Quem Ad Finem

Running Hot and Cold

2011-06-21T14:42:00.000-04:00

Here's a little something from the "All I Know Is..." Department.

Current political correctness, aided by former vice-president Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, would have us believe that industrialization is leading to a potentially disasterous climate change.

At the same time many voices are offering a counter-argument that the opposite is occurring, citing examples like the Maunder Minimum.

The picture above is of Big Knockemdown Key, one of the uninhabited Florida Keys. In the background is a stand of pine trees. During the last period of glaciation, which ended about 10,000 years ago, the sea level was substantially lower. What is now Florida Bay was a pine forest. As the sea intruded the area covered with pines became smaller and smaller. Although this species is tolerant of salt air, they will not grow in salt water. Their range was gradually limited to the mainland or to the few offshore islands that had a small freshwater aquifer.

According to botanists the pines pictured above are the descendants of remnants of the original post-glacial pine forest. The pines on each island are autochthonous--descendants of the original pines that were growing on site (as opposed to pines developed from seeds spread by birds or by the wind). Thus they or their descendants had been growing in place for at least 10,000 years.

After Hurricane Wilma passed through the Keys in 2005, the pines all died. So for 10,000 years they had survived countless storms and hurricanes, all of which leads to the strong conclusion that in recent years the sea level has increased slightly, enough to inundate the island during a high-water incident like Wilma to the point that they were killed by salt intrusion.

So I don't really know if we are in a warming phase of a greater overall cooling phase, or if human-generated warming is counteracting a strong overall sun-related cooling phase, or any combination of the above.

All I really know is that now the pines are dead. And they weren't before Wilma in 2005. They had been there for over 10,000 years.

Will Someone Tell Us--About the Marcellus???

2011-06-01T14:53:00.001-04:00

The price of gasoline has gone up again, not so high as it was three years ago in 2008, but high enough that families are feeling the pinch, and more specifically enough so that energy companies are exploring alternative sources of fuel.

One of the potential sources is the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation that stretches from New York State down through West Virginia. The Marcellus (named after a town in western New York where the "type section" was identified) was laid down in the Devonian era, 350 million years ago.

It is a black shale deposited in deep water when North America was splitting off from a supercontinent to the east. Decomposing plant and animal life was eventually converted to "natural gas," mostly methane, trapped within its layers.

In order to extract the gas in marketable quantities energy companies use a process called fracturing, or "fracking." Certain fluids and a type of sand are pumped into drilled shafts to fracture the rock, and find their way into every nook and cranny. When the fluid is extracted, the crevices remain, help open by the sand that is introduced. Then the gas can be pumped up the surface in marketable quantities.

(Above: section of the Marcellus Shale--darker layers in upper right)

But here's the rub: the companies who are drilling for gas in the Marcellus and other formations like it are hush-hush about the fluid used in fracking. After all, they are independent companies in competition with each other, and their trade secrets are proprietary information.

There is mounting evidence, however, not just from environmental bureaucrats but from landowners whose well water has been affected, that fracking fluid is contaminating local aquifers. Worse yet, it seems that in some cases the fluid contains benzene, a known carcinogen.

(Formula for benzene C6H6. Each carbon shares two hydrogens with the one adjacent to it, in a conformation known as a "benzene ring.")

Major urban centers like New York City and Philadelphia draw their water supplies from areas underlain by the Marcellus Shale. The potential problem is so great that even the state of Texas is now considering legislation requiring energy companies to reveal the nature of the fracking liquids they are using.

There is no doubt that the Marcellus contains enough untapped energy to alleviate greatly the country's dependence on foreign oil in future years. But it is also essential to maintain and safeguard a viable source of fresh, potable water for an expanding urban population.

Even a small amount of organic hydrocarbons (like benzene) can pollute an aquifer more or less permanently. Just ask anyone who has (or had) a well anywhere near a gas station with a ruptured or abandoned underground fuel tank. It's there, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you had better not drink too much of it.

Regardless of what kind of public relations "spin" energy companies put on the situation, good water is a basic necessity of human life, moreso than cheap, or even moderately cheap energy. Poisoning the aquifers is not an acceptable price. In the meantime the world awaits that clever engineer who will find a way to frack shale using a non-toxic method, and will surely beat a path to his door.

Annual Hurricane Prognostication

2011-06-01T13:31:00.001-04:00

Once again, at the start of hurricane season this year, we have contacted our amateur hurricane prognosticator Typhoon O'Connor, who otherwise declines to be depicted or identified, for his annual report on water temperatures, thickness of caterpillars' fuzz, directions of land tortises crossing the road (what few of them are left), and other obscure imponderables known only to old Florida hands.

“This is another a them La Niña years,” he says. “This year th’ hexperts is downgradin' th' number of storm we'll have, but sayin' to look out--there'll be at least one big one to make land. To me that's like saying they'll have their cake an' eat it, too. Which is it?

"But that's how it is with all them buroocrats--they gotta have it both ways. So I'll stick with the amatoors again. Shoor we're in th' middle of a drought, an' no rain means the water ain't been cooled off like it should be. But them as have dipped their dainties in the offshore waters say that ain't so---the water's actually cooler this year.

"So I say, cool yer jets. Don't get all hot an' bothered about what's gonna happen. I predict another light year with a couple of scares maybe, but we're gonna luck out.

"Cut your coconuts, lay in some tinned meat and bottle water, pay up yer insurance if ya got it, but don't give yerself a case of agita."

I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea...

2011-05-31T15:19:00.002-04:00

The door of the examining room opens, and the young doctor walks in, carrying an open laptop computer. He mumbles an apology for the delay, saying he wanted to take some time to review my records. On the computer.

He is a nice young man, with a young family, a local boy made good. This isn't really his practice, though. It's actually owned by a business which runs several clinics, and he works for them.

He continues to look at his laptop computer, as he reviews the results of my latest routine tests. "Uh-huh, uh-huh," he mutters to himself, in a standard physician-like manner.

Finally he looks up from the computer and asks me, "Now, if you come here, because you are having a heart attack, do you want us to revive you?

"I beg your pardon," I wasn't sure that I understood him. Why would he be asking something like that?

"Well, you know. Would you want us to shock you with an electric defribillator?"

"Paddles?" I ask. "Hell, yes! Why would anybody say no to that?"

"Well, some people, say they're 75 or older, take into consideration the quality of life after defribillation, and specify 'no resuscitation.'"

I will apply dietic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice. --Oath of Hippocrates

"Then this is something you need to ask me again when I'm 75." I'm reasonable healthy, and nowhere near 75. Clickety-click, he enters some unseen information into his laptop computer. The "examination" is now over.

Then my famous paranoia kicks in. In the first place I don't like the idea of having all my health records online and in someone's computer. I know that those records are available to everyone in that office.

What I may see or hear in the course of treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about. --Oath of Hippocrates

And realistically they are also available to every enterprising snoop who wants to see them, be it the town gossip, a potential employer, or an insurance company.

And in the second place, how many people are being asked about this "no resuscitation" notation? Is this part of the current administration's initiative to get everyone's medical records online in order to economize on paperwork?

And with the obvious need to cut costs in Medicare and Medicaid is this part of another initiative to reduce expenses once an individual reaches a certain age? And what is that age--40, 50, 60?

So what can or should we do about it? If you are 40 or over, the best thing to do is to start eating and exercising sensibly, to get and stay with the best doctor you can find and plan on having enough money to pay him (or her). We seem to have turned our health system over to for-profit businesses.

Chances are that "your" physician is making decisions about your health based not on his inner intuition and experience, but on dictates and guidelines handed down to him by a faceless bean-counter in a faraway office.

Americans may yet find a way out of our current medical morass, but by all indications things are going to get much, much, worse before they get better. When I get these kinds of paranoid feelings I have never been wrong, never, not even once.

Rick Scott and the Gordian Knot

2011-04-04T09:37:00.002-04:00

Key West, like the rest of Florida and most of the US, is faced with a large number of mortgage foreclosures and unsold properties due to the bursting of the real estate bubble and related problems.

So the legislature of that state of fun and sun has come up with a unique solution: override any and all local zoning laws regulating use of residential properties as transient rental units.

This bill will allow investors to turn previous residential properties into mini hotels, and presumably will correct Florida's glut of unsold and foreclosed units.

Before you jump on the property rights bandwagon, consider that Key
West is an island roughly one by four miles, located over a hundred miles from the mainland, that they need adequate housing for middle and working class families, and that a great percentage of their housing stock is already designated for transient use.

UPDATE: 'House bill 883 - dealing with transient rental regulations - was amended in the House Economic Affairs Committee to specifically grandfather in all local ordinances and regulations adopted prior to June 1, 2011. After being amended, the committee approved the bill on a 7-3 vote.'
This action, if reported correctly, will take the pressure off local communities for a while, but make no mistake: there is so much short-range money to be made here, that this bill will come back in another form.

Herewith some of the commentary from locals on the impending changes:

A bill that's winding its way through the state Legislature would end Florida Keys governments' authority to regulate transient rentals, allowing property owners to rent their homes by the day, week,...

Talk with the people that will be adversely affected by this ruling. The ones now renting the small apartments in town and barely making enough to get by, but love Key West too much to leave. We're talking Conchs and non-Conchs. The ones doing the $10-$15 an hour jobs. They're worried about their "homes" being turned into transient rentals and they'll be forced to leave. Some people will say who cares about them, or if they need more money get a better job, or maybe why don't they start their own business. They're in the economic situation that best suits them at this time in their lives and don't have all those options. Folks when these people leave if you thought the service in this town was bad before, you ain't seen nothin yet.

Congratulations Floridians! Another helpful bill from the GOP and Rick "I take the fifth" Scott. Another step toward the destruction of any middle class in Monroe County. These people claim they want Government out of our lives and stand for local rule, but they are passing a law that will prevent local communities from doing what they want in terms of zoning and regulation. Surely our State Capital knows what is best for the people living in Monroe County. If Obama's administration had passed this at the Federal Level, people would be screaming for States Rights and against Mandates. I guess it is OK to stick Government into my life when it is Scott and his band of merry thieves writing the laws. The only people who think this would be good are speculators and people who own multiple homes. They bought these homes fully aware of the rules, but that will not stop them from babbling about property rights. No one wants to live next to a transient rental home. No one.

One day, two days, one week, two weeks and no transient license required? Hmmm....who is going to regulate the occupancy taxes? Or the required rental agreements. We just had a spring breaker DIE in a rental property. I wonder just how many kids were renting that unit and if any were of legal drinking age. Word on the street says there is more to that story. I can see the lawyers like vultures waiting for their next prey if this bill passes. I also smell lawsuits - how many more injured or dead tourists does Key West want? Do you want to live in the neighborhood where every day different people come and go as they want, partying all hours of the day, wrecking your property values in the process? Say hello Key West to more crime and problems than you can imagine!

The realtors will be happy about this, but the quality of life in the Keys; such as it is, will be even lower. It will be a rental free for all. No wonder the Keys is losing population. You'll be living next to a place being rented out by the latest Keys real estate genius who thinks he'll be a millionaire because he bought a house here.

We must be proactive and be sure Saunders and other
representatives KNOW that this must be stopped. It will really ruin our neighborhoods and will take away rentals from local workers. It will harm the legitimate, legal lodging facilities. And it will take away from the tax base. This is a losing proposition at every angle.

Sounds like another of Slick Ricks favors for his business supporters. take away a good regulation that helps the neighborhoods live in piece and quiet for some greedy MF to make a quick buck. If this does pass then the neighbors will have to be vigilant about calling the police when there is too much noise and making sure the laws regarding noise are enforced. One thing one might also consider if this bill passes and someone ends ups with people renting next to their home and causing loss of piece and quiet after hours is to get some speakers and place outside or in your windows and blare some very loud music starting at about 8am when those partiers are trying to sleep during the day. Rick Scott is going to destroy our state and make it so only the very wealthy have a say in the way things are.

I don't like short term transient rentals; I live next to one and the noise, arg. It is annoying to the residents who live here year round ( now it is quiet; thank god spring breakers are gone-college kids). Residential neighborhoods are quiet and peaceful, we don't want some rowdy people move in for a couple of days or a week and disrupt everything by partying all hours of the night and have no consideration for others. I would not want to end Florida Keys governments' authority to regulate transient rentals, allowing property owners to rent homes, condos town houses for the day or two or a week. JUST SAY NO! to the bill that would allow this.

Those of us who are paying our own way and purchased property with the expectation of living in a residential neighborhood have no sympathy for the ones whining about how they need to destroy our neighborhoods so that they can make a buck. And, obviously, if they intend to rent their property short term, they will not even be around to share the hardship this would create.

Just wondering if any of you people who support this have ever lived next door to a transient rental home and had your kids waken up almost every night by people partying from morning to night. My guess is of course not. Property Right always seem to end when the advocate is impacted. How about if I put a pig farm next door to your house? It might help if you take some time to think about your neighbors and those of us trying to raise families in this town. Wanting your kids to be able to sleep does not make you a "gotminer!". I hope Karma visits on those of you who are nasty and you end up with your neighbor illegally renting. Lets see how fast you change your tune.

Modern day Libertarians, Teabaggers, and just plain conservatives tend to forget that zoning was originally a middle-class intitiative, aimed at protecting neighborhood values. There is a place for hotel type units, just as there is a place for machine shops and pig farms. On a one by four mile island strict zoning makes sense. This "cure" is very likely to kill the patient.

George Friedman: What Happened to the American Declaration of War?

2011-03-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

I have never reblogged outside material, but I thought that Friedman's article made eminent sense.

"This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR"

In my book “The Next Decade,” I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic.
World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war. The wars fought since have had congressional approval, both in the sense that resolutions were passed and that Congress appropriated funds, but the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think. The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress. Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him. Not only does it make his position as commander in chief unassailable by authorizing military action, it creates shared responsibility for war. A declaration of war informs the public of the burdens they will have to bear by leaving no doubt that Congress has decided on a new order — war — with how each member of Congress voted made known to the public.
Almost all Americans have heard Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan … I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, Dec. 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
It was a moment of majesty and sobriety, and with Congress’ affirmation, represented the unquestioned will of the republic. There was no going back, and there was no question that the burden would be borne. True, the Japanese had attacked the United States, making getting the declaration easier. But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
Forgoing the Declaration
It is odd, therefore, that presidents who need that authorization badly should forgo pursuing it. Not doing so has led to seriously failed presidencies: Harry Truman in Korea, unable to seek another term; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, also unable to seek a new term; George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, completing his terms but enormously unpopular. There was more to this than undeclared wars, but that the legitimacy of each war was questioned and became a contentious political issue certainly is rooted in the failure to follow constitutional pathways.
In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman took recourse to the new U.N. Security Council. He wanted international sanction for the war and was able to get it because the Soviet representatives happened to be boycotting the Security Council over other issues at the time.
Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways. First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter. Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered. Whether Congress’ authorization to join the United Nations both obligated the United States to wage war at U.N. behest, obviating the need for declarations of war because Congress had already authorized police actions, is an interesting question. Whatever the answer, Truman set a precedent that wars could be waged without congressional declarations of war and that other actions — from treaties to resolutions to budgetary authorizations — mooted declarations of war.
If this was the founding precedent, the deepest argument for the irrelevancy of the declaration of war is to be found in nuclear weapons. Starting in the 1950s, paralleling the Korean War, was the increasing risk of nuclear war. It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties. In that sense, it was argued fairly persuasively that the Constitution had become irrelevant to the military realities facing the republic.
Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general. If that was so, then constitutional procedures that could not be applied to nuclear war were simply no longer relevant.
Paradoxically, if nuclear warfare represented the highest level of warfare, there developed at the lowest level covert operations. Apart from the nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, there was an intense covert war, from back alleys in Europe to the Congo, Indochina to Latin America. Indeed, it was waged everywhere precisely because the threat of nuclear war was so terrible: Covert warfare became a prudent alternative. All of these operations had to be deniable. An attempt to assassinate a Soviet agent or raise a secret army to face a Soviet secret army could not be validated with a declaration of war. The Cold War was a series of interconnected but discrete operations, fought with secret forces whose very principle was deniability. How could declarations of war be expected in operations so small in size that had to be kept secret from Congress anyway?
There was then the need to support allies, particularly in sending advisers to train their armies. These advisers were not there to engage in combat but to advise those who did. In many cases, this became an artificial distinction: The advisers accompanied their students on missions, and some died. But this was not war in any conventional sense of the term. And therefore, the declaration of war didn’t apply.
By the time Vietnam came up, the transition from military assistance to advisers to advisers in combat to U.S. forces at war was so subtle that there was no moment to which you could point that said that we were now in a state of war where previously we weren’t. Rather than ask for a declaration of war, Johnson used an incident in the Tonkin Gulf to get a congressional resolution that he interpreted as being the equivalent of war. The problem here was that it was not clear that had he asked for a formal declaration of war he would have gotten one. Johnson didn’t take that chance.
What Johnson did was use Cold War precedents, from the Korean War, to nuclear warfare, to covert operations to the subtle distinctions of contemporary warfare in order to wage a substantial and extended war based on the Tonkin Gulf resolution — which Congress clearly didn’t see as a declaration of war — instead of asking for a formal declaration. And this represented the breakpoint. In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
After the war, Congress created the War Powers Act in recognition that wars might commence before congressional approval could be given. However, rather than returning to the constitutional method of the Declaration of War, which can be given after the commencement of war if necessary (consider World War II) Congress chose to bypass declarations of war in favor of resolutions allowing wars. Their reason was the same as the president’s: It was politically safer to authorize a war already under way than to invoke declarations of war.
All of this arose within the assertion that the president’s powers as commander in chief authorized him to engage in warfare without a congressional declaration of war, an idea that came in full force in the context of nuclear war and then was extended to the broader idea that all wars were at the discretion of the president. From my simple reading, the Constitution is fairly clear on the subject: Congress is given the power to declare war. At that moment, the president as commander in chief is free to prosecute the war as he thinks best. But constitutional law and the language of the Constitution seem to have diverged. It is a complex field of study, obviously.
An Increasing Tempo of Operations
All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
It is said that there is no precedent for fighting al Qaeda, for example, because it is not a nation but a subnational group. Therefore, Bush could not reasonably have been expected to ask for a declaration of war. But there is precedent: Thomas Jefferson asked for and received a declaration of war against the Barbary pirates. This authorized Jefferson to wage war against a subnational group of pirates as if they were a nation.
Had Bush requested a declaration of war on al Qaeda on Sept. 12, 2001, I suspect it would have been granted overwhelmingly, and the public would have understood that the United States was now at war for as long as the president thought wise. The president would have been free to carry out operations as he saw fit. Roosevelt did not have to ask for special permission to invade Guadalcanal, send troops to India, or invade North Africa. In the course of fighting Japan, Germany and Italy, it was understood that he was free to wage war as he thought fit. In the same sense, a declaration of war on Sept. 12 would have freed him to fight al Qaeda wherever they were or to move to block them wherever the president saw fit.
Leaving aside the military wisdom of Afghanistan or Iraq, the legal and moral foundations would have been clear — so long as the president as commander in chief saw an action as needed to defeat al Qaeda, it could be taken. Similarly, as commander in chief, Roosevelt usurped constitutional rights for citizens in many ways, from censorship to internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Prisoners of war not adhering to the Geneva Conventions were shot by military tribunal — or without. In a state of war, different laws and expectations exist than during peace. Many of the arguments against Bush-era intrusions on privacy also could have been made against Roosevelt. But Roosevelt had a declaration of war and full authority as commander in chief during war. Bush did not. He worked in twilight between war and peace.
One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done. The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
The Importance of the Declaration
A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things. First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously. Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens. Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war. And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided. When we look at some of our wars after World War II it is not clear they had to be fought in the national interest, nor is it clear that the presidents would not have been better remembered if they had been restrained. A declaration of war both frees and restrains the president, as it was meant to do.
I began by talking about the American empire. I won’t make the argument on that here, but simply assert it. What is most important is that the republic not be overwhelmed in the course of pursuing imperial goals. The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
There are enormous complexities here. Nuclear war has not been abolished. The United States has treaty obligations to the United Nations and other countries. Covert operations are essential, as is military assistance, both of which can lead to war. I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
My readers will know that I am far from squeamish about war. I have questions about Libya, for example, but I am open to the idea that it is a low-cost, politically appropriate measure. But I am not open to the possibility that quickly after the commencement of hostilities the president need not receive authority to wage war from Congress. And I am arguing that neither the Congress nor the president have the authority to substitute resolutions for declarations of war. Nor should either want to. Politically, this has too often led to disaster for presidents. Morally, committing the lives of citizens to waging war requires meticulous attention to the law and proprieties.
As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that. It also prevents a president from acting as king by default. Above all, it prevents the public from pretending to be victims when their leaders take them to war. The possibility of war will concentrate the mind of a distracted public like nothing else. It turns voting into a life-or-death matter, a tonic for our adolescent body politic.

The Deal of the Day

2011-02-21T11:55:00.000-05:00

Old Bill was a fine fellow, a man about town, caller of the weekly bingo games down at the DAV hall, and a sometime general factotum at the construction company, where I worked back in the day.

Not that he had to work—he was well set after twenty years working for a municipality back up in Ohio, first as a policeman, then as a fireman. “Was you on the force?” he asked enthusiastically. No, I was actually working there for a living, not as a sideline and for pin money as he was.

He came out of Ohio, he said, with full insurance coverage—medical, optical, dental for himself and his family presumably in perpetuity. His generous pension was twice what the average worker in our town was making. In today’s money it would easily be in six figures. He had no trouble keeping his large house up, his two cars on the road, a nice boat in the water, and at least one of his kids college tuition paid.

Sure, Bill had paid his dues, and had every right to cash in on the American dream. I didn’t begrudge him any of it, and to be fair, his attitude was “doesn’t everyone get this deal?”

I’d been around long enough to realize that no, not everyone gets this deal. In fact, if everyone got this kind of deal, it might be nice, but there is no way that our economy can sustain such a thing.

So now, years later, states and municipalities are beginning to realize that a giveaway to what is essentially a select few cannot be sustained—witness the goings on in Wisconsin. A number of local governments, like one with which I am familiar in Florida, saw the ultimate impossibility of paying retired employees full medical benefits for life, and quietly withdrew the “privilege” from new hires, so that new wage slaves would not be getting the same deal as their co-workers sitting a few feet away.

I imagine we will be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, as local taxpayers realize that, essentially, they have been had.

Don't Tax You, Don't Tax Me, Tax That Man Behind That Tree

2010-12-23T12:23:00.002-05:00

Much is the chatter this week about "net neutrality rules. "I see the issue framed not in the argument of government vs. corporate control, but in the age-old dichotomy between authoritarian and democratic ways of thinking.
There is always somebody (sometimes a frightening large number of somebodies) that thinks that everything should be controlled "from the top."

At the same time a few of the more perceptive "talking heads" are warning about unfunded mandates (like pension obligations) precipitating a crisis in state and local governments in the near future. So it is only a natural progression of things to say, "Let's just tax the Internet." A twofold benefit would result. (As our founding fathers knew, "The power to tax is the power to destroy.") Taxing the Internet would allow the government to control content, in a beneficent way to be sure. And at the same time, the tax could yield a great deal of much-needed revenue!

Far-fetched? Some time ago I made the mistake of going to work for a "taxing agency." Someone (with a degree of authority, too much perhaps) came up with the idea of taxing websites. They wanted us to comb the Internet for local businesses advertising on line, and devise a scheme to quantify their websites and assess a tax accordingly.

I maintained strongly that a website is not a tangible "thing," but something that can be created or deleted with the few strokes of a mouse, and therefore outside of the reach of the local taxing authorities. And in any event a website can be construed a free speech, thus protected, etc.

Needless to say with that argument I sealed my own fate as not being a "team player."

But if anyone thinks there aren't people (on the taxpayer's payroll) planning ways to tax (and therefore control) the Internet, that's OK. Maybe you'd be interested in this bridge we have for sale . . .

Cowed by the Nurses

2010-12-13T00:13:00.002-05:00

Now the inpatients are easy, they’re cowed by the nurses
[In your case the angels] and they know what’s what in the set-up.

It caught my eye, this thing about angels in that poem. Sure, some of them are angels, or the earthly equivalent thereof, maybe even most of them. But I don’t know. At one time I was thoroughly convinced that at least two of them were trying to kill me.

Ten years ago, around Christmas time, despite a few premonitory symptoms I overindulged myself on a huge amount of food, including a half-dozen homemade Mexican burritos, a half-gallon of bourbon and eggnog, and at least six “Manhattans.”
Waking up in the night knowing something was wrong, I stubbornly spent two days sipping ginger ale and slowly slipping into a delirium, saying, “I ain’t going to no hospital,” making it inevitable that I ended up at the local, small, close-by hospital, where the only guy who could operate the CAT scan was off for the holidays, and even if he were still in town and could be located, he would most likely be too drunk to be of any use.

Ere long I woke up with stitches from sternum to pubis, and tubes coming out of various locations. I was still, thank God, alive, but severely indisposed. The surgeon had convinced himself of the presence of a “mass,” and had pulled just about everything out for an exploratory look. The intestinal blockage or kink relieved itself as soon as he got me “open,” but he performed a resection anyway.

The operating theater of that hospital didn’t have a reputation for being totally antiseptic, a situation they circumvented by giving the patients what might be considered to be extremely high doses of antibiotics as a precaution. They also had me on a morphine drip. The surgeon left for a week’s vacation in Miami.

For a day or two I actually felt OK. The morphine took care of any great pain I might have been having. Someone brought me a book to read: Robert Graves’s I Claudius. I started reading it, and got to the part where Caligula is secretly poisoning Germanicus, when I started to notice that my skin was starting to look yellowish. Then one nurse I called “Roundface,” sort of a Kathy Bates from Misery clone, only fatter, came in the room while I was sipping a small cup of water. “What’s this?” she said, and dashed it out of my hand. WTF? She came back a few minutes later and taped a piece of paper to the door with the letters NPO on it. They had been taking blood samples every few hours, and without telling me anything had determined that I now had pancreatitis. No more food or liquids until it cleared up. NPO stands for nihil per orem, nothing by mouth. Of course Roundface couldn’t be bothered to explain any of this. She just stared at me like I was a dog about to be kicked. In the meantime I was getting sicker and sicker. She’d occasionally burst in and find fault with something I was doing. Another nurse named Karen arrived about the same time. They both acted like my being there was my own fault, and although I couldn’t even get up by myself, they acted like I was some kind of a threat.

Because of the goings-on in the book—Romans poisoning and killing each other-- and the fact that I was partially delirious, I became convinced that Roundface and Karen were going to kill me. The local newspaper provided free copies to the hospital, and every day that I was there someone my own age appeared in the obituary columns. More than likely they died at the same hospital and on the same floor!

Around New Year’s Karen came into the room in a particularly foul mood, and started slamming things around. Her breath reeked of liquor. She announced it was time to take out my nasogastric tube, and that she would be back at the end of her shift to do just that. The damn thing had been in there for days, and it had rubbed the inside of my nose raw. I couldn’t wait to get it out. I was sure she was going to inflict the maximum amount of pain possible by the way she talked about it.

I tentatively pulled at it to see what would happen. Sure it hurt a little, but it seemed like it would be such a relief to get rid of it that I went ahead and pulled the whole thing out. I put it in an empty paper bag I had and put it under the bed. It felt so good to get rid of it, that I had a smile on my face when Karen came back in the room. “What are you smiling about?” she asked. “What’s so damn funny?” My suspicions were beginning to be confirmed. I didn’t say anything. She busied herself putting on rubber gloves, and then she noticed. “Where’s the tube?”

I smiled and pointed to the paper bag. “It’s down there.”

“What? You took it out yourself? You can’t do that!” She was furious. My suspicions were justified. She’d been robbed of a perfect opportunity to hurt me, and she was furious. “You won’t get away with this! I’m telling the doctor!” She stormed out.

Fortunately that was the last I saw of Karen. Roundface still came around, usually to ask embarrassing questions when I had someone visiting me. “Have you had a bowel movement? What color was it?”

Eventually the pancreatitis cleared up and they let me go home. I went without food for two weeks, and lost a lot of weight. Yes, you might chalk my paranoia up to the shock of the operation, the subsequent sickness, and the effects of the morphine. But I don’t know. They sure acted like they wanted to do me in.

The Damp November of the Soul

2010-11-26T22:28:00.005-05:00

Was it my imagination? Ever since the time changed earlier this month I’d been feeling sort of blah---no energy, wanting to take a nap in the afternoon, difficulty focusing on work and projects, craving for sweets, putting on a lot of weight, no desire to go out and deal with other people---“social withdrawal.”

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

--Melville in Moby Dick

OMG, these are classic symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a form of depression that occurs in relation to the seasons, most commonly beginning in winter!

SAD was first systematically reported and named in the early 1980s by Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D., and his associates at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Rosenthal was initially motivated by his desire to discover the cause of his own experience of depression during the dark days of the northern US winter. He theorized that the lesser amount of light in winter was the cause. Rosenthal and his colleagues then documented the phenomenon of SAD in a placebo-controlled study utilizing light therapy. A paper based on this research was published in 1984. Although Rosenthal's ideas were initially greeted with skepticism, SAD has become well recognized, and his 1993 book, Winter Blues has become the standard introduction to the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

It’s hard to believe that the amount of ambient light reaching your retinas during daylight hours would have such an effect on your mood, but it does. Think about the number of animals that go into hibernation or “winter sleep.” Who is to say that a residual effect of this impulse doesn’t occur in modern humans?

Although they say it doesn’t affect everyone, Subsyndromal Seasonal Affective Disorder, a milder form of SAD, is experienced by an estimated 14.3% (vs. 6.1% SAD) of the U.S. population. The disorder may begin in adolescence or early adulthood. I remember my first twinges of it at that age, just before moving to Florida (from Vermont).

It’s said that the blue feeling experienced by SAD sufferers can usually be dampened or extinguished by exercise and increased outdoor activity, particularly on sunny days, resulting in increased solar exposure. Certainly Florida living with its warm weather and outdoors lifestyle cuts down of the endocrine, hormonal (or whatever) effects causing Seasonal Affective Disorder. But I’ve known people even there who were “victims” of this malady.

Now that we are living in North Carolina, it’s come back. As soon as I realized what might be happening, I started spending more time outside in the sunlight during the morning. Yes, it does seem to be working.

In some northern areas people use a light box. It seems a little ridiculous to picture someone eating their breakfast next to an array of 100 watt light bulbs, but they say it works. And for those who suffer from this syndrome, it enables them to ward off depression.

There was a businessman from Connecticut, who may or may not have been a SAD sufferer, but when he became successful, he built an indoor pool with banks of sunlamps and tropical foliage. There he drank his morning coffee, before the sun even came up. I really think he had the right idea.

Oh, It Counts, All Right . . . .

2010-11-05T21:46:00.005-04:00

. . .But sometimes you have to wonder who is doing the counting. It's a lesson we should have learned in 2000, when the country waited two months to find out who would win the presidential election, during which time "hanging chad" worked its way into the American vocabulary.

Many people were concerned when the "fix" seemed to be computerized voting machines that would record the votes electronically. "Technology to the rescue." They pointed out that the only sure way to maintain the public trust was to have a printed ballot, which provide a concrete paper trail. Anyone who has any experience with computers know that a whole database can be extinguished by the click of a mouse or a surge of electricity at the wrong time.

As long as there's a paper trail, election officials can do a recount, even if the ballots are scanned optically by machine. Devices like the Accuvote system proved themselves in numerous recounts, with close to 100% accuracy.

Of course as long as there are politicians, there will be someone who will find a way to gain the upper hand in an under-handed way. In a not-too-distant primary election, someone sent back an absentee ballot which had the box to be filled in next to two of the candidates' names, but nothing next to the third guy's name.

The elections people quickly and quietly corrected the mistake, but left some of us thinking. "That was just an honest mistake, wasn't it?"This year in another election in a different state, yet another disturbing issue came up. The voter signs an affadavit attesting to his identity and right to vote. The affadavit contains a bar code. The voter brings it to another table in the polling place, where a clerk gets out a paper ballot which also contains a bar code. The he scans both bar codes, and hands the blank ballot to the voter.

The question is: does that mean that they can find out how you vote? The official answer is, "No, of course not. They wouldn't do that anyway."

But the computer types we have talked to say, "It'd be a piece of cake." Not every jurisdiction has a political machine that might, say, tinker with the property assessments depending on how someone voted. But it's enough of a threat just thinking that someone could find out, if they wanted to, to have a chilling effect not only on free speech, but on your right to choose your candidates.

It's something to think about. As a retired lawman who was in a position to know once told me, "Free elections are our last bastion of freedom."

Dry Bite

2010-11-04T14:37:00.005-04:00

A story related by a friend, found at the bottom of the shoebox:

As an (undergraduate) student of botany I was fortunate enough to take part in several excursions to the Caribbean islands and Central America. One such trip took us to Panama, where an international non-profit organization maintained a research facility strategically located between coast and mountains.

Although we were primarily there to work and learn, I was looking forward to a promised midweek excursion to the nearest town, which would be a chance to have an informal conversation with our professors and visiting graduate students, some of whom were attractive females (but I digress).

After a long day of collecting and cataloguing samples of the native flora, a van and driver appeared to take us into town. In the tropics there is little of what they call twilight in northern zones. By six o’clock night had already fallen. As we made our may down the rough, darkened path to the van, one of the graduate students complained that someone had let a branch snap back on the path and hit her. She thought she might be bleeding.

As we drove into town over the bumpy road, the driver turned on the overhead light in the van for a minute and turned around to look. Something had scratched her above her tank top, right alongside her breast. He snapped off the light and kept driving.

A short time later we arrived in town, where there were lights and the promise of beer. The graduate student was still carrying on. “Boy, that hurts,” she said to no one in particular. “If you’re bending a branch to get by, the least you can do is give the person behind you some warning.”

“No, Señora, that was not a branch,” said the driver, turning to address her. “That is the bite of a fer-de-lance. There is a type here that climbs in the bushes at night.”

“Oh, my God!” she said. “What are we going to do?”

“Nothing,” replied the driver. “You see, they do not always inject the venom. They just bite. We call this a "dry bite." You can get some Neosporin to put on it, if you want to.”

“But are you sure it’s a dry bite?” She was starting to panic.

“Pero sí,” he said. “If it wasn’t, where you were hit, you’d have been dead by the time we got to town.”

Viva, Viva, La Democracia!

2010-10-30T10:09:00.012-04:00

So here's a dilemma: which congressional candidate to vote for.

--A long-term incumbent Democrat who has a good record of bringing federal dollars into the district. A large number of local working families benefit from the jobs made possible by this federal largess.

--A nice, "country club" Republican who promises to cut spending, taxes, repeal Obamacare, issue school vouchers, kill the inheritance tax, and make government smaller in general.

--A Libertarian whose platform seems eminently sensible (with a only few small exceptions), but who doesn't have a chance; a good way to "send them a message," but a vote for him may tip things toward the Democrat.

Tough one, eh? There's no doubt the public is in an anti-incumbent mood this year, and you hear a lot of "throw the bums out" talk. But is it a matter of relacing Tweedledee with Tweedledum? Quite possibly it is.

Most political action in English speaking countries revolves around two parties. Other countries may have several splinter parties that come together in a Parliamentary coalition, but the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have two parties. If a third party arises, it usually is based on a single issue or personality, and it's eventually absorbed into one of the major parties.

Once a congressman gets to Washington, he (or she) will have to align himself with one of the major parties, even if he was elected by third party. It's not as if some of the Tea Party-backed start-ups are really going to change anything, assuming they are elected. They'll be expected to pay their dues and "go along to get along" like everybody else.

So who does one vote for? The guy that will get an influential committee assignment? The challenger because change is good? The third party because "they" need a reminder that the "working man" is still out there, and he votes (sometimes)?

And then there's the problem that virtually no one is talking about the real issues. Jim Kunstler, perpetual predicter of doom, has summed things up today better than I ever could.

The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.

Hoping, seemingly against hope, that we will somehow muddle through.

Are We Wondering About This?

2010-10-14T17:03:00.005-04:00

On Sept. 27, retired U.S. Air Force officials disclosed that on multiple occasions over the last 30 years, structured craft displaying flight characteristics inconsistent with any terrestrial technology appeared over diverse U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons facilities, while simultaneously nuclear missiles at the various sites were alternately armed and disarmed--not under the control of the facilities.

It seems that enough of these people with solid credentials--after all, they were in charge of our nuclear arsenal--have come forward, that we ought to be wondering what it all means. One retired Air Force man, since deceased, maintained that, although there were some "true unknowns," there had been "no meaningful contact." The story of nuclear weapons being remotely disarmed at the same time unidentified aircraft are seen certainly falls into the category of meaningful contact.
We can speculate endlessly about where they came from, how they got here, and what they're up to without ever coming up with a logical, reasonable answer. One thing should be obvious however: if we don't blow ourselves up, the next thirty years are going to be an extremely interesting time.

On Mindless Boosterism and Babbitry

2010-10-09T13:05:00.006-04:00

We are living near a small rural town, the type of place where people are friendly, down-to-earth, and decent. As of late the town fathers have been presenting their plans for future growth. The economy has slowed things up recently, but during the go-go years leading up to the latest "adjustment," plenty of farmers made megabucks selling their cotton fields and pastures to developers.

The town built infrastructure for the coming real estate boom that didn't happen--yet. You'll see fire hydrants along country roads out in the middle of nowhere.

They're talking about attracting young people and new businesses. Mainly they were talking about franchised businesses. One fellow, who likes to voice his opinion on everything (he's a retired schoolteacher), said he would really like this-and-such a fried chicken franchise to come in. "It's a shame we don't have one of those, and a few others."
Who doesn't like progress? But the problem is, that if even one more franchised restaurant came within easy commuting distance, the first thing to happen would be that the good old boys' favorite breakfast places would go under. They're struggling to stay open now.

There's no point in saying anything about that, though. You'd get labeled a trouble-maker, or anti-development, or a Jim Kunstler type. What they don't realize is that what they have now is much better than any plasticine "miracle mile" seen outside every major American city.

Of course, American homogeneity seems to be what the public wants. But it's a shame some of the locals don't remember what their grandma used to say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

2010-10-07T12:07:00.007-04:00

A Christian pastor who I know and admire once remarked, "I can't imagine allowing a yoga class in a Christian church."

I'm thinking to myself "did I hear that right?" He must think it's some kind of Eastern religion. I mean, I've practiced yoga exercises, even taken a few classes. I've known yoga teachers--even the late, celebrated physical education guru Ruth Bender, pictured on the book cover above. In all that time I never heard anything incompatible with "Christian doctrine." Our church even had classes in Tai Kwon Do for a while.

Yoga may have come out of Indian culture, and aspects of it did come out of Hindu tradition, but the simple stretching and breathing exercises associated with the yoga of American popular culture are basically just that. Moreover, it's a good idea, especially for an aging population.

But now Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.

I've read many articles by Dr. Mohler in the past and generally agreed with him and found his messages to be inspiring. No, yoga might not be a "pathway to God," but that doesn't mean that it's not a really good way to make sure our bodies stay relatively limber into a ripe old age. Maybe if we called it "Christian Calisthenics" it would be acceptable to him.

Now the press has picked up on his putting his foot into his mouth--figuratively that is. If he practiced "Christian Calisthenics" he might still be able to do it literally. And bend over to tie his shoelaces without grunting and groaning.

Dogs, Boats, and Politics

2010-10-05T22:07:00.005-04:00

Bunch of the guys I worked with liked to go down to the Keys, when they got some free time. Capt. Gabby, who was “between jobs,” had two large skiffs sitting behind his trailer on an island just north of Key West. The guys needed a couple boats, Gabby needed money; we made a deal.

We spent the day snorkeling and fishing along the reef, where the shallow waters of the back country ease off into the Gulf of Mexico. One of the bunch, a nice enough guy by the name of Russell, brought along his dog, a husky. We let the husky run along the beaches on one of the islands, hoping to tire it out. It was young and excitable.

After the guys had a cooler full of fish, crabs, and assorted collectibles, Gabby, who had decided that the life of a fishing guide was not for him, shouted “I’m heading back!” He had his wife and some of the girls, who had had enough sun, with him. “You know the way!”

We knew the general direction, but without a chart finding our way through the basins and banks of the back country wasn’t going to be easy. We had only out been there a few times before. There were six of us on board, plus the dog. We hadn’t gone but a couple of miles, before it became apparent that we were lost. And after another mile or so of looking for a channel deep enough to get back in the general direction of Key West, we were out of gas. Thanks, Gabby.

As we sat there pondering what to do next, the dog began to run from one end of the boat to the other. I had been swimming with an old pair of Dacor fins. There was a sharp edge that always dug into the joint on my big toe. I usually brought along a pair of socks to keep this from happening, but hadn’t done that this time. “I sure hope that dog doesn’t hit me on the toe,” I thought. Sure enough, the next time through, he stepped right on it. I let out a yelp. To make things worse, the bottom of the boat was filled with sandy grit and oil. Every time the dog ran by he would step on my toe. As if it was working some intentional, insidious torture, every time it ran by, its long sharp middle toenail found its way into the place on my foot, grinding sand and oil into the wound.

After a while I thought, “This is going to be inevitable. That dog is going to nail me every single time, and there is nothing I can do about it but sit here and quietly endure the pain.” So that’s what I did. After a while somebody pulled out a bottle of rum. We passed the bottle around and swapped stories. That helped a lot.

The present mid-term political campaigns, with candidates leveling outrageous charges against each other and diatribes coming from the left and right, remind me of being in that boat with Russell’s dog’s grit-coated nail finding the hole in my foot every time it ran by.

Eventually a young kid in a small skiff came by and towed us in, wisecracking all the way about how stupid we were. When we told him where we were going and that it was Gabby’s boat, he got quiet and acted scared. I just read recently that that “the northern end of [that island] has developed a negative reputation and come to be known as ‘Little Beirut.’” Some things never change.

War Is Hell

2010-10-03T23:11:00.003-04:00

"It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." --Sherman
A friend arrived home yesterday after a 36 hour trip from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. He's a reservist who served a short four-plus month hitch this summer. He looked tired, but very glad to be home. No one pressed him to talk about what he saw over there. He volunteered that his base had been attacked just before he got there and one man was killed. He said that he heard the sound of bombs in the distance almost every night. He believed that the period he was there saw the heaviest fighting since our involvement in that region had begun.
Suddenly the reality of the war was brought home. For a number of reasons we don't see nightly clips of the fighting. Our network news seems filled with meaningless fluff about female celebrities going into rehab. Pundits and polemicists handing down pronouncements on stimulus funds, bail-outs, and government spending seem filled with Yeats's passionate intensity. But we see very little about the guy that is actually doing the dirty work.
Whether we're pro-war or anti-war in general, we have to realize that we are involved in a fight with a rural commonality halfway around the world and an enemy that threatened both our security and our way of life. And those fighting for us are our neighbors--regular working people. They don't make the rules, but they do the tough stuff. For the most part, like our friend, they handle their job quietly and competently.
No one knows how long it will take and what price must be paid to achieve a satisfactory level of stability in the world. Looking back at the last century, it's fair to say that somehow we did a lot better in the second half than in the first. War is really Hell. And we're glad that our friend is home safe.
"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . ." -- Matthew 24:6

A Point of View

2010-09-23T22:25:00.005-04:00

A number years ago I was working on a construction project in a foreign (non-US) country. Among the subcontractors on the job was a Israeli company, doing some of the mechanical work. The Israelis ran a tight, businesslike operation. One of their go-betweens was a normally jolly fellow by the name of Joseph, who coordinated the use of cranes and heavy equipment with us.

Someone had hung a strip of toilet paper on the wall of our office. On every piece was printed a picture of the president of the United States. (An approximation of what it looked like is posted above.) It had been hanging there along with notes and memos for some time, before I even noticed it. To me it didn’t seem much more scurrilous than other avant-garde political cartoons of the time. I mean, look what we did with Nixon.

But the it had apparently caused a stir among our non-American coworkers. One day an extremely agitated Joseph burst into our office and pointed out the presidential toilet paper.

“I cannot believe that you allow this outrage!” He said. “A thing like this is a disgrace! It is a terrible insult! Yet you leave it there on the wall, for everyone to see it!”

I looked at it again, trying to see his viewpoint. To tell the truth, I couldn’t imagine who from “our side” would have put it up there. Our boys’ conversation tended toward beer, babes and baseball, not current affairs or politics. “Well, you see,” I said (this was back in the day), “a lot of construction workers are Democrats . . .”

“Then you would just leave it there? I cannot believe you would put up with such a thing!” he said, storming out, before I thought to explain that partisan mudslinging has been an American tradition going back the expiration of the Alien and Sedition Acts. We left the toilet paper up for a while as a mute paean to the First Amendment.

Sometimes it seems–as in the present climate–that the stridency of partisan voices goes too far. But who would limit them without endangering our basic right to freedom of expression?

Igor and Them

2010-09-12T18:03:00.005-04:00

Igor became the fourth hurricane of the season Saturday evening as it headed farther west over the open waters of the Atlantic. The storm has since intensified rapidly, reaching powerful Category 4 status Sunday afternoon.

Still being waylaid, so to speak, and absent from the tropics (having gone back to the land in North Carolina: more on this later) we’ve been again neglectful of putting up our annual, strictly nonscientific (but highly accurate) hurricane predictions. And here we are already at our ninth named storm!

So once again we've managed to contact our old time prognosticator "Typhoon" O'Connor (who otherwise refuses to be named or depicted) for this year's belated reading on the thickness of caterpillars’ fur, the direction in which land tortoises are crossing the road, near and offshore water temperatures, and a general sniffing of the tropical breezes leading to an uncannily accurate prediction of what will come.

“This is one a them La Niña years,” he says, “and as such, th’ hexperts say there’ll be more storms than usual. But knowin’ as how th’ Titanic was built by hexperts, and th' Ark was built by amatoors, I’ll be going with the amatoors this year. Thems as have dipped their dainties in th’ local waters tells me, th’ water’s on th’ cool side this year. That means, for whatever reason, th’ hooricanes-- what there’ll be of them-- will be stayin’ offshore. Do pull down your coconuts, and doon’t be cancelin’ your inshoorance, but doon’t be chewin’ your nails neither.”

So that’s it. The pressure’s off. Now, we wonder if that’s what we were thinking just before Wilma? Still, October it’s over, isn’t it?

The African Student

2010-09-08T14:20:00.003-04:00

At one time I was friendly with a fellow freshman college student from Africa. He was older than most of us by a dozen years He'd never seen snow. "From the pictures we thought it looked like sugar!" he said. It was interesting to talk to him--he had a different perspective on things.

One day, while visiting his room, he brought out a book to show me. "Have you seen this?" It was a brand new-looking version of Hitler's Mein Kampf. I took it and looked inside the front cover. Sure enough, it had been printed in 1933 by such-and-such a Verlag in Berlin.

"Wow, man! Have you got any idea what you have here?" I said. Not realizing that the Nazis had printed as many of them as the Chinese did with Mao's "Little Red Book," I was thinking that it might be a really rare item. Worth a few bucks to some collector. "This is really something!" I was startled by his reaction.

"Please! Please!" he said. "I did not know!" I really wish I could duplicate his accent.

"Excuse me?" I said. "What are you talking about?"

"I did not think. I did not know." He took the book back and set it down like it was a ticking time bomb. "I beg of you! I beg of you! Please!"

"Wait a minute!" By this time he was on his knees. "I don't get it! What's the problem?"

"Of course I should have known!" he wailed. "I did not think, when I brought this thing with me from Africa! I should have known that here it is forbidden!"

"Forbidden?" I said. "No, you can have them here. I just thought it looked like an original version. Some people pay money to collect things like this." His eyes widened in incredulity. He was sweating and shaking.

"Are you sure? Are you sure?"

By this time I was getting a little "creeped out," so I said good night and left. A couple of days later I saw him, and he explained, "I--all of a sudden--realized that of course, your country had defeated them in a war, and anything like that book would be illegal!" Apparently when I left, he was certain that within minutes jack-booted thugs would be breaking down his door, to haul him off to an American gulag.

"No, there are a number of things that our government doesn't like us to have, but books, thank God, are not one of them."

Much later I heard that my friend had gone on to become "speaker of the house" in his home country, and after that, minister of tourism. Hope some of what he learned over here enabled him to do some good over there.

The Look On a Man's Face

2010-09-07T17:12:00.003-04:00

A recent article suggested that there might be irregularities in the upcoming elections. Let's hope not.

Something happened to me years that reminded me once and for all about the value of free and fair elections.

Some friends had talked me into becoming a poll worker. You had to get up early and be ready to open the polls at 7:00 AM. The polls closed at 7:00 PM, after which we would complete some paperwork and deliver the ballots to the election headquarters downtown. It made for a long day. Most of the other poll workers were retired people. Some of their stories were amusing. Still, after a few years I’d had enough and decided that the presidential election 1992 would be my last. Then something happened that changed my mind.

A friend of mine, who had managed to leave Cuba with some of his family a few years before (despues, despues de Mariel, he would assert–he was not one of that bunch), came in to vote, along with his mother. Both were naturalized citizens. His brother, a radiologist who had somehow been allowed to come from Cuba to visit his family in Florida for a short time, was with them. He waited outside while the others went in to vote. I tried chatting with him in my high school Spanish. It went something like this:

“Well, today we’re choosing a president.”
“Yeah, sure you are.”
“So, by tonight we should know who it’s going to be.”
“Yeah, sure. Of course that’s not really what is going on here.”
“Sure it is. You watch TV tonight, and you’ll find out which way it went.”
“But there are no guns. No police.”
“Uh, well, there were a couple of police officers here earlier, but after they vote they have to leave just like anybody else.”

I can’t really describe the look that came over his face as he realized that, yes, we were actually choosing the next president of the United States right then and there, and that his brother and his mom were actually part of that process. I suppose “amazed” might be a place to start, but it can’t come close to convey the way he looked.

After that I decided that the long day at the polls was a minor price to pay to take a small part in a critical process, which most Americans take for granted. Some of us don’t even exercise a basic right that most of our fellow travelers on this planet can only dream of, a lesson I learned from the look on a man’s face.

Hey, We Do Tune-Ups!

2010-08-24T19:04:00.004-04:00

Many a reminiscence calls for a modicum of discernment. The internet has removed time and distance from the arsenal of discretion. I’ve been receiving Facebook “friend requests” from two individuals I had on a long-abandoned e-mail list, both of whom departed this mortal coil years ago. So, in a way, the internet grants its own kind of immortality.

Still, I think enough time has elapsed to recount the following yarn.

Capt. Bill was a bit of a character. He’d pursued multifarious careers, ranging from police officer to bricklayer. For a number of years he lived on a somewhat dilapidated houseboat anchored just north of Key West, and spent a lot of time hanging around a jet ski operation run by Big Charlie, a semi-retired biker from Ft. Lauderdale.

The jet ski rental was adjacent to a large motel frequented by tour groups from Miami and points north. There were usually one or two tour buses on the grounds, and lately they’d taken to parking them where they not only blocked the view of the jet ski operation from the main street, but also where their exhaust pipes were a scant ten feet from the small kiosk where Big Charlie and Capt. Bill hung out. Blocking the jet ski place from the street was bad enough in itself, but they would also leave the buses running, presumably to maintain the air-conditioning. The gentle, prevailing southeast summertime winds wafted a steady stream of diesel fumes right into the offended nostrils of Big Charlie and Capt. Bill.

“Hey, brother,” says Charlie, putting on his best-possible hail-fellow-well-met behavior. “Would ya mind moving the bus over to the other side? You’re blockin’ my view, and you know, the fumes . . . ”

The driver, reportedly a Hispanic fellow, merely looked at him blankly, locked up the still running bus, and walked away.

“What the hell?” says Charlie, going back to the kiosk. “Did you see that?” His brother, who had financed the operation, wouldn’t be happy having to bail Charlie out on an assault charge. Remember, he was a retired biker. “What can we do?”

“Let me borrow a jet ski,” says Capt. Bill. He runs out to his houseboat and returns a few minutes later with something wrapped in a handkerchief. Reaching up under one of the front windows of the bus, he toggles a hidden lever and the passenger door swings open. “I used to drive a bus myself,” he says. He takes a small glass vial from the handerchief, and carefully places it on the second step up into the bus, and shuts the door. “Now we sit back, have a cigarette, and wait.”

In a while the driver and passengers show up. The driver opens the door, and the passengers start to board. Two or three manage to get on without stepping on the vial. Eventually someone crushes it noiselessly underfoot.

According to what Capt. Bill said later, the people on board began to open the windows and fan the air. Then they realized that something was drastically wrong, and started to get off, causing a pushing match with those still trying to get on. Eventually they realized what was going on, and all of them got off the bus. The driver had to tell them to go back to the motel, and after a few hours the company was able to get them on another bus for the trip back to Miami.

After that the buses were left on the other side of the parking lot.

“I still don’t see why the driver couldn’t have been a little more reasonable about it,” someone said. “He could have saved himself a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Capt. Bill. “But, hey, we do Tune-ups.”

Coyotes in North Carolina

2010-08-23T23:29:00.003-04:00

Curiosity
Originally uploaded by Mangrove Mike

Coyotes are now established in every county in North Carolina, as well as Virginia and Tennessee. They have been known to prey on household pets and smaller livestock like sheep and goats.
A friend of ours has a small farm along the banks of the Yadkin River in North Carolina, where he maintains a herd of up to 200 Angus cattle. One day his son, who lives nearby, showed up towing a trailer with the latest local fad in anti-coyote devices, a donkey.
"It'd be a shame if you lost a calf to the coyotes, Dad," he said. "Put this donkey right in with the cows. No coyote will dare come into that pasture--they know they'll get stomped."
Our friend had his doubts, but thought, "Well, what harm can it do? No point in looking a gift donkey in the mouth, so to speak."
He put the donkey in with the cows and went about his business.
After a while, he forgot it was there, even when the phone rang a couple of weeks later. It was one of the neighbors, asking if anyone had seen his dog. It was missing. "No, haven't seen him around here, but I'll sure keep my eyes open for him," said Harry. Nope, no dog around here.
A couple of days later he was driving his tractor through the pasture and saw something unusual off to one side. He drove over by it. Sure enough it was a medium sized brown dog, or what was left of it. It had been stomped flat.
Harry decided that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to have that donkey in the pasture. His son was a little disappointed when he called him and told him to bring the trailer back and pick up the donkey. It took him a few days to get around to it, and they say Harry found at least one more trampled canine before his kid got that donkey out of there. OK, maybe that one was a coyote--it was stomped so hard that you couldn't tell for sure. In any event no one called about it.
Moral: Apparently donkeys are good protection against coyotes. But it would be a good idea to keep your dog out of the field at the same time.

Update!

Harry visited this weekend and put a different spin on things.

"A lot of little dogs that belonged to the people around the farm went missing last year. 'Cause I said something about them getting after the calves, some of them thought that I had something to do with it somehow.
Later on we found a coyote burrow, and I swear there were 8 to 10 little collars outside it. Those coyotes will go after anything, a calf, a little dog, a skunk even.
That's what got all those dogs. It wasn't my donkey."

The Bottle Wall: End of an Era

2010-08-11T15:59:00.006-04:00

Not long ago I was surprised to see a letter to the editor in Key West's muckraking, bottom-stirring-up, irreverent Blue Newspaper from a former neighbor, local legend Carolyn Gorton Fuller, usually identified as the Bottle Wall Lady.
Back in the eighties, or earlier, she had started constructing a "wall" out of old bottles in front of her house, located on a sharp turn near the celebrated historical Key West Cemetery. Occasionally a car would crash into it, and it would reappear later in slightly different form. Over the years it became a tourist attraction and artistic motif.
One day it simply disappeared. Inquiring about it, I was told, "I went down to La Te Da, and after having two martinis started thinking about it. I had one more martini and came home and just knocked it down with a sledge hammer. I got tired of rebuilding it."
In the aftermath of Hurricane Georges, a neighbor of hers hired me to rebuild a fence between his property and hers. Knowing her idiosyncratic tendencies, I sent my helper, a high school dropout by the name of Tim, over to her for an hour every morning to see what she needed done.
"What have I gotta do that for, man?" he'd be asking.
"You gotta do that in the morning," I explained, "so we can do this for the rest of the day."
A short investment in time kept her at bay for the rest of the day. She was in her dotage even then, and more than slightly pixilated in the tradition of many an elderly Key West grande dame.
When I saw her letter, I was glad to see that she was still around and raising hell as usual about something after all these years, and all the more shocked to see that she had died the very next day!
She had an interesting write-up in the local rag. Interesting to see that they didn't gloss over her, ummm, original personality.

Update: Since there's been some degree of interest in the Bottle Wall and its creator, we've snagged another photo and added a couple of links to some pertinent stories. Carolynophiles, enjoy!

On "cashing in her chips" . . .

On the demise of her marvelous autumn-mobile . . .

Blessed Assurance

2010-08-06T13:59:00.010-04:00

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.
Oh, what a foretaste of Glory Divine!

Not far from the home of my youth was an old graveyard which I visited occasionally, checking out old headstones, some of which were of historical interest, or had interesting inscriptions. I remember one epitaph in particular: They died in certain expectation of a glorious resurrection.

It’s interesting, I thought-- here lies a couple who had no doubt that when they died, they would continue to live in another form, presumably altered and improved, of course.

In my mind there was something oddly biblical about that rural area: sheaves of wheat, barns full of hay, fields of cows, century-old white clapboard churches, but 19th century reality couldn’t have been much different from our own time. People got sick, people died, people were killed in wars. There were good times and bad. Were they so devoid of intellectual curiosity that they could avoid any doubt that things would work out pretty much as their religion indicated?

Oh, to have that same kind of certain assurance in this day and age!

But even in biblical times eyewitnesses to the miracles described in the four gospels still doubted. They were there when Jesus reportedly fed four thousand people. They saw him heal people. Some saw him walk on water. Three of them saw the “transfiguration.” Yet when the chips were down, they scattered like scared rabbits. And when he appeared to them after he “came back,” one who wasn’t there refused to believe it, until he himself had seen him in person, the original “Doubting Thomas.”

To me, Doubting Thomas’s position seems perfectly sensible. Let’s have a little honest rational skepticism going here. That’s why the position of atheism, as opposed to agnosticism, seems to be more of an emotional, rather than an intellectual argument. Based on solely scientific and deductive reasoning, agnosticism seems to be the only purely logical world view. Things of the spirit can only be perceived “through a glass darkly,” as Paul theorized.

There’s no logical way to prove or disprove the existence of God. Belief always requires a leap of faith. We just can’t know one way or the other.

I am a Christian because of a series of personal “slaps upside the head,” that left me, like Thomas, saying, “My Lord and my God!” I admit to a certain paranormal, and for lack of a better world, emotional undertone in my reasoning.

Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

Atheism requires a certain emotional edge in my opinion. In a way atheists are pushing their own conclusions on others in a manner oddly similar to the “Jesus Saves” crowd. The determination of the atheist, whether it’s a college boy trying to shock his peers, or a well-known writer touting a book or article, seems to me to be a cri de coeur, “Prove that I’m wrong. Show me that I’m wrong. Please! Please!”

Can y'all dig it?

2010-08-03T17:24:00.009-04:00

So I stumbled on this from one of the many other blogs out there.

When I was a teenager someone showed me a page printed in this "new language," Interlingua. At first it seemed like gibberish, but after looking at it for a few minutes, it was--amazingly--understandable! Here's a more recent sample from the article linked above:

Interlingua es un lingua auxiliar international naturalistic basate super le vocabulos commun al major linguas europee e super un grammatica anglo-romanic simple, initialmente publicate in 1951 per International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA).

Interlingua es le resultato del labores de 15 annos de un equipa de linguistas.

Le labor pro crear Interlingua habeva le start in Europa, a Liverpool in 1936 e le fin a New York in 1951, le equipa de linguistas ha extrahite le vocabulario international del linguas europee.

In 1967, ISO (International Organization for Standardization), que normaliza le terminologia, ha votate in unanimitate proxime de adoptar Interlingua como le basa pro ille dictionarios.

Interlingua = “International Lingua” es intendite que illo debe devenir un lingua commun del mundo pro succeder in servir le humanitate, ma non un solo lingua comun.

Apparently a team of linguists constructed the "language" from words common to several European languages--thus the fact that it's relatively understandable to speakers of those languages.

"Wow, this is great," I thought. "Now there'll be no real need to learn a foreign language!" But, alas, artificial languages may be useful for scientific papers, but, lacking the nuances and slang of an everyday living language, they can never become a substitute for authentic, natural human language. Things just don't work that way. (Sorry, kids.)

In fact, if I understand the above article correctly, the originators hoped it would develop into something useful, but had no illusions of it becoming a single common world language (un solo lingua comun, dig it?).

For better or worse, thanks to the internet, English has now become as close to a world language as any other, despite its odd and antiquated spelling "system", a fact that has allowed most Americans (in spite of the influx of Spanish speakers) to remain abysmally ignorant of other languages.

Not that it's willful ignorance by any means. Some Dutch people I knew, who settled in West Virginia, were often told, "Ya know, y'alls language can't be all that different from ours. We can almost understand some of what y'all say!" Problem was, they were speaking English.

Hoovervilles?

2010-07-26T12:25:00.003-04:00

While on vacation last week we caught a late night discussion between Bill O'Reilly and John Stossel (both of them well-paid broadcasters and political pundits) that left me with a really bad taste in the mouth, so to speak.
They were discussing some Republicans' reluctance to vote for extending unemployment benefits for out-of-work people. (Granted, part of the issue was the fact that further unfunded benefits add to the national debt.)
Stossel seemed to be saying that during the Great Depression, unemployed workers left their homes and moved to "Hoovervilles" outside of cities. (The picture above is actually the "Bonus Army" encampment outside of Washington, DC, but it's the same general idea. You left home and you're camping out looking for work.)
Stossel said "relief societies" took care of these peoples' wants and needs, and did it in a far more economical manner than any government.
The real facts are that--obviously--neither Stossel or O'Reilly has ever had to draw unemployment. And probabably neither one really knows anyone who has. They're smug and affluent, and their theorizing is in danger of approaching the "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" level.

Unemployment Compensation is one of the best things to come out of the post-Hoover era. An employer pays a small percentage into a fund as Unemployment Compensation Tax. When an employee is laid off, the employee can collect a small amount from the fund for a stipulated period. In this manner, the beneficiary can feed himself and his family, does not have to give up his living quarters, and can retain a modicum of dignity while looking for alternative employment.
The payoff for society is that we don't have families camping in vacant lots or living in vehicles.
Sometimes you wonder if the Chinese didn't have a good idea in rounding up the bureaucrats every few years and making them work in the rice fields. Might be good therapy for some of these pundits who are telling us what is good for us.

And while we're at it, I think we've had enough of this "let's go back to the Twenties" mentality. It's no secret that the "Middle Class" is going bye-bye. And through the magic of compound interest the rich are getting richer. All this is fine if you're talking about creating jobs, and so on, if that's what's really happening.
But now we're hearing that some people who really ought to know better are still touting a "Flat Tax" or "Fair Tax." Despite our national pluralism and diversity we're still in danger of ending with something less than a middle class republic.
Is there anybody out there talking sense these days?

Yadkin River Blues

2010-07-15T11:44:00.009-04:00

The stock market surged yesterday after aluminum giant Alcoa posted better-than-expected earnings. As Wall Street applauded, more than a few people in North Carolina were scratching their heads. They're in a legal battle with Alcoa over the use of the Yadkin River, which flows south from the Blue Ridge Mountains, through central North Carolina, eventually becoming the Pee Dee River and exiting to the sea in South Carolina.

Years ago Alcoa build four hydroelectric dams on the Yadkin and used the power to run a smelter which is now closed. They would like to renew their fifty-year lease on the river, but some locals and politicians say "no."

If the state misses this chance, it won't get another one for 50 years. Meanwhile, Alcoa will have perfected a perfidious kind of globalism: It still generates power from the Yadkin, and the power is still linked to industrial jobs—only the jobs are in Iceland.

The only certainty is that lawyers in Washington and Raleigh will be haggling about this for a long time to come.

But back to the Yadkin:

Years ago our friend Glen leased a small farm along the banks of the Yadkin. Glen was never a small man, and some say he topped the scales at well over three hundred pounds at times. North Carolina can get hot in the summer, and this year's no exception. It's always cooler in the shade by the river.

One summer I went down by the river to cool off. The fish wasn't biting and after a while I got to feelin' kinda lazy. I said what the hell, ain't nobody around, so I got off all my clothes, left 'em right there on the bank, and got into the river. The water was warm and I just floated on my back lookin' up at the blue sky and the clouds.
It was so relaxin' just floatin' there thinkin' about nothin' and after a while I just drifted off to sleep.

I still don't know how long I was asleep, but some time later I bumped up against something--it was a bridge piling--and I woke up. "Where the hell am I?" I musta floated almost two miles downstream. There was a highway with cars goin' over the bridge!

"Holy s--t! What am I gonna do?" This was gonna be hard to explain. I waited for almost half an hour for the traffic to slow up. Up by the bridge there was a couple of posters for a county fair that was comin' up. In between cars I ran up and got both of 'em, and positioned 'em fore and aft, so to speak.

It took me almost two hours find my way back to where I'd left my clothes. By then it was late, but not dark yet. I still don't know how I made it back there without anybody seeing me.

....Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end....

A Life Examined

2010-07-10T21:40:00.000-04:00

The Seablogger has died. Future historians may comment on how, toward the end of the 20th century, the internet changed the nature of human communication through the proliferation of "web logs," now more commonly known as blogs.

A couple of years ago I had the good fortune of stumbling on (another internet-coined phrase) Alan Sullivan's blog Fresh Bilge, immediately recognizing him as a Zeitgenosse: same age, same education, raised in the same region of the country, with some of the same interests. There was one critical difference, however. Three years earlier, still in the prime of life, he'd been diagnosed with a dangerous and ultimately fatal illnesss.

It's said that man is the only animal that has awareness of his own mortality and the ability to contemplate it. Alan had already laid out much of his life story on his blog site, along with his photos, writings, musings and poetry.
His daily observations of things which interested him attracted a huge following of internet users, many of whom joined in a lively on-line discussion of facts and opinions.

His ongoing web Chatauqua soon became a daily habit with me, joining probably a couple hundred other "lurkers" and, as he termed them, "rare readers." The subjects under discussion included current events, politics, geology, weather, volcanism, travel, weather, poetry, medicine, his own health, and later, after an "epiphany on the beach," his transition from agnosticism to Christianity.

The man's knowledge and energy amazed us, as he contined his daily postings and his final work--a retranslation of some of the book of Psalms-- right up to his final trip to the hospital. Alan's friends and rare readers have eulogized him far better--and in more ways--than I could. I never met the man in person, and if I had, quite possibly might not have gotten along with him. But somehow, through cyberspace, I think he has shown us a little glimpse of heaven.

"The unexamined life in not a life worth living," said Socrates.(ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ.) You examined yours well, Seablogger, and we are all the richer for it.

Key West's "Christmas Tree Island"

2010-05-25T09:24:00.001-04:00

If you've visited Key West, Florida, you probably saw Wisteria Key. It's the Australian pine-covered island across the harbor from the waterfront hotels and Mallory Square, home of the famous "sunset celebration."

The island was originally a "spoil bank," consisting of rock and sand dredged up a century ago in order to deepen Key West harbor. It came to be called Wisteria Key or Island after a ship that sank behind it. Eventually salt loving Australian pines took root, and the name Christmas Tree Island seemed more appropriate to locals.
Over the years the island has been home to hippies, vagrants, boat bums and the just plain curious. At one time someone wanted to put a campsite for handicapped people out there, but the local politicians saw that as a ruse and nixed the idea.
Now comes a more serious challenge. The island's owners and their partners want to put a real estate development out there. A citizens' group is saying "enough," claiming that they've known for years what they could and could not do under the county's long-term comprehensive plan.
So the battle lines will be drawn over individual property rights vs. sticking to a plan devised to preserve a unique area with limited land space.
The issue also raises the question of whether allowing development of this island will permit the development of the many other offshore islands, most of which contain flora and fauna found only in this part of the USA.
And of course there's the logistical problem of water, electricity, sewer connection and police and fire protection. The above picture is of a burning trailer on another offshore island, one of several torched by juveniles a few years ago. In that case there was no fire or police protection.
Coffee shop gossip says that the details of water, electricity, and sewer have already been worked out for Wisteria Island.
Here's a link to a recent article on the island.

Update! The plans have hit a ripple. If history is any indication, they'll be back to try again, but this summer's efforts have been a bust. The natives are restless, and after the recent school board and land trust scandals, are "out for blood."

Paranoia Strikes Deep

2010-05-15T23:07:00.000-04:00

Probably most people are aware of the "Facebook Revolt" by now. And then there's a story that Google, in taking pictures for its "Street View" photos, was actually also collecting information about WiFi signals in the area!

Ironically, the admission comes following outspoken criticism from Germany's Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar, who was "horrified" to learn that Google's Street View car cataloged private WiFi network data like Mac (Media Access Control) addresses and SSIDs, in addition to snapping pictures of public streets.

I say it's ironic because a man with whom I used to work, who was a child during pre-World War II Germany, told me what it was like there in those days. "We could get only two radio signals. One was from Paris and the other was from Berlin. It was against the law to listen to the one from Paris, of course. But sometimes people would do it, because the music was better. But there was a truck with an antenna that came around the neighborhoods, and they could tell if you were tuned into the Paris station, so we never listened to that station. Only Berlin."
Of course this "begs the question," what happened if you were listening to the Paris station and they found about it?
"Well, they say that happened to a family up the street," he said. "One day they were just gone. We never saw them again."

I'd been going on a paranoid jag even before these events came to light, having realized that I couldn't continue to write some of the stories I'd been writing without changing the names and places in such a way that would distort the original essence of the tale, for fear of offending those still living or their relatives, some of whom I actually heard from. The cyber-world had become too large, or too small, or both.

Through Facebook, Google search, and other programs and applications it's simple enough to track down people you haven't seen in decades. In many ways this is good, but like all innovations, it can be a two-edged sword.

When I worked for a county in Florida years ago, I had to put up with a private detective sending me phony e-mails in an attempt to "catch" me in a real estate solicitation. I'd innocently left remnants of a web site up that led to the supposition that I was still in business, even though I'd given up my license a couple of years earlier.

Of course I'm now old, and unlikely to be employed by anyone but myself ever again. The young, however, might be will advised to curtail their impulses to put every thought and photograph out there, where the world will be able to look at them for the next 100 years or more. From recent reports it seems the smarter ones are beginning to catch on.

Futurists predicted years ago that there would be a reactive "privacy movement" in this decade, and I hope we are seeing the beginning of it. It's great to be able to contact old friends over the internet, but every new development seems to bring problems along with promise.

The trick is to harness the information age in such a way that it serves us, and does not hasten the coming time when all those who want to take part in any commerce will be tagged with "the mark of the beast," and privacy becomes once cherished but now long-gone right.

Don't think there aren't people out there who would hasten that day. It's much closer than we think.

Burn, Baby, Burn! *

2010-04-29T21:03:00.000-04:00

Now they're trying to burn off the oil spill. Not a bad idea actually, according to the linked article. With the light, sweet crude that has leaked from this well, the burning in situ process is expected to get rid of up to 90% of the oil. Of course there is the problem of air pollution and disposing of the remaining 10%.
There's also talk of lowering a dome to contain the oil, and then pumping it out from there.
In the meantime there'll be a public relations battle over the incident. The oil companies will insist that there are thousands of rigs like this one that operate perfectly safely, and they'll be right.
And who among us does not rely on fossil fuel for most of our energy needs, not to mention a host of other products? Try as we might, the need for oil is going to be with us for a long time.

* Full circle on the alliterative slogans: Burn, baby, burn (Credit: Los Angeles rioters) morphed into Drill, baby, drill (Credit: former AK governor Palin and/or speechwriters), thence Spill, baby, spill (Credit: Seablogger) and now Burn, baby, burn seems appropriate again.

Spill, Baby, Spill!

2010-04-28T07:42:00.001-04:00

Ironic, isn't it? Just as the president throws his critics a curve ball and opens up a huge area of US coastline to oil drilling, we're now facing the biggest potential oil spill disaster since the devastating Exxon Valdez incident of March, 1989.

It was the Exxon Valdez incident, as well as other well-documented pollution problems in the past on both coasts, that led to the public outcry against offshore drilling. Similarly the near disaster at Three Mile Island, along with movies like The China Syndrome, and the actual meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear facility, led to a de facto moratorium on nuclear power facilities in the US.

And all this is happening at a time when it's become obvious that relying on foreign oil is a major mistake, politically and economically.

Prediction: even though these oil leases weren't going to become operative for a number of years, the public outcry (aided by politicians eager to hop on the newly-revived save-the-environment bandwagon, like Florida governor Crist) will put the kabosh on offshore drilling for the foreseeable future.

Despite the blandishments and assurances of some of the oil companies regarding the safety of modern equipment, there's unfortunately no guarantee that there won't be a spill like the one happening now. And it also seems that the equipment necessary to control such a spill hasn't been developed.

And if you think the the "envirowackos" have a momentary advantage now, just wait until that spill works it way onshore. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Road Rage and Retributive Justice

2010-03-26T11:02:00.000-04:00

Road Rage: a symptom of our times. Who hasn't at one time or another been subject to road rage, whether as a victim or perpretrator? And what is there in the human condition that sometimes makes us raging monsters when behind the wheel of a powerful vehicle? I read recently of a man who was sentenced to life in prison, after running over three people and killing a fourth.
And who hasn't had the experience of being in front of a driver madly expressing his frustration with our supposed dawdling along, when in fact we're unable to go any faster than the vehicle or vehicles in front of us? For whatever reason I decided long ago that it's better to arrive somewhere fifteen minutes late than to risk life and limb to get there immediately. A type B driver gets there in almost the same time, and with his blood pressure down to life-enhancing levels. I've tried to convey this philosophy to anyone would listen. After all, what're a few minutes in the scope of eternity? Better to chill out and arrive alive.
And as for taking out revenge or “getting even” with someone behind the wheel of another vehicle, I can hardly think of a better way to court disaster. Better to take things philosophically and pull over at the first opportunity, letting that steroid- or coke-enraged madman on your tail go on to this own individual destination–or destiny. Let the laws of karma deal with the situation. Sometimes they work quicker than we'd think.
A number of years ago I was driving my old ‘74 Peugeot north out of Key West to visit some friends up the Keys. That afternoon there was one of the famous toad-strangling thunderstorms that the Keys are famous for. The visibility ahead was maybe 60 feet, in between sweeps of the wiper blades. I slowed down to what I thought was a reasonable 45 miles per hour. Suddenly in the rear view mirror I see a huge pickup truck, honking its horn and flashing its lights. I’m thinking I can’t even see the shoulder to pull over, and this guy’s following so close I don’t even dare slow down to try to pull over or he’ll run right into me.
Soon the road opened up to two lanes, and as the truck passed, the driver gave me a traditional one-fingered salute. I’m thinking that guy must be out of his mind. There’s an inch of water on the road, and even worse, he’s towing a huge utility trailer full of stuff. And he’s doing well over 60.
A few minutes later the rain began to abate, and I noticed what looked like a pair of lights in the mangroves ahead off to the right. Sure enough, it was Hurry Harry: his rig had hydroplaned on the watery highway. He’d lost control, the trailer had jack-knifed, and the whole rig spun backwards into the brackish swamp, with the truck facing the road and the trailer at a very odd 90-plus degree angle off to the side.
I gave the fellow a tip o’ the hat as I drove by. And oh yeah, I called the highway patrol when I got where I was going. Told them they’d need a wrecker to pull the guy out.

Haiti: How to Rebuild?

2010-02-25T20:24:00.000-05:00

Above is a recent photo of a house in Belize that we rented for a few months back in 1983. This house is around 40 years old, and is still in good shape. It sits on a concrete slab, but the house itself contains no concrete and no lumber. (The only wood products used are a few light pieces of trim around the windows and doors.) The house is made of light-weight metal studs, some of which you can see protruding from the gable end on the left side. The roof is metal, the outside walls are thin cement-based composite board with an even thinner coating of stucco. The inside walls are gypsum drywall. The total package is strong, light, waterproof, and wind- and fire-resistant.

The situation in Haiti: hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless. The UN has decided, wisely, that providing tents for these people is a waste of money. Instead they're trying to provide them with metal roofing to construct makeshift shelters. Ultimately the answer may be structures like the one pictured above. A metal roof supported by a metal framework would provide durable shelter from the rains which will be starting by June, and would also be light enough not to present a threat in the event of another earthquake.

As long as the walls were firmly anchored, the floor could be an afterthought, installed later when the owner had enough time and resources to do so. Even the walls could be temporary, eventually replaced by a lath or hardboard covered by a type of tabby.

Given a workable design and a few basic materials, coupled with the average Haitian's ingenuity in scrounging scrap materials, which should be available in abundance, there's a chance that this type of construction might be the answer to Haiti's need for permanent, safe housing. Just a thought....

Haiti: Hope and Horror

2010-02-03T16:50:00.000-05:00

At left, ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A number of Americans were among those killed or injured in the collapse of the venerable structure. Still missing is volunteer Walt Ratterman of Knightsbridge International, a California-based charity, who was working on a solar power project in Haiti.
(At one time we lived for several months on the street leading up to the Montana. I remember that Mike Wallace, the TV newscaster, had a house on that street, although we never saw him. We'd talked about going back to Haiti earlier this year, and we would have stayed at the Montana, however briefly, for old time's sake.)
The horror of the situation has been widely reported to the world, and teams of aid workers from all over the planet have arrived and performed miracles of service and sacrifice. At home and abroad people have opened their wallets, and food and medical aid are now coming into the country. There have been a few problems: the specter of food riots, and Haitian bureaucrats holding up food and medical supplies at the airport with their ubiquitous red tape and desire to levy some kind of a "tax", seemingly oblivious to the suffering of their countrymen.
It's to the advantage of those still suffering that the international press is present, although now that some of the horror of the situation is no longer novel, the New York Times has actually run an article on Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta's choice of clothing.
Gupta in particular should be commended for staying behind at a field hospital, when UN authorities had ordered all medical personnel to leave the wounded behind, for purported security reasons.
Cooper got a minor "reality check" later in the week, reporting "on the ongoing process of an apparently organized effort run by local authorities to gather up the bodies littering the streets, collect them in dump trucks, then transport them out of the city, where they would be dumped in mass graves. The mass graves are shown as mounds of dirt in the hills outside the city, appear to be relatively shallow and hold no information to identify the dead other than the bodies themselves."
Grilling a (female) Haitian official American press-style on the situation, he was unable to elicit a "straight" answer.
If he'd been briefed on the details of Haitian folk culture, he would have known that many Haitians believe that bodies must be properly buried and remembered by relatives and family so their spirits can pass on to heaven. In Voodoo, some believe that improper burials can trap spirits between two worlds. A proper burial is necessary for a certain life-force to leave the body gradually, lest the soul be trapped in a sort of underground limbo. (This belief was described in ethnobotanist Wade Davis's book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was made into a movie several years ago.) It would be unthinkable for a government official to admit that such a thing had been allowed to happen, even in the interests of sanitation and prevention of disease.
As the relief efforts continue, we can sure that unforeseen problems will crop up. We can only hope that somehow the Haitian people, including expatriates, will summon up the courage and wisdom to straighten out their country themselves.
And let's fact it--thirty years ago Haiti was already overpopulated and an ecological disaster. Europeans and North Americans have been sensibly limiting the size of their families for years. It's neither racism nor flouting God's law to suggest that it's high time for Haitians to do likewise.

Earthquakes in Haiti

2010-01-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

I discovered an old book, Geologie d'Haiti, that I bought in Haiti around 1981. It appears to be a textbook for an introductory geology course. In light of recent events the section on seismology was interesting. It begins with a brief description of a seismograph and a definition of earthquakes in general, then gives a description of earthquake damages to be expected according to the Rossi-Forel scale. The language is a little quaint, translated from French.

There are devices for recording earthquakes. They are seismographs, which are essentially a sheet of paper wound on a cylinder that rotates. A needle draws a line on the cylinder. In times of calm, this is a straight line, but when the earth trembles, it becomes sinuous.
Earthquakes, like volcanoes, are due to internal operations of the globe. Earthquakes correspond to ruptures of equilibrium in different compartments of the earth.

Degree one and two: shaking recorded by some devices.
Degree three: tremors felt by people at rest.
Degree four: tremors recorded by all, with noise from doors and windows (shaking).
Degree five: in addition to previous effects: cracking ceilings, furniture oscillating.
Degree six: sleepers are awakened by the uproar and clock pendulums stop.
Degree seven: the walls have cracks.
Degree eight: old houses topple and contents are damaged.
Degree nine: panic -- buildings collapse and oscillate. Fires.
Degree ten: complete disaster: the destruction of buildings, bridges, drying up of wells.
Degree Twelve: uplift and subsidence of parts of mountains, breaking land, complete destruction.

Then it goes on to give a history of seismic events in Haiti from 1701 to 1953.

Quelques tremblements de terre historiques d'Ha'iti Some earthquakes of historic Ha'iti

In his book "Geology of the Republic of Haiti " (1924), the American geologist Wendel Woodring writes: " Earthquakes are frequent in Haiti. At the time of the colony and of the Republic, disastrous earthquakes, from time to time, have caused the complete or nearly complete destruction of Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitian, and other cities."

Indeed our country is often the seat of earthquakes whose disastrous consequences are intensified in the cities because they are generally built on alluvial land (soft ground).

November 9, 1701. It caused the destruction of the plain Leogane (degree VI).
From November 21, 1751 to December 8, Port-au-Prince, which had just been founded, undergoes a series of shocks. It is reported that after the first shock of November 21, one house remained standing, but was in turn destroyed by the earthquake that took place on the second day (degree VIII and IX).
June 3, 1770. New quake Port-au-Prince, in the plain of Cul-de-Sac. 200 deaths in the city of Port-au-Prince. Petit-Goave and Leogane were destroyed (IX degree).
May 7, 1842. One of the most violent. It completely destroyed the cities of Cape Ha'itien, Port de Paix and Mole St. Nicolas. There were 5000 deaths in the city of Cap Haitien alone, and no building was left standing in Port de Paix (degree X).
April 8, 1860. It was felt throughout the whole southern peninsula. (V degree).
September 23, 1887. It spared nothing in Mole St. Nicolas, and its effects were felt very far to South (Jérémie, Anse-d'Hainault) (IX degree).
March 20, 1910. It shook the whole North and North-West of the country causing extensive damage (degree IV).
August 3, 1910. The whole Republic was shaken, but with a particularly marked effect in Jérémie (VII degree).
August 21, 1911. The whole country was shaken with different intensities. Gonaives, Mole St. Nicolas, Pilate, Cap-Haitien. Gros Morne were the cities hardest hit (VIII degree).
October 6, 1911. The shock was particularly strong in Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic, but it seriously damaged the city of Cerca La Source (degree X).
6 and September 7, 1912. It was general, but particularly reached the towns of Plaisance, Limbe, Grande-Riviere-du-Nord and St-Michel de I'Atalave (degree. VIII).
July 31, 1914. Very intense shock affecting Port-au-Prince and its environs. It lasted 50 seconds (VII degree).
July 26, 1917. Very strong shaking in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Limonade (degree VI).
4 February 1918. It caused partial destruction of the Mole St. Nicolas (degree VII).
From 1909 to 1920. Several series of shocks, fortunately weak one, recorded at I'Anse-a-Veau (level III).
January 15, 1922. Quake which shook all the southern peninsula: from Jeremie to Port-au-Prince and from Jacmel to Cayes. (degree VI).
1953. L'Anse-a-Veau is again the seat of a series of tremors, but their effects are fairly localized (degree IV to VII).

Thus we see that things had been fairly quiet there for the last fifty years. Amid their many other problems and other disasters, most people had forgotten that threat from earthquakes was still a danger. On the scale given above, it looks as if the quake this month was a ten. Interesting that they don't have an eleven; at that level of destruction the details are moot.

Bleeding Haiti

2010-01-14T13:51:00.000-05:00

The latest reports from Haiti say that aid workers are now realizing the enormity of the logistical nightmare ahead of them.

Right now Haiti needs medical people, money and machines. The port facilities are damaged. Everything must come in through the airport.

Thankfully chaos has so far prevented Haitian bureaucrats from "doing their thing." It wasn't too long ago that there were whole warehouses full of rotting food, because Haitian customs types had the shipment held up with unfathomable red tape, while women and children were eating cakes made of mud in the same city. There's no time for that kind of nonsense now.

Unfortunately in Haiti there has been a lack of what one Haitian observer described as "organization." The Red Cross is sending in 100 "experts" to assess damages and needs. Their best approach will be to divide the damaged areas into manageable sectors and proceed accordingly.

In the meantime aid workers are fearing an eventual outbreak of violence. Added to that is the real and ongoing threat of malaria and other diseases.

Those viewing from afar can do little but pray and send whatever donation they can afford. Donations are best sent to organizations which have a proven record of getting the money to where it is needed.

Haiti: How Can We Help?

2010-01-13T15:47:00.001-05:00

Overlook
Originally uploaded by Mangrove Mike

The situation is every bit as bad as early reports indicated.

Right now they need medical people, machines, and money.
The charities most likely to get the aid where it is needed most are the American Red Cross and your local church.

Haiti is Hell

2010-01-12T21:09:00.000-05:00

"Haiti is Hell!" said the big man, throwing down a clump of dirt. "Wherever you dig on this island, if you dig deep enough, you will find Hell!" Gerard was one of the few Cap Haitien men who stayed to work on our job, after the others had left because of a wage dispute. I remembered him because of his size, the intensity of his manner, and his wild stories of Haitian magic and treasure digging.

It was because I knew his name that I noticed a month after he had left that he was still on our payroll. One of the company's most trusted bookkeepers had created a "Zombie," probably one of several, and was enriching himself at the company's expense.

Not that this behaviour was untypical. Even our own on-site timekeeper, whom we considered to be unimpeachable, bought himself a brand new Peugeot truck after the job was over, to be used as a "tap-tap."

Corruption, as in other places, is practiced from the top down in Haiti. As an unwritten law it's actually admired and emulated. This is one reason the nation has never been able to lift itself out of its cultural and economic morass, and the many ills which seem to descend on it like a curse.

Poverty, tyranny, disease, and ignorance are its recent history. Added to this is the curse of AIDS, overpopulation, political violence, drug trafficking and gang-inspired kidnappings.

This is not to say that there are not good and decent people among them. Even Sodom and Gomorrah were "spared for the sake of even ten righteous men," but I fear that today a great many of the righteous have been slain along with the wicked in Haiti.

A 7.0+ on the Richter scale earthquake doesn't ordinarily discriminate among its victims. In the countryside most of the houses are simple wooden structures with thatched roofs. In the city and "suburbs" are many substandard buildings made from concrete blocks and little if any reinforcing steel. Deaths and injuries must be substantial.

There is great suffering in poor Haiti tonight. The first news reports are slow in arriving. It will be interesting to see how the world reacts, and whether the better elements of Haitian society rise to the occasion, or whether the country sinks into further depravity and violence.

Well-intentioned Americans must decide what they can best do to help the afflicted, without unduly enriching the inevitable middlemen and agents even now planning how they will "tax" the largesse about to be disbursed.

The sadness about to be revealed in Haiti, while it holds our attention, will make our own national problems seem insignificant.

Sturm, Drang, und Friede

2009-12-15T21:32:00.000-05:00

Got a couple of e-mails not too long ago, noting that my old high school German teacher had died. Not that it was too much of a surprise. After all, from what he'd told us he would have been close to 90 years old. Yes, he had been involved in the Late Unpleasantness as a soldier on the Other Side, a situation we 60's youth found oddly fascinating.
Not that any of us had a great amount of desire to study German. Peer pressure and a desire to "skid" led most of us to choose French, clearly the easier language, so we thought. A little arm twisting by the department head led a sizeable minority of us to choose German that year. Of course we were also attracted by the possibility of attending an occasional Abendessen, where the German classes would meet at a local Rathskeller, the idea being to improve our language skills with regard to the ordering of food, etc. Rumor had it that here, far from the parental eye, and under the guise of European sophistication, there was the consuming of an occasional beer, and some said, even the smoking of cigarettes. I made it to one Abendessen before the powers-that-be squelched the activity, and it still stands out as the most fun I had the whole time I was in high school.
It was also that year that someone higher up somewhere thought it would be a great idea to accelerate some of us though several courses, theoretically making all of us two years smarter in one single year, not something I recommend inflicting on innocent youth. I remember waking up one Saturday morning realizing I'd been dreaming all night not about something normal, but the twenty-four forms of the definite article der-die-das! After that the whole thing began to fall in place. The guy was a good teacher--no doubt about that.

Eventually he told us about his early life. At some point he was drafted into the Arbeitcorps, one of the ways Hitler prepared Germany for war despite the terms of the Versailles treaty. Young men drilled with shovels instead of rifles. He saw Hitler only one time, at a rally in Nuremburg, speaking at night in a glass and steel ampitheater. As Hitler spoke, a thunder storm gathered in the distance. He said Hitler would see a flash of lightning and then time the end of each sentence to make each point coincide with the arrival of a thunderclap. "There were not many of us there, who that night would not have done anything this man said."
Of course before too long Hitler's madness became apparent, and he was sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded several times. Fleeing west through Poland, he relied on a knowledge of Latin to ask a priest for directions, "Ubi est via ad_____?" and made it back to Germany, where he was awarded a gold medal by the Nazis for his service on the front. "What happened to it?" we asked. "After the war I sold it for 200 cigarettes." "Oh, and you sold them?" "No, I smoked almost all of them myself."
Toward the end of the war he was assigned to a high ranking officer who later was involved in a plot to kill Hitler. Although he didn't know about it at the time, he was imprisoned for a while, long enough to establish his bona fides with the allies, and later he became an interpreter at the Nuremburg trials, then emigrating to the US and finishing his education. During the war his three or four brothers had all been killed; his parents had died and all their property was leveled in the bombings.
Eventually he ended up retired in Venice, Florida. Sometime in the late Eighties I was near there and stopped in for a surprise visit. He was pleased that we could still converse in German, even though I'd had scant opportunities to use it over the years. And he said that times have changed. "Du darfst mir du sagen."
I'm sorry now I never bothered to stay in touch with him. I'm sure he was active on the internet despite his advanced age.

And a minor update here--if there's any moral to this (vis-a-vis what happened with Germany, something our young people are bound to forget), it's let's not let this stuff get started again, here or there.

On the plus side, almost all the younger Germans I have met opted for the Zivilendienst rather than the army.....und das is auch gut.

Breakfast in Honduras

2009-11-21T14:44:00.000-05:00

We're still seeing an occasional article on the crisis in Honduras. Then-president Zelaya wanted to change the country's constitution, allowing him to serve another term. The judiciary, along with certain elements of the military, took exception to his plans, and he found himself on a plane out of the country.
Right-leaning blogs applauded his ouster, citing similarities to a Chavez-type takeover a la Venezuela, and decried the fact that the White House and Department of State seemed to favor Zelaya's position.

I have no opinion to give except that "we" took a proper and prudent public position, and no information to give, other than the following story:

It must have been around the late of the '80s, my friend Jim and the owner of a construction company based in Ft. Lauderdale flew down to Honduras to see if there were any opportunities for offshore construction work. Jim always considered Ft. Lauderdale a good "jumping off place," and indeed had found work that sent him to Jamaica, Haiti, the Caymans, Bahamas, Virgin Islands, and even Africa. This company had a good product and good track record. They'd been successful in other places, and now they hoped to be able to do business in Honduras.

They flew from Miami to Tegucigalpa, the capital. Arriving late in the afternoon, they checked into a downtown hotel. The boss made a few phone calls to local contacts, setting up a couple of appointments for the following day. They stayed close to the hotel that night.

The next morning they ate breakfast at the hotel. Whether it was to treat himself with the "hair of the dog," or to brace himself with an early-morning "shooter" (something he was known to do), Jim excused himself and went off in search of a barman, or some hotel employee able to be bribed to dispense a couple of drinks at 7:00 in the morning.

Having accomplished his mission, Jim reported, he returned to the dining room to find his boss sitting there with a disturbed look about him, his face suddenly gray and ashen. "Go up to the room and pack up your stuff. We're getting out of here."

Within a few minutes they were in a car heading back to the airport. They flew back to Miami later that day. "So what happened?" I asked, when told about the trip.

"He wouldn't say," Jim replied. "And he was so upset, I didn't want to push him. I surmise, while I was gone, somebody came to the table and told him to go. Exactly who it was I don't know. But I do know he wasn't sure if we were even going to make it to the airport."

So who knows what really happened? Certainly the boss wasn't a wimp who would scare easily; his company had operated in a lot of places, many of which had an "edge."
Whatever was said to him that morning at the breakfast table, for him doing business in Honduras was a clear-cut case of "No vale le pena."

The Strange Case of Antonio Tovar

2009-11-13T12:38:00.000-05:00

Did you ever meet someone whose real age was impossible to guess? A number of years ago, working for a construction outfit in Central America, I met a man who was, to say the least, of indeterminate age. If I remember correctly, his appearance was such that he ranged somewhere between a hard-bitten thirty and a nimble seventy.

He was short by American standards, slightly built, with an air of self-assurance about him that was out of the ordinary. He spoke easy-to-understand Spanish, and wore an expression on his face that can only be described as a cross between saintly humility and extreme amusement. His clothes were simple. He might have been any one of the many refugees from the wars in El Salvador of Guatemala who were growing corn and beans on small patches of land they had cleared in the woods around the job site.

“My name is Antonio Tovar. I’m here to see about the chain link fence,” he said. Part of the building under construction was going to get a chain link fence around it, but I hadn’t seen any details about it. Most of the previous crew had been cashiered for going “wild west” on the job. There’s a certain type of American who, when taken out of the country, feels that he’s beyond the law and goes bonkers. A lower level on Kohlberg’s moral chart, perhaps, or as someone said, “Travel makes a wise man wiser, but a fool worse.” For the first couple of months we were finding out indirectly about deals and arrangements that the ancien regime had made with various locals, some of which were legitimate and some of which were not.I referred him to one of the engineers on the job who would know something about the fence. That weekend I saw Antonio Tovar and a group of similar-looking men working behind the building, and shortly thereafter a chain link fence appeared. At the end of the week Antonio came back into the office with a bill. It seemed completely reasonable, so low that I was able to pay him out of our petty cash fund without bothering the boss with it. Off he went with the same inscrutable smile on his face.

About two months later I heard a radio broadcast about a missing person. Friends and neighbors were concerned about the disappearance of one Antonio Tovar. “If anyone has any information on the whereabouts of Antonio Tovar, please contact your local police or this radio station. His friends are very anxious to find him.”
That spring I made the acquaintance of some of the refugees who were living out in the woods. I asked if they knew him. They told the following story. He appeared one day on foot out of nowhere. No one knew exactly where he was from, except that the spoke a Spanish they could understand but not recognize as coming from any particular place. He wouldn’t tell them his age, except to say that he was very old.

When he arrived, he was carrying many seeds in a leather bag. He worked among the people clearing land and planting beans, corn, and vegetables. When the people spoke of lacking certain things, he found work that paid them money. He took very little for himself, but spread most of what they earned around where it was needed most. Then one day, saying he was going to a city, he simply disappeared. When he didn’t return, they made inquiries, first to the police and then later to the radio station. He’d been a big hit with all the people in their community. He brought money in. The women, the children, even the men all loved him. They were worried about what happened to him. He’d now been gone a long time.

So I asked them who they thought he was. The answers ranged from a Communist organizer, a Lakota “road man,” a guerilla agent, one of the Three Nephites of Mormon legend, a Cuban spy, a devilishly clever man from Scotland Yard, a brujo, a saint, to just a nice guy who disappeared in the jungle. A snakebite victim, perhaps.

I asked the engineer who he said had hired him, and he told me, “I thought you did.” Nope.

The ABC’s of Medical Care

2009-11-13T12:30:00.000-05:00

The Horror of “Obamacare.”

The Great Unwashed clog free clinics with their endless needs. Aunt Gabby, insured through her job, but who’s never been happy unless she has the latest ailment, burdens the system with imagined complaints. Richie Rich goes to a private cash-for-care facility, which, if necessary to avoid government interference, may be located offshore. “Death Panels” decide whether you or your loved one merits the expense of life-saving medical treatment.

The real horror is that such a system already exists, right here in Hometown, USA. There are three tiers of medical care, not to say there aren’t levels within each tier or that there isn’t a degree of overlap among them, but basically here’s how it appears:

Level C is where you end up if you don’t have insurance or money. You might have a low-paying job without insurance, or you were laid off and lost your insurance. You could be chronically unemployed or homeless. Maybe you’ve just arrived in this country, knowing that you can have your baby in one of our hospitals for free, or that if you need an operation or treatment, you’re much more likely to get it here, eventually, than you are back home in your Third World country. You’ll have to wait in long lines at free clinics and county health departments. You’ll be at the mercy of slow-moving, non-caring bureaucrats. If you’re really sick or hurt, you can go to a hospital emergency room. You’ll wait a long time there, too. But they eventually somebody will take a look at you. And with a little luck they may actually help you out.

At level B you’re a working stiff lucky enough to have some sort of insurance. If something serious happens to you, you won’t lose your shirt, and they’ll take reasonably good care of you. You’ll probably be in a shared room, if hospitalized, but you’ll move down the medical assembly line with relative ease. You may have to wait for elective surgery and for non-emergency tests and procedures, but in an emergency situation, they’ll take care of you before things get out of hand, and you’ll be OK. Still, it’s a good idea to have an intelligent advocate available to help make decisions in case you are incapacitated, or in case they start treating you like a number on a chart.

At A level, you’re likely to have a super-duper insurance policy (the kind they’re talking about taxing to pay for the Level C’s), or you’re extremely wealthy, or you’re relatively prominent in your community. It may help to be a doctor, or be related to a doctor, but it helps even more to be an attorney, or related to an attorney. (A doctor knows the limits of health care; an attorney does not.) At this level you’ll get a private hospital room. You won’t have to wait very long for anything; it’ll seem as if all the procedures are streamlined. You’ll wonder why anyone has any problem with American health care, and you’ll be sure that “we have the best health care in the world.”

“Death Panels”? At level C you may have something to worry about. At the higher levels, the problem is more likely to be that they’ll use extreme measures to keep your body alive past the point where your quality of life has disappeared, just because somebody, whether insurance or government, is paying for those measures.

What It Was Ain't What It Is

2009-09-25T22:33:00.001-04:00

Bearsville Store
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

And what it is ain't what it will be. --Old New England Saying

This historical marker, next to a Bearsville, NY, store, is actually the project of a local artist featuring scathing social commentary.

Someone else commented, "...and where you throw away your hard-earned money, (which is really pieces of time, your life, converted into paper) to buy "stuff" you really don't need anyway--"

Yes, those big box operations do tend to run the "Mom and Pop" stores out of business. And some small towns have been left with no commercial activity in their center except for the funeral parlor and maybe a Christian bookstore.

But they sure do sell stuff cheap!

Health Care Reforn: Letting It All Hang Out

2009-09-24T13:41:00.000-04:00

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed by President Obama on February 17, 2009, includes billions in provisions for healthcare information technology (health IT).
The idea is to have one unified, computerized system with everyone's complete health care records on it, in one place, accessible by medical professionals. The "up" side is that our records will be available to doctors and/or medical people in case of emergency. We will no longer have to fill out paperwork every time we see a new doctor; everything will be available to him or her with a few clicks of a mouse. And in theory our insurance information should be there as well.
The "down" side is that whoever has access to the system will be able to know virtually all our medical history, including treatment for depression, venereal diseases, drug or alcohol problems, sexual preferences and problems, and anything else that might appeal to a snoop's prurient interests.
"Oh," you say. "That doesn't bother me. I have nothing to hide." And perhaps you don't right now. I can't help remembering that one of the early jobs for the Watergate burglars was to get Daniel Ellsberg's medical records from his psychiatrist's office. Obviously any astute political person would take steps to make sure that his/her personal records stay off this proposed system.
And what about everyday people? I was in a doctor's office recently where I could hear someone on staff blurt out, "He's got AIDS," about a patient who had just left. No, I never went back to that office.
But over the years I have heard stories of Mr. X who has an artificial, well, thing. (Snicker.) I wonder if he has any idea that's public knowledge. Or politician Y whose chart indicates his life expectancy is, well...."He's got one foot in the grave, and the other is on a banana peel." Wouldn't the other guys like to know about that? Or nice young lady Z who came in for testing, because "her former boyfriend developed syphilis lesions." Hmmm...and she applied for a teaching job? And these are the sort things one catches in passing without really wanting to know.
Yes, there are some things that are desirable about a huge, grand database. But wise is he who has a physician he can trust, who will on request keep certain information off the system. No matter what safeguards or sanctions they put in place to protect our medical information, human nature being what it is, there is absolutely no way anyone can guarantee that it will remain confidential.

Health Care and the Hypochondriacal Dilemma

2009-09-23T12:44:00.000-04:00

One time, a number of years ago, I was almost flat broke and had to take a job where I worked in a cubicle. I'd known about such things for years, of course, and always had a totally abhorrent picture of them in my mind, sort of a giant nursery school for adults caught in a futuristic 1984-like hell. But I needed money, and was temporarily disabled with a ruptured Achilles tendon (a story for another time), so I went to work in an office lined with cubicles.

As it turned out, my premonition was 100% accurate. Some authorities maintain that fully half the cubicle type offices in our country are environmentally unhealthy. They're kept too cold in the summer and too warm in the winter. The first thing I noticed was that my new place of employment was no exception. Everybody seemed to be sick. I hadn't had a cold for fifteen years, it seemed, but soon after getting into that environment I had one cold after another. (Eventually I had to quit because of chronic sinus trouble.) Another thing I noticed was that everybody seemed to be taking antibiotics all the time, as if it were as natural as having a morning coffee.
Of course the tab for the pharmaceuticals and the doctor's visits was picked up by the employer's insurance policy. (In this case it was the government, i.e. the taxpayer, i.e. YOU) Once one of these office bimbos saw another one getting something on the insurance "dole," they would have to have the same thing: special braces to ward off carpal tunnel syndrome, antibiotics, antihistamines, antidepressants, you name it.

I've also heard that 70% of the patients seen in an average family practice are there for psychosomatic maladies. We all know people who are running to doctors with what seems like unbelievably minor complaints. And all too many doctors are happy to hand out an aspirin or placebo and bill the system for whatever it will bear. So whether the country were to go to a "single payer system," or simply muddle things through like they are now, the question remains: what to do about hypochondriacs and freeloaders clogging the system?
It seems to me that a hefty co-payment would cut down on a lot of this nonsense. It may be the only answer.

Odds & Ends: There, But for the Grace of God go....

2009-09-16T21:24:00.000-04:00

(CNN) -- Newspaper, magazines, Web sites and a few book publishers are tapping into a curious American fascination: mug shots.
You don't have to commit a violent crime; you don't have to be convicted; you don't even have to be a celebrity (though for some publications, it helps).
Just get arrested -- no charge is too small -- and your mug could grace the pages of a local magazine or Web site

Some people say there's even a word for mug shot cruising now. I don't know what it is, but I admit that for a long time, when I was bored at work (which was every day on that job), I would check out the local mugshots.
What surprised me was not the number of people I knew (it wasn't a huge town), but the number of people I knew who seemed to be arrested for vagrancy, trespassing, or for varying degrees of public intoxication again and again. Not just one time, but repeatedly, every few months or so. Each time their pictures looked a little rougher.

I knew all these guys when they were young. At that time they seemed like average, run-of-the-mill people. They definitely fell into the "normal" range of intelligence. A couple of them, when I knew them, even had their own businesses. I worked with two of them and had friends who worked with the others. Altogether unremarkable it seemed.

One of them did tell me, however, "I'm not like you. You shouldn't really be talking to me." I remember being somewhat taken aback, but when someone says something like that, what can you say or do? I said, "OK," and moved on. The real meaning of his words escaped me, until I started seeing him in the Sheriff's log twenty years later.

You sort of wonder, if he didn't have sort of a predestinarian vision of where he was headed.
If there's any common thread through these lives, you can be pretty sure that it's substance abuse. Whether it's booze or drugs, you might say that a physiological propensity coupled with relative ease of availability led to these fellows' downfall.
As far a crime goes, it appears that the victim (aside from the Sense of Public Order) is the individual himself.

"Who steals my purse steals trash.
'Twas something, 'tis nothing,
'Twas mine, 'tis his,
And hath been slave to thousands.
But he who filches from me my good name,
Steal that which cannot enrich him,
But leaves me very poor indeed."
--Shakespeare in Othello

In these cases the damage has been self-inflicted. For them it might simply have been better to heed Nancy Reagan's "Just say NO to drugs."
Not to condemn, for there, but for the Grace of God, go we all....

Invasion of the Bow Bugs

2009-09-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

I telephoned a Friend of My Youth of a Saturday morning. "What's up?" Stan was not the world's brightest kid, but there was usually something to do around his house. He lived in a middle-class neighborhood at the edge of the city, where development had ended with the housing boom of the 1920's. Behind his house was a glorious stretch of undeveloped farmland, all the way to the new interstate highway. It was a great place to run and explore. In the spring it flooded with a mosaic of small seasonal ponds, brimming with tadpoles, frogs and other critters, a perfect getaway place for a young kid.
"There's something new out back," he said. "Bow bugs." I had no idea what he was talking about, but managed to contrive a ride over there. There were several other neighborhood kids around. In his garage he'd set up numerous bowls and jars with "specimens" of this new creature they'd found in the ponds out back.
We walked out through the flooded fields, and sure enough, most of them held two or three of these primitive-looking organisms. Only the ponds nearest the house, where the first collecting had begun were devoid of this form of life. The neighbor kids claimed that they had somehow appeared overnight.
Stan explained that they called them "Bow Bugs," because they looked like a bow tie. Although, as I mentioned, Stan was far from an intellectual, he had managed to produce a dissecting kit from somwhere and was in the process of demonstrating his scientific acumen to the other kids.

The "Bow Bugs" consisted of two lobes of jellyfish-like membrane, separated by something that looked suspiciously like a rubber band. We all noticed that when "dissected," they gave off a chemical, formaldehyde-like smell. I pointed this out to Stan, who didn't want to hear my theory. He was too busy poking the "Bow Bug" with a needle, causing it to give up more of the formaldehyde smell and bringing small droplets of oil to the surface of the water in the dish.
By now every kid in the neighborhood had been into the garage and had seen the strange phenomenon, and a group of adults was beginning to form.
One guy came into the garage and grabbed his son, a blond-haired kid named Terry who had been in on the discovery from the beginning, by the arm and dragged him home. "I don't know what the hell these things are, but until we find out you're goin' home and staying inside. And no lookin' out either!" The whole thing was starting to remind me of a Twilight Zone episode. When I left a short time later, I noticed Terry's house was all shut up, and all the blinds were drawn.
In a day or two someone found out that the local health department had placed the "Bow Bugs" in the ponds as part of a mosquito control experiment. They weren't "bugs" at all. They were an envelope of semi-permeable membrane filled with DDT (or something similar) and cinched in the middle with a tiny rubber band.
As far as I know, none of us had any ill effects from handling the things. That neighborhood did produce its fair share of juvenile delinquents, but that might be a matter of coincidence. Someone said Stan went on to become a bartender.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: The "Death Panel" Scare in the National Health Care Debate

2009-08-13T23:51:00.000-04:00

"Mind-boggling," an old friend of ours would say when confronted with a complex problem, "mind-boggling."
Those words come to mind when viewing the current health care debate, and the amount of information--and disinformation--swirling about. Town meetings are disrupted by middle-aged protestors, the right screaming "socialism", and rumors abounding of government-appointed "death panels" handing down edicts concerning your loved one's worthiness to live or to die.
We don't presume to be able to offer a solution to the problem here, but we do offer some more pieces of anecdotal evidence which should figure into a thinking citizen's reasoning.
Yesterday the phone rang. The voice at the other end was vaguely familiar yet strange and rasping. It was the guy who used to say "Mind-boggling." It had been months since we had heard from him, and we were starting to wonder if anything had happened to him. He spoke so softly it was hard to hear him over the phone, but here's basically what he said.
(He's 66 years old, so he has Medicare, but most probably no supplemental insurance.) Some time ago he wasn't feeling well, so he had his wife take him to the emergency room. (That's right, no primary care physician, right to the hospital, as the poor tend to do.) He has a fever, and is given an "injection", after which he passes out and is admitted. During the course of his hospitalization, he is placed on a respirator. ("There were tubes coming out from all over me.") At some point, he says, they wanted to "pull the plug." By this time his sister was there. She is a bit of a "bammer," and talked the doctors into performing more tests. (Meanwhile, a priest is summoned and gives the last rites.) Eventually, he said, he was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. He's now home, but in weakened condition.
In the meantime an emotion-tinged debate about national health care rages on. The latest headlines speak of "death panels" as a provision of the pending legislation, conjuring up visions of the movie Soylent Green, with Edward G. Robinson going to his assisted suicide finale to the strains of Beethoven's Sixth.
It appears now that any wording that can be construed as establishing "death panels" has been taken out of the legislation.
But one fact remains: unless you yourself have a strong advocate present during your hospitalization, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll make it through unscathed or even alive.
We no longer have personal physicians (for the most part). If you are unable to speak for yourself, there's no telling which way your treatment may go. No matter which way this health care debate takes us, it's imperative to make out a living will and name someone you can trust (and who is likely to be available) as your spokesperson when and if you are hospitalized.
Of course no one is going to try to kill you intentionally. But inadvertently.... Your best protection is a living will and an informed and intelligent advocate.

Mas Vale Tarde Que Nunca!

2009-08-10T08:43:00.000-04:00

Having been waylaid, so to speak, and absent from the tropics with the exception of a brief foray in the month of June, we've been neglectful of putting up our annual, strictly non-scientific (but highly accurate) hurricane predictions.
No doubt there are going to be some who'll say, "That's fine and well, but you've made it easy for youself this year. The hurricane season's almost half over--we're into the month of August already!" That's true, and as the old ditty goes, "June too soon, July stand by...August------?" I could never remember what rhymed with August.
Then I found this late 19th century manuscript on the web which solves that mystery.
August rhymes with "look out you must." At least it does, if you put the accent on the second syllable of August. But I digress.
The first tropical storm, at long last (8/10) is already out there.
So with no time to waste, we've called our old time prognosticator "Typhoon" O'Connor (who otherwise refused to be named or depicted) to give us this year's belated reading on the thickness of caterpillar's fur, the direction in which land tortoises are crossing the road, near and offshore water temperatures and other inchoate observations leading to an accurate prediction of what might come.
"Activity's light this year (obviously)," he says. "But that don't mean nothing's gonna happen. If it comes this year, it'll come late. And if it comes, it'll come hard. I wouldn't want to be on the gulf coast when she hits."
Interpretation: the arrival of El Nino presupposes a less active season, yet the surface temperatures of the Gulf are such that if a system gets into that area, chances are good that it will intensify before landfall. The Keys and Key West: shootin' dice, as usual, a couple of late scares maybe. Keep the shutters handy, just in case.

Technophobia on the High Seas

2009-08-06T14:00:00.000-04:00

Dave was a fine fellow and in some ways a legend in his time. He’d served a few years in the Marine Corps, some say during the Vietnam era, but he never talked much about that. He married, had a pretty wife and nice young daughter, and was living an idyllic existence in the Florida Keys, busying himself primarily, it seemed, by mucking about in boats.

His family owned a lot of real estate, although he never talked much about that either. Dave himself drew a comfortable paycheck by managing a shopping center up around Ft. Lauderdale--collecting rents and cleaning up behind the stores once a month, a situation that gave him plenty of time to engage in his hobbies. His family didn’t own these properties outright, the rumor went, but held them through a murky fundamentalist organization in one of the Appalachian states, some say for tax purposes. Whatever the reason, Dave and his immediate family were not fundamentalists. At some point they’d converted to the Bah’ai Faith, and faithfully followed the fast days, feast days, and other disciplines of the Bah’ais.

In some cases it may be said , “His religion takes care of all his peculiarities.” But not so in Dave’s case. While his contemporaries dealt with mundane problems like how to pay their rent and their kids’ dental bills, Dave fretted over decisions like “Catamaran or trimaran? Ketch rig or sloop rig? What to do, what to do?” This is not to say that he wasn’t a good boatman nor fun to be around. He’d spent a lot of time sailing in the Bahamas, and had a wealth of knowledge about out-island Bahamian lore, seamanship and navigation. (This was well before GPS.)

Dave was also a purist, and in today’s terms, you’d call him a technophobe. Discounting one’s need for dentistry and perhaps an occasional antibiotic, he would have been perfectly happy back in the 1800's. He held a romanticized notion of sailing ships and a decided distaste for things mechanical and motors in particular. “Iron jibs,” he called them, making a spitting sound. “One time, just one time,” he would say, “I would like to see what it is like to be totally, totally away from the sound of motors!”
Time passed, as Dave went through a series of boats, never completely satisfied. For a while he had a 27 ft. Wharram catamaran. Then he had one of Jim Brown’s designs, a Searunner 25. In the meantime unfortunately Dave and his wife had been having some problems. They were waiting out the Bah’ai-prescribed “year of patience” before finalizing their split. They’d decided a few months before that their daughter would live with Mom for the school year. She would spend the summer sailing with Dad. She had just turned fourteen.

So many things in life depend on one’s point of view. What red-blooded American boy wouldn’t jump at the chance for an ocean-going voyage with his dad aboard their own speedy multihull, however cramped for space it might be? But what American junior high-age girl wouldn’t be happier staying close to home, hanging with her peer group? It’s said the daughter took one look at the single narrow hull which was to be her home for the next two months, “But it’s even smaller than the Wharram!” and burst into tears. Carried into the cockpit of the small craft, she bade farewell to her equally tearful mother, as Dave determinedly cranked his brand new 25 hp. Johnson outboard (a begrudging concession to technology purchased just for this trip) into action, and the Searunner sped away from the dock toward their first stop in Miami.
(To her credit the girl’s tears dried before they made their first anchorage at Key Biscayne, and she acquitted herself well on the voyage.)

There’s a small harbor on the southwest side of Key Biscayne where cruising yachtsmen traditionally gathered before making the crossing to the Bimini in the Bahamas. There they exchanged information on tides, weather, and possible hazards to navigation. There being safety in numbers, our travelers planned to travel in a flotilla with the other cruising yachts, weighing anchor at 5 in the morning, to take advantage of the outgoing tide.

Imagine the excitement, amid the smell of diesel oil and the slapping of rigging, as seagoing craft of all descriptions started their engines, weighed anchor, turned on their running lights, and one by one headed out into the predawn stillness of Biscayne Bay.

Dave raised the mainsail on the trimaran and readied the halyard to raise the jib once they were under way. He adjusted the choke and throttle on his new Johnson 25, reached down and gave the starter cord a couple of rapid pulls and....nothing happened. He re-primed the bulb on the fuel line, reached down and yanked the starter cord again. Nothing. He re-primed the bulb again and pulled the cord furiously. He began to smell gasoline. Now it was flooded. He disconnected the fuel line, pushed in the choke lever, hoping to clear the carburetor, and cranked again. Not a sound of life from the motor. He dashed below, retrieving a small tool kit. He took the cover off the engine and, tearing knuckles as he went, reached around and removed the spark plug, replacing it with a spare.

He re-primed the fuel line once again, set the choke and throttle and pulled. By now it was starting to get light, and he could see that the harbor was empty. All the other boats were under way. He pulled and pulled, but nothing happened. The brand new engine that had worked perfectly up until this morning had let him down. By the time he got it fixed , the other boats would be well out into the Gulfstream. He would not have his plans frustrated by the malicious vagaries of an iron jib. “Joshua Slocum didn’t need an engine, and neither do I!”

He unbolted the engine from the transom, and lifting it high overhead, with a superhuman effort, let it fly into a graceful arc into the waters of the little harbor. He hoisted the anchor, raised the jib, and the little trimaran moved out to sea.

Dave later said that everything went all right until they sailed into Nassau harbor to clear Bahamian customs. He eased the tri into a convenient dock in the harbor, but the customs official refused to clear him unless he brought the boat to another dock that was directly upwind. “If you want to clear customs, you must come directly to the customs dock,” he was told.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and somehow he contrived a way to do it. He was an excellent sailor before that trip, but not having a motor, he discovered ways to sail that summer that defied the imagination. A multihull is notoriously difficult to “bring about,” i.e, turn through the oncoming wind, because of the fact that it has two or three hulls which offer resistance to the wind and water, rather than just one.

Since then I’ve seen him tack the boat up a narrow canal against the wind. (Lubbers may have trouble following this.) Although it seems counterintuitive, he would set centerboard most of the way up, with only a foot or so in the water. Presumably this would lessen the drag on forward speed, and make turning easier. Then if he used a jib at all, he would have it set extremely loosely, almost luffing, so there was no chance it would push the bow to leeward. And he would sheet the mainsail in just enough to give the boat forward momentum, not enough to make the boat heel or sideslip.

Reportedly they had a fine trip down through the out-islands and sailed home safely, tanned and happy.

Oh, and the motor. Due to the fact that so many people use that harbor, we can be sure it was rescued by an enterprising snorkeler before too much time had passed. Whether it ever ran again, we can’t say.

Above all, do no harm.

2009-08-04T12:08:00.000-04:00

The pastor of our church has a marked antipathy toward “faith healers” who claim they can cure illnesses with prayer in a way similar to the healings described in the New Testament, performed not only by Jesus, but by his disciples.

“I don’t discount the power of prayer. I know that prayer can heal–sometimes. What I don’t like are those who claim they can do this on a regular basis. I’m not naming names, but there are a few in particular whom I have in mind. And, to put it mildly, I take great issue with their claims and practices.”

He might have been talking about another place of worship just outside of town, which holds weekly healing sessions. They appear to have a “charismatic” style of worship, with exhortative preaching, drums, hands in the air, and so on. I found out about it from our local Cable Guy, who claimed, “My wife was cured of diabetes there. I was cured of bipolar disorder.” And his daughter was cured of impetigo, I think he said. He was pretty much sold on the whole thing.

Then there was the Lakeland Revival phenomenon. In April of 2008 Canadian biker-turned-evangelist Todd Bentley started a controversial series of “healing” services in Lakeland, Florida, which steadily increased in size over the next few months, attracting 140,000 people from 40 countries. Eventually Bentley was found to have proverbial "feet of clay," and although there were many first-person accounts of miracles, there were no medically documented cures.

Our pastor also stated that according to the best current estimates, 70-90% of the ailments presented to primary care physicians today can be termed “stress-related,” hence psychological, rather than systemic ailments, the very type of ailment that can be "cured" by psychological and/or spiritual means. Clearly, though, there are some conditions that will only yield to the surgeon’s knife, or to modern, sophisticated pharmaceutical treatments.

With all this in mind I was extremely alarmed when a younger friend of ours, a botanist with a somewhat troubling inclination toward a magical world-view, announced that he had “performed some cures” with concoctions made from Petiveria alliacea, a tropical plant also called Anamu, among a dozen other names. He became aware the herb while doing a research paper on the botanicas (Latin-American herb shops) of South Florida, and later saw it in use among Native American tribes in South America.

“How can you know this stuff is safe?” I asked. “Don’t you know that the first rule of medicine since ancient times is primum non nocere, ‘first do no harm’? Have these people checked with their doctors about this? And aren’t you likely to stir up false hopes? Or maybe prevent them from seeking the regular medical care that they need?”

“No, no, no,” he claimed. “I’ve taken it myself many times, for one thing. And all three of these people are close friends. Each of them begged me to prepare this drink for them. They were quite aware of all the risks.” He went on to explain that all of his “patients” had been receiving conventional cancer treatments, assumed to be a combination of surgery and chemotherapy. One was an older woman from Cuba or Colombia who was already familiar with Petiveria. The other two were reportedly younger men.

Whereas herb companies sell the dried leaf to be made into a tea or to be taken in capsules, the botanist had a different recipe that he’d seen prepared by tribal curanderos. They used only the root, he said. He’d start with a large quantity of the roots, removing the outer bark with a vegetable peeler, like you’d peel a carrot. Then he’d cut the roots into inch-long sections and boil them in water for an hour or so. He’d then cool the mixture and strain out the roots, leaving a yellow, garlicky-smelling tea. The treatment consisted of drinking three approximately 16 ounce portions of this tea in a single day.

In each of the three cases where his friends took the herbs, he claimed, subsequent medical tests showed accelerated improvements in the patients’ conditions, and eventual remission, much to the surprise of the regular medical professionals, according to this fellow.

I pressed him on why, if this stuff was so effective, that the regular medical community had not picked up on it. His answer was vague, about the cost of research, the tyranny of institutional thinking, and so on. I warned him again about the seriousness of playing doctor, and he agreed that he would never present himself as such, but that in the cases cited the individuals had specifically asked him about the herb, and requested that he help them prepare the tea. “They came to me,” he said.

And would the results would have been the same without this modern snake-oil treatment? I don’t approve of what he did, and don’t advise anyone to take this or any other kind of herb without medical supervision. He did explain, however, that the herb grows wild in South Florida, in vacant lots and along roadways, and people have been using it for years. He even showed me three places in Key West where it was growing out of the sidewalks.

Captain Tony International?

2009-07-19T22:20:00.001-04:00

We noted a letter to the editor in the Key West Citizen a few weeks ago written by our old friend (and helicopter pilot par excellence), long-time Middle Keys resident Lee Cranmer (pictured at left). Lee's letter suggested renaming the airport in Key West for former Key West mayor and popular Keys character Captain Tony Tarracino. Captain Tony died in November 2008 at the age of 92.
The newly remodeled airport terminal recently opened amid the usual fanfare surrounding such openings, and not a little controversy over design, construction delays, cost overruns, and the death of at least one man in the collapse of a concrete form. Add to this another controversy over naming the airport for a still-living politician, a former county commissioner defeated in the polls last year as one of a dreaded "gang of three," and you have the makings of a proverbial "hot potato" for the present county commission.
Perhaps that's why Lee's letter didn't get the attention that it deserved. But many people we've talked with think it would be a stroke of genius. A Keys resident since 1948, Tony embodied the island's reputation as a refuge for eccentrics and renegades who had found their way to the southernmost point of the continental United States. He was friends with literally thousands of people. And he served an honorable two years as the city's mayor.
And, in contrast with certain others, Tony has now gone on the that Great Dog Track in the sky. (Tony always maintained that he did his best thinking while serving as mayor at the now defunct dog track on Stock Island.)
As we think of the many bed tax dollars that the tourist industry spends every year to keep Key West's economic pump primed, we should consider the advantage of Captain Tony International printed on every travel document, air schedule, and plane ticket having to do with Key West.You just can't buy that type of publicity. Now, you can't blame anybody for not wanting to handle a "hot potato," but can it hurt to let the County Commission know how we feel? If Tony didn't embody the best of Key West, who did? And since when was Key West ever know for political correctness? It's time Lee's idea got some serious consideration.

What's With This? III

2009-07-14T23:16:00.000-04:00

Remember this guy? He's the reknowned "Boy Buddha" of Nepal, who first created a stir back in 2005. He emerged from the jungle, so it was said, and spent several months meditating under a tree and dispensing an occasional word of wisdom, a la the original Buddha. It was reported at that time that he attracted a crowd of 10,000 people, many of whom were convinced that he must be the actual reincarnation of Buddha himself.
It was said that he sat immobile, meditating most of the time. At night his "handlers" would cover his place of meditation with a curtain. They claimed he neither ate nor drank. A French news crew was allowed to observe him over a 48 hour period, and they reported that they did see him eating a piece of fruit.
After a few months he disappeared, only to re-emerge in late 2008, looking hale and hearty as in the photo above.
The above photo shows the boy during his appearance in 2005 at the age of 16. He seems to have cleaned himself up considerably for his second appearance. The second time he stayed around for a shorter period, and has now disappeared again.
So what's a skeptic to think? He doesn't seem that he has started a cult, although with 10,000 visitors he certainly could have started one. We're left wondering about his third appearance: when and where, and to what signifigance. What does he do when he's not "on stage"?
And what about his handlers? What's their motivation? Helpful boddhisattvas presenting the young saint to the multitudes? Or perhaps only enterprising food vendors....I mean, with a crowd of 10,000 you could sell a lot of kebabs.

ADDENDUM: "Getting It Honest" (Cynicism, I mean.)
For several years this bumper sticker was seen on the rear of a VW van parked on Southard Street in Key West. Noted, that the people of Conyers downplay this nowadays.

Da Train! Da Train!

2009-06-16T00:08:00.000-04:00

I recently had a chance to do something I hadn't done for ages: take a trip by train. I'd heard many stories over the years, some good and some bad, about our quasi-nationalized rail system, Amtrak.

--"Th' unions ruined th' railroads!"
--"Rail travel remains the best and safest way to travel, and will be moreso in the future."
--"The condition of the railroads is a perfect example of why socialism just won't work!"
--"There's something romantic about train travel." (And so on and so on....)

Ironically all the above statements have an element of truth to them. But the only way to know for sure what modern train travel is like is to travel by train yourself and check it out.
Last week I purchased a one-way ticket from Raleigh to Orlando. The trip would take a little longer by train than by car, 13 hours, leaving around 9:30 PM and arriving a little after 10 the next morning. You'd have to sleep sitting up....

The train was running late, giving me time to check out my fellow passengers. There was a huge family who appeared to be from India, sitting off by themselves. I chatted with an older lady, who said that this was also her first train trip in years. She decided it might be simpler to take the train rather than hassle the parking at the airports. She had rented a sleeping berth. There was a teenage girl and her boyfriend, also both first-timers, who were on their way to meet her family who were already at Disney World. The girl's mother, who was waiting with them, having taken the train before, made sure they were equipped with cell phones, their own pillows, and other necessary supplies.

When the train did show up at the platform about 15 minutes behind schedule, it seemed like the first few people coming off it were having trouble walking. “Sea legs?” I thought. “The train lurches around so much they have trouble navigating when they get off?” The conductors, most of whom were black women, gave everyone a seat number as they got on the train.
I sat next to a young Air Force dude. “Wow, I’m glad that guy that was sittin’ here got off the train. He was really drunk!” Well, that explained the “sea legs” of some of the disembarking passengers. “He had his own bottle with him. I didn’t think they allowed that.” The Air Force guy was a little hyper himself. He kept drinking these "energy drinks," so he wouldn't miss a stop where he could get off and smoke a cigarette. In between times he worked a PPS (portable play station), tried to trade games for it with other people on board, and organized card games in the "lounge." He was here, there, then everywhere. By the end of the trip I was thinking, how can this guy possibly be in the military. I didn't see any i.d. or uniform, but maybe he was....
Amanecer en la Florida. The hardest part was sleeping in the seats. And oh! The get-off-to-smoke deal was a little complicated. The train made about a dozen stops, but only a few were long enough for smokers to indulge their habit. One fellow didn't make it back on, somewhere in South Carolina in the middle of the night. "Hey!" says the Air Force guy. "That bald guy got left behind!"
Apparently this was not uncommon. "The train didn't leave him," said the conductor, breezing by. "He left the train."
Thirteen hours after leaving Raleigh the train rolled into Orlando. The fare was $49, about the same cost in gas if your car got 30 mpg. If the trains were cleaner and faster, it would be a pretty good deal, but I guess "path dependence" says we keep the cars for a while longer, anyway.
Jim Kunstler’s latest rant includes some comments on an article about California’s proposed high-speed rail project, which appeared recently in the New York Times. (See Kunstler’s link at right.) He quotes:

It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas.... It would have been nice, too, if ... George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart...
...The sad truth is it's too late now. But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !).

It should be noted, too, that Jeb Bush, when he was governor of Florida, vetoed a plan to develop a “bullet train” between major Florida cities. We’re sure it would have been prohibitively expensive, especially in light of the history of Miami-Dade’s Metrorail boondoggle.

Still, with the maxing out of regional airports and the increasing price of gasoline and crowding of interstate highways, it would be nice to think that safe and economical rail travel might once again play a part in the national scheme of things.

The younger people I met on board seemed uniformly enthusiastic about train travel. Maybe it was the ability to move around and talk to other people while traveling. There are already a great many “Amtrak” groups on Facebook for fans of train travel.
Would I do it again? Well, maybe. As soon as I recover.

Changes in Blog Links

2009-06-01T17:48:00.000-04:00

Jim Kunstler's blog, Clusterf**k Nation, has a new URL. Jim is an acerbic, opinionated son of a gun, but he predicted the spike in gasoline prices right down to the day, almost. Author and speaker, he's been sounding a continuous Jeremiad against American urban planning, or the lack thereof for years. He's also an artist--maybe not a Rembrandt, but his paintings (sample above) evoke a certain sense of upstate New York, where he makes his home. His blog is always worth a read.
Tom Kemper (who I can't remember if I ever met personally or not) has left Key West after a ten-year sojourn. His heart is in the right place, and we'll stay linked to his Bahama Village Blog for a while longer. You can't say he didn't fight the good fight on that crowded island, reminding us that paradise might well be best experienced via a short vacation, or even better, seen at a distance from the surrounding seas. (After almost forty years on the islands, I'm still amazed at how the local political dynamics work. No,if you wrote a book, nobody'd believe it. 'Nuff said: when ignorance, is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.)
Good luck to ya, neighbor.

Oh! Almost forgot! I've added Rock Trueblood's Watchworld to the blog list. He's got a lot of economic news. But scroll down for some great insights into the current real estate situation in Key West. As usual, when the rest of the country catches cold, the Keys get pneumonia. Some heavy info there, and don't forget to check the comments, even if you have to read between the lines.

A DIfferent Kind of Freedom

2009-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Recent rummaging in old boxes led to the discovery of a few weathered slides, some of them recording a madcap junket made decades ago, when my friend Capt. Jim Leonard saw an advertisement for a cheap trip to Guatemala--"Guatemala Ganga!"-- in the Sunday Miami Herald. Jim owned and chartered a 27 ft. catamaran in the Florida Keys and avidly followed any news of multihull designs and exploits. Mark Hassal, a friend of celebrated trimaran designer Jim Brown, had built one of Jim Brown's Searunner designs, and had sailed it around the world, heading west, from California to Guatemala.
Things were slow in the Keys that spring. This was the year of the Nixonian gas shortage; you could have shot a rifle up US 1 mid-afternoon and not hit a thing. As not much else was happening, we decided that it would be a worthy adventure to go to Guatemala and check out Mark Hassal and his boat in person.
Guatemala had just had an election, and there was still a degree of unrest in the capital. We headed for the Caribbean side, where Mark was supposed to be living. After driving for miles through clouds of acrid smoke (it was slash-and-burn season) we came to a river crossing. Some boatmen said they actually knew him, and took us to what they said was the only place to stay: a "Stage One" resort on a nearby island, which had purportedly been a training camp for the Bay of Pigs invasion twelve years before.
Word of our arrival went out via jungle telegraph, and that evening we were pleasantly surprised to see a 37 foot trimaran come ghosting out of the shadows to make a perfect landing at the island's dock, and Mark Hassal stepping ashore. After a couple hours of most engaging conversation he and his wife Bonnie agreed to take us down to the mouth of the river to Livingston the next day. Livingston was then a remote Garifuna village, seldom visited by outsiders, although we did meet some German hippies living in stick huts and an Irish nun at the local school.
Needless to say, I'm leaving a lot out in this short narrative. On the river trip Mark pointed out the very few riverfront homes owned by wealthy Guatemalans as we went by. Of course it wouldn't do, we were told, for a foreigner to invest in any such thing. If it were too nice, it might be coveted by a bigwig from the city, and you might have no choice but to give it up to him. Mark himself lived in a simple but incredibly striking native-style structure right on the river, self built with the aid of a chain saw and a few local friends. But in spite of the government and sociological realities of the place, he found his situation on the river to be the most agreeable thing he'd found after a near-complete circumnavigation of the earth. "It's a different kind of freedom," he said.In those days there was an old van up and down the Keys with the words written on the back. "When reality starts expanding, it's time to start truckin'." Although that slogan always annoyed me, I wondered how long it would be before reality started expanding on Mark and Bonnie. We'd hear reports from people who visited down there from time to time that they were still there and doing well, and it turned out that paradise for them lasted a good fifteen years. I stumbled on their exodus story here. It's a interesting tale for those with a little time and patience. The most poignant section (on page five) clearly sums up why the Hassals "...needed to get out of the Rio Dulce. It was time. Past time."
Reflecting back, I'm grateful (and a little amazed) we were able to travel like that on a shoestring budget. And for all our occasional national self-deprecation, I still prefer the type of freedom we have here.

Was Gibt's Hier Dann?

2009-05-15T15:29:00.000-04:00

Da sprangen ploetzlich in dem “Live Feed” Fenster eine grosse Menge deutscher Fahnen. Warum waere das? Die Meisten kamen aus einem Google-sucht fuer “quem ad finem” an. Vielleicht hat’s was mit Schularbeit zu tun.

So warum nannte ich dieses Blog “Quem Ad Finem”? Zuerst hatte ich die Idee, eine Rede gegen politische Schaendlichkeit (besonders in meiner Heimstadt) zu machen. Und welcher bessere Name waer’s, als etwas von der historischen Rede von Cicero gegen die Schaendlichkeit seines Zeitgenossen Catilina?

Ich entdeckte bald aber, das die Redensarten der zwei ersten Saetzen (“Quousque Tandem?” und “Quam Diu Etiam?”), schon im Gebrauch von anderen “Bloggers” als Blogtitel waren! So musste ich den Anfang des dritten Satz fuer meinen Blogtitel wahlen.

Und das is warum, du “Quem Ad Finem?” hier findest.
Hoffentlich geht’s alle gut aber mit der Schularbeit.

Und nach Jahren auf einem kleinen Floridainsel haben wir endlich auf’s Land umgezogen. Hier geht’s besser, weit von der Schaendlichkeit entfernt. Noch eine Geschichte....

Country Funnin'

2009-04-30T22:52:00.000-04:00

I’d gone up to the house to have a cup of coffee, when the truck from the lumber yard pulled up. Running out to greet the driver and show him where I wanted the lumber put, I saw it wasn’t one of their regular drivers, but a big, younger guy with a heavy Southern accent. He was shouting something over the truck engine. I couldn’t understand him, and came along the side of the truck so I could hear him better. “Beg pardon?”

“I just killed a snake,” he said, coming around the back of the truck. Just then I caught sight of an orange and yellow object coiled up on the open bed of the truck. I jumped back.

“See?” he said. “You don’t like ‘em either.” No, I don’t. I lived in a place in Central America once where there were just a few too many of them for comfort. Sometimes people would be bitten by them. But then again, I don’t go around killing them just for the heck of it. Most of them are shy, retiring, and actually beneficial.

“I stopped up here, right on the dirt road,” he said, pointing behind him, “to check the load. I thought it was comin’ loose. And there it was.”

“It was in with the lumber then?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “it was layin’ there right in the road. So I got him with this.” He held up a steel pipe, used to turn the winches that tighten the straps that held the load down on the bed of the truck. The snake, although badly damaged, was still moving.

“You know what kind it is?” I asked. I know corn snakes and milk snakes were fairly plentiful around here, and have basically the same coloring. I figured a country boy would have a name for it.

“No, I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t care what they call ‘em, I don’t like ‘em.” Apparently he didn’t have a name for it. “I’m gonna have me some fun with it, though.” We went ahead and started unloading the truck. He explained to me what he meant.

“My boss knows none of the boys in the yard like snakes. Kenny and the old black guy both hate ‘em. So he’s always putting them in the truck when they go to make a delivery. Now I never go out without checking under the seats, behind the seats, and in the glove box. Just like checking the oil, fuel and water, gotta check all them places.

“But, whoo-ee, I’m gonna have some fun with this one. Not sure where I’m gonna put it yet, but I’m gonna get ‘em back good.” He got a large piece of plastic out, and picked up the snake with two sticks, and rolled it up in the plastic. It was then I noticed that it had sort of a triangular head.

He threw the rolled up plastic into the cab of the truck, backed it around and headed out. “Y’all have a good one, now!”

It’s sort of unusual for any snake to be out on the road in the heat of the day this time of year. And I’d never seen a snake that looked like that around our place before. I’m not convinced that snake didn’t come out of the load of lumber when he stopped.

When I got back to the house, I looked it up, just to be sure. No doubt about it, it was a copperhead.

Slouching Toward Emmaus

2009-04-13T23:42:00.000-04:00

A recent Newsweek article states that the number of Americans identifying themselves as "Christian" has declined by ten percent in the last twenty years.

A young friend of ours was no exception to this trend, even unsure about what denomination his family had identified with at one time. "Methodist, I think we were. Or maybe it was Baptist. No--Methodist--that's what it was." He found out later that it was Baptist, for what it's worth, and he's still pretty much a stranger to the inside of a church. But an unusual happening a few years ago got him thinking, maybe there is something to this whole business after all.

His work with a construction company took him up and down Florida's east coast. One day while grabbing a quick lunch at a fast food place in Deerfield Beach, an older woman whom he described as a homeless person, came up and placed something in front of him. "This old dirtbag gives me a napkin with a bible verse written on it. 'Luke' something. I threw it out and didn't think anything more about it."

"Then get this. A few days later, I'm in Miami, thirty or so miles south of there, and the same woman comes up, and hands me another napkin with the same verse written on it! I remembered it from before: Luke 24:32."

He was going to say something, but when he looked up, she was already out the door and disappearing into the crowd. "I mean, what does this mean?" he said. "Is this old lady going into every fast food place between Deerfield Beach and Miami and handing out the same bible verse written on a napkin? That's a lot of fast food places, man."

He got a bible, and looked up the verse. "It said, 'Weren't our hearts burning within us as he walked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?'

"It's about these two guys meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and all. He lays out the whole thing for them, they invite him to lunch, and he just disappears right in front of them, like into another dimension. That's when they realized who it was. They were the first ones to see him after, you know, what happened."

"And the Old Testament tells exactly what was going to happen. It's all in there. You just need to look for it."

So, is He still causing hearts to burn on a modern-day road to Emmaus? Or is there an elderly lady who visits fast food joints along Florida's concrete canyons, handing out napkins scribbled with a scripture verse? Or both?

The Best of Times....(Updated)

2009-03-19T22:31:00.000-04:00

A recent article in the Key West Citizen brought to light something that many of us have been maintaining for years, but that you don’t see in the local media or in broadsides from the chambers of commerce: the Keys are “fished out” and have been for years.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Loren McClenachan compared 13 groups of "trophy" reef fish caught by recreational anglers using photographs taken in Key West from 1956 to 2007. The mean fish size declined from about 44 pounds to 5 pounds, and there was a major shift in species caught. Landings from 1956 to 1960 were dominated by large groupers, including goliath groupers, and other large predatory fish were commonly caught. In contrast, landings in 2007 were composed of small snappers. The average length of sharks declined by more than 50 percent over 50 years. Major declines in the size of fish caught were not reflected in the price of fishing trips, so customers paid the same amount for a less-valuable product, McClenachan said.
(Published Tuesday, March 17, 2009)

Many of the early pictures of massives catches were taken by Charlie Anderson, a Keys photographer who also had a highly entertaining and informative radio show on Marathon’s WFFG for many years. The station’s advertising of the time stated that WFFG stood for “World’s Finest Fishing Grounds.” And the Keys undoubtedly were. A combination of shallow waters, protective mangroves, combined with the proximity of Florida Bay and the blue waters of the Gulf Stream, provided a plentiful assortment of sea life to be harvested.

With the right kind of bait you could be sure of catching enough fish for your dinner. Visitors from the north were amazed when, after a mere five minutes with no action, I would insist on trying another spot. “Hey, you’ve got to give it at least an hour,” they’d say.
“Nope, not here don’t,” I would answer. You could usually manage to catch mangrove snapper, mutton snapper or grouper just by going to specific places, all within a short distance of home. That’s how it was back then: the fishing was that good, and it stayed good right through the sixties and seventies. By 1980 things were changing forever.In the recession of ‘74, instead of doing something sensible like going back to school, I took a job at a fish company in Marathon. The fish business was still good. Local waters provided a living for hundreds, and the abundant Keys seafood was a draw for winter visitors all over Florida. From August through March thousands of pounds of lobster came across our docks. From October to May huge vats steamed stone crab claws on a daily basis. In the fall cold weather brought schools of mackerel, kingfish, and bluefish. Drift netters came down from the west coast of Florida to harvest their share of the catch. Tons of mackerel were shipped to freezer plants in Miami and Tampa every day for months.These mackerel fisherman supplemented their income by selling trophies from an occasional by-catch. (Jaws was in the theaters that year.)

And there was always a steady supply of fin fish: yellowtail, snapper, and grouper. Our company sold first-class local product to every restaurant from Ocean Reef to Key West.
When I came back to visit after having been out of the Keys for a couple of years, around 1982, a lot of things had changed. Very little local fish were being caught, yet they were still busy fileting what looked like local fish. "Nope," said the boss. "All of 'em are flown into Miami from Honduras or Nicarague in these white vats." He estimated the percentage of local seafood being sold in the Keys at about 10%. The change in the situation was due to many things. You'll still hear some people saying it's the government regulations that killed it. "There's still plenty of fish out there." The fact is, because of increasing population pressure and demand, the oceans around there simply got fished out.Even if we do arrive at a "maximum sustainable yield" for some species, there are others that simply will never be widely available again. For instance, when was the last time you saw a pompano on a menu?Still, looking back, I gotta say it was a most interesting time. It was fun working in a mainstay industry of the Keys economy. It was altogether a special time in a special place. Some of the friendships I made have endured for years. And the fringe benefits: excellent, with a little bit of drawn butter.

Oh! Almost forgot! Here's the way the place looks now (compliments of Google Earth).
That's right, it's a condominium development. Gone are the boats, fishermen, mates, traps, trap sheds, bait lockers, freezers, fishermen's homes, the whole shootin' match. O Tempora, O Mores!

Stretching the Rubber Band

2009-03-01T23:16:00.000-05:00

Larry was a heavy dude. Some said he’d been a biker for years. I knew he’d bummed around the Caribbean for a while. There were tales of smuggling of immigrants and such, although no one knew for sure if they were real or just talk. His rougher edges had been smoothed out to a degree when he shacked up with an artistic broad, a girl clever enough mentally and big enough physically to keep him under some degree of control. I knew him through her, so I suppose it was his softer side with which I was acquainted.

Still, there was talk that he popped a daily ten-milligram Valium tablet with his morning coffee, just to make sure that he could maintain a veneer of civility with his fellow man. In fact there were very few people that he could stand,. Out of a dozen or more Americans on the job there were only a couple that he could tolerate, by his own admission.

In addition to these peculiarities, he was also seemed to be one of the cheapest human beings I had ever met. The guys he lived with claimed he even had his own roll of toilet paper that he kept with him, unwilling to chip in for a general supply, given the possibility that one or more of his companions might actually waste this commodity. Thus I was surprised to find out that he was spending large sums of money on pre-arranged Voodoo ceremonies.
The first hint of this came when I inspected his concrete form work before a pour. Strange symbols began to appear regularly, drawn on the outside of the plywood forms. At first I thought this no more than an artistic impulse on the part of one of his workers, similar to the graffiti we sometimes saw on urban walls at home. I made no mention of it, because Larry’s crew was working like a well-oiled machine, accomplishing a great deal of work and pouring a new section of the project almost every day. The drawings continued, and became more elaborate.

One day there was a relatively rare occurrence. A form “blew out” during a pour. The plywood (which we reused until it became too worn and weak) had ruptured due to the pressure of the concrete. The place where it broke was right in the middle of one of the drawings. I pointed that out to Larry, and his response was inappropriately vague. It wasn’t till one morning, after another successful pour, that we noticed a series of black banners waving from the reinforcing rods over Larry’s project that it became clear. Something funny was going on. I went down to talk with Larry.

That’s when the story came out. He would confide in me, but I was the only American, with the possible exception of his boss, Jim O’Brien, who should know about this. He’d been talking with his men about his likes and dislikes (and general paranoia), and they had suggested that he consult a kind of voodoo operative called a bocor, who could cast spells and the like. For a nominal fee, the bocor had provided him with a specific potion, which, when applied to the face, elbows, and knees, would give him certain protection or powers. He showed me a clear bottle filled with what looked like a Haitian moonshine called clairin and various sticks and roots which I took to be herbs. He splashed a little out in his hand and spread it over his face, which I did notice had taken on an odd glow in the last month or so.He’d felt that the initial contact with the voodooists was so successful that he had ordered another series of private ceremonies. He was instructed to drive to a certain place near a cemetery after dark, to park and wait. After a while a young boy came out of the woods, and without speaking led him through the dark along a series of paths. After an hour they emerged from the woods, and there were more graves and a mausoleum-like structure. Larry had the feeling that they were back near where they had started, but wasn’t sure. There they were met by one of the men on his crew, and several others who played the role of zombies. Inside the mausoleum was the bocor. The crew member acted as interpreter. Voodoo dolls were set up representing various people Larry didn’t like, and they were stuck with nails, lit on fire with alcohol, and so on. Larry said at one point the bocor covered his arms with alcohol and lit it, but miraculously he wasn’t burned. One of the curses he requested was that everyone on the job that he didn’t get along with (which was just about everybody) would be eliminated, in one way or another.
The next day I mentioned to O’Brien what Larry had told me. At one time in his life O’Brien himself had been fascinated with primitive religions, and had actually traveled to Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti, and (so he said) Brazil to study Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs. “Tell him what he is doing is incredibly dangerous!” O’Brien said. “He is fooling around with low-level psychic phenomena, and it will lead to nothing but trouble!”

I told Larry what O’Brien said, to little avail. "He actually thinks it's gonna happen!" That afternoon the whole American crew got into a labor dispute with O’Brien (who had been on the job for two years without a break, and who had been acting a little testy). They went to the airport en masse to confront the big boss coming in from Jamaica, to present their grievances. What they didn’t know was that the money to complete the job had been held up, and the higher ups were at that very moment looking for a way to lay off a dozen men. When he saw them at the airport waiting to confront him with their demands, he just said, “Well, sorry, we’re out of money, and you’re all going home tomorrow anyway.”

For the next week Larry was walking around with the look of a crazed madman on his face. The ceremony at the mausoleum was worth every penny he had paid for it. He was planning another ceremony which he thought would secure him a permanent position with the company, and several other things about which he wouldn’t elaborate.

I told O’Brien he has walking around like the cat that ate the canary. “Tell him to desist! Tell him he is stretching a huge rubber band taught, and it will break and come back and hurt him!” I can’t remember if I passed this warning on to Larry. I’m pretty sure he continued with the ceremonies. Soon, however, he broke up a fight between two men. One was an old Tonton Macoute we had hired as a labor boss. The other was a younger citified guy with indeterminate duties, who was, however, a protege of the paterfamilias of our Haitian partner, thus not a man to be trifled with. The two got into an argument, and the young fellow had the old Macoute on the ground and was about to do him in with a sledge hammer, when Larry grabbed him from behind and pulled him off the guy. We had to let the man go, because of the assault.

He turned around and sued Larry in Haitian court for $60,000. (This is the amount the Haitians believe every American had in the bank, at a minimum.) The funny thing was that all the witnesses agreed with the plaintiff, that he had been basically minding his own business when Larry assaulted him for no reason.

Larry left for the airport two days later. To his horror his name was on the proscription list: those who would not be allowed to leave the country until any claim against them was settled. But his last name had been misspelled by one letter, and he was allowed to escape.

I think despite O’Briens’s warnings, the whole affair had a beneficial effect on Larry. Some time later I got a card and photo from him. After Haiti he’d cleaned up, shaved his beard, and gone back to Ohio and joined his family’s business. He’d gotten married to a nice hometown girl. In the photo he was wearing a three-piece suit and standing in front of a Cadillac.

Hang Angela Davis Now?

2009-02-06T08:39:00.001-05:00

This old slide, showing a billboard advertising Islamorada's Theater of the Sea with some grafitti of the era, taken on Long Key in 1971, recently surfaced.
A thirty-something friend of ours, upon seeing it, said, "Huh? Who's Angela Davis?" I was completely taken aback for a minute, thinking, "What? Don't they teach history in our high schools any more?" Then I realized that I couldn't remember what she had done to engender such rancor, especially in the faraway Florida Keys. I had to look her up in Wikipedia.
Reflecting back it's remarkable how much the country has changed. And how much better off we are than those who live in places where ancient slights and schisms still claim people's lives.

Love Mock, Attack Real

2009-01-29T23:46:00.000-05:00

(Islamorada, FL) A lady scuba diver from a Midwestern state narrowly escaped injury through the quick action of fellow divers, who frightened away a 400 lb. sea turtle which was apparently attacking her from behind. It was surmised that the marine reptile, not known for the acuity of its eyesight, mistook the woman's twin tanks and backpack for the shell of another turtle, and its advances were of an amorous nature.
The woman was reportedly wearing twin tanks, and a type of buoyancy compensator which was popular at the time (a SeaPro ATPack) which contained lead shot in lieu of a weight belt, (pictured above, also available in darker colors). The turtle recognized it as another shell, and proceeded to climb atop it in an aggressive manner. Some eyewitnesses maintained that the reptile gave the woman's black dive hood a playful nip. Earlier reports that it had punched a hole in her wet suit were discounted.

The Law's Delay, the Insolence of Office....Cutting the Gordian Knot

2009-01-29T23:09:00.000-05:00

AT&T Inc. announced (a week ago) Thursday that it will cut 12,000 jobs – or about 4 percent of its global workforce – citing the slack economy along with corporate reorganization and declining demand for traditional landline telephone service.
At the same time they've also apparently started a more "flexible rate" policy. If you tell them that you can't afford to continue their services, they might give you a slight break in their rates.
Rare and fortunate is he or she, however, who has not at one time or another been ensnared in the Catch 22 of timeless bureaucracy. A man in upstate New York had to regain his commercial drivers license ab initio, with all the attendant costs, despite the fact that the problem originated not with him, but with a mistake made by the Department of Motor Vehicles. At least it was outrageous enough to make the news.
AT&T is certainly still coming out with an attractive array of products, if their ads are any indication, and their remaining employees are excellent at touting and selling new services. But you have to wonder if maybe they should have kept one or two people capable of cutting the Gordian knot. I now have an inch-thick folder of correspondence and notes to prove my point.
In the middle of last October we left an apartment we had rented temporarily in North Carolina, and called AT&T to have the phone and Internet services turned off. At the same time they talked us into ordering a pay-as-you-go cell phone, to get us through the time we would be without a regular phone. So far no problem.
When we got the next bill, we were being billed for a month's services in advance. We called, and they said ignore that bill, because you'll be getting a final bill in a few days. That same scenario has been repeated for four months now. We've spent close to four hours (no exaggeration) on the phone with them, and written four or five letters. Each time they say first that we didn't have the service terminated, but then they check it and say, OK, it was shut off, and you'll get a final bill in a few days. But all we get is an ever-growing bill (it's up to $400 and change now) and an occasional letter saying the bill is going to a collection agency.
Oh well, hope springs eternal, and maybe the fifth time's the charm. Hope so, anyway, and hope you are luckier....

Wisdom of the Ages

2009-01-27T23:33:00.000-05:00

A number of years ago a friend sent me this card from an underage drinking establishment of our youth, a piece of memorabilia which has recently resurfaced. I don't recall seeing much dancing or dining in the place, contrary to what the card says, and can't imagine them catering a party, much less a banquet. It was located in Arbor Hill, even then a predominantly black section of the city. A long, dark "ladies' entrance," smelling vaguely of sweat and ancient vomit led to a darkened interior that looked very much like the inside of a log cabin. A political wink of the eye, so to speak, seemed to keep the authorities at bay, and the lads could get a six-ounce draft beer for ten cents without the inconvenience of showing a draft card. Needless to say, the place was a magnet for the more adventurous youth from uptown and the suburbs. OK, we loved it.
It's only with the resurfacing of the card that I noticed the doggerel on the reverse side, something we young swells would have dismissed as the Runyonesque ramblings of the retired World War I vets and other reprobates who were fixtures at the bar at the front of the establishment. Ironically I have now lived long enough to see it, despite the inventions of viagra, cialis, and other concoctions, as a timeless truism. Unless, of course, we could go back and have a couple more of Mike's clam cocktails....

More Bob Anderson: Let Us Now Praise Famous Authors

2009-01-13T01:32:00.000-05:00

“The works of William Gaddis are taught in the freshman English classes of all the great universities across our land,” Bob Anderson often said. He was proud of the fact that he was not only an acquaintance of the man now often acknowledged as being one of the greatest of American postwar novelists, but that he had actually entertained the celebrated author in his own home.

Bob had worked for CBS in New York for many years (claiming, in fact, to be the one who "discovered" Andy Rooney: an apocryphical tale to be related later), eventually "burning out” sometime around the early Seventies. He and his wife Annie sold their New York digs and moved to Jericho, Vermont to settle Bob's jangled urban nerves. They say Jericho’s now a bedroom community for Burlington, but back then it was an out-of-the-way rural place. Bob and Annie busied themselves making Tiffany-style lamps out of stained glass and selling them by mail order, a business they continued until the day Bob figured out that the hourly return on their labors was substantially less than the existing minimum wage, and retired altogether.They’d also acquired a house in Key West near the current Key West Seaport, which was then still a working commercial area of shrimp docks and fishhouses. One of their neighbors was a local grande dame of some renown who for a period of time ran an ongoing salon of, well, original Key West characters, the real kind who gave the place its zany reputation, but who are now for the most part extinct, displaced by generations of poseurs and arrivistes, as predicted accurately by Ernest Hemingway 70 years before in his novel “To Have and Have Not.”

It’s told that eventually the doyenne tired of hosting her parade of characters and one day without explanation threw them all out, withdrawing the welcome mat forever, but not before Bob had made the acquaintance of a young lady from New York who was William Gaddis’s second wife, Judith.

Before Bob and Annie journeyed back to Vermont in the spring, they extended an invitation to the Gaddises, through Judith, to join them for a country weekend at their place in Jericho. The appointed summer weekend was established and the invitation accepted, and although hindsight might have dictated a “let’s not and say we did” scenario, a commitment having been made, the Gaddises were obligated, for better or worse, to make a trip up to Vermont.

One can only imagine the arrangements made in Jericho that week leading up to the day of arrival, the weeding and mowing, the trips to the ABC store for the proper wine and spirits, the preparations for a perfect and memorable feast, the proper positioning of various pieces of memorabilia throughout the old farmhouse for conversational purposes. “William Gaddis is coming! William Gaddis is coming!”

About three o’clock Bob started to get worried that he hadn’t heard from them. They were, of course, on their way, and he’d send specific directions on how to get to his house. On the other hand a lot could go wrong. But if for some unfathomable reason they weren’t coming, they would call.

Instead of worrying about it, Bob decided to raid the liquor locker for a “stiffener” to steady his nerves. It’s a long trip. They probably set out late. They’ll come rolling in soon.

Nowadays people drive with their ears glued to a cellphone. People have even been killed in accidents while diverting their attention from the road ahead to the text messages of their cellphones. But as recently as 30 years ago, especially in Vermont, making a telephone call, especially a long distance telephone call, was not as simple as punching in a few numbers on a hand-held device. You’d have to find a pay phone and go through an operator, and you’d better have a handy supply of quarters to feed that pay phone, providing it was working.

Bob checked the phone at the farm house. There was a dial tone. It was in good working order. He’d better hang it up though, because they should be calling any minute. He strode out onto the front porch, looking down the empty stretch of Route 15. There was hardly a car in sight on that warm Vermont afternoon. He went back in and poured himself another drink.

Around five o’clock the phone finally rang. They were at a general store about forty miles south on Route 7. They got lost on some back roads in upstate New York. With a little luck, they’d be there in an hour.

By the time they finally arrived, Bob, having taken counsel of his fears that they weren’t really coming, had already had a few too many. Of course the guests had a long day’s drive, and a little attitude adjustment was in order. There was an obligatory round of drinks before supper, and what kind of a host would not join his newly arrived guests in a libation? Bob had another one.

When Annie finally brought out her feast, Bob was already entering a phase of incoherency. Raising his hand to make a point, he slumped forward, passing out face down in his dinner plate. Judith said all she could remember, when he came up, was that he looked like a Santa Claus, because of all the mashed potatoes in his beard.

I heard this story from Judith. Bob never mentioned it. He did say now and then that he’d known and admired William Gaddis. Perhaps he’d forgotten that he’d been carried up to bed by one of the greatest of American postwar novelists and two women.

We Are What We Eat

2008-12-17T00:16:00.001-05:00

MSNBC ran its program on Jonestown again the other night.

(For the few who might not have been born yet when the events at Jonestown took place thirty years ago or who are otherwise uninformed, an American religious leader, Jim Jones, led over nine hundred of his followers to the jungles of Guyana, South America, to set up an experimental agricultural colony. He went completely mad, and induced almost all of his followers to take their own lives, and the lives of their children, mostly by drinking Flavor-Aid laced with poisonous cyanide.)

Someone commented, “What planet were they ON?” Answer: a very small and compact planet, the Jonestown settlement. And the mind-control aspects of cults are well known, as is the fact that for every charismatic, manipulative leader there seem to be dozens, if not hundreds, of unquestioning, sheeplike followers.
But there’s another aspect to the Jonestown situation that the documentary touched upon only briefly. The original plan was to create a self-sustaining agricultural settlement, but coastal Guyana’s poor tropical soil doesn’t lend itself to traditional agriculture. The people had been living on a diet of rice and little else for months, while working and living in tropical heat. Their bodies were depleted of minerals and salts. Most of them must have been suffering from borderline malnutrition, notably the lack of certain vitamins necessary for mental acuity. They became passive and more likely to accept anything they were told. So it was easy for Jones to talk them into mass suicide.

Some years ago in Haiti I witnessed a similar scenario, although in this case the preacher himself was the victim. Earlier in the day it had rained. The boss was checking on some equipment in one of the sheds on the site, and slipped on the rain-soaked wooden stairs. He somersaulted down the steps and came down hard on his back, breaking a scapula. I drove him to the Hopital General in downtown Port-au-Prince in the hope of getting an x-ray of the shoulder and some sort of medical treatment.

Although the hospital itself seemed like something out of the pages of Dante’s Inferno, they did have some x-ray equipment, and the staff did their best to accommodate us. The process took the better part of two hours. During this time a young, earnest blond-haired American showed up at the hospital. He seemed extremely upset. He said he was a missionary from a Pentecostal denomination, one that I wasn’t really familiar with.He said that he was living in a small country town on the southern peninsula, and that he had been there for about eight months. He felt for sure that Satan was up to his old tricks in the village where he was working. Just the day before, for example, a woman caught her four year old daughter stealing, and to imbue her with a sense of Christian morality, she immersed the girl’s hand in a pot of boiling water. By morning it appeared that this may not have been such a good idea, however, and the missionary, the mother, the little girl, and some townspeople began an arduous day-long trip, fraught with mechanical breakdowns and misadventure, into the capital in search of medical help. “I can’t help but think that Satan followed us here tonight!” said the young man, his eyes searching the trees in the darkened street beyond the hospital. It was apparent that the guy had been having a rough day. A long trip in a series of Haitian tap-taps is a wearing experience, even for a young person. Still, his whole body seemed to be twitching unusually.

“So, you’ve been out there in the village this whole time?” I asked. He said that he had. “And what kind of food do you eat?” I asked.
“I eat what the people eat,” he said. “I didn’t come here to lord it over them and have my own special food. What’s good enough for them is good enough for me.” It was then I noticed that he had sores on either side of his mouth. I remembered from somewhere in my past (an eighth-grade science class, perhaps?) that this was a symptom of some kind of deficiency disease, like pellagra or beri-beri. (It’s actually caused by a lack of vitamin B-12 in the diet.)
“Dude, I’m not a doctor,” I began, “but I think it’s really a good idea to take vitamin pills while you’re here. I mean, I do, and I feel much better.”

I was about to tell him about the sores at the sides of his mouth, and how it was caused by his diet, when one of our Haitian engineers rushed into the hospital. He’d heard about the accident via the jungle telegraph, and had come looking for us. He’d already made arrangements for the boss to be examined at a private hospital in Petionville, where one of his cousins was a doctor.

I went to wish the missionary good luck. He was still looking out at the trees into the darkened street outside. “Look! Was that a bat?” he said. I never ran into the guy again. I hope he remembered to buy a bottle of vitamins before he went back to the village.

Monkey Island

2008-12-11T19:53:00.000-05:00

The Rhesus Monkey (macaca mulata) is native to Asia, its natural range encompassing northern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan, southern China, and some neighboring areas. They have close-cropped hair on their heads, which accentuates the expressive, humanoid appearance of their faces. They are an adaptable species, acclimated to many habitats, including some in close proximity to humans. This is most common in India, where they are associated with Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. A few troops of introduced rhesus monkeys reportedly now live wild, not only in Florida but also in South Carolina!Monkeys used for research come from private labs which raise them for that purpose. This was the source of the moneys that escaped to form the South Carolina colony. In the early seventies colonies were set up on two offshore islands in the Florida Keys.
We’d heard stories about these islands. When we acquired a used canoe a number of years ago, it seemed downright tempting to paddle out quietly for a closer look. It was a long and strenuous paddle, especially before we figured out how to use the tides and winds to our advantage. (Time your arrival with the low tide; that way you’ll take advantage of the outgoing tide on the way out, and the incoming tide on the way back in. Stay in the shelter of islands as much as possible in an adverse wind; use a following wind to your advantage.)
Once we got out there, we were treated to an exotic sight, an alien species adapted to our local ecosystem. The monkeys seemed to form troops of ten to twenty individuals. They expressed curiosity about us, but interestingly would not look any of us directly in the eye. When it became apparent that we were staring back at them, they would quickly avert their glance.
Another odd thing was that each troop seemed to have a slightly different appearance. The face color on some groups was more reddish. Others seems to have a more yellowish cast. Although we’d been told that they didn’t swim in salt water, we saw a group of twenty or more leap out of the trees from one side of a narrow creek, swim a few strokes, and disappear into the trees on the other side.By the late 90's tree-huggers were convinced that the monkeys were denuding the islands of vegetation and polluting the water. It’s certainly true that one of the islands had had a good deal of its mangroves stripped of leaves. We never saw any major evidence of pollution in the water. In any event the monkeys were gradually evacuated, someone said to similar islands in the Bahamas.

Life in the Keys Back When

2008-12-04T21:24:00.001-05:00

This picture of the two vessels at the dock in Miami always fired up my imagination, picturing an idyllic, probably non-existent, vision of a simple, romantic island life of time gone by.

As my old friend Charlie Hordt used to say, “The good old days? Forget it! What was good about ‘em? Everything was harder then.” The early islanders lived without refrigeration, telephones, radio and TV, screens on their windows, penicillin, automobiles, or power tools.

Maybe so, but we still cling to an idealized vision of times gone by, whether it’s to the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Wild West of TV and cinema, or to the Leave It to Beaver years of post-WW II America. Some would call it “escapism.”

A digression: Looking at that picture more closely now, I see that the American flag and Union Jack have 48 stars, making it post-1912, when New Mexico and Arizona were added to the union. 1912 was also the year when the Overseas Railroad was completed.

Ironically the advent of the Overseas Railroad meant the beginning of the end of island schooners like the two boats in the picture. Produce and seafood from the Keys could now be shipped by train to Key West, and more importantly to Miami and points north via refrigerated railroad cars.

For sailing buffs: We don’t know where the Crosland was built. But we do know that the family had a commercial fishery in Marathon for many years. The Crosland itself appears to be considerably larger than the Island Home. The article linked here (Keyshistory.org) indicated that the Island Home was close to 60 feet on the waterline, and weighed over 40 tons. We can also assume that by this time both boats probably had auxilliary motors. Neither of these boat’s owners were without means, and the addition of a motor greatly improved the craft’s manuverability and ultimately its survivability.

Christening of DETROIT (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

This is a photo of the christening of the Detroit, the first gasoline-powered vessed to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a trip it made in 1912. (So it's most likely both of the Keys vessels in the photo were equipped with gasoline engines by this time.)

And after all, what’s wrong with being an escapist? You’ll certainly never have to worry about office politics. There’ll be no need to dress down for “casual Fridays.” And you won’t have to worry about what a tranch is.

What was life like on the Keys before the railroad? Most of the settlers came by boat from the Bahamas. Miami was just a small settlement on the river. Some of the Keys had shallow wells, where settlers could take advantage of the fresh water lens that floated atop the heavier salt water below. Additional amounts of fresh water were obtained seasonally from cistern that held rainwater.

On most of the Keys the land could be cleared to reveal a rich topsoil overlying a sandy layer. On rockier areas natural sinkholes filled with years buildup of composted organic matter were also used to plant melons and fruit trees.

Did the settlers lead a “South Pacific” tropical island life? Or was life for them "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"? Well, neither extreme, it would seem, but there was no doubt they were tough. They lived without electricity, window screens, running water, air conditioning and fans, and most of the conveniences that we take for granted. Early census records list the professions of the settlers as farmers or “seamen.” All of the families must have had boats or some sort, most likely Bahamian type sloops. Some settlers were also listed as “charcoal makers.” Charcoal was needed for cooking, both locally and in Key West.

With the arrival of the railroad most settlers on offshore islands moved to the main islands where they could take advantage of the convenience of the trains.

Oddly, some time after the civil war, a relatively large settlement on Vaca Key, which is now the city of Marathon, disappeared without explanation. Whether by disease, depredation, or simply discovering a better place to call home, the families who were recorded as living there simply disappeared. (I always thought this story would make a good plot for a book or movie.)

A few people in the twentieth century emulated the lifestyle of the earlier settlers. Russell and Charlotte Niedhawk were two of them. When I lived in the Upper Keys in the 70's, many people knew them and spoke highly of them. Their interesting life is described in a post from Conch Scooter’s blog.

Others, many of whom would just as soon stay anonymous, have made homes for a time on the offshore islands.This idyllic setting was the home of an affable retired fire chief on one of the offshore islands. We met him while visiting on a camping excursion in 1995. The building was basically in ruins when I took this picture about ten years later. He left it sometime in the 1990's, before the island was raked by Hurricane Georges in 1998, and further damaged by Wilma in 2005. The last we heard the property had been bought by a fishing guide, who just visits it from time to time.

"The good old days? Forget it!" Yeah, but it's nice to think back to a quieter time, to a quieter place, if only in the shadows of our minds.

Leon Learns About Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T20:32:00.000-05:00

Here’s a picture of muh old pal Leon catching his first barracuda on a camping trip in 1995, just before the following events took place. He was at the beginning of an extended American sojourn when I met him, possibly the ritual Czech equivalent of a German’s Wanderjahre. Our first meeting coincided with my realization that I would never have to lift another heavy sheet of plywood again, if I were smart enough to hire someone else to do it for me. I employed Leon as casual labor for most of the following year.

When Thanksgiving came around I did my best to explain to him the nature of that beloved American holiday. I left out the political niceties of the Mayflower Compact, but touched on the story of the Pilgrims’ first year in America, how they had lost half their shipmates the first winter, but finally had harvested their first crop, and how they took time to thank God for their deliverance, and invited their native American neighbors to a meal which we still commemorate to this day.

And of course I invited him to spend the day with us, to enjoy a good meal, maybe watch some football, and to see what our custom was all about. His attitude surprised the heck out of me. He would have no part of it!

"In the first place, that means that I must to go one day with no pay, and this sucks. In the second place this sounds like some kind of religious fanaticism, and if that’s what you want, fine, just leave me out of it. I have been warned about this. If I cannot work, then I will go fishing."

He came to work the next day and quietly went about his duties. After a while he told the following story.

Yesterday I mad because no work. So I go fishing all morning. Then I go to get lunch. I see this guy Ricco who sell food from stand with umbrella by street. I go him and get sandwich and drink. I say, “ How much?” and he say me, “Nothing.”

I say, “Nothing? What for, this?” And he say me, one time on this day he have no food. He living on street in Miami. Someone feed him there. And he say, next time, when I can, I will give food away on this day. So every year he do same thing. So no pay.

“That’s pretty interesting,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Leon. “So now I know, what you mean.”

Now THOSE Were the Days

2008-11-14T13:33:00.000-05:00

Here's a photograph of an old photograph discovered recently. Years ago I borrowed it in order to make an oil painting of it. I made the painting and gave it to the photo's owner, but kept the photo intending to make another one, something I never got around to.

The photo shows two Keys fishing vessels, the John B Crosland and the Island Home, at the docks of the Miami Fish Company, presumably on the Miami River in Miami. The Crosland, a gaff-rigged sloop, appears to be about 60 ft. on the waterline. She's flying the American flag, a JBC flag, a union jack, and what looks like a Mexican flag.

The photo's owner had no information on the photo, other than that it was taken on the Miami River. The painting had been left at Crosland Fisheries in Marathon, Florida, after the property was sold. The original fishhouse was torn down, and the site is scheduled for a condominium development.

Update: Here's an interesting bit of history concerning the Island Home.

Looking for a New Church

2008-11-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

The thirtieth anniversary of the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana will be this November 18th. MSNBC has been showing a documentary on that event (it's scheduled to be shown again this weekend, November 15th and 16th). 913 people gave up their lives, more or less voluntarily, on that day.
How did so many people get caught up in that madness? The documentary reminded me of this tale from a then 17-year-old, and how his family dodged a bullet, so to speak. (His mom was a "shoestring relative" through marriage. Something of a hippie, she had moved her family to rural Ukiah, California in the late 1970's. Her son told this story on a camping trip around 1982.)

We were living in Ukiah, and my mom decided one day that it would be a good idea if we started going to church. "Everybody should belong to a church," she said. There was a new one near us she'd heard about. A lot of people were going to it. It was a different kind of church. It was called "The Peoples' Temple." I don't remember much about the service. Music and talking, I suppose. There were a lot of people there, and they seemed friendly. But what got us was these guard towers all around, with guys with guns in them. I mean, what was the point of that? It sort of creeped us out, and we never went back, not to that church.

A lot of people got caught up in a lot of crazy things back then, and we suppose they still do today. That family has had their ups and downs, but Jonestown was one bullet they were able to dodge.

Moral: If your church sports a guard-house, you'd better keep lookin'....

The Canary in the Coal Mine

2008-11-12T18:03:00.000-05:00

Back in April, when we were voting in Florida's non-binding presidential primary, I ran into an old acquaintance, who always had a unique opinion on current affairs. (E.g., "Obama can't make it. Don't waste your vote.") (He looks a little like the drawing at left, just add captain's hat, goatee, and twin tobacco stains. Yet he's considered a guru by some, and has an impressive local following.) Some of his recent jags have been: Cambodia, the next place to invest (and live,) and Nicaragua, the unrecognized real estate investment of the century. ("You can buy a hacienda for a few pesos down.")

I asked him what his current predictions were. "Well, after doing considerable research on the world financial situation, I have decided that the best and safest place to put my money is Iceland, yes that's right, Iceland. I'll soon be investing everything in Icelandic Kroners."
We haven't seen him to confirm whether he bought the kroners or not. If he did, we suspect he's laying low. Iceland's over-leveraged economy crashed in a major way this fall. Financial analysts are referring to it as "the canary in the coal mine." How Iceland gets out of its fiscal jam will be an indication of whether it's going to be possible for the rest of the world to get out of theirs.
The accompanying pictures are part of an Icelandic ad campaign in response to British PM Gordon Brown's use of anti-terror legislation to freeze assets of Icelandic banks in Britain.

No, none of these people pictured look like terrorists to us. They do look like poor suckers who got caught up in a messy situation like everyone else in the world.
And now the proverbial canary has kicked the bucket. In a coal mine you sound an alarm, put on an emergency breathing apparatus if you have one, and head for the nearest elevator.

In the real world you make arrangements to protect whatever assets you have, and make preparations to deal with whatever may come. In Iceland that may include preparing yourself to eat fish in the dark.

L'Ado Francais

2008-11-10T19:05:00.000-05:00

It's said that America has a love-hate relationship with France. Sure, they helped us win our Revolution, and we bailed them out in two World Wars.

A couple of years ago some friends entertained their 15 year old French nephew at their home in Key Largo for the summer. The idea was that the lad should learn English. He seemed to acquit himself well with the locals, and spent many an hour shooting baskets with new friends at a nearby court.

We thought it was only right that he should be treated to a canoe and kayak tour in the Lower Keys one day.After all, the Keys are a unique environment, and there is a lot more to the place than a basketball court and a few video games. He can have that at home. So we set out on one of the mangrove creeks. His uncle had been an exchange student in France years ago, and was able to explain the names of the birds, fish, and other marine life we saw on our excursion. Ever trying to be the obliging host, I attempted an occasional pleasantry based on my one formal year of study of the French language (bolsterd by a passing knowledge of Haitian Creole, and a recent trip to Canada). After all, the boy had come here to learn something about our country, and hopefully to pick up a few words in English.

When we got back to the launch site, his uncle went off to find a restroom. The kid (who hadn't yet uttered a word of English) turned to me and says, "Yo, flip me the keys to your truck. I'll turn it around for ya."

It was one of those cases where you're not really sure if you heard what you think you heard. "Excusez-moi?" I said.

"Your keys, man. Let me have the keys, and I'll bring the truck around."

"Why, you little son-of-a-gun! You mean to tell me you've been able to speak English the whole time? And you let me struggle trying to explain things to you in French?!"

He answered in his own language, with a smart-alec grin. This time I got the gist of it. "Well, you need all the practice you can get, man!"

Memo to my monolingual countrymen: You were right. They can speak it. They just don't want to!

Captain Tony: A Living Legend Passes On

2008-11-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

Click Here for some more recent news.

News item: Anthony "Captain Tony" Tarracino, "Mayor Emeritus" of the city of Key West, charter boat captain, saloon owner and visionary character who brought world attention to Key West, died Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008, at the age of 92.

About two years ago I walked into an Office Depot store and was surprised to see Captain Tony standing at a copy machine, busily making copies of something. I asked him what he was up to.

“Just printing some pictures of my 90th birthday party last week. I’m glad I saw you. Here, take one.”

Like any successful politician, Tony acted like he knew you even if he didn’t. (I had met him many times, going back to the 70's, but then so had thousands and thousands of other people.) Tony had something more than the knack of remembering faces, though. He had the gift, when he talked to you, of making you think that you were the only other person in the world that mattered.

For all his fabled exploits--gun-runner, bar owner, fishing guide--with his rare ability he would have been a success at anything he tried. He could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos, if he’d wanted, and make them glad he did it. If we could somehow bottle that knack of his, and spread it around, the world would definitely be a better place (and a lot more fun.)

Much has been said and more will be said about Captain Tony. Tony himself would probably admit a lot of it is just “b.s.” The simple fact is, he was a really nice man, and he had a great time. We should all do so well, before moving on to that Great Dog Track in the sky.

The Mysterious Maya

2008-11-03T23:09:00.000-05:00

Back in the Eighties when we lived for a while in Belize, rumors abounded of a brisk illegal trade in Mayan artifacts. The locals were tight-lipped about it for the most part, but one did hear stories of certain government honchos (long since departed) who, among others, were a conduit for this profitable business.

On one of our rare weekend excursions to the hinterland we ran into a couple of guys who worked for our company emerging from an even more remote area. They raced past us in a battered, mud-splattered Land Rover. In the back they had shovels and digging tools.

I'd been an afficionado of Mayan archaeology since discovering a copy of American explorer John Lloyd Stephen's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan while visiting friends in Mexico a few years before. I knew that grave-robbing and trading in artifacts were destroying any chance of learning the history of the vanished Mayan civilization. Sooner or later science would find a way to decipher the hieroglyphic writing on their ancient monuments. (And indeed, in the ensuing period, intelligent and incredibly patient archaeologists, after a lifetime of work, have cracked the Mayan code.) But the archaeological value of a hieroglyphic carving or a piece of art is much greater when it is discovered in situ, rather than by itself in a private collection far removed from its original place of origin.

Our chance meeting with the local guys led to a few discreet inquiries later in the week, and human nature being what it is, one night not long thereafter they showed up at the house to show off their loot. They actually came a couple of times. The first time I remember that they had things that looked like they might have been authentic, including pieces of green stone they claimed were jade. They were covered in mud, as if they had been recently dug up.

The second time they came they brought statuettes that they also said were jade, but they weren't green--they were a lighter, softer stone, and looked suspiciously like the kind of things that you can buy today at any schlock shop along the "Mayan Riviera." These, too, were covered in mud, but also had small fibers on them, as if they'd been buried in someone's yard, and grass roots had grown around them. Yes, there were also rumors that a few clever people, including some enterprising archaeology students, had taken up the practice of manufacturing and selling some convincing but completely fake artifacts. All in the interest of financing their own legitimate studies, of course.

But one piece they showed us did catch my eye, the granite disc shown above. It was only with considerable persuasion that they consented to allow us to photograph it. It was about ten inches across. The reverse side was concave, like a shallow dish. There were no signs of modern tool-marks on the piece, and it was difficult for me to imagine any modern-day person taking the time to create something out of such hard stone, just to pass it off as a legitimate artifact. I mean, with the skill and work involved, wouldn't there be a way to use those skills and effort to earn an honest living?

Later I had a print made from the original photo, which was a slide. I sent the print to National Geographic, explaining how I'd come by it, and how I thought it might have historical significance. After all, it does seem to show two priest-kings having some kind of palaver, and the glyphs up the center look like they might be an important date in Mayan history. Maybe I'd done my small part in saving this valuable piece of the Mayan puzzle.

A few months later they sent the photo back, along with a snide letter saying: "It's obviously a fake. Even the glyphs are wrong (you idiot), they're backward."

OK, so the photoshop must have turned the slide around by mistake. You'd think that the people at National Geographic would have considered that possibility. Then, again, maybe granite discs like this are commonplace souvenir items. But I've never seen one like it. So I still wonder....

Choosing A President, Then and Now

2008-11-02T22:03:00.000-05:00

Throwing out some junk today, I found this old 2" x 3" print of Nixon campaigning at the capitol in Albany in the fall of 1968. (He's in there somewhere, along with Nelson Rockefeller and a few other bigwigs of the time.) Nixon was running against unabashed liberal Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was a compromise candidate, chosen in a tumultuous convention in Chicago that summer, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. 1968 was a tough year for Americans.

Since Nixon's defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, the public consensus had been "Nixon can't win." He'd given a bitter exit speech, telling the press "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more." He sat out the 1964 Goldwater debacle, but campaigned actively for Republican candidates around the country in the 1966 congressional elections, and accurately predicted the gains the Republicans would make that year, re-establishing the "new Nixon" as a viable candidate.

He cleverly exploited the voters' yearning for a return to "normalcy" amid the sea of changes in the Sixties. He'd been Eisenhower's vice-president. Ike had ended the Korean conflict. Nixon claimed to have "a secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. He used a slogan he claimed he saw on a poster held up "by a little girl" at one of his rallies: "Bring Us Together." Historians will continue to ponder the root causes of what came to pass during his six years in office, but at the end of his presidency the nation was more divided than at any time since the War Between the States.

Are there any parallels between that election of forty years ago and the election that will take place in a couple of days? It's said that the "Imperial Presidency" ended with Nixon's disgrace. We no longer write the word president with a capital 'P,' as we once did. But the power of the presidency and the power of the federal government continue to grow, so that the daily lives of all Americans are affected by what happens in Washington (as we've seen in the continuing "bail out" legislation).

McCain and Palin are calling for massive cuts in federal spending, and playing to the "Middle America" that Nixon exploited so well. They've convinced a great many voters that Obama is a "socialist." They favor winning a war that has already gone on longer than World War II, but which has neither clear objectives nor a successful exit strategy, in spite of the lessons learned in Vietnam.

Obama, on the other hand, has based his campaign on the notion of "change." He's been purposely vague about his plans to bring peace and to restore prosperity, especially in light of the arrival of our day of economic reckoning. Few politicians refer to themselves as "liberal" any more, although the liberal paradigm has actually been the warp and woof of our national domestic policy since Roosevelt. In this race Obama is clearly the liberal.

So what are the parallels? We'll leave that b.s. up to the talking heads. Suffice it to say, whoever wins, let's hope he doesn't go wacko on us like Nixon did.

And one other observation: politicians are like diapers; it's a good idea to change them often, and for the same reason.

Peace, out.

A Set of Cojones

2008-11-02T07:12:00.000-05:00

Back in May I mentioned that a friend, Bill Estes, was running for County Commission and posted a link to his campaign website (see links, upper right). I told him that I really admired his courage, because when you run for public office (as one insider told me, as if it were a revelation) "they'll say terrible things about you." And Bill was taking on one of Monroe County's powerful "Gang of Three."

Bill had moved to Key West after retiring from Ma Bell and opened a small dive business. He soon became involved in Key West's longest zoning battle, when he bought a condo unit in Key West's Truman Annex Shipyard Condominiums, a development which had been promoted originally as "affordable residential" housing, but which soon morphed into resort condominium units rented hotel-style to tourists. Bill is a big, easy-going sort of guy, so it wasn't a surprise that before too many years had passed, he became chairman of the local Democratic Party.
Bill (and the small handful of full-time residents of Shipyard) lost that battle, although he had plenty to say about it, and moved to a more traditional neighborhood, but didn't sell the condo right away, so with the decline in real estate prices, basically had to hang onto it for a while.

Now, a few days before the election, the local paper prints a story that candidate Estes hasn't been paying his condominium "maintenance fees" ($550 a month: so much for "affordable"), and that the condo association had placed a lien on his property. (Gasp!) Bill explained that he's in the middle of a "short sale," and that everything will be settled up if and when they close on the property.

Conclusion: It does take guts to run for public office. And "they" will drag up anything they can, including fiction if necessary, and you can be sure, "they" had the computers whirring, trying to dig something up. In this case, if that's the best "they" can come up with, Bill's a pretty good candidate.

Postscript: Both candidates remaining in this race, Bill Estes and Kim Wigington are fine candidates. Kim's been "beaten up" as well, and has certainly paid her dues. Both candidates are a testimonial to our country and its Constitution: "regular" people still have a chance to be heard and to be elected.

The Eve of All Hallows

2008-10-31T13:27:00.000-04:00

As long as I can remember (and that's a long time, Bubba!) our Key West neighbors have hung these stylized "ghosts" from an overhanging Bouganvillea bush in front of their house, so you'd have to duck on your way over to the local 7-11. It's one of the little things that make Old Town a charming place, in spite of the changes of the last few years.

This picture was taken right after Hurricane Wilma in late October 2005, a situation which accounts for the absence of leaves on the foliage. It's a mute testimony to the spirit of the Conchs. This part of town, where the houses date back to the latter part of the 1800's, was the one part that didn't flood.

Overheard at the Pump

2008-10-30T21:39:00.000-04:00

Bunch o' the boys, and one gal with a conspiracy theory were pulled up at a gas station down Fayetteville (NC) way this week. Up until recently North Carolina had the highest gas prices in the nation. Something to do with Hurricane Ike, someone said. Both Barack Obama and John McCain were in town that week. One o' the boys said that the gas prices coming down had something to do with the fact that Obama was up in the polls. The gal said she figured the same thing: somebody was fixing the prices according to the political polls.

All this got us to thinkin'--could there be some connection? It does look like there's some connection between gas prices and which way a state is leaning in the upcoming elections. Just take a look at that red streak coming down from North Dakota, right down to Texas and across the once solid South. The red streak ties in nicely with the greens and yellows on the gas price map, showing that were gas is cheap they're voting Republican. (An aside: we always wondered how the Republicans got the red color, and the Democrats got blue. Someone said one of the TV networks started this, and it stuck. One o' the boys said it should have been the other way around, because as everyone knows, Obama's little better than a Socialist, and Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Communists have always favored the color red.)

The places where gas prices are the highest, like the West coast and the liberal Northeast, are leaning toward the Democrats. Now, an exception is the western states. Arizona and Utah have expensive gas, but Arizona is McCain's home state, and in Utah, as everyone knows, Mormons, like Baptists, almost always vote Republican as a matter of faith. Wisconsin and Minnesota are also an exception, but they've always gotten snookered by the liberal-progressive line, ever since that guy LaFollette stirred up all that trouble way back when. And West Virginia, they're in the red column even though they're on the expensive side gas-wise, but those hillbillies are hard to figure. They have kept a Rockefeller in the Senate all these years, after all.
So what's it all mean? When gas prices are low, people vote to keep the status quo? That makes sense.
Or could there be a committee down in Houston or over in Dubai manipulating gas prices according to the presidential preference polls? That's what that gal thought, but it sounds like a lot of work, especially since they seem to have Congress under control anyway. And both candidates are members of Congress.

It's said that in times of uncertainty, people come up with all kinds of theories to explain events they don't quite understand. And these are interesting times.
I think it's safe to day, whichever way it goes, most of us will be glad when it's over.

Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings....

2008-10-26T23:13:00.000-04:00

We took another informal, admittedly unscientific poll recently, of friends, acquaintances, and their offspring. The sampling included a great range of thirty-somethings who live in all parts of the country and a few college students as well as their parents. A few of the parents are "East Coast Liberals," but most of them are conservative business and professional people, and not a few are Southern Christian fundamentalists.

Here's the surprise: No one under the age of forty is planning on voting for McCain. With one exception all of them are going to vote (or have already voted where early voting is available) for Obama.

The one exception, a young man from the Mid-South, is going to for for McCain-Palin, because "She's hot." (Sorry, folks, it's true....his vote counts just as much as yours does.) Of course this is far from a scientific statistical sampling, and much can still happen in the next week, but the momentum does seem to be on the Obama side.

What does all this mean for the Republicans? There's some evidence that the Republican--Fundamentalist marriage is on the rocks and may soon be as dead as the Reverend Falwell. And there's talk of Palin's "going rogue," and positioning herself for a leadership role in the aftermath of this year's projected loss.

Another possibility: Our poll also showed a number of disillusioned conservatives planning to vote Libertarian this year, to protest the Republican's failure to scale back the size of government despite all their rhetoric. Perhaps, as in the past, the emergence of a credible third force will lead the "out party," in this case the Republicans, to incorporate that party's agenda into its own. If that happens, and if the boys back East don't find a way to blame their loss this year on her, look to Palin to play a major role.

The Weather Witches Hit a Home Run

2008-10-26T22:07:00.000-04:00

We told ya so,
We told ya so!
The Weather Bureau has access to all kinds of data, from satellite photos to ocean temperatures to computer models. But in recent years their long-range predictions of hurricane activity have been wrong as often as they have been right. Years ago farmers, fishermen, and just plain people who spent much of their time outdoors would develop an intuition about the weather, which often worked its way into local folklore.

Earlier this year we tried an experiment to see how the predictions of the "weather witches" would hold up, compared to the forecast of the experts.

We took a non-scientific poll of old timers, both male and female. There are some that will say the number of hurricanes is related to the relative abundance of land crabs. Others will say it has to do with the migration of land turtles across the road (from Ocean to Gulf, mind you), or the temperature of near-shore waters. And there are others who just seem to have an inchoate sense of knowing.

So here is this year's prediction: there will be two strong storms, both of which will probably miss us. Conditions will be reminiscent of 1979, when Hurricanes David and Frederic threatened the Keys, but passed us by.

Now that the 2008 hurricane season is (we hope) basically over, let's see how they did. Yes, two strong storms did threaten the Florida Keys this year, Gustav in August and Ike in September, and they both missed us. (Now, what happened with Ike in Cuba and Texas is a different story.) Hurricane Fay did pass right over Key West, but it was a dud. Last week's freak rainstorm did more damage than any of this year's hurricanes.

So what's the conclusion? Well, obviously sometimes the experts are wrong, and Aunt Gabby is right. "The Ark was built by amateurs," she would say. "The Titanic was built by experts." Now if we could just apply the same principles to the stock market, or the real estate market, for example....stay tuned.

PS: The original prediction, made in June 2008, is here.

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

2008-10-24T20:13:00.000-04:00

Sometimes things creep up on you. Here it is Halloween already, at least in Key West.

Our neighbors in Key West just sent us a potpourri of pictures taken in front of their house a couple of hours ago (Friday, October 24, 2008).
(Hey kids! Here's Grandpa and Grandma on the right!)

Two days ago Key West was bailing out after a record 7+ inch rainfall. It looks as if the drenching didn't damper the spirits of the annual Fantasy Fest revelers.

Key West's annual "Fantasy Fest" developed from an informal custom of adults donning costumes for Halloween. In the Seventies the city hosted the first formal parade, which developed into an annual week-long festivity of parties, fund-raising events, and outrageous antics, temporarily tripling or quadrupling the island's population of 30,000 or so.

The celebration has only been postponed one time, after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. For locals the event marks the end of the summer doldrums, and a barometer to indicate how successful the coming tourist season will be.

Friday night's parade is only a sampler of what the official parade on Saturday night will be like. (Can you imagine all this going on right outside your front door?)