Do the digits always add up to nine?

It used to make Harry's sister Lizzie crazy when she would notice that me and Patty M were adding up customer bills at the produce market in our heads. So when she was around and paying attention we would sometimes act like we were adding up the customer totals on paper. Pretty dumb because almost all the prices were in round quarters, so adding up the totals was easy and natural; and at that time I could effortlessly do calculations in my head out to five and six digits.

At any rate one time at Harry's I noticed that when you multiple 9 by 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., the sum of the digits in the answer always adds up to 9. Naturally I realized that this was trivial for numbers up to 9 x 10; but it went on after that even into results that were four and five digits long. This is not as hard as it seems. You don't do multiplication; you just keep adding 9 to each new result and then mentally check the new result to see if it's digits add up to 9. Way back then I could consciously sort of start a little part of my head to doing arithmetic while still going on with other things, like waiting on customers and adding up their bills and imagining female customers naked; almost as though all of me was concentrating on what I was supposed to be doing. That may sound odd, but all of us do something like it when we daydream while driving.

But back to the nines. As I recall, I discovered a case in the relatively low thousands where the digits didn't add up to 9; but now I can't remember that result. And, of course, I may have made a mistake when I calculated in my head to come up with that result. So it may be that the digits always add up to 9. But I doubt that because there doesn't appear to be a mathematical proof of it, at least in the first few hits listed by google when I search for "digits add up to nine." There seem to be some interesting math games there related to the properties of products of 9 and the properties of 9 digit numbers in that list; but my head hurts when I try to really dig into math games now; so I didn't inspect them further than to get the impression that none of say outright that the digits of a product of 9 always add up to 9.

I wonder how many customer bills I added up wrong during the period when part of my brain was endlessly calculating the products of 9 and I was very irritated to be distracted by anything else. See below if you have no clue what I'm talking about.

If you find an instance where the digits don't add up to 9 you get this post named after you.

9 2 x 9 = 18 --- 1+8 = 9
3 x 9 = 27 --- 2+7 = 9
4 x 9 = 36 --- 3+6 = 9
5 x 9 = 45 --- 4+5 = 9

9 x 14 = 126 --- 1+2+6 = 9

9 x 29 = 261 --- 2+6+1 = 9

9 x 57 = 51 3 --- 5+1+3 = 9

9 x 2374 = 21366 --- 2+1+3+6+6 = 18 --- 1+8 = 9

9 x 79647732 = 716829588 --- 7+1+6+8+2+9+5+8+8 = 54 --- 5+4 = 9

It's Hopeless

Some of you may have noticed, and one of you has complained a couple of times, about the lack of posts here over the past few days. So I just spent dinner trying to explain to my better half how each of last three posts I've started writing has been ruined by one of the little voices that argues with the others up in my head. Sometimes my dark cynical muse up there is actually helpful, shouting out stuff that adds a bit of edge to bland posts before one of the other muses throws a cover over his little cage, stifling him like a parakeet put into the dark. But lately he's been loose, playing hell with things, opening up all kinds of cobweb filled closets; and he's turned the nice neat trajectories of three successive posts into blind alleys.

Write about nature, Linda suggested, write about happy stuff. To which I replied that it doesn't work that way. A good post has to start with an inspiration. It can't just start with an intention to write something. And then I realized that I was holding inspiration in my hand, gesturing with it, as we talked. Ah, Linda, what would I do without her? Such wisdom. Such self sacrifice. There she was eating left over chili and rice so I could enjoy the second to last zep of the year. And the answer was obvious. I would write about marking the passage of time, using the zep as my takeoff point and ranging over all kinds of happy stuff, but with good potential for injecting just a bit of edge.

So. . . I sat down to write this post based on a wholesome straightforward idea, and what happened. I'll tell you what happened; Gordon Liddy came on the TV as a talking head for Rosland Gold. There he was, the old convicted burglar, holding up a little gold bar and advising people to contact this company and buy gold. . . perhaps so some of his old prison burglar buddies can score bigger paydays when they make their rounds. So, naturally, the dark little muse escaped his cage and started running around screaming that I can't waste my time writing happy stuff when fate has presented me with such an example of the degree to which simple common sense has fled the world. Enough of us have lost touch with history that a convicted burglar can be hired as a credible representative to sell gold.

Naturally I resolved not to be distracted. Gordon Liddy, I resolved, would not be permitted to hijack this post as he hijacked the attention of the whole nation by being so clumsy as to be caught burglarizing the Democratic Party campaign headquarters in the Watergate complex.

A delicious zep inspired this post; and the zep would rule it; even though it was maybe just a bit heavy on the onions, and the particular onion was just a bit hot. First cutting onions, except Vidalias or Bermudas, can tend to overpower a zep if you're not careful, and they can stay with you for a while. Ordinary onions are best peeled and then put in the refrigerator for a day or two to take the edge off their acid. But, even though it had left me discretely belching occasionally, the zep would rule this post.

Except then I realized that I had to mention, for you uninformed youngsters out there, that Liddy did an unbelievably dumb thing. He was sent to the Watergate to do a simple little black bag job and that idiot taped the door latch so obviously that it was spotted. Yet here we are, a few decades later, and people are apparently dumb enough to buy gold to keep hidden around their houses based on his recommendation. Idiocy.

Having said that, I resolved to get back to the zep, the last of which each year marks the furthest influence of my summer garden. For no rational human being will make or eat a zep made with a supermarket tomato. The last zep of the year heralds descent into the dark cave of winter. It confirms that the summer's finally gone.

But then the little muse whispered that coconut headed ex-con Gordon Liddy must remind me of that other Gordon, the one who so irked me the other day. That Gordon is Gordon Glantz, whose picture in the Norristown Times Herald reminds me of the bullet shaped little KGB agent figurine nested down in the middle of the nine layer Matryoshka doll that portrays bloated and grasping Soviet Commissars.

Gordon Glantz, for those of you lucky enough to be unfamiliar with his work, is the Times Herald's Managing Editor. As such he writes a weekly column that runs in the Sunday edition, probably because that's the least read edition of the paper and thus the edition in which he can damage its reputation the least. I rarely read the pulp section of the Sunday edition because it doesn't contain a bridge column and the comics are in a separate section. And, instead of a nice logical bridge column, or an opinion column by someone who can actually reason, like Stan Huskey or Lisa Mossie, the pulp section of the Sunday paper contains a Glantz column, which I try to avoid. I don't suffer fools gladly, especially not bigoted fools.

But, as luck would have it, I happened to open this past Sunday's paper, and there was the steaming pile of Glantz's column. I tried to avoid it; but the little dark muse was drawn like a fly to the ordure. And, of course, there was Gordon being Gordon, taking a gratuitous swipe at the Mormons, because he's nothing if not a reflexive parakeet for left wing talking points; and bashing Mormons has been all the rage among the leftist would be American Commissars lately.

What he wrote and published was that "fundamentalist Mormons. . . believe in the sanctity of marriage - between a man and 49 women." That is a clear falsehood, a bloody libel and calumny, untrue for more than a hundred years of every single member in good standing of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's the kind of catchy libel circulated by folks who have a hidden agenda aimed at inciting group hatred and mob violence of the sort that has terrorized out of favor minorities over the centuries; the kind of mob violence that has been occurring in California against the Mormons lately, because they had the audacity to exercise their free speech rights in the recent election. Furthermore, it's surely known to be untrue by Mr. Glantz, who is presumably a college graduate, even if from a journalism program far richer in political correctness and the inculcation of rationales for totalitarian programs than in actual education.

See how it is. I start out writing out about an innocuous happy subject like the last zep of the year and how it heralds the descent into the little dark age of winter; and the next thing you know the angry little muse gets out of his cage. And I end up giving myself agida by thinking and writing about a religion-baiting strunze like Gordon Glantz.

An unpaid commercial message

We interrupt this blog for a brief message from she who must be obeyed. . .

Linda asked me to point out that at her church Christmas bazaar she was representing SERRV (http://www.serrv.org/), which is a very worthwhile charitable organization that sells craft items produced by various and sundry poor but talented people around the world.

If you're looking for Christmas gifts you could do a whole lot worse both morally and from the perspective of taste and enjoyment than to go to the SERRV website and buy the hot mango chutney from Swaziland or the fair trade coffee from Guatamela. Additionally you can spend about as much on the super cool hand painted Christmas Tree ornament with stylistic deer and happy little brown people on it as you would on a crass commercial mass produced ornament with insipid snowflakes on it from wherever they mass produce such things these days.

And if you do buy some stuff from SERRV and thus build up some credit in heaven you can gorge and swill at Christmas with much less guilt, as I will.

If not for any of those reasons you should buy from SERRV because by doing so you will also make Linda happy. And we all know from that great old song that "When Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."

Sam, Jas and I were in rare form yesterday

It's been a great weekend despite the nasty rain and chill.

Last night Linda and I showed our stuff at the Ballroom on High up in Pottstown, proving that we remembered the intermediate Rumba steps that Jas and Kathy taught us on Wednesday and that we practiced here at home on Thursday. It's always dicey when we learn a new dance or even a new step. If we're not careful the new can seem to write over our memory of a formerly learned dance or step. But last night we proved to our own satisfaction that we still retain the Waltz and the Foxtrot and a little Jitterbug. The Rumba has not replaced any of them. And, the Rumba turns out to be a pretty useful dance. Last night we danced it to a number meant to be a Cha Cha, and it worked very well. It also worked for a number meant for a Bolero. Very gratifying.

Linda was working the bazaar at her church yesterday and today, so she missed seeing me, Sam and Jas in rare form yesterday morning. As we do periodically we took a real trip down memory lane to the old neighborhood in Trooper and various events around it.

We remembered the beautiful warm and still summer nights when the delicate scent of lilacs and honeysuckle would compete with the smell of burning hair that announced Foulke was disposing of the sweepings from his barber shop by night. And we remembered the time Little John got a neat new BB gun and immediately shot out a bunch of windows in Ziggy's pigeon coop next door. Alas, Big John bent the barrel of the BB gun into a nice "C" shape the next day after Ziggy complained. And we remembered the way the tar would ooze out of the road at the corner where it went around Carl and Mamie's house, so much tar in a puddle that sometimes you would find a bird or a mouse mired.

Jas told the story of Little John shooting out the pigeon coop windows; but this time he didn't tell, as he usually does, about the way he used to lay on his back and shoot up with his slingshot into the flock of homing pigeons as they circled overhead. He never shot one down; but not for lack of trying. Jas did tell about his adventures with Louie Lonzo when they both worked for Paul at the sale up in Gilbertsville. When they arrived at the sale Lonzo would open the back of the truck and announce loudly and repeatedly that "The Jonah" was there. Why he called Paul M "The Jonah" Jas doesn't know.

I can imagine the scene Jas describes, and so can Sam; because we both worked the sales in our time. We both rode in the middle of the bench seat of the truck after loading the back with an amazing quantity of fruit and vegetables. And then we worked ten straight hours, some days seeming so busy that there was never a moment without a customer. When I worked for Gap B he had a fellow who was much like Jas's description of Lonzo. Gap's fellow was a career fruit and produce salesman who had been with Gap for twenty plus years. He was paid enough cash under the table to have a typical suburban house over by Trooper School in which I'm sure he was a normal suburban husband with his wife and a typical father to his kids.

But at the sale up in Gilbertsville which he worked with Gap three or four days a week he was a carnival barker, and a very good one. He had a whole repertoire of gags that he used to draw in the customers and make the men laugh and the women blush. It kept the day interesting; even to those of us behind the counter who had heard the gags a hundred times. The beauty was in the sheer artistry and sometimes the sheer nerve. And it was always interesting to see how people reacted. There were people who got the jokes and people who didn't, people who walked away shaking their heads, supressing laughter, and people who walked away shaking there heads in confusion, still trying to figure out what he had meant.

Most interesting was the way people acted as though all they had heard was the line on the surface. "Top quality fruit," he might say, after picking up and weighing at chest height two apples or peaches that corresponded roughly in size to attributes of a cute young wife with her husband in tow, "firm and sweet; at the peak of ripeness and flavor." Or he might pick up two honeydews and cup them low toward a young woman with a nice backside and say, "Nice melons, Lady, smooth as a baby's behind, sweet to hold, sweeter to the taste." And, of course the women primly pretend that there was nothing at all unusual about the line. On an especially outrageous day he might pick up a carrot in one hand and two onions in the other hand while he said, "It's a chilly day out there, a good day to stay in and make a nice soup, and you can get your husband to help you stir the soup." Then he would put the carrot in the same hand in which he was cupping the onions so he could use his other hand to point to other vegetables that the ladies might want to put in the soup. And the hand with the carrot and the onions was making stirring motions that were almost, but not quite explicit, in and out motions.

Best was when some prim matron would lose control and laugh out loud, only to quickly catch herself and put on a blank look. It simply wouldn't do to have understood the other possible meaning of what the man had said as he was selecting the cucumbers. Maybe he had said, "You look like you know your produce. You want a cucumber that's nice and firm, not too big and not too small." And it certainly would not do to react when he partially inserted a cucumber into the bag and then pulled it most of the way out again and held it forward to more closely show how its skin was lightly oiled. "These are the best you'll ever enjoy Lady. Look at that cuke, smooth as silk but hard as a rock." And then his final words as he handed over he bags. "It's been a pleasure waiting on you Ma'am. Come back anytime you need anything. We know how to take care of a customer. Satisfaction guaranteed!"

A neat site to visualize numbers

While musing about the list in the last post I got to thinking about large numbers. The site linked below lets you see how big the pile of pennies would be for various numbers. It's best if you step up from size to size. Seeing the trillion penny cube made me wonder how much copper the world produces. Which turns out to be a lot, about enough to make five of those trillion penny cubes each year. That, in turn, got me to thinking about steel, and I found that the world produces enough steel each year to make a bit less than half of the quadrillion penny cube.

http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/

And, after looking at the piles of pennies, you can go to this site to let this pretty interesting guy tell you all about the events of his life as delineated by his collection of smashed pennies. Be sure to click on one of the pennies at the bottom of the page or else on one of the state names on the left of the page. Way back in his youth he started to collect smashed pennies. Then at some point, it seems, the smashed pennies started collecting him. But, all in all, he's still sort of normal; probably about as normal as me.

http://www.anythreewords.com/pennies/index.php

Fill in the blanks

0 The Zero Sum Game (Linda 11/14)
1 The One
2 The Two Minute Drill - (anonymous2 11/14)
3 The Three Stooges
4 The Four Evangelists
5 The Five Senses
6 The Six Day War
7 The Seven Deadly Sins
8 The Eight Maids a Milking (Anonymous 11/14)
9 The Nine Planets
10 The Ten Commandments
11 The Eleventh Hour - (anonymous2 11/14)
12 The Twelve Days of Christmas
13 The Thirteen Original States
14 The Fourteen Points
15 Sweet Fifteen Quinceanera Dresses (Jenny 11/17)
16 Sixteen Candles (Sis 11/16)
17 Seventeen Magazine (Don A in FL 11/18)
18 Wheeler (Don A in FL 11/18)
19 Hey Nineteen (Sis 11/18)
20 The Twenty Yard Line (Sis 11/15)
21 Twenty One Makes Blackjack (Don A in FL 11/16)
22 The Twenty Two Rimfire Cartridge
23 The Twenty Third Psalm (Sis 11/16)
24 Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Sis 11/15 )
25 The Twenty Fifth Hour (Jenny 11/17)
26 Twenty Six Miles Across the Sea (Don A in FL 11/18)
27 Twenty Seven Dresses (Jenny 11/17)
28 The Twenty Eight Days February has except for when we have a
29 Twenty Nine Day February
30 The Thirty Years War
31 Thirty One Days are what all the rest have
32 Thirty-Two Degrees Fahrenheit (Hah - Deb suggested 212 degrees but missed this one)
33 The Thirty Three on Rolling Rock Beer Bottles (Don A in Fl 11/17)
34 The Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street (Jenny 11/17)
35 MM Film
36 The 36 Officer problem with Euler's Graeco Roman Squares Conjecture (Rebecca 11/19)
37 Degrees Celcius
38 The Thirty Eighth Parallel (Don A in FL 11/16
39 The Thirty Nine Steps (Rebecca 11/17)
40 The Forty Year Old Virgin (Anonymous 11/14)
41 Hotel 41 at Times Square (Don A in FL 11/18)
42 Forty Second Street (Hah! Jenny had the clue for this one but missed it)
43 Superbowl 43 (Don A in FL 11/18)
44 The Forty-Four Magnum
45 The Forty Five Caliber Model 1904 (Don A from Florida 11/15)
46 The Forty Six Defense (Don A in FL 11/18)
47 The AK Forty Seven (Rebecca 11/17)
48 The Lower Forty-Eight (Sis 11/15)
49 The Forty Niners (Don A in FL 11/17)
50 Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover (Sis 11/14)
51 Area 51 (Rebecca 11/19)
52 Cards in a deck (Don A in FL 11/18)
53 Fifty Three is Herbie's number (Sis 11/18)
54 Car 54 Where Are You (Don A in FL 11/18
55 Mile Per Hour Speed Limit (Don A in FL 11/19)
56 Famous 56 WFIL (Don A in FL 11/23)
57 Heintz Fifty Seven Varieties (Don A in FL 11/17)
58 Gallery (Don A in FL 11/23)
59 The Fifty Ninth Street Bridge Song (Rebecca 11/19)
60 Sixty Minutes With Morley Safer (Don A in FL 11/17)
61 Home Runs - Roger Maris (Don A in FL 11/23)
62 BB-62 - USS New Jersey (Don A in FL 11/23)
63 Ranch (Don A in FL 11/23)
64 Ounce Can of San Marzano Tomatoes (Jenny 11/19)
65 CVAN Sixty-Five
66 Route Sixty Six (Don A in FL 11/16)
67 The Sixty Seven Chevy (Jenny 11/17)

69 (No comment - Jenny suggested it 11/19 and Rebecca endorsed it 11/19 - ask them)
70 Three Score and Ten Years

72 Cold Seventy Two Tablets (Dave 11/18)

76 The Seventy-Six Trombones (Sis and Linda 11/15)
77 Seventy Seven Sunset Strip (Don A in FL 11/18)
78 Seventy Eight Degrees Is Sully's Minimum Swimming Temp (Sis 11/18)

80 Four Score Years, Yet Is Their Strength Labor and Sorrow

82 The 82nd Airborne (Dave 11/15)

84 Lumber Company (Don A in FL 11/19)
85 Octane Gas (Don A in FL 11/19
86 It From the Menu (Rebecca 11/19)
87 Four Score and Seven Years Ago
88 Eighty Eight Keys (Dave 11/18)

90 Those Ninety Calibers, Those Pezzonovante

92 Reggie White's Jersey Number (Don A in FL 11/23)

95 The Ninety-Five Theses
96 Ninety-Six Tears (Sis 11/15)

98 Degrees Fahrenheit

100 The Hundred Acre Wood
101 The Hundred and One Dalmations

110 The Hundred and Ten Cornets (Hah! Sis was on the trail but she missed this - Linda 11/14)

151 One Hundred Fifty One Proof Rum (Jenny 11/17)

180 One Hundred Eighty Degrees Turns You Around

190 Proof Everclear (Don A in FL 11/19)

206 The Two Hundred and Six Bones (Sis 11/15)

212 Two Hundred Twelve Degrees Fahrenheit.

247 Twenty Four / Seven (Doug 11/17)

256 Two Hundred Fifty Six Megabytes (Dave 11/18)

300 The Three Hundred Spartans (Linda 11/14)

337 Three Hundred Thirty Seven point Five Degrees True is North by Northwest

360 Three Hundred Sixty Degrees in a Circle (Don A in FL 11/16)

365 The Three hundred Sixty Five Days in a year

368 Penn Street, Norristown (Don A in FL 11/23)

400 The Allstate Four Hundred at the Brickyard (Don A in FL 11/16)
401-K

403 Walnut Street, Norristown

409 Four O Nine, Four O Nine (Sis 11/18)

411 Dial Four One One for Information (Don A in FL 11/18)

415 Four Fifteen is Tax Day (Dave 11/18)

428 Four Twenty Eight Cobra (Dave 11/18)

451 Four Hundred Fifty-One Degrees Fahrenheit

454 Four Hundred Fifty Four Cubic Inch Big Block Engine (Jenny 11/17)

500 The Indy Five Hundred (Don A in FL 11/16)

600 The Six Hundred (Linda 11/14)

610 Six One Zero Area Code (Don A in FL 11/18)

666 Six Hundred Three Score and Six

700 The Seven Hundred Club (Don A in FL 11/16)

711 The 7-11 Stores (Rebecca 11/19)

747 The Boeing Seven Forty Seven (Don A in FL 11/16)

800 Dial Eight Hundred for toll free (Don A in FL 11/16)

911 Nine Eleven (Don A in FL 11/17)

930 Nine Hundred Thirty Years, and He died

969 Nine Hundred Sixty and Nine Years, and He died

1,000 The Thousand Points of Light
1,001 The Thousand Nights and A Night

1,066 Ten Sixty Six AD (Dave 11/18)

1,492 Fourteen Ninety Two (Don A in FL 11/17)

1,621 Sixteen Twenty One (Don A in FL 11/17)

1,776 Seventeen Seventy Six (Don A in FL 11/17)

1,814 In Eighteen Fourteen He took a Little Trip

2,000 The Two Thousand Year Old Man

2,008 The Two Thousand and Eight Olympics (Jenny 11/17)

2,525 In the Year Twenty Five Twenty Five (Dave 11/18)

4,844 Four Thousand Eight Hundred and Forty Four Years Old When Cut Down

5,440 Fifty Four Forty, Or Fight

8,808 Eight Eight Zero Eight (Hah! - Jenny had the clue for this but missed it)

10,000 The Ten Thousand (Sis 11/15)

20,000 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Dave 11/18)

22,900 Sagamore Two Two Nine Hundred (Don A in FL 11/17)

64,000 The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question

The Million Man March

2,997,922,458 Meters per Second

The Six Million Dollar Man (Sis 11/15)

The Nine Billion Names of God (Linda 11/14)

The One Hundred Billion Dollar Note

The Seven Hundred Billion Dollar Bailout (Don A in Florida 11/15)

The One Hundred Trillion Mark Note

Six point Zero Two Two Times Ten To the Twenty-Third Power

The Googol taken to the Googol Power is

The Googolplex

The Nth Degree (Dave 11/14)

The Infinity Pool

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anonymous suggested amendments to the constitution as all purpose cheaters which got me to thinking
The following Cheaters are not allowed unless desperate or unless the number of the cheater is a significant number:
x Bottles of Beer on the wall can be used for any number under 99
x degrees fahrenheit or celcius can be used for melting and boiling points
x degrees of bearing can be used for numbers up to 360, cardinal points and significant degree numbers by the scrupulous
Numbers can be used in the forms "x is prime," "y is perfect," "z is composite," "q is the sum or product or square or cube or square or cube root of x"
The numbers of Psalms (except the 23rd because I hadn't ruled out Psalms before Sis suggested it)
The Amendments to the constitution
The days of the month
Julian Dates

Obviously this list has strayed from the original rules; but that's life. It starts out simple and more or less manageable, warm milk in and a couple of other substances out. Then it gets increasingly complicated until the point where it begins to get simpler again.

Politics and economics explained

Gas was down to $2.16 at the cheapest station I saw on the way home today; and that got me to thinking. There was a lot of complaining about gouging and ripoffs when gas prices went up in the Spring and Summer of this year; but nobody seems to be taking notice of the decline in prices.

I can understand why people get upset when prices go up for what seems no apparent reason, and I can even understand that segment of the population that seems to see rapidly declining prices as proof that the prices are being manipulated by evildoers.

That kind of thinking is probably why a great many people like government run business so much. Government run businesses like the public schools and the Post Office have prices which go up and up and up, nice and steady. And they never, never, never get more efficient and cut prices. They also seldom produce new or better products. If they change at all the way they do things they change so slowly that a tortoise seems dynamic by contrast. I think that kind of stasis comforts people. It must; because 52% of the people just voted for a fellow whose whole life has been devoted to getting government more and more involved in more and more businesses.

Soon we'll have hospitals that avoid adopting new technologies just the way the public schools do, because new technologies cut the need for new employees. And we'll have pharmaceutical companies that are just as good at researching and developing new products as the post office is. And we'll have energy companies so tied up in politically correct environmental regulations and CO2 reduction regulations that they will be just as efficient and productive as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, not to worry, as we pay more and more and more for ever less reliable energy supplies, and as we get poorer quality health care in the hospitas, and as we suffer and die prematurely from lack of new drugs, we'll all be comforted by the knowledge that the government cares and no one is getting rich except the politicians and their friends.

Veterans Day, Armistice Day and horsemeat

It's Veterans Day and also Armistice Day; so naturally my thoughts are on the time Linda and I went to Europe after I finished my four years in the Navy and I ordered a Hamburger Aux Cheval in a Paris restaurant. I had learned enough in two years of French classes during high school to think the name denoted a hamburger riding on a bun. Only when I noticed it tasted just a little funny did I realize that the perfidious French were feeding me horsemeat.

Not that I was breaking new ground in the family by eating horsemeat for Grandpop L had eaten quite a lot of it when he was a young man. That came about because Grandpop L was clever enough to make his way to an American army recruiter in 1917 before he could be drafted into the Italian army. Not a trivial decision; because as a result he became a U.S. citizen and Grandmon L became a citizen in turn when he married her.

One of Mom's favorite stories was of the time she embarrassed an arrogant high school teacher who singled her out in class as a naturalized citizen. "No," Mom said, she wasn't a naturalized citizen. Yes she was, the teacher insisted. And Mom repeated that, no, she wasn't. But you were born in Italy, the teacher said. "Yes," Mom agreed, she was born in Italy. "So, I'm right," the teacher triumphantly announced, you can't be a citizen by birth. At which point Mom informed the teacher that she was indeed born abroad; but she was also a citizen by birth because her parents were American citizens living abroad when she was born. Mom loved that story.

Another benefit of Grandpop L joining the American army is that he thereby probably increased his odds of surviving the war by at least tenfold. The losses suffered in World War I by the Italian army are nearly inconceivable to us at ninety years remove. In that war the U.S. lost 116,708 men killed out of a population of 92 million. Italy, by contrast, lost 651,010 men killed out of a population of 35 million. Italy also suffered 589,000 civilian deaths, while the U.S. suffered 757. Think that through. More than one out of every thirty Italians alive in 1914 died in that war; and, additionally, one out of every thirty people left alive in the country in 1918 was a wounded soldier. Grandpop L made a very good decision indeed when he travelled over to present himself to the Americans who were recruiting Italian peasants for service in artillery units.

If you a want a relatively painless take on that war, in which Italy fought on the side of France, Britain, Russia and the U.S. against Germany and Austria-Hungary, there is an excellent novel by Mark Helprin titled A Soldier of the Great War. Helprin's presentation of Orfeo Quatta, the typewriter hating dwarf who starts the book as a servant to the family of the book's protagonist and ends it as a war department bureaucrat, is one of the greatest comic riffs in literature.

But this was to have been a post about Veterans Day, and I still have to get to horsemeat. Pop never ate horsemeat; and he always said that we, the U.S., had no business getting involved in World War I. To him it was a European business. But he didn't feel that way about World War II even though it cost him his health. It could well have cost him more; because as soon as he was old enough he and a buddy went down to Main Street in Norristown to join up with the Marines. But, as it turned out, the Marine recruiting office was closed when they arrived. So they walked next door and got into a conversation with a Navy recruiter, and the next thing they knew they were on the way to training and then to the South Pacific as Seabees.

Instead of storming ashore with the first wave, or the second wave, of Marines, Pop and the other Seabees went ashore on island after island to build roads and airfields and barracks and hangars after the Japanese were pretty much beaten. From some of his stories about Japanese bodies still littering the beaches and the fields, and about needing to watch where you walked because of occasional sniper fire and artillery it's apparent that sometimes the Japanese hadn't been fully informed that they had been beaten.

Pop survived the war fine, but the trip home on a slow freighter nearly killed him. By the time he got to San Francisco he was coughing pretty good; and then by the time he got home by train he was on his way to pneumonia which lead to tuberculosis, or perhaps it was vice versa. So he was in and out of Veterans hospitals and sanitariums for the next couple of years; and as part of his treatment they collapsed and then removed most of one of his lungs. The blessing in it all was it made him as calm and optimistic a man as you will ever meet. He was told by a Navy doctor in 1946 that he should put his affairs in order because he would probably not survive long. As it turned out he outlived that doctor by about twenty-five years; and he lived virtually every one of the days of those years suprised and glad he had wakened up alive, and intensely interested and involved in the world. He took life as it came and he definitely did not sweat the small stuff.

But I have to cut this off, and I still haven't gotten to the horsemeat. Well, the reason the American army was in Italy recruiting all those Italian peasants like Grandpop L was that artillery units in those days had a lot of horses to pull the cannons and the hundreds of wagons that carried the shells and the powder charges and the other equipment. And some bureaucrat like Orfeo Quatta in the U.S. War Department came up with the idea that Italian peasants would be good to have because they would know how to handle horses. An interesting idea, but sorely wrong, as it turns out, because Italian peasants rarely used horses since fields in Italy were mostly small and broken up, making it more efficient to do most of the farming work by hand.

Grandpop, of course, was smart enough to tell the recruiters what they wanted to hear when they asked about his knowledge of horses; and he was also smart enough to learn what he needed to learn to handle the horses just fine. He and his compatriots in the artillery unit were also smart enough to forget to put a gas mask on one of the weaker horses during a gas attack whenever their diet lacked in meat. And, finally, they were also smart enough to share the resulting bounty with their sargeants and their officer. Grandpop often said that he had never imagined eating as much meat as he ate when he was in the army.

Update: 80 89 89 80 80 87 79 ;<)

Violence, passion and politics in Collegeville

Linda woke me this morning to see the end of a battle between two bucks down toward the creek. It was easy to tell who won because one of the bucks departed the field; but now they're both back and chasing the herd of does around. They were too far away and the action was too violent for me to notice earlier; but now I see that one buck is missing his right antler and the other buck is missing his left. Furthermore the left antler buck is a mere stripling with a couple of prongs, while the right antler buck has a much bigger half rack.

Talk about symbolism. They've both chased one of the does down into the woods where I can't see them now, so who knows how the contest will end.

That left antler upstart may have cleared the field and thus won the right to chase Lady Liberty around to his heart's content down in Washington for the next four years; but up here in Collegeville hope is still alive.

Update: 85 90 80 79 ;<)

Update 2: This morning we saw the right antler buck limping after the does; so apparently he drove the left antler buck from the field of eros. Something is wrong with his right rear leg. Here's hoping he was able to score while we were at work because the battle apparently cost him pretty dearly. He's half crippled just as winter approaches; not a good thing. The world of the wild is tough on the weak.

Sanatoga Ridge, figs and the frog.

This afternoon we visited Delores W up in the Sanatoga Ridge Community. Delores moved into her new garden apartment a couple of weeks ago. As it turned out Delores was just returning to her apartment with Debra when we walked over after touring the rest of the development for while. Linda and I have been wanting to see her new place; and today happened to be an open house for the community, so we took the opportunity to walk around.

We saw one bedroom and two bedroom models in the detached housing blocks. While we were in the two bedroom model we were approached by a couple of residents who wanted to share how much they've liked the place since moving there a couple of years ago. And then a surprise; when we mentioned that we were also planning to visit Delores it turned out that their daughter recommended Sanatoga Ridge to Delores when they met at Corropolese in Limerick. It's a small world.

While we were talking to those folks the lady who lives next door to the model unit, Peggy, walked over and offered to show us her unit. She has the type of unit that has a garage, none of which were available and open for the tour. Peggy said she was also very pleased with her decision to move there eighteen months ago. She has her place filled with an amazing collection of hand made colonial style furniture.

All in all we liked the Garden Apartment building where Delores' unit is the best. The apartments are on both sides of a wide corridor that runs down the middle of the two long buildings. Then the buildings are connected by an even wider bridge on the second level. The bridge is a gathering area with a TV and tables for eating and assembling jigsaw puzzles and such. A very nice design touch. All in all a very nice place, and Delores' apartment, on the ground floor is also very nice, with two bedrooms, a combination kitchen, dining and sitting area, and an outside patio.

Linda just came in from a walk bringing the small fig I've been letting get ripe on the tree. It will be the last fig of the year unless we get some unusually warm weather over the next week. There are still a number of smallish figs on there but I don't imagine they'll get ripe. I'm surprised that this one got ripe. I have to start bundling up that fig tree to be wrapped, I'm planning to use old belts that I have upstairs. I haven't worn a few of those belts for years.

In other news - I changed the frog's water yesterday, so he's angry at me today and he's sulking under his rocks. He always sulks and hides for a few days after I change the water; which isn't surprising because it can't be a very dignified procedure from his point of view. At least this time there were no major hitches. He stayed nicely stuck to the sink basin by surface tension, able to slide around, but not able to get any leverage to jump out, while I cleaned out the tank and refilled it with fresh water.

He pulled his calm and complacent act when I picked him up out of the sink; but I wasn't fooled. I had him well in control when he started scratching and struggling; and I got him into the tank with no trouble. He hasn't escaped for years and yet he still plays his little games, always hopeful of turning the return to the tank into a real battle. From my side I remember all too well that time when I neglected to close the lid of the toilet and then had a hell of a time getting him out of there. Since then I never take him out of the tank without the toilet lid and the door to the bathroom closed.

He may also be sulking in there because I rebuilt the rocks into the cave pattern they were in before he went berserk a couple of weeks ago and shoved them every which way. If he objected to the arrangement, it's the first time he has since I started building a sort of cave with the rocks over twenty years ago. Maybe he was just sleeping and had a bad dream that he was being attacked. If so, he surely slayed his dream attacker. The two biggest rocks in there weigh at least five times what he does; but he was shoving them around like they were nothing.

It's worse than I thought it would be

Obama supporters are going into withdrawal after their high.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_win_causes_obsessive?utm_source=embedded_video

It's worth watching it a second time with the sound off to read the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

This replaces a post under editorial review

Another post was supposed to occupy this space; but that post worked its way around to the subject of race, and I'm not crazy enough to post anything that touches on race without giving my internal editor a couple or three chances to review it.

So you'll have to be satisfied with this safer, politically correct, post about the excursion we took last evening to the geezer warehouse down by Schrack's Corner. We fit right in, or at least I did; because I was hobbling along in full gimp mode from something that suddenly and inexplicably went wrong with my hip the other day. I was lamer and slower than most of the coots. But don't get the idea that I was feeling sorry for myself. I wasn't; I took consolation in the fact that I didn't have dentures to work around in my mouth and click during the play, and my hair isn't blue or orange.

All in all Shannondell seems a pretty nice place, sort of like The Villages only all the houses are stacked on top of one another and compressed into one complex of big buildings with open air balconies instead of Florida rooms. Sam is of the opinion that all the inmates are at least in their high seventies; but I had the distinct impression that there were some younger ones in the gaggle of them I accompanied up in the elevator after the show. Linda took the stairs because the elevators were slow; and there was a crowd waiting. I took an elevator without shame, muscling aside a couple of the codgers who were slower than me with their elbows.

We went to see Oliver, put on by The King of Prussia Players, an amazingly professional performance with a cast of at least fifty or so including a half dozen excellent singers. It always amazes me how much effort and organization people are willing to put into what is, after all, a hobby, so that other people can pay cheap ticket prices that probably just about cover the cost of costumes and scenery.

Also heartening was the fact that there were quite a number of young kids in the audience. I don't mean relative kids like me and Linda; I mean actual kids six and seven and eleven years old, some of them visiting their greatgrandparents and getting to see a play as part of the visit; and some of them just there to see the play surrounded by strangers old enough to be their greatgrandparents. Except for me and Linda again; we're only old enough to be their grandparents.

It was great having kids there; but as I was watching the play I was wondering how well a play like Oliver can speak to young kids today, who have never known the feeling of hunger, and who have moreover never spent much time with anyone who has known the meaning of hunger. Leave aside the fact that the shameful state of education in this country makes it unlikely more than twenty or thirty percent of the audience understood the symbolism of the red dress on the character who played the whore with a heart of gold.

I've never myself been deeply hungry; but I knew Harry M, who ate every meal like a dog hovering over and guarding his plate. I didn't realize it until later when I read the comic book version of Oliver Twist as preparation for a high school book report; but Harry M must have grown up hungry to have guarded his plate like that all the way into middle age when he owned a produce market and, while not rich rich, was well off enough to eat as high on the hog as he wanted.

Pop and Mom both grew up in relatively straightened circumstances; but neither of them, and none of their brothers or sisters or the cousins raised with Mom guarded their plates like Harry. So Grandpop and Grandmon A and Grandpop and Grandmom L must have consistently earned enough or grown enough or scrounged enough to feed their families reasonably well. They ate a lot of beans and macaroni, and a lot of beans and greens, and a lot of polenta, and salads of young Dandelion and Pokes, and greens like Chima d' Rabe and Mustard and old tough Dandelion picked in the fields and by roadsides; but they must have eaten to reasonable fullness.

They were, all of Mom and Pop's generation, except Uncle Pete, a few inches shorter than Grandpop L and all of my generation; so probably none of them got quite enough protein as youngsters. But they all must have eaten to reasonable fullness in their youth in accordance with Grandpop L's old, old peasant wisdom, no doubt shared by Grandpop A, that, "you can't waste what you put in the bellies of your family." Pop translated that saying for me, and his Italian was only fair; so the translation may be a bit rough. But I know what he meant.

Speaking of which, Linda and I just ate to reasonable fullness on the last picking of Sam's Swiss Chard, which I combined with some potatoes and green beans and garlic. Linda had a gourmet lunch up at Jennifer's in Lancaster and then went shopping with Jennifer and Kathy and Liana and Catherine and Linda L; so I was left here alone and too gimpy with this hip business to do anything much except entertain Sam and Jas to coffee and then putter around the house cooking and such.

And, I'm pleased to report that there's good news on the gimpiness front. Either because the hip business is disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared, or else because I took a couple of Ibuprofens in accordance with Jas's advice, I'm walking a bit less like Chester Goode although I wouldn't call myself dance ready as yet.

Quit the whining

Lately it seems everybody I talk with wants to whine about higher food prices. And they're right; in the past few years it's been getting outrageously expensive to go to the market and buy ripe mangos air freighted from Brazil and fresh lettuce from Mexico and hot chutney from East Africa which sometimes I can't even get; so I have to be satisfied with the inferior stuff from India.

And don't even get me started on how expensive it's getting to top off the shopping cart with those little frozen creampuffs and cashew nuts and seedless cucumbers from England and that breakfast cereal with the crunchy freeze dried strawberry slices that are so delicious they're probably harvested exclusively by virgins working under the light of the new moon.

Then there are the Costa Rican plutocrats who must think their Hearts of Palm are made of solid silver. Madonna! I just want the things to fancy up a salad, for God's sake. And the Sicilians - just how much more do they think I'm going to pay for their fattening damn Caponata in the little cans. The Chinese are a bit more reasonable with their Mandarin Orange segments; but even they're getting greedy.

So this week Linda and I stepped back into the past. We stepped back to simple, healthful, slow food, you might say. Slow, economical food, if I may say so myself.

Early in the afternoon on Sunday I started a pot of Goya Great Northern Beans. Ignoring the ridiculous recipe on the label, I rapid boiled a pound of beans in eight cups of water. Mexicans have a lot of guts even proposing a recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli, if you ask me, even if Mexicans are a tiny bit Italian, being diluted Spaniards who are basicly diluted Romans.

After about an hour, I drained and rinsed the beans with cold water so I could rough them up a bit by rubbing them between my hands to loosen the skins and float them away. Then I put the beans on the stove again with eight cups of water, a couple of teaspoons of salt and about half a cup of olive oil to slow simmer for a few hours until they pretty much disintegrated. That's the way Pop liked them, the way his mom made them, more like bean sauce with little broken up soft chunks than like intact beans in liquid.

A couple of hours before I shut off the heat under the pot I broke up a bulb of garlic and peeled and sliced the cloves. Like Mom and Aunt Mary R, I carefully sliced the first few cloves nice and thin; and then the slices might have gotten a bit thicker and less regular as I got tired of the task. I threw the garlic into the pot to simmer with the beans and then turned off the pot at about ten to cool down a bit so I could put it into the refrigerator at about midnight.

It was then a simple matter to come home on Monday at about 5:15, start a pot of water with a half a handful of salt in it for the Ditalini, dip about a third of the bean sauce into a saucepan to heat up, dump in a box of ditalini once the salted water was boiling, let the Ditalini boil for precisely the eight minute minimum for al dente specified on the package, poured off as much of the cooking water as I could without letting any of the Ditalini escape from the pot, poured in the now just boiling bean sauce to join the remaining water in with the Ditalini, and ladled the completed Pasta e' Fagioli into shallow bowls by 5:35.

Between us, Linda and I ate about one-third of the Pasta e' Fagioli for dinner, so the pot contained about six meals. There were also two more potfuls worth of bean sauce that I froze later. Figure two bucks for the beans and two bucks each for three boxes of Ditalini. Add in about three bucks for a cup and a half of olive oil and a buck for three bulbs of garlic. Total cost of eighteen meals? About twelve smackeroos. Sixty-six cents per meal.

And. . . I defy anyone to make a better meal, both from the perspective of health and from the perspective of taste, if taken with fresh Corropolese bread and a nice salad dressed with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Plus the garlic will keep away vampires and other pests.

So quit your whining about the cost of food.

Food is costing us more because we're eating like decadent Roman aristocrats. No, that's not right. We're eating far better than pampered Roman aristocrats because we also get to enjoy Hearts of Palm from Costa Rica which add a nice crunch and flavor to our salads. And we have Cheetos and Mountain Dew, which are lots better tasting than flamingo tongues and sour wine.

Lucullus would have swooned with pleasure if given access to the foods we consider common; but they wouldn't have made him any happier.

I'll let Epicurus explain; "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires."

Update: I forgot to say that I added a can of diced tomatoes to the pot early on in the process. I did that because I didn't have a little can of tomato paste or a medium can of tomato sauce. It's mostly for color anyway. Without something to make it a little bit red this soup looks pretty sickly. I'm too lazy to update the cost information above but a can of something tomato-ey costs about 60 or 80 cents, trivial.

Update 2: 80 86 64 88 :<(

The sun will come out tomorrow

I didn't get all teary eyed like Jesse jackson or Oprah Winfrey; but after watching Barack Obama's touching and inspiring victory speech late last night I experienced a road to Damascus moment and went to bed sure that the sun would shine bright today.

Just like The Little Engine That Could, I fell asleep chanting, "Yes we can," "Yes, we can," "Yes we can."

Imagine my surprise when I woke up to the gray clouds of a typical fall day rather than to the brilliant sun of a perfect future. And then, later today I got another surprise when the stock market dropped. Apparently, those perfidious foreigners who were all excited about Obama last week didn't rush in and buy up U.S. stocks in celebration of his elevation.

Very disappointing; but I plan to chant my "Yes we can"s again tonight. The One was very clear about that in his speech. We all have to do our part to create heaven on earth.

I'm very confident that the sun will do its part and come out tomorrow.

And - Speaking of Heaven on earth:

I keep reading more and more about the simple fact that there has been no (No!) global warming since 1998. So this earth, which was supposed to be irreversibly warming up, has not been warming up as Nobel Prize wiener Al Gore and all his acolytes told us it would. "The science is settled," they told us; but the earth has actually been cooling for the past couple of years.

Was it all a lie? Or was it just an, ooops!, mistake. If so, its been a very expensive mistake for the taxpayers and consumers in the European countries that have disrupted their energy markets and paid tens of billions to Russia and other sources of "carbon credits" which is a technical term for protection money.

This subject came up on my radar screen again the other day when an audio book I'm listening to mentioned that Vikings used to live in Greenland when it was a lot warmer there back in the period from about 900 AD to about 1500 AD. Who was generating the CO2 that warmed Greenland up that much back a thousand years ago? Who was generating the CO2 that warmed up Nova Scotia enough so that Leif Erickson found grapewines growing there, so many grapevines that he called it Vinland? Who was generating the CO2 that made England and Germany warm enough to have big wine producing regions in that era?

I think Al Gore has been trying to pull off the biggest investment and political corruption scam in the history of the world. He's made tens of millions off of it, but now he has gotten unlucky. If he had been lucky enough to have a few more years of warming he could have completed the scam and made tens of billions trading in carbon credits. But now it's falling apart. Al is desperately trying to change the terms of the debate by calling it "climate change" so he can claim any kind of weather, or any level of world temperature proves his case; but it isn't going to work.

Here's an interestingly written article that gets at some of this.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=310695037962525

Perspective

I never win lotteries or prizes; but today I won a minor one in the great lottery of life. When I got to the polling place there was a long line of H to R people and a moderate line of S to Z people; but there was only a short line of A to G people; so I got in and out within a half hour or so.

Best of all, I was just behind Bob Brant in line, so I got to chat with him a bit. Bob was there as a civilian, simply voting today; but I've seen him at the polling place every couple of years for twenty or more years because he's been the Republican Committeeman for our district all that time.

And then, after I had my little voting chit, I ran into Bud Templeton on my way to the voting machines. Bud was there as the Republican poll observer. I've seen Bud less frequently because he has moved from polling place to polling place over the years. Bud graciously welcomed me to Upper Providence when we moved here thirty years ago. He made sure we got registered, and then he made sure for the first few elections that we knew where our polling place was if it moved in those days before we had a good sense of the township.

Few of us adequately appreciate the part-time work done by guys like Bob and Bud, and their counterparts on the Demoncrat party side. Behind the scenes at every election, and between elections, there are patient party people on both sides getting people registered, explaining the voting process, calling to remind "their" voters of important local issues, organizing the polling places, watching over one another like hawks to keep the process honest, and generally making the whole system work. Without literally hundreds of thousands of people like Bob and Bud in tens of thousands of local voting precincts across the country our elections wouldn't work, or worse they wouldn't be sufficiently trustworthy to keep us all content with the outcomes.

And we do have a magnificent system bequeathed to us by those bewigged characters who designed it and got it started against all odd a couple of hundred years ago. It's the best such system in the world by far, even if it's unappreciated by most of us who have lived within it all our lives.

Back in 1992, a local legend named Clay Hess put it in perspective for me. He was old school, really old school, perhaps eighty years old in 1992. He was a farmer and an auctioneer, born in the township. Clay told stories of the time when local farmers graded the gravel roads adjoining their farms, before the roads were paved. He told of grading those roads with a horse team. By the time I knew him he was the local Republican Party chairman, and as partisan as anyone, but he also retained a healthy perspective.

You may have noticed that I'm not a big fan of Barack Obama. If so, you've had only the merest glimpse of how much I was not a fan of Bill Clinton back in 1992 when I was only 18 years out of the Navy and he was infamous for his Vietnam era statement that he "loathed the military." I was writing an opinion column for a local paper leading up to the 1992 election, and I was hot. So hot that I can't begin to count the number of columns I started and then tore up before the election because they went over the line.

Well, on election day in 1992 I made the rounds of the local polling places to write up a news story for the paper; and in the process I ran into Clay Hess up at the old Township Building. Despite his age Clay was aware of just about everything that went on locally; and he was certainly aware that I was hot about Clinton, although as a political tactic he always professed obliviousness to what appeared in the local papers. Anyway, Clay caught me aside and reminded me that no matter how the election turned out I needed to keep it in perspective relative to a very important fact.

"Sully," he said (I'm paraphrasing), "the important thing is that people are peacefully going to the polls and selecting the next president. I don't have much respect for Clinton either; but if he wins he will be our president. Having everybody respect a system that peacefully turns over power is precious. A whole lot of countries in the world wish they had such a system."

A very wise man, Clay Hess. That was one election; and this is one election. Win or lose, we all need to remember that in our constitutional system we have a priceless gift.

Update: 80 81 87 78 79 ;<)

This would increase voter turnout at The Villages

At first I thought this headline said "Lady Lake" and I was expecting to get quite a report from Al R when we call him on Saturday. Then I realized it's on the west coast of Florida, so maybe it's Don A who will get a real eye opener some day when he goes to vote.

LAND O' LAKES, Fla. (AP) - A nudist community on Florida's west coast wants to establish the first clothing-optional polling site. The Caliente Resorts, located in Pasco County north of Tampa, has approached election officials about the idea.

Nothing in state law would prohibit it, but the supervisor of elections says he is opposed to creating any new precincts before redistricting in 2010.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Update - Screw the Associated Press and its lawyers. Copyright 2008 Sullysside. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Use in a copyright infringment action is especially forbidden.

Maybe The One is as good a pilot as this guy

If Barack Obama is elected on tuesday the country will be flying with one wing, the left wing. The congress is already firmly in the hands of the left, and it will be more so after the election. The courts are arguably middle of the road; but within a couple of years of Obama making appointments they will be firmly in the hands of the left as well. And, of course, with Barack in the White House there will be no counterbalance for the loony ideas that congress will pass and the courts will approve.

So the country will be flying on one wing.

We can only hope that The One is as good a pilot as this fellow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY6LjeAEPJk

Where is the tipping point?

I survived this morning's ideological battle of me and Sam against Jas in pretty good spirits. When they left I was in a hopeful moment. In my hopeful moments I trust that our country will survive Barack Obama the way it survived Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon and Warren Harding, or at worst the way it survived the Civil War. In less hopeful moments I take solace that at worst our country will survive The One the way China survived its Great Helmsman.

You have to keep these contemporary events in perspective. What, after all, do fifty or a hundred lost years of relative poverty and despair matter in the great scheme of history. What difference does it make in the long run if the next miracle drug is discovered in 2010 or in 2110. Even the great wars and ideological cataclysms of the 20th century set back human progress by at most thirty or forty or fifty years.

Every system has a tipping point, a tipping point beyond which recovery is impossible in the short term. Like the tipping point in our cities which made the teacher's unions and the lawyers invulnerable and has thus condemned generations of kids in the inner cities to terrible schools and inability to compete in the general economy. It's no longer possible to repair the inner city schools because the interests of all the leaches and vultures feeding on the system outweigh the interests of the kids by so much that no politician can address the issue. Perspective helps as a curative to despair in recognizing that those bad educational systems in our cities have only destroyed the lives of a few million kids out of a couple of billion born in the world since our inner city schools became cesspools of interest group politics.

Somewhere out there is a tipping point where the interests and voting strength of those who depend on government for their bread and circuses and welfare outweigh the interests and voting strength of those who actually create the wealth by such a margin that the whole system spirals toward naked interest group politics. Liberals often rail at the selfishness of the rich; but they conveniently ignore the fact that the productive rich already contribute almost all of the taxes with which politicians buy votes, and the productive middle class contributes the rest. We are already at a point where half of the population contributes no taxes at all except to their own social security accounts, and most of the members of the lower half of the income distribution curve don't even fully support their own social security entitlement. More than half of our population is already on welfare to some extent.

And, having reached this situation, we have in Barack Obama a presidential candidate who wants to, as he says, "share the wealth;" even though our current system already shares the wealth to an extent unparalleled in history. Even though the productive half of the population already partly supports the third most productive quarter of the population and fully supports the least productive quarter, about half of which actually deserve welfare and about half of which are useless layabouts, able to work but too lazy to work.

At best Obama thinks the tipping point is out beyond the new taxes and entitlements he plans to implement. At worst he knows the tipping point is close and wants to drive the country over that tipping point in order to lead it into a new age of, who knows? Revolutionaries rarely have had a full understanding of where they want to lead their revolutions. This last is a harsh charge to believe, but it is fully consistent with his voting record since he joined the senate. And it is even more consistent with the sort of radical friends and supporters with which he surrounded himself before he began running for president.

Either way, regardless of what Obama believes; the tipping point is out there. I don't think he can lead the country over it, the system is pretty robust; but I don't know for sure except to say that I've never been more concerned.

What I mean by a tipping point is that at some point more and more of the productive can decide that creating more wealth, earning more income, is not worthwhile. Even worse, they can come to the point of view that the system is all about what you can get from government rather than about what you can create. The productive are not stupid. They can see which side of the bread is buttered and they're smart enough to create their own little pipelines to the government honeypot if they so choose.

Why work hard and earn and pay taxes when your neighbor works less and collects? Why work hard and pay your mortgage when your neighbor borrows and spends and then sees his mortgage paid for by the government? Why work hard and start a productive business that depends on real customers with choices when you can get a subsidy from the government and convert your business into a parasite that depends on government subsidies and customers who have no choices?

If you doubt this last think about all the farm state leaches and Washington political whores of both parties who have clamped their suckers onto the ethanol production and sales subsidies. That tipping point has already been passed. The interests of the ethanol leaches is now overwhelming, and the subsidies and mandates will never stop, even though the environmentalists who originally fostered ethanol subsidies now recognize that it was a bad path to go down. Every time you buy gasoline you're paying a little subsidy to some conglomerate that ought to be processing corm for food but instead is turning it into a poor additive for fuel.

Both parties are telling you that this election is the most important one in a generation. I'm not sure that's the case. But it just may be.

If you think I'm alarmist about this you may want to read Thomas Sowell's column to which I've linked below. Sowell has been an economist all his life, and he has made judicious good sense in every one of his columns that I've read, even if I haven't agreed with every single one of them.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell.html

Update: 77 84 79 ;<)

Memories and the viscissitudes of life

Last Saturday Linda and I braved near zero visibility in the second most intense rainstorm we've encountered in our lives to reach Desimones Cafe down in Bridgeport and step back into the past. Along the way, while stopped at the light at Route 363 in King of Prussia, we noticed a single white running shoe awash in the river flowing in the right lane, making it's lonely way toward the sea. We didn't see any sign of a shoeless foot, so perhaps the body had already been washed down the sewer.

Other than that the trip was uneventful, except that I took the wrong fork on the turn-off from 202 to Ford Street. As I said, visibility was bad. And then there was the rude honking when I made the hairpin turn back onto Ford while I thought I had the light. People are so impatient and inconsiderate. For the record, the fellow had plenty of time to brake. And he shouldn't have been accelerating so fast in a downpour like that anyway. Fortunately Linda's car performed magnificently during the somewhat hurried turn, hardly hydroplaning at all, the skid only just perceptible, well under control.

As always we were headed down to Desimones because Charlotte, Louie and Jonathan were in town. For them returning to Bridgeport means returning to Desimones, which is like condensed old-time Bridgeport. Down there in Virginia where they've lived for twenty years, they're staid suburbanites, solid burghers, as the Dutch would say. But when they come back here they seek out the haunt of their youth, as though for a recharge of their former neighborhood selves. Ultimately, you can take a Louie out of Bridgeport; but you can't completely take the Bridgeport out of a Louie, just as you can never wholly take the Penn Street out of a Charlotte or a Sully.

Linda and I arrived at Desimones, each of us, with one shoe full of water from having to step into the rivulet running down Holstein in order to get onto the sidewalk. Neither of us contributed our other shoe to the flow. That lonely shoe on 202 hasn't had any of our shoes for company in the Schuylkill this week.

Sandra and Joey were there with Louie, Charlotte and Jonnie when we arrived, as was Theresa B. Joey's ex-wife Marianne and Sam showed up little later. Bobby called in sick, or perhaps Pat begged off to avoid the smoke. There's no smoking ban in effect at Desimones, at least in the bar area.

Jonny was in costume as Elvis and served as waiter, or at least as order taker. Aside from our group there was the usual Bridgeport bar crowd, animatedly discussing whether the Phillies game would be called off, this while rain was coming down in sheets outside, and I was wondering if the rivulet would grow to sufficient size and force to carry away Linda's car. But I wasn't wondering that for long because Linda and I each had a refreshing Seabreeze when we arrived, and then I had another because it was a thirsty night. I later learned that Linda followed up her Seabreeze with a beer while I was talking with Sandra and Louie and Joey at the bar. Charlotte, as usual, was deep into it with Theresa B, and Linda had joined them at a table.

The big news of the evening was from Joey, who said he had read my recipe for porkette and couldn't see it as his mother's recipe, because she never put celery in her pork. Charlotte backed him up on that; so it may be that all of these years I've been making what I thought was Aunt Carmella's pork, and all these years I've been adding an extra ingredient. Go figure.

Which brings me to an interesting coincidence. Desimones reminds me of a bar called The Knotty Pine which I sometimes frequented back when I was in college. The Knotty was also in Bridgeport, only its Bridgeport is in Illinois, part of Chicago. The Knotty was a favorite of a lot of us because it was relatively near the campus, and the owner/bartender checked IDs in a figurative sense. If you showed him an ID he served you, no matter what date of birth it had on it. The knotty was also a favorite because it was a very safe spot in a very rough neighborhood.

Most of the regulars were cops and a good proportion of the cops were friendly, or at least tolerant of us kids, kidding us about our age or about being Joe College and such. Other of the cops were sullen, unfriendly; but not just with us. They weren't there to socialize. One memorable evening one of the sullen cops apparently took a dislike to the refrigerator in the corner. I didn't actually see him shoot it; but I turned aroung quick at the report of his pistol, and there he was looking at the refrigerator and holding out his gun. And there was a little black hole in the white refrigerator door. Everybody in what had been a pretty noisy place was all of a sudden very quiet. Then one of the other cops went over and talked quietly to him for a while until he put his gun back in its holster. Just an average night in 1967 at the Knotty Pine, a little bar in Bridgeport, maybe ten blocks from the row house where the mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, lived. Well, maybe it wasn't an average night.

What clinched the deal for us and kept us coming back to the Knotty Pine though, was that even for back then it was a very economical joint. Hard to believe now, but six ounce glasses of beer were fifteen cents during happy hour, and happy hour ran until seven or eight or nine depending on how observant of time the owner was being on any given day. One memorable winter night happy hour ran all the way through to the 2 AM closing time.

Nick O and I stayed to the end that night even though it meant our ride left and we had to walk the ten or so blocks back to campus, crossing the sort of no-mans land under the elevated tracks on the way. But hell, who was going to be out and about to bother us in the dark middle of a pretty cold night? Who indeed! Nick later told me there were four of them and that we had to run long and hard because they were very determined. For my part, I remember leaving the Knotty and walking back toward campus and noticing that it was pretty darned cold. And then there's a mixed up blur comprised of an argument of some sort, and Nick yelling to run, and then running into something, and getting back up, and running again.

But all ended well, except that I hurt my wrist a bit and I had huge bruises on the fronts of my upper legs, probably acquired from tumbling over the hood of a parked car that I ran into at full tilt, if Nick's account is to be believed. Also, the next afternoon when I got out of bed I found that I could barely walk due to a sprained ankle that Nick hadn't noticed when we arrived back at the fraternity house even though we climbed the stairs to our third floor rooms together. Nick was luckier than me. He was fine except that he had somehow acquired a several inch long slash in a leather jacket he somewhat prized. He said he thought they wanted the jacket; but I always thought he made too much of that jacket.

When is helpful tech support not useful tech support

I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with a very pleasant and helpful seeming fellow at Verizon, in who knows where, trying to find out why our home internet service has been intermittent. He led me through all manner of technical stuff on both our home desktop computer and then on my company laptop.

The end result was that he tried to give me to a paid service or connect me with the manufacturers of the computers to try to figure out why he was seeing internet coming to our wireless modem, and our home computer was seeing the wireless modem, but neither of the computers was seeing the internet. I declined those two options because the two computers are from different manufacturers and they run different versions of windows. Also, I told him it's hard to see how our computers can be at fault if both of them see the internet intermittently and we have not made any changes to their settings. In fact, I can't make changes to the settings of the company laptop, so its literally impossible for me to have screwed it up.

After I got off the phone with the pleasant support guy, I cut power to the wireless modem and then powered it up again, figuring that maybe that would knock some sense into its little brain. This was, by the way, something the tech support guy did not suggest that I do. Well, here I am on the internet again with the laptop. Go figure. I haven't tried yet with the home computer because I also cut its power and it takes forever for that desktop to reboot. I'll try that tonight. And then, assuming everything works, I'm going to have to call Verizon again because as part of his procedure the fellow changed our account password since I couldn't remember the original one. Who can remember such passwords over a gap of years? Who even knows that the little modem with its five green eyes requires a password?

If you are having internet connectivity problems you may want to try cutting off power to the modem and then giving it back its power as a first step.

I'm skeptical that this is a final fix because we've had some odd internet on and off issues for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I left the very helpful and patient Verizon fellow with the word that I'm not going to be paying their bill if the problem continues, so we'll see what, if anything Verizon does.

Update: I didn't mention above that, after remaining polite with the seemingly helpful human who failed to help, I also spent a couple of minute cursing the little modem, and Verizon, and the internet, and the gods of technology, before I cut off the power. If you have ccasion to try this you may need to say to the modem, "Take this you faithless little bastard, starve in the dark for a while," just before you cut off its power. And then, after its confused little green eyes have finished with their blinking once you have restored the power, it may be necessary to say to it, "The next time I'll cut you off for a few hours or I may just rip you out of there and throw you on a fire to see how you like that."

Update 2: Tonight at 6:00 the DSL was working. At about 8:00 it was no longer working. I had other stuff to do on this computer so I let it alone. A little while ago I checked and it still wasn't working; so I unplugged the modem and sure enough the DSL was working again after I plugged it back in. Does this mean I have to unplug the thing ever few hours? I think it means that I call Verizon's billing office tomorrow and tell them to cut off the DSL service. Hopefully that will cause them to put me in touch with someone who will authorize a new modem, which is clearly what's needed. Of course they may play it tough, in which case modern technology may retreat from this little piece of Collegeville.

Update 3: 84 82 45 82 54 84 87 59 86 :<(

Update 4 on 11/8: I got in touch with a different technical services human in wherever they are after I called billing. This tech services person spoke with a bit more of an accent than the first one above. I'm failing to resist the urge to believe that he was hired more for his technical competence than for his English language skills. He fairly quickly went into a mode of replacing the "firmware" in my internet connection gizmo after telling me that it's an older model whose "firmware" sometimes gets corrupted. Since then no problems. Someday I have to do a post about the tradeoffs inherent in recruiting and hiring, a subject about which I'm pretty knowledgeable.

Falling leaves

Since writing that blog post about the first falling of the sugar maple leaves a few days ago I've really been paying attention to how differently the trees behave as the cold weather comes on.

The sugar maple is all but bare now, but the leaves of the red maples aren't even close to reaching their full color; and the silver maples have barely reached full color, not that their feeble attempt at color is all that impressive. And then there are the sweetgums and the poplars, whose leaves haven't even shown any awareness that fall is here. Then, of course, you have the black walnuts, which lost their leaves a month or so ago; but nobody noticed because the darn things look half naked even when they're all leafed out.

For years after we bought the property I thought there might be something wrong with the black walnuts. They get their leaves last in the spring, they never really seem fully leafed out, and they lose their leaves first in the fall. It doesn't seem like a very efficient survival and growth strategy. And yet black walnuts seem to grow fast enough to hold their own very well in the pasture areas that I've let go wild since we got rid of the horses. Of course, I keep in mind that one year way back I scattered a bucket of walnuts around and thus gave them an assist. And then there is the fact that big nutrient rich seeds like walnuts surely give their seedlings an advantage. But still, the walnut trees must compete year in and year out in the wild growing areas with everything else, and they seem to do that just fine despite their seemingly inefficient leaf practices.

At the other extreme from the walnuts are the hybrid poplars. They're the first trees with full grown leaves in the spring; and the damn things hold their leaves in fall until well after I want them off the trees so I can grind them up with the mower. My tractor can't carry its John Deere belly mower and it's John Deere snow plow at the same time because some John Deere engineer who designed those attachments was an idiot; so every year there is a fine decision to make about when to get the dealer to send his guy over to take off the mower and put on the plow. Switch too soon and the drifts of unmown poplar leaves will irritate me a little bit every windy day for most of the winter. Switch too late and the lack of the plow will irritate me a whole lot all on one day if we get an early snow.

Rereading that last paragraph, I'm compelled to point out that most of the John Deere engineers who designed my tractor thirty or so years ago were manifestly not idiots. That tractor has been through a lot with me for the past twenty two years, and I mean a lot. I've never tested it's roll bar; but I've tested the strength of many other parts of the machine; and all of those parts are still on there. It has failed to start when needed only one time in more than twenty years and that was because some idiot let the water level in its battery recede below the top of the plates. Furthermore, it has only overheated twice in over twenty years of hard use despite the fact that it's air filter has only had the dust knocked out of it four or five times and the debris screen in front of the air intake has only been cleaned four or five times, two of which in each case were just after it overheated. All in all, John Deere's engineers should be proud of themselves, except for he one who designed the underbelly mower hitch so that it interferes with the plow attachment point. Everything else I can forgive; but that I can't forgive.

But back to the poplars. We had our first fire in the woodstove last evening, a fire made from some of the last wood from the big poplar that grew too big to be left to grow so near the house. Like it's twin, which is about forty feet from the house, that poplar grew about six feet per year for the first fifteen years of its life and it started providing serious shade when it was only five or six years old. It was almost three feet in diameter at twenty years old. Of course, besides shade it also provided no end of little sticky bud husks each spring - little sticky bud husks that were tracked all over the house. It also sent a big root under the bricks of the patio and a little root into the basement through the drain to get at the condensation water from the heat pump. But it was on balance a great tree, and it's been a great provider of heat from the woodstove since I had to have it cut down to put a stop to its unsociable behavior.

Update: 80 64 85 :< (

Can't you let the poor fellow rest in peace?

Around and around and around. The link below is to a story by a writer about a writer who has annotated and brought out a new version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. This got me to thinking about Scott Adams's Dilbert riff on degrees of separation of the work from the actual work. As in (when I'm actually working), I am a recruiter, mostly of people who design and build systems which allow people to manipulate symbols and thus plan the assignment of other people to actually go out and do something.

But that post is too long to write now, even if I come to understand what it will be trying to say; so I'd better stick with posting on my original reaction to reading the story linked to below. Now, though, I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to let you write this blog post in your own head by just asking a couple of questions.

Why must writers exhume the dead, so to speak, and write about such things?

Why can't writers let poor Dracula lie?

Can the undead never rest in peace?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122514491757273633.html?mod=article-outset-box#articleTabs%3Darticle

Update 7:30 PM: 81 93 80 ;>)

It's snowing cats and dogs here

It's snowing cats and dogs here, and it's even sticking on the side streets, the earliest heavy snowfall I remember; which puts me in mind of Nobel Prize wiener Al Gore (PBUH).

I wonder if Al is out on his yacht, or flying somewhere in his jet, or being driven somewhere in his Cadillac Escalade, or whether he is giving a song and dance show about global warming or climate change or whatever he's calling to nowadays.

I'm going to be writing a longer, kinder, post about Fat Albert very soon, for I have learned that he has joined me in the legion of the threatened, at least in one respect; so I hope he won't mind my taking his name in vain today.

Excuse any errors, no time to spell check or proofread this - must run.

Mom periodically made a point of reminding. . .

Mom always made a point of reminding me and Pop that Pop went to a Phillies game the night she was at the hospital having me. The funny thing is that I never asked Pop if they won that game. I imagine there is some baseball web site where I could learn if the Phillies won on my birthday in 1948. On the other hand, maybe I don't want to look. Given the kind of revisionism I noted in some of the long standing but ever evolving stories, it's altogether possible that the Phillies were out of town that night and Mom's whole story was an urban legend that she herself had come to believe.

Speaking of the Phillies, Pop used to tell of being invited by a friend to go down to Connie Mack Stadium for a World Series Game in 1950. Apparently the friend decided to scalp his two tickets instead of use them after learning how much they were worth. So he and Pop sat in a bar down in Philly and listened to the game on the radio. I forget the name of Pop's friend, although I'm sure he mentioned that name at least a hundred times when he told that story.

Sam may remember the name. Sam's mind is like a steel trap for such facts, although the other night he said Father Larkin could say Mass in 14 minutes, so he's not infallible. Both Jas and I agree that, on a roll, Father Larkin could do morning mass in 22 minutes, but never 14. We all agreed that he could probably do Mass in 14 minutes if he really needed to, like when shells were coming down over in Europe during the war, but not in Trooper.

Jas claims that he never got behind on his altar boy responses during Father Larkin's masses. I remember getting behind, and I like to think I was pretty fast with the latin responses, if I wasn't daydreaming. Not that having an altar boy get behind ever slowed Father Larkin. He did both parts if you were too slow. Also, he used to sway, forward and back, back and forward, very slowly, seemingly almost to the point of tipping over, when he said early mass. He could practically hypnotize you with that swaying if you hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. And then he'd look hard at you if you forgot to ring the bells or whatever. There was like one or two or three little old ladies in church, all of them probably too deaf to hear the bells; but Father Larkin liked the bells rung on time, and he wanted the wine and the water there promptly when it was time for it - very little water. Not that anybody could get much of a buzz out of that wine. Later, when me and others altar boyed Tuesday night Sodality we got into that wine. Terrible stuff.

Now that I'm sort of on the subject of sports; Pop also used to tell of Grandpop L deciding to fish in a fellow's pond while the fellow was away. By Pop's account Grandpop L fished with a quarter stick of dynamite; and there were a lot of fish to share around the neighborhood. The owner of the pond was said to have been somewhat displeased and to have figured out who done it - but what was he going to say to someone who had dynamited fish near Norristown, and who might have the other three quarters of the stick of dynamite close to hand. I wonder how carefully Angela checked out the basement of her Mom's house before she sold it.

And finally, still sort of on the subject of sports; Don A down in Florida recently, I think, cleared up the question of how Uncle Joe Sky came to be well involved in his sports related business by the time Pop got out of the hospital a couple of years after returning from the war. Don told me that Uncle Joe was the brother-in-law of his aunt - I think I have that straight. Anyway, that means Uncle Joe was already related to the Perino side of the A family before he married Aunt Lucy from our side of the A family. And, being related to the Perino side, he was related to Jamaica, a very snappy dresser among Perino's sons. Jamaica died in the late 1930s or early 1940s; but before that he could very well have been connected with folks who could have set Uncle Joe up in his business. I know Jamaica was a snappy dresser because Don included a picture of him on a disk he sent me a couple of years ago, and I saw other pictures of him at the Perino side reunion a few years ago. One of these days I need to compare that picture of Jamaica to the fellows in the sort of rogues gallery of New York guys that I found in Aunt Lucy's box of pictures that passed down to Anna M.

Coincidences and Perspective

This morning I was drawn over toward Mom and Pop's old house across the creek by the sight of white shapes billowing in the grass just beyond the bamboo patch I planted in the middle of that field two years ago. I could have just gone into the TV room for the binoculars, but it was a nice day, so I took a walk. Fortunately so, for I found that the white shapes were "ghosts" fluttering from a framework that the S's had erected as part of an obstacle course for kids coming to a picnic today. And I had a nice conversation with Mr. S about a variety of stuff.

Now here's where the coincidence comes in. How many times in your life do you think about gargoyles two times within a few hours as a result of two separate incidents?

While talking with Mr. S I noticed that one of the high dead branches of the weeping willow tree down by the pond presents a perfect image of a gargoyle at it's very top when looked at from up by his house - and I mentioned it to him. It looks so much like a crouching animal that we both looked at it for quite a while before becoming sure it was just an aspect of the profile of the branch from that perspective. So that's one gargoyle.

Then later, about mid afternoon, Marianne M called to talk to Linda about plans for a cookie making day before Christmas. But Linda was napping, so Marianne and I proceeded to talk about a variety of things, one of which was art and her surprise at finding me writing about it in a previous blog entry. And that led to talk of the artwork that Catherine and Liana are doing in this class they're taking. And, naturally, one of the things was to model a gargoyle. So that's two gargoyles in one day.

Below are links to the girls' artwork. I liked the positive negative cutouts they did and I found it interesting that their work is so much different one from the other.

Liana's cutouts are very symmetrical, very controlled. At first glance they're reminiscent of parquetry or formal design, like an English formal garden. But then the first one started to look like a tribal mask to me, quite a good tribal mask, symmetrical but not symmetrical at the same time.

Catherine's cutouts are aggressively asymmetrical and interesting in a whole different way, reminiscent of cubism at first glance. And then I noticed the jester face within the teddy bear face on the left side of the first one. The first one is very, very cleverly done; but I still like the second one best for the way the angular cutouts on the left complement the rounder cutouts on the right and top, and especially for the way the little windy road at the bottom leads into the square.

That windy road in Catherine's cutout reminded me that Van Gogh painted a picture of a winding road entering a field from the foreground much like that. I think Van Gogh's picture is in Chicago with one of his greatest paintings - the one of the little room he lived in, in Arles, I think. Stand back from that painting and the perspective is perfect, the corners vividly sharp and angular. Move closer and you have to be amazed because the corners are just the barest suggestions sometimes suggestions made of lack of paint. Like when you get involved with a pointilist painting. You're forced to ask yourself, how did Van Gogh do that? He had to be close to daub on those little brushstrokes; but he had to be seeing the painting from far to see the corners in his mind's eye.

The standing in my shoes pictures are also interesting for the differences between them. Liana goes for bold colors and complex geometric shapes on the soles of the shoes, while Catherine goes for softer colors and softer, more restful, motifs on the soles of the shoes. It took me a while to figure out the logo on the soles of Catherine's shoes.

Only Liana has a gargoyle, which is what started this whole blog entry. Her gargoyle reminded me of a cow that was in one of the Disney cartoons. Maybe Catherine had a gargoyle but it came alive and ran off like the gargoyles in the movie Ghostbusters.

I'll have to remember to point out the gargoyle at the top of the tree to Liana and Catherine when they next come over.

Perspective is everything in life. What is obvious from close up is sometimes a mystery from afar. And what is obvious from afar is sometimes a mystery from close up.

You can sometimes see what Van Gogh saw by squinting your eyes just so when looking at a vivid scene like fall tree colors in bright sunshine, or a dark scene like the sky in moonlight. If you could paint what you see when you squint your eyes like that maybe your paintings would be the prizes of museum collections, almost literally priceless. The last Van Gogh that came on the market was a relatively small and not very good one, if such a thing can be said. It brought a price of $87 million from a Japanese fellow a dozen or so years ago, I think, for the information of you Philistines out there. Not that I have much room to criticize, as though that has ever stopped me. Aside from a very few artists that I recognize on sight, I read the labels in the museums just like most people to know which ones to look at more closely and respectfully than the others.

You can see Catherine and Liana's artwork at the links below.

Catherine http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=3679928

Liana http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=3679958

Catching up on book reviews

I've been busy reading and listening to booktapes. Here are a few quick reviews.

True Grit by Charles Portis - I listened to this as an audio book last week. I had never read it, or even heard of it except as the title for the movie. This novel is a masterpiece. It's told from the point of view of an old spinster who hired Rooster Cogburn to help track down her father's killer back when she was 14 years old and then accompanied him on the hunt. It's a bit over the top, but then a good adventure story should be a bit over the top. If you liked Huckleberry Finn or Kim or Tom Sawyer or Red Badge of Courage you should pick this book up. It's short (6.5 hours on 6 CDs) and gripping. I think is it would be as good reading as listening.

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks - I also listened to this as an audio book last week. It's also short (7.5 hours on 6 CDs) and it's gripping in a different way than True Grit. It's the story of a pregnant black teenager in the 1960's South as she and various relatives set out to dig up her mother's body both to move it from where a shopping center is going to be built and also to retrieve a treasure of jewelry that they think her mother was buried with. I'll write more about this later in another post because as an audio book it's unique in my experience in that it includes professionally performed blues songs as the voice of the mother, so it's more of a multi-media presentation such as might be put on by an old timey storyteller. Probably a good read as well, but that depends on how well you can tolerate reading colloquial dialogue.

Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman - I read this in the large print edition that all the book racks seem to have on them now as us old geezers start to predominate in the reading population. A typical Jonathan Kellerman production - well written, interesting plot, characters who are old friends if you've read his other books. It's not literature, but if you must waste time reading popular novels it's an excellent one.

The Burnt House - by Faye Kellerman - I picked this up at the same time as I picked up her husband's book (above) but, oddly enough, it is a regular sized paperback. Pretty much ditto with what I said about the book above; but if I were forced to choose between them I would say Faye writes the better novel, at least for me. She gets a bit more into the actual lives and thinking of her characters, or maybe I'm a smidgen more interested in her characters than I am in Jonathan's. Well worth reading - no, more than that - excellent.

Book of the Dead - by Patricia Cornwell - It's a sad thing to see a writer you've enjoyed in the past go over the edge and take her characters with her into utterly preposterous psychological waters. There is a phrase, "jumped the shark," which is applied to TV shows that have gone over the top and into the realm of the ridiculous. That phrase aptly describes what Cornwell did in this book, and what she has been threatening to do in a couple of previous books. The name brand critics apparently loved it; but then the name brand critics inhabit a world where it's reasonable to believe that one of a pair of very close twenty year friends and business associates suddenly tries to rape the other. Non-geniuses like Cornwell are well advised to leave repressed desire themes to geniuses. Also, the underlying plot is preposterously complex and unlikely even by pulp novel standard; and the main character's niece has now accumulated so many diverse skill sets that she puts James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Jason Bourne to shame. The niece is now Wonder Woman with Marie Curie's brain; but still encumbered by a healthy dollop of downright Victorian emotional stupidity. I managed to finish it; but I won't pick up her next book.