Warlord

I’ve just finished the book Warlord, by Ilario Pantano (on Amazon). It is an excellent read on several levels.

Foremost (for me, at least) is the way it articulately presents the war from the perspective of a real modern warrior. I’ve not read anything else like this concerning the war in Iraq. One cannot help but be impressed with the professionalism of our military after reading this.

Nearly as interesting is the glimpse this book gives into Mr. Pantano’s fascinating life. Even though the book is nearly entirely about Iraq, you discover things — quite amazing things — about Mr. Pantano’s other experiences. There’s material for several more books in there!

Finally there’s the major plot component — the story of how then-Lt. Pantano was accused (wrongly) of murder, went through the military justice system, was cleared of all charges, but had his career ruined. It would be a sad and tragic story if it wasn’t for Mr. Pantano’s (and his family’s) admirable reactions and handling of the experience.

It’s very comforting to know that our military has men — more than a few of them, too — like Lt. Pantano.

Read the book. That’s an order!

Alaa is Free!

About six weeks ago, I told you about the arrest and jailing of prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa, and several other less well-known bloggers. And I asked you to participate, with me, in a boycott of all things Egyptian — and to write to the Egyptian embassy in protest.

Yesterday the Egyptian government released Alaa and all the other bloggers. No charges were ever filed. Alaa is now free to resume his activities.

Bloggers are being credited (by the lamestream media, no less) with having organized an effective campaign that succeeded in convincing the Egyptian authorities that they had made a tactical error.

Well, imagine that. I’m delighted to have played a small part in this, and even more delighted that we got a positive outcome. My personal boycott is now over. If you are amongst those friends and family who helped in your own way, my thanks — and share the glory!

Alaa is free!

Damn Them!

Much has already been written about this. Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup, and Pajamas Media is running another.

Just in case you haven’t heard, here are the salient points:

— Our intelligence teams have been running a brilliant secret operation that used access to Swift (an international financial clearinghouse) to track the funding of terrorist groups worldwide.

— Somehow, some of the most blatantly and militantly liberal reporters on the planet (at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, of course) discovered this fact.

— The reporters wrote their story, and in the course of doing so intelligence agencies discovered the intent to publish details of the secret effort.

— The government formally and officially asked both papers not to publish this information because it would blow the cover on a valuable operation that had stopped millions of dollars in terrorist funding and had netted at least one top-level terrorist financier.

— The two papers published the story anyway.

And now the operation, blown sky high, will have no further value in the war on terror.

The papers defend this action out of supposed concern for Americans' civil rights. They claim that Americans are having their transactions examined in an illegal fashion.

I claim that those papers have violated a much more fundamental civil right of mine — the right to have my life and property defended by my government. Those publishing houses — bastions of liberalism — are traitors to the American cause of the war on terror.

I would love to see someone in our federal government have the balls to initiate action to punish those reporters and all the editorial staff who approved publishing this story. Those people should be treated exactly as any ordinary citizen who gave the enemy a vital secret would be treated. They should be in jail, for a long, long time.

And what does it say about our country that in many quarters the reporters are being lauded, and treated like heroes? I can think of many implications of that, and not a single one of them is good.

Damn them! Damn them all to hell!

Khobar Towers

Ten years ago, on June 25, 1966, terrorists exploded a huge bomb outside the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudia Arabia. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed, along with one Saudi. Then-President Clinton said “no stone would be left unturned” in the effort to bring terrorists to justice.

Louis Freeh — the head of the FBI, appointed by Clinton — was given the job of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. Mr. Freeh took that responsibility very personally, and today in an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal, unfortunately behind the subscription wall, he tells some of the infuriating details of how his investigation was obstructed — not by the Saudis, but by Americans. It serves as a detailed reminder of why we just cannot trust U.S. security to unserious liberal politicians.

I’m going to talk about a few points from Mr. Freeh’s piece, but if you can, please read the whole thing.

It soon became clear that Mr. Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the Towers. This is astounding, considering that the Saudi Security Service had arrested six of the bombers after the attack. As FBI agents sifted through the remains of Building 131 in 115-degree heat, the bombers admitted they had been trained by the Iranian external security service (IRGC) in the Beka Valley, and received their passports at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, along with $250,000 cash for the operation from IRGC Gen. Ahmad Sharifi.

We later learned that senior members of the Iranian government, including Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and the Spiritual Leader’s office had selected Khobar as their target and commissioned the Saudi Hezbollah to carry out the operation. The Saudi police told us that FBI agents had to interview the bombers in custody in order to make our case. To make this happen, however, the U.S. president would need to personally make a request to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

So for 30 months, I wrote and rewrote the same set of simple talking points for the president, Mr. Berger, and others to press the FBI’s request to go inside a Saudi prison and interview the Khobar bombers. And for 30 months nothing happened. The Saudis reported back to us that the president and Mr. Berger would either fail to raise the matter with the crown prince or raise it without making any request. On one such occasion, our commander in chief instead hit up Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his library. Mr. Berger never once, in the course of the five-year investigation which coincided with his tenure, even asked how the investigation was going.

Mr. Freeh’s contempt for Sandy Berger and President Clinton are clear. Who can blame him? The man who appointed him and gave him this solemn responsibility behaved in an appalling, even traitorous, fashion. And if you think the trusty sidekick (Sandy “papers in my pants” Berger) sounds bad above, consider this:

Finally, frustrated in my attempts to execute Mr. Clinton’s “leave no stone unturned” order, I called former President George H.W. Bush. I had learned that he was about to meet Prince Abdullah on another matter. After fully briefing Mr. Bush on the impasse and faxing him the talking points that I had now been working on for over two years, he personally asked the crown prince to allow FBI agents to interview the detained bombers.

After his Saturday meeting with now-King Abdullah, Mr. Bush called me to say that he made the request, and that the Saudis would be calling me. A few hours later, Prince Bandar asked me to come out to McLean, Va. on Monday to see Prince Abdullah. When I met him with Wyche Fowler, our Saudi ambassador, and FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson, the crown prince was holding my talking points. He told me Mr. Bush had made the request for the FBI, which he granted, and told Prince Bandar to instruct Nayef to arrange for FBI agents to interview the prisoners.

Several weeks later, agents interviewed the co-conspirators. For the first time since the 1996 attack, we obtained direct evidence of Iran’s complicity. What Mr. Clinton failed to do for three years was accomplished in minutes by his predecessor. This was the breakthrough we had been waiting for, and the attorney general and I immediately went to Mr. Berger with news of the Saudi prison interviews.

Upon being advised that our investigation now had proof that Iran blew up Khobar Towers, Mr. Berger’s astounding response was: “Who knows about this?” His next, and wrong, comment was: “That’s just hearsay.” When I explained that under the Rules of Federal Evidence the detainees' comments were indeed more than “hearsay,” for the first time ever he became interested — and alarmed — about the case. But this interest translated into nothing more than Washington “damage control” meetings held out of the fear that Congress, and ordinary Americans, would find out that Iran murdered our soldiers. After those meetings, neither the president, nor anyone else in the administration, was heard from again about Khobar.

Are you infuriated yet?

When reading a piece of our recent history like this, I often reflect on how it relates to our current situation with the war on terror; the conflict of civilizations between Western secular liberalism and radical Islam. The actions of unserious politicians like Clinton (and his minions) were clearly harmful to us. Their tepid reaction to Khobar Towers, and their reflexive “realpolitik” avoidance of an Iran confrontation, could do nothing but encourage the radicals — as, with hindsight, it obviously has. It’s Chamberlainesque appeasement all over again.

It’s also arguably traitorous. The man who swore he would uphold and protect the Constitution, the man who was our Commander-in-Chief (and I’m disgusted as I write that) — betrayed all of us with his actions. Most of all he betrayed the memory and families of those 19 servicemen killed at Khobar Towers.

And of course this is but one example of Clinton’s betrayal, and not even an extraordinary example. However, I think it is counter-productive to focus on Clinton, as he will not be in a position to betray us like that again (unless the world is so stupid as to allow him to become the Secretary-General of the U.N., an often-mentioned idea in liberal circles). Instead we should focus on how such a dangerously unserious politician came to hold the office of chief executive, and endeavour to avoid those mechanisms in the future.

In todays American politics, if we restrict the discussion to those politicians who actually have some hope of coming to power, the dangerously unserious ones (e.g., Pelosi, Dean, Reid, Kennedy, McCain, Schumer, McKinney, etc.) are concentrated in the Democratic Party. There are some Democrats (most notably Lieberman) who stand out for their seriousness, and there are many Republicans whose politics I have major disagreements with but who are at least serious about the war on terror (e.g., Frist, Hastert, Hunter, etc.).

Personally, I’ve arrived at a mental position that I never thought I would — where I can point to a single issue (defense, including the war on terror) and say “I don’t care how a politican addresses anything else but this.” If they’re serious (in the philosophical sense) about defense and the war on terror, I’ll support them. Even if they want to wall up the border. Even if they’re pro-abortion. Even if they’re pro-union.

Even if.

Laughing Gods

Tip of the hat (again!) to Jim M. for pointing this one out.

The Gods Are Laughing

Tom Harris, National Post (Canada)

June 07, 2006

Scientists who work in the fields liberal arts graduate Al Gore wanders through contradict his theories about man-induced climate change.

Gore’s credibility is damaged early in the film when he tells the audience that, by simply looking at Antarctic ice cores with the naked eye, one can see when the American Clean Air Act was passed. Dr. Ian Clark, professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa (U of O) responds, “This is pure fantasy unless the reporter is able to detect parts per billion changes to chemicals in ice.” Air over the United States doesn’t even circulate to the Antarctic before mixing with most of the northern, then the southern, hemisphere air, and this process takes decades. Clark explains that even far more significant events, such as the settling of dust arising from the scouring of continental shelves at the end of ice ages, are undetectable in ice cores by an untrained eye.

Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as “global warming pollution” when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that — an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting.

In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don’t precede, and therefore don’t cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise — by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the correlation is poor; the planet actually cooled between 1940 and 1980, when human emissions of CO2 were rising at the fastest rate in our history.

Similarly, the fact that water vapour constitutes 95% of greenhouse gases by volume is conveniently ignored by Gore. While humanity’s three billion tonnes (gigatonnes, or GT) per year net contribution to the atmosphere’s CO2 load appears large on a human scale, it is actually less than half of 1% of the atmosphere’s total CO2 content (750-830 GT). The CO2 emissions of our civilization are also dwarfed by the 210 GT/year emissions of the gas from Earth’s oceans and land. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the uncertainty in the measurement of atmospheric CO2 content is 80 GT — making three GT seem hardly worth mentioning.

But Gore persists, labeling future CO2 rises as “deeply unethical” and lectures the audience, “Each one of us is a cause of global warming.” Not satisfied with simply warning of human-induced killer heat waves — events in Europe this past year were “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations,” he says — he then uses high-tech special effects to show how human-caused climate changes are causing more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, infectious diseases, insect plagues, glacial retreats, coral die-outs and the flooding of small island nations due to sea level rise caused by the melting of the polar caps. One is left wondering if Gore thinks nature is responsible for anything.

Scientists who actually work in these fields flatly contradict Gore. Take his allegations that extreme weather (EW) events will increase in frequency and severity as the world warms and that this is already happening. Former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg Dr. Tim Ball notes, “The theories that Gore supports indicate the greatest warming will be in polar regions. Therefore, the temperature contrast with warmer regions — the driver of extreme weather — will lessen and, with it, storm potential will lessen."

This is exactly what former Environment Canada research scientist and EW specialist Dr. Madhav Khandekar found. His studies show there has been no increase in EW events in Canada in the past 25 years. Furthermore, he sees no indication that such events will increase over the next 25 years. “In fact, some EW events such as winter blizzards have definitely declined,” Khandekar says. “Prairie droughts have been occurring for hundreds of years. The 13th and 16th century saw some of the severest and longest droughts ever on Canadian/American prairies.” Like many other researchers, Khandekar is convinced that EW is not increasing globally, either.

On hurricanes, Gore implies that new records are being set as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions. Besides clumsy errors in the presentation of the facts (Katrina did not get “stronger and stronger and stronger” as it came over the Gulf of Mexico; rather, it was category 5 over the ocean and was downgraded to category 3 when it made a landfall), Gore fails to note that the only region to show an increase in hurricanes in recent years is the North Atlantic. Hurricane specialist Tad Murty, former senior research scientist Department of Fisheries and Oceans and now adjust professor of Earth sciences at U of O, points out, “In all other six ocean basins where tropical cyclones occur, there is either a flat or a downward trend.” Murty lists 1900, 1926 and 1935 as the years in which the most intense hurricanes were recorded in the United States. In fact, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, has stated that global warming has nothing to do with the recent increase in hurricane frequency in the North Atlantic. Murty concludes, “The feeling among many meteorologists is that it has to do with the North Atlantic oscillation, which is now in the positive phase and will continue for another decade or so."

In their open letter to the Prime Minister in April, 61 of the world’s leading experts modestly expressed their understanding of the science: “The study of global climate change is an 'emerging science,' one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth’s climate system.” It seems that liberal arts graduate Al Gore, political champion of the Kyoto Protocol, thinks he knows better.

Institut Pasteur (Paris) Professor Paul Reiter seemed to sum up the sentiments of many experts when he labelled the film “pure, mind-bending propaganda.” Such reactions should certainly cause Canadians to wonder if Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Andre Gide had a point when he advised, “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."

- Tom Harris is a mechanical engineer and Ottawa director of High Park Group, a public policy company.

SEA LEVEL FALLING, POLAR BEARS STABLE, ICE CAPS THICKENING …

- - -

"I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific.” - - Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, N.Z.

- - -

"We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry, if applied properly.” — Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics and geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden.

- - -

"Gore is completely wrong here — malaria has been documented at an altitude of 2,500 metres — Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1,500 metres. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the “30 so-called new diseases” Gore references are attributable to global warming, none.” — Dr. Paul Reiter, professor, Institut Pasteur, unit of insects and infectious diseases, Paris, comments on Gore’s belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes.

- - -

"Our information is that seven of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world’s estimated total) are either stable or increasing..... Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has.” — Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager, wildlife research section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut.

- - -

"Mr. Gore suggests that the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner.” — Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax.

- - -

"The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling.... Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all.” — Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, Calif.

- - -

"Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years.” — Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia.

- - -

"From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic.” — Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.

- - -

"The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand.” — Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, B.C., comments on Gore’s belief that the mountain pine beetle is an “invasive exotic species” that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost.

Nowhere has the lamestream media displayed their lack of talent for reporting on science as they have on global warming. The reporting that I’ve read has, to date, been astonishingly one-sided — especially when you compare it to the pronounced debate underway in the scientific community. This piece doesn’t come anywhere close to balancing the overall coverage…but it sure is refreshing to see something like this in the press…

Who's Your Daddy?

Tip of the hat to Jim M. for this gem…

When someone puts in for Child Support, the proper thing to do is to find out who the father is and see why he is not providing support. The following are all replies that Dallas women have written on Child Support Agency forms in the section for listing father’s details.

Or putting it another way....Who’s yo Daddy!

These are genuine excerpts from the forms. Be sure to check out # 11 - it takes the prize and # 3 is runner up.

1. Regarding the identity of the father of my twins, child A was fathered by Jim Munson. I am unsure as to the identity of the father of child B, but I believe that he was conceived on the same night.

2. I am unsure as to the identity of the father of my child as I was being sick out of a window when taken unexpectedly from behind. I can provide you with a list of names of men that I think were at the party if this helps.

3. I do not know the name of the father of my little girl. She was conceived at a party at 3600 Grand Avenue where I had unprotected sex with a man I met that night. I do remember that the sex was so good that I fainted. If you do manage to track down the father, can you send me his phone number? Thanks.

4. I don’t know the identity of the father of my daughter. He drives a BMW that now has a hole made by my stiletto heels in one of the door panels. Perhaps you can contact BMW service stations in this area and see if he’s had it replaced.

5. I have never had sex with a man. I am still a Virginian. I am awaiting a letter from the Pope confirming that my son’s conception was immaculate and that he is Christ risen again.

6. I cannot tell you the name of child A’s dad as he informs me that to do so would blow his cover and that would have cataclysmic implications for the economy. I am torn between doing right by you and right by the country. Please advise.

7. I do not know who the father of my child was as all blacks look the same to me.

8. Peter Smith is the father of child A. If you do catch up with him, can you ask him what he did with my AC/DC CDs? Child B who was also borned at the same time.... well I don’t have a clue.

9. From the dates it seems that my daughter was conceived at Disney World; maybe it really is the Magic Kingdom.

10. So much about that night is a blur. The only thing that I remember for sure is Delia Smith did a program about eggs earlier in the evening. If I’d have stayed in and watched more TV rather than going to the party at 146 Miller Drive, mine might have remained unfertilized.

11. I am unsure as to the identity of the father of my baby, after all when you eat a can of beans you can’t be sure which one made you fart.

Yep, you guessed it right. We are all paying taxes to support these dim bulbs. Is this a great country.....or what!

And that’s about 'nuff said on that topic!

Summer Solstice

For anyone located in the Northern Hemisphere, as I am, today is the longest day of the year (in the Southern Hemisphere this is the Winter Solstice). The scientific term for this phenomenon is solstice. The actual solstice (the moment when the earth’s tilt is pointed directly at the sun) occurs about 10 minutes from the moment I’m writing this post, at 5:26 AM Pacific Time (12:26 PM UTC).

The solstice is also the day (again, in the Northern Hemisphere) when the sun rises and sets closer to north than on any other day. In fact, at any location north of the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets today. At my location (near San Diego, California) the sun will rise this morning at about 58 degrees east of north (estimated by Brunton compass); tonight it will set at the same angle west of north. Our view of both sunrise and sunset here is a little distorted by the fact that we live in a valley and are surrounded by mountains — we can’t see the actual horizon in any direction.

Many people believe that summer is when the Earth is closest to the sun, and winter when it is furthest. A simple way to prove to yourself that this is not true is to consider that right now (summer for us) it is winter down in the Southern Hemisphere. The Earth can’t simultaneously be at its closest and furthest from the sun! In fact, nearly all of our seasonal climate variations are caused by the tilt (about 23 degrees) of the Earth’s axis, relative to its orbit around the sun. There is a tiny variation caused by distance; tiny because the Earth’s orbit is almost perfectly circular. There’s also a tiny effect caused by the precession of the Earth’s axis (i.e., its angle of tilt changes slightly), and a few other even smaller effects — but all of those smaller effects are trivial when compared to the effects of the simple tilt.

Visions Dancing

This post is related, in a very tangential way, to the series of “formative events” posts I’ve been making. But what I’m discussing here is not, in and of itself, a formative event.

Remember the famous line from “Twas the night before Christmas"? …visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads

Well, there are no sugar-plums dancing in my head.

I have long been envious of people who are skilled at making sketches of real-life scenes, especially faces and animals. Once, long ago, I decided to pursue this skill — I bought a book called “Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain” (which came highly recommended by a friend who could draw), and some appropriate paper and pencils. I sat down with the book, getting just a few pages into it when the author asked me to do a simple exercise: she wanted me to visualize the letter “L” in my mind’s eye, and then rotate it. It was clear from the prose that she never expected anyone to find this difficult.

I found it to be impossible. I cannot, no matter how hard I try, visualize an “L", much less rotate it. I can’t visualize anything else, either. As far as I can tell, I have no “mind’s eye”.

For a few years after I made this discovery about myself, I often asked other people about their ability to do this exercise with the “L” — and not one of them ever expressed any difficulty with it. I’ve also asked my doctor about it — actually two doctors, at different times. Both of them gave me an odd look; one of them asked if this was a change. Both told me not to worry about it.

More recently, I’ve done some “research” on the web, and I’ve found a few references to this phenomenon — it seems to be uncommon, and associated with autism, poor visual memory (e.g., faces), disinterest in the visual arts, and low scores on spatial reasoning tests. So far as I know, I’m not autistic. I do have a very poor memory for faces. I’m very interested in some visual arts, particularly photography, drawing, and graphics. And I’ve got 99th+ percentile scores on every spatial reasoning test I’ve ever taken. Nothing I’ve read on the web, however, points to any particular cause for being unable to visualize.

I’ve often wondered how (or if) the absence of visualization ability has impacted my life. One thing I’ve read in several places is advice to people with “visualization disability” that they avoid careers like engineering that supposedly rely on visualization. That would have been tragically bad advice to me — I’m all about engineering, and I can’t imagine a career I’d enjoy more, or be more competent at. I’ve also wondered whether my brain developed in some other way to compensate for the inability to visualize — or even whether development in another area caused the inability to visualize.

For a period of a few years, I was really bothered by this inability. Now, though, I find it more curious than anything else; just another one of those things I’d really like to understand. And if I ever want a sugar-plum, I know I’ll just have to go out and get one!

Early Memories

One of my 11.5 regular readers asked for a discussion of my early memories, where “early” means around four years old. That’s easy — I have almost no memories from when I was that young.

I should be careful here — it’s not that I have a big blank in that part of my life. It’s more that I don’t have many crisp, specific memories. I do remember feelings, having been part of certain kinds of activities (though not specific instances of them), and of course the people who were an important part of my life.

With that caveat, here are all the specific early memories I can muster up right now:

The Flagpole: my parents are skeptical that I can remember this, as I would have been very young (still an infant, perhaps), but this is one of my clearest, most vivid early memories. I’m looking out a window (I think it’s my bedroom window), and a long truck backs up to the spot where the flagpole is to be set. The flagpole is a tall (perhaps 35') white wooden pole, very traditional. The truck stops, and my father appears. With him are a familiar farm worker (who goes by the moniker Chalky), and two men I don’t know. The pole is worked upright by means I don’t know, bright white against a saturated blue sky. I have no idea why this memory is so vivid; there’s no hint of any emotional context that would account for it.

Sputnik: I remember my father taking me outside in the early evening to see Sputnik. This would have been in October, 1957, not long after my fifth birthday. We walked out into the field toward the highway from our house, and looked to the west in the twilight. Somehow (I presume via a newspaper) my father knew just where to look in the sky. Right on time, we spotted the bright little dot moving across the sky. But the most vivid memory I have of this is of being excited, and looking up at my father’s face — and seeing fear (or something I interpreted as fear) and concern painted there. That was the first time I had ever seen such a thing, and it was profoundly shocking to me. My father was very quiet; he picked me up and carried me back inside, hugging me tightly all the way back.

Cigarettes: My mother smoked until 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General issued the first official report detailing the hazards of smoking. Before that, she would often stop the car at local stores and send me inside to buy her a pack or two of cigarettes. I can still remember the packages, the raw smell of the tobacco, and her eagerness to get the packs from me when I returned. Oddly, I have no memory at all of her either actually smoking, or of any ashtrays around the house.

Injury: My brother (a year younger than I) and I were out in a field, digging a “foxhole”. I had a shovel; my brother had a garden rake (the kind with short, solid steel teeth). For some reason my brother decided to swing the rake over his head — and instead of digging into the ground, it dug into my head. The result was (a) much pain, (b) a flap of skin detached from the top of my head, and (c) a whole lotta blood. I ran into the house, where my mother took one look at me, shrieked, had me hold some kind of a rag on my head, and threw me in the car for the 20 minute ride to Dr. Garwood’s office in Crosswicks. I remember Dr. Garwood taking a very quick look at me, and then spending some time with my mother to calm her down. I think my mom thought I was a dead kid walking. I don’t recall getting stitches in that wound, but I think I must have. I do recall the resulting bandages, and my mother being torn between hugging me and wanting to punish me severely for whatever stupid thing I’d done to acquire this injury.

Electrical Experiments: Gertrude Ames, a sweet and wonderful woman whom I still remember with great fondness, would often babysit us when both of our parents had to be away. On one such occasion, when I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, Gertrude was working in the kitchen of our house, and I was there with her. For some reason I decided it would be fun to unfold a paperclip and insert the two ends of it into an electrical socket — with my bare hands. All I remember is a bright flash, a popping sound, smoke, an awful smell — and my right hand being quite badly burned. It hurt, and I was terrified. Gertrude was perhaps 15 feet away; she was there in a flash, picked me up, figured out in seconds that I was fine except for the burn, and hugged me tight until I stopped being so scared. Then she put me down and commenced a very stern lecture on the general stupidity of little boys, especially this one — and I could see that she was very scared, herself. The remains of the paperclip were still sticking out of the electrical socket, and she dampened a dishtowel and used that to bat at the paperclip until it fell out. Then she started crying, took me into our livingroom, put some ointment on my burns, and called my mother. I got another lecture when my mom got home <smile>. The most vivid parts of this memory are of Gertrude’s face and the various intense emotions her very open face displayed during this incident.

Reading Ah Ha: When I was quite small, my mother would sit me on her lap with a book open so we could both see it. Then she’d read out loud, occasionally following the words with her fingers (for my benefit, of course). One day she was reading from a book of fairy tales. We were on a page with a color plate of a goose, wearing a blue bonnet and carrying a basket of eggs. As she read aloud, her finger walked along the words — and I noticed that every time she said “goose” her finger pointed at a word that looked the same each time. The big ah ha! had struck — it dawned on me that those funny squiggles on the page corresponded to the words she spoke aloud. I was very excited upon this discovery, and it’s mainly that excitement that I can remember now. I know as she read, on that day and others, I started putting more and more words together with the writing, and I also remember pestering both my parents to explain road signs after that. But “goose” — that was the first word I ever “read"…

Brushing: My father would often sit in a big chair, and put a kid upon his shoulders, armed with a hairbrush. We’d sit there and brush his hair (he actually had some back then), while he’d make exaggerated moans of pleasure. I loved doing this.

Illness: My parents have no memory of this, and are skeptical that it actually happened. My memory is of being in the bedroom that I shared with my brother Scott, on a hot summer day. I was so small that getting into bed was a challenge. Scott and I were both in bed, sick. The most vivid memory is of the nature of the illness: we vomited, and the vomit was full of corn kernels.

Culvert: One of the fields on our farm, not far from my grandparents' home, had a drain with a culvert that led about 150' from within the field to near the creek that ran through our farm. This culvert was made from large terra cotta pipes, and until I was about 8 I could fit through these pipes. One day, on one of my earlier ventures into this pipe, I got stuck right in the middle — in the stretch where it was completely dark. And I was totally by myself; for whatever reason I had decided to make this particular journey on my own. The most vivid memory here, of course, is the fear — when I discovered I could neither move backward or forward, I went straight to totally terrified, out of my gourd. I don’t know how long that lasted — probably just seconds — but it’s still one of the most purely scary things that’s ever happened to me. After I got done being terrified, I discovered that my belt loop had gotten snagged on a root sticking through a joint in the pipes — once I worked that out, I had no further problems. But I never went back into that culvert alone again.

Fossil: My uncle Donald (my father’s brother), who lived on the farm with us, was sort of an amateur scientist; he was interested in a wide variety of things. Amongst those interests were fossils, and our farm, it turns out, was a rich source of a wide variety of fossils. But on the particular day of my memory, I didn’t know any of that. I saw my uncle — a generally dour and unapproachable guy whom we kids were a little frightened of — walking in a freshly tilled field, carefully watching the ground and occasionally picking something up. I saw him put something in his pocket, and I got curious — so I gathered up my courage and walked over to see him. To my surprise, he was eager to share this with the little kid (me), and he patiently explained what fossils were, and how you might recognize them. We then started searching together, and he found a few right away that were very mysterious to me — they were sponges, whose fossils don’t look much different than any other rock to the uninitiated. A little further on, though, he found a very different kind of fossil — some kind of sea worm — that had a sharply delineated shell that I could clearly make out. My uncle said this particular fossil looked like it might be better if we split the rock, so I followed him back to his house, and together we cleaned the rock, set it up on an anvil, and he used a chisel and small sledge to crack it. The split rock revealed about four inches of an intricately detailed, twisted sea worm shell…and I was hooked on fossils. He and I spent a lot of time together on fossils in the following years; eventually (just before I left home after joining the Navy) I worked with him using a microscope (which I have now inherited) to examine and classify the fossils we found. That first experience, though, remains amongst my vivid early memories — I think because of two things, roughly in equal measure: the discovery that Uncle Donald had some redeeming value, and the sheer adventure of “discovering” that worm fossil inside a rock from our own field.

I’m sure that I have some other early memories rattling around in my brain, but those are all the specific ones that occur to me now…

Father's Day

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. By choice and preference, I am not a father in the sense that term is used on this day — my “parenthood” of our numerous animal companions, and innumerable lame ideas doesn’t count. But that fact doesn’t hamper my ability to appreciate and honor the many real fathers out here, and I’ll raise a glass to them all tonight.

Including my own father, who made a most surprising phone call to me yesterday — but you’ll need some context to understand why it was surprising.

My parents retired a few years ago to a home they built in south-central New Jersey (I know, I know, that’s direct evidence of some serious mental instability, possibly of a dangerous kind). There are four of us kids; I’m the oldest. Compared to many people I know, I grew up in a “Leave It To Beaver” kind of home — loving, honest, hard-working parents; no divorces, no drunks, no abuse; lots of positive experiences that I look back on now with much gratitude. But my father has never been a demonstrative man — always approachable, enjoying his children’s company obviously and enormously, these things certainly. But he’s always been a little uncomfortable getting a hug from his adult boys, and rarely does a conversation ever touch on an emotionally charged subject. We all knew our father loved us — of this, there was never a smidgen of doubt — but we weren’t likely to hear that very directly.

Well, yesterday my dad gave me a call. He billed it as a “reverse Father’s Day” call and then he said, straight up, that I was a wonderful son, that he was proud of me, and that he loved me. That’s very much out of character for him, which is why I was so surprised. But as I absorbed what he said, and his evident good cheer, I had an intensely emotional moment. Of the very best kind, I think…

I love you too, dad. Happy Father’s Day, from a son who couldn’t be prouder to have you be his father…

Vent

It doesn’t get much better than that.

So says Michelle Malkin at the end of her current Vent on “Hot Air", which is all about the flapadoodle surrounding Anne Coulter’s latest book, “Godless”. Michelle’s point (which you’ll have to watch the video to understand) is right on. Don’t miss it!

BTW, if you’re not familiar with Vent — it’s Ms. Malkin’s recent venture into video blogging. It’s updated daily, and is often quite good. It is the only video feature of any kind (on television or the web) that I watch every day.

And Anne Coulter can be “shameless” around me any time she wants to be!

Ah, Home

Yesterday afternoon I headed home from my week on business in San Francisco. My company’s offices are on the Embarcadero, and I was flying from Oakland. In the past I’ve taken a taxi; they’re expensive (around $60), and the timing is subject to the whims of traffic. This time I took the BART (there’s a station a block from the office) and a shuttle bus from the Oakland Coliseum exit to the airport — just under an hour, from the time I left the office until I hit the security line, and $5.35. I think I’ll be doing that from now on!

I actually left the office an hour or so early, hoping I could catch an earlier flight than I’d booked, but this was not to be. When I got to the airport, I discovered two things: all the air conditioning in the airport was down (and it was a hot day), and every Southwest flight to San Diego was delayed. Not exactly my favorite combination. By the time my original 4:45 departure time rolled around, the Southwest folks had mostly caught up — I ended up leaving just 15 minutes late. Normally I don’t look forward to the airplane seat, but this time, after the stultifying heat of the airport, the airplanes seat was wonderful — it had a fan!

And that plane took me to San Diego, in luxurious air-conditioned comfort, where my lovely bride picked me up at the airport. We had a “catch up” conversation on the way home, sharing some laughs. I missed those. And finally we drove onto the home stretch, into Lawson Valley — painted in the abstract pastels and stark silhouettes of dusk in the desert — and to our little house. Inside, I was welcomed back by three deliriously happy brown dogs, each in their own fashion. Mo’i practically knocked me over, nibbling frantically on my ear, making funny little grunting noises. Lea looked all excited, got low to the ground, and kept running away and returning for some more petting. And little Miki (whom I was worried might have forgotten me) was all over me, squeaking and squirming, and so obviously beside himself with joy that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. My face was very wet before he was done with me…

It’s funny how little things about home can seem so good after you’ve been away for a while. Our shower, for instance — nothing really remarkable about it, but it does work very well, pouring huge quantities of our well water all over you when you turn it on. Nothing like the feeble squirts from the (perfectly normal) hotel shower. Ah, I enjoyed that shower.

And much else. There really is no place like home…

Broasted Chicken Cafe

The hotel I’m staying in (tonight’s the last night!) has remarkably little to commend it, though it’s not actually awful in any particular way — just rather uniformly mediocre and uninteresting. About the best part of it is the restaurant on the ground floor; I’ve eaten there each night this week and had a very pleasant, quality meal each time. I’d particularly recommend the smoked chicken pasta.

But tonight I decided to take a little walk through the immediate area to see if I could find something a little different for dinner. I was actually a bit early for many restaurants; about 4 PM. I’d left the office early to work in the quiet of the hotel room, only to find a rather raucous get-together was happening in the room next to mine. Sigh. So an early supper would make a good escape.

I walked a few blocks uphill on Market Street, away from the Civic Center, just enjoying the walk and waiting for some eatery to catch my fancy. A small cafe; neat and uncrowded, advertised in big letters on a metal sign over the door “Broasted Chicken Cafe” — I happen to be a fan of broasted chicken, and the place looked like it might be safe to eat in (several others I’d passed were not so highly qualified), so I stepped inside.

A fellow who appeared to be from somewhere in South Asia — perhaps Sri Lanka, or southern India, or even Thailand — greeted me very pleasantly and prepared to take my order. I looked over the menu above the counter, and to my surprise didn’t see a single item with broasted chicken. There were some tasty looking panini, wraps, soups, and salads on the menu, but not one item with chicken, much less broasted chicken. Also no broaster in sight.

So I asked the fellow behind the counter where the broasted chicken items were. He looked at me as though he’d just discovered he was in the company of a lunatic, and thought that a bit worrisome. With a very thick accent, he said: “No chicken! Panini, wrap, soup, salad, very good. No chicken! No chicken!"

"But…", I said, “the sign outside says 'broasted chicken'.” I should have known better than to question him.

"No chicken sign!", he said, looking worried — and then he ran out from behind the counter and right out the door, beckoning me to follow him. He pointed to the tiny little sidewalk sign — a small folding sign with a chalkboard on both sides — and repeated “No chicken sign!"

So I pointed up to the large sign over his door that said “Broasted Chicken Cafe” — and I couldn’t resist; I said “Chicken Sign!"

My fellow looked at that sign, squinted, and tilted his head sideways — looking for all the world like someone who had truly never seen the sign over his door before. He looked surprised. Then he looked at me and said, definitively, “No chicken!"

And went back inside. Where I followed and meekly ordered a ham and swiss panini and some potato salad. Both were outstanding; I actually went back for more potato salad, which was absolute spudly perfection.

But it wasn’t broasted chicken.

Facing Down the Man

Forwarded by SimonM…

Never Argue With A Woman

One morning, a husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap.

Although not familiar with the lake, his wife decides to take their boat out. She motors out a short distance, anchors, and takes out her book.

Along comes a game warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says, “Good morning, Ma’am. What are you doing?"

"Reading a book,” she replies (thinking, “Isn’t it obvious?!").

"You’re in a restricted fishing area,” he informs her.

"I’m sorry, Officer, but I’m not fishing, I’m reading."

"Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment. I’ll have to take you in and write you up."

"If you do that, I’ll have to charge you with sexual assault,” says the woman.

"But, I haven’t touched you,” says the game warden.

"That’s true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know, you could start at any moment."

Have a nice day, ma’am,” he said…and quickly left.

Moral of the story: Never argue with a woman who reads. It’s likely she can also think.

Moonbat Encounter

Yesterday morning I left my hotel room at about 5:30 AM, and headed for the Starbucks in the lobby — my usual routine on this business trip. I got my coffee and pastry, wandered over to a table, and proceeded to set up my laptop so I could read the news while I drank my coffee.

Sitting next to me was a slight man, perhaps in his late 20s or early 30s. He glanced at me once, then again, and gave me a sour sort of look. Over the next few minutes, he repeated this, looking more and more agitated and disturbed — and I was starting to wonder what sort of a nut I’d managed to choose a seat near. More about Ethel Merman, perhaps?

Finally this fellow couldn’t stand it, and he spit out a single word that apparently summed up everything he was feeling so intensely: “Fascist!"

Moi, fascist? There are many unkind things one could say about me and be perfectly accurate. Accusing me of being a fascist, though, would not be one of them.

Engaging with this guy (whom I was starting to think of as a full-on loony) didn’t seem like a particularly attractive option, but…I was very curious about why he labeled me as a fascist. So I asked him, very politely, “Why do you think I’m a fascist?"

In response, he nodded and glanced toward my chest. On my shirt I had a small pin of the American flag, something that’s been a normal piece of my business attire since shortly after 9/11. So I asked: “You think I’m a fascist because I have an American flag pin?"

And that set this guy off on a moonbat rant that lasted for a minute or so, non-stop, at the end of which he got up in disgust and (thankfully!) left. His voice started out low, but by the end of his rant he was quite loud, and several other patrons started to look a little worried. Most of his rant consisted of a string of assumptions, all derived in the end from my flag pin. I will not be able to recall them all perfectly, but the general gist of it was something like this: because I wear a flag pin, I must be a mindless, jack-booted, racist, UN-hating, rich Republican. Republicans are all low-IQ, pollution-loving, evil rapists who long ago corrupted representative democracy in America into its current form, where all policy is dictated by some combination of Karl Rove, Enron, and Exxon, which are all fascist organizations. Therefore I was clearly a fascist. Well, at least it was clear to him!

By the end of this rant, he was red in the face, yelling, spitting a bit, and had lost any semblance of control over his emotional state. He was really quite agitated when he left. And those two questions really are the only things I said to him to provoke this — well, that, and my unforgiveable sin of wearing an American flag pin.

From some perspectives, this was an amusing little interlude; a run-in with a nutjob that really had no larger meaning.

From a different perspective, though, it’s more disturbing — a window into a mindset fervently held, but so different than my own that I have a great deal of trouble comprehending it. A fellow citizen of this country, who believes, apparently, that any open expression of patriotism — love of my country — is something to be despised. A fellow citizen who seems to be convinced that he lives in the land of evil, with his life controlled by operatives of the devil and is totally out of his control.

That was yesterday morning. Now I’m about to go down to Starbucks again for this morning’s coffee. I wonder what awaits me there today?

The Big City

Big cities are not exactly my favorite kinds of places — I’m pretty much a country bumpkin at heart. There are many things about big cities that I just plain detest. But some things about them are downright wierd, and sometimes even funny.

This morning I got up around 5:30 AM (late for me!) and headed down to my hotel’s lobby, where there was a Starbucks. I bought my coffee and a pastry, and sat down at one of the high tables on a ridiculously tall stool. My plan was to sip my coffee and read the news online (I had my laptop, and the hotel has a free WiFi service). As I was waiting for my laptop to boot, a very scruffy looking fellow — a homeless guy, I think — hailed me as if I was his long-lost buddy, and immediately started in on a lengthy discourse about Ethel Merman. Clearly he believed this was the most important topic in the universe, and nothing I could do or say would dissuade him from this belief.

At first I tried to be polite in my attempts to disengage, but eventually I ended up just telling him directly “I’m going to read my news now, and I am not going to listen to you or respond to you.” And I sat down to do that. My scruffy guy was completely unfazed by this — in fact, my disengagement seemed to give him new energy in his Ethel Merman monologue marathon. So I listened, unwillingly, to his highly detailed knowledge of Ethel Merman’s childhood on Long Island, while I tried to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

It was challenging.

After my coffee and pastry, I walked outside and immediately down to the train station — the “Muni”. It’s a subway, really, with big stations that aren’t very crowded. The train ride from my hotel to work is only a couple of miles — and yet on that short ride this morning, I saw more unusual people than I’d see in a couple of years in the country area where I live. Hell, probably more than a lifetime in the area where I live!

The odd folks that I recall include:

— A man who appeared to be in his 60s (or even older) was stationed in the Civic Center train station, playing an unrecognizable tune on a guitar with only two strings still intact. He hummed along with his guitar playing, and his humming was missing a few strings, too. He had short-cropped white hair except for a long ponytail that was dyed a brilliant, almost neon orange; his face had the good cheer and wholesomeness of a Santa Claus. He didn’t have the appearance of someone who was impoverished or homeless — he had nice clothes and looked healthy enough — but he had a little sign next to a plastic bucket that said “Your coins are my salvation.” Thing is, that sign was done at some kind of professional graphics outfit — it looked like a piece of classy marketing literature.

— A pair of young women were on the train I climbed into, dressed identically and sitting together; their outfits and makeup seemed calculated to make them appear older than they really were. They spent the entire train ride (thankfully it was a short ride!) pointing to various riders and loudly discussing whatever they felt like discussing. Usually this involved speculations about sexual orientation, sexual experience, sexually transmitted diseases, or…you get the idea. Most people just ignored them. I won’t repeat what they said about me. The little old Chinese lady sitting next to me laughed and laughed at all their ranting, and kept begging to be their next target.

— A pair of young men (late teens, most likely) dressed in the current fashion: pants with a crotch at knee level, pant leg bottoms all gathered at their ankles, and their waistbands lowered to mid-butt level with a few acres of their loud boxer shorts showing. They were speaking to each other in what appeared to be a hybrid of English and grunts, using many more gestures than one would ordinarily see. I was just a few feet from them, and could hear them clearly, but I could not understand a word they said. Whatever it was, it was serious stuff, to them, at least. But it got a lot less serious when one of them somehow got hung up on his clothing as he tried to get on the escalator — he fell and his trousers ended up entirely around his ankles. That got an appreciative chuckle from all my fellow commuters within sight.

— A middle-aged fellow with a distinctly professorial air, unless you happened to be walking behind him. He was wearing dress pants and a dress shirt, cardigan and a bow tie, with dressy loafers. But as he walked, and his soles became visible to those behind him, you could see in big, neat white letters “EAT” on his left sole, and “SHIT” on his right. Classy.

— As I exited the Embarcadero train station and made it back into the sunlight, an older man pushing an old-fashioned ice cream cart came to a halt in front of me. Right in the path of the commuters streaming out of the station, he set the brakes on his cart, and opened up the freezer compartment. Inside, I could see, there wasn’t any ice cream — just a collection of junk that was uniformly bright and shiny. Pieces of brightly colored bottles, polished bits of metal, some ribbons from gift packages, and so on. He rummaged about for a moment, then closed the freezer, unset his brakes, and moved on along. The entire incident took perhaps 45 seconds, and accomplished nothing whatsoever that I could see. But the fellow seemed to be happy with the world…

And that’s just one trip!

Now Hear This

I will be working away from home (in San Francisco) this week. I’m not sure what this will mean for blogging, but my guess is that it will be light…

Marine Email

Via Tammy Bruce:

Just wanted to write to you and tell you another story about an experience we had over here.

As you know, I asked for toys for the Iraqi children over here and several people (Americans that support us) sent them over by the box. On each patrol we take through the city, we take as many toys as will fit in our pockets and hand them out as we can. The kids take the toys and run to show them off as if they were worth a million bucks. We are as friendly as we can be to everyone we see, but especially so with the kids. Most of them don’t have any idea what is going on and are completely innocent in all of this.

On one such patrol, our lead security vehicle stopped in the middle of the street. This is not normal and is very unsafe, so the following vehicles began to inquire over the radio. The lead vehicle reported a little girl sitting in the road and said she just would not budge. The command vehicle told the lead to simply go around her and to be kind as they did. The street was wide enough to allow this maneuver and so they waved to her as they drove around.

As the vehicles went around her, I soon saw her sitting there and in her arms she was clutching a little bear that we had handed her a few patrols back. Feeling an immediate connection to the girl, I radioed that we were going to stop. The rest of the convoy paused and I got out the make sure she was OK. The little girl looked scared and concerned, but there was a warmth in her eyes toward me. As I knelt down to talk to her, she moved over and pointed to a mine in the road.

Immediately a cordon was set as the Marine convoy assumed a defensive posture around the site. The mine was destroyed in place.

It was the heart of an American that sent that toy. It was the heart of an American that gave that toy to that little girl. It was the heart of an American that protected that convoy from that mine. Sure, she was a little Iraqi girl and she had no knowledge of purple mountain’s majesty or fruited plains. It was a heart of acceptance, of tolerance, of peace and grace, even through the inconveniences of conflict that saved that convoy from hitting that mine. Those attributes are what keep Americans hearts beating. She may have no affiliation at all with the United States, but she knows what it is to be brave and if we can continue to support her and her new government, she will know what it is to be free. Isn’t that what Americans are, the free and the brave?

If you sent over a toy or a Marine (US Service member) you took part in this. You are a reason that Iraq has to believe in a better future. Thank you so much for supporting us and for supporting our cause over here.

That’s a little Iraqi girl that I’d really love to do something for…

Smoke Rings

The rightmost photo is Mt. St. Helens; the leftmost is Mt. McKinley (Denali). As usual, click on the photo for a larger version.

From Jim Mundy:

Not many of you get to see this, unless you live near there — Mt. St. Helens at sunrise.

Mt. St. Helens continues to spew ash, while it is forming a lava dome in the crater and still having minor tremors.

Here in this sunrise shot, she appears to be blowing smoke rings (and anything so benign is welcomed, given recent history).

What forms the “smoke rings” is the air flowing over the mountain getting pushed up higher as it goes up and over the top. The moisture content and initial temperature are just right so that the moisture condenses from a vapor to small particles at the higher altitude. When the moving air moves past the peak and comes down again, the particles evaporate back to an invisible vapor.

The two “pancakes” describe that there are two layers of air for which this is happening, thus making this awesome picture possible.

Formative Events

This is the third of a series of posts on the formative events in my life. Search for “formative events” to see all of them.

If you could somehow peer back at my interests and activities in the 1960s and early 1970s, you’d quickly conclude that I was headed for some kind of a career in electronics, and in particular, radio electronics. While I still dabble in electronics, I haven’t done anything with radio electronics for over 30 years. My career is all about programming, with a distinctly minor element (especially for the past 25 years) of digital electronics. What the heck happened?

In 1971, I had an advanced amateur radio license and an FCC first class license. I was building radio transmitters and receivers of my own design; primitive but they worked. I knew quite a bit about analog and radio electronics, especially with vacuum tubes as the active element. I had read a bit about digital logic — AND gates, inverters, flip-flops, and so forth — and had even puzzled out how they worked, though I never connected the dots about how you could do something useful with them. But I never seen an electronic calculator, much less a computer. I had zero interest in computers as a hobby, as the notion that I could ever own one myself had never entered my head (this was long before the days of personal computers!).

Then I joined the U.S. Navy, in a special six-year enlistment program they had. This program guaranteed that I’d get two years of training in electronics before I spent four more years serving; the only condition was that I had to pass the classes. The recruiter, true to form (he lied), told me that I’d be able to choose the field I’d be assigned to — and the Navy had some very interesting radio communications programs. I was very attracted to a rate called CTM, which was basically an electronics technician for the spook’s (spies) gear — and everyone knew that the spooks had the latest, hottest gear.

I went to boot camp for 18 long and shocking weeks in Orlando, Florida. Boot camp was not nice, but there was one (and only one, trust me) element of boot camp at which I excelled: taking aptitude and achievement tests. At that time, everyone in boot camp took a battery of standard tests. Guys who did well on certain tests were given more tests, at a higher level. There was even a third round possible, depending on the results of the second. I did well on basically all the tests (all that reading and studying was paying off), even on tests for areas that I thought I had negative aptitude, such as foreign languages. But the tests that got me the most excited were the tests involving electronics, math, and physics: I got 99th percentile scores on all of them, and I’d been told that this meant I would be able to choose whatever rate I wanted. I wanted CTM, and I was certain I would get it.

Wrong again, burrito-breath.

The way we found out what rate we were assigned to is by the orders we got upon leaving boot camp. Because my enlistment program guaranteed two years of school, I knew my orders would be to a school — but I didn’t know which one. When they handed out the orders, and I read mine, I could scarce believe my eyes: I was being sent first to “BEEP” school (basic electronics) in San Diego, then to “DS” school. I had never even heard of the DS rate, so my very disappointed imagination went into overdrive trying to figure out what the hell it was. My company commander was not a help: he was certain it was some kind of dental technician, though he couldn’t figure out why they’d send me to BEEP school first for that. I didn’t find out the truth for a couple of agonizing days, but finally I knew: DS was “Data Systems Technician", an electronics technician specializing in repairing digital equipment, including computers.

Oh, I was so bitterly disappointed! I was even moved to do something very unusual for me at that time in my life (I was still extremely introverted): I complained. Loudly. Eventually I got an appointment to see an actual officer; I’ve forgotten his exact role, but it had something to do with “detailing” — the Navy’s name for the process of assigning sailors to roles. He let me vent my whole story: my high test scores, my recruiter’s promises, my choice of CTM, my unhappiness with the DS assignment. Then he said, basically: “Tough toenails, sailor. Buck up and get with the program; you’re going to be a DS.” Of course he used a slightly cruder set of verbal constructs involving creative arrangements of both common and exotic four-letter words, but that was the general notion. He also added something that gave me pause: that the washout rate from DS school was very high, amongst the highest of all Navy schools — and that I really ought to consider what a prestigous and plum assignment DS school was. He allowed as how he was very surprised at my negative reaction, because a DS assignment as about as good as it gets for an enlisted guy in the Navy.

After my post-bootcamp leave, I was off to San Diego for BEEP school. This was a “self paced” course, which means you could stay there for quite a few weeks until you passed all the module tests. Shore duty in San Diego is just about as good as it gets in the Navy. So did I do the obvious thing, and stretch out that time as much as possible? Hell, no! This idiot went and “challenged” all the modules' tests on the first day I was there. This took the system a bit by surprise (apparently nobody else had ever been so stupid as to pass all the tests on day 1), and I ended up stationed there for a couple of weeks while they figured out where to send me next. I spent that two weeks just goofing off — and kicking myself for having been so stupid as to pass all those tests immediately!

Finally the system caught up to me, and the Navy packed me off to Mare Island, just outside of Vallejo, California. This is on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, and it was to be my home for the next couple of years. I like that area a lot, and I have very fond memories of the many trips I took to the surrounding sights.

I attended a series of classes at Mare Island, starting with basic digital logic and eventually working up to repair of computers and various peripherals (some of which were fairly exotic things, such as interfaces to sonar systems and radar systems). The courses were very much focused on the hardware, as back in those days the interval between failures was quite short — you really needed technicians to keep the equipment running.

While the training was focused on repair work, it included quite a bit of theory — you can’t repair something unless you understand how it works. These classes were, for the most part, almost trivially easy for me. This was because of a combination of several things: my relatively heavy electronics background (especially compared with my classmates), the relatively slow pace of the coursework (the lowest common denominator problem), and at least to some extent my own aptitude for it. But because the coursework was so easy for me, I had lots of time on my hands during school time — and my instructors were generally quite supportive of my doing “extra” things, so long as there was some conceivable connection to my Navy work.

I’ll pause here to mention another significant factor for my work at school — something that was a powerful motivator for me. On the first day in school, our new class was gathered and a chief (a relatively high-ranking enlisted guy) tried to scare the hell out of us. He succeeded admirably with me, but to my surprise he failed with most of my classmates. His message was real simple: half of us would likely flunk out of class, and those who flunked out would be sent to another school at Mare Island: the “swift boat” school. Swift boats, if you’re not familiar with them, are small, light, shallow-draft, and fast craft designed for patrol work on the rivers and coastal waterways. They are made of plywood; there is no armor. They are lightly armed; this varied, but generally was a .50 caliber machine gun and little else. They had small crews. And they had the highest casualty rate of any Navy unit — the Vietnam War was still going hot and heavy. There was a reason so many people were going to swift boat school — replacement crew member were always needed.

Yikes! I thought about the swift boats at least 100 times a day. Whenever my focus wavered or my energy level lagged, those thoughts would take care of the motivation problem. Amazingly (to me, anyway) this was demonstrably not true for most of my classmates. Even when their grades were putting them in danger, the typical response would be to go out for pizza and beer. And many washouts did go to swift boat school. Oh, man…

So I put in a lot of hours — to some extent, motivated by the threat of swift boats, to an increasing extent as time went by, motivated by my own interest. My first “extra” projects were hardware. It was just starting to be easy at that time for ordinary people to buy digital logic IC chips. I built all sorts of things, first from schematics, later from designs of my own. My most ambitious digital project was a “camera controller” — a gadget designed to let me take pictures of wildlife by setting up my camera on a tripod, and having the shutter triggered by the animal breaking light beams, making sound, or stepping on a trigger. I built a fancy little control box, full of lights and switches, that let me use any combination of these things I wanted to set off the camera. It could also take pictures at regular intervals, or take very long exposures (with a fancy integrating light meter to control it). I was very proud of that box, even if I was the only person who had any idea what it did. And it was my first really challenging digital electronic design.

But at some point, about a year into my school at Mare Island, we were taught the rudiments of programming. And I mean rudiments! Remember, their goal was not to make programmers out of us — it was to teach us how to repair digital equipment (in this case, a computer). But to repair a computer, we had to know just the tiniest smidgen of programming, at the machine code (lowest) level. This was the first class I found challenging — and I remember a period of a few weeks when I was wandering around with a bruised brain. I just wasn’t “getting” it. I knew that programming was the “secret sauce” that made computers actually useful, but I was having a lot of trouble understanding how that could be so. There was a very crisp event — in my brain — in the middle of one of these class sessions; this event was the proverbial light bulb going off, the big “AH HA!” moment. To any technical types reading this, the nature of that event might be quite amusing: it was when it dawned on me that computers executed machine code instructions one after the other, in sequential order unless there was a branch instruction. This is one of the key constructs of the “Von Neumann architecture” that all computers were (and still are) based on — but we weren’t taught that (it wasn’t necessary for repair work!).

That event, in context, was a key formative event in my life. From that one simple realization all sorts of derived notions spring quite naturally, and I was springing them like mad. And I wanted to program; I desperately wanted to program — this looked like a lot of fun to me (it was, and still is). But where could I get a computer to practice on? There were no Apples or IBMs back then; normal citizens couldn’t just walk out and buy a computer. The facility at Mare Island, however, was chock full of computers — and they were only being used during working hours on weekdays. With expectations of being shot down, I asked permission to have access during off hours — and the Navy floored me, because they granted me free access.

I went completely crazy on programming for the next year. There’s no other way to say it. I spent every possible waking hour (and I was young, so long evening hours were still possible!). The only programming language I knew was machine code (that’s all they bothered to teach us about, as that’s all you really need to know as a technician), so everything I did was in that language. I quickly grew tired of manually translating instructions into machine code, so I wrote a program to do it — I didn’t know it at the time, but I had re-invented something called an “assembler”. I called it a “translator", and it worked by reading files (on magnetic tape or paper tape) containing something that almost looks like English, and figuring out what machine code would represent that. I came up with the same basic idea of using “symbols” to represent variables or labels that modern assemblers use, but I worked it out on my own. That experience was invaluable, and formed a pattern for a lot of the programming I did over the next few years — I was simply unaware of the fact that other people had already explored this territory, so I just kept reinventing the concepts that they’d already invented. One way to look at that is that I wasted an awful lot of time “reinventing the wheel”. I choose to look at it another way: by reinventing the wheel, I learned an awful lot about how wheels work.

By the time I graduated from Mare Island’s schools, I was a reasonably competent programmer — albeit using strange, unconventional techniques and a self-invented assembler. The most ambitious program I wrote was a chess program that used all the computers in the lab, in a network (although we didn’t call it a network back then!). It wasn’t a very good chess player, but then neither was I and that wasn’t really the point — the point was that I had been able use the “secret sauce” to do something fairly abstract and complex. And I had a lot of fun doing it!

After school, I was stationed on the USS Long Beach (CGN-9), a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. It had three mainframes and one minicomputer in the NTDS system that I was assigned to, two more mainframes in the SPS-33 radar system, and a UYK-20 mainframe in the radio room (part of a secure satellite communications system). I did quite a bit of programming while station on the Long Beach. Some was job-related — for example, I successfully found and fixed some (very bad) bugs in the software that interfaced the SPS-33 radar with the NTDS system. These were hand-patched at the machine code level, if you can imagine that, as we had no compilers or linkers on the ship (not that I even knew, then, what those were!). Other things I did were recreational, and what I was quite well known for on the ship was a game I wrote. This game allowed multiple players on multiple “display consoles” (basically simple vector graphics displays) to fly simulated aircraft in a shoot 'em up contest. The simulated planes could fire cannons and missiles, and were as realistic as I could make them in terms of flight capabilities. Most of the people who worked on NTDS — officers and enlisted — spent many, many hours playing my game (called “BOINK"). And I learned a lot about programming while doing it.

Partway through my four years, I made friends with a fellow named Mike Blier — a chief electronics warfar technician. I’ve actually forgotten how we met, but I’ll never forget the next couple of years when we spent nearly every free moment working together on hobby computers. Mike bought one of the earliest kits (an IMSAI), and built it — but he had no idea how to make it do anything. Enter me — and of course I got hooked on this really quickly, and soon began building my own computers. I was astonished at the power of this little hobby computers — they were far more powerful than the “mainframe” computers I was repairing for the Navy! And I could buy one! Yee ha!

Mike and I spent countless hours with our computers, building, learning, experimenting. A long “WestPac” cruise with many weeks in the Indian Ocean helped provide many hours for us. So far from any source of parts, we had to make do with what we had — and all that improvisation was a real learning experience, too. Mike never really got into programming — that was my gig — but we both gained a lot of expertise about modern hardware.

Toward the end of my Navy career, I owned several computers of my own, and was spending a lot of time working on them. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got out of the Navy, but I knew for sure I wanted to work with microcomputers. But there weren’t any obvious job for someone with my skills — there really wasn’t much call for microcomputer technicians, and what need there was was being filled mainly by college students working for next-to-nothing. And I didn’t have the credentials (a degree) to be an engineer. Things were looking a bit shaky, career-wise, when Mike Blier showed me an ad in one of the magazines he was always reading. The ad was from Tarbell Electronics, a well-known name in the fledgling hobby computer industry. Don Tarbell, the owner, was looking for someone to write some software for him, on a contact basis — for something called a “Basic interpreter", intended to out-perform and compete with a product already on the market: Microsoft Basic.

Technical types will find this next bit quite amusing. I had absolutely no clue what a Basic interpreter was. I had no idea what any high level language was, or an interpreter, or a compiler. This is what happens when you don’t have any formal training — concepts that are well-understood by a first-year computer science student were completely missing from my brain. All I knew was that Don Tarbell was willing to pay someone to write some software, and he was asking for proposals. So, figuring I had nothing to lose, I wrote to him with my proposal.

Try to imagine what this must have looked like to Don Tarbell. He gets a letter in the mail — a hand-written letter, full of corrections, with a US Navy “from” address. In this poorly written letter is something that looks like a child’s idea of a proposal — but it does firmly say the following: that this nutcase would write him a Basic interpreter, to his specs (which I had not yet seen), in three months, for a fixed price of $2,000. To deliver a Basic interpreter, written from scratch by one guy, in just three months sounds completely absurd — six months or a year, maybe. But three months? No way! And to offer to pull off such a miracle for a mere $2,000? Crazy!

But to me, $2,000 for three months work was great pay — my Navy salary was just $333 a month. And since I had no idea what I was going to build, I just figured that I could build anything in three months. Don Tarbell wrote back and asked for a phone call; I called him and we talked for about an hour, and then he agreed to engage me. Years later he told me that he figured this was a no-lose proposition for him — the next lowest proposal he received was for (if I’m remembering correctly) $60,000 and 9 months, so if he blew $2,000 and 3 months on me, he hadn’t really put much at risk. I think most businessmen would have passed on my proposal, figuring the risk was just too high. Don Tarbell, for whatever reason, gave me a chance to do something that ended up starting my career in programming. I suspect he liked my spirit and confidence, and further liked the idea that his contract meant a lot to me.

This contract provoked an effort that when I look back on it myself has some elements of the grand epic…and not a little bit of Keystone Cops. When I got the signed contract in my hands, along with the specs for the Basic Interpreter I was to build, I didn’t even own a computer capable of being used for development: I needed a computer with 64K of RAM (the most you could get on a microcomputer back then), some kind of storage (I was still using cassette tapes and paper tape), and a printer. Nor did I own any of the development tools one would consider essential today: I had no editor, no assembler, no linker, and no debugger. And I had just three months to deliver.

To save time, I bought an economical computer kit from a fellow named Dr. Suding, who had a company in Colorado named Digital Group. I built the kit in a couple of days and got it all running. Nice stuff. I bought eight 8KB static memory boards and put them on an extension motherboard — and then had to build an enormous 5VDC power supply to power those things, and also jury-rig a whole bunch of ground to cure some ground noise problems I had. I bought a dot matrix printer from them as well — but it came without software, so I had to write a driver for it. I bought a floppy disk controller board (from Don Tarbell!), and a Persci dual voice-coil positioning 8” double-sided, double-density floppy drive — the Cadillac of floppy drives! It took me a total of about two weeks to get all that stuff in my hands, build it, write the drivers, and make it all work. That was two weeks of very, very long hours, but I didn’t mind at all, as I was having a ball!

When I finished with that, I had a 4MHz Z80 development system, with 64K of RAM, a monitor, a keyboard, and a printer. The operating system was CP/M. Now I needed development tools, and I needed them badly. There was a “tiny” development system running around in source code form; this included a simple monitor with a line-oriented editor, an assembler/linker (all code had to be in a single module), and a debugger. The latter was a brand new concept to me; that’s one idea I never came up with on my own. Anyway, I can’t remember the name of this stuff, but I got my hands on the source code and studied it for a day or so to see how all this stuff worked. Then I had a bunch of ideas for how to make it better. For starters, I wanted to edit directly on the screen (the way we do today, but back then such a thing was a new concept). I absolutely had to have multiple modules, as this program was going to be large. And I had all kinds of ideas for the debugger, especially for “smart” breakpoints and register dumping.

So I spent the next three weeks building development tools. The first thing I wrote was an assembler whose input was Zilog Z80 mnemonics and whose output was a linkable, relocatable code format that I invented (once again, because I didn’t known that others had already done this). Then I wrote a linker to take multiple modules of assembler output and create an object code image from them. Then I wrote an on-screen editor; primitive by today’s standards but compared with the line-oriented editors normally used it was wonderful! The most challenging feature of that editor was that it could handle files larger than would fit in memory; that was essential for the kinds of source code files I’d be working with. Then I wrote a debugger — a very nice debugger, with features I’d never heard of anywhere else, such as conditional breakpoints. I had a lot of fun using the debugger to debug itself!

About 5 weeks into my 13 week contract, I was finally ready to actually start developing the Basic Interpreter. My starting point was to learn Basic, as I’d never seen a high level language before. Compared with assembly language, the syntax of Basic is almost trivially easy — but very powerful. Once I figured out what an “interpreter” was, the majority of the Basic language was really straightforward. I could easily imagine how to build my interpreter for those parts. But two parts of the language looked considerably more challenging: evaluating arithmetic expressions, and the whole notion of floating point math (and all the associated operators and functions).

Eager to make some progress, I decided to leave the hard stuff to the end, and I started writing code. Note that I completely left out the usual design phase of the project: — I just sat down and started coding. This is as though you hired someone to build you a house, and they just picked up their tools and started sawing and hammering, not bothering with anything so irksome as a plan!

For a project this large, and especially for something I’d never built before (an interpreter), this was borderline crazy. But that’s what I did…

In about a month (working, I think, 18 or so hours a day on average) I had everything running except the hard stuff. A real, live Basic interpreter — buggy, some parts were very slow, some parts of the spec I was ignoring, but it was working. This was already a very satisfying achievement for me. But now to the hard stuff…

I had worked in the Navy on something called a CORDIC MATHPAK — basically a collection of subroutines that implemented floating point math, with all the usual operators and functions. I understood that stuff fairly well, and it served as a model for me on my interpreter. But…the Navy work was predicated on a mainframe computer that had add, subtract, multiply, and divide as basic instructions that the computer could do by itself — and a Z80 (the target processor for the interpreter) was missing the last two. I wrote multiply and divide functions and optimized the heck out of them (I remember that my divide function was a couple of clock cycles faster than any I’d seen published), mainly by unrolling loops. But still the CORDIC algorithms would be very slow using these multiply and divide functions. So I looked for something that would be faster, and somehow happened on a little book called “Hastings Approximations”. This volume contained a whole bunch of polynomials that allowed very fast evaluation of approximately correct transcendental functions (logs, sines, etc.), to know accuracies — and there were approximations listed for all the functions I needed, with more accuracy than I needed. These approximations were my salvation: I used them to build all the transcendental functions in my interpreter, and the result was substantially faster than the spec.

The last remaining hurdle was expression evaluation, along with a new one that popped up and turned out to be very challenging: formatted numeric printing. Expression evaluation is one of those things that any computer science student is exposed to very early, and it’s one of those things that’s been well-studied. There is a lot of literature on this subject. Naturally, I was blissfully ignorant of this, so I just invented my own way. The approach I took wasn’t a bad one, either: I converted a conventional expression into reverse-Polish form, and then evaluated it using a stack. I got this idea from seeing how HP calculators worked; it made sense to me. Printing a formatted number really is a challenging problem, but more because it’s a big, messy sort of job than any real algorthmic challenge. I remember this piece of code was a terrific challenge to debug, because there were so many tests that had to be made in order to exercise every branch of the code.

I completed the last functional piece of the interpreter about a week before I was due to deliver it. I thought that was a luxurious schedule, for now I had an entire week to polish the thing up. And I did — I spent the whole week testing and benchmarking, fixing bugs and optimizing. By the delivery day, it was looking pretty darned good.

A couple of days before delivery day, I called Don Tarbell to arrange my trip up to see him (I was in San Diego; he was in Carson, about 120 miles away). I remember being very surprised by his reaction when I told him I was ready to deliver — he was absolutely astonished! He asked me over and over again if I was sure I was ready; he said he’d rather I be a little late than to deliver something that wasn’t really ready. I assured him I was ready, and we set a date and time.

It was a very exciting drive for me up to his place. The whole time I was anticipating the fun of showing him the product — but there was also a little fear, that Don Tarbell might not be happy with what he got, for some reason. I was also looking forward to collecting that check — I was in real need of the money! When I arrived, bearing floppies with the source and object code, Don was ready with a system to test it on. We spent the next couple of hours with him just sitting at the keyboard, trying one thing after another, and every last thing he tried worked perfectly. After the first couple of tests, he had a smile; after about five he had a big grin. In a half hour or so, he was very excited and loudly happy. That was so much fun! And it’s still the part I like the best about being an engineer — having a happy customer when you deliver.

Don wrote me a check on the spot, gave me a tour of his shop (including the TTL logic computer he’d built from scratch), and sent me home with a couple of boards as a gift. Over the next few months we worked together a lot, with him contracting for both bug fixes and enhancements — and insisting on paying me going rates for that work. I made a lot more money on the followup work than I did on the original contract.

And that was my introduction to a career in software engineering…