I have long believed that one of the reasons we are such a loutish nation is related to our steadfast refusal to learn another language or even acknowledge that there is one. The Mexicans have fixed that to a degree by swarming over us in their semi-literate thousands to snap up the jobs that our noble selves find abhorrent. After all, somebody has to clean the toilets, and it strains the imagination to think of all those unfortunate millionaires in Arizona with horrible weeds and bathtub rings and poo smells that they will have to live with now that all the Mexicans have gone to New Mexico. The impact on real estate values in the gated communities alone fair boggles the mind.
Anybody who has taken a foreign language course will have discovered that there are words and concepts in other languages that simply cannot be easily rendered into English. In some cases they are such useful words that we have claimed them for our own. A famous example of this was brought into embarrassing prominence by that intellectual curiosity, former leader of the free world, George W. Bush, who was heard to say, in a public place, with regards to the French, “They have no word for entrepreneur.” It was not revealed whether any of his aides who had successfully completed fifth grade had the poor judgment to explain that the word and, presumably, the concept had been snatched from France.
But there are lots of others. Sushi for example, which is much more than dead sea life on a rice patty. Or siesta which is not just any nap, but rather a period in the heat of the day set aside for loafing around and having lunch and maybe a snooze, but maybe not. Or schadenfreude, a single elegant word meaning “the pleasure derived from somebody else's misery or misfortune,” a concept that Americans should be completely at home with having visited so much misery and misfortune on distant foreigners with the bad taste to speak a language we do not understand.
The important and valuable point is that a language tends to guide the thinking of its practitioners. Those who speak only one language live in a somewhat circumscribed world. Like a painter who has only a single tube of green paint. His pictures will reveal only leafy closeups, caricatures, or distortions. So it is that our so-called leaders peer at the world that appears to their blinkered minds to contain only one narrow spectrum stretching from the eye-scalding white of our own perfection through the grim grey British and the sooty grime of the misguided socialists to the inky blackness of Communists far and wide.
For the most part native Americans, by which I mean people who were born in the United States which is what the word means, speak English, or some barely comprehensible variant of it, and see no reason to strain their intellectual resources with picking up a phrase or two in the gibberish of foreigners when there are important matters like Paris Hilton's love life or recent sports scandals to occupy their thoughts. There are, of course, a certain number of immigrants who still speak the language of the old sod, but for the most part they want their children to forget all that and speak English only, forcing them into the tunnel vision of american linguistic and social thought and practice.
For the most part, the high-minded wise men who have been marching us off to distant and disastrous invasions belong to that seething majority who can barely speak their own language, much less anybody else’s. They see and measure the world through the lens of “refudiate” and “misunderestimate” from the comfort and security of their heavily guarded compounds along the Beltway. Nobody needs multilingual advisors more than these benighted people. They are proudly responsible for the death of thousands and the destruction of buildings, crops, and communications infrastructure in places they can't pronounce without a particle of understanding for the people they are destroying. All they see is a smelly backwater populated by people who need to be more like us who, through an inexplicable mistake by God, are sitting on top of a lot of oil that should properly be ours.
So the trumpets sound, the fighter jets are fueled up, and another blow is struck for peacelibertyandfreedom.
And that is why we should all study French in school.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Hive Mind at Work: Safety
There are many still alive and taking solid food who remember those carefree distant times when children would dash out of the house with shoe laces half tied, hop on their bikes and pedal off to the playground or swimming hole or somebody's back yard. Once there they would play on whatever the playground offered, which were a variety of metal structures often covered in rust or sporting protruding sharp edges. Or they would jump off rock ledges into the pond on top of their little playmates since there were no adults handy to tell them not to. Or they would play at whatever occurred to them in or around the rusty old dead truck out in some field. In the course of all this high risk behavior, of course no child would reach majority without a goodly number of scrapes and scratches, cuts and bruises.
There are two very significant benefits to this. One is that when you got one of these injuries, it hurt, and when you went home and your mother found out it would hurt again when she scrubbed it clean and applied iodine or merthiolate, either of which might as well have been napalm, and yet a third time when one parent or an other would give you that look and say “Well, that was stupid, what were you thinking?” All of this led you to avoid doing that again.
The second benefit is that having experienced actual pain at some time or other, you would develop a sympathy for others in the same boat. In addition, you would be less likely to inflict pain upon others either because you knew what it felt like and weren't mad enough to want to do this to your classmate, or because you figured they might find a way to get back at you in kind.
It is not clear what happened to this sensible approach to child rearing. Maybe the increase in communication. Maybe some undermedicated Mom in Providence read a human interest story about a child in Montana who, while riding his bike somewhere east of Billings, skidded on something and impaled his head on a fence post, leading to his immediate and tragic death. A story which found its way all the way east to Providence because it is the first time such a thing had ever happened. Of the 6 million children who had ridden somewhere on a bicycle that day, one had suffered this bizarre trauma. Of the 200 million children who had ridden bicycles prior to that day, suffering no ill effect, this is the story that reached Providence. Suddenly an image of her own child's precious head run through with fence posts is all she can think of and she tries to make her little darling wear a helmet to which he responds by tossing it in the bushes as soon as he's out of sight of the house so his friends won't think he's a sissy. So the mom mounts a noisy assault on her state representative to mandate that all children must wear helmets. The cry is taken up by people in other states who are bad at math and before you know it everybody is wearing helmets, and a new industry is born.
This is closely followed by related industries producing elbow pads, knee pads, special protective gloves, shatter-proof goggles, Spandex clothing, specially designed shoes and innumerable sports drinks without which the child would perish horribly by the roadside on the two-mile ride to school. As usual it takes the government a while to sign on to this cash cow, but soon enough the fines appear for failing to adhere to whatever norms the Providence mom has managed to badger through congress.
The result of all this is that the suppliers of all this clap-trap have tasteful houses in Vail, Cancun, and the south of France, the Chinese factories making all this stuff are expanding like a dead possum in the hot sun, the local governments have a robust new revenue stream, and the children on bikes are so encumbered with armor that it is a wonder that they are able to ride a bike at all. But they are safe, right? And that was the whole point, to which I would argue that one of the key ingredients of growing up is testing your limits. If you find one avenue to this end blocked you will seek another, which may have more lasting and damaging effects than a skinned knee.
But that is just bicycles. Anybody who has bought a ladder recently will have noticed that there is no flat surface on it that is not covered with bold-face warnings, cautions, exclamation marks, limitations of liability and so forth. Everything is covered including, but not limited to, the perils of electric wires, unstable footings, the use of the various latches and fittings, unsafe practices, angle of use. You might think it preferable just to let your gutters fill with leaves and then when they rip off the house under the weight of all that sodden detritus, just hire somebody to put up new ones. Using their own death trap ladder.
On the other hand you can go to any hardware store and buy knives and hatchets and no end of implements that have breathtaking potential for mayhem and amputation, and you will find nothing on them apart from, perhaps, the manufacturer's name or “Stainless.” It is all very confusing. Should we protect our children from ladders and bicycles, but allow them easy access to knives and chisels? If the Great White Regulator feels that We The People are so dim that we need to be told not to poke our fingers into a churning blender or reach under a lawnmower when the blades are spinning then surely we should not be allowed anywhere near gasoline or firearms.
So why all the fuss? In this, the land of the free and the home of the brave, why shouldn't we just be allowed to cut off our fingers if we wish to, or cover 2/3 of ourselves with 3rd degree burns, or drown our infants in the bath?
Here are some explanations:
1. Litigation – Any company afraid that their customers will sue them into bankruptcy in the event they incur some injury as a result of doing something incredibly stupid with their product will cover the product with warnings and cautions and devote the first 20 pages of the 24-page manual to Important Safety Information.”
2. Revenue Stream – Governments are always on the lookout for new sources of income, and fees and fines are the gold standard, as they do not present the dangers of, say, a drug bust and its associated seizure of assets, nor do they incur the widespread antagonism of increased taxation. If your neighbor gets a $300 fine for speeding while not wearing a seat belt, well, you are either not going to care at all or you will be thinking “Serves him right!” The Government, in any case, comes out smelling sweet as a soft spring morning while gouging The Public just a surely as a tax hike would.
3. Entrepreneurial Opportunity – A startling number of safety remedies involve special apparatus purpose-built for some specific hazard. Somebody's going to make a killing off it, and it's a first-come-first-serve opportunity. Of course, there is a certain amount of wiggle room. Consider helmets: There are bicycle helmets, climbing helmets, football helmets, skiing helmets, hockey helmets, motorcycle helmets, skateboard helmets, and more, not to mention the military stuff. Each of these created one Really Rich Guy, at least 5 jobs here in the US and another 200 in China.
4. A Deep and Real Concern for the Safety and Prosperity of The People – Not a chance.
There are two very significant benefits to this. One is that when you got one of these injuries, it hurt, and when you went home and your mother found out it would hurt again when she scrubbed it clean and applied iodine or merthiolate, either of which might as well have been napalm, and yet a third time when one parent or an other would give you that look and say “Well, that was stupid, what were you thinking?” All of this led you to avoid doing that again.
The second benefit is that having experienced actual pain at some time or other, you would develop a sympathy for others in the same boat. In addition, you would be less likely to inflict pain upon others either because you knew what it felt like and weren't mad enough to want to do this to your classmate, or because you figured they might find a way to get back at you in kind.
It is not clear what happened to this sensible approach to child rearing. Maybe the increase in communication. Maybe some undermedicated Mom in Providence read a human interest story about a child in Montana who, while riding his bike somewhere east of Billings, skidded on something and impaled his head on a fence post, leading to his immediate and tragic death. A story which found its way all the way east to Providence because it is the first time such a thing had ever happened. Of the 6 million children who had ridden somewhere on a bicycle that day, one had suffered this bizarre trauma. Of the 200 million children who had ridden bicycles prior to that day, suffering no ill effect, this is the story that reached Providence. Suddenly an image of her own child's precious head run through with fence posts is all she can think of and she tries to make her little darling wear a helmet to which he responds by tossing it in the bushes as soon as he's out of sight of the house so his friends won't think he's a sissy. So the mom mounts a noisy assault on her state representative to mandate that all children must wear helmets. The cry is taken up by people in other states who are bad at math and before you know it everybody is wearing helmets, and a new industry is born.
This is closely followed by related industries producing elbow pads, knee pads, special protective gloves, shatter-proof goggles, Spandex clothing, specially designed shoes and innumerable sports drinks without which the child would perish horribly by the roadside on the two-mile ride to school. As usual it takes the government a while to sign on to this cash cow, but soon enough the fines appear for failing to adhere to whatever norms the Providence mom has managed to badger through congress.
The result of all this is that the suppliers of all this clap-trap have tasteful houses in Vail, Cancun, and the south of France, the Chinese factories making all this stuff are expanding like a dead possum in the hot sun, the local governments have a robust new revenue stream, and the children on bikes are so encumbered with armor that it is a wonder that they are able to ride a bike at all. But they are safe, right? And that was the whole point, to which I would argue that one of the key ingredients of growing up is testing your limits. If you find one avenue to this end blocked you will seek another, which may have more lasting and damaging effects than a skinned knee.
But that is just bicycles. Anybody who has bought a ladder recently will have noticed that there is no flat surface on it that is not covered with bold-face warnings, cautions, exclamation marks, limitations of liability and so forth. Everything is covered including, but not limited to, the perils of electric wires, unstable footings, the use of the various latches and fittings, unsafe practices, angle of use. You might think it preferable just to let your gutters fill with leaves and then when they rip off the house under the weight of all that sodden detritus, just hire somebody to put up new ones. Using their own death trap ladder.
On the other hand you can go to any hardware store and buy knives and hatchets and no end of implements that have breathtaking potential for mayhem and amputation, and you will find nothing on them apart from, perhaps, the manufacturer's name or “Stainless.” It is all very confusing. Should we protect our children from ladders and bicycles, but allow them easy access to knives and chisels? If the Great White Regulator feels that We The People are so dim that we need to be told not to poke our fingers into a churning blender or reach under a lawnmower when the blades are spinning then surely we should not be allowed anywhere near gasoline or firearms.
So why all the fuss? In this, the land of the free and the home of the brave, why shouldn't we just be allowed to cut off our fingers if we wish to, or cover 2/3 of ourselves with 3rd degree burns, or drown our infants in the bath?
Here are some explanations:
1. Litigation – Any company afraid that their customers will sue them into bankruptcy in the event they incur some injury as a result of doing something incredibly stupid with their product will cover the product with warnings and cautions and devote the first 20 pages of the 24-page manual to Important Safety Information.”
2. Revenue Stream – Governments are always on the lookout for new sources of income, and fees and fines are the gold standard, as they do not present the dangers of, say, a drug bust and its associated seizure of assets, nor do they incur the widespread antagonism of increased taxation. If your neighbor gets a $300 fine for speeding while not wearing a seat belt, well, you are either not going to care at all or you will be thinking “Serves him right!” The Government, in any case, comes out smelling sweet as a soft spring morning while gouging The Public just a surely as a tax hike would.
3. Entrepreneurial Opportunity – A startling number of safety remedies involve special apparatus purpose-built for some specific hazard. Somebody's going to make a killing off it, and it's a first-come-first-serve opportunity. Of course, there is a certain amount of wiggle room. Consider helmets: There are bicycle helmets, climbing helmets, football helmets, skiing helmets, hockey helmets, motorcycle helmets, skateboard helmets, and more, not to mention the military stuff. Each of these created one Really Rich Guy, at least 5 jobs here in the US and another 200 in China.
4. A Deep and Real Concern for the Safety and Prosperity of The People – Not a chance.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The American Dream
We didn’t even have an American Dream until 1931 when some guy made it up to put in a history book along with a lot of other stuff that was pretty borderline. But what the heck – it has provided politicians and motivational speakers with a rallying cry for 80 years. The charm of it is that it can be kneaded into pretty much any shape and flavored with whatever you are trying to sell, and your eager audience will throw their hats in the air and cheer.
Politicians were probably the first to realize its potential. You’ve got your Republican standing up there among all the flags and bunting promising the dream of a tax-free Shangri La where all those welfare mothers have been starved out, and all the brown parasites have been sent back to wherever, and all the true, hard-working Americans are busy building pick-up trucks and automatic rifles to sell to each other. The speech doesn’t touch on the knotty problem of paying for the military necessary to backdrop all this, not to mention the police, the prisons, and the cost of relocating all the undesirables. And the proud Americans who would prefer to spend their days kicked back on the La-Z-Boy burping Bud Light. Not to mention the fact that a great number of the brown folk slated for removal have been here a good deal longer than the crackers who want them removed.
Not that Democrats are innocent of flamboyant excess. Imagine The Great Man standing in front of the murmuring crowd in the school gym, self-consciously clad in a red flannel shirt to demonstrate that he is Just Like Us. His American Dream involves free schooling, right up through the PhD level, free health care for all, social security to include an annual holiday in Florida, subsidized housing for the poor, public transportation, cheap gas, a chicken in every pot, and free beer. The cost to be absorbed by the rich. There is no mention of what the rich might think of all this, nor of who the rich are considered to be. No limits placed on medical conditions or procedures covered, or who are considered poor. This is the democrats’ dream and they’re sticking to it.
All of this is loosely based on a very broad interpretation of The Constitution of the United States which, like the bible, can be called upon to support any position a clever orator can call to mind. Thus it is hardly surprising that revival tent preachers and suchlike have their own view of the American Dream. I deduce from the tracts I find tucked in my door or the trumpeting of some of our southern congressthings that their received wisdom is that this perfect world involves pretty little Christian white girls in freshly pressed dresses playing wholesome schoolyard games with happy little freckle-faced boys with parts in their hair. There are lambs in the background, and trees, and a clean red barn, or perhaps smiling brown people all set to give them oranges or towels. What this happy fantasy lacks is the housing projects and the flies and the massage parlors and all the countless features of the reality of the majority of American, not to mention the world’s, children.
For the most part, though, to people living ordinary lives, spending their days in a cube farm and their evenings driving their children to sports events, people with mortgages and 5-year-old cars, the American Dream is that any day now one of their children will demonstrate a unique and bankable skill that will lead them out of their tedious lives and unattractive subdivision and into a McMansion with an in-ground pool. This hope has led to the pernicious notion that anybody can do anything, that no matter how dull-witted the child, it can be badgered into the Harvard School of Business and from there to CEO of whatever bank survived the depredations of previous waves from the Harvard School of Business. This hope leads many of these people to oppose medical, educational, and tax reform, and various financial, commercial, and environmental regulations, since they know in their bones that one of their own is sure to make it big in one of these arenas and lift them up to the life of ease and excess that is their American Dream.
And then there’s the American Dream in all those distant fly-blown places we have bombed back to the stone age. They have seen postcards showing tall buildings with no bullet holes, rolling green hills, handsome people in expensive cars. They have seen the movies of people living in enormous houses, supermarkets bulging with food, running water, paved streets. They sell everything they have, borrow the entire net worth of their extended families, promising to pay it back as soon as they get to the promised land and earn their first million by year’s end. What must they think when they actually arrive and move into a tiny apartment in a poorly maintained building along with two other families from the old sod. Soon the parents find work in a sweat shop, the daughters ply the oldest trade in very short skirts and wobbly heels, and the sons go off to war and wind up bombing somebody else’s country back to the stone age in the name of peacelibertyandfreedom, which means no more to them than the lie of The American Dream.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Hawaii Five-O
I enjoyed Hawaii Five-O back in the sixties. I watched it on an unreliable black-and-white TV sprawled on the rump-sprung Salvation Army couch along with my husband, Robert, our cat, Little, our dog, Roonie, and disorderly bits of my master’s thesis liberally intermixed. It was a good bit of fun, with all these exotic people and sunny beaches. Nobody got seriously killed, and even the felons had a sort of wholesome beachboy aura. There were some car chases, of course, but they were mostly just a noisy rip around the block in a couple of convertibles with bad mufflers.
So imagine my pleasure when CBS announced its return. Then imagine my disappointment when I actually watched it. There may have been a plot, but mostly what I remember was a lot of explosions and people getting beaten bloody, and of course the obligatory 100-pound bimbo whose proficiency in the martial arts is unmatched on 3 continents, except maybe by the 100-pound bimbos on all the other cops or soldier shows that vie for our prime-time attention.
The original NCIS, for example, is amusing, largely because of the spiky-haired lab technician who can make a gas chromatograph sing and seldom leaves the building. The 100-pound bimbo on that one is a transplanted Mossad agent who learned all these tricks Over There whilst being trained, by her father who is the head of Mossad, to be a whiz-bang assassin. She is drop-dead gorgeous, speaks half the world’s languages flawlessly, can strip down and reassemble a nuclear warhead in 3 minutes flat, and has a huge crush on her handsome colleague who is a slobbering idiot. So you can see why I like the lab technician.
NCIS Revisited is in its second year and has a 100-pound bimbo trained by Navy Seals or somesuch – a home-grown whirlwind who is the equal of any six bouncers fully armed with flame throwers and grenades. This show also offers up another techie who shares the Most Appealing Character slot with the resident psychologist and has a thing going with the spiky haired siren from the other show. Are you following all this? There will be a quiz.
Then there is Flashpoint, a relative newcomer. There is a 100-pound bimbo in this one too, but it is sometimes hard to tell because you almost never get to see the protagonists out of their spooky black riot gear outfits, with full face-plates, massive body armor, 150 pockets in their vests and pants full of spare ammunition clips, several different kinds of grenades, a couple of knives, a spare pistol or two, spools of garrote wire, a selection of exotic poisons, 2 or 3 pounds of C-4 explosives with blasting caps, and of course a highly sophisticated communication center and visual aid complex in their helmets. I watched 10 minutes of one show during which something like 10 of them, including the bimbo, surrounded a building using mincing little quick steps so as not to trip over their shoelaces, not conspicuous at all in their black moon suits on a bright sunny afternoon, and then with much shouting and trumpeting they kicked in both the front and back doors and were all over the place. They got their guy, of course, trying to flee down the fire escape as who wouldn’t? A scrawny latino who had been seen jaywalking or something, and there he was face down on the sidewalk surrounded by gum wads, dog turds, and black-suited, heavily armed goons, all congratulating one another on a job well done, while the remaining tenants of the building are left to fix the hinges.
And now there is a new show whose main character is a 100-pound bimbo. She is apparently a bounty hunter of some sort with superhuman martial skills and the tenacity of a honey badger. In the few minutes I watched by accident, triggered by a terse phone call, she transformed herself from Susie Creamcheese taking simple pleasure from an innocent birthday party or wedding or something into a snarling Klingon, fondling her automatic pistol while squealing away from the curb toward some situation that will no doubt involve kicking down doors in some grubby neighborhood.
It is hardly surprising that the violent prime time dramas are becoming bloodier, the crimes more horrible, the disembowelments more graphic. After all we are a bloodthirsty nation. Our heroes are bulked up goons that “…don’t take no crap from nobody,” confusing courage with homicidal rage. However, I am mystified with this recent popularity of anorexic women with grenades.
For that matter I mourn the passing of the innocent dramas of times gone by in which all the hangings took place off screen and shootings did not produce a red mist. Where Marshall Dillon always got his man and we didn’t have to watch while he exchanged body fluids with Miss Kitty.
Where the lantern-jawed Steve McGarrett would stand on a dock overlooking the wide Pacific, that carefully coiffed curl lifting in the gentle onshore breeze, a noble determined expression on his handsome face, assuring us that yet another criminal had been dealt with and that we could all sleep safe in our beds for yet another week.
So imagine my pleasure when CBS announced its return. Then imagine my disappointment when I actually watched it. There may have been a plot, but mostly what I remember was a lot of explosions and people getting beaten bloody, and of course the obligatory 100-pound bimbo whose proficiency in the martial arts is unmatched on 3 continents, except maybe by the 100-pound bimbos on all the other cops or soldier shows that vie for our prime-time attention.
The original NCIS, for example, is amusing, largely because of the spiky-haired lab technician who can make a gas chromatograph sing and seldom leaves the building. The 100-pound bimbo on that one is a transplanted Mossad agent who learned all these tricks Over There whilst being trained, by her father who is the head of Mossad, to be a whiz-bang assassin. She is drop-dead gorgeous, speaks half the world’s languages flawlessly, can strip down and reassemble a nuclear warhead in 3 minutes flat, and has a huge crush on her handsome colleague who is a slobbering idiot. So you can see why I like the lab technician.
NCIS Revisited is in its second year and has a 100-pound bimbo trained by Navy Seals or somesuch – a home-grown whirlwind who is the equal of any six bouncers fully armed with flame throwers and grenades. This show also offers up another techie who shares the Most Appealing Character slot with the resident psychologist and has a thing going with the spiky haired siren from the other show. Are you following all this? There will be a quiz.
Then there is Flashpoint, a relative newcomer. There is a 100-pound bimbo in this one too, but it is sometimes hard to tell because you almost never get to see the protagonists out of their spooky black riot gear outfits, with full face-plates, massive body armor, 150 pockets in their vests and pants full of spare ammunition clips, several different kinds of grenades, a couple of knives, a spare pistol or two, spools of garrote wire, a selection of exotic poisons, 2 or 3 pounds of C-4 explosives with blasting caps, and of course a highly sophisticated communication center and visual aid complex in their helmets. I watched 10 minutes of one show during which something like 10 of them, including the bimbo, surrounded a building using mincing little quick steps so as not to trip over their shoelaces, not conspicuous at all in their black moon suits on a bright sunny afternoon, and then with much shouting and trumpeting they kicked in both the front and back doors and were all over the place. They got their guy, of course, trying to flee down the fire escape as who wouldn’t? A scrawny latino who had been seen jaywalking or something, and there he was face down on the sidewalk surrounded by gum wads, dog turds, and black-suited, heavily armed goons, all congratulating one another on a job well done, while the remaining tenants of the building are left to fix the hinges.
And now there is a new show whose main character is a 100-pound bimbo. She is apparently a bounty hunter of some sort with superhuman martial skills and the tenacity of a honey badger. In the few minutes I watched by accident, triggered by a terse phone call, she transformed herself from Susie Creamcheese taking simple pleasure from an innocent birthday party or wedding or something into a snarling Klingon, fondling her automatic pistol while squealing away from the curb toward some situation that will no doubt involve kicking down doors in some grubby neighborhood.
It is hardly surprising that the violent prime time dramas are becoming bloodier, the crimes more horrible, the disembowelments more graphic. After all we are a bloodthirsty nation. Our heroes are bulked up goons that “…don’t take no crap from nobody,” confusing courage with homicidal rage. However, I am mystified with this recent popularity of anorexic women with grenades.
For that matter I mourn the passing of the innocent dramas of times gone by in which all the hangings took place off screen and shootings did not produce a red mist. Where Marshall Dillon always got his man and we didn’t have to watch while he exchanged body fluids with Miss Kitty.
Where the lantern-jawed Steve McGarrett would stand on a dock overlooking the wide Pacific, that carefully coiffed curl lifting in the gentle onshore breeze, a noble determined expression on his handsome face, assuring us that yet another criminal had been dealt with and that we could all sleep safe in our beds for yet another week.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Pioneer living
Chapter 1:
Last Friday my idiot tenant took a quick dump and dashed out the door, in a big, important hurry. It was not until late that afternoon, after the soaking rain started, that I went to rinse out a milk bottle in the kitchen sink and nothing emerged from the tap but a mournful sigh.
I looked up at the ceiling light to confirm that there was electricity. There was.
I turned on the hot water tap to make sure that the problem was not a matter of mice getting into the cold water line and blocking it up, but this did not appear to be the case. I tried the upstairs tap just to leave no stone unturned and to postpone the moment when I would have to accept the reality that Something was Wrong at the Well.
Meanwhile the idiot tenant had returned home and was upset that the water was not flowing. Upon intense questioning, he claimed that his water usage was, if anything, less than normal, no hoses left on. No 2-hour showers. No laundries since Monday.
Had this been a bright dry afternoon, with cheerful birdsong and scent of newmown hay, I would have gone down the hill to the Other House, occupied by the idiot tenant and as close as possible to the well, thrashed my way through the bramble and goldenrod jungle, over the stumps and half-buried barbed wire, and so to the well house and looked in. Unhappily, it was not such a day. It was cold and miserable and had been raining for an hour with increasing intensity. Furthermore, Spafford & Sons had been here not 3 weeks previous to install a new pump, the old one having fried itself, so I opted to assume the Aggrieved Customer hat and phoned them, implying that the problem could only be their faulty pump.
So it was that John, the representative of Spafford & Sons who had drawn the short straw, swaddled in wet weather gear, arrived and slogged out to the Scene of the Disaster, and discovered that the pump was fine, but the well was empty. To ensure that this brand new pump did not follow the trend set by its predecessor, he turned off the power and went for a Meaningful Dialogue with the idiot tenant. It did not take long to discover that the idiot tenant, in his hasty dash for the door had left the toilet running resulting in the entire contents of the well being relocated into the septic tank serving the Other House.
What happens, among other things, when the pump stops working is that all the water in the 520’ pipe that connects my kitchen sink to that muddy hole in the ground starts heading back from whence it sprang, loosening, along the way, all the sediment, clay, humus, mouse hair, insect parts, that have achieved a stable foothold in the pipe, but only in a north-bound current. Thus when the pump is finally operational once again, what emerges from my taps is all the newly dislodged accumulation amounting to a thick, dark brown sludge looking a lot like the material that the honey dipper sucked out of my septic tank last year, mercifully without the aroma.
Chapter 2.
So it was, in the gathering dusk of that dreary Friday, that I scanned the kitchenscape with the unhappy realization that there would be nothing coming out of the taps that could be used for washing, much less ingestion, for 3 or 4 days.
Luckily my rain barrels were full so I got a couple of buckets out of the greenhouse and rinsed out the potting soil and dead wasps and filled them full of pretty clean water with only a few globs of algae and small sticks. While dragging these back up to the house I got a Little House on the Prairie feeling of gritty self-sufficiency in the face of the hostile elements.
Once back to the kitchen I rinsed the larger chunks of spaghetti sauce out of the dutch oven using the effluent that spluttered out of the tap and then filled it with the nice clean bucket water which I heated on the stove. The dishwashing process, once I had adjusted the water temperature down from Scald to Yikes with a few scoops out of the bucket, went surprisingly smoothly in spite of the almost insurmountable instinct to turn on the tap, but finally I had the several days worth of dishes cleared off all surfaces, and escaped spaghetti sauce scraped off the counter.
I really wanted a shower, but did not feel this would be a good idea, so instead spent the evening watching drivel on my single reliable TV channel, and so to bed after a very sketchy sponge bath in Perrier water, followed by a quick pee flushed away with dark chocolate water.
The Very Next Day I ran into Shaw’s and got a 2 ½ gallon jug of Poland Spring’s finest. I celebrated the presence of this much clean water in the place by having spaghetti for supper.
During the afternoon I could have sworn that I could see the bottom of the toilet when I flushed it. I tried it several times to convince myself. Maybe.
But now I really felt the need for a shower. I considered going to motel, or turning up at somebody’s door dressed in a towel and a desperate expression, but in the end I just went back to the rain barrel, visions of Laura Ingalls Wilder beating laundry on the rocks. The main disadvantage of bathing in the sink is that the only part of you that gets to be warm is the part that is actually in the sink. Everything else is a shivering wasteland of duck bumps, but it does most certainly feel good when it’s over.
By Sunday afternoon I could definitely see the bottom of the toilet, so I went downstairs and ran water into the washing machine, which has a white enamel tub. The holes nearly disappeared when the water was maybe 6” deep. After draining this out and refilling, the holes were definitely visible in 8” of water. On the third try the color changed from tea to urine. Not wishing to drain the well yet again, I suspended my experiments for the time being.
However by Sunday evening, after many flushes – I was beginning to understand that compulsive cat in the viral video – the water was very nearly water colored, and so it came to pass that on Monday morning I added a bunch of foul-smelling laundry to a tub whose color I would describe as “light urine” and washed it.
And that very evening inserted myself in a long overdue shower, and while hosing the shampoo out of my eyes, vaguely wondered at the state of mind of people willing to heave themselves into an ox-drawn wagon and head for Montana with not a single bottle of Perrier.
Last Friday my idiot tenant took a quick dump and dashed out the door, in a big, important hurry. It was not until late that afternoon, after the soaking rain started, that I went to rinse out a milk bottle in the kitchen sink and nothing emerged from the tap but a mournful sigh.
I looked up at the ceiling light to confirm that there was electricity. There was.
I turned on the hot water tap to make sure that the problem was not a matter of mice getting into the cold water line and blocking it up, but this did not appear to be the case. I tried the upstairs tap just to leave no stone unturned and to postpone the moment when I would have to accept the reality that Something was Wrong at the Well.
Meanwhile the idiot tenant had returned home and was upset that the water was not flowing. Upon intense questioning, he claimed that his water usage was, if anything, less than normal, no hoses left on. No 2-hour showers. No laundries since Monday.
Had this been a bright dry afternoon, with cheerful birdsong and scent of newmown hay, I would have gone down the hill to the Other House, occupied by the idiot tenant and as close as possible to the well, thrashed my way through the bramble and goldenrod jungle, over the stumps and half-buried barbed wire, and so to the well house and looked in. Unhappily, it was not such a day. It was cold and miserable and had been raining for an hour with increasing intensity. Furthermore, Spafford & Sons had been here not 3 weeks previous to install a new pump, the old one having fried itself, so I opted to assume the Aggrieved Customer hat and phoned them, implying that the problem could only be their faulty pump.
So it was that John, the representative of Spafford & Sons who had drawn the short straw, swaddled in wet weather gear, arrived and slogged out to the Scene of the Disaster, and discovered that the pump was fine, but the well was empty. To ensure that this brand new pump did not follow the trend set by its predecessor, he turned off the power and went for a Meaningful Dialogue with the idiot tenant. It did not take long to discover that the idiot tenant, in his hasty dash for the door had left the toilet running resulting in the entire contents of the well being relocated into the septic tank serving the Other House.
What happens, among other things, when the pump stops working is that all the water in the 520’ pipe that connects my kitchen sink to that muddy hole in the ground starts heading back from whence it sprang, loosening, along the way, all the sediment, clay, humus, mouse hair, insect parts, that have achieved a stable foothold in the pipe, but only in a north-bound current. Thus when the pump is finally operational once again, what emerges from my taps is all the newly dislodged accumulation amounting to a thick, dark brown sludge looking a lot like the material that the honey dipper sucked out of my septic tank last year, mercifully without the aroma.
Chapter 2.
So it was, in the gathering dusk of that dreary Friday, that I scanned the kitchenscape with the unhappy realization that there would be nothing coming out of the taps that could be used for washing, much less ingestion, for 3 or 4 days.
Luckily my rain barrels were full so I got a couple of buckets out of the greenhouse and rinsed out the potting soil and dead wasps and filled them full of pretty clean water with only a few globs of algae and small sticks. While dragging these back up to the house I got a Little House on the Prairie feeling of gritty self-sufficiency in the face of the hostile elements.
Once back to the kitchen I rinsed the larger chunks of spaghetti sauce out of the dutch oven using the effluent that spluttered out of the tap and then filled it with the nice clean bucket water which I heated on the stove. The dishwashing process, once I had adjusted the water temperature down from Scald to Yikes with a few scoops out of the bucket, went surprisingly smoothly in spite of the almost insurmountable instinct to turn on the tap, but finally I had the several days worth of dishes cleared off all surfaces, and escaped spaghetti sauce scraped off the counter.
I really wanted a shower, but did not feel this would be a good idea, so instead spent the evening watching drivel on my single reliable TV channel, and so to bed after a very sketchy sponge bath in Perrier water, followed by a quick pee flushed away with dark chocolate water.
The Very Next Day I ran into Shaw’s and got a 2 ½ gallon jug of Poland Spring’s finest. I celebrated the presence of this much clean water in the place by having spaghetti for supper.
During the afternoon I could have sworn that I could see the bottom of the toilet when I flushed it. I tried it several times to convince myself. Maybe.
But now I really felt the need for a shower. I considered going to motel, or turning up at somebody’s door dressed in a towel and a desperate expression, but in the end I just went back to the rain barrel, visions of Laura Ingalls Wilder beating laundry on the rocks. The main disadvantage of bathing in the sink is that the only part of you that gets to be warm is the part that is actually in the sink. Everything else is a shivering wasteland of duck bumps, but it does most certainly feel good when it’s over.
By Sunday afternoon I could definitely see the bottom of the toilet, so I went downstairs and ran water into the washing machine, which has a white enamel tub. The holes nearly disappeared when the water was maybe 6” deep. After draining this out and refilling, the holes were definitely visible in 8” of water. On the third try the color changed from tea to urine. Not wishing to drain the well yet again, I suspended my experiments for the time being.
However by Sunday evening, after many flushes – I was beginning to understand that compulsive cat in the viral video – the water was very nearly water colored, and so it came to pass that on Monday morning I added a bunch of foul-smelling laundry to a tub whose color I would describe as “light urine” and washed it.
And that very evening inserted myself in a long overdue shower, and while hosing the shampoo out of my eyes, vaguely wondered at the state of mind of people willing to heave themselves into an ox-drawn wagon and head for Montana with not a single bottle of Perrier.
Friday, June 11, 2010
A Fragment
It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He had clearly been down on the waterfront in the thick of the festivities as he had that febrile look, eyes too shiny, cheeks too pink, of one who has slept little and drunk much and danced through the night. I tried to duck into a shop, but it was too late. He grabbed my arm and breathlessly cried. “It’s the Russian princess, the one with the golden eyes, in the black velvet!”
“Still black velvet?” I asked, “Still mourning the distant loss of her virginity?”
“Ah, you mock me!” he gulped, clutching at his tie and striking a tragic pose that effectively blocked the door.
Embarassed by the sharp looks the proprietor was giving me, I dragged my friend out into the street, in spite of the increasing chill of the gathering twilight. “Come have some tea before you catch your death” I soothed, “where’s your coat?”
“I hung it up this morning, because the pig with the black feet was eating it.” he said as if this made sense. We came to a tea house and found a table behind a large plant where his histrionics would be less public. He slouched sideways in his chair like one of the more conspicuous saints in his final moments. “How can I go on?” he moaned, “I thought I’d get over it, but no, it gets worse every year, more and more bitter every day. I am tormented by dreams by night and haunted by regrets by day. Ah!”
I ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a plate of cakes from a passing waiter. When I turned back he had thrown back his head and would have been staring at the ceiling except that he had covered his eyes with soiled pudgy fingers, giving the appearance that someone had laid 2 pounds of knockwurst across his face. “You couldn’t learn from others, you couldn’t bend, and so you broke like a dry stick.” I lectured unsympathetically.
A heavy sigh from behind the knockwurst. Then we sat in silence.
At last the tea came and I picked out a hard cookie crunching it noisily. Signs of life quickly returned to my companion who gobbled cakes and slurped tea, miraculously revived. “Aren’t you going to save a treat for the Baron?” I asked.
“What, after the ungrateful rascal ate my coat? Certainly not. The princess, now, she would never have done such a thing. For her I would have brought a whole plate of treats! Lord how I miss her!” he declared spitting little gusts of poundcake crumbs.
I paid for the tea while he licked the last of the icing off his fat fingers.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Life's Lessons #1
One of the most widespread fallacies in our society is that waiting is a wholly unskilled function. A mere nuisance, like intestinal gas, that requires no more training or aptitude than breathing or defecation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Consider the new-born infant. It wakes up. It screams. Its mother immediately feeds it or cleans its bottom or both. Waiting has no meaning for it. It is inexperienced. But not for long, because pretty soon its mother has either dropped dead from exhaustion or discovered that attention postponed for a few minutes will not prove fatal. The wise baby will learn at the same time that these solitary moments can be put to good use by eating small objects off the floor or teasing the cat. This is the first lesson in waiting: that life offers periods of uncommitted time as well as myriad resources to fill them.
A lamentable number of people do not progress beyond this. These are the children in the supermarket who trigger grapefruit avalanches, the young persons who attack mailboxes, the junior executives who pace and fret in airports, the angry citizens who enliven traffic jams through repeated and prolonged use of the automobile horn.
The second lesson, that it is a good idea to sort out those methods of passing time that will result in gastric ulceration or jail time from those with a more benign impact on later life, may be learned soon after the first or may be postponed for years, depending on the aptitude of the individual and the quality of instruction available. Most of us do achieve this level of competence eventually. We are the ones who never leave home without a pocket full of reading material or a bag of knitting or a tape player that will teach us French in our idle moments. But we need these crutches. We are fidgety without them.
It is the rare one among us who successfully completes the third lesson, that resources can be found within us to ease the passage of uncommitted time. Those who have mastered this lesson are usually old, but rare instances exist of younger adepts. These are the people you see occasionally, without books or puzzles, who are seated quietly somewhere looking through the fuss of their surroundings at some gracious and satisfying world that they have summoned out of their experience. Their faces are peaceful. They have achieved satori.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Fawn
“A pox upon these slovenly spreaders,” I thought as I approached. And then I thought the blob moved. I slowed down in case my mind was suddenly gone. And then the blob changed shape. I slowed some more. And then the blob resolved itself into a deer standing in the middle of the road. Now I was down to a dead crawl. I was almost upon her.
She twitched and dithered and finally soared into the woods next to the road. I was nearly at the spot where she had been, but there was still a blob. A very small blob, which finally staggered to its tiny wobbly feet and staggered in the direction its mother had gone.
I stopped the car on top of the blob site and got out to look. There was a pretty good sized berm beside the road here, beyond which was a deep ditch. Then the hillside rose steeply into the trees. There was no sign of the deer. There was also no sign of the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little creature could have made it up onto the berm much less down into the ditch and up the other side. I walked up and down the road peering into the ditch, looking behind bushes, parting the grass. Nothing. I was standing on top of the berm about to throw in the towel. I looked down to find a foothold. There was a big leaf there. I lifted it up and there was the infant, folded neatly into a tiny speckled mound, like an exotic dessert, absolutely motionless except for its long velvety nose. I studied it carefully, its little legs folded up like carpenters rulers, its velvety ears pressed close to its neck, its long, soft nose moving almost imperceptibly, just as it was in utero.
Jim would love this, I thought. It was only a quarter mile back to the house. I backed away and studied the trees, the bushes, a mossy rock, so I could come right back here, and then went home.
We returned in minutes. I had no trouble finding the trees, the bushes, the mossy rock, but I could not find the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little fellow would have sprung to his feet and scampered off so soon. The both of us walked up and down the road looking into the ditch. Then I saw my big leaf. I bent double and looked under it. It was still there, still immobile, with its waffly little nose still probing its small world.
Now, I have read about cryptic coloration allowing moths and lizards to blend into their surroundings. I have seen photographs of zebras under trees and leopards in them, but it is my belief that this went far beyond that. This was not optical trickery. This was pure witchcraft.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Theology
So there he was, on an idle afternoon, around 4.7 billion years ago, The Supreme Being, bored. Nothing to look at and supper a long way off, picking his cosmic nose and kicking at empty space, wishing, wishing that there was just a little bit of matter to mess with. “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,” his mother had said in that dismissive tone of voice that made it clear that she was not going to tell him what a beggar was, or a horse either for that matter. Then all of a sudden it came to him that he was The Supreme Being and he could do anything he wanted. He could make a beggar to play with and it would be whatever he wanted it to be. Abruptly his mind cleared and he thought and thought about what a beggar should be – so many possibilities – he would try a couple of ideas and see if he liked them, but first things first.
“Let there be light!” he cried, and clapped his hands so hard that a spark flew out and grew and grew, spinning and spinning. Then it started breaking up into lots of lesser sparks and he watched entranced as they spun around like a huge pizza, although he had no idea what a pizza was at the time, growing and sparkling until he was surrounded with them.
After a billion or so years this grew tedious, and he didn’t think this is what a beggar was anyway, although he was pretty sure this was matter and should be fun one way or another. So he took a closer look and found that there were little bits of dust between the sparks. He gave one a little poke and it flew apart. “Oooh!” he cried in childish delight and did it again. But after another billion years or so this too grew tedious, so he kicked back and looked at his little universe while he thought what to do next.
He whiled away another billion years perfecting volcanoes and oceans and continental drift. He launched a few comets and set up some magnetic anomalies, lit off some supernovas and watched some stars collapse.
Then idly, he stirred up a little ocean and noticed that there was some stuff there that he hadn’t ordered. Cross, now, he thought it would be amusing to make some trilobites to eat this stuff. “Let there be trilobites!” he cried, and there they were crawling around the bottom of the sea, lapping down the presumptuous crud. Then he added some mollusks and worms and brachiopods and sponges and jawless fishes and some nice oozy plants, some jellyfish for pretty and some echinoderms for fun, all the while looking for something that might be a beggar. But nothing looked just right, so he just sat back and watched it all for a while, and before you knew it another billion years had passed.
Crossly, he wiped out most of his little creatures to make room for new ones that might be beggars. Then he noticed that there was nothing on dry land. Lots more space to make things on so he started filling up both land and sea. He made bugs and toads and cycads and mosses and starfish and lungfish and sharks and kelps. But none of them were beggars, so he wiped them out again and again and replaced them with new ones. Magnolias and lizards and spiders and tree ferns and clams and salamanders and plesiosaurs and brachiosaurs and tyrannosaurs and mosquitos and rats.
He liked the rats so he got rid of a bunch of stuff and made some bears and bats and seals and tigers and antelopes and rabbits and horses (at last a horse) and weasels and mastodons and monkeys. This was beginning to look more and more like a beggar. So he made lots of monkeys and lemurs and apes and lorises and marmosets and baboons. Finally, in a whimsical moment, he made a big naked ape with an oversized head and watched while it multiplied and played with matches and worshipped itself and wiped out his other creations. This would have annoyed him a lot more than it did were it not that he knew at last that he had his beggar. So he just sat back and watched, and laughed and laughed at the idea that this preposterous creature should think that it looked like him.
He had completely lost track of time when he heard his Mother’s voice shouting “What have you done? I leave you alone for a little while in a nice clean void and look at the mess you’ve made! You clean that up right now and come in for supper!” And so he turned for one last look at his funny little ape strutting and swaggering, and regretfully raised his hand…
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