Johnny's Rants

Why did they sabotage the invention?

2011-12-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

The heat pump thermostat

For the technically challenged, the heat pump is the greatest invention ever for heating your house affordably with electricity. For every kilowatt-hour of energy it consumes, it delivers as much as four kilowatt-hours heat equivalent to your home interior. This is because it fetches heat energy from the cooler outdoor environment, raises it’s temperature by a compression process, and delivers it into your home. At the flick of a switch on the thermostat, it reverses itself to become a central air conditioner in the summer months.

The fly in this miraculous ointment is the stupid thermostats that they install with the heat pump. These all have a feature called “emergency” or “auxiliary” heat. This feature turns on an array of cheap energy-hog resistance heating elements to help the heat pump speed heating the house when the temperature setting is raised or in case the heat pump mechanism fails.

Now, I admit some benefit in having emergency back up elements in case your heat pump compressor fails on a frigid night in Fargo. The stupid part of this feature is that the thermostats are designed and default programmed to almost guarantee that the energy-hog emergency heat comes on eagerly all the time when it doesn’t need to. Apparently the vendors, installers, and thermostat manufacturers have a terror of getting complaints that the heat pump does not blow out warm enough air or that it just takes too long to warm up the house after the temperature has been set down for the night or a weekend away. So, your thermostat is configured to bring on the emergency heat when you tweak it up as little as one or two degrees higher than the current house temperature. Then it keeps it on until the house temperature rises to one or two degrees above the set point. Also there is a manual setting for turning on the auxiliary heat any time you want to as well as accidentally whenever you change modes from cooling to heating. Take heart; there is some relief for some thermostats. Check your thermostat manual; you will have to download one from the Internet since you lost it or were never given one. Actually you may have to download the installation instructions, which is often a separate item, intended for the installer. Many models have a well-obscured procedure to increase the difference between the set point and the actual indoor temperature that triggers the automatic energy hog to come on to maybe five or more degrees. Increase this setting to the maximum. Sometimes it is labeled as a choice between “comfort” and “economy”. Choose “economy”. Then when you’ve had the temperature way down because you’ve been away you may still have to raise it back up in increments so you don’t trigger the energy hog. Be patient though. The mass of structure and furnishings in an average house weighs 40,000 pounds, more or less. It takes a lot of energy to reheat it after it has chilled down. That means a whopper cost if you let your auxiliary resistance heat do it.

Finally here's a tipsheet from my former employer that will give you an option if your thermostat can't be adjusted to reduce the eagerness of auxiliary heat.

Why did they uninvent the...

2011-12-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

...single blade shaver? I’m talking about the human powered shaver, a.k.a. razor or safety razor, not electric shavers. They used to have one-blade safety razors in a reusable handle that was advertized as well-balanced. Balanced?! Are they afraid you’re gonna hoist it to your chin and stick it up your nose or maybe fall over into the sink? Ha! OK, I diverged into ranting about balance. Pretty soon in modern time this safety razor evolved into the plastic throw-away type that taxes our landfills, but still I’m diverging from my point. After a couple of years, the throw-away plastic shaver started appearing with two closely spaced blades for “closer shaves”. Not to be outdone, competitors came up with the three-blade model and now they are up to five blades or more. Not even one electron of a whisker extends above the skin line after the final swipe until a few seconds later when it has already grown out a micron’s length. STOP the blades! Haven’t they heard that it is now fashionable for the elegant sexy well-dressed man to have day-old to week-old stubble? The worse thing about all these multi-blades is that if you wait more than 24 hours between shaves, as fashionable and lazy men do, the whiskers jam between the blades and clog the stupid multi-blade shavers. You have to stop after every stroke and use your toothbrush to clean them out. OK, single-blade ones are not quite totally uninvented yet. I did manage to find one product at Target that is still single blade, the Bic 12-pack of single blade shavers. The package even says “Single blade for easy cleaning”. Go out and buy these.

Why did they uninvent...

2011-12-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

...home economics? OK, so it’s not exactly uninvented, but it has fallen out of popularity. Maybe it needed some modernization but it should not have disappeared from the mainstream of education. I’m not sure why it has nearly disappeared, but I assume it is because it was always considered a girl thing. Guy stuff like changing faucet washers and buying lawn mowers was not included in any significant degree. Then, with the feminist movement and more women validating their self worth in the work place instead of in the home, it lost status. I assert that it is, and probably always has been, more than just learning how to bake a delicious and attractive cake or artfully display Christmas decorations. For example, in Hand Jr. High School, Columbia, SC in 1958, it was a conduit for girls’ sex education. I know this because my seat in social studies class was next to a hole in a new wall to accommodate a radiator that predated the remodel that made two small classrooms from one bigger one. I heard all the stuff they taught the girls about the birds and the bees in the home ec class on the other side of the wall. I got a D in Social Studies. But, there I go diverging into sex again. Lets get back on track.

While we’ve forgotten home economics, we have gone ape over global economics. This is the great disaster of everybody on the planet trading with or hiring everybody else, especially on the opposite side of the planet. You can read more about why this only works on a micro scale. This global economy thing is showing itself to be unstable and able to turn some former winners into losers because there is little regulation of global markets and finance. As we all end up unemployed or underemployed, or at least way underpaid from this monster genie being let out of the lamp, we need to do some rethinking. As individuals there is little we can do to stuff the genie back in the lamp or teach him some manners. However, we can reduce the power he has over us if we get smarter on home economics, the economics of our household and the households of our friends and family. This doesn’t necessarily mean baking tastier cakes. The 21st century home ec should be more like what its name says. It might cover stuff like getting the most nutritious greens and beans to feed our loved ones with the meager twenty bucks in our pocket. We need to reinvent home economics for the 21st century and teach it in school. We need to cover diverse things like:
• What to eat and drink because it’s good for us and what not to eat and drink because it will kill us or bankrupt us.
• What we need and don’t need in a house and how to finance the house we need.
• How to shop for and buy stuff to outfit and care for the house and yard that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, break down prematurely, poke our eyes out, or drive us nuts with superfluous features.
• How to make stuff we need instead of buying it.
• How to get the best deal on a credit card and how we should never carry over a balance month to month.
• How to find a mate to share the shelter and expenses, how to bring joy to the mate and keep him/her forever, and (above all) how to have a good time with the mate without making more babies than you can feed.
• How to get an employer and keep him/her happy no matter what our skills are.
• How to create or at least participate constructively in neighborhood and community associations.
• (Last but absolutely not least) Become media literate.

I need to elaborate on this media literacy thing. Defining it properly would take up more than I want to put in this post but you can Google it. Start with the Wikipedia description. Basically it pertains to learning not to be so freakin’ gullible to all the media conduits that the genie uses to turn us into zombie slaves. The “poster child” of media illiteracy is probably the sticker you see on so many products and ads in magazines and catalogs, “As Seen on TV”. Do you know what that means? It means the majority of cabbage brains out there believe the stupid television is actually credible, that it furnishes valid and reliable information. God help us.

Maybe there is some hope. We seem to be figuring out finally that nearly all politicians and people in the finance industry (a.k.a. Wall Street) are lying sorry sacks of slug slime. The problem is (although the Tea Party might disagree) we can’t just get rid of these characters and expect things to gravitate to harmonious prosperity. We do need to select leaders for ourselves. We have to educate ourselves in how to detect their lies, unmask their lies, and hold them painfully accountable for their lies. That’s where media literacy comes in. It’s all about recognizing and rejecting lies that come to us in an overwhelming barrage of mostly electronic media. Let’s reinvent home economics for the 21st century with a good chunk of media literacy education.

Why did they uninvent the...

2011-12-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

...energy absorbing car bumper. We had ‘em in the late 70’s and early 80’s by federal regulation until a sweet old president with dementia decided to excuse the car manufacturers from this requirement. I had great ones on my ’80 Civic. They were mounted on shock absorbers and covered with scratch resistant black rubber. The current car bumpers should be called the senile Republican bumper in honor of the president who allowed the manufacturers to make painted plastic bumpers that cost $500 to $1000 or more for repair or replacement after one’s wife has a 1 mph contact with a concrete post in a parking garage.

Why do we need a better mousetrap...literally?

2011-12-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

We’ve had fine mousetraps all my life. Aside from a pesky little habit of sometimes snapping your finger when you set them, they did the job, executing the little rodent painlessly in about a millisecond. But now we have the sticky mouse paper inspired, no doubt, by fly paper. With the sticky paper, the poor little sentient beings (What does sentient mean anyway?) get stuck, trapped in terror for hours until you find them. Then, what do you do? They’re still alive, looking up at you with pleading little beady eyes, hoping you’ll at least drive them across town to your insurance adjuster’s house and set them free. You can’t peel the paper off so you’d have to cut around their little feet leaving them little paper slippers for the rest of their mousy life. But no, you’re too busy so you have to drown them in the toilet while they struggle in agony as if they were being water-boarded by Dick Cheney, or worse yet, you just toss them in the garbage can to agonize for hours while ants eat their eyes out. Yep the original was much better.

Why did they uninvent the...

2011-12-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

...ordinary toothpaste cap. The ordinary toothpaste tube nozzle and cap were perfected at least as far back as when I was a small child and Dodos and Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers filled the forests. You just unscrewed the cap, squeezed out the paste and screwed the cap back on. But, they couldn’t leave it alone. They had to devise nozzles that dispensed different colors of paste through little sub nozzles. You’re supposed to believe these different colors are actual different ingredients (like epoxy glue) that can’t be mixed until they’re about to enter your gaping maw. They also had to add a flip up cap that won’t stay closed and copiously ejaculated toothpaste into your travel bag on air flights until toothpaste on flights was finally made illegal. The flip up caps usually break off before the last of the toothpaste is used up too. Bring back the ordinary toothpaste tube and screw-on cap.

Why did they uninvent the...

2011-11-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

...car that uses a one size fits all round sealed beam headlight?

There are adults alive today who don’t remember this. There used to be a one size fits all standard headlight for all cars and trucks; Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, Mack trucks, even the imports like Volkswagen Beetles, Triumph sports cars, and Opal Cadets. They cost about one dollar and constituted the whole thing from illuminating filament to integral lens of thick non-yellowing, scratch proof, pebble-resisting glass. There were some improvements as the years passed. They started to make them with permanent quartz halogen bulbs inside for greater efficiency but they were still round, under five bucks and above all, one size fit everything. If one burned out or took a rock, replacements were still available at any gas station even in Nowheresville. Then it started to happen, first innocently enough. The car manufacturers’ stylists figured we needed some new shapes; rectangular and small rectangular.

Then things started to get out of hand. They figured we’d like two lights per side on some vehicles and they added extra small and small round to the increasing numbers of sizes. Suddenly somewhere around the early 80’s each car manufacturer started designing custom component illumination systems with separate bulbs, reflectors, and protective (ha ha) clear plastic covers that scratched and yellowed. And, they leaked too, fogging up and corroding the reflector. What a great ADVANCE! When my wife hit a deer and cracked a custom protective lens on our ’85 Subaru, they wanted $180 for the replacement. Of course I got some junk yard parts plus some screws, rivets, and epoxy glue to make a mount for a one size fits all replacement. I had to do it again when I bought and “restored” a wrecked Civic for a few months transportation in Washington State a couple of years ago. So what if my cars were asymmetrical. I’ve heard of “illumination systems” on higher end models of today’s cars that cost over $800. As consumers, have we gone nuts to accept this? We’re scared to death of federal standards requiring greater fuel efficiency because they might make the cars cost more. Of course we’re happy to pounce on the newest all fluff and no stuff squinty-eyed illumination system proffered by free enterprise innovation.

Why did they uninvent the...

2011-11-23T17:13:00.000-08:00

This post inaugurates a series on laments about great things of the past that were uninvented. True to form I shall probably drift off topic onto some other twists like “Why didn’t they invent it right?” and “Why did they have to make a better mousetrap when the original was perfect?”

Have you noticed that your fitted sheets never fit? That’s because the bed industry has gone bonkers making mattresses and box springs thicker and thicker. If you get a new set today (They nearly always come in a set.) the combined box spring and mattress thickness almost require you to have nine-foot ceilings. Why do you even need the box spring at all? You could put bowling balls under the mattress and you wouldn’t feel them. Heaven help you if you have to get up and go to the bathroom at night. You’ll need a stepladder. You’re liable to fall off the ladder since you’ll be suffering from hypoxia at the extreme altitude. I know why beds all have that pile of sham pillows now. You need to throw them down around the base of the ladder in case you fall climbing down. Why did they uninvent the sensible thickness mattress?

Thinking about Whales

2011-08-13T08:23:00.001-07:00

You’re wondering, “Why is he thinking about whales and putting up pictures of bears?” Simple answer. I’m thinking about whales because I’m reading Moby Dick. It was a free download on our iPod Touch and I’ve never read it before. I don’t have a convenient recent whale picture so I used a picture of the largest mammals that I have photographed recently, the shy gentle bears that somewhat regularly visit our backyard.

Moby made me think of two impressive whale experiences that predated my blogging habit. I felt they needed to be recorded since whales, along with everything else in the ocean, appear soon to be extinct if we don’t change our ways. Hopefully not, but possibly in the next generation or two, nobody will have any more first-hand whale experiences.

OK, first whale experience: We lived many years on Eld Inlet, the southern tip of Puget Sound. We saw lots of harbor seals there. That was novel to me as a Carolina boy where, growing up, I thought you had to go to Eskimo-land to see any seals. One day soon after we moved into the Eld Inlet place, my parents came to visit. I quickly got my father down to the gravelly beach that we semi-privately shared with four other property owners. I proudly pronounced that we could dig our own clams, grow our own oysters, and sometimes we even saw seals. As if right on queue, directly in front and close in to shore, a huge mass rose to the surface and blew a V-shaped spout. My father frowned and opined, “That ain’t no seal!” Clearly it was a gray whale, the only huge thing other than the distinctly-finned Orca that might venture so far south in the sound. We watched it spout several more times and it clearly was hanging around for a bit. Leaving my father there, I ran up to the house to fetch down my kayak and camera. My mother was hollering after for me not to get into the water with any whale. I chased it around the inlet racing toward each spout to get a close snapshot but each time it rose in a different location hundreds of feet away. There were no good pictures.

I got another chance for a close encounter a couple of years later. The neighbors reported that a grey whale had been hanging out all day feeding in the bottom muck in the cove across the inlet from us. Wife and I again mounted kayaks and crossed the inlet. This time the whale was working a much smaller area and it was easy to get close. More sensible kayakers were also there to observe from a sensible distance. With all the good sense of a guy who climbs wet ladders barefooted, I charged up right over the location of the last couple of spouts. Suddenly the whale rose beside me and exchanged breath with a huge, “Chug; suck” sound. Mist from the spout drifted over me. I have to say I did not smell the foul odor that some people report from close encounters with whale spouts. However, what I will never forget was the deep resonance of that sound. It sounded like someone had briefly vented a steam valve in a mine tunnel. It gave me a sense of the huge volume of the breathing tube and lungs in this gentle but mighty creature.

Second whale experience: This one concerns Orcas. Orca whales are cute, smart, and relatively small as whales go, though hellishly much bigger than about anything else that isn’t a whale. They’re the ones that, if unfortunate enough to get captured, end up doing tricks in sea aquariums until they get disgusted with the life and decide to drown their trainers. Most Orcas live in pods, don’t roam too far from home, and enjoy a good diet of fish, like salmon. However, some Orca pods are the real rouges of the sea. They are transients and roam far and wide to munch on big animals like seals and even other larger whales. Several years ago the town of Brinnon, WA on Hood Canal (not really a man-made canal but a fjord wide and deep enough for submarine traffic) was experiencing a seal problem. Normally popular and welcome, the seal population had grown way too big for their local habitat. They were gobbling up lots of fish, fouling the water with their excrement and causing commercial oyster beds to shut down. Well, one day we were driving along the canal near Brinnon and saw a crowd of cars pulled over to the side of the road. We pulled over to see the attraction. The rogues had come. The water was filled with tall Orca dorsal fins racing back and forth, singly and in groups. No boats were out. We didn’t see this ourselves, but some friends who live in Brinnon told us they had seen seals far from the water and still heading for higher ground. While walking down to witness the spectacle our friends passed a seal that looked at them curiously as if to say, “You guys are going the wrong way. Are you nuts? Get further inland.” When the rogues had left the seal population had been culled down to a fraction of its size.

Naked Girls Reading

2011-07-23T07:58:00.001-07:00

Naked Girls Reading! That’s the name of a play my wife and I saw here in Asheville last night. I spied the ad for it and figured it would make an ideal Friday evening outing that both of us could enjoy. Wife has master’s degrees in both drama and librarianship, and I… um… also like reading.

The play was in the old, fashionably seedy, artsy west side of town at a tiny theater squished into an ancient vintage storefront strip. They were selling $1 raffle tickets for an original oil painting door prize. Wife sprang for a ticket then actually inspected the prize (a choice of two very naked female nudes) and commented, “Ick”. I figured then that we’d probably win the door prize.

The play action was exactly what the title said except there was also some singing and celebrity impersonation, e.g. Elvis and Dolly Parton. I enjoyed the performance very much except the venue was not air-conditioned on an uncommonly hot evening in this mountain town. I began to envy the performers who had the privilege of stretching out naked, drinking their ice water.

Oh, I almost forgot! Of course we actually DID win the door prize raffle (a lifetime first). I was about to choose a standing nude who had a cupcake levitating in front of her public parts but wife nixed that one. We got the one you see in the picture above. I think I’m gonna have to get my own man cave before I have a place to hang it.

Gun hater stuck with gun

2011-07-22T07:07:00.001-07:00

My loyal buddy of 55 years was kind enough to drive my car from Charleston to Asheville for me. Friendship is a wonderful thing and there is much more that unites us than divides us even though he is at the opposite end of the political spectrum from me. He’s like a serious Republican NRA-supporting dude and I am a kind-hearted enlightened Democrat.

Anyway, to get on with the story, Bud (not his real name) got home and realized he’d left his Glock 27 bad guy-whacker pistol in my glove compartment. (What's with these GOP NRA types that they can’t take a day drive up the interstate without deadly weaponry?! Do they think some deranged bleeding heart, liberal, government-lover is going to assault them at a rest stop?) All right, back on topic, I can't just leave it in the glove compartment because I think it's against the law to be packing heat in your car without a license unless you're in South Carolina where it's actually smiled upon. Now I have to get the damned thing out of the glove compartment and find a safe place to stow it. I guess I just carefully pull it out by the butt end while keeping the nozzle pointing away from anything I don't want to shoot. Apparently guns are liable to spray out bullets spontaneously at any time judging by the number of my friends and people I've met who have managed to accidentally get shot by their own gun.

Later: I got the gun out of the car and into my office. Now I've got to figure out how to safely take the bullets out and ship it to Bud. He tells me the bullets are in something called a magazine, which is not the same kind that you read. He said there is a little button on the left side that I can push to make the magazine drop out. I pushed the hell out of it and nothing drops out. Maybe I’m pushing the wrong thing. That’s scary.

Voila! I got the bullets separated from the pistol and didn’t shoot any holes in anything. Following Bud’s direction I was able to eject the magazine by pushing a little thumb button on the left side of the handle in a certain forwardish downward direction while carefully avoiding pulling the little pointy-finger lever under the bottom.

Uh oh! Turns out those sissy second amendment-hating liberals in government of all levels have made it very difficult for an innocent law-abiding person to ship a firearm to another innocent person. Bottom line: Costs over $50 and must be shipped from a licensed firearm shipper to a licensed firearm receiver.

I will just take it to Bud on my next trip past his town, currently scheduled for next month. If he has to shoot anyone before then he’ll just have to use his turkey gun.

A spider made me do it

2011-06-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

I’m in the rehab hospital. No, I’m not a celebrity druggie; I’m an idiot. Here’s the story. I was up on a ladder pressure washing the pilings and girders under our Edisto Island house. Hot day, good fun, bathing suit, barefoot. Almost done when a huge black spider dashed out from a crevice right over my head. I don’t like spiders so I commenced a high-speed emergency descent. When I got to the bottom rung I stepped back off onto the concrete floor. Just one problem! It wasn’t the bottom rung and I stepped off into thin air. Suddenly my frail nearly naked body was speeding toward cruel hard concrete at about 900 miles per hour. Fractured left side humerus and femur near the top of each. Sassy spider looked down at me writhing on floor for ten minutes awaiting rescue. Spouse found me and kindly hosed off dirty floor all around me so things would be tidy for the ambulance guys.

Fast forward 17 days. I now have some metal pins in my femur and am just able to walk on a cane with a spotter. Left arm still strapped tightly to my side. Nice ladies help me go pee and poo. They promise me hellish agony when the time comes to unstrap my arm and start cranking it around. Due for discharge and further outpatient therapy beginning on June 15. Will convalesce at my sister’s house until well enough to travel to Asheville for the rest of the summer. Good news is it’s supposed to heal completely to original strength and I got out of my dreaded trip to Spain.

Fast forward again 58 days from fall. I can drive, walk in almost a normal gait, ascend and descend stairs normally, and scratch my head with my injured arm. Punishing physical therapy and home exercise continue and I continue to slowly improve. No jump rope or pull-ups though. I think I will be as normal as anyone my age eventually.

The South Carolina Light Bulb

2011-03-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

Failing schools, genocide in Libya, budget deficits, drunk drivers killing 17,000 people per year nationally, earthquakes, tsunamis, scary unions wanting to bargain collectively. Just when we thought we had heard it all, we learn that the government wants to tell us what kind of light bulbs we can buy, starting in 2012. They want us to use those sissy energy saving “Curly Friggin’ Lightbulbs” (CFLs for short) Isn’t that the coup de gras for our personal freedom!

We in South Carolina don’t have to take this. Representative Bill Sandifer (Republican Oconee County) is going to attract a manufacturer here to build a factory to make old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs like Thomas Edison invented in the late 1800’s. Apparently if they are manufactured here, we can still sell them here. Heck; we should take this to the next level and make it a state constitutional amendment. We already have a “right to hunt” amendment. We could have a “right to buy horridly inefficient light bulbs” amendment. Yeah! And even a “right to eat junk food while praying in school” amendment. OK, I’m getting off topic. Just got a little excited about how SC could set the nation’s pace for freedom.

How will we get a manufacturing facility for obsolete light bulbs here? Easy! Give them giant tax breaks, and fund training programs for their workers. We did it with Boeing. We can do it for obsolete light bulbs. If need be we can even give them big subsidies. Everyone knows that if you give money to rich businessmen they will invest it in ways to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

Why should we support this effort to keep ourselves in the 19th century? There are lots of reasons. Everyone knows the 19th century was the best century. The old fashioned light bulbs are only 10% efficient so we can get 90% heat out of them in the winter at only three times the cost of heating with a heat pump. Two out of three women say the 19th century bulbs make their skin look better and warmer. In fact it really is warmer because they are so inefficient they give off tens times more heat than light. If you think that doesn’t make you look good, go to Light Your Face and have somebody look at your face. It lights up your face like a super inefficient 19th century light bulb. Oh! Don’t make video calls to movie stars with this; they’ll fall in love with you and start stalking you.

Funny Superbowl Commercials

2011-02-11T15:50:00.001-08:00

I watched the Superbowl XYZ (or whatever the Roman numeral for 45 is) along with the rest of you. The commercials were truly entertaining. There was one where a fellow fell through a rotten wooden bridge and smashed his testicles. There was another where a whole bunch of different guys were getting violently kicked and kneed in the testicles with near lethal force. There was one where a baby got smashed into a glass window and another where a giant log smashed into an elderly lady. There was one where a robber had a gun in the face of a guy in a convenience store threatening to take his life while another guy lay writhing in agony on the floor with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Ha ha ha ha! Isn't it fun to watch other people get painfully injured?! Oh oh, another great one was the one where somebody threw a pop can with such force that it smashed a young woman in the face and completely knocked her off her park bench. Oh, crack me up! Ha ha, get it? CRACK me up. How will they top this next year? I can’t wait. Maybe they can have people getting their eyes gouged out or actually killed completely dead. Sooooo funny!
Actually I’m being sarcastic, which is supposed to be the lowest form of humor. That’s probably why you aren’t laughing. I miss the gentler more refined commercials of a few years ago like the Budweiser one where the greatest violence was when a couple just got singed a little when they accidentally ignited a brewery horse's bowel gas. And wardrobe malfunctions! That one with Janet Jackson was GREAT. I know that was the half time show but why can’t we have more of that in the commercials?

Boo may come to Edisto Island

2011-02-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

Brace yourself. He wants to move to Edisto and bring Boo. I am speaking of Kiawah resident, Graham Banks, a self-described poet, investor, day-trader, and dog owner. Mr. Banks is fed up with getting big fines on Kiawah Island for repeatedly having his dog Boo on the beach unleashed. According to a February 9, 2011 Post and Courier article, he plans to teach Kiawah a lesson. He aims to sell his Kiawah house and move to Edisto Island where he figures it’s more “laid back southern”.
I am a very laid-back grits and collards-eating Edisto Island resident, born and raised in the middle of South Carolina. However, I really do not need Boo or others of his species scampering unleashed and sandy-footed on my beach towel, shaking water on me, and shoving his big wet sniffing nose where I do not care to be sniffed. My two-year-old granddaughter does not like getting body slammed by affectionate forty-pound carnivores laying siege to her and her sand castles. Few of us good old freedom-loving southern boys and girls on Edisto really want unleashed dogs digging up turtle nests and defecating big steaming piles of disease-causing coliforms in the sand, even if their owners do scoop when watched.
Town of Edisto Beach rules require that dogs on the beach be leashed May 1 through October 31 and of course owners must scoop year-round. Dogs anywhere in town anytime must be under “verbal command” of their owners when off leash. If Mr. Banks does not intend to live by the democratically established rules of the community, perhaps he and Boo can seek their Utopia somewhere far away. Maybe there is a place where the prestige of having a poet and day-trader for a neighbor outweighs all else.

Man's Best Friend

2011-02-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

She yaps at me every day to go for a walk with her. Then she scampers all over everyone’s yard inspecting their new shrubs and things while I holler for her to come back before we get into trouble with the neighbors. At least this ritual ensures that I get my daily exercise. She’s not always nuts about me watching television but she will sometimes reconcile and flop partially across my lap to be stroked. She’s very protective of my children and grandchildren although she gets restless in the car when we drive to visit them; we sometimes have to stop for exercise breaks and it’s hard to round her up again. She’s a good early warning alert because her acute hearing and sense of smell pick up anything unusual long before I can detect it. My friends all adore her. Most heartwarming of all, she is very loyal and comes bounding to greet me when I return from a trip. Yep…though I sometimes complain about her, I really really love my wife.

Shameless: Coarse language and Insufficient Nudity

2011-01-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

Last night we watched Shameless, the much-hyped new edgy Showtime mini-series. Normally we don’t get Showtime but our cable TV provider is doing a free week of it for promotion. Anyway, the show is well named. It is about a trashy single-parent family where everyone uses coarse language to discuss their sex lives and even normal everyday events like going to school or getting arrested. The Dad is drunk most of the time and passes out on the floor every night. They’re just the type of family we all wish we had. Right?

Why does the entertainment industry think viewers are dying to hear coarse language? I’m not a prude; I just don’t see the entertainment value in it. I don’t use coarse language in normal conversation and neither do others with whom I associate…too much. Coarse language should be reserved for special moments like dealing with an inane robotic call director when trying to report a lost credit card, or getting your finger snapped in a mouse trap you’re trying to set – both of which happened to me yesterday. If I become habituated to coarse language in ordinary conversation it will lose its efficacy for these important moments.

There are scant moments of sex and nudity in the show. But somehow the producers think the most exciting sex is on the kitchen sink with dishes getting broken with every lunge. Obviously they have a lot to learn.

The bright spot in the show is Fiona, a lovely young woman and the only character with a shred of discipline and responsibility. She also happens to be smart and deliciously curvy. We need to see more of her…not just more screen time but more surface area. She should be innocently nude in all the scenes, while speaking with a civil tongue of course. It wouldn’t matter what she’s doing. She could be baking cookies, doing her income tax, or practicing her yoga. I’d subscribe to Showtime for that!

Kids say the darndest things

2010-11-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

…was the title of a segment in Art Linkletter’s 1950’s TV show House Party. It’s true too. I was too busy to write down what my children said and now I’ve forgotten or garbled their best one-liners. Therefore I aim to transcribe my grandchildren’s quotes. At this time I only have two grandchildren Yaiza and Ayla. Only Ayla at two and a half is old enough to speak. But, already she says the darndest things.

Her most used line is “Don’t worry” which she pronounces, “Don’t woe-rie”. For example…
Me: Ayla if you run around with that sharp letter opener you might fall and accidentally stab it through your eye.
Ayla: Don’t worry.

On the day of her sister’s birth she was left in the care of her grandmother and me. I was about to step into the shower when I realized that I had forgotten to bring a towel to the bathroom. I didn’t bother dressing again to go out and find a towel, figuring that at two and a half my exposure wouldn’t even register with her. She tracked me walking all the way down the hall to the bedroom then called out, “I like your bummy Bapa.”

The next morning I emerged street legal with my shorts on, but no shirt, and sat down on the sofa to check E-mail. She ambled out with her Red Riding Hood book and sat down next to me. She looked up at me and the following exchange occurred.
Ayla: I like your boobies Bapa
Me (ready this time): Thank you Ayla. I like your boobies too.
Ayla: Thank you Bapa.
It all seemed to transpire like any perfectly ordinary exchange of pleasantries.

One day at dinner my wife served Ayla some broccoli. She responded, “Aaaaack!” Her mother said you shouldn’t talk that way to Grandma. You should politely say “No thank you Grandma; I don’t care for any”. Ayla responded sweetly, “No thank you Grandma; I don’t care for any”. At the next meal when we served her something she didn’t like she said (You guessed right) “Aaaaaack!”

The other day we phoned her mother. We could not hear what she was saying because Ayla was jabbering away in a strange voice. Her mother said that she was talking for her stuffed Teddy Bear and then said:
Mother: Ayla AYLA! Can you have Bear settle down now so I can hear Grandma and Bapa.
Ayla: No, sometimes Bear just does that.

Ayla is the world’s worst back seat driver. Her advice usually consists of, “Go Mama” or “Go Daddy” when we’re waiting at a red light. On one of these occasions I counseled her.
Me: Ayla, we have to wait until the light turns green because it’s the other cars’ turn to go now. If we don’t wait we might have a crash. We could be horribly injured with owies all over and have to go to the hospital in an ambulance.
Ayla: Don’t worry.
She may also be the world’s worst mycologist. She snatched a mushroom out of the ground and immediately started dissecting it during our nature walk last week. We exclaimed at how you should never pick mushrooms because some are deadly poisonous and she should put it down so we could wipe her hands good. She was reassuring.
Ayla: Don’t worry. Only white ones are poisonous.

Red Riding Hood in the bushes

2010-10-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

I went trick or treating tonight with my wife and my daughter's family. A little slow start with most apartments having the shades drawn and no decorations on the porch. 2 month old granddaughter was taken along in her skeleton PJs. 2.5 year old granddaughter was red-riding hood. Daughter painted me up as a big bad wolf. Things perked up when we went into a development of single family houses...until granddaughter announced she had to pee pee just after we mounted the porch of one house. Daughter and wife whisked her away into the shrubbery. Then homeowners heard the rustling and came to the door to find a 190 pound wolf and a 6'-4" Daddy standing on the porch with an orange bucket looking stupid. At first they didn't seem to be buying our story until they finally realized that Red Riding Hood really was having a pee in their shrubbery. A block further along 12 pound skeleton suddenly became ravenously hungry and we had to sit on the curb while her mom nursed her. It was a halloween we'll always remember. The neighbors probably will too.

My mother's story

2010-09-29T18:34:00.001-07:00

My mother passed away today. This is her story that I began compiling about four years ago.

Mazie Mitchum Coats and Ezekial Coats were blessed with a daughter Mary Lee on April 13, 1918. She was the fourth of five children spaced about two years apart. In order of age they were Cenetta, Ezekial Jr. (Zekie), Mae Barry, Mary Lee, and Geneva. Tragically Cenetta lost her life in an automobile accident at the age of 16 but all the others have enjoyed long lives.

Shortly after Geneva’s birth, their father Ezekial died of the flu. Their mother was also ill with an incurable disease causing paralysis. She was unable to care for her children and they eventually went to live with other family members when Mary Lee was about two years old. Mae Barry and Zekie went to live with their grandparents Cenetta Murray Mitchum and Charlie Watson Mitchum. Geneva went to live with their Uncle Sonny Mitchum and his wife Ruby. Mary Lee went to live with their Aunt Catherine Mitchum Martin and her husband Mackie Martin. Their mother Mazie’s disease progressed and she died when Mary Lee was about seven years old.

Mary Lee had no memory of living with Uncle Mackie and Aunt Catherine because she was so young and no more than a year passed before Aunt Catherine died in childbirth. She must have been about 3 years old, if that much, when Aunt Catherine died. She remembers being taken to her grandparents Charlie and Cenetta’s home by her brother Zekie, then hearing the older folks talking about who should take her. It was decided that she would go to live with her Aunt Olive Carolyn Ayers Way and her husband Jacob Way in Eutawville. Olive was a niece of her Grandmother Cenetta Murray Mitchum, so she was actually Mary Lee’s first cousin once removed. Mary Lee thought of the Ways as her true parents and called them Mama and Papa Jake. She was adopted into the family and given the surname Way which she always used thereafter anytime her maiden name was called for.

Mary Lee remembers her Mama (Olive Way) as being very kind and loving to her. She remembers Papa Jake as not being unkind to her but being rather distant. Perhaps he had his hands full with his business ventures and his own three rather wild older children Sadie, Buster, and Otto.

Papa Jake owned a lot of property. He owned a grocery store in Eutawville. He also sold coffins that he kept in another store in Eutawville. He farmed, growing sugar peas on some acreage he owned right behind their house. He grew cotton somewhere near the edge of town. They grew nuts and figs in the yard for their own consumption. He had at least one additional house that Mary Lee remembers as not being occupied. She remembers him going to the gin with his cotton and seeing cotton bales temporarily stored in the yard waiting to be trucked away by a buyer.

Sometimes Mama Olive would send Mary Lee to Papa Jake’s store for a ginger ale. That was a big treat that she and Mama Olive would share.

Otto and Buster were a rowdy pair of older step brothers. They were nice to Mary Lee, but they liked to tease her. Buster had a moustache and Mary Lee wondered how one could grow such a thing. He told her you had to keep rubbing a little chicken manure on your upper lip. Both the boys played baseball in high school. She remembers seeing them in their baseball uniforms.

Sister Sadie, years older than Mary Lee, had her distractions with social life as a young woman. However, she was at least nice to Mary Lee if not highly attentive. Sometimes Mary Lee would get frightened at night and want to get in bed with Sadie. Sadie would consent if Mary Lee would agree to scratch her head. Sadie loved to have someone else scratch her head.

Eventually Sadie married and became pregnant. It seems she birthed her baby in a bed in the living room. At the time, Mary Lee was sick in bed, which conveniently kept her away from the action. That suited everyone fine as nobody had told Mary Lee where babies came from, or even that Sadie was expecting one. After the baby was born, they brought it and showed it to Mary Lee without telling her where it came from. It was the custom of the time to keep children naive as long as possible. Since Mary Lee was a good girl and not prone to ask pushy questions, she was very slow in accumulating essential information on such matters.

Mary Lee remembers Papa Jake often arguing with Sadie and the boys presumably over their escapades. She was not privy to exactly what their escapades were but thought they had to do primarily with some disreputable company they kept, and in the case of Buster, alcohol. Otto, the youngest, had the most moderate temperament. He eventually married and lived a respectable life as a police officer in Savannah. Buster, however, evolved into an unrelenting alcoholic and became very familiar with the inside of a jailhouse. By most standards his life was a failure.

Papa Jake made and canned his own home brew (probably beer). Mary Lee remembers that her cousin Vaneaton from Holly Hill liked Papa Jake’s home brew. At the time Vaneaton drove a bread truck. Mary Lee thought he was a perfect young man and looked up to him.

Uncle Mackie remained in the picture. He was very sweet to Mary Lee. When she was little, he would visit her sometimes and bring her candy and take her for rides in his horse and buggy. Once he took her to an Easter egg hunt at a little wooden church. Later when she was living in Holly Hill, she would see him occasionally when he was there on business. He would always give her a dollar or two. Uncle Mackie had an interesting business, sort of a double life. In later years Mae Barry revealed that he was a big time bootlegger as well as a respectable community member. Mary Lee (always nearly a tee-totaler) qualified that he was a “gentleman bootlegger”. Mae Barry said he had a staff of armed guards and had paid off all the key people in the sheriff’s office.

All in all, Mary Lee found life with the Ways to be good, though she was not too fond of the bathroom. It was just an outdoor privy. She hated having to go out to it and always feared being surprised by a snake in the privy at an inopportune time. I don’t believe an outhouse snake surprise ever happened but the fear of it kept Mary Lee dreaming of a better life. She hoped that some day when she was grown up she could get a job as a maid for the rich Cross family that lived in the big white house down the street. They had a modern almost indoor bathroom at the end of their porch.

Once Mary Lee climbed up the old Chinaberry tree in the yard and couldn’t get down. Mama Olive let her remain there for a while as a lesson that she shouldn’t do such things. Eventually the cook came to fix supper and got her down. (Even people of modest means often had African-American cooks because their labor was so cheap.)

One of Mary Lee’s memories in the Way household was the time of the big flood. She doesn’t know why the big flood occurred. Perhaps a hurricane came through because the infamous Chinaberry tree blew down at the same time. The land was quite flat and a stream very near the house overtopped its bank. The water rose and came way up into the yard, which was a bit higher than the street. Mary Lee said there were little fish in the water. As a child I loved fishing about as much as swimming and her story caused me to imagine being able to fish from my own yard. I always hoped for a wonderful flood and I made her retell the story of the flood many times.

Mary Lee remembers getting a switching that she never thought she deserved. I fully agree. The incident began when she went with a girlfriend into Papa Jakes field behind the privy. There they found a cow that had just given birth to a calf. Excited, she ran to tell Mama Olive about the calf. Mama Olive responded by giving her a switching, claiming she had told her not to go back there. Mary Lee does not remember being told not to go there and always wondered why her Mama was so angry about it. She thinks it was probably because children were kept quite in the dark about where babies, human or animal, came from. She had actually arrived too late to see exactly where the calf had come from and nobody told her.

Life in the Way household came to an end when Mary Lee was 11 years old. Papa Jake died. Mama Olive took Mary Lee and moved seven miles away to live with Olive’s sister and brother-in-law, Ethel Ayers Price and Henry Price in their Price hotel in Holly Hill. Mary Lee called them Aunt Ethel and Uncle Henry, but like Mama Olive, Ethel was actually a first cousin once removed.

Life in the Price hotel was very different, in a positive way. Mary Lee ended up with a second step mother, a different step dad, and two new step brothers-Vaneaton (the admired bread truck driver) and Henry Jr. The permanent renters and the drummers (traveling salesmen) made for considerable excitement compared to life in little Eutawville. Some of the permanent residents were three Jewish families, each of whom owned stores in town. Another couple had a son Mary Lee’s age. He and Mary Lee were both too shy to talk to each other.

Mary Lee spent four years in the Price hotel. Then, when she was 15, Aunt Ethel moved to Columbia along with her sons, Olive, and Mary Lee. Aunt Ethel bought a boarding house on Pendleton Street across from the men’s dorms at the University of South Carolina.

Uncle Henry stayed in Holly Hill for a while doing his horse trading business but he came often to Columbia. When he came, he would bring good things like sausage and fresh produce. Soon he ended the horse business and permanently rejoined the family at the boarding house. He and Henry Jr. did all the buying of food for the meals served there. They would go down to the farmers market on Assembly Street, often at night, and buy food. Henry Jr. did the driving because Uncle Henry chose not to learn to drive.

Mary Lee enrolled in the 10^th grade at Columbia High School as soon as they moved to Columbia. Life was exciting. It was a big city. There were always college men working and dining in the boarding house.

Another lady from Holly Hill also came to Columbia and ran a boarding house on the opposite corner from Aunt Ethel’s. Uncle Henry bought groceries for her too.

The perfect young man and now stepbrother, Vaneaton, eventually found a sweetheart in Lancaster. Her name was Thelma and Mary Lee thought she was exceptionally nice. She also really liked Thelma’s mother. By and by Vaneaton and Thelma eloped and lived happily and productively ever after.

The boarding house was a very large two-story structure. It had a full length front porch with a sleeping porch above it. A beautiful Wisteria vine twined around the porch. It was a street where the sidewalk ran close to the houses. There was a very wide parking strip (actually a front yard) that extended between the sidewalk and the street. All of humanity passed by on the sidewalk. There was a cozy parlor with a fireplace and a piano. Three meals per day were served family style. Aunt Ethel had a staff of black cooks and maids and Mary Lee. I remember Henry Jr. punching meal tickets for the diners. Some of the college boys also waited tables for their meals. Early the next year when she was in the 11^th grade there appeared one very interesting college boy eating and waiting tables at the boarding house. He was Garland “Doug” Douglass.

Doug took an immediate interest in Mary Lee. She thought he was pretty nice too. She said maybe it was even love at first sight, but she was young and there was a lot of excitement, work, school, and other college boys. Mary Lee believed in proceeding with caution in all endeavors. To her credit she didn’t get too serious too fast.

The next year, Mary Lee graduated from high school just after her 16^th birthday. Doug wanted to court her. Mama Olive didn’t forbid it but she gave her a lecture on how to behave. She and Doug would go to the drug store soda fountain for a Coca Cola and crackers.

Doug was persistent in his courting and knew she was the one, but she wanted to date some other boys as well as him. One time she dated a nice young man in a wheel chair, John Garner. He had said he and his mother thought she might like to go to a play. She agreed and when the time came he appeared without his mother and took her to the play. When they got home, Doug was standing on the boarding house porch waiting for her. He was quite peeved and said, “I’m a one girl man.” That line was good for chuckles for decades to come.

Doug was an intramural boxer at the University. One night he had a public match and Mary Lee showed up among the spectators…with another boy. Doug’s opponent took a sound pounding that was probably really meant for the rascal sitting with Mary Lee.

Olive had heart problems and died suddenly during Mary Lee’s last year of high school. One day in Aunt Ethel’s bedroom she said “Oh, I feel so bad. Uncle Henry gave her an aspirin. Almost immediately she fell backward onto the bed and died. Mama Olive’s death of course was sad for Mary Lee but not as devastating as it might have been under other circumstances. She had become very close to Aunt Ethel, whom she adored, and Uncle Henry. Aunt Ethel was a good humored and very smart lady who was not as strict on Mary Lee as her sister Olive had been. Also life in the boarding house was very busy and exciting with Doug and all those college boys.

The romance with Doug grew. He wanted Mary Lee to marry him and move to his home town in Chesterfield. The Chesterfield part didn’t sound too interesting to Mary Lee. She figured there wasn’t much there and she had a close family in Columbia, not only with the Prices but with her sister Mae Barry, brother Zekie, and two delightful cousins Tavie and Mattie.

Doug graduated and took a job teaching 7^th grade in Chesterfield. He missed Mary Lee tremendously, and the little 7^th grade brats drove him crazy. He left teaching after just one year and came back to Columbia. Soon after, he asked Aunt Ethel for Mary Lee’s hand in marriage. It was while Mary Lee was visiting friends at the beach near Charleston. When she related this, her memories of that trip were fuzzy. She didn’t remember how she got there but she had gone down to visit Aunt Carrie’s daughter and son-in-law. Somehow when she arrived, something had come up and it was no longer convenient for her to stay there. She knew her friend Rachel Nusbaum’s family also lived in Charleston and she was able to stay with them instead. After the visit, the Nusbaum’s took her back to Holly Hill to their mutual friends the Brownlees’ house. She stayed there until Henry Jr. and Sr. came to fetch her back home.

After she got home she considered Doug’s proposal and accepted. A big selling point was that Doug promised her she would never have to make another biscuit. Biscuit making was one of her biggest jobs at the boarding house and one she had become quite weary of.

Doug and Mary Lee married on September 3, 1938 when Mary Lee was 20. The honeymoon was a big event. They took the bus to Aiken. A friend of Doug’s in Aiken leant them a car and they went out to supper and a movie. Truly two of the kindest people on the planet had found each other. Years later, Mary Lee would credit the hand of God for leading them to each other.

By the time they married, Mary Lee had a job working for the Unemployment Compensation Commission which eventually became the SC State Welfare Department. Within three years they were settled into their permanent lifetime home on South Woodrow St. I was born in 1944. In three more years my little brain was formed well enough to start storing long term memories. My earliest memories are of feeling very much adored. My parents seemed to feel I was truly a gift. Aunt Ethel was like a real grandmother to me. She became Ma-ma (pronounced with two short a’s) to me, just as she was for Vaneaton and Thelma’s children Van and Jane. Uncle Henry was "Papa" to us and Henry Jr. became "Uncle Henry" to us little children. That created lots of confusion for me since Mary Lee still called Henry Sr., “Uncle Henry”.

The world surrounding Ma-ma’s boarding house, as I remember it, seems like a stereotypical setting for a southern novel. We visited there a lot. Henry Jr. remained a bachelor and a permanent fixture. He was quite obese, 440 pounds I once heard. His 1940’s vintage Studebaker had modifications so he could slide the seat back far enough to sit in it and still reach the pedals. He would call me, “Sugar”, and let me sit on his lap. He would let me punch him in his amazingly enormous stomach which seemed very well adapted to absorbing impacts from my tiny fist.

In the parlance of the day, Ma-ma “wore the pants in the family”. She managed the boarding house as she had managed the Holly Hill hotel, and she took the lead role in making decisions about properties to buy and places to live. A testament to her role in the family was that Doug asked her, not Henry Sr., for Mary Lee’s hand in marriage. Her role as head of the household did not seem to be secured by any hardnosed or domineering manner. She was a gentle lady beloved by all. As far as I know, Henry Sr. recognized her talents and strength of character and appreciated the strong role she took in the family and their livelihood. I don’t recall anyone ever commenting or acting as if this was unusual or inappropriate. Before he became elderly and ill, Henry Sr. worked as a horse trader (literally as well as figuratively) and bought all the food for the boarding house.

In the early years of their marriage, Mary Lee and Doug worked hard to establish a home. Doug went to work selling tires and eventually became a bookkeeper. Mary Lee continued her job with the Welfare Department. The only culture shock in her marriage was that she missed the boarding house. She didn't miss the hard work, but things seemed strangely quiet after the bustle and excitement of all those relatives and guests. All her life she had been surrounded by lots of people.

Things didn't stay quiet very long. Mary Lee and Doug joined the Rose Hill Presbyterian Church and began making lifetime friends. They bought a little house with a large yard on South Woodrow Street in about 1942 that was to be their permanent home. They became best friends with Bruce and Buck Kingman and had many adventures together. Doug's mother joined the household and helped with chores especially tending to me after my arrival. By 1950, Doug had joined Southeastern Freight Lines as bookkeeper (where he remained until he retired as Treasurer in his late 60's.) Doug's mother passed away in 1953. Three years later, Mary Garland was born and we were again a household foursome. Mary Garland and I grew up, went to college, and became productive law-abiding citizens. We always found joy in returning to visit our parents in the little house on South Woodrow St.

All of us were greatly saddened in 1988 by Doug's death. His passing left a vast empty spot in our family. With the support of faith, family, and friends, Mary Lee endured the grief of his passing and continued to be the loving and giving person that so many people relied upon.

As a child, many memories were made for me in the little house with a large yard on South Woodrow Street. I had no doubt that it was the finest spot on earth. Mary Garland found it the same.

In early 2006, Mary Lee moved out of the little house on South Woodrow Street and joined the embrace of new friends at the Presbyterian Home in Summerville, SC. That put her back again amidst the cheering bustle and excitement of wonderful interesting people…and she didn't have to make biscuits! More years passed and inevitably Mary Lee eventually became frailer and physically dependent. Up until her last utterance she always had a kind word and loving touch for all who crossed her path.

Senior Museum of Play

2010-09-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

We visited the Marbles Kids’ Museum in Raleigh with my Granddaughter. It’s a realm for educational play in a world of pretend reality. It was a blast, with all sorts of activities; dance, construction, life size pretend vehicles, and farms. Granddaughter loved it as you can see from the pictures.

All the while I couldn’t help but wonder why they don’t make senior play museums. I can just visualize one now. It would have venues with memorable pleasures of things done years ago and things we wish we could have done. Of course it would have all sorts of vintage vehicles, mostly convertibles, like ’57 Chevys and ’32 Ford Hot Rods. People could sit in them and be towed around, drinking Schlitz beer and making stops in drive-ins where curb girls in roller skates would sell giant burgers and French fries made from actual potatoes.

There would also be dance venues where people could do or learn to do important vintage dances like the Jitterbug, the Carolina Shag (not what you Brits think it is), Clogging (not for the faint of heart) and swing dance (Those actually old enough to remember swing dance should best view it on one of the large video screens from a comfortable seat). There would actually be many video screens all featuring black and white snowy reruns of everything from Howdy Doody to politically neutral news programs.

There would be many outdoor venues since in the olden days there was more outdoors than indoors and people went outdoors to cool off in the summer time. There would be big back yards. On warm days people could go into changing rooms to get into swimsuits. Then they could run or toddle through sprinklers in the yards and young “mommies” in floral print sundresses would come out through wood framed screen doors to serve Kool Aid in frosty pitchers. It would not be real Kool Aid of course; it would be Sangria. Real Kool Aid would be unhealthy for seniors. At 4:00 PM each day daddies (staff men in their 30’s and 40’s) would bring out churns and hand churn homemade ice cream.

There would be a major water slide venue with everything. For the really seriously old there would be stable rowboats with handsome oarsmen to take out widows (in life vests, bonnets, and parasols) and read poetry to them. There aren’t enough really old men to make them a market priority. For younger seniors, like new retirees, there would be waterslides similar to what young people enjoy today. They would not be made of gaudy colored plastic but real stuff of our memories like storm water culverts and irrigation flumes. There would also be just plain swimming holes with sandy bottoms, not concrete pools. Hey! Maybe for the Woodstock generation there could even be a skinny-dipping water hole. It could be seeded with a few young attractive staff members to embolden shy seniors. The young staff would be behind a protective Plexiglas barrier where they could safely distract the seniors from themselves and each other.

Throughout this marvelous play museum there would be food food food. It would all be made from actual organic vegetables and killed animals, which had enjoyed a good free life before they hit the chopping block. Food would be served in various cafes where waitresses actually wear uniforms, and a mere 10% tip will be met with raves of stunned appreciation. Food would also be served in other surprise ways like the Kool Aid and ice cream discussed above. For example men driving vintage Cushman three-wheeled ice cream scooters would come putt putting through the outdoor areas ringing a bell. Some food would even grow on actual live trees. Seniors could use a big rock and a claw hammer to crack actual windfall hickory nuts and black walnuts. Fruit trees would probably be stripped bare too fast.

I realize the overstimulation of all this food and activity could tax the energy and well being of vulnerable seniors. There would have to be on-site pharmacies, vintage of course. They could offer tonics like Hadacol (really Jack Daniels in replica bottles; it has the same active ingredient and tastes better) Carters Little Liver Pills (placebos of course) and lots of Milk of Magnesia (real). Of course there would have to be some concession to twenty-first century miracle drugs upon which some contemporary seniors depend for life safety. But, none of those little blue pills. They would make things way too awkward in the skinny-dipping venue.

Maybe I can start this museum myself. I don’t have any successful entrepreneurial experience but my granddaughter would certainly encourage me with her favorite phrase, “You can do it Bapa!” If you want to invest in this endeavor, comment below and I shall open a Pay Pal account. Buzz, you’ll have to get a young computer savvy person to show you how to make an anonymous comment.

New granddaughter's first day

2010-08-31T20:16:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling like a very fortunate fellow. My second grandchild was born this morning (August 31, 2010) at 5:54 AM. Mother and daughter Yaiza are doing great and looking great! We have been running around all day visiting at the hospital and entertaining big sister Ayla, now two and a half. Friends and family are asking who she looks like. I don't know. Here she is. Probably just like any other mixture of Swede, Norwegian, Israeli, German, Swiss, Yemeni, Finn, Scot, Irish, and Scot Irish. Her hair is quite dark now and her eyes are sort of standard newborn bluish gray. Being an infant, all this may change. One thing is certain. She sure looks good to me.

Here are a few more photos of the people in Yaiza's world today.

The telltale diphthong

2010-07-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

I just moved to the Smoky Mountains. People talk different here. One clear marker in the regional accent is they never diphthongize a long i. Now those of y'all who aren't English majors or married to one may need to know what a diphthong is. It's a vowel sound that you can't hold indefinitely like you can hold a short a as in fast. Many other English vowel sounds are diphthongized, ending with a little transition as the a in "Dawg" the way U of Washington Huskies pronounce it. We diphthongize that a with an "ah-oo" sound. Now...back to the long i. Well bred erudite flat-lander southerners like myself strictly observe the rule of never diphthongizing a long i if it is followed by the consonants b, d, n, g, l, m, v, z or no consonant. For the other consonants we diphthongize it like yankees by sort of a quick long e ending. From here forward in this engaging lecture I will insert an h after an i in a quotation when i want to designate no diphthong as in, "Ih'd be much oblihged if you'd get me some ice cream."

The thing that makes this long i non-diphthong so culturally interesting is that non-southerners (a.k.a. yankees) consider it a marker of special toothless ignorance. Even the most dull double negative-using elementary school dropout from yankee land feels intellectually superior to a southern fellow who says, "Ih think it's about fihve mihles down the road."

Now, here's the interesting part. When I was growing up I had the same snooty feelings about Smoky Mountain folks who never diphthongize a long i no matter what consonant follows it. They don't let it go to waste though, they might diphthongize something else like as short a. Famous race car driver Richard Petty might say, "Ih drihve a faa-eest race core on a track that never turns riht."

I was stunned to learn that I still have my prejudice when I recently arrived here to live in the Smokies. The first thing I did (of course) was break off a tooth. (Probably from chomping on a BBQ rib but that's another story.) Oh mercy! I had to go to a strange new dentist from the yellow pages. Of course I got lost on the way and had to call for directions. I had to report to the receptionist that I was at the corner of Biltmore and Short Coxe Avenue. (I'm not kidding; that's really the name of the street.) She instructed me to, "Go just a little down Biltmore then turn riht into our parking lot." Yeow! At least she was just the receptionist. When I finally arrived and got in a chair, the dental hygienist instructed me to "Biht down on this." I almost bolted out of the chair running. I resisted the escape urge and I got the greatest crown job ever. I've been here a month now and I'm finally overcoming my silly linguistic prejudices. I long ago determined to never behave or think like a racist. Now I'm committed to never being a diphthongist. We're all human beings no matter how we close our vowel sounds. Riht?!

Johnny is faltering

2010-06-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after loading a full chest of drawers, and other tonnage from our Dragonfly beach house into our little Honda Fit, we stopped at the bank to make a deposit. What?! No check book. It was supposed to be in our big FedEx envelope with our passports, birth certificates, and SS cards that we had used to register our car and lives in SC. We unloaded everything out in the parking lot and searched every drawer of the chest of drawers. No FedEx envelope. Then I decided it had to be under the back seats that were folded down. But, I couldn't lift the left seat because the head rest was under the drivers seat and somehow the drivers seat wouldn't slide forward. After a cursing fit in the parking lot, my first crush (Ginger from when I was 8) wandered up to enjoy some comic relief. It turns out that I had dropped one of the screws from removing my front license plate (not used in SC) and or course it had bounced into the seat adjustment track and jammed it. Finally dug it out. Still no FedEx envelope. Then in an epiphany moment I sort of remembered that I had stuck the envelope in a plastic box for safe keeping when we left the department of motor vehicle office (60 miles behind us). Where was the box? Oh yes! That was one of the boxes we had just stashed in our 150 degree Edisto house attic. Back to the house and up into the attic we found it. Yee Haa! We celebrated by a good long swim in the ocean, now 86.7 degrees according to the NOAA sea surface temperature web site. Life is good...intermittently.

We're Selling Our Olympia, WA Home!

2010-02-21T20:35:00.001-08:00

Yes! We're pulling up stakes and moving to Asheville. We signed a purchase agreement so barring any unforeseen hitches before closing, it's sold.

What we have to kiss goodbye are our memories in our 4-bdrm, 2 bath, 1960 square foot beach view & beach access on Eld Inlet of Puget Sound. One acre lot exactly. Very quiet forested site. One of the bedrooms opens into the living room through French doors and can be used as a Den. Large activity room with plenty of storage space. One car attached garage and plenty of room on the lot to add a giant detached garage. Hot tub (dead but wiring and deck surround still intact) and H&C outdoor shower. Large private sun deck. The home was built in 1983 as a Model Conservation Standards house. It has super insulation and a whole house dehumidifier that can keep the house at a nice balanced 50% RH in this damp maritime climate. There are four secluded outbuildings ranging from a 12 square foot rabbit hutch turned tool shed to a one-cord wood drying shed, to a 144 square foot open-sided shed, and finally a 120 square foot climate-controlled storage building.

This is a great place to live as long as you are not a thermophile like me. You can swim, windsurf, kayak, dig clams or raise oysters right on your beach access easement on private land. It's only 16 minutes to downtown Olympia, 13 minutes to I-5, 11 minutes to Westfield Mall and walking or biking distance to The Evergreen State College (TESC). There are miles of trails and hundreds of feet of publicly accessible, yet virtually deserted, beach beginning just a block away in the 1,008 acres of mostly forested TESC campus. The few neighbors within shouting range are fabulous.

Found Mastodon Tooth at Edisto Island

2009-12-28T07:16:00.000-08:00

I found a sizeable mastodon tooth fragment yesterday on the beach at Edisto. That was a thrill. There are lots of Pleistocene bone and tooth fragments here. This was the biggest and most thrilling fossil find for me.

There are lots of interesting things to find on Edisto Island. On an earlier occasion I found a really nice projectile point.

Kiting at Edisto Beach

2009-12-26T17:41:00.000-08:00

The whole family gathered at Edisto for Christmas. It was damp outside but cozy inside. We enjoyed my mother, sister, son, daughter, granddaughter, and all extant spouses. You can click any of these little pictures to enlarge them. At risk of sounding sappy religious, I felt blessed by the good loving family fellowship.

Today, the day after, it was sunny with a nice moderate breeze on the beach for kite recreation. Son James gave his Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary Garland a kite. It's a trainer kite at about a quarter scale of the type that people use to go kite boarding across the water. By practicing first with a trainer kite you can avoid those silly beginner errors with the full size version that we enjoy on You Tube where people slam into jetties or hard objects on the beach. What a hoot! Actually nobody thinks Tom and Mary will eventually start launching themselves into the sky over the water with the big kind. It just happens that the trainers are lots of fun just for dry land kite flying. James put a video of the kiting festivities on his blog.

Christmas Eve fun at Edisto Beach

2009-12-24T19:24:00.000-08:00

We had a rather stormy Christmas Eve afternoon at the beach down the block from our Edisto house today. That was a delight to son James the windsurfer dude and granddaughter Ayla. She now stands on her little plastic boat, holds her hands out, and says, "Sheew sheew sheew".

Landing in the surf looked a little tense...at least to me it did.

I took some video. James edited it, replaced the wind noise, and put it on his blog.

Electric Radiant Slab Heated Cat House

2009-12-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

We recently rescued a cold stray cat that was hanging around our home at Edisto Island. I wont go into the ugly details of that story but it reminded me of one of my most clever and successful inventions, the electric radiant-slab-heated cat house. This should be shared with all humankind for the benefit of our animal friends, or at least the ones we keep as pets but don't let into the house. The illustration above shows how you can build this home for your animal companion. You can of course modify this with your own ideas to fit the size of your pet. Here's what I did:

Start with a cheap plastic round garbage can of about 35 gallon capacity.
Cut the bottom off straight and square.
Cut out a circle from rigid foam insulation like you use for foundation insulation.
Sit the bottomless top half of the garbage can on it.
Cut out a circle of hardware wire and place it on the surface of the foam insulation to act as concrete reinforcing.
Stick a bunch of little galvanized finishing nails at diagonals through the hardware wire into the foam to help ensure that it is held on after the concrete is poured.
Stick a bunch of roofing nails laterally into the sides of the can an inch from the bottom to help ensure that the concrete slab attaches securely to the plastic of the can sides.
Weave in an electric bedding plant heater cable such as a six foot Gro-Quik Soil Warming Cable with integral 74 degree thermostat. Tie it to the hardware wire so it doesn't pucker up above the concrete that you are about to pour.
Mix up a bag of Redi-mix concrete, pour it in the can to about 1.5 inches deep, and let it set up for a day.
Cut a barely cat-sized hole in the side of the garbage can a couple of inches above the slab surface.

Plug it in and keep it plugged in. It is low wattage and even begins to cycle off and on after the slab warms and the thermostat starts regulating to 74 degrees. I added a thin towel for the cat to have something soft to snuggle onto but you shouldn't add a big wad that insulates the cat from the heat below.

Kite-boarding at Edisto

2009-12-20T17:33:00.001-08:00

My son came into Edisto Island for the Christmas vacation last night. There wasn't quite enough wind for good windsurfing so he decided on his 2nd favorite water distraction, kite boarding. This is in the sound where the south fork of the Edisto river approaches the ocean. You can also see a video that I took and he edited on his blog.

No Boeing in South Carolina Please

2009-10-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

A new Boeing assembly plant may be coming to North Charleston, South Carolina. At least that's what everyone seems to expect and hope for. Not me. I grew up in South Carolina and was recruited to Boeing right out of Clemson University. I lived in Seattle and its surrounding communities for 38 years. I worked for Boeing for six of the early years. I shall list the ways Boeing was a bad employer and bad neighbor.

Boeing was, and still is, a boom-bust corporation. There was little stable employment for locals. During booms they recruited worldwide, bringing in droves of outsiders with the special technical skills required. During busts they laid off workers drastically, often requiring the survivors to work as much as 16 hours per week overtime because the modest overtime premium was cheaper than paying benefits for a sufficient number of workers doing 40 hour weeks.

When Boeing expanded they never did so in the same place. They went where the land was cheapest. Plants sprawled along 54 miles of the I-5 corridor from Auburn, WA to Everett, WA. They frequently transferred people along that corridor and there was never compensation for moving expense. 54 miles was considered a reasonable commute even though the traffic was usually slowed to a crawl by the glut of Boeing workers commuting in opposite directions. During my tenure at Boeing I was transferred among four Puget Sound cities, Seattle, Everett, Renton, and Kent. I was laid off twice when business slumped.

Boeing finally abandoned Seattle, its place of origin, and moved its corporate headquarters to the Midwest. This left varying reactions of shock and abandonment among the sentimentalists, to expletives of good riddance to a bad neighbor from many others.

Now Boeing might put a new 787 assembly line in North Charleston because South Carolina is so very business friendly. Indeed South Carolina solicits big corporations to come here with almost a blind religious fervor. The October 28, 2009 Charleston Post and Courier (P&C) lists these proposed goodies for Boeing:
Sales-tax break for construction materials.
Unspecified goodies similar to what was offered to Google's data storage facility
Tax exemption for aviation fuel used in test flights and transporting airplane parts
We don't know exactly what all the goodies are. The P&C says the revenue impact study released by the state board of Economic advisors was short of details but "Lewis Gossett, president of the S. C. Manufacturers Alliance said the 'state will certainly come out ahead'". Yeah, right!

South Carolinians need to wake up and be wary of this corporate giant. Otherwise our leaders will give away the store in their giddy glee. Who do we think makes up the revenue when we give all the tax breaks to business? We ordinary tax payers make it up of course. We pay the tax and we enjoy the urban sprawl and traffic jams. In South Carolina we pay both a hefty sales tax and a state income tax, and still endure underfunded schools and other public services. In Washington State they have no state income tax. They don't need one because business pays more of its fair share. Schools are better funded. This is one of the most important factors to produce higher skilled and better educated citizens and to retain and attract businesses that provide employment for higher skilled and better educated employees.

ADDENDUM OF OCT 29, 2009: Well they did it. This morning's P&C says "North Charleston won the fiercely fought battle for the 787…" Won! Ha! "Bought" is a better word. Our lawmakers paid $450 million in incentives. Boeing has to create 3,800 jobs here. The other thing we "get" is Boeing has to invest $750 million here within 7 years. Hmm, lets see, we invest $450 million and we get $750 million in seven years. That's like investing the $450 million at 7.57% interest. Hey wait a minute! They don't have to pay back $750 million in seven years. They just have to locate $750 million of their own assets here. Is this a good deal for us? Apparently I'm not the only one not falling down and foaming at the mouth in ecstasy over this sweet deal. The P&C quotes economics professor, Calvin Blackwell, of the College of Charleston as saying, "Generally this is not a very good strategy for states to employ…It's a race to the bottom: who can provide the most goodies?" Blackwell is paraphrased as saying that companies play localities off one another and that another downside is that jobs created don't necessarily go to current state residents. But, state residents are the ones who shoulder the impact to the tax base. Just how many jobs will actually go to local residents? Apparently that detail wasn't in the deal. Tim Coyle, Boeing VP in Charleston said the labor force should include a "fair amount" of employees from Charleston and from other areas. Tim, please define "fair amount".

South Carolina is about as nuts for capitalism as Michael Moore is nuts against it. I'm cool with capitalism. However, the South Carolina concept of capitalism is sort of the Latin American model, i.e. we welcome the outsiders to come in and exploit us. We beg those with the capital to come here for our business tax breaks, lax rules, cheap labor and paucity of labor unions. For Boeing we really bent over, grabbed our ankles and said, "Kick me…or whatever."

Windsurfing the Columbia River Gorge and Bridging the Cultural Gorge

2009-08-27T19:48:00.000-07:00

We went to the Columbia River Gorge. I sailed in it. That confers a certain amount of status since it is the premiere nukin' wind spot of the planet. Of course I sailed in an uncommonly light wind, using my longish floaty board that I can tack. I never got very far into harnesses, foot straps and carving jibes even when I was at the peak of my game about 20 years ago.

Me

Son James near the event center. I taught him everything I knew; then he took it from there. He has videos of the same outing taken from his water proof video camera that straps to his head.

More James, this time at Mary Hill park about 40 miles east of the event center

When we began packing up our gear after our last evening at Mary Hill park we passed a native American family grilling their dinner. I made some cheery remarks like, "Mmmmmm, smells really good. This elicited some chuckles. Just a little later as we started loading our stuff a little girl from the family came over and invited us to join them and share their Bar B Q. I thanked her effusively and declined politely, explaining that we had to get back to Hood River. I didn't have much time to think. I figured we didn't have much to contribute and I didn't know how much they had to spare. Also dear wife had been excited all day about a restaurant in Hood River where she wanted to eat supper.

After we all got under way we each confessed that we wished we had accepted. I felt like an oaf for declining. If you only listen to the news you would think there is nothing but squabbling between native Americans and European Americans over who gets the salmon, what can't be built in native cemetaries, whether to dam a river, etc. In this un-newsworthy moment total strangers extended themselves and invited us to break bread with them because we appeared hungry. Truly for us Americans, notwithstanding diverse origins, there is much more that unites us than divides us. ...like food and family!

Fun on the beach at home in Olympia, WA

2009-08-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

My son James is visiting us from Florida this week. Wednesday we gathered at our beach access on Eld Inlet of Puget Sound. Here are some pictures that we'll remember fondly because we plan to sell this nice family home and move to the Carolinas.

Wednesday was warm with no wind so we did Stand Up Paddling or SUPing as it is called. Here's James contemplating his first SUP.

Apparently we were very puzzling to the harbor seals because they usually popped up to investigate as you will see in the following pictures.

Here's my friend Rob doing his first SUP.

Wife Catherine has great balance and never even got her hair wet. I can't say the same for myself.

James and Catherine.

James and friend

The next day (Thursday) was very windy. No SUPing for us but James had a real "woo hoo" afternoon windsurfing. See our videos on his blog: SUP Windsurfing

Here's a glimpse of his fun on the water.

Great Day at Mt. Rainier

2009-08-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

We went to Paradise visitors center at Mt. Rainier National Park yesterday. We took a hike to Panorama point. The flowers and mountain glaciers were spectacular.
The people are my sister Mary, her husband Tom, my wife Catherine, and me. Animal is a marmot. Click any picture to enlarge it.

Need a Couple of Bucks?

2009-07-12T17:59:00.001-07:00

If you need a couple of bucks, just call on me. These fellows along with their doe friend accomplish much of the pruning that we need as we spiff up our house getting it ready to sell. We just need to supplement them with some giraffes for the high stuff.

Apologizing for Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2009-07-08T10:40:00.001-07:00

Lately I have read about a group that wants to apologize to Japan for us dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has been met by wide objections from Americans who protest, "Ha! They asked for it when they bombed Pearl Harbor first. They should be apologizing to us." Another objection centers on deterrent. "It wasn't nice, but we had to nuke 'em to save American lives." These may be persuasive arguments for why we should have done it in 1945, but they are not relevant to why we should not apologize in 2009. I am sympathetic to the apology supporters for reasons outlined below.

Reason 1: Japan's decision makers and those they commanded killed a bunch or our innocent people, but so did our retaliation. Even if necessary and justifiable, we killed a bunch of their innocent people in addition to (or instead of) their decision makers.

Reason 2: It has been 65 years and we have been friends and growing together as allies in world leadership all that time. Today there are adults living in both countries whose grandparents weren't even born when these horrific acts of war took place. Japan is not a current adversary with whom we have to talk tough for our national security.

Reason 3: What the heck is the harm in it for us? What if we apologize before they do? That only makes us look magnanimous in their eyes and the eyes of the global community.

I just looked up "apology" in www.dictionary.com. It is defined as "a written or spoken expression of one's regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, or wronged another". I noted that there are two ORs and no ANDs in that definition. Surely most of us feel at least sorrow for the injury caused to at least the innocent children killed and maimed when we dropped the big ones. That strikes me as justification enough to offer the apology. I also note that nothing in the definition says those who offer the apology must feel or believe themselves to be the greater transgressors than the party to whom the apology is offered.

My wife gets home today from a 5 day visit with her parents. I didn't complete all the chores I promised I'd complete. I shall apologize for not meeting my goal. I shall not say "I'm sorry I didn't get all my stuff done but YOU left the car lights on and killed the battery TWICE last week." I'll just tell her I'm sorry I didn't get all my stuff done and how great it is to see her. She knows she killed the battery twice. This is the way you need to act with those important to you to keep the relationship strong and healthy.

A Rain Barrel. Life is Good!

2009-05-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

I just completed a rain barrel installation on our Edisto Beach house. Woohoo! This is the type of thing retired engineer curmudgeons like to do and talk about. It solves two problems. It intercepts the rain that pours off the front of my house and washes out the driveways, and it collects water for the plants. Our town water comes from wells and is so salty it's bad for the plants. Fortunately the town lets you draw free reverse osmosis drinking water from spigots at the town hall.

The white pipe is the overflow system. I drilled a bunch of 3/16" holes in the part that goes around the corner of the house to distribute the overflow water. OK, I paid a guy to install a gutter on the front of the house to catch the water. Fiddling around on the top of a jouncy 24 foot extension ladder is a good way for an amateur to end up dead.

The Model Airplane Family

2009-03-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

As a child in Columbia, SC in the mid-50's, Owens Field was but a short bike ride from my home. I loved to go there and study the airplanes up close. I marveled when they defeated gravity as they took off or gently floated in for landings. The big airplanes were fascinating, but so were the model airplanes that hobbyists came to fly on weekends near the old Curtis Wright Hanger. Eventually at age 12, I built my own model, which was frankly a rather disastrous performer.

On Sunday afternoons an African American family frequently appeared to fly their models. That seemed a bit unusual to me in those Jim Crow days where everything was segregated. What I remember most about the family was that the model airplanes they built and flew were superb. They looked as if they should be carefully displayed in a museum rather than flown about over the hard asphalt. They were excellent replicas of actual aircraft including even spectacular multi-engine bombers. The whole family worked together to fuel them, start their engines, and set them into flight. They performed as well as they looked.

The family was as memorable as the airplanes they flew. They arrived in a late model Dodge that always gleamed from a recent wash and wax job. The family was always dressed as if for church. Even the young boys wore suits and ties. At the time, I wondered why they arrived so spotless and formally attired for an afternoon of play. Did they feel they needed to go the extra mile in appearance and decorum to assure being accepted among all the white people? Did they take just pride the fact that they far exceeded their comparatively advantaged neighbors in their craft? Did the parents feel resentment that they had to go to such lengths to demonstrate their competence and respectability? Were they encouraged and heartened by the acceptance and admiration shown to them by onlookers like myself? I suppose I shall never know.

Ten years after my idyllic Sunday afternoons of aviation admiration, I was designing real airplanes for Boeing in Seattle. My skills had improved since my first crash and burn model. I received tremendous support in improving those skills. In South Carolina I was allowed to go to good public schools and encouraged through my university years in a tough engineering curriculum. Those advantages were not available back then to the family with those fine models.

Over 40 years since I left South Carolina to seek my fortune in the great northwest, I have maneuvered myself back home. The other day I walked by the old Curtis Wright hanger at Owens field. It still sits there, windows broken and vines crawling over it. A cyclone fence surrounds the hanger and grass grows high from all the cracks in the asphalt around it. The carcass of an old B-25 bomber or something of that ilk sits like a ghost inside it. Jim Hamilton Blvd. and a skateboard park occupy the space where people flew the model airplanes. As I looked over that memorable space I wondered what became of the nice family with the perfect model airplanes. Are the parents all wizened and gray somewhere enjoying their golden years? Have the children grown up and realized their dreams? I sure hope so. I wish I could thank them for entertaining and inspiring me with those cool model airplanes.

Savannah River Stemmed point

2009-02-23T16:48:00.000-08:00

I found a splendid large projectile point (arrowhead in layman terms) on the beach at Edisto Island where I have a so-called tourist rental house. I just looked down and there it was right on the surface of the sand. It's really a good one as you can see from the photos. The photo on the sand is just as it lay, before I first touched it.

I didn't have any idea of it's origin but I had visions of it being real old, like made during cowboy times or maybe even pre-colonial times. My sister recently met an eminent archaeologist whose specialty is Native American archaeology. I sent him the two photos here and he identified it as a "Savanna River Stemmed point". He said it was chert, likely quarried near Allendale, SC and stained dark by a long rest in the marsh mud for about 4000 years. That puts it in the transition from the Middle Archaic to the Late Archaic cultural period of Native American prehistory. Dang! 4000 years! Here I sit holding this thing in my hand looking at all the little edges chipped away by some guy around the same time the biblical Abraham was about to cut his son's throat in a sacrifice commanded by God. (For those without a religious background, at the last minute God said, "Just kiddin'; I was just pullin' your chain to test your loyalty.")

Anyhow, holding this thing sends chills up my spine. It's like a voice from the past. I wish it could really tell me its whole story. Did it have a short useful life before it was lost? Or maybe it was lost and found for several cycles of life. Did it ever stick in a deer, a bison, a man? Wow!

Explanation of the Economy

2009-02-15T06:40:00.001-08:00

Many people are disturbed by something called "the economy", which is always misunderstood but clearly accepted as being caput at the moment. I shall explain how it works. In a nutshell the economy is an abstraction. It is neither a particle nor a wave. It is the other thing, a system. Right now it is a flawed system.

There are two kinds of economic systems. One is called microeconomics and the other is called macroeconomics. Microeconomics is where you have a maximum of two islands and two products, usually coconuts that grow best on one and clams that grow best on the other. There is a strong and logic-based science that guides the people on these islands toward certain mutually beneficial agreements that make all the islanders better off. These agreements involve the clever practice of trading some of what one island has for some of what the other island has.

The science of microeconomics breaks down when the two products are not both food, but something else such as guns and butter. It also breaks down when a bully owns all the canoes, or when somebody eats the cow that makes the butter. Then it is no longer microeconomics but macroeconomics, sometimes called politics. These aberrations that degrade microeconomics into macroeconomics are accelerated by a special invention, the IOU (pronounced "I owe you") also known as money. Money pretty much drives the nail into the coffin for microeconomics.

Since we are stuck with macroeconomics, here's how it works. It works on greed. Do not be intimidated by the negative connotation this word has in normal parlance; it is a good thing in macroeconomics. If it were not for greed, we would all have starved to death when we finished eating all the clams and coconuts. The greed is that everyone wants the money and performs conniving manipulations to get it, sometimes even resorting to work.

The macroeconomic engine runs on hot air exchanged between two opposing greed driven groups. The first group (called the Haves) worships the earth's first man, Adam Smith, and his only begotten son, Will Rogers, who described the trickle down theory. The second group worships Adam's wife, Eve, who was thrown off the coconut island for eating a coconut from a tree designated by God as his own tree. Eve scraped by on a sandbar with nothing but sand and seaweed to eat. The followers of Eve are called Have-nots and they espouse a theory called the soak-up theory.

The hot air happens when the preaching starts. The Haves start preaching the trickle down theory which reckons that if you designate some money (like in a stimulus package) and give it to them it will trickle down to the Have-nots, creating jobs and income on the way. The Have-nots preach the soak-up theory which reckons if you give all the money to them it will soak up to the Haves, again creating jobs and income on the way. As long as one side has hotter air than the other, the engine will be driven by a law of physics called the Carnot cycle. (Named for Eve's son Sadi Carnot who was half brother to Will.) There is a physical limit to the Carnot cycle's efficiency. Not all of the flowing hot air can create jobs and income. A certain percentage of it turns into entropy which is a lot of hot air floating away in all different directions.

So why has the economy gone caput? Simple! The Haves' aggregate greed slowly caught up to the have-not's aggregate greed even though the Haves were greatly outnumbered by the Have-nots. This destroyed the temperature gradient and the macroeconomic engine ground to a halt. What can you and I do about it? Our best bet is to go back to an island and eat coconuts and clams while something called the market sorts itself out.

My conversation with a Nazi prisoner of war

2009-02-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

Who let Dr. Strangelove back onto the set? I'm speaking of Dick Cheney of course. (Yes I know. I promised a Nazi and I'm talking about a different brutish thug. I'll get to the actual Nazi a little further down.) So anyway I was watching TV the other night and up rolls Dick in front of the cameras, raving on about how much danger we're in. This supposed danger is because we might move Guantanamo detainees onto the US mainland, release some for repatriation, and stop torturing the others. Gad! We voted this guy's party and their failed policies out of office. Why doesn't he just shut up, get with his cronies and play golf or, better yet, go on a hunting trip.

OK, now for the Nazi story. I'll get back to Dr. Strangelove's ideas again later. Long ago, 23 years after WW II to be precise, I was hitching from Newcastle, England to London. I was picked up by a lorry (British English for a big truck). The driver right away heard my southern accent and asked if I was from the United States, Australia, or some other English speaking country. I told him the United States and he said, "Oh, I've only been to the United States once and that was only to Columbia, South Carolina." I said, "You're kidding; that's my home town. How did you end up there and only there?" He told me he was a German soldier in WW II. He was captured and ended up being held at Fort Jackson.

This led me to a thousand questions for Heinz (not his real name, which I long ago forgot) about his capture and detention at Fort Jackson. He said one of the first things that happened after his capture by the US military was that a kind American soldier came along giving each detainee an apple for a snack. As he relaxed and started relating his experiences it sounded more like a comedy romp than anything else. It reminded me of the TV series "Hogan's Heros" except with the roles reversed.

I asked him if he ever tried to escape. He said, "Yes, I escaped twice." I asked him how far he got. He said he only went as far as Columbia for a night on the town then sneaked back into the fort. Once he even asked a Columbia policeman for directions. The policeman inquired about his accent and he told him he was a Polish refugee. The policeman wished him well and sent him on his way with directions.

After the war he was released. By then he thought America was great and he didn't want to go back to Germany. He wasn't allowed to remain in America, but he managed to settle in England and build his life there.

I have since learned that German prisoners of war were also sent out to assist my wife's relatives on farms in Wisconsin and probably elsewhere too.

My purpose in relating this story is that sooner or later we have to release prisoners of war. Oh yes, I know that some Americans would like to just shoot them all. It ain't gonna happen, thankfully. There are many Americans who would like to at least keep them in high security incarceration forever in Guantanamo (No wait; we're closing that) or in Charleston's Navy brig (What? The locals are afraid to house them there?) Well, maybe in the federal penitentiary in Kansas (Oh? The locals don't want them there either?) Golly, where? Wherever we stash them it will cost a lot of money every year they are held but American taxpayers just love to pay taxes for the government to do stuff, don't they? Of course they don't!

My point is this. It seems like we always end up having to release prisoners of war sooner or later. When we release them we would like them to be sufficiently mollified that they don't resume or begin a life committed by rage to killing us. For an inside look at how we're actually doing it, read Chaplain James Yee's book For God and Country. I didn't find reference to waterboarding and dogs as we heard of in Abu Ghraib but the relentless sensory deprivation, humiliating harassment, and endless insults to their religion and values seem unlikely to change their hearts toward loving the USA. Would you feel safe releasing prisoners who had been abused repeatedly, had their sacred religious text mocked and vandalized, been shackled and taunted for hours (sometimes daily for extended periods) in interrogations seemingly aimed more at revenge than information recovery. Or, would your rather be releasing people whom our military had treated humanely like Heinz, provided with facilities for worshiping according to their faith, and even shown random acts of kindness.

Now I know what my conservative Republican friends are thinking. (Yes I do have some; I live in South Carolina after all.) They're thinking, "That naïve lilly-livered liberal has really lost it now. Sure, just give them some fresh cut flowers in a vase with orange juice and toast and hummus at breakfast and they'll be singing the Star Spangled Banner. Yeah, right…NOT!" No, I realize that we have already done irreparable damage with abuse of many existing detainees. Moreover not all the new ones we capture will completely forget their raging determination to do us ill, even with the most humane treatment. Anyone released must be evaluated by an intelligent process and cleared of criminal charges of war crimes by an open system of justice consistent with our own laws and the agreements that we have within the international community. I simply believe we will end up with a heck of a lot more detainees that we can eventually safely release and repatriate if we incarcerate them legally and humanely rather than listening to Dr. Strangelove who (incredibly) is still telling us to torture them.

Postscript on safety: Why are we so terrified of transferring the Guantanamo detainees to the mainland? We already intentionally release into this country unrepentant murderers and rapists every day when their sentences are up. Most of us even have lovable friends who (whether we know it or not) have DUI convictions. These drunk friends and fellow Americans slaughter 17,000 Americans per year, far more than the sum of American deaths in the twin towers destruction and the entire Iraq war.

Image of Virgin Mary Has Appeared in My Underpants

2009-02-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Virgin Mary has appeared in my underpants! When I cast them upon the floor before my shower this morning I saw the amazing likeness. This is not faked! If I lie, I pray Satan will turn me into a pillar of salt or, worse yet, a Republican. At first I thought it was Mother Teresa but then I realized it was actually the Virgin Mary. Not the romanticized child face from Michelangelo's imagination in his Pieta, but the real Virgin Mary at a later age. Look at this image. Is this not the worried face of a woman whose eldest son at age, say, 33 is still unmarried, neglecting his day job, growing his hair a foot long, and running around claiming it's all fine because he's on some kind of self-devised spiritual quest?

I do not know why the Virgin Mary has appeared to me. I think it may be to reassure me that my house will sell. My cousin told me that if I buried a statue of St. Joseph in my yard upside down it would make the house sell. I could not find such a statue. In good faith, I went to garden shops but they only had statues of St. Francis and various naked cherubs frolicking in bird baths. Now I am thinking that if Saint Joseph is good, his wife would be ten times better. I think I shall bury my underpants in the yard upside down... unless someone out there wants to purchase this priceless religious relic for $400. Oh, the image is no longer visible because I am currently wearing the relic. You can even purchase the underpants along with the house in which this miracle occurred for $420,000. May God bless you!

Charles Krauthammer you've got your head up - uhh- in the sand!

2009-02-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

An opinion piece by Washington Post columnist Dr. Charles Krauthammer appeared in The (Charleston, SC) Post and Courier titled "We owe Muslims no apology". That is quite an incendiary title. I infer that "we" means all Americans. The title and article offend me for several reasons.

According to the US State department, two to three million of "we" Americans are Muslims, making it the third largest religious affiliation in America after Christianity and Judaism. I have worked with Muslims. My best friend when I was a young man was an Egyptian Muslim. He saw me through a lengthy slump when I was unemployed and dumped by my girlfriend. He and his wife eventually introduced me to the fabulous woman to whom I have been married for thirty two years. I attended his funeral and burial in a large Islamic section of an old Seattle cemetery. We non-Muslims were welcomed there with kindness and appreciation by the Muslim community. All my direct experiences with Muslims strongly support former President Bush's often repeated assertion that "Islam is a Peaceful Religion."

So what about Dr. Krauthammer's claim that we don't owe Muslims an apology? We have been sticking our American nose into Middle Eastern countries and insinuating ourselves into their political conflicts and civil wars for a long time. Our noble humanitarian mission usually synchronizes better with American economic interests and majority religious beliefs than with neutral peacekeeping. Many Muslim civilians have been killed by Americans and other Middle Eastern groups armed and funded by Americans.

I know first hand of one Muslim who deserves a gigantic apology. I had the privilege of meeting Chaplain James Yee's Palestinian wife when Chaplain Yee was a prisoner in the Charleston Navy Brig. He was there on trumped up charges stemming from his kindness to Guantanamo detainees to whom he ministered as a US Army Islamic Chaplain. I learned first hand of the FBI's terrifying intrusion into Mrs. Yee's home and their refusal to tell her where he was or of what he was accused. Chaplain Yee was cleared of all charges.

Dr. Krauthammer argues that we not only have not harmed Muslims, we have done them a long list of big favors. One example he cites was the military campaign for the liberation of Iraq. Give me a break! This liberation began with a vicious shock and awe bombing assault, precipitated a civil war, destroyed priceless antiquities, and has taken the lives of well over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. Surveys of Iraqi citizens reveal that virtually all of them feel less secure now than before we liberated them.

The audacity that Dr. Krauthammer shows in his commentary is beyond belief. How would we respond to a title claiming "we" owe Jews or Christians no apology? All of the big three religions have at various times and places defamed the others, spilled innocent blood, violated their rights, or seized their land. The sooner we all quit keeping score and start apologizing the better off we will be.

Here is an afterword for those readers who can't see past the fact that Osama Bin Laden is a Muslim. Yes of course he is and he is arguably the most evil man of the twenty first century. Several Popes of the fifteenth and sixteenth century were notorious war-mongering fornicating torturers. They were Christians. You shouldn't tarnish a whole religion by the excesses of their most notorious intolerant leaders.

Octuplets: Are you kidding?!

2009-02-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

This source of intellectual commentary usually eschews popular tabloid fodder like, "Greed Crazed Fertility Doctor Assists Single Mother in Having Fourteen Children". But, that's exactly what this post is about. It was too tempting to pass up. By now we've all read about the woman who had octuplets and (Oh yeah) already had six other children. It turns out she was single and living with her mother.

I don't know much about this mother of octuplets. It is kind of being kept hush hush but apparently her own mother has said her daughter is obsessed with having babies. For goodness sake; there are over six billion people on this planet eating it up and heating it up. Why should we not be aghast that a woman wants to have fourteen children by extraordinary methods? OK, I don't know the whole story. Maybe she is an Olympic athlete with an IQ of 180, the beauty of Cleopatra, and assets of 20 million bucks to birth her exceptional babies, raise them, and educate them. Maybe her genes are just so fabulous they need to be spread for the betterment of the human race. But, I doubt it.

This blessed multiple birth event has led to some criticism of the fertility medical practitioner community. They have responded with "Who us? Why should we question a woman's personal choice about what to do with her body and her life?" I don't buy that. Doctors see all kinds of people. Many are mentally disturbed, poorly educated, suffering from various obsessions, and incapable of acting in their own best interest. Johnny's Rants believes unequivocally that doctors have absolute responsibility to not exploit these people by cutting on their bodies, impregnating them, or anything else that takes away their money and/or alters their mind or body in a way contrary to their best interest. See also my sensitive essay on exploitive cosmetic elective surgery, Coping with Cleavage.

Greedy plastic surgeons exploiting persons of low self-esteem may be the poster child of the medical profession sliding from Hippocratic ethics to gutter grubbing. However, exploitive fertility doctors can take it to another level. Making babies grow inside women with insufficient means of supporting them is not only a violation of the mothers' wellbeing but also the wellbeing of the babies and the tax payers who will have to pick up the tab for a lot of food, shelter, medical care and public education. I read one article that alleged that just the prenatal care, birthing, and postnatal care of these octuplets is costing $400,000 PER BABY. If I help a vulnerable woman make babies by personally donating sperm cells (you know in the traditional manner between the sheets) the law will hold me financially responsible for helping to support the resulting babies. Why should we not also hold a fertility doctor financially responsible for his complicity in making babies with a woman obviously unable to sufficiently support those babies through their upbringing and education to independent adults?!

Putting the Toilet Seat Down; NOT!

2009-01-29T17:38:00.000-08:00

There is a humanitarian crisis in East Africa and Gaza. There is a collapsing world economy; there are brazen pirate attacks on the high seas which are getting higher by the day because of global warming. Accordingly I intend to address the issue that I know is foremost on the mind of all Americans, LEAVING THE TOILET SEAT UP. Sadly it seems to be the toughest issue in the gender equality quest.

Obviously the best and most equitable solution to this gender war issue is to leave the seat as it was last used. For women, this will be the down position. For men after whizzing, this should be up as shown in the photograph at the right margin…or left or top, wherever BlogSpot puts the photo. The efficiency of this is obvious. Supposed the next necessary function in the toilet is the same act by a person of the same gender such as a male. Imagine if the male had put the seat down following the prior use; he would have to raise it again. These are unnecessary cycles of the seat. Scrink scrawnk; the hinges wear out.

I know my women readers will scream at this suggestion. First let me say that I am very sympathetic with essentially all women's issues such as the need for equal pay for equal work, having the word NO respected, maternity leave, getting better representation in upper management positions, etc. Neurologists have discovered that women actually have more neural connections between the left and right brain hemispheres making them better at multitasking and alliance-building networking, both key management skills. But on this important bathroom issue I have to ask my women friends, "Ladies! What's the big deal?" You just grab the seat between two fingers and put it down before sitting. Yeah yeah, I hear you. You are yelling, "Do you know what it feels like to think it's down when it's not and sit and fall through?!" Well yes I do because so many times I have been host to women or a guest in one's home only to hear a scream then see them come tearing out of the bathroom to grab me by the neck and deliver a scalding lecture on why I should put the toilet seat down after I use it.

Allow me to make a suggestion to my hundreds of women readers. Look before you sit! This should be a no brainer to a person of any gender sitting on anything. There could be a creepy spider on that toilet seat. I have a woman cousin in Florida who once approached the toilet to sit. Fortunately she looked and saw the large land crab that had entered the bowl from the sewerage system and was waiting with raised open claws. I have heard of sewer rats sloshing around in the bowl too. Even sitting places other than a toilet seat, like on a sofa with your pants on warrants a look. Anyone who has a house cat should know this. I don't have one but I learned fast when I visited a friend with a house cat. Anybody who has made it through junior high school where some jerk-head invariably puts a thumbtack in your seat when you come blazing into class late should learn and retain this important safety fact. LOOK BEFORE YOU SIT!

Ladies may I suggest you count your blessings if you have a loving wage-earning male whose only alleged sin is leaving the toilet seat up. There are much worse men. These are the ones that we men must also be wary of. They're the cabbage brains who leave the seat down BEFORE whizzing, sprinkling it with little yellow spots. When I was a little tyke I had trouble remembering to lift the seat before starting. My mother was so intent on training me to raise it before starting that she never even tried to confuse the issue by training me to lower it when I was done.

Now I must confess that there is one situation where a male should lower the toilet seat when he's done whizzing. That's when he's a guest in a lady's home and she requests it. It is her home after all. She has the right. My sister and sister in law will applaud this concession I'm sure. I am working hard to remember when I visit them.

I have a lot of sympathy for the extra hardship a woman faces because she has to sit for a number one. I have often railed with my women friends in support of more stalls in public women's restrooms where lines form because there is not sufficient capacity to accommodate the necessary extra privacy and time required for women to drop their drawers for a tinkle. However, in the quest for gender justice there is one behavior a man must never accede to. Some women actually try to require this behavior. This unmanly act is to sit to make water. I almost never use the term "p-word envy". It is an arrogant accusation usually levied by loser males who can't take it when a woman beats them at their own game. However, to the woman who has the audacity to suggest that males should always sit, I must say, "Madam, you suffer from p-word envy. Get over it."

T-mobile Hotspot at Home - NOT

2009-01-27T10:59:00.000-08:00

This is a rant. Everyone should launch a rant when they are a victim of overhyped advertising for a product that doesn't measure up.

T-mobile had the greatest mobile phone idea in years. It's a cell phone that picks up WiFi signals and switches from cell towers to internet (without charging your minutes down) whenever you're in WiFi range. The only problem is it only works erratically.

My wife and I leaped at the idea and signed up for two phones. That was six months ago. We have two homes (We're snowbirds) and we travel a lot. Both our homes are in locations of zero to one bar signal strength so conventional cell service is hit or miss. Unfortunately T-mobile "hotspot at home" is NOT at home half the time. With either phone, no matter how close we are to a wireless router or what router it is, it fails to connect or drops the connection half the time. Often the calls are dropped in mid call. Johnny's Rants give T-mobile hotspot at home a big two thumbs down!

Visiting Granddaughter

2008-10-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

Hey, we're in Kansas City spending time with our 7 month old granddaughter and her parents. This is a real treat for us and it's a lot of work. Babies are a lot worse than bosses for making ambiguous demands designed to multitask you to death. The redeeming thing is that they are a lot cuter than bosses.

Our princess seems to be a baby of great robustness and strength. She's in the ninety-something percentile of size in all dimensions such as length, weight, and head size but a little slow in the hair growth department. Despite the pink outfits, our daughter is always receiving dubious compliments from strangers such as, "Great baby. He's going to be a bruiser isn't he."

Ayla is her name. This is a girl's name in both Finnish and Hebrew, so it recognizes respectively her paternal grandfather and grandmother. It is also notably the name of the protagonist in Clan of the Cave Bear, that bright, courageous, and decisive little Cro-Magnon orphan girl who had the misfortune to be found and raised by thick-witted Neanderthals. Our daughter read the book when she was a child and emphatically announced, "If I have a daughter I'm going to name her Ayla." I have suggested to her that she probably identified with Ayla, particularly the part about being raised by thick-witted Neanderthals. Disclaimer: She does not always find my lame attempts to analyze her psyche particularly accurate or amusing.

Back to Ayla. She is in the exploratory stage now. That means she instantly grabs anything in reach and stuffs it in her mouth, with both hands, to assess by gnawing. For instance, she can grab a paper table napkin, stuff the whole thing in her mouth and gum it to shreds in the moments it takes a stiff-backed grandparent to bend over and pick up the spoon she just tossed on the floor. Her two parents, four grandparents, and four surviving great grandparents have provided her with a wealth of colorful, jangly, child-safe baby toys to satisfy her intellectual curiosity but, as her father notes, she definitely prefers the choking-hazard non-toys in her surroundings.

Ayla is impatient to crawl so she can more quickly reach fragile and dangerous articles. She can do push ups and she can stand up on her feet with her face mashed into the floor but she hasn't gotten all four limbs operating in sync yet. Her current traveling method involves the snowmobile technique wherein she uses her face like a sled runner (lubricated by a stream of saliva like a snail track) while her powerful legs serve as the traction propulsion device. Then she takes a couple of rollovers before assuming the snowmobile again. This can get her from the highly engineered baby teething toys to the skull and crossbones hazards as quick as a flash.

We take lots of outings with Ayla. She likes stroller rides, I guess because of the jiggling motion and changing scenery. She even tolerates latte stops if there are enough straws and table napkins to eat. Here are some pictures of some of our weekend outings. One notable stop was at an adult exercise station in one of the parks. This was particularly pleasing to Grandma who seems to be the genetic source of the boundless curiosity and energy passed to her descendants. Click any image for a larger view.

Willy C Becomes Rowdy Beaver

2008-10-01T17:55:00.001-07:00

While driving from Liberal, Kansas (actual town name) to Kansas City on Monday my wife and I got hungry about 50 miles before Witchita. This was a natural consequence of the fact that it was two hours past lunch time. I wanted to stop at some reliable convenient place like one of the many golden arches and KFCs. This never works when traveling with my wife. She feels that every meal may be our last or at least our last in that part of the world and thus must be special. It must be delicious, low caloried, and memorably representative of the character and history of the region. This causes her to research all our AAA books and interview numerous passers by in quest of the ultimate dining experience. It drives me nuts.

As we were approaching Wichita, she read all the quick histories and restaurant reviews of Wichita from our AAA and other reference guides. She came up with the "must eat at" restaurant, Willy C's. We dutifully programmed the address of Willy's into our trusty new Garmin GPS. Ms. Garmin got us off at a certain exit then immediately directed "Turn left…" on some street then, "Arriving at destination on right." when we were in the left lane with lots of traffic on the right and no sight of anything called Willy. Almost immediately it was into, "Recalculating: Turn right on Elm St. Recalculating, Turn Left on Oak Street. Oh Golly, Go back". Then my wife starts in with, "No it's got to be on West street; go under the freeway." I respond, "I can't go under the freeway; I'm in the left turn lane." Then all hell breaks loose (this happens all the time) with wife, Ms. Garmin, and me all squawking at each other hysterically and wife insisting that I'm losing my temper and becoming an unsafe drivers so I should stop there in the middle of the freeway ramp and let her drive.

So, to make a long story more tolerable we somehow moved wife into the driver's seat and caught a few honks and middle fingers as we headed off with her in pursuit of Willy's. This time she resolved to stop right where Ms. Garmin said, even though it definitely did not say Willy C. (a rare moment of agreement with Ms. Garmin). It turns out that this was not Willy C's but the Rowdy Beaver. We went in and learned that Willy's had gone bust and the Rowdy Beaver had just opened two weeks ago in its place.

In the end it was good. The Rowdy Beaver was my kind of place. They had much paraphernalia for sale including, prominently, manikins with tiny very narrow-fronted thong bikinis that said Rowdy Beaver on the front. They had many micro brew beers and ales to choose from with good names like "Flying Dog Doggy Style pale ale". They had big burgers with thick beef patties and they weren't all soggy with that crappy mayonnaise and pickle relish that runs downs your forearms when you try to eat burgers at most of the fast food chains. There were lots of flies but we were able to swat them with carefully aimed blows of our menus. I really liked the place. I think my wife did too; she figured it was soooo authentic Witchita.

Crazy Woman Takes Charge

2008-10-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

Why do I only think up a good response after the incident has passed?

Last week I was driving to the north rim entrance to the Grand Canyon when I saw some people standing in the road flailing their arms up and down. It was in a meadow area so I could clearly see the road beyond them. Other than a couple of parked cars and some more people on the shoulder there was nothing on the road, so this was a bit puzzling. As I approached more closely one woman began running toward me in the center of the road flapping her arms more wildly and looking quite angry. I had to stop because she was completely blocking the road. She ran up to my door still flapping her arms wildly and demanded, "Don't you know what this signal means?!" I tried to get my window open to hear her better but in my nervousness I accidentally had my finger on the wrong button so I kept opening and closing the rear window. Finally I opened my door so I could better communicate with her.

The lady continued raging, raving, and flapping her arms while blurting, "This means SLOW DOWN. There's been an accident up ahead!" Since I could see the roadway was completely clear ahead and I was completely stopped I reasoned that I had slowed down sufficiently soon and thoroughly to satisfy any reasonable person. I just gave her my best Jack Nicholson glower and only slightly snidely asked, "Well what do you want me to do about it?" This really set her off and she yelled, "I want you to SLOW DOWN!" Then she rushed at my door with both hands and tried to slam it. I don't like people getting physical with my car so I held it open until she stopped pushing, then closed it gently and proceeded very slowly on. When I got into the middle of the area she was guarding I saw a crunched up motorcycle off the road in the meadow and I could tell that the people on the shoulder were tending to a man lying on the shoulder, presumably the unfortunate rider.

The rider was wearing one of those pirate-like bandanas that bikers who disapprove of helmets use to protect their hard craniums during an accident. OK, maybe that remark is unfair. Perhaps he was wearing a helmet when the accident happened and Ms. Take Charge had wrenched it off his head oblivious to the dangers of neck injuries. So, anyway I proceeded on, hoping this unfortunate fellow would survive and feeling very annoyed at the bossy rude woman.

What was this woman? My school teacher wife said she was probably a school teacher because they instinctively and aggressively try to take control of any situation that looks like an emergency even if they don’t know what the hell they're doing. I just kept mulling over the answers I should have given her when she demanded, "Don't you know what this signal means?!" Perhaps I should have said, "I'm just back from Venezuela and there it means 'I'm from FARC and I want to kidnap you and hold you hostage for six years'". Or perhaps, "This is a national park so obviously I thought you were a wildly excited German tourist trying to share with the world that you had spotted a cute chipmunk eating a pine nut." Or maybe just, "I thought you were listening to a Rufus Thomas CD and just got an uncontrollable urge to leap out of your car and start doing the Funky Chicken dance in the middle of the road.

Anyway I guess I said the right thing. As it was, it irritated her enough to make her charge my car like a bison bull in rut. By the way, this isn't the first time this has happened to me. The previous time it was an almost identical situation except it was a lady police officer who went berserk. I know there are those who will say I'm from an era when men thought a woman saying "stop" really meant "go further" but this isn't true. In both cases I had female witnesses who attested to the fact that I had slowed sufficiently soon and thoroughly and that the berserk woman was truly delusional.

Old dogs can't even do OLD tricks!

2008-08-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

I just went windsurfing in the Columbia River gorge…barely. Decades ago in the infancy of the windsurfing sport (when I first did this) sailing in the gorge was considered a badge of honor. You didn't have to excel, just survive. My son James prodded me there this time. He's a black belt windsurfer. Well I guess it's not a belt; it's a harness.

To be honest, in the heyday of my youthful windsurfing skill, nearly 20 years ago at about age 45, I was really a long board light wind sailor. My trips to the gorge could be easily counted on two hands and my successful jibes (the essential short board U-turn) could probably be counted on one hand. At least I could awkwardly water start, an essential skill for one who falls on his jibes.

Back to the present. When I arrived at the "Event Center" beach to attempt my sailing I had already make a bad decision by drinking too much coffee. This amplified my jitters which were already strong from fear of death or (worse yet) damaging some expensive equipment. I knew I was off to a bad start when my hand slipped off the rubber bootie that I was tugging on and socked myself in the groin almost causing me to fall off the stump I was sitting on. Somehow I mounted my inappropriately long skinny old Mistral Pandera board and made it out through the other crazy windsurfers and kite boarders to the middle where there was some real chop. Of course I fell off in my tack but then I somehow managed to remount with a rope start. I steamed back in to shore feeling relieved about missing all the other kiters and windsurfers until I hit an invisible submerged sand bar and broke off my fin screw.

I thought I was off the hook but unfortunately I found another fin screw and (with James' urging) made repairs with trembling hands. When I was done, I looked out and counted 15 kite boarders and 10 windsurfers slashing through the area where I proposed to sail. That was it for me; I didn't want to hurt them. My vision of myself was like one of those metal balls in a pin ball machine; round, stupid, totally at the mercy of the laws of physics and highly likely to collide with any of several colorful objects in my trajectory. I spent the rest of the day reading a book and snapping some photos of James.

I felt bad that I kind of weenied out. My best excuse, advanced age, was shot down when I saw that there were quite a few other wrinkled old prunes out there doing a good job of it. I do aspire to freshen my skills a bit in some less intimidating venues. Here are some pictures of James, not me.

We also did some hiking on the flanks of Mt. Hood on our final day in the vicinity. Here are some pictures of that. With all of these pictures, click to see an enlargement. There are also more pictures of these adventures on James' blog.

Granddaughter Swimming

2008-08-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

Anna and Ayla have a swim in Kansas City motel pool.

Click snapshots below for a larger image. These were taken in Kansas City while Catherine helped Anna and Ayla survive a series of motels after starting her new job there. They were awaiting availability of their new apartment and the arrival of Joonas from Columbus with the moving truck.

Visiting the Crypts of Venezuela's Doctor Death

2008-06-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Today we bring you another blast from the past. The narrative below was written in the evening after our November 5, 2006 pilgrimage to the hacienda ruins of prominent German-born Dr. Gottfried Knoch. It continues the strangeness theme of this wacky, weird, and wonderful country that was also exploited in the post on Maria Leonza, the nude tapir rider.

Our adventure de la dia was a bush-whacking hike through steep mountainous jungles to the overgrown ruins of Dr. Gottfried Knoch. His hacienda, crypts, and laboratory date back to 1886. They are the legacy of this man, an apparent necrophiliac 19^th century doctor. Besides nice humanitarian stuff like offering free services to the poor, he also appears to have been a scientist in quest of a method of mummification to embalm bodies in a humid, tropical environment. Apparently that task is difficult in climates that are not extremely dry or perpetually below freezing.

The story of doctor Knoch appears to be in the genre of Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…except it's true! Dr. Knoch's great scientific work began with experiments on dogs and other small animals. After refining his methods, his work spread to humans. One of the complications of the process was the need to anticipate the onset of death and inject special mummification chemicals just before his patient's heart stopped beating. Apparently Dr. Knoch always timed it just right. After administration of the chemicals, his patients always passed away right on schedule.

Dr. Knoch's experiments may have met with some skepticism in the coastal community, causing him to move his work place. He built a home and laboratory several thousand vertical feet up a steep mountainside with a spectacular jungle overview of the Caribbean. Deprived of a willing population of patients, he was forced to develop his technique on his own family members. Among the beneficiaries were his daughter, his wife, and his nurse/mistress.

Our hike this morning started with an ascent in five, 10-passenger 4X4 vehicles up a treacherously narrow and twisting (but actually paved) road over the Avila Mountains that separate Caracas from the sea. After descending to 2 or 3 thousand feet altitude on the sea side of the mountain ridge, we reached the trailhead. There were lots of us: students, teachers, and family members. The trek in on foot was not long horizontally but was steep and overgrown with banana trees, briars, and every other kind of tree, grass, and brush known to thrive in the tropics. Mud, slippery rocks and insects added to the challenge. Well acquainted with the threat of chiggers, we hosed ourselves down with insect repellant. Some of the other's neglected to do the same. Our hearts go out to them.

Needless to say, there were many falls, skinned knees, and bruised buttocks. Catherine slipped on a rock and slid off the trail, but thanks to the entangling vegetation, did not take a long plummet.

After a sweltering hot ascent, we arrived at the remains of Dr. Knoch's mausoleum, just as a chilling mist blew in around us. (Why didn't we do this adventure on Halloween?) The mausoleum was a moss and fern covered tower reminiscent of some South and Central American Indian pyramids. It containing six open crypts, long since emptied by either souvenir hunters or a failure in the mummification process. Steep stone stairs led to the flat roof of the building which provided a splendid viewing platform over the mist covered jungle and distant Caribbean. There we ate our cheese, crackers and chocolate before bushwhacking our way down to the overgrown ruins of his hacienda and laboratory - a dark cellar-like place of stone or concrete. Returning the way we came, we arrived at our vehicles just as the mists turned to rain causing Catherine to turn a big banana leaf into an umbrella.

Perhaps this place and its history will inspire a really great movie some day – something in the style of an Indiana Jones thriller. Under my direction, it would probably turn out more like a 50's horror movie for the drive-in movie theater market. Uh…do they still have drive-in movies?

You may click the pictures to enlarge. In order they are, the mausoleum, the empty crypts, the one remaining wall of the hacienda with the doctors spiral symbol at the top, and a slightly "creeped out" visitor exiting the doctor's dank laboratory.

Current Granddaughter Pictures

2008-06-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

After a steady string of Venezuela posts I'm going home to family now. Here are some new pictures of the foremost thing on my mind, our new granddaughter Ayla. Click to enlarge. For any visitors who don't know me, the handsome gentleman with white hair is not me. He's Aimo, Ayla's other Grandpa from Finland and Israel. I'm the ugly guy at the top left margin of the web page with a brazen parrot trying to steal his gold tooth.

Buff Nude Woman Rides Tapir

2008-06-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

There she is, right in the middle of the urban Caracas arterial, a gigantic statue of a buff nude woman riding a tapir. Well, why not?! This is Venezuela after all. First (for those of you who didn't have Mrs. Mulligan for 9^th grade biology) a tapir is a big animal that looks like a giant pig with rhinoceros toes and a little elephant trunk. Tapirs live here in Venezuela along with nearly every other exotic animal that stepped off Jonah's ark. What's weird is that people normally don't ride them – probably for some good reason.

So who is she, this amazing woman in the statue? My detractors will no doubt suggest that I find something perversely erotically tantalizing about buff nude women riding tapirs. That of course is untrue; I am simply intellectually curious about how this seemingly mythic figure fits into history and weaves into the social fabric of Venezuela. After inquiring about her for nearly two years and getting nothing but shrugs from natives as well as expats, I got the brilliant idea to Google her. She is Maria Leonza, the central figure in a very blended Venezuelan religion sometimes referred to as a cult. The woman herself is supposedly a historic figure born of an important native chief in about 1502. According to legend she was a very buff woman and perhaps a goddess or queen. She was particularly noted for reigning over savage beasts and she liked creepy reptiles too.

Getting back to this religion that Ms. Leonza dominates, it combines indigenous Venezuelan, African slave Santeria (supposedly from the Yoruba of Nigeria), a touch of European spiritism, and Catholicism of course. It's got something for everybody, whether you like forest spirits, animal sacrifice, Jesus, or buff nude women who ride tapirs. It's no surprise that it remains popular. Maybe I'll convert. I think the Catholic part was a later add-on. The local priest missionaries here in the 16^th century didn't always follow the "my way or the highway" dictates of their management back in Rome. If they couldn't convert the natives, they'd at least mess with 'em and try to stuff a little Christianity into their native religion and a few genes into their gene pool. Accordingly they managed to give Ms. Leonza her proper Catholic name of Santa María de la Onza Talavera del Prato de Nívar, which means (I think) Saint Mary of the Jaguar Something Something Something.

Well, anyway, I'm just starting to copy stuff from Wikipedia and some other web articles now so I'll quit. If you find this interesting like me and have time to fritter away, Google it yourself. I have to go to the grocery store now.

They're watching us!

2008-05-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

I have often mused that Venezuelans seem enamored with the United States. However their image of us seems glamorized much beyond reality. I have attributed this to movies and television. Many or most movies showing in Caracas are Hollywood products and roughly half of the cable and satellite channels feature USA movies or sitcoms with Spanish dubbed or subtitled. Even some of the local shows are knock offs of American TV shows like Wheel of Fortune and Candid Camera. Anyway this cartoon that appeared in the Caracas El Nacional Sunday magazine sort of validated my assumptions. So, we Yanks have to set a good example. They're watching us.

Pájaro del día

2008-05-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Monday Catherine played hooky and we took a hike in El Avila Parque Nacional. The trail head that we took is just a nine buck taxi ride from our apartment. In fact from the high point on our steep scramble we could see our apartment building with our binoculars. But, the first things we saw were several members of one of my favorite Venezuelan bird species, the Querrequerre. It is the Inca Jay in English. The Latin name is Cyanocorax yncas. These were almost tame, probably because of being fed by the hikers. You can click the picture to open a larger image.

After the hike we had a late lunch at Tarzilandia (Tarzan Land) just outside the park entrance. You enter and walk through a tropical garden menagerie with large birds, most notably three species of Macaw parrots. In the outdoor dining area it is white table cloths and waiters with tuxedos. The décor is jungle. Among the decorations were large Loggerhead turtle shells. I didn't want to think of how they got those but the restaurant has existed about the same since at least back to the 50's so I assume they were acquired legally and morally before the animal was known to be endangered. The food was great and reasonable, even considering the dollar's nose dive. We saved nine bucks coming home though by just walking down hill to the Altimira Metro stop and taking the subway free (because we're over 60) to Chacaito where it's just 15 more minutes walk to our apartment. Ahh, life is good when you are retired.

Douglasses Do Downtown

2008-05-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

We went downtown Saturday. That doesn't sound like too big a deal but it's kind of a big deal here. Downtown Caracas is the old part of town where the offices of the federal government are located along with the Caracas city offices. Many gringos and even some Venezuelans won't go there because it is considered a bit dangerous. It is somewhat run down. It is also a stronghold for government supporters, and we all know the government position regarding the USA is that we are a bunch of dirty Yankee imperialists. I'm still not sure whether the alleged danger is more from ordinary pickpockets and street bandits looking to prey on anyone who looks like he may have a few Bolivares in his pocket or if its political animosity toward gringos. I think mostly the former.

We felt pretty safe because we were hosted by our new friend, whom I shall call Freddie (because I'm not sure he wants web publicity). He is a devout Chavista unlike most of the people we know here who are exactly the opposite. We did not see any signs of contempt or much interest expressed in us by anyone. We of course had dressed for obscurity by wearing simple drab colors and no jewelry of any market value. At Freddie's recommendation we had bathed well and put on all clean clothes before our departure because he said the locals can smell stale gringos. Freddie gave us plenty of safety warnings and had me stand guard with him behind Catherine when she made a quick photo sprint to take pictures of a dramatic wall mural that chronicled the history of Venezuela. Freddie said motorcycle bandits are skilled at purse and camera grabs. There were some places where he advised against showing the camera at all. At one point he had us abruptly change direction because he said a suspicious young man was walking too close behind us. Freddie is used to rough neighborhoods. He used to live in New York so some of his security habits may have come from that experience.

After we got off the subway in the downtown area we were confronted by a giant work of wall art. It is very common in Caracas. This example symbolizes much more than I can recall. It is notable because it shows Bolivar's beloved mistress whom he credited with being a great source of his strength.

We saw some good stuff including the Plaza Bolivar, and the presidential palace. Most of the government buildings date from colonial times. We were able to walk through the beautiful capital courtyard. We visited the Cathedral in which many important historical people are buried. The most notable by far is Simon Bolivar himself. Here's a picture of his tomb with the motionless guards armed with rifles and bayonets. Freddie said they're not just for decoration because several years ago when his ex-wife stuck her foot beyond the roped off area to get a snapshot, they came off their posts real fast to send her scurrying back. Oh, by the way, you can click the pictures to see a bigger image.

We visited the spot where the famous (or infamous, depending upon your perspective) movie "The Revolution will Not be Televised" showed some guys firing pistols into the crowd (or empty street, depending upon who you believe) in the coup attempt of April 11, 2002. There is a monument there now.

We also visited the birthplace and first home of Simon Bolivar. It is well maintained and filled with large paintings and murals illustrating important events in Venezuelan history. I have a picture here of one of the paintings that shows the abuse of the Indians by the Spanish on the left and the protection of the Indians by the Catholic Church on the right. It's looks like both sides of the picture may end up in the creation of more mestizos.

The downtown and the government buildings are undergoing some renovations. The government buildings looked great and there were some museums in historic buildings with wonderful historic paintings and narratives about Caracas and Venezuelan history. One museum was dedicated to the renovations that Caracas is doing in the area and also new public housing projects. A very sweet young red-shirted woman proudly showed us around and gave us the standard handouts. One was the pin button shown that says (translated) something like, "For love, we put a stop to the empire." We all know who the empire is. When we left she thanked us for coming and with a big warm smile said "Bye" in English.

We wound up our visit with a nice lunch at what I think was a very old restaurant in an old building. At least it seemed old compared to our own upscale ever-changing USA-emulating neighborhood of Las Mercedes. The restaurant was on an upper floor that we accessed through an elevator that looked more like a refrigerator than an elevator. Freddie warned us to keep our hands away from the door because there wasn't an inner door. The eating area was a delightful breezy balcony overlooking Bolivar Square. We were just opposite a Cathedral bell tower that chimed every 15 minutes. The bell was charming in the day time but Freddie said it would be less than charming if you were trying to sleep in the nearby hotel rooms.

So what do I think of Chavez now that I see how he and his supporters are spiffing up downtown? Well, I saw a lot of pride, hope, and energy in the downtown. Still Chavez strikes me as a bit of an impulsive, paternalistic, patronizing, populist demagogue. He hasn't succeeded widely at eradicating poverty in blighted neighborhoods like Petare, but who the hell could?! A long enduring culture of poverty is a hard habit to break. It seems that too many Venezuelans either feel he is the solution to all Venezuela's problems or that his removal by any means would be the solution to all Venezuela's problems. Perhaps he's a man of noble aspirations, astute political skills, pathological ambition, and flawed character like the Lyndon Johnson portrayed in the Robert Caras biography, only more so. Whatever, I don't think just finding the right president is going to improve a country like Venezuela or the USA. I suspect it takes a whole lot of people willing to provide leadership and work hard at all levels of government and community to eliminate corruption, improve education, clean up the environment, and achieve an enduring stable, fair, and prosperous, economy. I don't have the key to jumpstarting that.

Hobnobbing with Saudi Diplomats then Getting Bossed by the Maid

2008-05-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

I'm doing computer housekeeping and I just found my journal entry of September 12, 2007. It predated inauguration of this blog so I didn't post it at the time.

My wife and I had an interesting evening last night (September 11). We were invited by the Saudi ambassador to a major reception commemorating Saudi Arabia's national day. My wife is his son's school librarian and several of the boy's teachers and school administrators were invited. It was in a real swanky hotel and there was food in every direction from appetizers to whole roast sheep to an endless variety of to-die-for desserts. At first I tried to eat only with my right hand but that was awkward because we were standing, holding little plates as well as our (non-alcoholic) drink glasses. Also, I soon noticed that nobody else was worried about that.

Lots of people were there from the Chavez government including the former Vice President of Venezuela. There were some American embassy people, and lots of business persons and other diplomats of various nationalities. Most of the women dressed fairly conservatively out of respect for the host but there were a couple of "over the top" (in every sense of the word) highly revealing cocktail dresses worn by a few of the Venezuelan women. We met the ambassador and several Saudi diplomats in the reception line. Generally they greeted us in Spanish and hospitably switched to English when they realized we were Americans. They were wearing those little red and white checkered head scarves and had the obligatory little mustaches and goatees. There were some other guys in robes and Santa hats who looked like the notorious blind Sheik. Most of the Arab women were wearing the full hair covering things but none were wearing veils. The ambassador's wife looked a bit more modern with some pretty bright clothes and a more moderate headscarf that allowed some hair exposure.

We had quite a long conversation with the only Chavez supporter that we know here and her husband. They're both very nice folks and revere Chavez just as much as all our other very nice Venezuelan friends despise him. There seems to be no in between.

It is interesting to see how amiably the Saudis and the Venezuelans get along seeing as the former are tee-totalers who hide their women under bags and the latter are party drinkers who glorify and display the sexuality of their women. I guess they are united by their common purpose to provide oil to the thirsty US at as high a price as possible.

The Saudis gave each guest a gift as we left. It was a large beautiful print of a Saudi Beach and a folder with material from the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information.

Morning after now: It is maid day. That happens twice per week now but my wife still makes me wash dishes the night before. Maria, our young maid, usually has lots of questions for me and occasional assignments. She is a talented exterminator so my wife had asked her to zap the termites living in our cupboards and bar with her trusty cure-all chemical, "Vensol". That was not without complications as I have dramatized below, translating our dialogue into English.

Maria: Senor Johnny, can you fix this thing (showing me the hypodermic needle she uses to inject poison into the termite holes in our cabinets; it had a swelled and stuck rubber piston.)

I got it loosened and moving again with much friction.

Me: OK now, but you make suck much slowly. .

Maria: (later) It broke again.

Me: Oh. That sad.

Maria: What are you going to do about it?

Me: Uh

Maria: What are you going to do about it now?

Me: OK, I go pharmacy buy new one now. What it word?

Maria: Injectadora and while you're at it stop by the grocery store and buy some green plantains, potatoes, and chicken bouillon. (She's actually supposed to do the grocery shopping.)

Me: OK

Maria: Take your umbrella. It looks like it's going to rain.

Maria got the job done, even finding and harpooning one of the larva to show me. She fed me well, as usual. Yesterday's lunch was something like Beaufort stew except with chicken instead of shrimp and with a gigantic mountain of white rice. I have tried to tell her that I like her rice but that I prefer brown rice and much smaller portions. The only part that comes across is that I like her rice.

Tortuga Lodge: Naturalist Experience and Beach Paradise on a Budget

2008-05-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

Hey! We just spent the weekend with a bunch of friends in the national park, Laguna de Tacarigua. At least I think that's the one it was. Venezuela has 43 national parks so it's hard to keep them straight. We stayed in Tortuga Lodge which cost about BsF 550 per couple or about $170. That price covers a big clean room with king size bed and private bath, three ample meals per day, and all the cokes and alcoholic drinks you want. It is right on the ocean with great surf and shady spots to repose under palm trees and large thatched roof sun shelters. You can walk on the beach for miles in either direction without encountering another human. Incredibly, for on the beach in front of the mangrove marshes, there were few mosquitoes and no no-see-ums bit me.

OK, so what's the hitch? The only minor downside was the potable water system was rather weak delivering a mere drizzle of brackish water from the sink and shower but the bottled drinking water was also part of the deal at no extra cost. I suppose finicky guests could even do a sparing post-shower rinse with it. Oh yeah, there was some lamenting that the fine new air conditioners didn't work, but personally, with the fans in the room and windows on both sides I felt well-ventilated and just comfy.

While we weren't lying around under the palms like Microsoft execs on their one weekend off per year, we were enjoying the naturalist experience. (That's naturalist with an l for all you unrefined smart alecks.) For a very reasonable price the same boatman who brought us to the lodge took us on an evening boat excursion into the mangrove areas where there was spectacular birding. The most dramatic and memorable were the scarlet ibises. We also enjoyed pelicans, storks, several species of heron, some magnificent frigate birds and a flock of white birds coming to roost that we couldn't agree on. We ruled out white ibises because of the beak shape. A retrospective review of my Steven Hilty book suggests cattle egret to me. The beak shape looks right and they live in the area. Perhaps some of my SCAN organization friends can tell me. They are in the roosting pictures along with the scarlet ibises and the cormorants. I regret there are no good close-ups. You can click on the pictures to blow them up to a larger size.

My Edisto Island friends will be pleased to know that the beach there is a protected nesting area for loggerhead turtles. The bar tender at the lodge remarked on my Edisto Interpretive Center T-shirt with the loggerhead turtle pictures. He recognized them as loggerheads immediately and found it rather remarkable and uplifting that someone from so far away also lived on a loggerhead nesting beach and was a volunteer in loggerhead protection. He said you can go to jail if you mess with the nests here. That was good to hear in this country where you can generally get away with anything.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Beach Paradise to Caracas Barrio

2008-05-12T07:12:00.000-07:00

Following a weekend of paradise, alternately swimming in the surf and lying around like royalty under palm-thatched sun shelters drinking cold caipiriñas, we went home. Dang! I hate that. Entering Caracas from the east the first big thing you drive through is the Petare barrio. I think barrio just means neighborhood in some Spanish-speaking countries but in Venezuela, it means slum. The US Embassy and other rumor spreaders claim that most of the approximately 65 homicides in Caracas on an average weekend occur in the barrios. Petare is one of the biggest and the worst. I never know where truth ends and legend begins in this country but our friends' sweet and wonderful maid lives in Petare. She sometimes is unable to get to work because she's hunkered down in her house ducking a flare up of street violence. A few weeks ago her nephew was murdered there.

Although my cultural enrichment-craving wife is dying to visit a squalid barrio, I hope to steer clear of them. I prefer instead to keep them as romantic fantasies in my mind like pirate ships. Zooming past one at 100 km per hour on the autopista, while taking snapshots out the window, is plenty close enough for me. I am peppering a few of the snapshots in this blog post.

Being an engineer (retired emeritus) and not a sociologist, I am most interested in the structure and infrastructure of the barrios. In a word, it's scary! Around Caracas they are built on prime view property, i.e. perilously steep hills. They ain't exactly geotechnically engineered for this kind of terrain. In fact, we are told they are all squatters' habitations and sometimes wash away in the wet season. There seems to be a lot of public land in Venezuela and poor people are prone to just find a piece of it, get some of the hollow extruded clay tiles that Venezuela is made of, slap 'em together with some mortar, then presto…a house. If the bare land is all taken up, they may just build their house on top of someone else's…literally! We just heard the other day that someone's maid was agitated because someone else was building a house on her roof.

I don't know a whole lot about how the utilities work in the barrios. I don't think the plumbing is pretty but I can at least testify that by dusk they are twinkling with the light of modern efficient screw-in compact fluorescent lights. Charles Hardy, a Wyoming native and former Catholic priest actually lived in a very impoverished barrio ministering to the occupants during the early years of Chavez' administration. He reports on life and infrastructure there in his book "Cowboy in Caracas". See http://www.cowboyincaracas.com/. His description of the habitations that he and his neighbors lived in was even more dismal than what you see in the photos. He says they were desperation shelters provided by a former "benevolent" right wing leader, consisting of cardboard walls with tin roofs. The bathroom was wherever the lowest corner of the concrete floor was so you could take a whiz and it would run outside under the crack between the wall and the floor. You did your number 2 on a newspaper then discretely took it outside and set it across the road to wash away (wherever away is) in the next rain. Somebody brought drinking water in on a truck that didn't always arrive. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Charlie is a fervent believer in Chavez as a positive instrument of beneficial social change. I can agree with Presidente Chavez that his predecessors were corrupt right wing oligarch's and that his arch-enemy George Bush is an arrogant belligerent imperialist doophus. However, Charlie has a long way to go to convince me that Chavez has the intellectual capability and the genuine commitment to bring long term prosperity, stability, democracy, and an end to corruption and poverty. But, hey! I like the energy-saving screw-in fluorescents.

Caracas Breakfast with Macaws

2008-04-28T06:12:00.001-07:00

In the middle of my scrambled eggs and ricotta cheese on the balcony this morning an impressive Blue and Gold Macaw parrot made a close pass. Soon I saw that there were three of them doing aerial maneuvers complete with the obligatory squawking. I was photographically unarmed on the first pass. I fetched my camera and took some pictures but I didn't get another opportunity for such a close shot. Here are three better shots out of dozens of so-so ones. See respectively an overhead pass, a wide shot of one alighted on a new palm tree shoot (Can you find it?), and a fully zoomed and cropped one of the bird on the palm shoot. Click any picture for a larger image. I'll miss these birding breakfasts when I'm back in the USA.

Girl race car driver - Selling it with sex

2008-04-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard of Danica Patrick? For those who don't remember, she's the girl rookie who at 100 pounds and age 23 led in the 2005 Indianapolis 500 race. She raced aggressively and wisely to finish ahead of all but 3 of the testosterone fueled veteran male drivers. I'm not a racing fan but I channel surfed into the race that day and was hooked. As father of a daughter the same age, former coach of a girls' softball team, and a believer in women's abilities to achieve as highly as men where brains and coordination are involved, the drama grabbed me. I was on the edge of my chair rooting for her.

Because I am not particularly a racing fan, Danica was quickly off my mental radar screen after the race. Once in a while I'd hear her name in the sports news as having placed in some position in some race, but that was about it. I never heard of a win… until now! She just appeared on my computer news page for having become, on April 20, the first ever woman to win an Indy car race and she's holding a third place point standing this year in that sport. I felt a little "hooray moment" and quickly Googled my way to her web site to revel in the excitement and see what this woman was all about.

Whoowee! Imagine my shock when the page opened up with a big splash of highly sexualized Bat-woman type whiz bang. The page opens ponderously slowly if you don't have an Indy-speed bandwidth but it links to this page. http://www.indymotorspeedway.com/danica.htm There she is wearing trashy little skimpy outfits and draped sensually all over a yellow '57 Chevy. This certainly doesn't promote my interest in Indy racing. If anything it makes me want…uhh…to have a vintage '57 Chevy. Then it only gets worse with a link to her Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo-shoot where she appears in various stages of squirming out of a racing suit wearing a tiny bikini and not always both parts of it.

Now I don't have anything against nudity or sexuality. In fact, sex is my favorite human interaction. It's just that this business of SELLING IT with sex really puts me off. There's not one chance in a googolplex that Ms. Patrick would blunder into this blog post, but if she did, she might comment "Mind your own business gramps. This is who I am. This is who I want to be. Don't confuse me with Nancy Drew!" Continuing this imaginary conversation I might say, "OK, fair enough. But consider the unique position you are in to inspire the three billion women and girls in the world to believe in and nurture their athletic and intellectual gifts." In 1993, pro basketball bad boy Charles Barkley defended his personal behavior, declaring that sports figures should not be considered role models. I couldn't agree more. But I say to you, Charles and Danica, sports figures ARE considered role models, whether or not they should be or want to be.

Danica, you ARE certainly cute draped over a yellow Chevy quarter panel with your hiney crack peeking out the top of your underpants, but so would be a million other young women. My grandfatherly advice is to save this for your close friends or spouse and keep your public image focused on racing. Women who can't back out of a parking place without having a thousand dollar crash can pose for these kinds of pictures. NO! On second thought, I don't want my wife posing for such pictures either. Well anyway, be careful zooming around out there so fast in your Indy car. I'm still your fan. I want to keep seeing you for a long time…holding trophies while completely zipped up in your racing coveralls!

Bug Paradise

2008-04-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

Bug Paradise, a.k.a Casa Maria. Those are two official names of the one superb posada 3.5 hours west of Caracas in Carabobo State where we just spent the weekend with several friends. It hardly seemed paradise for the bugs because the entomologist owner had huge numbers of them crucified in display cases.

(This picture and all the others are tiny in here but you can click to see them bigger.)
Also the numerous ponds on the premises were teeming with fish and frogs that made short work of any mosquito larvae so unfortunate as to hatch there. Ha! YES! Numerous other bugs met a grisly end when (attracted by the light) they sneaked into the screen cage teeming with golden orb-weaver spiders.

The posada as it exists today represents a 16 year labor of love of Bavarian immigrants, Norbert and Gabriele (Gabi) Flauger. Norbert is foremost an entomologist and ecologist but has obvious talents in horticulture and landscape and building architecture. Gabi is business manager, decorator, and master chef. Both are trilingual in Spanish, English, and of course German. Check out their website at www.bugparadise.com. To proceed from the home page, click the language of your choice.

Bug Paradise is not only a native plant horticultural garden but a menagerie of native animals including huge aquaria of salt and fresh water fish, a butterfly house, a sociable free flying Amazon parrot, a cute native possum, an impish Capuchin monkey, and two lethargic boa constrictors. The owners also deploy the right attractants of fruit and seeds to bring many flying visitors of the bird and butterfly sort. It was a paradise for Homo sapiens too. There was a small but picturesque swimming pool amidst orchid wrapped trees and dangling bag-like nests of the Crested Oropendolas. The sleeping rooms and the grounds were all maintained with stereotypical German fastidiousness. The feng shui was right on the mark.

You can hang out in the Garden of Eden premises if you're sedentary but Norbert can take you on naturalist excursions to the cloud forest and other locations on the Caribbean beaches or in the Los Llanos (plains). You can also take walks in the extensive orange groves up the hill behind the posada, enjoy the view, steal oranges, and get lost. We did that Saturday evening. On Sunday we took a lurching ride in the 1957 Unimog pictured at the top to a point higher up in the cloud forests. (No side impact airbags there.) In addition to Norbert, we had a distinguished German botanist guest Winfried (Vinnie) accompanying us.

Vinnie was inspired and inspiring, definitely a botanist worthy of a Gary Larsen caricature. He is cataloging the native species in Venezuela in the cloud forests from about 200 meters to 1000 meters I think he said. Here are some interesting specimens such as the compound Hibiscus and the walking palm tree.

We ended our adventure by going home, which is the way we end all adventures. These last two pictures are at a stop for fruit (mangoes and avocados). A very poor looking mother with a one year old baby came up and asked if I'd like to take her baby's picture. I didn't know what the deal was so I said no. Then I sized her up as truly needy and found a BsF 10 note in my nearly empty wallet. It's hard to know how much that's worth as both the dollar and the Bolivar race toward worthlessness. I think about $2.75. I gave it to her and she was crossing herself and giving me blessings of gratitude till we rode out of sight. It's cheap to feel generous in a poor country.

Name My Species

2008-04-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

Can anyone name the species of this bird sitting on the antenna on the building next door to me this morning in Caracas? My Hilty book shows several similar Orioles but they have a different pattern of black on the face and throat.

Updating now on 16April '08: A number of people have suggested the Oriole Blackbird (Gymnomystax mexicanus). He lives here and the marking patterns of these seem to match perfectly.

Dream Vacation on a Budget!

2008-04-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been to historic Charleston, SC? Do you like white sand beaches with warm water? Golf, nature walks, safe bike trails, eating? Do you like luxurious accommodations? Are you on a tight budget? Have I ever got a deal for you! Come stay at The Dragonfly on Edisto Island. The Dragonfly is our beach house occupied sporadically by my family but most of the time available to YOU for a vacation accommodation. This is not your moldy old run of the mill beach cabin. The Dragonfly is a modern four year old house with plenty of conveniences and luxuries, four bedrooms, two bathrooms plus a private outdoor bath house (for those frequent beach swims), three televisions, three porches, modern kitchen with dishwasher, big fridge…the works. There are enough beds for ten people plus a baby crib, ceiling fans in all the rooms, and of course four-season climate conditioning. It's all in a setting of beautiful Palmetto, Magnolia, and moss draped Live oak trees.

But, the house is nothing compared to the location. Location location location! It is a one block barefoot & swimsuit walk to public access ocean beach, 600 feet to be exact. If you tire of the quiet relaxing beach bum life, there is plenty of other stuff to do on this 55 square mile historic sea island. You can rent fat tired bicycles and cruise the island. Play golf. Go fishing. There is a huge state park in two parts. One part has a long undeveloped beach for walking and swimming. The other part occupies maritime forest and pristine salt marshes. There's a modern interpretive center in the middle of it in case you are into wildlife and botany. The beaches are a prime nesting ground for Loggerhead sea turtles. In the summer you can sometimes see them hatch. Do you like to kayak? No problemo. Rent one at the small local marina and take a marsh creek tour sometimes accompanied by playful bottlenose dolphins. Do you like to eat? Of course you do. Edisto has several tasty and affordable restaurants, four with bars. Excepting the Sub shop in the BP, none are chains.

Did I mention windsurfing? Winds are often sporty. The water is warm enough for no-wetsuit windsurfing May through September. Here's an April 3 picture.

The island is oozing with natural and human history too. Pleistocene fossils of sharks teeth, and fossilized mammal and reptile bone fragments can be found on the beach. The first humans were Native Americans and their shell mounds and pottery shards are still about. In the heyday of antebellum times it was one of the richest places in the country with magnificent plantations passing through the eras of indigo, rice, and king cotton. Several plantation houses are still standing. You can get a historic tour and learn about the pirate raids, duels, and the civil war upheaval.

So, you're still not convinced. You get claustrophobic on even a large island and you want a city experience. Maybe you're from New York or Caracas and you get spooked by quiet. Not a problem; you're connected to the mainland by a bridge. By Mapquest it's only 46.4 miles to historic Charleston, an easy one hour trip. Drink up the history, wallow in the art galleries, and eat yourself to death in restaurants of this four century old city. Want to take in a bigger chunk of the low-country culture and history. It's an easy day trip to beautiful historic Beaufort and Savannah. Consulting Mapquest again, it's 1 hour 26 minutes to Beaufort and 2 hours exactly to Savannah.

So back to the Dragonfly. How much is it gonna cost to stay there? Check out the rates and you can book it at the property manager's Atwood Vacations site. Be sure to take the virtual tour there. If you are really on a super tight budget, avoid the high rent season of June through mid-August when school is out. If you're flexible about when you can go, you can really get a great deal. For example if you choose a time when school is in session and pick a 5-day stretch of Monday to Friday in a week that already has the weekend booked, just enter a comment after this post. I will make you a really good deal of less than half the listed full week rent. If you're a retired Canuck you might want to chill out (Oops; bad metaphor) warm up there for a couple of mid-winter months when we go away XC skiing in the northwest. Another chance to negotiate a good deal.

I leave you with this scene of a little before dinner volleyball match with our other geezer friends.

He talks pretty but can he lead?

2008-04-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

"He talks pretty but can he lead?" We sure hear that a lot from people who prefer someone other than Obama to be the next president. We're supposed to get real nervous lest he be all fluff and no stuff. Well Hrmph! At the chief executive level it's all about talking pretty. If your own heart is in the right place, you've got your facts down, and you are eloquent, you can win the hearts and minds of others at home and abroad. Add to that the ability to select the right staff to analyze, strategize and implement and you pretty much have the makings of a good president. Senator Obama seems quite capable of hiring the right staff to make his campaign successful.

Coping with Cleavage

2008-04-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Women have breasts. These are the cute little bumps on their chest that nature devised initially to produce food for their infants. Somewhere along the path of evolution they got poofed up a little bigger than they need to be purely for lactation. Evolutionary biologists surmise this is a visual sexual dimorphism feature such as a man's beard. These distinguishing features help us to sense at a very primeval level who to mate with and who to be wary of.

Sometimes evolution runs amuck when competition for mates pushes sexual dimorphism to a ridiculous extreme. This is most evident in birds where you have animals like male peacocks with gorgeous, gigantic, and aerodynamically disastrous tails.

An extreme of dimorphism has not affected the human female breast, which though quite variable, on average only adds a couple pounds of purely decorative body flesh to the dairy tissue. This was completely sufficient for our ancestral female hominids lolling around naked on the African savannah. They needed only to approach their favorite male and say, "Honey (wiggle jiggle) can you go kill a wildebeest or something so little Thaggy and I can have something yummy to eat (wiggle jiggle). Then I'll feel real good and want to make you feel real good too (wiggle jiggle)". Off runs big Thag, 90 miles per hour with his club and spear.

The normal breast size worked pretty well for countless millennia until disaster struck. The ice age came and the shirt was invented. There was a decline in human population long attributed to direct affects of the cold. In fact a decline in fecundity was more likely the cause. "Honey, please go kill something because little Thaggy and I are hungry." Thag replies, "Oog! Go kill your own mastodon…and bring me the liver."

Fortunately the ice ages subsided, shirts disappeared again (at least in tropical climates) and humanity was saved. However a big problem developed in the Middle East Fertile Crescent area. There was a religious myth that the first woman on earth tempted man to disobey God by offering him some forbidden fruits, which he of course slurped up. Somehow as myths do, this story got distorted into the notion that the forbidden fruits were actually the woman's own round and delicious bodily adornments. No less than three major world religions branched off with this perverse myth of original human sin. The shirts stayed on.

With the shirts on, suddenly normal size boobs were not sufficient. They needed to be big enough to bulge through the shirts if Thag was to kill anything. Women with naturally big ones had a reproductive and survival advantage. For the lesser endowed, in order to get Thag off his ass, some modification was necessary. Given enough millennia, evolution would have boosted all women's boobs up several pounds larger but women were impatient. They invented all manner of squeezing corsetry and wads of padding to push their breasts up, exaggerate their apparent size, and make them nearly spill over their shirt tops.

The shirt and corsetry phenomena, though ridiculous, was rather harmless. People reproduced and the world continued to turn until (begin background music theme of movie "Jaws") cosmetic surgeons invented themselves.

Cosmetic surgeons have become a disaster for the female breast, mutilating them and stuffing them with plastic bags of chemicals until they are distorted and stretched to almost bursting. I am an expert on this problem because I live in Venezuela and watch television. Most TV shows in Venezuela are either government propaganda channels that show constant speeches by Chavez and his supporters but quite a few others are private channels with constant programs glorifying or promoting glamour as an essential feature of women.

On my Supercable (pronounced "SOUP'-pear-cobb-lay" and sure to deserve a very special rant from me at another time) channel lineup there is a show about plastic surgery on the English language E! Channel, which also is a channel in the US. It mostly features a steady stream of celebrities and their shenanigans. When you tire of boring CNN International drivel like discussions on whether water-boarding Iraqi suspects is torture, you can turn to E! for the really important stuff. You can peer deep into the lives of people who do not know you exist, nor do they care. You can find out who Brad Pitt is fornicating with, learn how ugly the dress was that Nicole Kidman wore last weekend, hear speculation on why Britney Spears doesn't wear underpants, and watch yet another memorial service for Elvis Presley.

OK back to the E! Channel plastic surgery program. This show is sort of a reality documentary about a couple of plastic surgeons and all the people they rescue from the humiliating horror of being…well… normal. You also get to peer into one plastic surgeon's tortured home life wherein his wife is falling to pieces because her 1600 square foot kitchen "doesn't work" for her. Granted sometimes it's a real touching rescue that happens. Some guy who caught his face on fire in an accident and had to beat it out with his own track shoe gets a nose and a new face and his children no longer cry when they see him. But, most of the time, it's about boobs. Yep boobs. It makes you want to cry. Typically some woman has lost all her self esteem, can't keep a job, her kids don't respect her, and her marriage is falling apart because... You guessed it. Her boobs are too small or they have dropped down a notch because she has experienced the shameful state of having passed 35.

In the typical case study of this educational program you see a first visit to the plastic surgeon who is typically dressed in a purple business suit with lots of grease in his hair. Somehow in spite of the great shame these women feel in their body, they are presumably persuaded by large payments to bare all for science and millions of TV viewers. The plastic surgeon pushes, pulls, and lifts their breasts and tummies and writes purple guidelines on them. In the US they have to put big pixels or blurring clouds over the most taboo parts of their bodies but this is either not a legal requirement in Venezuela or is, like most legal requirements, ignored.

After the examination, you see the actual surgery which looks something like cleaning a chicken. The nipple is sliced nearly completely off, a hole is made and the flesh of the breast surface is sliced and burned away from the underlying breast tissue. Then the surgeon stuffs plastic baggies full of salt water or liquid silicone (whatever that is) into the hole like someone stuffing a turkey. Usually it’s a big stretch but they always get it all stuffed in and somehow stitched back together. Several weeks pass during the commercial. Then you get to see how she looks all healed up. Her normal soft jiggly breasts are replaced with tightly bulging stiff mounds that look like more like the nose of a submarine than a breast. They are a bit comical, and seem to fit the name "boob" much better than breast. In truth they look quite unrealistic and unappealing to all except the tearfully joyous patient whose self esteem has been miraculously restored and the ecstatic surgeon whose wife can now have a 2500 square foot kitchen.

In one particularly poignant case study a woman had some issues with her breasts which had already undergone augmentation in the past but were in need of routine renewal. They had migrated to a different shape and different location from where the originals were and where the last modification had relocated them. This was a serious career threatening thing for her because her noble profession was strip club dancer. She and the doc had agreed to 650 milliliter implants. When surgery time came the surgeon went to his closet and could only find 600's and 700's. Tough choice, but she made the right decision. She informed the surgeon to go for 700 and stuff 'em in any way he could. It was truly gruesome to watch but she was so proud of her two projecting submarines when all was over and she was sure to get another five years out of her lucrative career.

In another even more poignant case, there was a beautiful young woman who relied for personal fulfillment and self esteem on competing in beauty contests. Apparently unlike performance enhancing drugs for athletes, fake body alterations are not illegal in beauty contests. She had a perfectly lovely pair of perky little B-cup teacups, nicely sloped down the top, pointy at the tips and gently rounded under the bottom. But, in her opinion and her plastic surgeon savior's…TOO SMALL. When all the slicing and dicing was over, this normal pair was mutilated into two boringly spherical submarine noses that made her look so top heavy you thought she might topple over on her head at any moment. To dramatize this (ahem) improvement they kept flashing back and forth between two overlaid before and after images.

OK time for a sidebar on "cosmetic surgeons" the sleaze balls of the medical profession. These guys are all sizzle and no steak. That's what they are. That's what they want you to believe life is all about. As an example, I offer you a picture below of my neighbor Doctor Bruno's plastic surgery clinic as the patient sees it.

Now, below this paragraph is the true view of the clinic as I see it from my office window. (I see nearly everything from my office window but that must await another rant.) As you can see, it is a dump. People are running out the back door with buckets all the time. My wife and I speculate they are filled with grease from liposuction. We would go down and suggest that they render it into bio-fuel but with gasoline at 14 cents per gallon, maybe it could used to deep fry empanadas.

Now, getting back on topic… All of this breast up-squishing and augmentation leaves Thag wondering what is the proper etiquette when encountering the enhanced display, particularly if obviously recently enlarged. Is this like a new hairdo or new dress, and he is supposed to say, "Wow; nice new knockers! Who's your surgeon?" or should he just look dumb, run out, and kill a wildebeest.

Of all nationalities, Venezuelan women are particularly generous with the bust cleavage. Many are amply to excessively endowed and many others use uplifting lingerie or surgery to create an in-your-face dual spherical display of their endowments. This leaves an old southern boy struggling to react with proper manners.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't get fired into uncontrollable lust with such displays. Thirty two years of marriage to a beautiful woman, ten years living next to a nude beach, and (sigh) maybe even a slightly age-diminished testosterone level mean that a couple of mere bulges are not going to send me out killing wildebeests. Heck, in just a couple clicks on this computer I could reach a site that would fill my screen with the most gorgeous women in the world, totally displaying all their corporal morphology. Of course I don't do that. No, the problem is perception. That is… my perception of their perception of what my perception might be.

I'm talking about eye movement. Eye muscles are almost under involuntary control. Any large, bright, or uncommon object in the peripheral field can cause the eyes to snap involuntarily to that direction. I worry, lest that cause the lady displaying to think I am trying to drink up the view in a most boorish manner. To avoid the eye reflex I try to keep my eyes locked above her cheek bones and not allow any thought of what lies (or projects) at the bottom of my peripheral vision. This is easier said than done. There is a famous tale of an Indian businessman who admired a certain mystic for his ability to walk on water. Thinking such a trick could be useful in business, he asked the mystic to teach him how to walk on water. The mystic explained how he must follow certain discipline in diet, exercise, and meditation. Then the mystic said, "Oh, one more thing. You must not think of monkeys". From that moment on, every time the businessman even glimpsed water, his mind filled with monkeys racing to and fro. My monkeys are boobs. When I gaze at a displaying woman's cheek bones my mind keeps alarming, "Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs" and in a split instant's lapse of control my eyes can snap down to the forbidden zone.

This isn't really too much of a problem with a Venezuelan woman. In fact you could probably gaze right at the forbidden zone and say, "Rrrrrow! You look splendid today" and she would be touched that you thought to compliment her in such a sweet manner. The problem is with gringo women who, inspired by the greater openness of the Venezuelan women, start to emulate them in dress. The gringo woman is unfortunately much more self conscious, even though she may be feeling deliciously naughty with her new freedom to display herself. This is apparent because with even one microsecond of involuntary eye snap on your part, she will begin nervously checking her top button and tugging her blouse up. Worse yet, the gringo woman often has a chip on her shoulder and is just waiting for a man to behave like…well…like a man, so she can be righteously disgusted.

This is my advice. Relax with the Venezuelan women. It will be OK. However, when you encounter a cup-runneth-over gringo woman, never look below her forehead so as to remove any perception of improper thought. Keep your conversation strictly to business. If you must compliment her, your compliments must be something like, "My, your hair looks very nice today" or "Those are beautiful earrings" or "Great shoes" or "You have lovely boob eyes…I mean blue eyes".

Venezuelan People

2008-04-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

I've been in Venezuela for nearly two years and I only have two and a half more months. I'll try to address conditions here in my next few posts for the benefit of friends or strangers who might consider coming here. This one is about the people. They're not so bad.

Venezuelans are stratified, perhaps polarized by economic class. There are what people call the rich, which includes the middle class, usually with higher education degrees and the truly rich (I don't know how they get that way; they don't talk to me about it.) Then there are the poor; some say two thirds of the population. They usually have enough to eat but not much more. They typically live in humble little clay tile houses with poor (or no) plumbing and often no glass in the windows. These habitations usually have a to-die-for (sometimes literally) view because they are often built as squatter houses on treacherously steep terrain. Unless I say otherwise, my comments pertain to rich and poor alike.

Venezuelans are patient, sweet, sociable, uninhibited, and they seem impervious to noise. They place a high value on family. (There are some exceptions to these virtues of course, which I will get to in a moment.) You will often even see adolescents being affectionate with their parents, e.g. walking arm in arm with their mother or grandmother. People of all ages congregate at dance venues and other popular hangouts. People greet each other warmly even in casual situations. Women greet everyone with a little kiss on the cheek. Men usually greet other men with warm handshakes and sometimes a jolly pat on the shoulder. They are, after all, men and appropriately homophobic.

Even the gentlest Venezuelans find their dark side when they get behind the wheel. They honk incessantly even at policemen who are directing traffic, jostle for position in intersections, drive all over the sidewalk and aggressively crowd into fully occupied lanes. Any pedestrian is fair game, even the elderly crossing on a walk light, burdened with 40 pounds of groceries. I experience this first hand! However, if you can make eye contact with the driver and hold up your hand as if pleading for your life, they will often spare your life without even honking. They try to keep you from making eye contact though by having heavily tinted windows. The strangest thing is pedestrians of all classes show total deference to motorists and never lift a middle finger salute or shout an expletive. Also motorist to motorist road rage is rare and hardly ever comes to more than fist shaking as these two women below my office window are doing.

Venezuelans proudly tell you they are not a racist society. True; there is no racial labeling here. Nearly everyone other than recent immigrants have at least a few snippets of African and/or indigenous DNA in their genome, which would make them a certifiable minority in the USA. The closest thing to racial classification is that people might use the term "indigenous" for people who have been very geographically and genetically isolated most of the last five centuries and very thoroughly retain their pre-Columbian culture and appearance. Though there is no racial labeling, the poor tend to have a higher proportion of darker people than the wealthy, but wealth trumps color. The concept of "politically correct" has not made big inroads here. I have heard stories of snooty nightclubs turning women away, bluntly telling them they are too dark or too fat.

The one homo-sapiens sub-species that seems to be totally missing here is the "redneck". You North Americans know the type I mean. For my Venezuelan friends I shall describe this sub-species. Long ago redneck was a derogatory term for farmer but now it is applied more often to unpleasant blue collar workers. Rednecks are brash, aggressive, undereducated, and financially over-extended on pickup trucks, motor-sports toys, and firearms. They have a good time when they're drinking (same as Venezuelans) but they often become belligerent or destructive when they've had too much. They tend to be patriotic to a ridiculous extreme and very politically and religiously conservative. They think they're funny and they like to show off. They are fond of aggressive bumper stickers that say things like, "This truck protected by Smith and Wesson" or depicting an impish little boy urinating on just about anything that intimidates them, which is just about everything but their own brand of pickup truck. They yell at their kids and whack them a lot. They take great pride in being stupider than average and their choicest bumper stickers say things like, "My kid just beat up your honor student." Their favorite icon is the Confederate flag (because they see themselves as rebels) even if they’ve never traveled southeast of Spokane, Washington and couldn't tell you in which century the United States civil war was fought. Consistent with their contrary nature, they study science in church and pray in school. Uh oh! I'm on a sidebar rant. Let me wrap up and say the good news for visitors to Venezuela is THEY DON'T HAVE ANY STINKIN' REDNECKS HERE!

Pickpockets and panhandlers are also rare. Criminals exist in sufficient quantities to require lots of walls, bars, razor wire, and electric fencing. However, they are mature and professional. It's a tribute to the Venezuelan character that there aren't more criminals because the police and judicial system are quite ineffective at capturing them and prosecuting them. If you cooperate, they usually don't shoot you or beat you up. They just point a gun at you, demand your money or, better yet, break into your house and take what they want without vandalizing the place.

Oh, I almost forgot. Outside of the President's railing tirades, they seem to really be OK with American's from the USA. Most of the movies in the theaters are Hollywood fare. People buy T-shirts made for the USA market with stupid slogans in English. In our international Las Mercedes neighborhood with the Finish, Bulgarian, and Russian embassies only blocks away and plenty of Venezuelans with German and Italian ancestry, we feel quite camouflaged. When we've been out in the country side, about the only evidence that we've been detected as Americans have been a few heavily accented English greetings like, "Hello Yankees" or "Hello Beautiful" (to my spouse and her Canadian amiga).

Now, let me tell you about the politics. No wait. That's too big and complicated. I'll save that for a later post if I have the energy. So that's it for now. I don't think I've offended any of my Venezuelan friends with this but I'll be extra especially careful in the future when I step out into the crosswalk with armloads of groceries.

Caracas Daybreak in the Rain

2008-04-04T05:54:00.001-07:00

Today broke with swirling clouds followed by misting rain. Perhaps the overdue rainy season is finally here. I look forward to the afternoon thunderstorms. For now though it's just nice sitting out on the covered end of our balcony having our coffee and peanut butter toast breakfast while enjoying the light sprinkle.

We had a visitor to the balcony before we ventured out this morning. It was one of the brash chacalacas, a bird in the same order with chickens and turkeys. They greet the sun with a deafening squawk of "cha ca LA' ca". Our balcony is a very good bird viewing location.

Maid Day! Maid Day!

2008-04-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Today is maid day. This is good because it gets our house real clean for only about ten or twelve bucks. It is bad because I am always slightly uncomfortable with Maria (not her real name) flitting about and sweeping under my feet. That's because I'm totally unable to understand anything she says and vice versa, a) because I don't speak Spanish, and b) because she speaks a mile a minute. For an outsider to Spanish it might sound like I know some Spanish but it's only when we stick to the script. The script (as it sounds to me) and the translation are almost invariably as follows:
8:30 AM
Maria: Senor John, BlalalalalalalalalaCadaBlalalalala Translation: Mr. Johnny, I'm ready to go to Cada (the grocery store) Can you give me the money.
Johnny: Si (handing over BsF 70.00) Sufficiente? Translation: Yes. Is this enough?
Maria: Si. BlalalalalalalaLlavesLalalalala Translation: Yes. May I have the apartment key.
Jonnny: Si
Maria: Ciao
9:30 AM (A while after she arrives back from the grocery store)
Maria: Senor John, BlalalalalalalalalalalaLlaves? Translation: Mr. Johnny, did I remember to give back your keys?
Johnny: Uhhh, Si
10:00 AM
Maria: Senor John, BlalalalalalaComerAqui o la escuela con Senora Cati? Translation: Mr. Johnny, are you going to eat here or at the school with Mrs. Catherine?
Johnny: Si, aqui. Translation: Yes, here.
12:15 PM
Maria: Senor John, BlalalalalalaComidaLalalalala. Translation: Mr. Johnny, your lunch is ready.
Johnny: Oh, Si (Johnny eats lunch on balcony. Maria eats hers on the bar in the kitchen.)
12:35 PM
Johnny: Gracias! Es muy delicioso comida. Translation: Thank you. It very delicious food.
Maria: Tee heh Translation: Tee heh.
2:30 PM
Maria: Senor John, Blalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala. Translation: Mr. Johnny, I'm done and ready to go.
Johnny: Oh OK, (handing over BsF 50.00.) Hasta Viernes. Translation: See you Friday
Maria: BlalalalalalalalHuevesLalalalalaTeehehCiao. Translation: See you Thursday. Can't you ever get your days straight?! Tee heh. Bye
Johnny: Ciao Translation: Bye

That part is easy. The tough part is when we go off script, which is a couple of times per day. Today she asked me if she could bring her camera on Thursday for me to upload some pictures to my computer. I don't know why; I didn't know how to ask. She also wanted to know if she could take a shower before she went home because she had spilled some cooking oil on herself. That led to some considerable charades and confused communication. I won't even go there.

I know very little about this woman except she is a 26 year old Colombian, has a husband, a 4 year old son, and lives in La Guaira an hour's bus ride away near the airport. How does she make it on a two hour round trip to work for people for BsF 50 per day? Does her husband have a job? Does she live in one of the tiny clay brick huts, without window glass, clinging to a hillside in some dangerous barrio with poor or non-existant plumbing like so many of the poor people here? I'm poignantly aware that she is about the same age as my own daughter. Does she have aspirations for a better life? Is she happy to anticipate being a domestic for the rest of her life? What chances for a better life does her son have? I'd like to invite her to lunch with me on the balcony and tell me these things but of course I'd never understand a word she said. I found out today she likes coffee. I'm going to brew an extra cup in our pot each Tuesday and Thursday before she comes.

It's not all bad

2008-03-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'm counting the days until I'm back home again where I know the language and my family and old friends live. However, I have to admit that there are some pretty views in Caracas. This one's from the stairs of my apartment building looking toward the Parque Nacional Avila (the mountains in the background).

I'm a Grandpa!

2008-03-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a grandpa. My wonderful daughter and son-in-law Joonas had Ayla Catherine Ojanen on March 13.