No Regrets

I often play the game of imagining what I would do if I got to go back in time with the knowledge and experience I now have and be reinserted into my younger body.

What would you do if you could do it over, knowing what you now know? This isn't meant to be an exercise in regrets, it's meant to be a fun mental exercise of what the benefit of your experience would do to guide you now. I realize that it is comforting to hear a aged person preparing to die, when they say, "I have no regrets. If I had it all to do again, I'd do it exactly the same." I understand that part of what someone is saying when they make this statement is that they love their family and friends very much and can't imagine doing anything differently because they wouldn't have those people in their lives. That's a nice sentiment to express to someone, that they are important to you and that you love them.

The point of my mental exercise is not to do your life over. You've already done that life once. The point of the exercise is to get another chance and this time you do it differently. So the point, since this is impossible anyway, is to dream about what kinds of things you could have done differently. If you went back and made some changes, how would things have turned out? So part of the fantasy is actually trying to understand cause and effect. What are the consequences of your actions? What are things that lead to consequences, and what are things that we fail to do because we fear consequences, when in fact there would either be no repercussions. There might even be positive results from actually speaking out or taking action when our inclination is to remain silent or not react. It's funny how sometimes you see someone blurt something out and you secretly cheer their candor, and other times you shrink away from the scene in embarrassment.

So, specifically, some of the things I would try differently if this time transplant could actually take place. I tell myself I would date differently in high school and college. Not to "score" more, but to get to know more people, more casual dates. I think the power of being older is realizing that things were not so impossible as they seemed at the time. The other thing I would do differently is to study another major. Actually, I could play this game several times, as there are many other majors I would like to have tried. I started out in Chemical Engineering and ended up in Mechanical Engineering, so one thought would be to go back and stay in Chemical Engineering, this both because I was interested in the subject, but also to prove that I could. But I also really like Biology, Physics, and Astronomy, so I can see trying those fields. I don't really get excited about going back and trying fields that I know I would not be interested in ever just because they would make more money (Law, for example). I don't know if I would stay in school and get an advanced degree, or not.

I would not get married young as I did, which is easy and a no-brainer. My first wife was not the right person for me, as it turns out, and part of the exercise is that you get to avoid mistakes that you made the first time around. I went in the Army and went overseas to Panama and from there deployed all over South and Central America. Being married then was just cruel to her, as she had to sit around waiting for me to get back. If I didn't have someone that I was holding hostage, I would have gone to these deployments with nothing but enjoyment of what I was experiencing. Another thing I would correct would be to always have a camera and take pictures everywhere I went.

I wonder many times if I could go back and make my parents quit smoking and take care of themselves. I don't know if this is even possible, to alter the behavior of other people. I used to adamantly insist that people make their own choices, and you can't impose your will on others. But my parents both died pretty young, and I look around at people my own age and sometimes 10 or 15 years older that still have their parents. My parents missed a lot of good things in life, and denied their grandchildren the benefit of knowing them and the getting to spend time with them.

Other than that, there's not much else that I care to change. I would travel differently, but I still plan on doing some of the travelling that I've always dreamed of. I imagine that it would be great to buy stocks that you now know would do well, but honestly, I'm not paying that much attention to these things, so I can't say experience would benefit me. I guess you could go back after memorizing a winning lottery number, that would be fun, but it's not certain that the same numbers would come up. Going back supposedly changes things, so it may be that the things you do differently would make the numbers come out differently.

One of the things that I consider when playing this mental game is to wonder what the me of 10, 15, or 20 years from now would be telling the me of right now to do differently. I think that would make for a useful mental exercise. Figure out how a more experienced mature you would do things, and temper your actions based on this knowledge. Somehow, I can't ever get my mind wrapped around this game as easily. Maybe it's a zen thing.

In reality, the great thing about life is that we don't know what's going to happen next. It's a new and exciting adventure that unfolds each day. You don't get an unlimited supply of life, so you might as well enjoy it and make the best of it while you can.

The Lottery Game

I play the lottery. For some reason, I've been about half convinced that I was going to win some day. People always say that the odds against winning are astronomical, and they are right, but someone does win every so often, and it's obvious that you will certainly never win if you never buy a ticket. So, for a relatively small amount, I can pretend that it's going to happen to me each week.

I figured out a long time ago that what you get when you play is the opportunity to imagine what you would do with the money. So you're paying for a fantasy.

You have to get past the silly complaints that you will hear about how all your relatives will have their hand out and how you will be hounded by charities. Minor problems. Either throw sis a bone (hell, it can be just a couple of percent of the winnings and they still could be out of debt) and change to an unlisted number, or just give it all away if you believe it's really that much of a problem. The real problem that many lottery winners have is blowing all the money and being left penniless. So lets assume that the money doesn't go to your head and make that happen.

What I have decided was not that I would buy a huge fancy house, or two, or an expensive car or whatever, but that I would like to travel. By travel, I don't mean constantly hopping airplanes everywhere, I mean, have a house, pay someone to maintain it, but go live in different places, maybe 4 or 6 months at a time. Rent someplace nice and move enough stuff there to be comfortable, then explore. The list of where to go can become quite extensive, if you play this fantasy game. I've got big cities, middle sized cities and remote coutryside locations in mind. Surprisingly, most of my ideas are in the continental U.S.A. Really, international travel is a great idea, but not as a constant thing. I don't think I could get through the U.S. hit list in 20 years of 6 months at a time per place. I think some places would merit repeat trips. Here's some of my ideas: Upstate Maine in summer into the fall, Michigan's upper peninsula, Seattle, San Diego, Key West, Chicago, New York City, Telluride, Boseman, Flagstaff, Taos, Corpus Christie, Washington D.C., Denver during ski season, Charlotte, Jamestown, the outer banks, Miami, and Destin Florida, just for starters. Two of my special adders are: charter a boat in the Mediterranean and go around the southern coast of Europe from Greece to Spain in about 3 months in the summer, and the Ecuadorean Andes (I've already been, but it was in the Army, and painfully missing any freedom of movement and exploration). I suppose Alaska and Hawaii should go on the list, but I can't say they are high on my priorities.

I've fleshed out this fantasy to include details like: for NYC, get an apartment near Grenich Village and hit the streets every day sightseeing; and the type of cabin to get in Telluride and the places I would go in the backcountry in the mountains.

The trick to these fantasies is to realize that they aren't all fantasies. If you pick and choose a few of them, they are easily within the realm of possibility. I'm not saying quit your job and go live there for a month, I'm saying pick cool places and JUST GO. Life's too short to imagine that there are lots of places to go and no way to go there.

There goes that theory

One Thanksgiving, I got into an argument with my cousin. He stated that "If you think someone is gay, they probably are." I thought this was ridiculous. The subtext of the assertion was that you can safely discriminate against people based on your unconfirmed guess about what their sexual orientation is. While I immediately rejected the result of the assertion, that we should discriminate against people, I completely ignored the premise, that you could tell what someone's sexual orientation by looking.

It turns out I was wrong. We've all heard about Gaydar, the word coined for the supposed uncanny ability of gay people to recognize other gay people. Is it true? Did I believe this before our argument? I always assumed that there were agreed upon signals being passed, or that mutual eye contact like flirting was giving the final clues. But a study that came out last month that was reported in the Science podcast (see the January 24, 2008 episode at time stamp 34:50) says that people have a highly accurate perception of sexual orientation based on a very brief glance.

The study was apparently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and was conducted by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal. It was a repeat of a 1994 study where the competency of professors was evaluated by people that didn't know the professor. They flashed facial pictures only at the test subjects and asked them what they thought. The correlation was very accurate, matching the student surveys taken from people that had spent an entire term with the teacher.

They conducted the survey again, this time asking subjects what the sexual orientation of the person in the photograph was. A quick glance was all that was required for most people to accurately judge the sexual orientation of the person in the picture. In fact, they said that if the people were allowed to think about it longer, the accuracy dropped to below 70%.

So it seems that Gaydar is not limited to gays.

The question I have then, is why do most heterosexuals totally ignore this input? I know sexual orientation of people is not something I ever wonder about. I just assume everyone is straight, and I have to be shaken out of regular thinking modes to even wonder about homosexuality. Anybody can spot outrageously overt gay behavior, but not many homosexuals are that obvious.

They stated that this effect of recognizing something in a quick glance is also related to romance. They said the same brain pathways would be used in determining love at first sight. And I always thought that quick attractions were somehow delusional. I guess you have to trust your gut.

I still stand by my original position that people should not be discriminated against, but that's just my own idealism. The important lesson here is that people are making subconscious decisions about others. I'm sure these decisions are not restricted to sexual orientation. I wonder how many people make snap decisions about me when I meet to discuss technical matters? I wonder if they also choose whether they think you are knowledgeable and competent from the first glance? Since I am in sales, selling technical equipment, it would be useful for me to know if people thought I was full of crap before I even opened my mouth. I've been in a perennial discussion with my boss about the impression your car makes to people. I always thought this was stupid and shallow, but you have to wonder how many opportunities are missed or made based on first impressions.

Kids these days

I'm 45. Age is weird when you experience it from within. In some respects, I can feel everyone of my years. In others, I still think like a 20 year old.

For some reason, lately I keep hearing people really getting down on young people. I hear many common complaints, like: Kids today don't understand the value of hard work, their music is terrible, all they want to do is play video games. They said the same thing about us when I was that age, and I'm not going to bother looking up the ancient Greek quote by some philosopher or king or other important person where they are saying virtually the same complaints about 2500 years ago.

Old people always bag on young people. To be fair, it's quite clear that young people have plenty of complaints and jokes about older people. And many of the complaints, going both ways, are true when applied to particular people. Blanket stereotyping of any group of people is usually inaccurate and often insulting.

I keep thinking that "these kids these days" are going to be the ones taking care of these crotchety old people when they are drooling in their hospital gowns and have long since forgotten about all their complaints. They are going to be the few that are working to add to the Social Security pool when the many of the baby boom will be insisting that none of the benefits they were promised their whole life be cut. So let's be clear, the aged naggers better be mostly wrong about their complaints, and they better hope that there is no youth movement, rebelling against the almost certain high taxes that will be required to secure their benefits. I think of that when I listen to people complaining about youth.

I believe that young people today will have a better chance of playing catchup in the information age than any other generation previously. I've noticed myself that learning something new is easier, more convenient, and less expensive than ever before. I'm talking about the massive amount of courses and information that can be found online. Younger people are more comfortable with information technology than old people, a phenomenon that some call the digital divide. This is probably only going to accelerate. Current experiments with neural/computer interfaces center around allowing paralyzed people to move or communicate. While I can think of many reasons why it would be a bad idea to have a computer connection right in your brain, I can also see many advantages. Assuming that it won't be made illegal, who do you think is most likely to use this technology? Young people would embrace it while older people would reject it. If this computer access could be done inexpensively and without any serious problems, it would provide a huge advantage. Imagine being in a business negotiation with someone that could be checking records, compiling spreadsheets, and contacting your competitors while you are introducing yourself. The digital Grand Canyon. It would be the same as being confined to a wheelchair and getting in a foot race with a teen track star.

I was trying to explain that people usually recognize the value of knowledge later when they are away from school and out in the world. For some reason, this idea has usually been scoffed at when I bring it up. I don't know. The idea really can't be compiled as an overall statistic. It only matters on an individual basis. It doesn't take a large percentage of people to figure out the next cure for cancer, only a few. So only a few people need to "get it" to move science and society forward. I still believe if everyone cranked it up just a notch or two, that society overall would improve drastically. I've seen the movie Idiocracy, where people just keep getting dumber and dumber until society starts to fall apart. While it's easy to think and believe that this is the way things are going, I can't help but believe that we are heading in the opposite direction.

Who's in Control

I realize that inspiration for some ideas don't always seem related, so bear with me here. I was listening to the Savage Love podcast, an online broadcast of a sex advice column by Dan Savage. Savage Love is the name of his popular newspaper based advice column that has been around for years, usually in some little local newspaper you find in a rack next to the gum machines in your favorite Bar & Grill.

What I heard in passing in the middle of a explanation was a bit of a revelation. The idea resonated with me and later evolved into a different train of thought. Dan was saying, "This is about control and dominance, so much of sex really is, isn't it? ...humans are all about domination and control. Human society is all about domination and control, why shouldn't human sexuality [also be about domination and control]...." He mentioned marking your territory, taking possession, submitting to someone else's authority, and demonstrating control over others. The context here was sexuality, and Dan Savage didn't dive into the way that this mirrors society as a whole or human traits in non-sexual situations, but you could immediately see the connection.

Later, on a long road trip, my wife and I were talking about how parents try to control their children. I told her that I thought that parental control was only an illusion. You can try to shape your children's behavior, but you can't control their thoughts and desires. You can exert influence, and you can modify behavior through punishments and rewards, but you can't change what they think or what they want to do. We acknowledge that people grow up and are given their own freedom and independence gradually over time, but what many parents don't recognize is that their children have already developed their own way of doing things and thinking long before the parent finally realizes this. We also discussed abuse (parental and spousal), which is a sick twist on control, but that is another subject.

Human society is all about control.

My wife recently graduated from nursing school and started working at a university (teaching) hospital. Before graduation, she was required to shadow a working nurse. She was assigned to a hospital in a system in our city has struggled to maintain profitability. Their hospitals have a reputation as horrible places to work. The atmosphere is bullying, and management never offers the carrot, but is always quick to use the stick - or maybe the sledge hammer. This was a health care system being run primarily as a business, and failing miserably.

While there, basically as an unpaid intern, they started bullying her to come to work for them. This period, just prior to graduation, is when most of my wife's class was busy searching for a job, sharing their experiences with each other. My wife was certain of one thing, she did not want to work for this hospital. It wasn't just that the atmosphere was dismal, it was also that the pay and benefits were nowhere near as good as other hospitals, and the workload was higher. Things kept getting creepier. Managers would "announce" to groups in front of my wife that she was going to work for them, when she wasn't. She finally had it out with the HR manager, when he wouldn't leave her alone. She listed all the better benefits with the hospital she was going to work for. He remained unconvinced, which was his own fatal flaw. If he couldn't see the problem, how could he hope to correct it?

I told her that it was all about control. They mistook the temporary control they had over her during the intership as the same complete control they thought they had over their own employees. They thought that they could just dictate to her to take a job with them because she was assigned to go there like she was working for them. That's the way they treat their employees, so why should they treat her any differently? They were so lost in their warped mindset of controlling others that they didn't understand why she didn't do what they told her to do with her life.

Although she is working for an educational hospital now, and she doesn't get bullied, it is still all about control. This is a different type of control. The school/hospital tries to teach their nurses everything that they will need to know, so that they will understand the best way to do things. This is a more subtle kind of control. They seek to control the way people think through their influence. Given enough free access to information, they trust that people will learn the truth. Understanding should make employees do what is right without being told every step and it will also make them better employees. This is a better type of control, one that recognizes that the person being controlled must ultimately come to the same conclusions themselves and agree that their duties are the best course of action.

And I think this speaks to the great divide in our country right now. I believe the blue/red, republican/democrat, or conservative/liberal debate is also one of freedom versus control. Look at what conservatives attack nowadays. "Liberal" professors on campuses trying to subvert young people's minds. "Liberal" media trying to bring down the conservatives. Attack conservatives are people that are trying desperately to maintain the control of the worst aspects of capitalism in our society.

Capitalism in it's pure form means everyone is voting with their pocketbooks, and only economically viable ideas survive the Darwinism of the marketplace. But excesses and breakdowns in our form of capitalism make it easy for people with lots of money to exert too much control over government and society. In an overly controlled workplace, you see this with a tough profit minded boss trying to dictate what all the employees say and how they act. In our society, you see big companies trying to bend government to their will, restricting regulation and lowering taxes. They don't want any government control of business's behavior. All the while they demand government supports them handsomely with tax breaks and subsidies. We have anything but a pure form of capitalism when you consider that everything goes easily in favor of those that already have the overwhelming majority of the capital. They usually get the best government money can buy.

So the people that support this system (most notably those that benefit handsomely from it) would like everyone to believe that taxes are always bad, regulation is crippling society, our education system is trying to imprint a liberal way of thinking on our youth, and the media is actively against everything they stand for. It's all about control. If you try to impose any kind of control over them, taxes or regulations, for example, they scream bloody murder. If you try to let people explore the truth about the world, and they read up or educate themselves and then learn that things aren't that great, they get really angry. They feel themselves losing the control that they are seeking to impose on society.

My wife summed this up quite simply: one seeks to keep you down, the other seeks to lift you up.

This reminds me of several parallels. Remember how the Soviet Union sought to control their population through oppression, fear, misinformation, and propaganda? In the end it didn't work. Religions don't want you to think too hard about or question what they say, they want you to blindly believe in their gospel so they will continue to have control over you. And look at the way that the interpretation of Islam is used control women in Muslim countries. The common thread here is that people with free will are able to learn the truth. They will then act from the lessons learned and take control of their own lives. This will remove the illusion of control from oppressive governmental, business, and religious leaders. Those that think they are in control now stand to lose everything they care about. Desperate people will say anything to stop from losing that control.

The Black Marble

It's harder to do a book review of a book that you read almost 30 years ago. The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh was written in 1978. I probably read it within 5 years after it was written, I don't remember. I probably reread it 2 or 3 times.

It's a story about fate. The main character, Homicide Detective Sgt. Valnikov had recently lost his detective partner who had died. He was quickly drinking himself to death. He was assigned a new partner, Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman, who thinks he is going nuts. He's of Russian descent and so he drinks vodka. His new partner keeps coming this close to turning him in, but something always intervenes. Natalie gets him really drunk one night to pump him for information. She only finds that he enjoys Russian classical music and has a poetic streak. You can see her heart softening to the guy.

The story revolves around a dog groomer named Philo Skinner. This guy is down on luck, owes a lot of money to the mob for bad gambling debts. In order to get money to pay back his debt, he kidnaps a prizewinning purebred dog to ransom him back to the rich owner. The dog's owner, Madeline Whitfield, is actually not rich, she is practically broke, but maintaining a facade and holding out, waiting until she loses it all. She loves the dog like it is her child, but she is very unstable because she drinks excessively. Detective Valnikov finds a case he can really get into in this dog kidnapping, and even begins to sober up. In the course of helping her, they end up having sex, even though they are both over the hill lushes.

The icon of the Black Marble is from a saying, "Why do I always get the black marble?" That means why am I always getting the bad choices, why do I have such bad luck? The story is a black comedy. None of the characters is noble, perfect, or even completely respectable. The funny things that happen are usually painful or tragic to the people that experience them. Somehow, rather than becoming distressed and dragged down by the characters' pathetic lives, you find sympathy and humor for them.

Valnikov's problem ends up being that he has been slowly losing it over seeing too much death. Most cases he studies are actually suicides. His old partner seemed to be following a similar path before Valnikov. He was slowly getting more and more depressed by what he saw, people doing themselves in. He became an expert at recognizing it and eventually committed suicide himself. Many of Valnikov's random memories thoughtout the book are a series of flashbacks of the horrific ways that people did themselves in.

In the end, he solves the crime, saves the dog, saves his own life, and gets the girl. Strangely, the happy ending is not what you remember most about this story over the years, only the struggle to persevere when life hands you the Black Marble.

Big Oil's Illogical Stance

News of the latest record profits by Exxon are stunning. They broke their previous record, which was also an all time record of the biggest profit of any company in the world. They made $1,300 a second in profit. We looked up the per capita & per employee profits, which dwarf the "economic incentive" tax refund we are about to get this year. What corporate policies lead to such extreme profits? Is there a direct correlation with the secret energy task force put together by Vice President Dick Cheney in the early days of the Bush administration and the resulting deregulation surge of uncontrolled lopsided capitalism?

I listen to the talking points of the Republican Party & Far Right, courtesy their effective brainwashing of the gullible masses. I have plenty of friends, acquaintances, and associates who dutifully repeat these pearls of wisdom sent down by their corporate overlords. One of my favorites is "The LIBERALS (use your own degree of degradation and scorn here) won't let us drill for oil of the coast". Never mind disastrous oil spills and the fact that oil won't last forever, and the fact that we are polluting our planet to death - all of our problems would be solved instantly by more drilling. This would already be happening except for the fact that crazy liberals, who have nothing better to do but plot the destruction of America, have insidiously inserted OVERREGULATION into the mix in order to thwart those civic minded saints at the oil companies, who just want to be allowed to help us all, out of the goodness of their hearts.

This ignores the fact that Republicans were in charge of both houses of congress and the presidency during the time when gas was soaring over $3 a gallon and this phony argument was most often heard. It also ignores that often restrictions to oil drilling are put on the ballot and supported by popular votes. I seem to remember that they found "the biggest oil reserve ever" under the seabed off of Louisiana. This is the one place where they can and do drill without any restrictions, so I've never understood the logic behind this complaint.

Then Katrina hit, and gasoline prices surged again, and we were told that the problem was that we don't have enough refining capability. Yet, curiously, you don't hear the Oil Industry lobbying to make more refineries. If you ask about this, the response is that there is too much regulation and it's almost impossible to make more refineries. The complaint of overregulation doesn't stop the industry from lobbying to drill for more oil, only to refine it. And why is this? This is because a bottleneck of refining capability is what drives the price up.

Wake up, America. We were sold out on this one.

Arrival in Panama part two of two

I left off in my previous post at the point that I was on a deployment in Chirique Province. I talked about the helicopter rides, but I did not talk about the countryside rides. I worked with Smith and Woldridge (Woolridge? I can't remember for sure). Smith was red headed and funny in a confident country boy kind of way. Woolridge was funny in a Christian Slater kind of way (and he looked a lot like him).

We had to drive down these little crappy roads to get to our sites. On one road was a stream that had banks that dropped down about 10'. The stream wasn't too far across, maybe 12' or 15'. There was a cut in the bank and a water crossing, or you could take the bridge. This was not a bridge that for one minute I considered taking. It was a suspension bridge, with the support towers visibly leaning into the center. I was for going through the stream. Smith was driving and didn't want to go through the stream because then he would have to wash the blazer. This funny exchange went on, with Smith telling me we should do it and me telling him he was nuts. Finally, Woolridge and I got out of the Blazer and stood on the bank while he went across. I must have gone over the bridge first on foot, because I remember watching Smith's face as he went over. Smith went very slowly over the bridge, and I watched, expecting the whole thing to come crashing down. I think Smith knew that's what I was thinking because he was driving with his neck craned up, looking over the side until he got in the middle, where he stopped and his eyes went wide. I had just enough time to wonder what was wrong when he started bouncing up and down in his seat. I'm sure I did a frantic "Don't do that, you crazy person!" look or gesture, because he was laughing his ass off shortly. I can't believe the truck made it over that crappy little bridge.

There was a stretch of road we were making that was getting the most attention. We could not find a good local natural supply of rock, much less crushed rock to make the roadbed with. While we searched, construction on the road continued and we worked around the frequent heavy rains in the area. We knew that if you graded everything smooth at the end of the day and ran the vibratory roller over the road last, that the smooth hard dirt surface would drain off the rain and dry out in about an hour. The road was so smooth and slick that kids were going down it in skateboards. I never questioned what a kid in the jungle with no paved surfaces in site was doing with a skateboard.

The road went through a coffee plantation, and the coffee was harvested by hand and spread out on tarps or small slabs to dry in the sun. It was swept up and put into bags, and these little old ladies would sling great big sacks of coffee beans over their backs and walk for miles to the processing buildings.

The leader of the platoon working on the road was Lieutenant Gonzales, a Puerto Rican officer with little engineering abilities or experience. He did speak spanish fluently, though, so he could sure talk to the locals. Lt. Gonzles started to wear these big sunglasses one day, and I could see he was trying to cover up a black eye. I spoke to Sergeant (SFC) Parks, his Platoon Sergeant, but he would not tell me what was going on. SFC Parks was a wizard with equipment, a really good yet friendly Platoon Sergeant with a ready smile and a southern accent. I found out that Lt. Gonzales had tried to take advantage of a local girl, and SFC Parks had caught him in the act before he could do anything to the girl. SFC Parks had torn Lt. Gonzales off of the girl and beat the hell out of him. Now you have to understand that in the military it is very much against the rules to strike a superior officer. The penalty for that would have been very severe. Lt. Gonzales couldn't turn him in without people discovering what he was doing when he got caught, and SFC Parks wasn't going to say anything about it either. It was one of those rare cases when justice was served.

The other main thing I remember about the deployment, besides the cheery red and white color that they painted all the little schools in the area was the fruits. There was fruit trees everywhere with these lemon looking fruits in them. They called them limones (lee'-moan-ays), but they were really limes. You could make a really nice drink with them if you squeezed them and cut them with water, but they were way too tart to drink. There was something funky about the oranges, too, and you could not eat them either.

I didn't make any lifelong friends or accomplish anything noteworthy on the deployment, but I did enjoy myself and learn a lot.

When the deployment finished, I had to go back to Panama and get a house and meet my wife coming down from the states. But that is another story.

Bob Lutz of GM is a crock of sh*t

I have a 13 year old car that has 335,000 miles on it. It's my third car. My second car lasted about 9 years and had around 175,000 miles on it. My first car stretches back to 1981, so there's another 5 years.

My point here is that I have an increasing trend of driving cars into the ground. Part of it is that I'm one of those rare people that, even though I am a guy and a Mechanical Engineer, I'm not really torqued about new cars. Don't get me wrong, I can get excited about automotive engineering, and I appreciate classic lines, but I am more impressed by longevity than flashiness.

I got it from my father, who also had a habit of driving cars into the grave, but also from the military. We had lots of Viet Nam era equipment in my unit in Panama during the late 80s. These were big complex, rare things like 20 ton cranes, asphalt laying equipment, and two quarry crushers. I learned that you can keep anything going indefinitely as long as you maintain it. I had a friend in the Army that liked to buy and restore 60s cars. He had a 1969 Grand Sport and later a couple of sweet Mustangs. These cars were really old and beat up, but if you spend enough money, you could make any car look and drive like new.

So don't get me wrong, it's not a matter of being cheap and not wanting to make a car payment, because older cars start costing more and more to keep up. It's a matter of familiarity and comfort and connection with your machine. And, I have to admit, it's a matter of loyalty. I know that the car can't feel anything, and wouldn't care if I sold it or took it to the junk yard, but it just feels disloyal to abandon it after all the adventures I've had in it and all the wonderful places it has taken me.

My current car is nearing the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced soon. So my first priority is to get another car that will last a long time. It has to be rugged and dependable. If I'm going to be driving this car 8 to 10 years from now, one thing I cannot imagine is driving something that gets 20 miles to the gallon. When gas is $6 a gallon and rationed because we are at war with Iran and the cold war with Russia is in full swing, and Venezuela refuses to sell to us anymore, and global demand has gone through the roof with a billion more cars in India and China, 20 miles to the gallon will not make any sense. Maybe 35 or 40, but I'd really like something that has a little more of a flex fuel capability and a plug-in hybrid possibility. Don't get me wrong, I believe in global warming, and that we are responsible for it, but that's not the primary reason to look for fuel efficiency. Reason #1 is the expense, and right behind that is not to continue to enrich Muslim fundamentalist that hate us.

My dilemma is that the idiots that run American car companies (and I am one of those buy American types) can't pull their heads out of their orifices long enough to see what's coming and plan for it. They say it's impossible to get better mileage, that there is just this physical limit. I say they can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag and they don't deserve to share the title American Engineer with the geniuses and heroes that won WWII with unbelievable productivity and innovation, invented the atomic bomb (it's horrible, I know, but it's also a triumph of science, design, and engineering), and PUT MEN ON THE MOON. My message to US Automaker Engineers: You're pathetic. You don't deserve your diplomas. We should take away your licenses and give you the only thing you have earned, which is membership in the Diaper Club. I've listened to these lame excuses for 20 years about why we can't have a more fuel efficient automobile. It's a "can't do" attitude that is so against the grain of everything American stands for that I wish the government would take away your companies and give them to someone that deserves them, and give you a baby bonnet and a jail shaped like a big crib.

OK, that was fun. That said, my dilemma remains. So while I ponder this problem, this morning I see this article: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/02/13/gms-bob-lutz-global-warming-is-a-total-crock-of-sh-t/ where GM chairman Bob "No Can Do" Lutz says that global warming is a crock of sh*t. Bob, I know you're just saying that because for some reason a scientific fact, a global trend that can be proven and documented just happens to also be politicized. Nowadays, if you're a conservative Republican, you're not supposed to believe in global warming because it's a fairy tale concocted by crazy environmentalists that just want to bring rich and wealthy people down, and want to stop people from doing whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it.

Hey Mr. Rich bastard, you've got about 4 or 5 more years to sell your outdated crappy cars to your dinosaur friends before your whole empire comes crumbling down around your ears. Actually, if you're like most of your rich and narrow minded friends, you'll probably be sitting in your mansion with your 9 figure severance pay and your fat pension and your immense stock dividends - completely unconcerned that you drove your company and an American icon into the ground. So I don't understand why what people think about global warming is your problem or concern. You're so insulated by your wealth an priveledge that you can laugh all the way to the bank. Maybe you feel the cold hand of reality creeping in to destroy the system that annoints individuals like yourself without brains or talent to be the caretakers of our giant American corporations.

I think I'll by a Toyota Prius. Long live the Japanese.

Arrival in Panama part one of two

I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship. They paid my out of state tuition in exchange for 4 years in the Army when I got done.

I graduated after 5 years with 156 credit hours (ROTC electives did not count toward my BS degree, so it added up to an extra 28 credit hours above what I needed for my degree).

After a 4 month stint in Washington DC at Ft. Belvoir, I shipped out to Panama. The flight was memorable, because although it was long, it was over the Carribean, which had the most beautiful blue water you'll ever see.

I stepped off the plane in Panama into a very moist and unbelievably hot climate. I remember getting a brief ride from the airfield to the guest house, where I would inprocess from for the next few days. I arrived on December 27th, 1986. I only got a brief look at the city, and the guest house was in the middle of Ft. Clayton, where all I had access to was a remote part of the post, and nothing local or native. After a couple of boring days of filling out paperwork, I finally had a Lieutenant pick me up and take me to his apartment. This was a guy that had arrived a month earlier and had gotten an apartment downtown with 2 other lieutenants, one that had been there a month, and another (one or two) that had been there just a little bit longer.

They had an apartment in a heavily urban area, on the second floor of a streecorner building with a paneria (bakery) below. I was brought to the apartment, and then the inhabitants quickly left the city for New Year's Eve celebrations on some remote beach. I did not have a key, so my nervous forays into the neighborhood were accomplished by putting a block in the door, and hoping that the apartment would not be broken into. Fear of this possibility kept me out for only 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I was amazed that the storefronts of this sweltering tropical city were decorated with fake snow, snowmen, and a Santa Clause in a thick red coat. I don't know what I expected, but in a land where most people barely knew what snow was, and almost none had ever seen it, I figured the Christmas fairy tale would be different.

At some point, I finished reading all the books and magazines I had brought and I started getting very bored. New Year's Eve was a nerve racking experience, as there were fireworks all night long, and some were firecrackers thrown from down on the street level onto the balcony of the apartment I was in. I don't know if I slept at all that night.

Finally, the long weekend was over the other Lieutenants came back. I'm not sure why they did not take me with them, but in my memory, this was the start of the hazing of the newest Lieutenant that I had to endure for around 11 months before the next new Lieutenant arrived. It sucked, and I don't count many of those guys as my friends, to this day. I ended up hanging out with an older Lieutenant Turner, Mike was his first name, and his wife was Staci. They had gone to Berkley and were definitely liberal minded, probably you could say hippies, except Mike was in the military - a strange contradiction. Staci was a very happy, very smart, very non-conventional thinker. If she thought something was bullshit, she pretty much piped up and declared it for anyone to dispute, if they cared to challenge her. I never did, because she rarely said anything that was untrue, just shockingly candid. In the military, you learn that you are working within a caste system, you are relatively powerless, and you can get into a lot more trouble for simple things than you can in the civilian world. So you learn to shut the hell up when you see something that either doesn't make sense, or makes perfect sense because it is stupid. The military way of doing things does not allow for human thought or emotion, only strict adherence to the rules, no matter how obscure or retarded.

The first thing they did was send me out into the field. I was married, and I was supposed to find a house off post - on the local economy, as they said. There used to be plenty of base housing for all the troops, but this had been turned over to the Panamanians in what we continually discovered was this long inevitable course toward turning over the whole Canal Zone to the locals as well as all the bases and abandoning the country in 1999. So you had to get an apartment, and for this, you were given $1000 a month in a housing allowance calculated for the overseas area you were in. But I was not allowed to do this normal procedure, I was shipped to an area of Panama called the Chirique province.

This deployment was called Camino de la Paz (Road of Peace) and was in a coffey growing region of low mountains on the boarder of Costa Rica. The projects consisted of roadbuilding, school construction, and well digging. I was put into a vacant slot in the S3 (Operations), where they sent me out to inspect the projects. I was given two surveyors, Smith and Woldridge.

The fun never ended. For whatever reason, I was housed with the aviation officers. These deployments always had lots of helicopters attached, and they were our air taxis, as they were just there to get air time, and shuttling us around was a good way to get it. We had mostly Hueys, but a couple of Blackhawks. The pilots were all very young, mostly CW2s, which was technically below me in rank, but in this region outside of normal military protocol where I couldn't really order them around if I had wanted to. They drilled all night under the watchful eye of their senior warrant officer, who continually asked them things like "If the relative humidity is high, do you get more or less lift?" as well as the more interesting questions involving how to crash land the helicopter if you ran out of power. I did not learn how to fly a helicopter by listening in to the nighttime training, but I did manage to wrangle a lot of extra flight time by being ready and able to hop random flights when I had nothing better to do.

One day, we went out to this site, and were trying to return when a thick cloud bank rolled in. We were in the air already, and the clouds were up high, at the peaks and ridges of the mountain range we were in. Unfortunately, we were about 40 minutes out from base camp, and already in the air when the clouds boxed us into this long valley. The base camp was in a field that was at the end of the next valley over. The valley we were in just kept us to the east of the base camp with no way to cross over without going over a mountain ridge.

The problem was that we couldn't see the top of the ridge, it was in thick clouds. We were in our own little triangular space defined by the cloud cover and the canyon walls. While cruising south down the valley, we searched for a low point in the ridge to our west that we could go through. You couldn't just plow through the clouds. Although there was no mechanical constraint from doing this, there was a huge safety concern. When you can't see the ground, you're likely to smack into the side of a mountain. While the copilot on the right was looking for a way out by scanning the horizon and reading a map, the pilot on the left was also looking for a way out of the valley. That's when the high tension power lines suddenly appeared in our front. We were on a direct collision course with the wires, and the pilot and co-pilot spotted them at the same time, about 40' in front of us, with us cruising along at about 30 or 40 mph. The first time I saw the wires, was when I was reacting to the sudden drop in the helicopter and watching my weightless legs kick in the air in front of me as I was thrust against my harness.

The wires were not on the map, a fact that was already being woven into that evening's lessons learned review by the pilots. I think the lesson's title was going to be, "Don't trust the damn outdated maps".

We saw a tiny clear triangle at the back of a small valley coming into the main valley to our right. The pilot turned up the valley, and measured the small opening against the helicopter, and found it to fit with a little bit of room to spare. The question was, does this valley end in a ridge/saddle line, or does it go up higher into the clouds just out of sight from the opening we could see. We had to know before we could commit ourselves. So the copilot's job was to look through the hole to see if it was clear, and the pilot's job was to pick the last possible point that he could ascend to before he would have to wheel around in the branch valley and head back down to the main valley.

You see, Huey's like ours could not just hover, we had to maintain some forward momentum in order to manuever and keep aloft. It was sort of like a frisbee, the spinning surface of the rotor blades acted like a big wing that gave us lift. Without the forward motion, you could still control the craft, and sometimes you could maintain some altitude, but usually, you would slowly descend under the weight of the craft.

We took our first run at the gap, trading speed for altitude until we hit the point of no return. At the last possible moment, the co-pilot shouted that he could see the other side and we were clear to go through, but the pilot had already used all his forward momentum and was already executing the abort maneuver when the co-pilot figured all that out.

The helicopter turned on its side and cut close to the valley walls as it dropped and gained speed back into the center of the big valley. We turned on our side again, lined up the saddle, and gunned it up the valley, pointed at the little helicopter sized opening in the end. We shot through the opening with our rotors touching the bottom of the cloud and dropped down into the new valley below, gaining speed and losing altitude. The rest of the flight was uneventful, and I felt as if I had just enjoyed an exciting roller coaster ride.

Only later did I discover that this was a pretty desperate and unique flight maneuver they had put me through. I was the only passenger, and they begged me not to tell their leader what we did. Which I was more than happy to do.

To be continued....

The Ghost Brigades

Book Review: WARNING! WITH SPOILERS

You've been warned. I mowed through the last of the second book in the series by John Scalzi. It was also very good. Not quite as good as the first, but that one was up in the stratosphere, so we're still talking much better than most.

You got to the point where you really liked John Perry by the time the first book finished, so for those John Perry fans out there, there is no John here.

There is a nod to other science fiction stories. Scalzi has a group of people reading war fiction, and it's really a reading list of influences on his development. Interestingly, we've read most of the same material.

This version really got into how the Special Forces troops were made. It gets into the awakening and integration of the troops as well as their training. The computer brain interface allows them to have consciousness, even as they are first awakened. They talked about how they were able to clone a full grown adult in 16 weeks by accelerated development, which was cool. They talked about consciousness transfer, which was an interesting concept.

The main character is a clone that is made to house the consciousness, stored in a device, by a mad scientist that defected from the humans and was trying to serve his own goals, which unfortunately involved the slaughter of the human race.

He has the memories or personality of the defecting scientist downloaded onto him, but it doesn't take. So he is trained as a Special Forces soldier, only to have some of the memories and emotions of the bad guy come out gradually and incompletely.

They did another space drop in this one, and they had only one really active battle scene, although it focused more one the main character than the blood & guts you come to see.

In the end, the story was more about morals and honor, conceptual ideas, rather than the mechanics of how all this works. You find that the person that is accused of having no morals or sense of humor has the best of both of these. The way he kills the bad guy in the end is a very interesting twist.

There is a third book in the series, which I think I will wait a while to read. Perhaps when it comes out in paperback. I look forward to seeing more good things from John Scalzi in the future.

Calm, Cool, and Collected

When I was in the Army, I was a young 2nd Lieutenant stationed in Panama. I got a platoon after a while and got a Platoon Sergeant a while after that that I really liked. Sergeant Gates. He seemed young. He was an E6, which is a Staff Sergeant, rather than an E7, which most Platoon Sergeants were. He was smart (although he was so cool that you wouldn't think he was brilliant when you first met him). I had just had an E8 Platoon Sergeant for a very short time, Sergeant Messer, who was a lying really stupid arrogant bullying piece of shit. I still remember the only time I almost cried was when I was getting my ass reamed by Captain Toombes over an issue where an official report I had submitted was in error because my piece of shit Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Messer, had lied to me. I was in a horrible conflict, because on one hand, it was against my style to rat out someone, I simply wanted to go and confront him myself. On the other hand, I was being asked specifically by the Captain about this issue, and I found that I could not tell him the truth. I remember telling Messer later that he lied to me and made me look bad, and I remember it was the only time I ever saw him with any humility. I finally shamed him, because he realized that I knew he was a lying sack of shit, and the only thing I wanted from him was for him to move on so I could forget about him and try to erase the damage he had done to the platoon.

Gates came in after that. Actually, there was a short stint with another Platoon Sergeant, a black quarryman named Sergeant Farmer. I can remember his face, he had been in a horrible accident at some point and his head was dented above his left temple. He was not very bright about a lot of things, like speaking clearly and spelling and writing, but he was a really nice guy, kind to the troops and very good with equipment. Then Gates came in. This was the best thing that happened to me in Panama, having a Platoon Sergeant that knew what to do with the platoon and knew how to play the Army Game. He was married to a Panamanian woman, had two enormous and very scary Rottweilers, and had a tattooed biker past, probably complete with lots of drugs and alcohol. He was funny. He also treated me with a combination of respect and friendship that I appreciated, partly because it was good and right, and partly because it was the first subordinate I had that I both liked and trusted.

Things were always chaotic, confused, and harried back then. I would get rattled, trying to do what was right when the odds against being able to get anything done, much less everything done, much less correctly, approached certainty. When I would get bent out of shape, he used to say, "Don't panic, sir." It was said with a great deal of humor, and although I would not say I was panicking, more like stressing, obsessing, or fretting, the phrase never ceased to make me stop what I was doing and laugh. It was like this perfect antidote to the daily disease that was life in the Army in Panama just prior to Noreiga's downfall and the American invasion.

That's a long lead in to the real story I wanted to tell, but I haven't thought about Sergeant Gates for a long time, and it is fun to recall what a great guy he was.

The real story is about panic. I was listening to an "All in the Mind" radio Australia podcast (rebroadcast) about panic disorders the other day. The gist of the program was looking into panic attacks and panic disorders and the drugs that are thrown at them today. The main person being interviewed was a psychologist that had personally had panic attacks herself and been prescribed Xanex. She actually participated in a clinical trial for the drug and tampered with the results. That part of the interview was a little weird, but mainly the story focused on people prone to panic attacks. Apparently, it feels like you are about to die, and it's a lot more serious than just some person being a drama queen.

I can't relate to that, just like I can't relate to manic depressive disorder. I'm not saying I'm not sympathetic, I'm just saying I haven't personally experienced that particular malady, so I don't know what it's like. Just like I can't relate to childbirth - and never will.

I'm always calm, cool, and collected. I never panic.

OK, that's not true. It's one of those things that you want to believe about yourself, but if you really had to be honest with yourself, you'd have to admit the truth. In this case, I recognize that we as a society value those that can maintain a calm, even in a crisis. I wouldn't say that I panic so much as the fact that I get very irritated, almost bent out of shape. When things aren't right, particularly when things aren't fair, it really bothers me. When bothered, I sometimes expend a lot of energy trying to get things back on track, and/or ranting about what a bunch of shit the screwed up situation is. When in Panama, everything was screwed up all the time. You spent most of the day being somewhere between pissed off and furious about how fouled up things were. What we developed after a while was an attitude of humor about all the crap that was happening. You learned to laugh at everything, because everything sucked.

My brother recently was telling a story about how his boys were complaining about how things were not fair. His response was, "Life isn't fair. Get used to it." Alternately, the soldiers in Iraq come up with slang to describe what a bunch of crap a particular situation is. They've got this great expression: "Embrace the suck": Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it. These phrases can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7458809 if you are interested.

I was describing the program on panic disorders to my wife, and I started thinking about synonyms and antonyms of panic. This was a useful exercise in thinking about how this flavor or mood infects everyday society. Panic is a form of stress or distress. Panic has a flavor of being completely irrational. Anger isn't the same thing. When soldiers panic in combat, they may retreat or surrender, and it leads to a rout. The opposite of panic would be serenity. If you are calm, cool, and collected, you are as far from panicked as you can get. So what is the secret to serenity. I guess there is this happy balance where you are taking care of business, so you are engaged and concerned, but it's not bothering you. Is this the zen state we are looking for? I know that we tend to think of people like this as cool characters, not just that they keep their cool, but that they are cool.

I guess it doesn't matter if you're happy with what you are doing in life, and you're not driving the people around you crazy.

That's cool with me.

Old Man's War

WARNING: THIS BOOK REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS:

I found this book by John Scalzi by accident. I was looking for a book called The Forever War in a newly reissued version around Christmas and was told casually by the person at Barnes and Noble, who had read the Forever War, that this book was a little like it and also good. So I bought it and put it on a shelf for a month.

Then I read it in 3 days.

Absorbed is kind of a light word for my reaction to the book. I might also say entranced or enthralled, but that doesn't quite cover it either. Let's just say that I have not one critism of the book, it's excellent in every respect.

Probably my favorite aspect of the book, after the concept, is the dialog. Probably my favorite dialog is the part where John Perry talks with the Consu, a superior alien species, in order to find out information about humanity's enemies. It's not a negotiation, but a one sided conversation with a species that hates humans and doesn't care much what they say. The funny part is that John Perry has nothing to lose, so he talks with the irreverence of a high school kid with an attitude. It's fun.

The character development is very good. You really feel like you are getting to know John Perry well, and you really get to like him and feel some strange pride in his accomplishments.

The technology is very interesting. Cloning, consciousness transfer, integrated personal computers in your brain, the Skip Drive to get you around the cosmos without having to slog along in a straight line, nanobots, and advanced weapons spice up the story nicely. The space drop onto a planet is a cool touch, similar to a halo drop by our combat forces in real life.

The story builds nicely, because you know of some important things without knowing about them. The whole mystery of what is going to happen to them as their age is reversed is a wonderful mystery until it happens. Another favorite thing about the book is their time in basic training. The drill sergeant character is another high point in the book.

Threading through the book is the love story of John and his dead wife. It's poignant, believable, and interesting without weighing the book down with melancholy. I like the way the believability of the book is enhanced by this aspect of the story. You know that the character understands why things have to happen, and even understands what it is that he is feeling without being rendered useless by his feelings. That in itself makes John Perry a hero, but his matter of fact way of dealing with each new twist, shock, or surprise is what you really come to like.

I'm half way through the sequel, The Ghost Brigades. Not as compelling as the first book, but still head and shoulders over most books I've read. I'll write about it when I'm done.

Dune Series

CAUTION: Book Review with spoilers:

I can finally say I've finished the Dune series.

I read the original some time in High School. My brother and I read the original 3 books (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune), as well as all the later ones done by Frank Herbert's son, at roughly the same time. I had read the continuation of the classic line (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse) by Frank Herbert years ago, and my brother read them more recently. I remember thinking that it was becoming more and more incomprehensible as Frank Herbert put out his last three sequels.

But that didn't stop the story from being intriguing and interesting. I like the way that the son stepped in and backfilled the original story, as well as taking the old storyline forward.

The continuation of the series was a collaborative effort between Brian Herbert, Frank's son, and Kevin J. Anderson. I just found out, after finishing the series, that Kevin J. Anderson did a lot of the Star Wars books. I'm glad I didn't know that. Most Dune purists probably think of Dune as being an intellectual exercise, and the Star Wars series is more like the pulp fiction branch of science fiction. Heavy on the action and adventure, light on the science and philosophy.

There was a different flavor to the continued series. The original series made the characters seem too complex to completely understand, while at the same time, more respectable and less human. The new series had the characters feeling more human, but also more shallow and superficial. It wasn't a major flaw, just a minor distraction.

The major draw of the continued series, both the backstory and the continued thread of the main story was all the background and explanation as to why things were the way they were. What was the real motivation of people and peoples - this is what made the whole saga more detailed, coherent, and complete.

That said, there were a couple of annoyances. The Deus Ex Machina of having the Oracle of Time simply fly in and solve the problem with the machine invasion and Omnius at the last second was a little too convenient to be satisfying. The fact that everyone simply stopped struggling and got along once Duncan Idaho merged with the machines and was found to be the ultimate Kwizatz Hadderach was not very interesting (it was satisfying, but not interesting). The entire conflict went from coming to a head to being resolved so quickly that you get literary whiplash.

So, in truth, what does the completion of the series accomplish? There were no loose ends left to tie up that I can think of. There is no reason to write more backstory or continued narrative. I have no curiousity about things, it's all been explained. I'm glad I read the series, it was interesting and an epic saga with many interesting characters and concepts. I'm left not feeling sad or nostalgic about the book, as the original three books of Dune left you feeling sympathy for the tragedy of Paul Atreides life. This one leaves you feeling like things will go on, only better now.

The conflict and messiness of the original core of the series is what made it interesting. Like a splinter in your brain, there's always some pressure and a little bit of pain, the issue never goes away completely. I think that I would have always felt that way if I hadn't read the series to the end, but now I find that I miss that feeling.

I hope that's not a comment on life in general. You think you are striving toward completion and contentment, but what does it mean when you're not satisfied being satisfied?

Ill Wind

Book Review WITH SPOILERS

I was loaned Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason by my brother, who recommended it. I'd read Anderson before, particularly his collaborations with Brian Herbert in the extended Dune series. A quick search shows that he was also the author of "The League of Extroidinary Gentlemen" which was made into a movie. He also wrote a lot of Star Wars books.

This book has a great premise, but it falls flat. There was something both unbelievable and incredibly irritating about the characters. I kept waiting for something very dramatic or very heroic to happen, and it didn't. Some characters had fatal flaws, but kept mucking around. Other characters were full of honor and purpose, but couldn't get their act together. While you could argue that this is a fair description of real life, the result here is a story you can't believe.

The premise is an interesting. I remember hearing about oil eating bacteria years ago as a solution to oil spills years ago. The intersting premise here is what if it gets out of control. They manage to make this very extreme, unbelievable, and not very interesting. Connoisseurs of the end of the world genre know that society breaks down pretty fast. They just sort of gloss over this effect. In all, I didn't care if the noble scientists trying to save the world succeeded, and I didn't believe either their triumphs or setbacks. Too bad. It's worth exploring in better detail later.

Ironically, there was an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay the week I started reading this book, and another in the Black Sea the next week, as well as a minor spill off of Israel, if I remember that last one properly. So it was a timely read, but not at all satisfying.

Big Barns to Big Box Churches

There used to be big barns here. When I was in high school, a little over 25 years ago, I drove down my street to 50 Highway and turned to go the last 4 miles into town. We used to be "out in the country". Near here was all farms and cropland for as far as you could see.

On the way into town, and come to think of it, on my street, were these huge barns. We're talking 4 story high monstrosities, grand old monarchs of the golden age of agriculture. Big wooden structures with enormous doors on either end. I remember driving by one that was open one day and looking inside and seeing two combines side by side in the middle lane. That's only about a third or a quarter of the width of the building, and they were side by side. The barn was BIG.

As the 90s progressed, I still noted and admired the barns on my drive into town. You could tell they weren't being used any more, but they were still majestic icons of a bygone era. There was something permanent and comforting about them. They linked you to a simpler past.

My favorite one grew more obscure each year as a grove of small trees grew up around it.

Progress marched our way, and the cursed developers kept gobbling up the farmland to fill with their big box stores and car dealerships. Then the barns were torn down. I don't remember the exact day, or if they were knocked down suddenly or slowly. I remember I had been thinking that the biggest barn could be made into a clubhouse for the housing development that was sprouting up behind it, but that didn't happen. It was simply destroyed. And it wasn't destroyed so that something else could be immediately built in it's place. It was simply discarded as if it had been a blight on the landscape instead of a welcome beacon. The grove of trees is still there, taller now, and the small pile of rubble that remains is probably still in there as well.

Next to the grove of trees marking the big barn's final resting place is a new church. If you got a quaint Little House on the Prairie vision of a little white church with a cute steeple, forget it. This thing can probably hold a couple of thousand people. It looks like a spaceship landed in a field and is waiting to take over the city after it gets instructions from the mothership. Next to it, another enormous big box church went in, and next to it, I just noticed that the enormous building being constructed right now is another giant church. How many people are going to be going to these churches? It used to be that people went to church for a sense of community and connection. How much connection can a person feel in a crowd 4 times bigger than your high school graduating class?

There's something sterile and sinister about the big box churches. Just like there's something soulless and impersonal about the big box stores, these new churches feel like a commercial endeavor, fuel by tax increment financing. I wonder if they told the city council that they would bring lots of revenue to the city in exchange for locating here? Really, will they be filled on day one? Are people in this country really that busy out there shopping for a church? Is one's piety now measured in the size and grandure of the church you attend, rather than how good you are to your fellow man? Can people not connect with God unless it's in a really nice, new church? I suppose God doesn't want to waste his time in tiny dingy run down churches. Those people probably aren't even going to be saved. I guess when the Rapture comes, all the big box churches will be empty and nothing else will be touched.

That's why they call it Rapture. It'll be good for those of us that are left.

Billboard Blight

I hate billboards. That's my position, so if you're an owner of a billboard conglomerate, or if you are so everything-is-beautiful crazy that you like them, you can skip this.

I remember driving in the Missouri Ozarks, down around Branson some years ago. When I left on this trip, I was interested in seeing the natural beauty of the Ozark Mountains. These are "mountains" so worn down by time that they really are more like hills. But the region is beautiful, heavily forested with big springs and wild rivers. However, this vision of beauty is blotted out around Branson by what almost amounts to a highway wall of billboard advertising. I was angered and saddened then, and things have not gotten any better in the meantime.

If you've ever travelled down I-70 in Missouri, you know what it means to completely mar a landscape with these nuisances. We're not talking quaint little signs that some guy on a ladder could go out and resurface in an afternoon. We're talking enormous expanses that are so huge that they need skyscraper grade support columns. They are equipped with a blinding display their own spotlights, and I think they should have aviation warning beacons, if some of them don't already.

A few years back, people in the state got fed up and finally tried to make a law that no more new billboards could be put up. They didn't even try to address the blighted ones already in existence. The Billboard Lobby (you wouldn't think there would be such a thing, much less an enormous and effective one) went into action. First, they blanketed the state with a huge increase in billboards that would be grandfathered in if the bill passed. Then they tried to get the courts involved, saying that this bill would limit their free speech. In the end, they won and defeated the bill, probably filling the campaign coffers of the legislatures that "supported" them.

During this period, we were thrilled to be presented with two new billboards at the end of my street where it ends at Highway 50. I don't need to reiterate that they are ugly and a blight on the landscape and produce serenity spoiling light pollution at night. My point here is that they are not even being used. As you can see by the picture, the only thing they advertise is that someone needs to put an ad up on them. They're basically advertising that they are not only an ugly nuisance, but unneccessary too.

And that is the real tragedy of the story.

Giving Up?

I freely admit to spying on neighbors.

However, I'm not sure you should even call these ones neighbors. House flipper realtors don't really count as neighbors.

I saw a couple in a white SUV on the driveway, talking to the "owner" flipper. I watched from my window. The conversation did not look congenial.

At first, I thought maybe it was a potential buyer, then I started wondering if it was the realtor. The couple was a man and a woman, but the woman was a lot older than the man, so I didn't think they were husband and wife, but maybe colleauges.

It looked like the owner was sort of arguing, maybe not in a contentious way, just trying to get his points across, and the couple looked like they were utterly unconvinced.

Later, I noticed that their footprints in the snow showed that they went to the front doors of the house where the electricity disconnection notices were still posted. I also noticed that the owner backed into our yard and made a mud rut with his back tire.

The next day, the real estate agent's sign was removed.

News of the housing markets just keep getting worse. I went through the back yard around the pool last night, looking for a cat and noticed that there was 2½' of water in the pool equipment room. Obviously, the drains are clogged with leaves and debris. It's possible that the cabana that they removed used to keep the water out and the deck that they replaced it with does not. I wonder how much damage the water is doing to the pool heater and filter? More money just evaporating away.

I wonder if we'll see a foreclosure sale sometime?

Postscript:

I called the realtor. It was another exercise in unreality. The secretary had a guy call me back that didn't even know that their company was listing the property. He kept trying to engage me on the phone, even when I figured out that I needed to talk to Pamela. Truly Dave, you are an idiot.

Pamela is his kindred spirit. Maybe they are brother and sister, their mental processes were certainly a match. Pamela said that they were going to "re-list" it. This is another meaningless buzz word that can mean anything they want it to mean, similar to the way they would tell us that the house was "under contract", which we were supposed to interpret as meaning that they had someone interested in buying it, when it really meant "I don't want you to think we are losers".

Pamela (if that is her real name) said the house is now $900,000 (down from $1.2 million - 25% off! that's a real sale!). They would be willing to take $875,000, as is. That means that for $900,000 he'll finish working on the house. Then she proceeded to tell me about the granite counters they are going to put in the guest house.

If this isn't like putting makeup on a pig, I don't know what is.