and solid evidence that failsafe systems had failed tests. Workers on the rig have testified that they saw the accident coming and feared for their lives. As the evidence mounts, independent engineers, including distinguished faculty from the best engineering programs in the country, shake their heads in wonder.

One of the few pieces of good news that has been missed by the media is the slow rate at which the massive body of oil has approached the Gulf coast. Despite the horrific images—fouled beaches; dead and dying birds, fish, and endangered turtles; thick oil and tar invading fragile marshlands—the diagrams of the growing leak have demonstrated an amazing concentration offshore that has yet to make anywhere near its full impact on coastal communities. This is meager comfort given the disaster at hand, but it has at least given authorities and BP itself time to respond as best they could to contain and minimize impacts.

If even a smaller leak had occurred in one of the shallow-water operations close to shore, it’s easy to imagine that the result would have been far worse far sooner.

Blame the environmentalists and blame Obama; the loonies try every tactic to shift blame to their targets of opportunity, however specious their arguments.

I expect no less of Sarah. I’m just surprised it took her so long.

Drill baby.

Abundance

2010-06-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

A note from Mary:

"Honey,

We have everything we need except green beans."

[heart]

Little enough

2010-06-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

I've just made a donation to the National Wildlife Federation towards their ongoing efforts to save and protect wildlife affected by the gulf oil spill. The people of Louisiana need our help, too. I hope you will join me by contributing in whatever way you can.

Thanks,

ross

Good news at last!

2010-06-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

This just in from the Washington Post:

"A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made it very difficult to tell if the cap was fitting well."

BP also stated "Spewing oil is pretty much the only reason we're not sure if we've
stopped the spewing oil."

As soon as the oil stops spewing so much, BP promises to issue an optomistic press release and BP President Tony Hayward can take a well-deserved week off.

Fingers crossed

2010-05-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

Lest I be thought alarmist, (me?), NBC Nightly News last night cited two experts, geophysicists or some such, who said that if BP can’t successfully cap its leak, oil will flow unimpeded into the Gulf of Mexico for our lifetimes and longer. BP’s top kill effort, today maybe, is given a sixty to seventy percent chance of success by its own engineers, and you have to worry that they’re putting a good face on it.

I’m not given to prayer unless there’s a direct and immediate benefit to me, but I’ll say a little prayer on this one. What’s to lose? I’ll also cross my fingers.

NBC also had a guest, the former president of Shell Oil, who said leaks like this are actually rather common. This one gets press because it’s here and already destroying vast wetlands and a fishing and tourism industry. The Shell guy said a comparable leak in the Gulf of Arabia a couple of years ago was treated by a fleet of supertankers which siphoned the leaking oil from the surface, separated it from the sea water, and headed for port and the refineries. He thinks we should be lining up tankers now.

I take it the Arabian leak was finally plugged, though it’s also the depth and cold that make our blowout particularly hard to stop.

Side bar: In his press conferences on this and other subjects, I notice that Obama’s hair is already turning gray, and not just a little. His has to be the toughest job in the world. Sadly, too many Americans expect him to fix every national problem in a matter of weeks, including a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

He's missing a photo-op: he should be standing on a shrimp boat wearing a mask and snorkle with a Mission Accomplished sign in the background.

In the light of day

2010-05-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

I forgot last night—it was late—that BP is also drilling a new well that it hopes will relieve pressure from the leak and perhaps slow or eliminate the flow. Maybe that will work.

It’s hard, though, to take seriously anything BP says, since it’s consistently understated the size of the leak and withheld information from Congress and the public, including video that showed multiple leaks gushing oil and gas at rates impossible to measure. Now, according to BP President Tony Hayward, “Everything we can see suggests that the overall environmental impacts of this will be very, very modest.”

This is more than spin control. It’s lying.

Tony—and let’s add Rush Limbaugh, who bloviated that environmentalists are overreacting and the ocean is self-cleaning—needs to get some detergent and rags and start cleaning pelicans, or paddle up into a saltwater marsh and tell us how he’s going to clean oil out of reed beds.

One thing we do know: when it’s over, if it’s ever over, we’ll have lots of tar and feathers.

What then?

2010-05-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

The news of the massive oil leak in the Gulf just keeps getting worse. A month ago, it was 2,000 barrels a day, and BP was going to put a dome over it. At the time, news stories focused on how much worse the Exxon Valdez spill had been.

I don’t even know what the current estimates of barrels per day are, but I’m beginning to believe we’re looking at the largest environmental disaster in American history. It breaks my heart.

Now, as BP prepares to pump tons of mud, cement, and golf balls into the breach in hopes of clogging the flow, I’ve yet to hear anyone speculate that perhaps this leak simply can’t be stopped. But note that certainly BP hasn’t expressed any confidence, and I've heard not a word about yet another plan if this one, too, shall fail.

Suppose, like the volcano in Iceland, this is now a force of nature beyond the control of man.

What then?

Another year of bliss

2010-05-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

Once again I'm proud to announce that Mary and I are enjoying our wedding anniversary today, our 35th, which I'm sure everyone knows is the Treasury Bills Anniversary. T-Bills make the perfect anniversary gift and come in a wide variety of denominations, one to fit every budget. You can have them gift wrapped and enclose a nice card.

It's not too late even if they don't arrive for a few days because I forgot, too, and Mary had to remind me. Now I have our anniversay and Mary's birthday on my Google calendar, which will send me reminders a few days in advance forever.

Thank you all in advance for the lovely T-Bills!

Why I read the papers

2010-05-21T09:31:00.001-07:00

I love it when the insufferably self-righteous turn out to be blatant hypocrites. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, and the more vocal they are in their moral superiority, the more spectacular their splat when they hit the sidewalk.

This is why I was only somewhat appalled by Bill Clinton’s dalliance, even though I was horrified by the thought of the President getting a blowjob from an intern in the oval office. At least Clinton hadn’t campaigned on a platform of No More Blowjobs in the Oval Office and was a known-womanizer in the Democratic tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

Sometimes they get away with it: It’s widely know that Newt Gingrich was having an affair with his soon-to-be third wife while his soon-to-be-former second wife was being treated for cancer.

And sometimes they crash and burn: John Edwards’ career went kersplat for the same offense, as well it should have. And suppose, as many have pointed out, he’d won the Democratic nomination and then the news came out? It would have been a deathblow to Democrats for years if not generations to come, and we’d now be suffering through the presidency of John, “I never said I was a maverick” McCain, who, by the way, had an affair and was whooping it up with his current wife while his former wife was recovering from a serious car accident back home.

McCain admitted in his book that he was actually running around with several women at the time. What the heck, maybe he was a maverick after all. He finally settled on a second wife who happened to be thin, blonde, and rich.

Some maverick.

The best hypocrites, though, are dripping with a particularly savory duplicity, like the downfall of newly-former Republican Congressman Mark Souder, who had an affair with an aide. (A part-time aide, he insisted, which I assume he sees as a distinction with a difference.) It’s all the more delicious since he’s on tape doing a public-service interview with this very aide on abstinence education.

At least Bristol Palin, pregnant at 17, had her baby first before she became a spokesperson for abstinence education. “If they’d only told me in high school!”

And you have to love Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who first pleaded guilty to soliciting homosexual high jinx in an airport bathroom, then claimed he was only cleaning up toilet paper off the floor. I can relate to this because I always clean up toilet paper off the floor of public restrooms, just like Mary has a thing for always returning shopping carts in the super market parking lot. It’s a kind of tic.

Okay, on to the best, or at least most recent: George Rekers, newly resigned board member of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, (you can’t make this shit up), an organization dedicated to helping homosexuals unchoose their immoral lifestyle. Rekers is also a co-founder of the Family Research Council with Dr. James Dobson, who, by the way, isn’t actually a real doctor.

(Fortunately, I personally was about 12 ½ when I chose heterosexuality, but I was heavily influenced by a steady supply of Playboy magazines which I and this buddy used to steal from Safeway. Safeway probably stopped carrying Playboy because we were so adept at stealing it, but it seems to me that my personal history makes a pretty good argument for putting Playboy back in supermarkets or I could have gone the other way. Think of our children.)

Rekers, we all know, was busted for taking a male escort along on his ten-day visit to Europe. He needed somebody to carry his luggage because he’d just had surgery, so he went to the webpage “rentboy.com.” I checked out the webpage, I’m sure along with about a billion other people, and found there are lots of young men who could sure carry your luggage if you were going to Europe.

Then someone came up with a picture of Reker carrying his own luggage—I guess he made a quick recovery—so he switched tactics and pointed out that even Jesus went among the prostitutes to minister to their souls, though it should be pointed out that Jesus settled for a foot massage with olive oil (anybody else find that a little weird?), whereas Rekers went in for a more whole-body massage, probably with the new Intimate Warming Olive Oil available only at sexual specialty stores and Safeway.

When I had hernia surgery a few years ago, I was in a really bad way for a few months, but I could get only Mary to carry my luggage, which she was particularly good at owing to all her experience with shopping carts. On the road, I probably would have had to settle for a bell boy since I’d never heard of rentboy back then.

One almost loses track of names, they’re falling so fast: Ted Haggard, (I’ll bet he is), the Colorado former leader of the country’s largest evangelical Christian organization, not only has a taste for male prostitutes, he likes a little meth while he gets his luggage hoisted. And speaking of fun with names, I can’t forget Jimmy Swaggart (the swaggering braggart) and his blubbering confessing that he had sex in his car with a prostitute. (“I have sinned! But, hey, at least she was a female prostitute. Or at least I thought she was. Female, that is.”)

Is this something entirely new? Well, no. Jefferson had his little fling with his slave Sally Hemings, and he was slandered for it when he ran against Adams for president, but the full truth didn’t come out until about two-hundred years later. And I don’t recall that he was a board member of “Keep Your Filthy Hands off the Hottie Slave Girls.”

These days, though, they seem to be coming by the dozen. Much more entertaining, I guess, than the debate over regulating financial derivatives.

So who’s next? Not me, that’s for sure, though I’ve always had a secret desire to drop a watermelon off a skyscraper.

Kersplat!

A modest proposal

2010-05-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Here’s a simple suggestion to help Arizona remedy problems with its new law 1070: require everybody to carry and show proof of citizenship upon demand. Police would be required to check everyone’s citizenship papers during arrests or minor traffic stops, or when someone stops to ask them directions. Everyone who can’t produce proper papers is treated the same, probably held in detention until someone can come up with the proper documentation or deportated if they can’t.

This is the only fair way to ensure equal protection under the law, and it would also keep out unwelcome Norwegians and other Northern Europeans who take advantage of their fair complexions.

It would be interesting to see how long the law would stay on the books if white people faced the same scrutiny as brown people.

Gary Johnson for President

2010-05-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

Colbert was particularly funny in his show this Monday, May 10. You can watch the full episode here:

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-may-10-2010-gary-johnson.

Particularly interesting, though, was his interview with former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican who says he’s not running for president in 2012, a clear indication he’s running for president in 2012. Here’s what his Website says about Johnson’s stand on drugs:

“More Effective Drug Policy
Gary has been a leader of the movement toward a new, more effective drug policy that is more in line with conservative principles of fiscal discipline, limited government, and personal responsibility. Gary advocates an end to the failed prohibition of the past seventy years, and an honest discussion about the drug issue with America's youth. Specifically, he advocates the legalization of marijuana and the decriminalization of other drugs. While Gary himself abstains from all drugs, including nicotine and alcohol, he recognizes that the billions of dollars wasted on a big-government anti-drug policy have not been responsibly invested.”

Is there hope that we might be moving toward a realistic discussion of the failed prohibition policy known as The War on Drugs, first named by Richard Nixon and so far delivering only what I call “The Three Cs” : Corruption, Cartels, and Chaos on the Border? (Help me out here: I’m looking for a better third C. P is also an open letter, but I’d have to start over.)

Is it possible I could one day vote for a Republican for president?

In fact, Johnson is a GOP libertarian from the Ron Paul school of Ayn Rand, but if I had to be a conservative, I’d definitely want to take it to the extreme like they do. Ending drug prohibition, though, isn’t an extreme position at all (insert all the relevant arguments here), and I would be thrilled to see at least a few mainstream politicians begin to consider it under the rubric of reforming America’s drug laws.

Maybe this guy Johnson can help jump start the conversation. He’s one of the few guests who can keep up with Colbert’s machine gun interviewing style, so he should be able to hold his own on a stage with a few merely mortal candidates for President.

A post in search of a title. . . .

2010-05-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Here are a few loosely connected items floating around my cerebrum this morning: In the Washington Post, Philip Caputo reviews Sebastian Junger’s new book War, based on Junger’s extended experience embedded with an Airborn platoon in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. Caputo gives War an excellent review, particularly for its insights into the psychology of men in combat.

I’ll probably pass. I don’t read a lot of war journalism or novels or see a lot of war movies because, What’s new to say about that? The last war novel I read was James Jones’ The Thin Red Line, recommended by Broschat as (I quote from memory), “far and away the best war novel I’ve ever read.” I heartily agree. Jones writes about the army’s bloody capture of Guadalcanal, and though it’s a novel, Jones was there himself as a combat soldier. What distinguishes The Thin Red Line is its riveting psychological portrayal of very different men in combat. There’s heroism in Jones’ novel, but mostly there’s fear, brutality, and pure dumb luck, good or bad.

I watched the film version of the book just a few days ago and found it to be sadly lacking, sadly. I doubt any film could capture the omniscient narrator’s insights into the minds of soldiers in combat, but this film seems to fall particularly short because it takes its name from such a powerful novel. It could have changed the title and few would have noticed any cinemagraphic plagiarism.

Loosely connected item number one: Junger also wrote The Perfect Storm, which I happened to be reading shortly after its release while teaching summer school for two months aboard the California Maritime Academy’s training ship The Golden Bear as we cruised the South Pacific and visited mostly undiscovered or uninhabited islands.

And yes, I got paid for it. Hate me if you must.

The Perfect Storm, published in 1997, is also a creative nonfiction book based on a massive storm that battered New England and cost lives on ships at sea. Chances are good you’ve seen the movie if you didn’t read the book.

Interestingly, the ship’s officers on the Golden Bear were unanimously scornful of The Perfect Storm. In their view, Junger didn’t know squat about ships or storms, and mess hall conversation in no small part consisted of ridiculing particular points of the book.

I wasn’t qualified to say, of course. My only ongoing criticism is that the phrase “the perfect storm” should have been retired from the language no later than about Y2K, as it is now used to describe everything from an oil rig explosion and massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the release of the iPad to a city council meeting gone bad.

As a career writing teacher and sometime writer myself, I admonished students to avoid clichés like the plague. Enough with the perfect storm.

So I have my doubts about Junger’s verisimilitude, or “truthiness,” as Colbert would call it, in his new book. Not to say it might not be a book worth reading. Maybe it is.

Better, I’ll bet, is Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, the story of NFL star player Pat Tilman, who gave up his successful football career to join the army and become a Ranger after 9/11, only to be killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. (This is loosely connected item number two, as I recently finished the book.)

The military and the Bush administration not only did their best to cover up how he died, they tried with initial success to use his story to promote public opinion in support of the war, as things by now were going very badly in Iraq. Krakauer’s book brings back all the powerful emotions of disgust I had for the Bush administration and its most vocal spokespersons, (Henny Penny Rumsfeld engenders particular disdain once again.) And while I initially saw Tilman as just another jock-bully-blindly patriotic-and-overpaid-sports popstar, I quickly began to develop the highest regard for him. It's a book well worth reading.

Loosely connected item the third is that reviewer Philip Caputo (back to Junger here) has just published a well-reviewed novel about life on the border entitled Crossers. My brief time this winter along the California and Arizona borders with Mexico, combined with my continuing efforts to learn a bit of Spanish, have left me thinking a lot about border and immigration issues lately. With a nod to the Arizona legislature and governor for keeping the kettle boiling, time will tell whether the current situation in Arizona will ultimately help move the cause of immigration reform forward or whether it will only serve to make real reforms politically more difficult.

I vote the latter and doubt, for that matter, that we’ll see much in the way of reform in coming years. I believe even more strongly lately that legalizing marijuana is the only effective way to dramatically reduce drug smuggling and deal a serious blow to the cartels, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t even inhale.

I’ve ordered Crossers onto my Kindle.

And since I’m coupling loosely this morning, I watched the film Frida last night. It could have been better, but I thought it was quite good overall, if a little lacking in gritty, and I learned a lot about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Who knew that they hosted Trotsky in Mexico, where he was murdered by Stalin’s hit men? A quick Web seach this morning tells me not to make too much of this as history, but still. . . .

Also, Selma Hayek naked. Both she and Alfred Molina as Rivera turn in fine performances.

The fight against terrorism, the border with Mexico, The Taliban, and the drug cartels: not so loosely coupled, maybe.

The movie I just happened to watch last night. Mexico is such a beautiful country and so rich in cultural history. It's sad to see it fall into such turmoil, and not just along the border. I'd love to visit to continue my language study, but there are few areas left that aren't on the State Department's caution list. Better, maybe, to go someplace safe, like Cuba, for example.

One voice of reason

2010-04-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

In a column in today’s Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein addresses some of the wildly off-the-mark nonsense being bandied about concerning President Obama’s policy initiatives. These gobsmacking commentaries come not just from the usual radio crock-jocks but from the reputed leaders of the Republican Party:

“The most extravagant rhetoric has come out of the gathering of Southern Republicans in New Orleans, led by former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who called Obama ‘the most radical president in American history’ and urged his partisan audience to stop Obama's ‘secular, socialist machine.’

At the same conference, Liz Cheney, the former vice president's daughter who is often mentioned as a possible Senate candidate from Virginia, fiercely attacked Obama's foreign policy as ‘apologize for America, abandon our allies and appease our enemies.’ And last week the ubiquitous Sarah Palin said of the arms-control treaty Obama signed with Russia, ‘No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step,’ likening it to a kid telling others in a playground fight, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate.’”

Orenstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, begs to differ:

“Looking at the range of Obama domestic and foreign policies, and his agency and diplomatic appointments, my conclusion is clear: This president is a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center. The most radical president in American history?”
He concludes with a paraphrase of a conservative Southern Senator’s question about Strom Thurmond’s defense of segregation some fifty years ago: “Does Newt Gingrich, a PhD in history, really believe that [expletive]?”

The expletive here being, let me guess, “shit.”

It’s good to hear a few conservative voices begin to call out their brethren on the ridiculous spew that passes for political discourse these days. Here’s just one more example; he quotes from “Mark Levin, who manages to make Limbaugh and Beck sound like calm voices of reason:

[Speaking of Oklahoma’s conservative Republican Senator Tom Coburn, who dared to call Nancy Pelosi “nice”] ‘We don't need you hack, detestable politicians telling us a damn thing. Most of you are a bunch of pathetic, unethical morons. And so, no, Mr. Coburn, we won't be told to sit down and be quiet. We won't be told by you to watch CNN to balance off Fox. You got that, pal? Who the hell do you think you are? You sound like a jerk, to be perfectly honest about it. You, the jerk, who backed John McCain.’”

I swear, I’ve heard kids having a supermarket tantrum scream more cogently than Newt, Rush, and Sarah. The difference is that, at the least, you would expect a harried parent to look embarrassed and take the kid out of the store.

Home again

2010-04-09T10:47:00.001-07:00

We’ve been back for about ten days now, and I have to say I enjoyed our three-month trip enormously. I don’t like to think of it as a vacation because for now it’s just what we do in the winter: we go south. Still, it was a vacation in many ways.

For me, I can’t recall when I felt more at ease and in the moment for an extended period of time. In the moment almost never describes me, but while on the road, I could read a book all afternoon, practice Spanish or not as my motivation determined, go for an easy walk around the campground or a more vigorous hike up into a desert wash.

With my new Kindle, I could download newspapers for less that a dollar, and since we spent most of our time in Arizona, I usually read the Arizona Republic. If we felt like it, we would go into a nearby town and find an internet café and have coffee and maybe a sandwich while we caught up on our email and paid bills online.

I never felt bored. Never anxious. Never depressed. I never felt like I should be doing something else.

Our biggest concern during the first half of the trip was money, as many national, state and local campgrounds have substantially raised their fees if they haven’t actually closed down. But during the second half of the trip, we began to find free or very low-cost campsites. Organ Pipe National Monument charges ten dollars a night, and since I’m now officially a senior (sixty-two), fees are half price. Five bucks a night to stay in our favorite park.

You can stay three weeks at Organ Pipe, then move a few miles north of the park and stay for free on BLM land for another two weeks: five weeks of camping for $105. We were paying that for three nights before we found out better.

We also scouted some of the BLM Long-Term Visitor Areas, which charge $80 per year for camping within a certain area, usually very expansive. The biggest of these is near Quartzite, Arizona where hundreds of thousands of snow birds come for the winter and spread out across the desert, either tightly packed for those who enjoy the company, or widely spaced for those who don’t. We didn’t stay in Quartzite and probably never will, but there are other areas run in the same way that are much more appealing, and we can easily see ourselves staying for a month or so in a few different locations.

We also found Wal-Mart parking lots to be commodious and convenient for overnight stays while traveling to new locations. Wal-Mart doesn't mind, and with our GPS, I’ve found you’re never more than ten miles from a Wal-Mart. I forgive Wal-Mart for killing Chinese babies for pet food. I even shopped in a few, call me what you will.

For me, this kind of life is so enjoyable and inviting I’d love to sell out up here in Klamath Falls and go full-time, which some millions of Americans do. As small as our trailer is, we were very comfortable in it for three months, and there are middle-sized trailers that come close to the feel of a small apartment. It would be a simple matter to retain a legal address in Klamath Falls through a mail-forwarding service.

I envision staying here between three to six months a year and traveling the rest of the time. I could see us doing that for another ten years or so. Although we’d take a beating if we sold the house now, I’ve been thinking a lot lately in terms of how many good years I have left, and good years have come to mean a lot more to me than money.

Especially since we have the money. It’s actually a lot cheaper to live on the road than in a house, and when the time comes, it’s easy enough to settle down again in a nice rental or old persons’ home. I’d like to find one that accepts only liberals. The Hubert Humphrey Cozy Home for Aging Leftists or some such.

Mary is less thrilled than I am with the idea, though she’s not completely opposed to it. She loved the mobile life as much as I did, but she also feels more connection to our home here than I do.

Whatever we decide, we’re both happy with the way things are for now or could be in the immediate future. The best of it is that with both of us retired, we have choices now that we never had before. We’re also cognizant of our great good fortune to have a modest but secure income in this time of such a serious and painful recession, but we more than earned what we have. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty that things have gone our way in the last quarter or so of our lives. It’s not like I was a bank president or something.

The Spanish word for “retired” is “jubilado.”

So, back home to a cold and sometimes snowy spring, but it definitely is spring and I can wait it out until the weather improves. I’ve enrolled for this summer in an eight-week, intensive Spanish program at Southern Oregon University, across the mountains in Ashland. I’m both excited and intimidated by it. I’ve been studying Spanish, mostly on my own, for about three years now, and despite making progress, it can only be slow progress without good instruction and a chance to practice speaking every day.

Classes start mid-June, and I’m trying to cram on my own so I’ll be as ready to start as I can be. I’ll be staying somewhere near Ashland in the trailer four days a week, then back home on the weekends. The trailer is a good place to study since it’s about the size of a jail cell but nicer, and there aren’t any distractions built in.

Besides, I see myself spending a lot of time on campus. There’s even an Hispanic Students Union. If I study hard, maybe I can pass for a Mexican.

My only souvenir from the trip is a rattlesnake-skin belt, but that’s a story for another day. He was a big mother.

The Cubs win the pennant

2010-04-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

But enough about me. How ‘bout that Obama!?

Like most of his supporters, I’d completely given up on passing any kind of health care reform and had come to believe he represented an enormous and completely unexpected sign of great social change in our country, as well as being both a charming and inspirational figure as president. Sadly, though, in the end it seemed he didn’t quite have what it takes to overcome The Great Republican Wall of No, No, a Thousand Times No. He proved us wrong, with Nancy Pelosi deserving as much or more of the credit for the final outcome. Next, he signed the most comprehensive arms control treaty with Russia in the last two decades. Then he rested and shot a few hoops.

Nothing but net.

It may not be perfect, it may not even be great, but we progressives have done the near-impossible in passing this health care bill, and I’m hopeful we can survive the November elections and continue to build modestly on recent successes.

In the meantime, there’s a grand array of buffoons and jesters to entertain us, and granted, there are a lot of scary people out there; still, there’s much to enjoy in the antics of the Tea Baggers and their leadership.

I mean, Sarah Palin: what’s not to laugh?

Beethoven in the desert

2010-03-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

Mary and I are dry camping on BLM land about twenty miles north of Organ Pipe and some twelve miles south of the town of Ajo. We’ve been into town a few times, mostly to buy groceries and have a coffee and use the internet at a nice little café called the Oasis.

Other than the IGA market and the Oasis, Ajo doesn’t have much to recommend it except that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists yet, there not being much to discover. For a hundred years, it lived off a giant open-pit copper and gold mine, but that closed in 1983, and I’m sure the town’s economy collapsed just like the economies of small Northwest towns collapsed when the mills shut down. Today, law enforcement is probably the biggest employer, with 450 Border Patrol agents alone, though many of them must live in Gila Bend, about forty miles to the north.

So Ajo, despite some impressive historical buildings and a quaint Spanish-style square, isn’t a place you’d expect to find much in the way of culture, which is why I didn’t quite register the 8 ½ x 11 announcement at the Oasis the first time I looked at it: “Tucson Symphony Orchestra in an evening of all Beethoven, Tuesday, March 9, Dicus Auditorium.” It was only the next time we were in town that I looked a little closer and saw that the concert was sponsored by the Ajo Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Dicuss Auditorium?” I asked at the Oasis.

“The high school.”

“Where’s the high school?” I asked.

“Right there,” she said, pointing through one of the Spanish-style arches that surround the square.

I bought two tickets, twelve bucks each, thinking, Who knew Tucson had a symphony orchestra and why are they driving a couple of hundred miles to this little town, and could they possibly be very good, really? Maybe it was in fact the honors orchestra for the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, not Phoenix, but still, that would probably be worth going out to hear. We’ve been camping for three months and haven’t done anything that might be called cultural the whole time, not even visit a museum. I guess we’ve been looking for other kinds of rewards on this trip.

What a wonderful surprise and a musically exciting evening! The Tucson Symphony, it turns out, is the oldest in the Southwest. It auditions nationally and sometimes internationally, and its conductor, George Hanson, has an impressive musical biography, as printed in the program. Most importantly, to my not entirely untrained ear, they sounded marvelous, at least in two of the three pieces they performed.

The Octet for Winds was performed by eight musicians, and although it was from Beethoven’s mid-career, I didn’t find it to be very interesting. To me, there’s a rather dramatic point at which Beethoven stops sounding a lot like Mozart and begins to sound like something entirely new and unsurpassed in classical music. The octet was still from the Mozart period, I thought.

The second piece featured the much larger string section performing the Grosse Fugue in B-Flat Major, which is an expanded version of one of the late string quartets. I’ve actually listened to the late quartets rather a lot, though many years ago, and remembered this piece and was once again struck by how modern it sounds, a good hundred years ahead of its time in its harmonies and fractured fugue structure. As the conductor said in introducing it, it drove audiences insane the few times it was first performed. I loved it.

Best of all after the intermission was the performance of Symphony No. 2. I expected this second symphony to be again rather Mozarty but was surprised at how many twists and surprises it held. The performance was stirring, only in part because it was so unexpected on a Tuesday night in Ajo.

In the whole evening, I can only fault the acoustics of the room, which swallowed up vast quantities of sound and left the performances sounding anemic, especially the two pieces before the full orchestra came on stage. Nobody’s fault. A high-school auditorium was never designed for a concert like this.

Mary and I drove back to camp navigating the twisted little dirt roads by my GPS and still having a bit of trouble finding our trailer in the dark, but enjoying that fullness of spirit that can come only during and after an evening of fine music, regardless of genre.

My knowledge of classical music is limited at best (please don’t take any of my music-critic comments very seriously here, though I do know enough to know that “classical” is a period, not a genre), but I actually did listen to quite a lot of Beethoven for a couple of years in college, about 1972 and 73, say. I had bought a number of collections on LP: the complete symphonies, string quartets and piano concertos of Beethoven, along with a few other things by different composers I liked. I remember often spending an evening just listening to music. Some music should never be used for background, I thought for a long time, though I suppose that’s a foolish limitation.

But still.

Beethoven was the composer who most fulfilled me emotionally and intellectually. The wonderful evening made me regret a little that I haven’t paid more attention to classical music over the years. Jazz has so dominated my passion for music, and so much of what I think of as classical music is frumpy rubbish. But then so much of everything is frumpy rubbish or rubbish of some other kind. In listening widely and well, I’ve discovered a world of music in jazz that I’ve now refined down to a broad but essential collection that continues to grow and delight. Is there room enough and time for a vast expansion in my tastes?

In any case, since I still have a working turntable, I think I’ll get out some of those old LPs when we get back home.

Smugglers

2010-03-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is our favorite campground so far. It’s located at the extreme southern edge of Arizona. The nearest town of any consequence is Gila Bend, eighty-three miles north. There doesn’t seem to be any air traffic headed for distant cities, so the night sky is unpolluted by light or noise. Temperatures are in the mid-70s. The campground itself is small and lightly used, and with my new Seniors Pass, we’re camping for half price, a budget-comfy six dollars a night. At that rate, we can actually afford to do this trip again next year and probably for as long as we’re physically and mentally able.

There are also numerous BLM areas close by where you can boondock free for up to fourteen days at a time. We’ve scouted some of these along the way, and they range from isolated spots with only one or two trailers to sites just off the highway with rigs packed in pretty tight. We’re moving out in the morning to see how we like it.

We’re moving to one tomorrow

Whoo-hoo!

The stay limit is here is three weeks, and we’ll probably max out; there’s lots of hiking, as well as an excellent visitors’ center and ranger programs in the amphitheater; tonight’s is titled Bark Rangers, about working dogs in the park system. Most of these programs are not rocket surgery.

The desert landscape is as beautiful as any we’ve seen, surrounded by mountains near and distant and lush desert vegetation made possible by somewhat higher rainfall than surrounding deserts get. And it’s been a wet year after years of drought. Everything is an unlikely green right now, and the whole thing looks professionally landscaped.

But in major ways, the rules of the park and the overall atmosphere are dictated by the common border with Mexico. Outside the safety and comfort of the campground and a few close-in trails, this is “no country for old men.”

The campground is only five miles from Mexico and the small border town of Soroyta. Much of the park itself sees high traffic from illegal immigrants and drug runners. Most of the park that used to be open to the public is now closed, including a fifty-mile dirt road with several historical sites, abandoned mines and ranches. The visitor center is named for a ranger who was murdered six years ago while tracking drug runners who had recently committed a string or murders in Mexico. The park’s own brochure warns of wandering off the few approved trails and cautions to keep valuables locked up, report any suspicious activity, and, most of all, not intervene personally if you see anything suspect. No other park we’ve visited has posted such warnings.

Also, the highway is thick with Border Patrol SUVs, some of them pulling trailers with quads loaded for off-road pursuits. There are also signs of the virtual fence being built on contract by Boeing, parked trucks coverer by camouflage tarps with cameras mounted on tall poles. From what I’ve read, the fence is a near-complete failure and way over budget, but work continues.

All of which has got me thinking about the problems of immigration, drugs, gangs, cartels, murders and rapes that have people talking about Mexico as a failed state and dramatically changed the way of life for many along the border, not to mention the explosion of gangs and related violence affecting all of our cities.

I have the solution, two different measures that would be easy to enact and would reduce all the attendant problems by something like ninety percent. Make it ninety-five.

Neither idea is new.

The first is to adopt—I hate to say it—George Bush’s immigration reform package. It provided for a guest worker program which would allow Mexican nationals to enter the country legally and employers to easily hire documented workers. Despite issues of social justice, the program would substantially improve the lot of Mexican laborers by regulating wage, health and safety issues. It would also allow them to return home and reenter the United States without fear of deportation. Everybody’s happy.

Bush’s plan fell flat because it also addressed the problem of long-time residents who entered illegally and have integrated well into their communities. Many of them have been here for decades and have children and even grandchildren who were born here and thus are themselves US citizens. Bush intended a “path to citizenship” for these long-term residents, which was immediately branded “amnesty” by others in his own party, and the future of the plan quickly died.

John McCain, Arizona’s senator, initially embraced the plan but quickly distanced himself when he became a candidate for president. Sadly, of all the problems Obama doesn’t need to take on right now, immigration reform is probably first on his list.

The other simple solution that will never happen is to legalize most drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. The drug cartels would immediately collapse, as would American street gangs. They’d probably dabble a little in murder, prostitution, and double parking, but for the most part they’d be out of work.

Despite fears to the contrary, this doesn’t mean the country would suddenly be awash in drugs. We could still regulate drug use the same way we regulate alcohol and tobacco. No shooting up in restaurants or parks. No reporting for work while high on cocaine. No DUIs or you’re back in rehab and then jail. Certain professions such as airline pilots and Sunday school teachers could still have a zero-tolerance policy.

Pretty much, the same people who use drugs now would still use them if they were legal. Availability would be about the same since, demonstrably, the War on Drugs which started under Nixon has been an abject failure.
These two simple solutions would solve so many problems and work so immediately that it’s all the more heartbreaking that the current situation is tolerated and perpetuated by small-thinking, opportunistic politicians in both parties, backed by the full faith and credit of a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Or we could do what a camper next to me suggested yesterday: shoot them all and send the bodies back to Mexico.

That could also work.

Don't tell anybody but. . . .

2010-02-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

There are at least two things I’ve never tried and thought I never would in this life: gay sex and riding a Harley-Davidson. The thought of both is repulsive to me, and in the case of Harley riders, I’m even more repulsed by the lifestyle. I feel more than squeamish about gay sex, too, but gay people are okay with me. Kind of the way I feel about vegetarians.

But I was starting to feel a little bored by the life of warmth and leisure we’re enjoying on this trip and needed a little something to liven things up, so yesterday I rented a Harley from the local dealer and went for a long ride into the mountains north of Phoenix.

I wanted a big one, a full-dress touring bike which turned out to be an Electra Glide Classic. Cost me a hundred and fifty bucks for the day, and when Mary dropped me off to pick it up, I have to say I was turned on by all the black and chrome on the engine and the sparkly red paint which glistened in the morning sun. A handsome motorcycle, I admitted to myself, and one that promised all-day comfort with its relaxed riding position and amenities such as cruise control and a full stereo system.

The morning ride was a real pleasure and I was starting to think I’d been a little unkind over the years to The Motor Company, as Harley likes to refer to itself. I stopped by our campground—a beautiful county park in the desert outside of Phoenix—and put on longjohns and a warmer coat because the temperature was still in the low 50s. Then I turned north and headed for Payson, a town a hundred miles away along a highway marked scenic on my map.

And scenic it was. I quickly climbed out of the Sonoran Desert, beautiful enough in itself, and into a jagged, hostile landscape of rocks, rocks and rocks, big mothers that increasingly were building up into their own mountain ranges. A big vista like this deserves a big bike. The view from the road was magnificent, looking out over a mountainous landscape, with tall ranges surrounding me and snow in the higher elevations. The oddity of saguaro cacti as the dominant vegetation created a feeling of weirdness, but as I climbed, even the saguaro could no longer get a foothold and the mountains became bare and even more imposing.

And it was cold, but the Harley provided reasonable protection from the wind and I was really enjoying the bike. It put me in mind of my truck: a behemoth of the road that surprises with its planted feel and reasonable good handling, its power, and its plush ride. Kind of the ¾-ton Diesel pickup of the motorcycle world.

The road continued to climb, a four-lane highway with little traffic and beautiful sweeping turns, long climbs and descents, and the imposing Mogollon Rim that divides Arizona west to east looming ahead. An Indian casino in the middle of nowhere announced that this was Apache country, which only added to my sense of a true encounter with what I think of as the real West. By the time I reached Payson I was up into the pine forest and some now near-painful temperatures, hovering right around 40 degrees. I hadn’t brought any riding gear, but was layered up with enough clothes from the trailer than I was only moderately uncomfortable. I had on a full-face black Harley-Davidson helmet, which kept my head and face warm. I had passed on the Harley Davidson dog toys for now but figured I could pick some up when I got back.

I had lunch at McDonald’s only because they’ve decided to compete with Starbucks and serve good coffee, and a good cup of hot coffee was worth the terrible food I knew would go with it. I cannot recommend the new 1/3 Pounder.

After that, I turned around and started back into the low country, where I hoped to find higher temperatures and some interesting desert cruising.

But on the ride back, I grew to like the Harley less and less. Having kept my speed at a comfortable 70 on the ride up, I now wicked it up to a more typical 85 or so, and at these speeds the Lard Glide was decidedly wallowing in self-pity. Turns taken at 70 on the way up became white-knuckle head shakers on the way back, and even the relaxed riding position was becoming a butt-torturing device as I began my second hundred-mile leg. Also, my legs hurt.

With stock pipes, I had been impressed with the dealership-Harley’s relatively quiet exhaust note, but after a couple of hours in the saddle, the big V-twin’s thunderous clatteration started to annoy. And the relatively heavy controls were wearing. I realized the Harley’s healthy torque curve was a blessing mostly because it’s so tiring to pull in the clutch and bust my toes on the John Deere shift lever. This is a bike that just wears you out, and I see now why its riders tend to be big, burley guys; it’s a big, burley bike. I’m not man enough to ride it all day, but then I don’t generally rate manliness by a double-plus shoe size.

When I got back to camp, I took Mary for a short ride, and she wasn’t particularly impressed from the co-pilot’s seat either. I got the bike back to the dealer right at 5:30 when it was due in, glad that I had decided against the big discount for a three-day rental. I declined the offer to speak with a sales rep.

In the end, it was worth it just to be out on a bike again, and I realized how much I miss riding and started thinking about how I might bring a bike down with me next year. There’s no easy way to do it, but on two wheels, I could take a ride into Comanche country and see how I do at their casino.

Maybe I’ll also try a little gay sex.

Endnote: Tomorrow we leave for Tucson, potentially a much more interesting city than Phoenix, which impresses only by its sprawl and which I rate as one of three American cities that would be most improved from a direct strike by an asteroid. The other two are Las Vegas and Dallas, and I’ve never even been to Dallas.

A favorite author passes

2010-01-28T21:07:00.001-08:00

A moment of quiet appreciation for J. D. Salinger. I would say that he probably touched me more deeply and personally with Catcher in the Rye than has any other writer I’ve read before or since.

What was I like at that age? Read Catcher in the Rye.

Me and about a million other guys.

More on the road

2010-01-28T20:46:00.001-08:00

With the big storms coming in, we left Anza Borrego on Monday instead of Thursday as planned. We should have left Sunday, as we still drove through heavy rains and high winds, although there wasn’t any major flooding yet.

We took shelter for a full week in Mission Viejo, just east of Laguna Beach. My cousins Mary and Chris run a household that thrives on near-chaos. They’ve been taking in abused foster children and adult women for about forty years now and always have a house full of people and activity. Some of these guests stay for years, most of them get their lives off to a good start, and many of them stay in close touch. While we were there, live-in guests included Vera, a battered woman who has been with them for two years; Jason, their older son who has health problems; and Steve, a grandson of twenty who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s heading yet. Mary and Chris require that he have a job and be in college earning passing grades, and he goes along with the rules, although I don’t think he’s going to be a big success in college until maybe he gets a little older. Great kid, though. He turned twenty while we were there.

The weather finally broke on Saturday, and Sunday morning we left for Joshua Tree National Park. The western half of the park is high-altitude Mojave Desert, and that’s where we’re camped. The most interesting feature here is the granite rock formations. As they cooled and pushed up through an upper layer, they cracked and weathered, so that now they form massive formations of boulders, both giant and small, nested together in every imaginable pattern. They look like cushions stacked in perfectly fitted but wild disarray.

Our campground has the quite uninspired name of Jumbo Rocks. There is also the occasional totally unexpected palm oasis where water seeps up near the surface.

The downside here is that we hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be at this elevation, about 4,000 feet. The climate, though not the vegetation, is much like the Pinnacles: mid-50s during the day, dropping quickly into the twenties at night. We came down here to get warm, after all, and tomorrow, after only three days, we’re heading for some of the regional parks in the Phoenix area. Again, our guidebook, Southwest Camping Destinations, offers a number of choices.

We’ve saved a lot of money in camping fees over the last ten days. Staying with cousin Mary was free, of course, though I did insist on buying a few meals out in return for their hospitality. The camping fee here at Joshua Tree is only ten dollars a night.

Still, travel is expensive, and I’ll have to face the cold reality of my online bank statement tomorrow. It might determine how much longer we can run around out here in the desert.
But in four days when I turn sixty-two, camping fees in many parks drop to half the usual rate. I also start receiving Social Security next month, so I guess it pays to be old.

Anza-Borrego

2010-01-18T21:38:00.001-08:00

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is California’s largest state park, and indeed the largest state park in the US. Most of it is Mojave Desert wilderness, set aside to protect native plants and animals, among them the endangered Desert Bighorn Sheep, of which only 750 survive. Around the borders of the park are a few scattered campgrounds, mostly undeveloped.

Palm Canyon, where we’re staying, is the largest and most developed, with about a hundred sites with power and hookups for RVs. We’re surrounded on three sides by mountains, and if you like dramatic desert scenery, you would love it here.

We’ve taken a number of hikes, most notably to Palm Canyon. It’s a two-mile one way, mostly easy trek up a desert wash, and for the last half-mile or so the trail runs along an improbable stream. At trail’s end is a beautiful desert oasis with palms and ferns and little waterfalls. Only the seventy-two virgins are missing to keep it from qualifying as a genuine paradise on earth. Despite it’s being the most-used trail in the park, we met only a few other hikers along the way.

One of the pleasures of travel during the school year is, not surprisingly, the absence of children. I love children, (no I don’t), but they’re noisy, and campgrounds are usually noisy places. Nine months a year, though, it’s pretty much just retired people like us that we meet, the exception being some weekends in some parks. We stayed here a week and had reserved another, but we realized Thursday night that this was the MLK three-day weekend (thus are our national heroes reduced) and by Friday families were arriving in large numbers.

Yesterday, Saturday, we drove five miles out a dirt road recommended only for four-wheel drive vehicles, (our truck is), and then hiked up a steep and rocky trail to Wind Caves, only to discover a troop of Boy Scouts camping there. We chatted with one of the adults sitting well away from the campsite, and he said he had to get away from the noise. Said he wasn’t sure he could make it through the weekend. Mary told him she had done it for thirty years, and he just kind of groaned.

The scouts managed to mostly spoil the effect of the wind caves, naturally sculpted sandstone caves used for shelter by Native Americans for thousands of years, but it was still a great view of the badlands, and the drive in up the narrowing canyon was exciting.

We have a reservation here until Thursday, but we’re leaving tomorrow, four days early because of a forecast for a series of storms that will hit the west coast starting tomorrow. The San Diego paper says this storm will join one of the four record storms since records were begun in the 1860s, and even allowing for a lot of media weather-hype, it sounds like a good idea to clear out early. Five days of rain are forecast, maybe more, and flash floods are likely, as are high winds. We can’t travel if the wind is much above thirty miles per hour, so we’re hoping to cut out early and make it over to the LA area, where my three delightful cousins live. They’re the last and the closest of my relatives I have any contact with, and I only see them every several years.

As I write, I’m hoping we didn’t wait a day too long as the wind is coming up fast and thick clouds are gathering. With luck, the wind will back off when the rain starts tomorrow and we can make our escape, much as we did when we left Klamath Falls, now five weeks ago.

After a week with the cousins, we’re coming back this way heading for Arizona, but we’ll probably stay in Joshua Tree National Monument a little to the north. Anza-Borrega, though, will be on our list of stops in years to come. We’ve talking to several people who have been coming here for years.

Adventures

2010-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

We like to think of our winter travel as an adventure, but really, you can have about the same level of adventure at home by taking a warm bath. You could break your hip, but how many of us worry about that in the comfort of our home? I do.

A typical day in camp consists of reading, dozing in a chair, taking a nap (not at all the same as dozing in a chair), studying a little Spanish for me, sewing for Mary, going for a walk, and various other activities that will not raise your blood pressure more than a few millibars.

In fact, our trip to date has been so low-key and relaxing that I’ve been having roaring anxiety dreams every night, usually some variation of I’m still working and arrive at school totally unprepared to teach my classes. When I was actually teaching, I didn’t need this particular nightmare since it happened often enough in real life. Now that I get paid at the end of every month whether I even make the bed or not, my subconscious is punishing me by pretending that I still have something to worry about.

A few days ago, we thought we might be having an adventure when we drove our 4-wheel drive, high-clearance truck over a sandy two-track road five miles through the desert to a trailhead. What if we got stuck? Who would ever find us? When we got there, palms a little sweaty, there was a ranger in a jeep, probably ticketing offending dog owners for not having their dogs on a leash, which seems to be how the rangers spend most of their law-enforcement time.

(More later, maybe, on the changing official attitude towards dogs in county, state and national parks.)

In addition to the ranger, there were a handful of compact sedans with not-great tires which had somehow made it in.

The few occurrences which have reminded me that I’m no longer at home watching a Colbert rerun have involved coyotes. Back in Pinnacles, we were sitting around the campfire and our dog Nick grew increasingly uncomfortable and fixed on something just outside the ring of light. After telling myself it was nothing or maybe a deer or stray cow, I scanned the zone of anxiety, which is that area around me at night which I can illuminate with a powerful flashlight, and discovered not one but two Wileys moving towards us with the clear notion that Jack Russell terriers were excellent canapés.

Despite popular belief, coyotes do sometimes attack people, and they often pick off stray pets. In fact, their principle diet in the urban/rural interface where they are most numerous is the house cat, followed closely by toddlers. If a coyote has your cat, it’s best not to interfere, but most people will fight for a toddler. (Not everyone, apparently: “The dingoes got my baby!”)

We quickly took the dogs back inside Fort Arctic Fox (our trailer) and let the fire burn itself out. Later I went down to the flush toilets to make a poop but carried my walking stick with a sharp point and tapped it noisily on the ground while I made quick circles with the flashlight and occasional shouted “ bad doggies go home!. I actually did see another coyote which seemed to be considering whether or not my slight limp of late qualified me as one of the old and weak that it was his job to cull.

Last night I took the dogs out for a last walk before bed We ambled down to almost the end of our loop, several sites past where the last RV had left on its outside light, when some deep inner voice told me “go no further.”

“Farther,” I correct my inner voice.

We turned back to the trailer and both dogs made a poop, so I cleaned it up with a doggy bag and dropped them off in the trailer. Then I left my walking stick leaning up against the desert-weathered picnic table and made my way the hundred meters or so to the garbage to throw away the poop, but just before I got there a group of coyotes broke into full blood-clotting song, and they were very close, right in the campground I was quite sure. I kept my calm and didn’t run, which prompts the predator’s response to chase. With a great effort of will, I took the few extra steps to the trash bin, making sure to slam the top down as I started the fearsome walk back to safety.

The coyotes continued to howl, which could have meant “fresh meat!” or just “Is Colbert a rerun tonight?” but I walked determinedly back to safety and shut the door firmly behind me with a big exhalation of stressy breath.

Close call.

Santa Cruz

2010-01-04T11:53:00.001-08:00

Today marks three weeks on the road. We left Pinnacles a week ago and traveled to Santa Cruz, where we stayed for five days at New Brighton State Beach. Again, we were more than a bit shocked at the camping fees: $35 per night for a site with no hookups. We started to consider the possibility that we will have to return home sooner than we planned, but for now we’re still heading south and planning to be out for at least two months. I’m still thinking four months, but I’m happy just to be traveling and still moving south.

On the way to Santa Cruz we stopped in San Juan Bautista, less than an hour away but a town I never visited when I lived here. It’s a nice enough tourist town, the likes of which we expect to see lots of on this trip, but what makes it special is the Spanish mission, which dates back to the late seventeen hundreds and which has been in continuous use since then. We were lucky to visit on a Sunday because mass was in session and I was able to stand in the open doorway and listen for awhile. The service was in Spanish and I could follow it fairly well, and the church is magnificent. I was reminded how long the Spanish and then Mexicans owned this land and all of the Southwest until we stole it from them in the Mexican-American War of the mid-1800s. That culture has lived on uninterrupted here for over three-hundred years, and it reminded me once again of the foolishness of much of the anti-immigration rhetoric.

Also, there were lots of chickens, magnificent roosters which wander loose on the streets, just as we saw in Kauai when we visited there last summer.

We wanted to stay at New Brighton for a few days before going on to stay with our friends Sue and Marty so we could visit old haunts on our own without putting them out too much as guests. In fact we went into town only once to do laundry and catch up on email and such in a coffee shop/internet café. We did drive by the old house on 14th
Avenue where I lived for four years in the early 70s and where Mary and I lived together for a couple of years before we made the permanent move north in 1975. The house, amazingly, is still standing and occupied, a one-room cinder block ugly little thing that I still love. This in the middle of a now mostly upscale neighborhood where by all expectations the house should have been torn down to make way for a new expensive home or condos.

I always have mixed feelings coming back to Santa Cruz. Much as I love it, the years I spent here were hard in many ways, especially when I graduated and had a hard time finding a decent job. The future looked bleak for a couple of years, with me working first for minimum wage in a deli in Watsonville and then as an area manager for 7-Eleven stores, by far the worst job I ever had. Although I did a good job for them, I never fit into the Slurpy culture and was finally fired. I still feel the shock of that, but it led to our decision to move away and all the good things and lucky breaks that followed for the rest of our years up to now.

Still, I’m drawn to Santa Cruz for its amazingly beautiful scenery, its artistic and intellectual culture, and its total hipness. If a modest little home could be had for less than half a million bucks, I think we’d probably move back, but as it is we have to be content just to visit. I get back mostly every year when I come down for the motorcycle races at Laguna Seca, but it’s been about fifteen years since Mary was last here.

And here it is 2010, and I’m just amazed at how time flies, or seems to have flown when I look back.

After a cool, rainy spell at New Brighton, the weather has taken a turn towards spring, with temperatures in the 70s and sunny skies. It’s always wonderful to visit Sue and Marty. Sue, Mary and I all met here now nearly forty years ago, and Sue and Marty are the only friends left who have managed to stay in Santa Cruz with its astronomical home prices and scarce employment. Marty has mostly stayed employed in the computer industry, though now he has to make the dangerous commute to San Jose every day. Sue is an artist of growing reputation.

We’ll spend a few more days here (free camping in their driveway!) and make at least one visit to Mary’s brothers in San Jose. Then we plan to head south again for a hundred miles or so and stay at Corrizo National Monument. We’re both still very happy to be on the road and are taking our time getting down to southern Arizona, which is as far as we plan to travel.

Not quite Christmas Eve, Pinnacles

2009-12-24T11:39:00.001-08:00

We paid a premium to move our trailer to a site with electricity. It’s been cold enough here to run our propane heater often during the night, which uses expensive propane and drains batteries, so we have to run a generator much of the day to keep up. With electricity, we can run a small electric heater and keep the lights on instead of using battery lanterns, which make it feel like a cave in our trailer.

More about caves later.

The site with electricity is $36 a night, compared with $23 a night for a no-hookups site. This puts camping here at the cost of a private RV park with full hookups, not that there’s any comparison. I’m assuming the parks are having to cover their actual costs because of budget cuts, but you don’t have to multiply $36 by very few days to figure out that it adds up fast. And no WIFI.

We’ve more or less settled into a happy routine. Up about 7:30 to walk the dogs and make coffee. A few hours of reading or studying Spanish for me during the day. Mary is busy on sewing projects she’s brought along and also reading a great deal. We spend a lot of time walking the dogs, a little time with maintaining camp and cooking and eating. Every couple of days, we go for a longer hike. And evenings we listen to an hour or two of Anna Karenina, which we have on audio book.

I don’t think I would have ever read this otherwise, but as a story it’s quite engaging, and at this rate we still have a few weeks of Anna to go. I think we’ll make this a regular part of the trip with more audio books to come. We could do an all-Russian vacation but probably won’t.

Today we took an exquisite hike of about four miles to the Boundary Cave, a talus cave that connects the west and east sides of the park. The hike up was on one of the most lovely trails I’ve ever enjoyed, heavily wooded with lots of rocks covered with moss and lichen and views of the pinnacles through the canopy. I’m not exactly sure what a “glade” is, but I’m pretty sure this would be a glade.

A talus cave, I learned, is formed when earthquakes dislodge huge rocks from the peaks and pile them up in ravines. Since they don’t fit together like a puzzle, the open spaces get partially filled in but leave passages. Bats, of course, love it. We made it to the cave entrance, which was set in a magnificent rock formation, but unfortunately forgot to bring a flashlight so we couldn’t explore further. We might go up again before we leave.

Weather is still cold at night, and we’ve had a little rain, but daytimes are still generally beautifully sunny and relatively warm in the mid-50s. On a trip into town, I got online at a Starbucks and among other things checked the weather back in Klamath Falls.

Ha!

Tomorrow we’re going into Hollister to provision up again, get online, have a Mexican lunch, and explore the site of the 1950s biker takeover that inspired the movie “The Wild One.” If you don’t know the story, it was actually a rather minor incident, with a motorcycle gang buying a lot of beer and getting drunk, fighting, and breaking a few windows over the weekend. Somehow, though, Life Magazine got a reporter and photographer in. There wasn’t a lot of excitement left when they got there, so they got a few of the bikers to stage fake fights and sit drunkenly on their bikes. (Not all Harleys, btw. Brando rode a Triumph in the movie.) The article made outlaw bikers familiar and somehow fascinating to enough people to keep the myth and legends going long after Hunter S. Thompson’s The Hell’s Angles: A Wild and Terrible Saga.

The movie followed the article, and the age of outlaw bikers was born. The dark and brooding Brando didn’t make a very convincing outlaw, but Lee Marvin is actually scary.

What we’ve seen of Hollister so far suggests it’s a nice little town with great strip malls. Tomorrow we go looking for the real downtown deal.

Still at Pinnacles

2009-12-24T11:36:00.003-08:00

I love it here, and with several days left on our reservation, I’m hoping we might decide to stay longer.

Or not.

The whole idea of this excursion is to do exactly what we feel like, and we have very few actual plans and no real commitments. If the money holds out reasonably well, we’ll be traveling for something between two and four months

Our campground sits at 1,000 feet of elevation, and it’s cooler than I expected. Daytime temperatures of about sixty degrees are perfect, but nights it drops to freezing, and there has been ice on our things outside most mornings. It warms up slowly and cools down fast, so we’re dressing warm.

In fact, on a run into town today, we stopped at the Goodwill and bought sweatshirts. Mine’s a Nike, in honor of Tiger Woods. Cost me nine bucks.

Another aspect of the cooler temperatures is that we’re going through propane quickly. We had to take the trailer with us to town, and eleven gallons cost $45. We’ve started a more serious conservation effort. I mentioned the part of the money holding out.

We’re surrounded by the steep, oak covered hills of one of California’s central ranges, beautiful in themselves, and the actual pinnacles are a few miles up the road. We’ve only been up once so far for a short but challenging hike for us, a one-mile, 1,100-foot elevation gain to a great viewpoint.

I won’t say I could have knocked this out without effort when I was younger, only that it was a slow crawl for me now. One of my big objectives of this trip is physical conditioning, so I hope to combine a vigorous walk every day with more serious hikes a few times a week.

The wildlife here is abundant. A herd of deer numbering in the dozens makes its home in the campground, not that exciting for us since deer are also common in our yard at home. But Thursday we sighted our first condors flying over the ridge above our campground. Even from a distance, the size of these birds is apparent, and there was no confusing them with the more common turkey vultures. The campground has a viewing station with high-power telescopes, and if you can lock on to one in flight, it’s easy to follow it for long periods.

Very exciting. The condor’s survival is far from certain and it’s been a treat to be able to see them in part of their natural range.

We’ve seen lots of coyote scat and heard them at night. A few nights ago we built a campfire and were enjoying the evening with our JR terriers Bandit and Nick. Nick was very nervous and kept fixing on thingsthat go bump in the night. We thought he was just being paranoid, but when I scanned the perimeter with my flashlight, there were two Wileys circling in, and they weren’t quickly scared off when I threw a few rocks at them. We’ve seen several since then. Sometimes when we’re walking the dogs to go pee at night, Nick jumps sky high at something he smells and pulls hard on the leash to get away from it. We think it’s probably coyote piss marking the location of a new fast food franchise. They’re known to quickly grab and run with little dogs left unattended for any time, so we’re extra careful.

We also saw a bobcat in camp, and I got some pictures of it at about 100 meters. Later in the afternoon, it wandered much closer, obviously hunting mice or ground squirrels (of which we have seen none) and I slowly made my way over to it taking pictures and got to within about 30 feet. I would guess its weight at about thirty pounds.

(If you’ve never heard a bobcat cry, btw, it’s about the scariest sound in all of nature. You can hear samples with a Google search, but if it doesn’t send a primal chill up your spine, you haven’t got close to the real thing.)

Shortly after the bobcat, we also sighted three feral pigs, which for all purposes are pretty much wild boar. We had seen signs of their rooting, and Mary guessed what they were before we asked a ranger, and she (the ranger) confirmed they’re common around the campground. She said that within less than a year, a domestic pig will take on all the characteristics of a wild one: a lean frame and prominent shoulder hump, plus tusks. These pigs have been wild for generations.

They are an imposing presence, and we were glad they were a hundred meters or so away and moving the other direction. The ranger also said they are shot on sight as part of an effort to eradicate them from the park, which explains two shots we heard close in yesterday.

Still, good luck with that. Wild pigs breed like rats, and I don’t know of any successful efforts to remove them.

Because the oak trees have had an abundance of acorns this year, the bird population is very high. Common are jays and magpies, quail and, not surprisingly, the acorn woodpecker. Also lots of hawks, golden eagles, and the always comely turkey vultures.

I suppose you have to be here to appreciate all this, and I’m very glad we decided on a whim to make this our first stop. We’ve been the only campers here until two other RVs came in today, but they’ll be gone after the weekend and we’ll have the park to ourselves again, save for the hikers and climbers who drive up to the trailheads early in the morning and leave late.

The rest of the time, it’s just us and the chickens.

Thursday, 12/17, Pinnacles

2009-12-24T11:34:00.001-08:00

Our first full day here was very enjoyable. We went for a few walks around the camp area, finished setting up the trailer, and did a lot of reading and hanging around. We practiced yoga separately, which felt wonderful with our mats in the soft leaf bed from the oak trees and the warm sun on my back. I also did about an hour of Spanish. All in all, I was surprised how quickly the day filled up without either any sense of boredom or rushing. If anything, I would have enjoyed an extra hour or two for Spanish.

We haven’t explored the park beyond the campground yet. Plenty of time for that as we’ll be here another ten days or so. In camp, though, there is an abundance of wildlife to watch: a dozen or so deer which are quick at home with us campers, plus a large variety of very numerous and active birds: we’ve identified quail, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, magpies, and our old friends from home the Oregon juncos. We haven’t seen any condors yet, though a very serious birder camped here yesterday uaesaid he could pick some out in the trees on the ridgeline above us with his very serious scope mounted on a tripod.

Other than him, we’re alone in the camper section. We’ve seen one tent in the tent section. There’s a lot of activity during the daytime, though, with workers busy building new rail fences and making other repairs and improvements. Stimulus money, I’m thinking, and glad to see them at work.

Last night we built a fire and were listening to Anna Karenina on audio disc, but were startled by an animal noise, a kind of combined grunt and growl. We both thought it was a deer, but we turned the disc off the listen more closely. Didn’t hear anything more. There aren’t any bears or cougars around, so we weren’t worried about getting eaten. It was getting cold, though, so we went in shortly after. It’s been warm and sunny during the day, about 60 degrees, but down to freezing at night.

This is a good test of boondocking since we don’t have any hookups. I ran the generator for a few hours yesterday and am not worried about the batteries, but water could be a few problem. The trailer carries sixty gallons, which seems like it should be a lot, but we’re down to 1/3 according to the indicator in the trailer, despite taking showers in the park shower/restroom. We’ve been out only three days now, and I was hoping we could get a week or more if we were careful. It doesn’t look like we’ll get anything like that now, though the indicator isn’t too accurate. For here, there’s a dump station and fresh water in camp, so we’d only have to hook up and drive over to them. Out in the desert, it would be a bigger undertaking.

Today we’re going into town for a few supplies.

Overall, we’re both enjoying the trip very much so far, but then it’s only been a few days. And we wouldn’t mind if it were a little warmer, but I think this is going to be typical of the weather. Actually, it’s very nice during most of the day, and we just layer up when it’s cooler.

Ross and Mary’s Voyage of Discovery: Chapter One

2009-12-24T11:32:00.001-08:00

Mary and I left Klamath Falls on Monday, December 14th. We had the trailer up at the house for a couple of days and were hoping to get out Monday, but weather reports kept changing. After a week of sub-zero temperatures, now we had a series of storms coming in, and it was looking like the better window would be later in the week. By Sunday afternoon we had a few inches of snow on the ground, and I chained up the truck and trailer, mostly so we could be sure of just getting down our steep hill. Once we got on the highway, I was optimistic we would have good pavement. I thought we could drop the chains and drive with the truck in 4-wheel once we got on the road.

By Monday morning, though, the weather report was calling for heavy snow that night, so we decided to make a run for it. It took us until 1pm to finish packing and loading, which was something of a bigger job than usual since we’re planning to be gone somewhere between two and four months, considerably longer than we’ve been gone before.

The escape from Klamath was only a little harrowing. We had bare pavement all the way, but at Weed, the junction with I-5, we hit heavy winds, which I expected. I would guess 20 mph, with gusts as high as 40. The trailer was definitely getting seriously pushed around. By this time, it was also raining hard and the temperature was only 36. We had just made it out in time.

We were thinking to stay in Redding and try something we’d heard about but never yet done ourselves, which was to camp free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Not that I don’t hate Wal-Mart as much as the next enlightened liberal, but free overnight parking and a chance to stock-up on any last minute supplies is hard to pass up. With our Garmin GPS, I did a search and found one in Red Bluff, so we motored on down I-5 another thirty miles and Flo led us right to it.

(Flo is the voice on the GPS, and when in doubt about directions, we always go with the Flo.)

Staying at Wal-Mart was actually kind of fun and we especially appreciated the free camping. Our first real stop is Pinnacles National Monument, and we were surprised that dry camping (no hookups) is $23 a night. We’re used to paying $10 to $15 a night in Forest Service or BLM campgrounds, and some of the parks and monuments we plan to visit in the Southwest are also free, so it’s hard to understand the high prices here, especially in the off-season.

But we’re staying twelve days and are looking forward to it. Pinnacles lies in the oak foothills (some would say mountains) that separate the Salinas and Central Valleys of California. What makes the park interesting is that it’s composed of the remains of an ancient volcano, mostly eroded away now but with peaks rising to above 3,000 feet. The landscape is dramatic and beautiful. Mary and I camped here with a friend almost forty years ago, probably our first camping trip together. We’re looking forward to some hiking and caving, and if we’re lucky, we’ll also see some condors, which were successfully reintroduced here some years ago.

We’re also looking forward to being warm. Part of the reason for our trip, which we hope to repeat in coming years, is to camp and explore the desert Southwest, but we’re also here as snowbirds, fleeing the snow and freezing temperatures of the Oregon high desert. It’s not that I hate winter, it’s just that after all these years, I mostly hate winter.

So, although I was surprised that the temperature was only 28 this morning, it’s sunny today and should get up to about 60.

Yes!

We’ll have to go into Hollister once or twice for supplies while we’re here, and we already saw a Starbucks, so we’ll stop by to surf the web and check our mail and I can post this rambling first entry of our trip. There’s no WIFI here and not even any cell phone reception.

What’s the latest news on Tiger Woods? Talk about roughing it!

Stephen and Eve

2009-12-09T22:04:00.000-08:00

I thought Colbert went easy on tonight’s guest, Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis The Wicked Witch of the Right, and founder of Conservapedia, an online alternative to the liberal bias of Wikipedia.

Here’s the Conservapedia definition of liberal:

“A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”

I just love a concise, unbiased definition. Stephan could have just read that and asked, “WTF?”

Still, Colbert did take his shots at Conserva earlier when “On October 7, 2009, [he] called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a Biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name.” This resulted in articles on topics such as “Stephan and the Ark.”

For more on Conservapedia and other “alternative conservative sites” here’s a link to the evil Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

[You still gotta cut and paste the links. Blogger is messing with me.]

Small world

2009-12-03T17:17:00.000-08:00

Mary and I exchanged Christmas presents yesterday. Actually, we both kept the one we had bought for the other. We gifted each other (why not make another new verb? It’s all the thing to do) a pair of Kindles, and when we opened them, we found we had to register them if they came as a gift, but they were already registered to the gifter, not the giftee, so we said, well hell, let’s just keep our own.

Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.

But hell, I still want some presents.

I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.

Ah ha!

I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.

This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.

So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.

I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.

Again, have I got news, but still.

So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.

Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.

Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.

I’m really killing the publishing industry.

Midnight Sun

Send the boys back

Mary made me do it

Welcome Home

The Tiger revisited

In which art imitates life

Hogar dulce hogar

A few last pictures

Ultimo dia

Immerse or drown

If you had told me a year ago. . . .

No, I don't ride a Harley

Language

World's Greatest Outhouse

Santorum

Abrumado

Mamas, don't let your sons grow up to be cowboys

Two great books

Reefer madness

Vamoos a Mexico

Real money

They will always be among us

A fine race

Race time

Deus ex machina

Double-dog dare ya

Bright lights, big city

Paddycake

A little perspective

Don't call me Ishmael

Don't know much about history

Five myths

Instant dick

Lucky shot

Laughter, the best medicine

Final respects

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, Utah

Cliff dwellings, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

RIP Opal

Bisbee

Scared north

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

An island of sanity, sort of

Arizona Loco

Tucson Blues

Sixty-three

Anza-Borrego

The Great Escape

Prudence

God of Winter and the North Wind

Vexed!

Tweet

And he died in a fiery crash. . . .

No comment

??!!

Lazy blogging

The blur

Why Dinesh D' Sousa is a neo-colonialist

A good day to get sick

Four thoughts of autumn

A few facts

Crater Lake Ride

A day that will live in. . . .

Post parto

Progress Report

Laca laca laca

A blog of note

Week one progress report

What is the meaning of this?

Primero dia

Joe Hablo

Mea gulfa, mea gulpa, mea culpa

Abundance

Little enough

Good news at last!

Fingers crossed

In the light of day

What then?

Another year of bliss

Why I read the papers