Somthing's happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear

Keep this under your hat.

While helping my older daughter with her science project (it's a long story), I was surveying the area around Ft. Stockton, Texas with Google Earth, when I saw these strange markings in the terrain near Interstate Highway 10 and Ranch Road 1776 (33° 55' 43.87" N, 103° 4' 53.49" W):

Here's a close-up of one part:

 

 And an even closer-up:

  

There's only one explanation: Aliens, and I don't mean the kind you can deport, either, if you know what I'm saying. I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle in place yet, but I think I'm getting close. I'll keep you posted.

There's one more thing, and this is important: if something happens to me, take this information immediately to the Mainstream News Media--someone trustworthy like Fox News or MSNBC.

Wish me luck.

Flaco

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Revised)

[Author's note: I often make small revisions to posts after I have published them to this blog without calling attention to the fact. But the revisions I have made to this post are fairly radical, so I wanted to call my reader(s)' attention to them. After the original posting, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with parts of the post, because I was afraid they sounded sappy and phony. So I've changed those parts. Additions are underlined, like this. Deletions are stricken out, like this. I'm still not happy with the post, because there's an emotional statement that I was trying to make that is now gone. But until I have time to make that statement in a way that sounds less sappy, it's best that I keep it to myself. Maybe I'll try again next Christmas.]

According to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, is the ninth-most popular Christmas song so far this year. Recordings of the song by various artists were played on the radio 38,395 times between October 1 and November 28. Unfortunately, data are not available to show how many times each of the two versions of the song’s lyrics was played.

You may not have known there were two versions; you hardly ever hear but one of them nowadays.

The most popular version—the one you hear 99% of the time—goes like this:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

From now on, our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Make the yuletide gay.

From now on, our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,

Happy golden days of yore,

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Gather near to us once more.

Through the years we all will be together,

If the fates allow.

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

A few years ago, I was only vaguely aware that there might be two versions of the song. I remembered hearing something about "muddling through" in the lyrics of the song, but I heard them only every once in awhile. I didn’t give the matter much thought except to think that those were unusual words for a Christmas song. Then I heard the song played one December night on the radio, and the announcer referred to it as the “original version recorded in the 1940’s.” Everything then fell into place for me. The 1940’s! I’ll bet it was during the war, I thought. A quick internet search confirmed my hunch.

The first recording of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sung by Judy Garland, was released by Decca records in 1944. These were the lyrics:  Think of what it must have been like for Americans that Christmas. Gasoline, rubber, nylon, shoes and other essentials were being rationed because the war effort needed them. People had planted “victory gardens” in their backyards to grow their own food. They were conducting paper and scrap-metal drives and buying war bonds. All across the country, families had husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers in combat theaters “somewhere in the Pacific” or “somewhere in Europe.” (That’s all the military censors would allow the servicemen to say about their locations in the letters they sent back home.) From October through December of that year, for example, General MacArthur's army was fighting the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, and in Leyte Gulf the navy fought what some say was the greatest battle in naval history. Allied troops were fighting their way across Europe, and beginning in mid-December many were fighting desperately in the snow to repulse the German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge. And whether servicemen's families celebrating Christmas back home in 1944 said it out loud or not, they worried they might never see their loved ones again. They dreaded the knock on the door from the Western Union boy, and of course, many had already received that life-changing telegram from the War Department.

Here are the words that Judy Garland sang that Christmas:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Let your heart be light.
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Make the yuletide gay.
Next year all our troubles will be miles away.

Once again as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us once more.

Someday soon we all will be together,
If the fates allow.
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

I understand (I’m getting much of this from Wikipedia by the way--credit where it's due) that Judy Garland’s recording was a wartime favorite among American servicemen. And this original version of the lyrics was recorded by a few other singers as well. But things changed in 1957 when Frank Sinatra prevailed upon the composer to change the words of the song so that Sinatra could include a less bittersweet version in his album, A Jolly Christmas. Hugh Martin accommodated Sinatra by writing a jollier set of lyrics. He changed the song's future-looking point of view--"next year" and "someday soon"--and replaced it with "from now on." And most tellingly, he deleted the muddling-through and in its place hung a shining star upon the highest bough. But the title remained the same, which presents something of an anomaly. If things in the Sinatra version are so hunky-dory now and will be from now on, why is it still just a  merry little Christmas?

The shining-star version has since been recorded many, many times by many, many singers (including Judy Garland, herself). It’s pretty much all you hear nowadays (although James Taylor, bless his heart, did record the muddling-through version on his 2006 CD James Taylor at Christmas).

I much prefer the muddling-through version to the shining-star version, and it’s a shame we hardly ever hear it. Its lyrics fit the scaled-down, subdued, merry little Christmas of the song's title much better than the shinging-star version does. And it's more realistic. We’re bombarded with fru-fru, secular Christmas songs that pretend that the problems that were challenging us during the first eleven months of the year magically disappeared the day after Thanksgiving. But we all know in our hearts that it doesn't work like that.

To my way of thinking, we still need the original version of the song, because there’s still plenty of muddling-through to be done at Christmas. I guess there always will be. Take war, for example. By my rough count, there have been 22 Christmases since 1944 when Americans were serving in combat zones. (It’s a rough count, because it’s hard to keep up with the dates that some wars start and stop, as you know.) That's twenty-two Christmases when there were American families uncertain that their loved ones would return home alive--and were muddling through the best they could in the meantime.

And there are plenty of other reasons besides having a family member deployed in a war zone why a person or a family might find themselves muddling through a Christmas and hoping that things will be better next year: illness; unemployment; recent divorce; a recent death that has shaken a family’s very foundation. Under such circumstances, it will take quiet heroism for the folks involved to make Christmas merry, and if they achieve a merry Christmas at all it is likely to be a little one.

My family is doing just fine this Christmas, and I hope yours is, too. But that could all change in a heartbeat. Or with a telephone call. Or with the delivery of a pink slip. If we are not among the ranks of the muddling-through today, we could be tomorrow. It seems to me that it isn’t asking too much to have at least one Christmas song for people who are just trying to muddle through.


So I’ll close by offering this modest Christmas wish to you and yours: Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow. So have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.

Turns out there really was a Casey Jones

My local newspaper has a little daily feature that lists a few events that happened on this date in history. Today I read about the death of John Luther "Casey" Jones, the railroad engineer, who died on this day in 1900. Wikipedia and the Casey Jones Village website (http://www.caseyjones.com/) tell me the following about Casey Jones:

He was a train engineer for the Illinois Central. He was from Cayce, Kentucky, hence the nickname "Casey." He prided himself on keeping  his train on schedule or, in trainman's vernacular, "getting her there on the advertised" and never "falling down" (arriving late). Some say he had a tendency to take chances to meet that goal, but he was talented, and his peers considered him one of the best in the business.

Jones had a special train whistle. Its unique sound involved a long-drawn-out note that began softly, rose and then died away to a whisper, a sound which became his trademark. Some described its sound as "a sort of whippoorwill call," and people asleep in their beds along his route would hear it as he went by late at night and wake momentarily, saying, "There goes Casey Jones.”

On the night of April 29, 1900, he had just completed a run from Canton, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee and would normally have laid over in Memphis.  But the regular engineer who would have had the Memphis-to-Canton run  called in sick, and so Jones was assigned the run (nicknamed "the Cannonball Express"). The weather was rainy and foggy, and the Memphis-to-Canton run was known for tricky curves. The change in engineers delayed the start of the run by 95 minutes, and although the run would normally take 4 hours and 50 minutes, Jones was determined to make up the 95-minute delay and "get her there on the advertised." The train left the station at 12:50 a.m., April 30.

He almost made up the entire 95-minute delay. By the time he was 155 miles into the 188-mile run, he was almost on time and was feeling chipper. He told his fireman,"the old girl's got her dancing slippers on tonight!" By the time he reached Vaughn, Mississippi, he was only two minutes behind.

But ahead around a bend there were two freight trains stopped on a side track with several cars extending out onto the main line. They were preparing to perform a maneuver called a "saw-by" to allow the Cannonball Express to pass, when an air hose broke and immobilized one of the freight trains, leaving the cars on the main line. Jones' fireman was in a position to spot the trouble first and yelled, "Oh my Lord, there's something on the main line!" Jones yelled to the fireman to jump. The fireman jumped from the speeding train and was knocked unconscious, but Jones stayed at the controls to try to reduce the train's speed. He reversed the throttle, applied the emergency air brakes, and succeeded in reducing speed from about 75 miles an hour to 35 before the train plowed into a wooden caboose, a car load of hay, a car full of corn and half way through a car of timber before leaving the track. Jones died in the crash, but none of his passengers were seriously injured, nor was the fireman who had jumped from the train. It's pretty clear that Jones' decision to stay on the train and do what he could to slow it down saved the lives of the passengers.

An African-American engine-wiper for the Illinois Central, Wallace Saunders, was a friend of  Jones and composed a ballad about him that caught on and has been recorded many times in various versions. The poet Carl Sandburg called "Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer" the "greatest ballad ever written." For his part, Wallace Saunders called Carl Sandburg "the greatest poet in the history of the world." (Just kidding.)

The Grateful Dead recorded the ballad but also did a spin-off entitled simply "Casey Jones." It's a lot more catchy to my ear than the ballad, but it also defames poor Casey with these lines:
 
Driving that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones, you better
Watch your speed.
 
Jones was a teetotaler and devoted family man, and there is no evidence that he used cocaine. That's just The Grateful Dead being The Grateful Dead. The posthumous warning to "watch your speed," however, probably has some merit.
 
For years after the train crash that killed Jones, corn grew wild at the site--generations descended from the load of corn that was scattered from the freight train when the locomotive plowed into it.

John Luther "Casey" Jones
March 14, 1863--April 30, 1900

Remembering Margaret Hamilton

For some years now I've felt some affection for the memory of Margaret Hamilton. I'm not sure why.

You probably don’t recognize the name. She was a character actress who was very active in film and theater during the '30’s and '40’s. I can give you a hint to help you picture her, but the hint is so broad that it’s much more than a hint; it’s the answer. One of her movie lines was ranked 99th in the 2005 American Film Institute survey of the most memorable movie quotes: “I'll get you, my pretty . . . and your little dog, too!"

She wasn’t the producer’s first choice for the role of Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. (By the way, credit’s where it’s due: I’m getting most of this from Wikipedia.) Some pretty actress whom I’ve never heard of (Gale Sondergaard) turned down the role, because she was unwilling to allow herself to be made up to appear ugly. (That’s what vanity will get you.) Hamilton, never having been burdened with good looks, took the part, nailed it cold, and made it a part of movie history. It’s now hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

Selling the Wicked Witch of the West

As scary as the Wicked Witch was in the movie, she apparently could have been scarier. The studio executives cut some of her more wicked scenes for fear of scaring children in the movie audience. (Wouldn’t you like to see those cut scenes?) Many years later, she did a reprise of her role as the Wicked Witch on Sesame Street in an episode about fear. Apparently, she did her job too well, because it scared the bejeebers out of the kids in TV land, and the complaints from their parents persuaded the Sesame Street executives to never air that episode again.

Apparently, Hamilton was cast against type when she was cast as the witch, because in real life she was apparently very loving and friendly toward children. She had been a kindergarten teacher before making a career of acting. She sat on the Beverly Hills Board of Education in the '50’s and was also a Sunday school teacher. She appeared as herself on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood in the mid-70’s to show children how makeup could make a person look scary but that it was just make-believe.

In the '60’s, she was a regular in the soap opera The Secret Storm; in the early '70’s, she was a regular in the cast of As the World Turns. She continued acting until just a few years before her death in 1985. Her last acting job was a guest appearance as a veteran reporter on The Lou Grant Show.

Sometime in the '70’s, while I was in college, I saw a commercial on TV in which a kindly, elderly lady was promoting some brand of coffee. “That’s the Wicked Witch of the West!” I exclaimed. Whoever I said it to was skeptical, and I had no way to confirm it. Until now. Wikipedia tells us that Ms. Hamilton made a series of commercials for Maxwell House coffee during the '70’s, in which she played the part of Cora, the owner of a general store, who thought highly of Maxwell House.

Selling coffee

But she’ll always be a witch to me.

(And am I the only one who feels a twinge of pity for her near the end of the movie when she’s melting? When she’s shrunk down to nothing but a steaming pile of witch's clothes and while she’s barely moving what used to be her arms and her voice is growing more and more faint, her last words are, “What a world, what a world.” Kind of makes me sad.)

So here's to Margaret Hamilton--such a good wicked witch. To borrow from the lyrics of one of the songs in the movie: she was a whiz of a witch, if ever a witch there was.

Our Tent is a Very, Very, Very Fine Tent

Santa Claus left our family a Big Agnes Flying Diamond 8 tent for Christmas. It was the largest tent I could find at REI. I think it’s the largest tent you can buy without a circus license.

I chose such a big tent on the theory that the bigger the tent, the more comfortable my children were likely to be in it, and the more comfortable they were, the more pleasant they would find the camping experience. And the more pleasant they found the first camping trip, the more likely they would be to go on another. If it doesn't work out that way, I guess I'll have a very large, lightly used tent for sale.

It wasn’t that way with me when I was a kid. I was drawn to camping and didn’t worry too much about getting rained on or bitten by mosquitoes. When my father and my uncle took my cousin, my brother, and me camping on the Sabine River, we didn’t have a tent at all. My father and my uncle would string up a flimsy tarp of polyethylene that my father got for free at the DuPont plant where he worked, and we huddled beneath it when the rains came. We didn’t mind.

But back to our new tent. I think it’s the biggest tent I’ve ever seen. It’s long and wide, and at its tallest point I can stand up straight without my head touching the top. It has two doors—a front and a back—and a zip-up curtain that allows you to separate the tent into two rooms (or to tie it back out of the way if you don’t want to). I figured that as my daughters get older and become more modest, they will appreciate having a room of their own or at least a separate dressing area. And since the separate area has its own entrance through the back door, they can even act like their parents aren’t there. That will come in handy when they reach the age where our presence embarrasses them. They can pretend they have a completely separate address in the campground, as though they lived in a ripstop nylon duplex.

The tent is so large that I’m having some buyer’s remorse, because I’m afraid it may be too big for the space allotted in most car-camping spaces in state and national parks. I guess I’ll find out. I’m not going to try to send it back at this point, given what I put it through last night. What’s done is done.

The “8” in the name of the tent means it can sleep eight people. It doesn’t mean it can sleep eight people comfortably, however. Fortunately for tent-shoppers, companies like Big Agnes provide a diagram showing how the claimed number of sleepers would actually fit in a particular model of tent, so no one is misled. Those diagrams always remind me of wasp larvae in their nest. When I was a boy, I once took apart a wasp nest to see what was inside. The wasp larvae were white grubs with the beginnings of wings. Each larva was nestled inside its own little cell, which was topped with a white paper cap. Looking back on it, I’m sorry I took apart the wasp nest and aborted those would-be wasps. But what’s done is done.

Back to our tent. Here’s the schematic diagram supplied by the Big Agnes company showing how eight sleepers can fit inside the Flying Diamond 8:

You can see that if the sleeper in the middle of the pack needs to get up in the middle of the night, there will probably be some grumbling from the others. I suppose some people actually camp like that, but I can't imagine why. I'd bring fewer campers or more tents, or I'd rig a tarp or sleep under the stars, although my experience of last night is a reminder of why a tarp or sleeping under the stars is not always an option. (By the way, I don't fault the Big Agnes company for claiming that their tent sleeps eight. All tent-makers follow the same convention in naming their tents; they name them for the maximum number of persons who can be laid out on the floor.)

Here's a picture of our new tent with the rainfly in place:

I slept in the tent last night in our back yard. I wanted to set up the tent to see what it was like and to learn how to do it. (I’ve learned from sad experience that you don’t want to find yourself using a flashlight to read the instructions for the first time as you try to set up your brand-new tent at night on a riverbank in the pouring rain.) I thought my family, or some of them might want to have a back-yard campout while the tent was up. Unfortunately, the weather forecast was very discouraging: 100% chance of rain, and thunderstorms highly likely after midnight, along with blustery winds. My wife opted out. At first, my two daughters said they would join me in the tent. I knew the younger would bail out when it came time to actually say goodnight to mom and head off for the tent, but I thought there was a fairly good chance that the older one would stick with it. As it turned out, she bailed, too. Neither one was willing to brave the wilds of our backyard without their mother, sad to say.

But I stuck with my plan and thought the predicted rain and wind would actually be a pretty good test. I put the rainfly on and tied it down with extra guylines to prepare for the expected blow. There was only a slight drizzle when I drifted off to sleep but I was later awakened by a hard blast of wind that was strong enough to push the wall of the tent inward momentarily to where it was almost horizontal and touched my face for a few seconds before the tent sprung back into shape. Then the rain came. It was ferocious. The sound of the rain on the fly grew so loud that I began to wonder if it was mixed with hail. I was glad then that my kids weren’t with me, for they surely would have panicked at this point.

Then the lightning and thunder started. At first, I tried to count the seconds between the flash and the thunder to estimate the distance, but there were so many flashes and so much thunder that it became impossible to pair the flash with its corresponding rumble, so I gave up--but not before concluding that the lightning was very close.

I began to try to evaluate the risk I was putting myself in. I knew it was low: there wasn’t much chance that I was going to be struck by lightning. Still, my chances of being struck were much greater in my back yard than they would be in my house. The risk was low, but the “delta” of the risk (as the engineers would say) was great. I began to have serious doubts about whether I was doing a smart thing.

And something else began to bother me. I realized how incredibly stupid I would sound in the news story that would report my being struck by lightning. I started imagining all the “Darwinism in action” jokes that strangers would make at my expense. (The jokes come too late, however, since I've already reproduced. Hah!)

On the other hand, if I abandoned my backyard campout, what message would I be sending my kids? That camping is dangerous, even in your own backyard?

These were the things I was thinking as the lighting kept flashing and the thunder kept banging. Ultimately, I couldn’t stand the thought of the postmortem mortification I would feel from the headline: “Local Man Killed by Lightning Strike While Camping in Back Yard During Thunderstorm Warning.” I gave up and dashed to the house in my underwear at about 4:30 a.m., where I dried off and crawled into my real bed, feeling defeated.

This morning, I surveyed the damage. There wasn’t much. There was a little water in the tent. I’m not sure where it came from. It might have come through the little hooded windows in the rainfly, which allow for ventilation but are configured so that rain would have to be falling almost sideways (or upwards) to come through the openings. You have the option of closing them, and perhaps I should have. Or maybe the water in the tent came in when I opened the door to make my dash for the house. Or maybe the tent just leaked. As strong and unrelenting as the rain was, I wouldn’t fault the tent for taking on a little water.

The wind pulled the stakes loose from the vestibule portion of the rainfly at the front door. I have an idea how I can avoid that the next time I face strong winds in this tent.
But the main thing I would do differently if I had it to do over again is that I would have stayed in the tent throughout the storm. I had a golden opportunity to teach my girls that rainstorms while camping are nothing to be particularly afraid of and that camping is a safe thing to do. Instead, I ran for cover. I blew it very badly. But what’s done is done.

(The news reported today that the local airport reported a wind gust of 69 m.p.h. at 4:02 a.m. and widely scattered hail. A tornado with winds close to 100 m.p.h. inflicted major damage to the roof of a high school in the western part of the county. Today, though, the weather was very nice.)

A Different Kind of Christmas Pageant

My wife supervises the rehabilitation department of a children’s hospital. This is the first Christmas she has worked there. Every Christmas the hospital puts on a pageant. It’s the only chance that some of these disabled kids will ever have to be in a Christmas pageant.

The cast of the pageant isn’t exclusively hospital patients. The therapists who produce the pageant also like to include non-disabled kids from the community, so that the hospital patients get a chance to hang around with normal kids. My two daughters, ages 7 and 3, were part of this year’s pageant. They’ve been going to frequent rehearsals for several weeks.

The pageant was presented yesterday. The cast included some Down syndrome children, some autistic children, some children who couldn’t walk, and a little girl with an extreme (but reconstructed) cleft palate. The audience included a little girl, maybe five or six, dressed up in a frilly, gold-colored dress, who seemed sad and may have been blind. Another little girl in the audience had a portable IV.

The program itself was a pretty typical Christmas pageant. It included: A skit entitled “The Magic Toyshop” (I didn’t pay much attention to it, since my kids weren’t in it); one entitled “The Kingdom of Sweets,” which consisted of excerpts from the Nutcracker (using dancers borrowed from the local ballet school); an enactment of “The Night Before Christmas;” an enactment of “The Twelve Days of Christmas;” and at the end, a re-enactment of the Nativity scene.

I watched most of the pageant through the viewfinder of my video camera, trying to focus on my own children. And it wasn’t easy, because I had to lean back and forth around the guy in front of me, who was watching the pageant through the viewfinder of his own video camera.

During “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” my younger daughter was a golden ring, and she got to stand up and twirl around prettily every time the song came to the drawn-out “FIVE. . . GOL. . . DEN. . .RINGS. . .” part of the song. There was another golden-ring girl who appeared to have Down syndrome who enjoyed jumping up and twirling so much that she would start early and wouldn’t stop.

During “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” I heard from time to time what sounded for all the world like the honking of a goose. I didn’t think much of it, since the song does include repeated references to six geese a-laying. But after the song was over, and the cast was just standing there accepting the applause, I noticed that the honking continued. It was coming from a boy who appeared to have multiple disabilities. Apparently, honking was just what he did and didn’t have anything in particular to do with the song.

The final scene was a re-enactment of the Nativity, with a recording of someone singing “Silent Night” playing in the background. My younger daughter was not in this scene, but my older one was. She was dressed as an angel, with a long, satiny white dress and a white, fuzzy halo. Her job was to just stand there. She was beautiful. And—by the grace of God or random good fortune—so healthy.

The wise men, dressed in resplendent gold costumes, came with their gifts for the baby Jesus. The first was a large boy, probably in his teens. He felt his way forward as he walked with a cane, and a helper led him where he needed to go, which included walking to center stage. There, he turned toward the audience, and looking beyond them with sightless eyes, held up a small bag of brightly colored, shiny cloth for the audience to see. He then turned and was led back to the baby Jesus (played by one of the hospital’s infant patients). The blind wise man presented his gift to the man holding the baby, and then his helper led him off to the side.

The next wise man was a slight boy with a very thin face, in his early teens, I’d guess. He used two black orthopedic canes to walk. His walking looked like a struggle, as he threw his elbows and hips and shoulders out at odd angles as he moved from one step to another. He, too, walked to the center of the stage, faced the audience, and held up his little bag of shiny cloth. He then turned and made his way to the man holding the baby, gave him the bag, and then lurched off to one side.

The third wise man was another teenager. It looked to my untrained eye that he had cerebral palsy, or something like it. His head and arms and hands were held at odd angles. A man stood behind him, held him up, and helped him walk to the center of the stage. Like the two other wise men before him, he turned to the audience, held up his bag as though presenting a toast, and then, with his helper, hobbled over to the man holding the baby.

To my eye, the face of each of the three wise men held an expression of determination, but not triumph, as he faced the audience and held up the gift he was about to present to the Christ child. I could imagine that each was saying, “This is just the way it is for me. I go through this every day.”

After the third wise man presented his gift, the mistress of ceremonies thanked us all for coming, and the show was over. The actors stayed on the stage to have their pictures taken, and the audience was milling around. I stayed seated for quite awhile, looking at the disabled children and at my healthy angel-daughter and thinking of the three wise men. I considered tearing up but decided against it. The honking boy started up again.

I'm happy for the hospital kids who got to be in a Christmas pageant. I'm glad my kids got the opportunity to learn about children who are different. I hope my kids contributed in some small way to a pleasant experience for the hospital kids. Most of all, I'm grateful that my kids were outsiders and not patients. And I hope with all my heart that the same is true next Christmas.

Showing Off for My Kids

I got it into my head the other day to talk about gravity with my older daughter (whom I will refer to by the initial of her first name, “A”). After looking forward to it all day, I brought the subject up at the dinner table when we had finished eating.

“Have you ever wondered why things fall down instead of up?” I asked her.

She looked at me sideways with an intrigued smile. I could see she was trying to tell whether I was asking a legitimate question or just setting her up for a word-game trick.

She said no. I then asked her if she knew what gravity was, and she gave a good answer: it was the force that made us fall back down when we jumped up in the air.

“So why do we fall back down instead of falling up?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, still suspecting a trick.

“Well, sometimes things actually do fall up.”

“What?!! How?”

I started moving things around on the dining table to represent the earth and the moon and the planets and a rubber ball. I explained that if the rubber ball was very close to earth—like in our dining room—and you dropped it, it would fall down to the floor. But if you took it far enough away from earth out into space and close enough to the moon, for example, it would start falling away from earth—in other words, up—and toward the moon. I told her it would work the same way if you moved the ball close enough to Venus or Mars or the sun. If the ball got close enough to any of those bodies, it would fall toward it and away from the earth.

Then I did a few historical riffs, talking about how Isaac Newton figured all this out hundreds of years ago by studying the movements of the planets. (I left out the part about the apple bonking him on the head, since I understand there is little evidence to support that story.) I told her that Newton was one of the smartest people who ever lived and that she would be hearing more about him as she continued in school. I added that Newton had to invent a completely new branch of mathematics just to figure these things out (which didn’t mean much to her) and that he did it a long time ago before it was possible to even send rocket ships out into space to see if something would in fact start falling away from the earth and toward the moon if it got far enough away from earth (which did seem to catch her attention). And I closed with this moral: “Smart people don’t just try to answer difficult questions. Sometimes they start by thinking up entirely new questions that seem silly, like why things fall down instead of up, and then they try to answer those questions that other people might think are silly.” I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

When I was originally planning my talk to “A” about gravity I imagined that I would be contributing to her education. But I think the truth is that I was just looking for a chance to show off by demonstrating that I knew things that my children haven’t learned yet. And I figure that my time for doing that is running out.

My father was a pretty smart man, and he could explain lots of things to me when I was a boy. Often, he would do it by drawing a diagram of some sort. He would take out his elegantly slim Paper Mate® mechanical pencil (the kind with the little raised white dot on the barrel near the top), give it a twist, send me to fetch a piece of paper, and then draw a picture. Sometimes, the picture would illustrate some concrete, physical thing (like some principle of mechanics) and at other times something abstract (like Roman numerals).

One day I came to him with a textbook opened to a page showing a simplified diagram of a rocket. There was something about the working of the rocket I didn’t understand. He looked at the picture only a few seconds and then handed the book back to me.

“Son, you’re asking me things now I don’t know anything about,” he said.

I don’t know if the sadness was in his voice or just in my hearing of it, but I was sorry I had asked the question about rocket science. I was in elementary school at the time.

So I figure my kids are going to catch up with me very soon. If I’m going to show off for them, I’d better hurry.

Here’s a list off the top of my head of things that I need to hurry up and teach my children before someone beats me to it:

1. How to use a map and compass.

2. How to use a watch (analog only) as a compass, based on the position of the sun. (Don’t forget to adjust for daylight savings time, because the sun doesn’t know anything about that.)

3. “GOP” stands for “Grand Old Party.”

4. In writing, use the passive voice as little as possible.

5. In writing, don’t use big words just to make yourself sound smart.

6. How electricity works (direct current only).

7. The moon rises approximately 55 minutes later each day.

8. “A quitter never wins.
      A winner never quits.
      When the going gets tough,
      the tough get going.”
             (From “Memo to My Son,” by Randy Newman, on his Sail Away CD.)

9. You don’t really have to change the oil in your car every 3000 miles. Most cars can go 7,500 miles or more between oil changes without harm, according to Consumer Reports.

10. Pay off your credit card bills each month.

11. The speaker implies; the listener infers.

12. “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman nor an empire.”

But first things first:

13. How to ride a bike without training wheels.

First-Day Jitters

My older daughter starts first grade Monday. I can tell that this is going to be a traumatic and upsetting experience. As for my daughter, I think she, also, is a little nervous.

El Flaco, the Back Story: Part 1

I recently added a page entitled "The Story of El Flaco." I described a tough guy in Mexico long ago (19th century, I guess) and the barest outline of a plot. I was just clowning around and being facetious.

But something about El Flaco captured my imagination, and now I'm taking him seriously. Accordingly, I have now added the first part of his "back story," in the form of a new page entitled "El Flaco, the Back Story, Part 1: Learning to Be Strong." Feel free to look at it if you're curious.

The Story of El Flaco

I've added a page that tells the story of El Flaco (or so much of it as I have been able to come up with so far). The "pages" are separate from the "posts." (You are now reading a post.) The pages are marked by links on the right side of the screen.

Eye Boogers

I took my six-year-old daughter to an ophthalmologist recently, because we suspected she might need glasses. During his examination, the doctor thought he saw signs of a minor infection of her eyelids. He asked me, "Have you noticed an unusual amount of matter--goop--in her eyes lately when she wakes up in the morning?" I told him I hadn't, but the truth is I'm not very observant at that time of the morning, since she gets up pretty early. He turned to my daughter.

"When you wake up in the morning, do you have lots of matter, you know, stuff, in your eyes?"

She seemed to ponder the question for a few seconds. Then she looked up brightly. "Do you mean eye boogers?" she asked.

He and his assistant laughed. I felt vaguely embarrassed that I hadn't taught her a more genteel way to refer to the substance in question, but I couldn't really remember the subject having ever come up.

They confirmed that eye boogers was what they were talking about, and the conversation proceeded from there.

Here is an illustration from Gray's Anatomy, which I have altered slightly to bring it up to date on the subject of eye boogers:





Love the Hat! It's a Good Look For You.

Here's an Associated Press photo of Texas Governor Rick Perry talking to a group of Texas sheriffs on July 26. (Perry is the one without a cowboy hat.)



This photo reminds me of the Smothers Brothers' version of "The Streets of Laredo":

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a young cowboy all dressed in white linen,
All dressed in white linen as cold as the clay.

(Dick Smothers): I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
(Tom Smothers): I see by your outfit you are a cowboy, too.
(Both): We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys.
If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy, too.

The Thing Itself

A friend recently mentioned a trip she had taken to Morocco, which reminded me of my trip to Morocco many years ago.

I was traveling alone, and my trip to Morocco began with a ride on the ferry from Algeciras, Spain across the strait to Tangier, Morocco. The weather was blustery, sunny, and very hazy, and the sea was choppy. I was leaning on the rail looking south towards Africa when I noticed through the haze in the distance off to my left a dense mass, like a mountain, jutting up from the ocean. It probably didn't take me but a matter of seconds to put two and two together and figure out what it had to be, but while I was working on the problem I experienced a moment of disorientation--that feeling of a rug being pulled out from under me--that I'll always remember. What I was seeing didn't match at all the only depiction I had ever seen of the Rock of Gibraltar: it did not bear the slightest resemblance to the logo of the Prudential Insurance Company.

As a boy, I had sometimes watched "The Twentieth Century," hosted by Walter Cronkite on Sunday afternoons and sponsored by Prudential. I'm not sure how the subject had come up back then, but I believe my father had explained to me that the big mountain-looking thing in the Prudential logo (although the word "logo" was unknown to us then) was the Rock of Gibraltar. Maybe he told me something else about it. I didn't give it much thought after that. But like everyone else, I saw the Prudential logo all around me as I grew up.

But the mountain I saw rising out of the sea in the distance through the haze as I rode the ferry didn't look anything like the Rock of Prudential. Prudential's graphic designers had picked just the right point of view for a very effective composition that has stood the test of time. But as I was looking toward the east, my point of view had been selected by no one. The shape the Rock presented to me was completely different from the Prudential logo, and I didn't recognize it at all.

I've thought often about that brief instant of mental vertigo I felt when I discovered the real Rock of Gibraltar. It still makes me squirm a little to remember my first glimpse of that giant, misshapen, hazy hulk that I was completely unprepared to recognize.

Prudential's logo today

There's a poem by Wallace Stevens entitled "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself." The title reminds me of my encounter with the Rock of Gibraltar, but the poem itself is completely beyond my comprehension. If you want to take a crack at it, you can find it here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/not-ideas.html

By the way, in addition to being a serious poet, Wallace Stevens was a successful corporate lawyer and insurance company executive. But not for Prudential. He was a vice president specializing in investment banking for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co.

Just a Cave

We were passing through San Marcos this past weekend and decided to take a side trip to Natural Bridge Caverns. I’ve passed by the billboards advertising those caverns dozens of times without giving them much thought, figuring that the caverns couldn’t amount to much—certainly not compared to Carlsbad Caverns, which I’ve seen once or twice.

But S thought the kids would enjoy seeing the caverns.

While we were lined up with the other tourists on the sloping walkway waiting to head down into the mouth of the cave, my younger daughter, fresh from Disneyworld, asked me if there was going to be a movie. I told her no. Then she asked if there was going to be a ride. “No, honey. It’s just a cave.”

It was a pretty good cave, though. Lots of stalagmites and stalactites with fanciful names, as you would expect. There were some very big rooms. Water dripping on us from time to time. I jokingly asked my older daughter if the water dripping on us meant that a stalagmite would start growing on us. She dismissed the possibility quickly and perhaps didn’t realize I was joking.

It was quite a long walk in and out and down and up. About a mile in all. I didn’t think my younger daughter would make it on her own, but she did. Both girls were excited to be there.

I don’t actually remember all that much about Carlsbad Caverns, but I’m sure—because it is more famous—that it must be bigger and more spectacular than the little Natural Bridge Caverns of San Marcos. But Natural Bridge Caverns were the caverns that we had handy Sunday afternoon, and they suited us just fine. Comparisons to grander caves a thousand miles away would be pointless.

I Guess He Read the Book

Marine General James Mattis has been selected to head Central Command in Afghanistan.

Earlier, while stationed in Iraq, he had a meeting with tribal leaders during which he made the following statement:

"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f— with me, I'll kill you all."




Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/weeklystandard/20100712/cm_weeklystandard/thecomingstudentloandebacle

I Am Eccentric and My Life Complex

The only thing I know, or ever intend to know about the Chinese zodiac is what I’ve learned from reading the paper placemats at Chinese restaurants while waiting for my food. They all say the same thing.

Unlike the Western zodiac, the Chinese zodiac doesn’t divide the year into different periods. Instead, it gives each year its own sign until it uses up twelve signs in the twelfth year and then it starts over again. Thus, everyone born in the same year has the same sign, and the signs are named after animals—the rat, the snake, the sheep, etc. All the animals in the Chinese zodiac are real except for one. I'm proud to say that in the Chinese zodiac I'm the one imaginary animal--the Dragon.

Being a Dragon makes up some for the fact that in the Western zodiac I’m the most embarrassing of signs, a Virgo. I’ve never studied the subject in any detail, because I don’t believe any of this stuff, but Virgos are usually made to sound like very unpleasant people. I much prefer the thought of being a Dragon.

Over the years of eating lots of Chinese food, I’ve learned verbatim all that a placemat can teach me about Dragons, except for the important parts. Here’s what the placemats say to Dragons: “You are eccentric and your life complex. You have a very passionate nature and abundant health. Marry a [some animal I don’t remember] late in life. Avoid the [some other animal I don’t remember].”

I did in fact marry late in life, but I didn’t marry the animal the placemats say I should have married. It’s worked out okay so far, though.

Genesis 1:14

"Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window—and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 19; by Mark Twain

A Quiet, Intimate Little Blog

Things are pretty quiet in here. Just as well. Crowds make me nervous.

Which reminds me of a joke.

Seems there was a man (out of respect for his privacy, I will refer to him only as “K”) who became fed up with the rat race and the general decline of Western Civilization and moved out to the country. Way out in the country. His closest neighbor lived miles away, in fact. Shortly after his move, one of his neighbors, Farmer Joe, dropped by for a visit. After exchanging pleasantries, Farmer Joe brought up the subject of a party he was having at his place that night.

“Anyway,” said Farmer Joe, “I would surely be pleased if you could come.”

“I’d love to,” said K.

“We’ll cook some barbecue, play some music, do some dancing. You like country music?”

“You bet!” said K. “‘Kindly keep it country, don’t wanna hear no symphony!’” he said, mimicking the song.

“How about rock ‘n roll?”

“Of course. Rock on!”

“Uh . . . right. Now, I do need to mention,” said Farmer Joe, “there will be alcohol in various forms served, and things may get a little rowdy. There have been occasions in the past when some fisticuffs broke out.”

“That’s okay,” said K. “I figure I can take care of myself all right.”

“Well, I figured you probably could. Oh, and one more thing. As the night wears on, there’s liable to be a little hanky-panky, if you know what I mean.” Farmer Joe playfully elbows K in the ribs. “I hope you won’t be offended.”

K chuckled a bit. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve been around the block a few times. I know the score.”

“Great!” said Farmer Joe. “I’ll look for you around 7:00.” Farmer Joe starts to leave when K calls him back.

“Hey, what should I wear?” asks K.

“Oh, whatever you want. It’s just going to be you and me.”

Our Dog the Abstract Expressionist

We have a pathetic little dog named Max. My wife acquired him years ago from some people who kept him on a short chain in their front yard through all kinds of weather, including the most inclement. Finally, Susan had enough of watching their neglect of the dog, knocked on their door, and asked them if they really wanted him. They admitted that they didn’t and gave him to Susan there on the spot.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

We believe Max is a poodle-schnauzer mix. Or something. He has long black and white hair and an extreme under bite that makes his lower jaw jut out, giving him the profile of a grouper. The protruding lower teeth are crooked and yellow. We don’t know how old he is.

He has cataracts and he sleeps with his eyes open. When he's asleep, his staring, cloudy eyes and his limbs splayed out in all directions make him look for all the world like he has shuffled off to the next plane. But so far he has never turned out to have been sincerely dead.

Max has no manners at all. Someone could say that’s our fault, and maybe it is, but I think his earlier life had left him largely untrainable by the time my wife rescued him. He erupts into barking fits at the slightest provocation and charges people who come to our door. It's embarrassing.

He's expensive to maintain, because he has allergy problems. The allergy problems and the scratching they provoke make him stink most of the time. You don’t have to get close to him to smell him; you can just walk into a room where he is and immediately want to do an about-face. My wife bathes him several times a week, but it seems like each bath kills the stink for only an hour or two. She takes him to the vet for cortisone shots for his allergies, but the vet says it’s dangerous to give the shots too often, so Max often suffers severely from the allergies near the end of the period of the shots’ effectiveness. And the harder he scratches, the more he stinks. When the shots stop working and we’re still waiting for the time to come when it’s okay to give the shots again, we can only rely on the allergy pills, hidden in Cheez-Whiz. They don’t work very well, but at least he enjoys the Cheez-Whiz.

Apparently, Max’s butt itches a lot, despite Susan’s diligence in keeping him medicated with worm medicine. So it’s not unusual to see him scooting along the floor to scratch his butt. It would be funny to watch if he were someone else’s dog in someone else’s house. For some reason it reminds me of the late Michael Jackson doing the moon walk.

Because Max has long hair, his feces occasionally get caught in the hair around his rear end. We send him to the groomer often to try to keep his hair short, but there’s only so much we can do. And my wife bathes him often. But still.

Most of the house has wood floors, and you can imagine that if you were a dog looking for a place to scratch your butt, you wouldn’t want to do it on a wood floor. Thus Max’s favorite, indeed exclusive place to scoot is the carpet at the entrance to our bedroom; he likes the nubby texture. I’m sure you can see where this is going. He’s got feces caught in his long hair. He scoots on the carpet. He leaves skid marks.

For a long time, it would gross us out when he left a skid mark on the carpet, and we would call the carpet cleaners right away (since our do-it-yourself efforts at getting the stain out never worked very well). But the carpet cleaners are expensive, and over time we’ve learned to ignore the skid marks for longer and longer periods before calling the carpet cleaners. And that means more skid marks accumulate, all in the same place.

There are more skid marks at the entrance to our bedroom right now than I believe there have ever been at any one time. In this most recent episode, I first noticed one brown line that started faintly at the edge of the carpet, grew darker and bolder as it extended further into the bedroom, curved, and then faded away. A few weeks later, I noticed another line that crossed the first and made a curving, loose, stylized “X.” Now this started to get my attention. Then another one or two short lines showed up, intersecting one of the two main lines of the “X.” Each line varied in thickness and darkness in soft, subtle ways, almost like calligraphy. And because there are several overlapping skid marks, I’ve started to see them as forming patterns--which means I’m looking at them as though they were art. The pattern of skid marks reminds me a little bit of the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock at work

Pollock was more extravagant than Max has been, though. Max takes a more minimalist approach.

MAX, Dogshit Composition No. 1, 2010

I should say it’s minimalist so far, since it’s a work in progress. I suppose if we tolerate it long enough before calling the carpet cleaners, it might start to compare with Pollock in the density of the work, and the carpet at the entrance to our bedroom might start to look like one of Pollock’s finished paintings.

JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

But I’m pretty sure we won’t let it go that far.