Gnocchi or Cavatelli

I've often wondered why Mom always said she was making "cavadeellie" from leftover mashed potatoes when we were kids, since actually she was making gnocchi. Not that I knew it at the time. I don't think I ever heard the word "gnocchi" until some time in the 1970's or 1980's, when Mom, paradoxically, had started making actual cavatelli, with ricotta instead of potatoes.

Anyway, today I made gnocchi from some leftover mashed potatoes. They went down just like Mom's old cavadeelies, but not so elegantly. Mine were all shapes and sizes. It turns out to be hard to get them nice and uniform. Mom and Aunt Mary no doubt had those little mocking smiles on their faces if they were looking down this afternoon when I was struggling with that dough.

In other news: Sam and Don and I went down to Norfolk last weekend to take a tour of the Enterprise. It was good to see and walk around the old ship again, especially because, just by chance, the Ensign who served as guide for the group we joined is the Assistant First Lieutenant and thus happens to hold the same job title that I had back in the day (after I had spent a year as a Division Officer and more or less knew which end of the ship was the bow and which was the stern).

His job function is hugely different from mine since he got his commission via OCS after rising to First Class Bosun's Mate as an enlisted man, so he actually knows a lot about the management of the anchors, the mooring winches, the ship's boats and such, and he actually functions as the Ship's Chief Bosun. I was more or less the administrative assistant to the First Lieutenant, helping with paperwork that required an officer's signature and overseeing the department watch bill and duty assignments and such so the young department yeoman wouldn't be bullied too much by the petty officers. In port the job took me a couple of hours a day in the office, plus a couple of hour long walking around tours to check the various department spaces and go over stuff with the Division Officers.

Underway I was on a one in three rotation on the bridge; so the department management function was a duck in to the office and do a couple of hours of paperwork every couple of days sort of thing; and I did wandering tours of the department spaces on the way to and from bridge watches.

It was good to stand up there on the bridge and go back mentally to those heady days when the captain left the bridge and trusted me in charge out there, back when Enterprise was still "the largest warship in the history of the world," as he put it to me when he qualified me as Officer of the Deck. Heady days. The 1MC box next to the Captain's chair still connects to all those innumerable watch stations throughout the ship that could call in the middle of the night to report a problem or an emergency.

Mostly, even an actual emergency could wait on a decision for the few moments it took to call and wake up the captain in his sea cabin so you could explain the situation to him and get orders that you would merely pass along for action. But occasionally there would be an emergency that couldn't wait, one that needed orders right now; and you informed the captain after you had actions in train to put things right.

Then to, every so often there would be a merchant ship that was clearly in a privileged situation that suddenly and inexplicably changed course and put you in a situation where you had to maneuver right now to avoid a collision, and inform the captain only after you had given the necessary helm and/or engine orders, while the ship was already in process of making the unexpected change in course or speed. It was very gratifying when he merely gave you a "very well" over the phone after you had reported on what you had done, or when he came out in his bath robe, looked around and listened to what you were up to for a few minutes, or perhaps asked a couple of questions, and then quietly left the bridge to go back to his cabin.

One thing I noticed is that they've cluttered up the windows on the bridge with a whole lot of electronic equipment that was not there in 1971 and 1972. Back in those days we figured the course and speed for flight operations with a circular slide rule, and we kept track of nearby ships and did maneuvering board solutions for collision avoidance by hand on plotting sheets. They have special dedicated computers with touch screens for that stuff now.

Into the tunnel

It's getting cold around here. Yesterday, for the first time, I lit the woodstove during the day when it became clear that the sun would not emerge to warm up the house. And we're now down to a pitifully small selection of remaining ripe tomatoes from the garden. Later today I think I'll go down and gather the reasonable sized green ones. I expect we'll be getting our first frost any day now. There's also a picking of Swiss Chard down there.

I'm happy to report that the good guys appear to have triumphed once and for all over the naysayers at Wikipedia. The entry for Xenopus now correctly states that African Clawed Frogs can live into their twenties. There was a period a few years ago when I went back and forth several times with a denier at the site who refused to let my editing of that page stand. In the course of checking on the matter recently I found that at least two others have reported on their own long lived Xenopuses (Xenopi?) on the web.

Assuming those web sites are to be believed, William the Frog lived to be 21 years old and the unnamed frog at Downend School lived to 30 years old before dying in 2001. My Xenopus is now about 23 or 24 years old so he (or she - I remain too lazy to check on the matter) may now be the oldest in the world. At the least my frog appears to be the oldest one in the world that is memorialized on the web.

For the record he's still quite spry and active over there in his bowl, still quite capable of moving the rocks around and splashing noisily to get attention when he hasn't been fed for a while. And he's still possessed of plenty of energy and will to present a problem when it's time to put him back into the bowl after I change his water. One of these days I need to give him the run of the house again to see how high and far he can jump.

On to other business. I've been rereading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels over the past few weeks. And the other day I came across his assertion that Admiral William Mitchell of the Royal Navy had not only started his career as an enlisted man but had moreover managed to rise in rank after having been flogged around the fleet for desertion. According to the words O'Brian puts into the mouth of Captain Aubrey, Mitchell was an impressed man at the beginning of his career and he deserted his ship multiple times in order to continue a liaison with a young lady ashore. After having been several times been recaptured and punished with moderate floggings by his captain he decided to go the sea lawyer route and demand, as was his right, a court martial. Big mistake! The court martial board turned out to be a bloody minded one that decided to make an example of him in order to deter others. He was sentenced to receive five hundred lashes in a boat that was rowed from ship to ship so the sailors of the whole fleet could view his punishment.

The Wikipedia entry confirms that Vice Admiral Mitchell originally joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman; but it casts doubt on the flogging around the fleet story, saying that no official records exist of that event and that it's only provenance is a story told several years after his death. It remains potentially true however, because according to Wiki a whole chunk of Royal Navy records covering the early years of Mitchell's career are missing.

This interested me because when I served in USS Enterprise from 1970 to 1972 my boss was Lieutenant Commander Jack Henrizi, who said he was (at that time) the most senior unrestricted line officer in the navy who had started his career as an enlisted man. As I recall Commander Henrizi was careful to mention that he had worked his way up to Chief Petty Officer before becoming a commissioned officer; so it may be that there was a more senior grade officer who had started as seaman and then had immediately (more or less) been recommended for Officer Candidate School on the basis of test scores or such.

Jack Henrizi was nn interesting man with quite an extensive and colorful vocabulary. I vivedly remember the chewing out he gave me and the Fourth Division officer after the party pavilion at Subic Bay Naval Base somehow came to be burned to the ground during a joint party we had convinced him to let us hold for the nearly one hundred men of our two deck divisions, much against his better judgement. That was some party. And Commander Henrizi was some stand up guy. He took the whole brunt of reporting the incident to Captain Peterson, who never mentioned the matter to me or Mike Murphy even though he saw us every day on the bridge when we stood OOD watches.

Shortly after he retired from the navy in about 1974 or so Commander Henrizi was killed by a drunk driver who lost control of his car and came across the center lane of an expressway in California.

Update: I'm not the only one in the world with too much time on his hands. Behold - sheep fireworks - The nighttime sheep game of pong is neat, but you have to watch to the end to see the fireworks.

Billions, Three Million and a Trillion

A long time ago in a galaxy far away a Senator named Everett Dirksen famously said, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money." Back then in the 1960's McDonalds was still bragging about a couple of million burgers served, so a billion bucks was a lot of moolah.

A bit after that, in late 1970 or so, a Supply Department Ensign I had gotten to know asked me over breakfast aboard the Enterprise if I could help him out with a little task he had to do preparatory to our departure from Norfolk to go around the Horn to San Francisco. I said "sure."

Shortly I found myself with a .45 on my hip, the first I had ever worn a pistol like an old west gunslinger. I did have some prior experience shooting a .45, although never very accurately after the first shot taught me how violently that sucker was going to kick back each time I pulled the trigger. Later, when I stood in port deck watches alone in Seattle aboard a reserve fleet Destroyer Escort, I again wore a holstered .45, but for all I know that gun wasn't even loaded. We were so blase' about the Navy aboard that ship that I never checked it when it was handed over to me for the watch, and my reliefs never checked it when I handed it over to them.

Anyway, outfitted like Audie Murphy, I joined the Supply Department Ensign, also sporting a loaded .45, and two Marines carrying loaded M16s in a Navy car headed for the a local bank off the base. He went in and was soon followed out by two guards carrying three big suitcases between them.

There followed a somewhat comical loading of the car which ended up with the other officer and me in the back seat weighed down and immobilized by a suitcase on each of our laps, our .45s inaccessible. The Marine in the right front seat was also immobilized by a suitcase on his lap. The two M16s were propped barrel up between his legs, wedged between the suitcase and the dashboard. So much for the security detail of the three million dollars in small bills that we had just picked up. Thankfully organized crime was not very efficient in Norfolk in 1970, so we reached the base alive and still with the suitcases, which we carried aboard the ship without incident.

I carried one of the suitcases up the gangway, so I can attest from personal experience that handling a million dollars in twenties, tens, fives and ones is very much comparable to handling a fifty pound sack a potatoes, quite a few of which I moved around at Harry's Potato Market before I became an Officer and a Gentleman. Both at Harry's Potato Market and in the East End of Norristown I occasionally came into contact with people who would not have spent much time wondering what to do if confronted with four nearly helpless minders in a car carrying three million Simoleons - three thousand Large. Train robberies and bank robberies have been carefully planned and carried out for less.

The Supply Department Ensign who planned that little evolution obviously grew up in a very different kind of neighborhood from the one where I grew up. Also, after a little conversation with him, I realized that he simply didn't think of what was in those suitcases as the kind of money someone might want to steal. To him it wasn't money, it was payroll. A few weeks later he was amused when I showed up at the disbursement window with two beefy petty officers to pick up a trivial little tuck under the arm package of bills that I needed to pay the amounts that the 200+ member Deck Department had requested in cash when we carried out our one and only payroll payment at sea. He just couldn't understand why I might think there could be one sailor among the five thousand in Enterprise who could be both smart enough to observe the parade of officers picking up cash and tough enough to hit one of them over the head for perhaps twenty grand or so.

So much for history. In the realm of current events tThe link below will give you a very good graphic idea of what a trillion Benjamins look like. Barry and his Homeboys and Gals in Congress have spent more than that in the past couple of weeks.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Direct TV, The Big E's Hood Ornament and Seaman Recruit Johnson

I'm waiting here for the Direct TV guys or gals to come and install their satellite dish, hoping that the ones assigned to come here haven't been blown off a roof on one of their previous calls. The wind is positively raging out there. I wouldn't be surprised if it's gusting to sixty miles an hour as the weather people warned.

We used to restrict access to the flight deck on the Enterprise when winds over the deck exceeded 50 miles an hour, not an uncommon thing if we were steaming to get somewhere at twenty-five or thirty knots. At those kinds of wind speeds there was a real risk that an eddy would pick up a light sailor and fling him over the side. Not a good thing, even if he could swim and he was seen to go overboard. The flight deck was about sixty feet off the water.

At lower wind speeds we were often treated to the sight of a tall slim black sailor who liked to. . . Wow! I just saw a tree down by the pond break about ten feet off the ground and fall. That tree is about fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter, but it may have been weakened by rot. It's been dying and I've been thinking of cutting it for firewood for a couple of years. That's the first time I've ever witnessed the fall of a tree that I didn't cut myself or watch a neighbor cut.

I watched our neighbor on the right hand side as you go out the driveway fell an almost twenty four inch in diameter tree onto his house one day a few years ago. He didn't look like he knew what he was doing, and I almost went over to talk with him about the danger; but I didn't know him, so I figured it was best to keep quiet. He was lucky that the top of the trunk of that tree was rotted almost through because that caused the top to break off when it hit the house. If that top hadn't broken off it would have done a lot more damage. A two foot in diameter tree that's maybe eighty feet tall weighs a lot.

Anyway, that slim black guy on the Enterprise liked to position himself in the very center of the flight deck at the bow like a hood ornament. He would lean forward into the wind like a ski jumper. I never saw him from deck level but many was the hour that I glanced at him periodically from the bridge, wondering what was going on in his mind. When we were steaming up along the coast of South American toward San Francisco after going around the Horn he used to be out there much of the day almost every day that it was sunny.

Later, when we steamed across the Pacific he was again out there almost every sunny day, to the point where it was a standing joke for his status to be passed along to me when I relieved the Deck, and for me to report it on to my relief, along with course and speed, any expected changes of course or speed, any new standing order, any unusual conditions and such.

"The ship's hood ornament is in position and maintaining an approximately thirty degree lean into the forty knots of wind over the deck. The Captain is aware of his status." That's what I reported if the Captain had been on the bridge to personally observed the fellow during my watch as was usually the case. If the Captain hadn't been on the bridge I would tell my relief that "his status has not been reported to the Captain."

Captain Peterson used to glance at the hood ornament with his binoculars from time to time when he was reading message traffic or doing paperwork up in his chair on the Port wing of the bridge on such quiet days. The reason we knew for sure that the hood ornament's habit was okay was because the Captain had seen him and said nothing. And he wasn't the least bit shy about mentioning his preferences if he saw something he wanted changed. He had, for instance, given some very explicit direct orders the day we both noticed Seaman Recruit Johnson being escorted off the flight deck.

Johnson was still ambling around, obliviously taking pictures, quite a while after I had had the word passed over the 1MC for all nonessential personnel to stand clear of the flight deck. The Captain noticed Johnson from up in his chair. My Junior Officer of the Watch had the Conn and there was nothing except our escorts anywhere around the horizon; so I was free to quietly and discretely watch Johnson from a position a few feet behind the Captain's sea chair, hoping that he would get below before he was noticed by anyone else except the flight deck personnel who were assembling to do a FOD walkdown.

Very shortly thereafter Seaman Recruit Johnson was personally escorted to the bridge by the Chief Master at Arms and a Flight Deck Boatswain's Mate Chief after I informed the Captain that there was no reason to pass the word for his Division Officer to report to the Bridge since I was his Division Officer. Johnson was well meaning and willing, and more or less harmless; but he was also easily the dullest knife in my 50 man Deck Division, which was saying a lot. Captain Peterson merely grunted very meaningfully after I informed him of those facts in the appropriate technical human relations and supervisory terms.

A bit later Captain Peterson, who could become a bit volatile at times when provoked, had a surprisingly calm and quiet personal chat with Johnson, who had surely been coached by the Chief Master at Arms to properly request permission before entering the Bridge and whose chambray shirt was fully tucked fully into his pants, clear evidence of coaching. He was somewhat winded from his hasty several deck climb up to the Bridge. The two chiefs were less winded than Johnson; but they were a bit red-faced as they waited with me on the Starboard wing of the Bridge for the Captain to finish with Johnson. None of us would have been altogether surprised if the Captain had summarily ordered his Marine Adjutant to shoot Johnson right then and there; but as I said, the conversation stayed very calm; and it ended quite peacefully with Johnson marching over in an almost military fashion to report that the Captain wanted to talk to the Chief Master at Arms.

While we waited for the Captain to finish with the Master at Arms Johnson told me that the Captain had mostly asked him questions and talked with him about his home town, and why he joined the Navy, and how he liked the Navy and why he had been on the flight deck. Johnson also reported that the Captain had said he thought Johnson could be a real asset on the Mess Decks. He had also counselled Johnson that he really must make a special effort to listen up when announcements were made over the general announcing system, especially when he was on the flight deck or the hangar deck.

After Johnson and the Cheif Master at Arms left the bridge the Captain had a pointed little chat with me. Seaman Recruit Johnson, the Captain told me, was to be sent TAD to work with the mess cooks; but that would not to change the fact that he would remain a part of my division and thus my special responsibility. I was to meet with him briefly at regular intervals for counselling.

Thus it was that I got to know Seaman Recruit Johnson as well as I got to know any of the sailors in my Division. I met briefly with with him every couple of weeks for the remainder of the time I served in Enterprise; and I passed on the counselling duty to the Ensign who relieved me as Second Division Officer. If Johnson has continuously re-upped in the Navy for the past thirty- seven years he may still be mustering with the Second Division of the Deck Department; and he may still be being sent, every day, to do temporary duty assisting the mess cooks. He turned out to like that duty since he liked to eat and there were always sailors passing through the mess decks at all hours of the day and night to talk to.

As far as I'm aware Johnson got into no further trouble in the Navy except for the time when he was fingered as the sailor who almost surely opened a large valve in the salt water washdown piping system which he had no business touching. That earned me an invitation to briefly visit with the Engineering Officer in Main Control after a damage control party traced out the entire piping run and figured out why certain things happened which were not supposed to happen when the system was tested.

I had a somewhat intense counselling session with Johnson after that incident in which he admitted in his whipped puppy dog way that he "might" have turned the valve handle a little "to see what it did." He and I then walked the entirety of the area where he worked in the forward crews mess compartment looking at and talking briefly about every valve, switch and control that didn't have a lock on it. I extracted a very solemn promise from him that he would never again so much as touch a valve, a switch or a control without direct orders from a petty officer, and that further he would promptly report any such touching to me immediately. I warned him that the next time he came to my attention for any reason except muster and our regular little counselling sessions, I would take him up to the Bridge to see the Captain. I had no idea what sort of duty the Captain might assign him to in such an eventuality, I told him; but I was sure it would not be something pleasant like helping out on the mess decks.

From time to time thereafter Johnson would report to me that he had been required to touched a valve in the course of cleaning or painting or such, and I would have him lead me to the valve so I could inspect it and make him explicitly say that the valve wheel had not moved so much as a millimeter during the course of his touching it. Once when the valve involved was part of the aviation gasoline piping system I had Main Control send up a damage control technician to check the valve setting after thinking about it a bit despite Johnson's assurance that he had not turned the valve but had only polished it's brass nameplate as instructed; but I didn't let Johnson know that I doubted his word.

I never learned what division the hood ornament sailor was in. On the Bridge we suspected he was an aviation bosun's mate or some such in the air group from the fact that he had so much free time when aircraft weren't being moved around. He always left the flight deck before we passed the word for nonessential personnel to stand clear of the flight deck due to heavy winds. And he never lost his balance and fell over that I saw or heard of. He used to lean amazingly far forward at times.

Update 3:30 PM: On the other hand former Seaman Recruit Johnson may now be working for Direct TV. So far I've received about seven calls from their dispatcher asking me if their technician has arrived and I've received four calls from two different technicians assuring me that they're on their way; but there has as yet been no sign of either or any technician.