Brigham's Blog: May 2011

31 May 2011

I had a great weekend! There were only four or five yard sales - I didn't see anything I wanted. I did see a really cool 1972 Buick Riviera on the street, however. I haven't seen one of those boat-tails in... I don't know... decades? By and large I like Seventies automotive styling... it could be bold!

The pool opened on Saturday, and to my utter delight when I dropped in the water I discovered the temperature was perfect. We ordered the first pizza of the season and so I heard my favorite summer rhapsody, as announced over the p.a. system by a lifeguard: "Clark, your pizza is here - Clark?"

I did some more work on the Garage Project, but, boy, was it ever hot in there. (Yesterday it was 99 - today is going to be another scorcher.) I am now paying the price for not insulating the attic during the winter. As you can see from my photos, I patched some cracks, put up some dressy new light fixtures and got rid of my smelly beige cabinet - a yard sale purchase gone bad. Fortunately, I paid very little for them, but once again, the old saying holds true: You get what you pay for. Yesterday we went to a Lowe's and found the vinyl floor base in gray; it'll look good. I install that after I put in the epoxy floor. When do I do that, and smell up the neighborhood for a time with industrial chemicals? When we get a spell of cool weather, maybe. Or after the summer. I had meant to be further along with this than I am, but, oh, well. No big hurry. It's not like we're putting the house on the market next week or anything like that.

Organ recital: I met with my doctor Friday morning and got a prescription for an MRI on my shoulder for this Friday. Get this: the appointment is at 10:15 PM. Yeesh! It'll cost me some money but I'm hoping to find out once and for all what's wrong... this right shoulder has been hurting me ever since I injured it in my last rugby season in fall 2006 - nearly five years ago. I've done physical therapy for it since then twice, which relieves some of the pain and increases some of the pain free movement, but it has always hurt. It's worse now: I felt it twang when I was painting the garage doors a couple of weeks ago - I possibly re-injured it. Combing my hair is a painful process. Good thing I don't have a lot of it to comb! I'm wondering if I haven't torn a rotator cuff or something...

I tried watching Inception (2010), the latest Chris Nolan film, which came recommended to me by twenty and thirtysomethings. I got about fifty minutes into it and became bored; at the hour point I fell asleep. When I awoke I gave up and practiced the piano for a while. An hour and a half later while my wife was still watching - this is a needlessly long film - I checked the ending and became convinced that I didn't miss anything. I thought the plot was a mess and they were sort of making up the rules as they went along, like a cinematic game of Calvinball... If you get killed during a dream you wake up. Unless you are on one of the sub-levels, in which case you're in undefined dream space, which is like limbo. It can last decades because dream time is different than waking time. You have to have a token that nobody else knows about in order to check to see whether or not you're in somebody's dream. etc. etc. etc. Perhaps people who play and enjoy complicated video games will enjoy this film better than those who do not. BTW, my wife liked Inception.

Inception falls into a film category I call "Too clever for its own good." Other films in this category: The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, Minority Report, The Prestige, The Black Dahlia. It's not that I dislike non-linear time lines and complex story lines; it's just that they're so infrequently done successfully. Memento and Mulholland Drive are complicated films with non-linear time lines and they work brilliantly - and they are both favorites. Some noirs from the classic period (1940 - 1960) have flashbacks and nested narratives... while this is somewhat annoying, it can work. I notice that the Netflix user reviews for Inception seem to be about evenly balanced between people who loved it and people like me who thought it was overrated and uninteresting. To conclude, I will state that it reminded me of The Matrix. This is not a compliment.

I am now reading All Around the Town - Murder, Scandal, Riot and Mayhem in Old New York by Herbert Asbury. Written in 1934, it's a companion piece to his 1928 The Gangs of New York - which I read because my father told me it was his favorite book as a child. So far it's pretty tame - no murders, scandals or riots yet - but still interesting. It's rather like a collection of quaint Yankee magazine stories, but set in old New York City. Many of these pieces originally ran in The New Yorker.

Yesterday, my Burbank pal Mike presented his research book of Burbank veterans who were killed in action. He said the response was really good; all of the booklets he printed up were taken. If it's not too big I want to make this available via our Burbankia website. He's finding out all sorts of interesting things... for instance, one fellow is known as Bill Evans Signalman (the Bill Evans part isn't the real name - I forget what it was - I'm sure Mike will correct me when he reads this). He was a sailor, and his full name is impressed into the brass veterans plaque Burbank maintains in a small memorial park. The problem was that "Signalman" was his naval job, not his surname. There are other misspellings Mike caught...

I posted some new Burbank photos while I'm working on the slides for the July 9th Burbankia presentation. I'm fond of the 1940's Jeffries Barn photo. On that very site, some years later, would be built the aerospace industry union hall (the I A of M) which my Dad would have occasion to visit from time to time. It was a steely, futuristic building with plants and a water course running through it; it reminded me of Disneyland. It was torn down some years ago, when Lockheed fled Burbank. It seriously annoys me that we don't have an image of it on our website! The IAM logo, above, is one of the iconic images from my childhood. Dad was a Senior Steward (the first level of contact between a worker and the union) and so I used to see it on things all the time.

This past weekend I thought of a good name for a fried chicken place near Quantico: "Semper Fry." No? It came to my while in a Lowe's, posing with a cardboard cutout of R. Lee Ermey selling WD-40.

30 May 2011

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

27 May 2011

Yesterday I wrote that I watched the weirdest film ever set during World War II, but I think this one would top it easily. The concept: Jerry Lewis at Auschwitz. Wow.

I am more or less done reading about the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. And what have I learned?

This being the first time the homeland was being invaded, the Empire of Japan placed 22,000 fanatically determined soldiers on the island. It took the Marines more than a month to kill 21,000 of them to prevail, and even then, two soldiers didn't surrender until 1949!

So, based on this experience and Japanese resistance on other islands, the allied war planners turned to an invasion of Japan, which was code-named Operation Downfall. The estimates for allied casualties were frighteningly high: from 400,000 to 1.2 million. The allies didn't have to suffer this because production of the atomic bomb was finished and so it was available for use as a weapon. And here's where the lesson comes in...

Yes, the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons was a terrible thing. But here's the necessary question for those who are convinced that the atomic bombing was unnecessary: How many hundreds of thousands of Americans and others would you agree to sacrifice to convince Japan to surrender? 100,000? A quarter million? Half a million? Remember, the United States had already incurred great losses in the war up to 1945, and the only other time the United States had suffered casualties in the hundreds of thousands was during the Civil War. Were I Harry S. Truman and I had the bomb, I would use it, too. It's a terrible decision to make, but it was the obvious and ultimately humane one (the Japanese would have suffered tremendous casualties as well in an invasion).

I am convinced that while the smugly virtuous may approach the subject of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an inhumane, morally unacceptable thing (and some do - I have heard this opinion expressed), what it really is is a matter of not doing one's homework.

About President Truman... I have respect for the man. If nothing else, he could make hard decisions. He ushered in the atomic age when he decided upon nuclear weapons against Japan. While this proved to be a popular decision, it must have been a difficult one. In 1951 he fired General McArthur for insubordination and reaped a storm of resentment from Americans. It was a vastly unpopular decision, but it was the right one - as Americans eventually agreed. Do we have politicians who can make those kinds of decision nowadays?

It is these things I shall be pondering on this Memorial Day weekend.

(By the way, funny quote. In the early 1960's, at age 77, Truman said, "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.")

In a cub scout pack committee meeting last night, the Cubmaster announced that the pack would be doing popcorn sales. GROAN. Sales was the worst single experience during my short and unhappy career as a cub scout. I think I shall take the route of passive disobedience on this one...

The pool officially opens tomorrow! Let the lazy summer days of lounging around, swimming and eating pizza and grilled hot dogs begin!

Have a great weekend...

26 May 2011

I am now reading Bruce Catton's Waiting for the Morning Train - An American Boyhood; I found it at a yard sale, and I'm very glad I did. It is, like all of Bruce Catton's books, excellent. (His Army of the Potomac trilogy is an especial favorite of mine.) He is a wonderful writer whose prose, thanks to his insight, often turns into a kind of poetry.

This one is unlike his other books, which are about the American Civil War. This is about his childhood. The title comes from his observation that boyhood is very like old age: at both points, one is waiting for a train ride to an portentous, unknown destination. Boys await a morning train, old men await the night train.

He writes about having seen Halley's Comet in 1910, when he was eleven. "...we were invited to reflect on the wonders and marvels that would take place in the world before that day came..." That day came in April, 1986. I was at a reenactment on the Sayler's Creek battlefield near Farmville, Virginia - just the place to see Halley's Comet because the urban light pollution was nil. Good thing, because, like Catton, I, too was underwhelmed. It looked like a small smudge in the sky, hardly the thing I had been preconditioned by the Bayeux Tapestry (which illustrated the 1066 appearance) to expect. In fact, it was a whopping disappointment!

I am now convinced that I live in the time of Disappointing Comets. Halley was a dud, and the other comet let-down of my life was Comet Kohoutek, in late 1973. From wikipedia: "...it was believed likely that this was the comet's first visit to the inner solar system, which would result in a spectacular display of outgassing ... Before its close approach, Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the "comet of the century." However, Kohoutek's display was considered a let-down ... Because Comet Kohoutek fell far short of expectations, its name became synonymous with spectacular duds." Indeed. While I have great memories of 1973 and being seventeen, Comet Kohoutek is not among them.

What wonders and marvels developed between the Catton Halley appearance in 1910 and my view of it in 1986? Too many to cite, actually. And it could be that the development of atomic energy - and atomic bombs - influence an overriding theme of Catton's book, that the pace of technological change could threaten to overwhelm us. It's a proposition that still seems valid. To his credit as a prophet, there is a growing suspicion nowadays that technology, while fine, is not the end-all and be-all of existence, and that perhaps there is spiritual value in a slower-paced and more reflective life. It all comes back to the astonishing ancient Greeks for me; Sophocles said that the examined life was the one worth living. I think Bruce Catton is saying essentially the same thing in this wonderful book.

Catton also writes movingly about the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock, a short literary gem I have placed on my Civil War reenacting website. Excellent stuff!

Last night I watched the weirdest film set in World War II I have ever seen - and when I write that, I really mean it because I have a high tolerance for cinematic weirdness. It was The Tin Drum (1979), a German moralistic tale about a precocious child who decides at age three to refuse to physically grow up. He uses his little tin drum to pound away during sights he considers immoral and/or alarming. (NOT the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock.) Which is all very fine as a concept... where this film falls apart is in execution.

The kid is weird-looking, he narrates in a tiny but harsh voice and is INCREDIBLY irritating and badly-behaved. Far from being the voice of universal offended innocence, he comes across as a spoiled brat who is badly in need of a damn good spanking. There was more than one instance when I wished I could have walked into the screen, grabbed that drum and pitched it into a garbage heap. The film also featured scenes that caused me to fidget: imagine a woman - the child's mother - constantly cramming cooked and uncooked fish down her gullet. Ick. And I won't even get into the sex scenes... This film did have one very unusual effect on me, however. In the scenes where the Nazis were shooting up the Polish post office in Danzig, I was seriously hoping an artillery round would take out the kid. It is a very rare film indeed that can make Nazis come off looking like the heroes!

Last night was cool... I sat at the piano and, sight reading slowly at first, then at more of the proper tempo, I worked out a short classical piece that served as one of my lessons. This is so neat! A thing I had been wary of nearly all my life - sight reading music - is now coming to hand.

25 May 2011

I was going to slam President Obama's naive insistence for Israel to return to its 1967 borders at length, but will instead quote my friend Bob on Facebook: "So the President thinks Israel should go back to its 1967 borders? I think its time to elect a President who thinks the government should go back to its 1967 federal budget."

I watched a short, late period film noir the other night: The Cat Burglar (1961). The plot isn't anything I haven't seen done better elsewhere, but what made this one worth watching were the 1961 street shots of L.A., the great old cars and the shadowy warehouse interiors - plus the Daddy-O personality of the protagonist. Obviously, one of the joys of watching these old films is to see how Americans used to dress and comport themselves. (According to Hollywood, anyway.)

That was the cat. Carrying on with the animal kingdom theme, I also watched an awful "old dark house" genre whodunit, The Bat (1959 - "When it flies, someone dies!"). Its only redeeming grace was Vincent Price and Agnes Moorhead hammily acting up a storm, but still, I fell asleep during it. It contained plot holes big enough to drive the proverbial truck through. Grown up Little Rascal Darla Hood is in it. It's an ill-starred remake of a 1926 production of the same name, which in turn helped inspire a similarly bad subsequent old dark house whodunit, The Cat and the Canary (1927), which I found unwatchable. Avoid them all.

My right shoulder is killing me! I can barely raise it without pain that causes me to wince. Somehow, while painting the garage, I wrenched it - this is in addition to the usual pain I feel in it from the last rugby season I played five years ago. I see the doctor Friday about my blood pressure... I think I'll ask if it isn't time to get an MRI and find out just what's hurting me, arthritis, tendinitis or possibly a torn rotator cuff.

I had a piano lesson last night. I am happy to report that while I didn't do especially well performance wise in my pieces (I never do - reciting for a teacher is a problem for me), I did manage to mostly play an entirely new Bach piece (featuring arpeggiated chords) through, all sight-read. It's a thrill to realize that I am beginning to be proficient at reading music. I always knew that was going to be a hurdle. In fact, when I took up the electric bass I used tablature to avoid having to learn to read music. It's always been a challenge from my earliest days for me, like math. But once I finished engineering school (and the required calculus), I thought, "Okay, I can now put my old fears of math behind me." The next challenge is musical notation.

Continuing to answer reader Larry's questions from yesterday ("How do you feel about a gang of strangers reading about your life? How your family felt then and still feels about your blog? Unique stories to share about blogging?"): It's curious. I first started revealing myself in my "Avocado Memories" web site, which is a photographic account of my boyhood, growing up in Burbank in the Sixties and Seventies. The response to AM has been uniformly good ever since I first put it up in 1997; in fact, I have gotten hundreds of e-mails from complete strangers ever since, all complimentary. The e-mail usually has words to this effect: 1.) Even though we grew up in different times and at different places, my house looked much like yours, 2.) I spent hours this evening reading your site and have laughed and even cried at your accounts of growing up, 3.) Why haven't you published this? I'd certainly buy the book, and 4.) Your web site has inspired me to put together something similar from my own past (my favorite comment).

The effect of my exposing my life to the Internet in the way that I have has caused me to realize that we are all more interconnected than we think. For example, I had no idea that the avocado green, harvest gold and the general tackiness of Seventies style was a universal thing throughout the English speaking world (I have gotten emails from the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia confirming this); growing up, I thought it was pretty much a Southern California, or at most a bi-coastal thing. But that just goes to show how young and provincial I was.

As for my family, the response to my blog writing (and website writing, which I regard as the same thing) varies. My wife reads it nearly every day - she chiefly laments the grammatical mistakes contained in it, but that's because she's an editor. My son reads it every now and then, but my middle child, my daughter Julie, reads it every day, I think. Meredith, my youngest child, reads it not at all. My family and friends have all made the wary comment during conversations: "Is this going to wind up in your blog?"

Curious stories: Actually, having complete strangers comment on the things I write is gratifying, if a bit weird, sometimes. For instance, a comment from a stranger whose name I don't recognize to the effect, "Sorry to hear your shoulder is hurting. Get that looked at!" makes me wonder if I'm not revealing too much personal information. One time, at a reenactment, when a fellow reenactor realized that I once wrote for a national reenacting publication as Jonah Begone, quoted a bunch of phrases from articles I had written back at me. It was one of the few times in my life I didn't know what to say! A couple of times I've had Avocado Memories readers admit to driving to Burbank to look at the house in which I grew up, just to see the place I have documented so thoroughly. Too bad there's no National Historic Site designation for places a web site has made semi-famous.

I have learned through my hometown website Burbankia that the place where I grew up is still a small town, despite its population of over 100,000. I constantly make contact with people I used to know from years ago - a factor that has been increased with my activity on Facebook. And I frequently get e-mails from siblings, children, work associates and others of people I know and have written about.

In fact, I am now sure that if I cite somebody's name in a web site or a blog, somebody will eventually come across it in a google search and comment. For instance, I once published articles by a fellow reenactor which I edited for a newsletter. The articles concerned a Civil War soldier named Enoch T. Baker. Sure enough, I eventually got e-mails from people who were Baker's descendants, thanking me for the letters. (Here, scroll to the very bottom.) When I published my father's World War II unit history - complete with a roster - I got responses from the descendants of the men on the roster, thanking me for filling in some family history they weren't aware of. I find this sort of thing very gratifying.

But, to conclude, outside of simple entertainment, encouraging others to organize their childhood photos or possibly assisting people to learn about their ancestors, these blogs primarily exist to fulfill a creative need within me. If a hundred people read them, great! If five people read them, that's great, too. (The actual number is somewhere between the two values, but I don't know what it is.) I write because I enjoy it. If anyone else out there enjoys reading it, so much the better!

24 May 2011

I watched a cool Netflix DVD over the weekend: a collection of Storybook International tales. It was a British series from the early Eighties my kids and I used to watch from time to time... each episode was the kind of thing you'd read in a volume of Grimm, set in a different part of the world.

For instance, a Hungarian tale dealt with the months of the year (young and progressively older men, depending upon what month) sitting in a circle in the woods, assisting a girl who was set upon by her step mother and sister. Another was a Samoan story about a man keeping his village from being raided, yet another was an Indian tale about which was better, riches or happiness. A very satisfying series with good production values and interesting settings. I'll have to keep them in mind for grand kids. The opening sequence was memorable, "I'm the Storyteller - and my stories must be told." We always got a kick out of the "must" - or else what?

A curious thing: the incidental music to these was quite good, and the melodies are now banging around in my head. In fact, last night I picked one of them out on the piano. Another curious thing: the cast are, for the most part, anonymous. (These stories are all acted out soundlessly, with a narrator relating the action.) That and a certain timeless look to the productions (were they set in, say, the 1600's?) made them intriguing.

I can't say the same for a film I watched, Trinity and Beyond - the Atomic Bomb Movie (1995). If you like explosions, this is the film for you: mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud, set to ridiculous, pseudo-epic orchestral and choral music. But the whole thing was rendered in a silly sort of mock-documentary style that undercut the seriousness of the topic at hand. William Shatner narrates - which is perhaps all I need write.

Larry, a reader, asked, "Do you remember the time when you first started blogging? The date? A first response you received? How you feel about a gang of strangers reading about your life? How your family felt then and still feels about your blog? Unique stories to share about blogging?"

I started recreational writing in 1984, when I contributed to a Civil War reenactment unit newsletter for a club I joined. A year later, when I joined another unit, I took over the editing of that "publication," a journal that I used to hand out at events three or four times a year. Photocopying it was a serious pain. When the members saw I was serious about quality and content, I started getting all sorts of neat submissions from other unit writers and artists.

This gave me experience for The Maryland Union Patriot (we called it the "MUP"), 1989-1990, the newsletter of yet another unit I was a belonged to. The members of the Third Maryland (U.S.) were an especially talented bunch, and I'm pretty sure that I developed the Civil War reenactment unit newsletter format about as far as it could go, content-wise. It was quite the creative effort and was known outside of our own unit because I used to send courtesy copies to others. "I wish our newsletter read like that," was a frequent comment. When we splintered off into another unit - the Second Maryland, one less than the Third - I did the unit newsletter for that as well from 1991 to about 1994.

I quit reenacting in 1994 and, the next year, started developing websites - using the material I wrote or edited for newsletters, giving the newsletter articles a potential global reach - or at least throughout the hobby. JonahWorld! is the primary result of that, and yes, other reenactors read it. I began to play rugby in 1998, and in 1999 was elected the club secretary/webmaster when somebody found out that I developed a rugby website. Once again, I developed the website with an emphasis on quality and content, and the word went out - especially because we owned a good URL - "rugbyfootball.com." "I wish our website looked like that" was a common sentiment in e-mails.

In addition to posting news and event information on the web site, I also sent out daily e-mails. After a short time I got tired of merely relaying the what and where for rugby matches and in 2001 began adding filler about whatever it was I had on my mind or was reading about at the time. (I have never experienced a "writer's block.") I called this "Brigham's Cultural Corner" - an archive is here. While this is the direct inspiration of this blog, what you are reading now is really a development of Civil War newsletters into websites into club e-mails into an honest-to-goodness backwards chronology blog. I'm the blogger... and my stories must be told.

More tomorrow.

23 May 2011

It was a very musical weekend... I went to the Kennedy Center to hear Sibelius, Beethoven and Nielsen on Friday and heard the U.S. Army Orchestra play Sibelius, Haydn, Elgar, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Mozart on Sunday. And guess what? The U.S. Army Orchestra concert was better than the NSO's!

They played Haydn's 104th "London" Symphony, his last and, according to Haydn scholars, his best. I am just now learning it... after a minor key introduction in the first movement it becomes very upbeat, tuneful and jolly. In fact, it is so full of buoyant good spirits and so elegantly constructed it is a hard work to not like. I think I have found a new entry into my list of favorite symphonies! Even cooler: a gal in my church we know played the viola in the Army orchestra.

The Nielsen 4th, called "Inextinguishable," I found less impressive. I observed that it had something in common with another Scandinavian work, Rued Langaard's "Music of the Spheres." (This was a great disappointment to me because it took me two decades or more to find a recording of it after I first heard it on a radio station when I was eighteen. After I got to know it I wondered what it was I initially found so interesting about it.) The problem is that that don't seem to be musical journeys or narratives with themes, modulations and a sense of development and conclusion - in other wards, saying something musically - as they are a series of musical effects. Or perhaps the structure eludes me... I am not, after all, a learned musician.

My son and I attended the fathers and sons camp out Friday night - without sleeping out in a tent. To be honest, I am now thoroughly burned out with sleeping in the Great Outdoors. I've done a ton of it in scouting and reenacting in for the past 29 years, and have come to agree with my church's general authority who called a sleeping bag a "contradiction in terms." I'll do it in the infrequent reenactments I do but won't really look forward to it. As B.B. King used to sing, the Thrill is Gone. Anyway, it was nice to sit around and jaw and eat Oreos for a few hours.

On Saturday Ethan and I did yard sales - I got nine CDs for $8 - and we then drove up to D.C. to have lunch at the Pret a Manger just north of Ford's Theatre (there are three in D.C., two in Chicago and a bunch in Manhattan). Pret is a sandwich chain in London we frequented while there. Their speciality is sandwiches made absolutely fresh with the best ingredients... I hope they eventually put one somewhere in Northern Virginia so we won't have to hassle with parking in D.C., which almost makes the experience not worth it. It took me about a half hour to finally get a parking receipt out of one of those retarded parking fee machines.

One of my nine yard sale Cds was one of Greek chanteuse Nana Mouskouri: Nana Mouskouri's Greatest Hits. She's shown above: I've always been intrigued with her eyewear. Did you ever see the hilarious SCTV skit where Andrea Martin portrays her getting an eye test? "Sigma, delta, gamma..." Hahaha!

Somehow, painting the garage last week I really torqued my right shoulder; I can't lift my arm without a fairly significant pain. As I've been experiencing fairly constant shoulder pain for the last five years (a rugby injury during my last season) that was only partially helped by therapy and exercises it may be time to get an MRI and see what happened in there...

And Monday drags on.

20 May 2011

We knocked off requirements for the Readyman pin last night in Webelos. That one usually works well because it involves discussing first aid treatment for injuries, and ten year-old boys have a billion stories (both experienced and heard) about injuries.

What's funny is when I discuss arterial bleeding or an especially traumatic injury, like a limb being removed: the room gets quiet because they momentarily switch from talking mode to listening and rapt attention. Then a few milliseconds later their attention spans are exceeded and the hands shoot up and the mouths start moving with more tales of injury and woe. Ten year-old males... ya gotta love 'em!

I mentioned that I was working on the engineering challenge of getting my mother's legacy wooden doll house up into the garage attic. After cleverly removing a couple of gears on the pull down attic door to buy myself another inch or so of side-to-side clearance, I found I still wouldn't be able to get the thing upstairs. So I used my workplace experience. I "brainstormed," thought "out of the box," "leveraged my resources" and "arrived at a new paradigm." I moved all the Christmas boxes out from under the basement stairs, fitted the dollhouse there, and repacked the space with the Christmas crap, moving some of the overflow to closets. Done! The garage now has a sleeker, less cluttered appearance and the doll house is out of sight, awaiting a granddaughter. (Well, she would actually be my mother's great-granddaughter. I just don't have it in me to dispose of "Great-Grandma's Doll House.")

I found one of Mom's puzzles - she used to like building them - and after I ascertained that nobody wanted to keep it I planned to pitch it out. But I couldn't. So I repaired the box with some duct tape and put that into a closet awaiting... I don't know what. Assembly by the Five Families at some future Virginia Beach stay? Grand kids? Retirement? Dust accumulation?

Now the challenge moves to getting my tools and stuff out of a tall, fake wood grain cabinet I bought last year at a yard sale for very little. I could paint it dark gray as I did my cabinets, but the problem is that I got this thing from a military man who lived for a time overseas and, I am guessing, is married to a foreigner. In a word, it stinks. It smells like some pungent spice. I can't stand it. I tried putting in the automotive trees which hang from rear view mirrors, but that just made it worse. It's got to go. I need two more kitchen cabinets like the ones I have.

I quit reading Musicophilia. Too much neurology, too little music. So now I'm reading Burbank's 100th anniversary commemorative book, some content provided by my friend Mike and I. The bite in the shorts is that while our Burbankia website is acknowledged throughout, Mike is not. Typical. Also typical are mistakes... they didn't let him edit it. "..the firm closed in 1940 due to wartime shortages." We weren't at war in 1940. "J.W. Fawkes opposed incorporation of the City in 1911." I have never found any indication of this, and the photo included on the page is from his 1920's annexation effort, not 1911. One photo is reversed, showing Sunset Canyon Drive curving to the left instead of right. But, overall, the book is a credible effort, and probably nobody but us would notice the faults.

I noticed the the phrase "Beautiful Downtown Burbank" keep appearing in the text with a trademark indication - that's new - and wondered why. Now I know. (Scroll to bottom of page.)

The other day on Facebook I was discussing the 1979 song "Good Girls Don't" by the Knack. The lyrics are here. It's a vulgar song. It occurred to me that pretty much the same topical content was once covered by the inimitable Julie London in a 1967 song amusingly titled "Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast." The lyrical content is not at all vulgar - same topic, but see how cleverly the lyrics address the subject matter (with a funny concluding line). Class. And that, my friends, defines the cultural difference between the Fifties (the song may have been written in 1967, but it's really a 1940's/1950's throwback) and the Seventies. We have gotten even more vulgar and crass since the Seventies. Julie, come back!

(By the way, as is usually the case with London's work, I like that album cover. A caption might be, "Me? Do the 'walk of shame?' I don't THINK so.")

This afternoon is awesome. I take the Metro to the Kennedy Center, have my usual corned beef on rye with Swiss for lunch at the Cup'a Cup'a in the Watergate complex and hear the National Symphony Orchestra - my favorite musical instrument, next to Julie London - perform Sibelius' En Saga, Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto and Nielsen's Symphony #4, the "Inextinguishable." (Perhaps the score was written on gasoline-soaked paper). This evening my son is insisting upon going to the church Fathers and Sons campout. Very well. We shall go to sit around the campfire, eat Oreos and watch other guys' kids run around with burning sticks like a scene out of The Lord of the Flies. But I refuse to spend the night in a tent. Too warm, too humid, too un-mattress. (In fact, I'm loaning out my tent.) So we'll leave in the evening to wake up tomorrow morning (after a good night's sleep on comfy mattresses in dry rooms) and scout out yard sales. AND... there's a U.S. Army Band concert on Sunday. Wonderfulness.

Have a great weekend!

19 May 2011

This week I finished watching the first season of Matt Smith as Doctor Who in the BBC series of that name - Series 5, the most recent complete season - which was broadcast last year. While it's somewhat of an improvement over the David Tennant seasons (which I found overbearing and almost unwatchable), it's still a disappointment.

This franchise has badly lost its way. While it used to be literate, understated and well-written with great casts (and, admittedly, poor production values), it is now dumbed-down, sensationalistic, Americanized, overly-romantic (WAY too much hugging and kissing) with a feminist agenda and contains too many explosions accompanied by the sound of pretentious choral background music. Doctor Who is only about the production values now. With the exception of one intriguing episode featuring a mysterious Dream Lord, most of the scripts are a muddle. The two-parter season closer seemed to be much ado about nothing, with loose plot ends everywhere. When the entire universe isn't blinking out galaxy by galaxy (this was actually the climax of the two-parter) the other important matter in the scripts dealt with a marriage - yawn. I think I'm done with the New Who. It doesn't help that Matt Smith reminds me strongly of an especially gormless reenactor I used to know...

Another disappointment was The Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1949 John Wayne film - but I had an idea this would suck. It's a war film in the old style, which is to say that while the amount of death (and drama) is great, the amount of graphic gore is minimal - a cheat. The war film is one of the very few genres I think has improved with the advent of modern film making. My thought is that unless you're a bit sickened with the amount of gore being flung about in a war film, what you're seeing really doesn't depict war. In general I am opposed to PG-rated violence, you know, the kind of thing where somebody gets slashed with a sword and there's no blood on the blade. This is fraud and misleads audiences about what war and violence are really like.

An amusing feature of this film was the phrase "Semper Fi, Mac!" as an all-around general use retort. (My father occasionally said this to me when I was in the Marines; while I never asked, it appeared to me that he was quoting a film - perhaps this one!) In Sands of Iwo Jima, one Marine can say it to another to defuse a fight, a Navy guy can say it to a Marine to shut him up or two drunken Marines can repeat it to one another as a general salutation. Some interesting commentary about this phrase from old-timers is located here. It appears that while the exact meaning and origin is debated, most of the time it was given and accepted in a negative, pejorative sense, and could be roughly translated, "I got mine - the hell with you!"

As with the phrase "Yankee Doodle," which was first a British insult hurled at hapless (as they thought) American colonials, it has lost its original negative connotation and been transformed into something positive. Perhaps this is why: Sometime shortly after the Beirut bombing in 1983, then–Commandant of the Marine Corps General Paul X. Kelley was visiting a wounded Marine in the hospital. The lad shook the Commandant's hand and then scribbled the words "Semper Fi" on a piece of paper. It was the Marine's way of saying "Semper Fidelis." Gen. Kelley became emotional and said, "Lord, where do we get such men?" The press picked up on it.

(I once read that, "...to a foreigner, a Yankee is an American. To an American, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is a Vermonter. To a Vermonter, a Yankee is a man with indoor toilet facilities. I'll stop there." Ha! One of my favorites is: "To be a Virginian either by birth, marriage, adoption or even on one's mother's side, is an introduction to any state in the Union, a passport to any foreign country and a benediction from the Almighty God." Supposedly from an old sampler.)

I pretty much finished up the painting with the Garage Project yesterday and just have one wall to re-roll. Annoyingly, the roll marks of one sweep were a noticeably different shade than that of another session, so I have to re-roll the wall so it isn't noticeable. It may be a case of a slightly different hue from can to can, or perhaps I didn't mix a batch sufficiently, I don't know. The garage looks MUCH better. All the drywall holes, scrapes, bangs and discolorations are gone.

I'm struggling with the engineering problem of getting my mother's large wooden doll house stored up into the garage attic out of sight if I can. The problem is, the thing is slightly too large to fit through the opening. I'm trying to figure out if there is some simple, direct and reversible way of partially disassembling it. I'd get rid of it, but I have a hunch that, some years in the future, a grand-daughter will enjoy playing with great-grandma's doll house. I found a big piece of white foam core that I can wrap it in so it makes the garage look less cluttered, but this isn't the optimal solution...

Webelos tonight. I have no idea of what we'll do. Time to start work on another activity pin, I guess. 99% of the time our sessions are directly related to advancement (working towards the Arrow of Light), but there are times I'd like to just mindlessly set them free in the cultural hall to play basketball. They have no problem with that.

18 May 2011

My sister-in-law and I have recently gotten cards from my mother-in-law, who died in November 2009. My father-in-law says he didn't mail any old cards from her he found lying around, and there is no explanatory note attached. (Cue Twilight Zone music.) While it could be a matter of a very tardy USPS, I suspect it may be that one of the hospice care workers found these among her things at some point. At any rate, it's an odd mystery.

Last night my son Ethan and I watched funny youtube videos. Here's one that emphasizes the importance of leaving behind some trace of yourself for your children and grand-children, so they can see what sort of person their ancestor was. As I'm interested in genealogy and scrapbooking I find this notion appealing. In this one, a clever young woman (shown above - I'm guessing an art student) prepared a short video diary for her as yet unborn posterity: I Am Your Grandma.

Elsewhere on youtube, a man teases his poor dog about food (bacon, the maple kind) and the same man talks to a really bad psychic cat. Mouse. Mousssse. I find these two addictive.

We also watched "Worst Band Ever Butchers Pink Floyd" and I almost had tears in my eyes, I was laughing so hard. No matter how bad I think I may be on the bass, I’m light years better than this guy. The big sign in back may say “Music,” but don’t be fooled. And, as usual, the comments are great: “Nailed it.”

For more fun there’s the Residents, the freaked out art collective from Louisiana who produce nightmare-inducing videos. Here’s Constantinople, one of their most accessible videos (because it’s only 2:27). Sorry for the ad at the beginning... it seems that youtube isn’t as good as it once was. “Act of Being Polite” is more my style; it’s only a little over one minute and looks retro.

I am now reading Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, a curiosity I found at a yard sale. Sacks is a doctor, and these are stories about his experiences with patients with neurological problems that have involved music somehow. The first story is fascinating: a fortysomething doctor who used a public phone during a thunderstorm is struck by lightning and manifests a strong desire to hear and play the piano music of Frederic Chopin - and compose music himself despite the fact that he was never musical before in his life. Also, Sacks suggests that a good way to get rid of “earworms” (when a segment of music plays relentlessly in your head - he calls them “brainworms”) is to play the entire piece so you hear a beginning a middle and an end with the segment, at which point the earworm (hopefully) goes away because the segment is played in context. I might try that some time.

I did some more garage painting last night and finshed both doors - I have just a bit more painting left to do. I want to hurry because with the advent of hot weather, working in that garage will become very unpleasant...

In Burbank, even the manhole covers are centennial. Speaking of which, I have started making the slides for the “Burbankia” presentation my friend Mike and I are doing on July 9th. I am converting the curious tale of the dysfunctional Fawkes Family into slides. Geez, what kind of son taunts his parents about blowing them up, and then actually scares them half out of their wits with a fake bomb? I’ll also assemble a set of slides that describes the work of J.W. Fawkes - “Consolidation Joe” - to annex Burbank with Los Angeles. Had he succeeded we wouldn’t be celebrating a Burbank 100th! The boys in Burbank hung him in effigy in the middle of San Fernando Road when the 1925 annexation vote failed... and in the next month a pair of incautious teens were peppered with shotgun pellets when they ventured onto Fawkes’ property and threw some flares.

Interesting guy, that Fawkes.

17 May 2011

I just read the most interesting book... A Celebration of Bells by Eric Sloane and Eric Hatch. I've read a number of Sloane's books before; he specializes in early American lore - barns, weather, use of wood, covered bridges, etc. - and always has interesting, well-wrought drawings in his works. This book is no exception. For instance, look at this drawing. Did you know that a single bell actually produces a chord, each note issuing forth from different parts of the bell? I didn't. (I'm guessing that the notes are at different amplitudes.) I also didn't know that the belfry and steeple on churches was an evolutionary thing, or that Paul Revere was in the bell business. The book lists the 37 bells cast by Revere which still exist - perhaps unsurprisingly, they are all located in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.

And... did you know the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia has a twin, cast within a year of the famous one, which is not cracked and rings just fine every day? The biggest bell in the world? It's the Tsar Kolokol Bell, in Moscow. So big that it was once used as a chapel!

There is a lengthy section on peals and "change" ringing, that is, a complicated mathematical sequence of bell ringing. (Check out the sequence in "Plain Bob Minor.") The book mentions that they do this in the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. I'll have to make some inquiries and see if I can watch them doing this and listen to it some day... Another D.C. Thing To Do on my mental checklist.

I also finished The Wanderers by Richard Price (1974), the latest entry in my growing juvenile delinquency paperback library. It's one of those rare books where the film adaptation (1979) proves better than the source material! The film and book deals with a Bronx Italian-American gang named the Wanderers, who have as their national anthem the 1961 hit song of that name by Dion. The book is a curious work in that it is mostly about the everyday dealings of teenagers in a gang, but includes passages of unexplained (and unlikely) stunning evil. For instance, in one chapter a boy (a sixth grader, I think) who is insulted by another boy in a schoolyard connives to have his enemy leap off a building to his death; he is apparently unconcerned about this. In another chapter the mysterious, lethal and multitudinous "Ducky Boys" robotically beat a rival gang member to death. (The real, historical Ducky Boys were nowhere as evil.) A curious work.

The film adaptation has a very effective scene late in the movie which is not a part of the book. Set in late 1963, the entire film has as its milieu the Bronx and teenage gangs, so the viewer is used to that setting and action. There is one sequence, however, where the film's protagonist is walking down a sidewalk and weirdly encounters an adult woman weeping. He then sees a man crying, then another woman. For a moment it's like a scene out of the Twilight Zone. The protagonist then rounds a corner and sees a group of people staring at the television sets in an appliance store window: The announcement has just been issued that JFK has died of his wounds in Dallas. It symbolizes that the world of the Fifties/early Sixties gang has changed, and that other upheavals of the Sixties are coming. Good work!

I bought myself an item at the Marine Corps Museum Gift Shop that I've wanted for at least a year: A Tervis Tumbler. It's a tall, 24 ounce double-walled plastic glass that, amazingly, can hold ice for hours. Mine has a USMC emblem in between the layers. Made in the USA. Awesome!

I also spent a couple of hours in a warm garage yesterday, painting one of the doors with a brush (a roller just doesn't work well). What a chore! I do the second door today after work, and when I'm done the majority of the wall painting will be done. It looks a million times better. Nothing dresses up a room - especially a dirty, cobwebby garage - faster than a fresh coat of paint. I'm at odds as to what to do about the floor. I'm content to patch the cracks and put down a coat of concrete paint, but my wife is encouraging me to paint down one of those epoxy surfaces, you know, the ones with the chips which look somewhat like terrazzo when finished. I'm unsure about this; I'm afraid it might lift in places and be a pain to maintain. What I'd really like is a linoleum floor of alternating black and white tiles, but that would be a total pain to lay and I'm uncertain if it would stand the stress of cars moving and parking upon it.

16 May 2011

Blogspot is back! And I see they restored my Thursday entry... good.

Yard sales weren't so good because of rain, but there were some. I didn't buy anything, however.

Iwo Jima Week continued Saturday: My son and I visited the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico to check out the Iwo Jima exhibit, and saw the actual second flag (the one in the photo). The museum has both the first and second flags - they alternate displaying them.

I was honored to meet and listen to an actual Iwo veteran, Frank Matthews, who serves as a docent. He was an eighteen year-old Marine PFC 66 years ago in 1945 who, he was told later, shared a landing boat with Joe Rosenthal. He didn't know it at the time because, 1.) Joe Rosenthal wasn't anyone famous until he snapped that famous photograph, and 2.) They're not in the habit of telling PFCs things.

PFC Matthews served 28 days at Iwo Jima (!) with the 25th Marines, 4th Marine Division, and was wounded three times. The most serious injury was a piece of shrapnel lodged in his left temple which he insisted the corpsman remove. He did - and got into big trouble with the surgeon in command for performing something like brain surgery on the battlefield! The second injury was a bullet wound in his right hand which kept getting infected afterwards. The third injury was a back problem he acquired when a sailor caused an industrial accident aboard the ship, causing Marines with full packs to fall some distance.

Mr. Matthews told a grim but funny tale about his time after Iwo aboard a ship. His sergeant wanted to put him on mess duty, but Matthews decided upon a risky legal argument to avoid it. He cited the fact that he was the last survivor of his platoon (I think he said platoon - it may have been company) and that being such he in an acting officer or sergeant and therefore couldn't be placed on mess duty. The sergeant smiled at that and gave him some less arduous assignment.

After listening to him and asking him questions, did I shake Frank Matthews' hand, thank him for his service to our Republic and wish him "God bless you?" Indeed.

Afterwards my son and I visited a Mini dealership where he test drove a Mini Cooper S. I was impressed, but he less so. He objected to what he thought was an excessive use of plastic in the interior; he said he felt like he was sitting in a piece of Tupperware. We were both stunned at the cost of the vinyl stick on Union Jack atop the car: $700!

Over the weekend I also saw the Clint Eastwood film Flags of our Fathers (2006), based on the book I read last week. It was good, but not as good as the sequel Letters From Iwo Jima, which described the battle from the Japanese point of view. The problem was that it had a somewhat confusing, non-linear narrative. I was glad I read the book before seeing the film so I could keep track of what was going on.

I talked to my friend Bob over the weekend, who filled me in some more about Quiet Riot Burbanker guitarist Randy Rhoads. As it turns out, in 1973 my Mom bought my spinet piano from Rhoads' mother, who owned Killeen Music in town. (Mom sold the spinet in 1995.) Also, a fellow named Drew Forsyth was in my graduating class (1974) at Burbank High School - he was Quiet Riot's drummer from 1975 to 1982. Here's his photo from my 1974 yearbook; I include it to give you an idea of what hilarious fashions eighteen year-olds were wearing in that year. The Seventies! My wife thinks he cut his own hair...

I did some more painting as a part of the Garage Project. This is proving to be a lot of work and I still have many things to do...

Have you ever seen those "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters which are now something of a rage? I bought a refrigerator magnet of it while in the Imperial War Museum gift shop in London. They have an interesting story... designed by the British government in 1939 they were never used during World War II, but instead were rediscovered in 2000. A good design is classic!

13 May 2011

Sorry, folks, this blogger.com software had a major meltdown and was down last night and today. So... have a great weekend anyway...

12 May 2011

My son and I watched a Dr. Who DVD last night, a really poor Matt Smith episode featuring - sigh - the Daleks. Again. (I am really sick of the Daleks.) Only this time they are now in bold colors suggestive of mayonnaise, mustard, orange juice, ketchup and blue cheese. No, no, no, Dr. Who writers and producers in the DVD features - you cannot do this and claim that the Daleks are now "more terrifying." The only proper color for a Dalek is an industrial matte gray. Matte black, perhaps. But certainly not Marimekko colors.

In fact, the Daleks were never terrifying at all. They are more properly described as annoying, with those insistent voices. Perhaps terrifying if you were a sheltered British five year-old in the early 1960's when they were introduced - but that's arguable.

I did some more on the Garage Project. Painting walls is not exactly fun when you've come home from a long day at work... well, "work," that is, sitting in a classroom all day. I'd rather just watch TV.

Hey, check this out: I did what I always advocate to my scouts, I wrote an e-mail to my elected representative (in this case, Senator Mark Warner) and expressed my views about the folly of giving billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan. Read this. Pakistan, Senator, the subject is Pakistan. I posted this to my Facebook page and a friend commented, "Do you get the impression those guys don't give a hoot what you think?" Yes, I do.

I am still reading "Flags of our Fathers," which just keeps getting more impactful and moving. I bring it to class to read before class starts; the woman sitting next to me looked at it (the cover features Joe Rosenthal's iconic Associated Press photo of the Marines raising the flag at Mt. Suribachi - a sure giveaway about the subject of the book), laughed, and said, "That looks like a really boring book... about flags. How interesting can that be?" Gentle Reader, I allow you your own thoughts about this without comment on my part.

I wish this book had existed when I was in the Marines. I think reading it would have made me a better Marine. But... let's face it, I was an immature age 18-22 when I was in the Corps. Perhaps no book would have helped.

Iwo Jima... the bloodiest battle since Gettysburg. Did you know that Harlon Block, the lowest Marine in the grouping who is shown jamming the base of the pole into the ground, was not identified for years - but that his mother instantly knew it was her son, and steadfastly claimed this despite an official government declaration that it was a different man? Her comment: "I've changed so many diapers on that boy's butt I know it's my boy." Another thing I didn't know: There is color footage of the second (Rosenthal phtoo) flag raising. Rosenthal's photo captures 1/400th of a second of this sequence... Amazing.

Instead of cookies, today Learning Tree, the training vendor, set out trays of celery and carrots at the 2 PM break - bleah. I see this as an artifact of women in the workplace, along with web sites trimmed in pink (yes, there were some).

11 May 2011

You know what's good about being middle-aged? I've become harder to offend. I try to live my life by the axiom, "Only a fool takes offense where none is intended," and most of the time I'm successful at it. What's more, it seems nobody is trying to offend me; people are too busy with their own lives. It's kind of liberating.

The first day of Sharepoint class was a rather short one, hooray. And I have learned a thing or two I'll take back to the office with me. And, as always, Learning Tree has candy, doughnuts and cookies available. I do not expect to lose weight this week.

Iwo Jima Week continues... I find myself becoming fascinated by this campaign. Last night I watched Iwo Jima: 50 Years of Memories - a 1996 PBS documentary, and a good one. Real IJ vets read from their letters and journals while footage from the battle was shown. What bravery, what raw courage those Marines exhibited!

The Garage Project: Yesterday I got a darker shade of gray paint for the cabinets and did some painting... that's more like it. And a late birthday present arrived from my daughter: a metal VW logo for the wall - excellent! Just the thing!

Ever hear of Randy Rhoads (pictured above)? He was a founding member of Quiet Riot and, later, Ozzy Osbourne's guitarist. A very influential heavy metal guitarist, actually. He died young in a plane crash in 1982. As it turns out, he was a fellow Burbanker and a fellow graduate of Burbank High. In fact, there's a memorial for him in the Burbank church where his funeral took place. I recall hearing my high school pal Bob saying that he played guitar with him on one occasion, but I forget what Bob said about it. See last paragraph in this article.

As I predicted yesterday, my piano lesson was bumpy. A quote from my teacher: "I like the way you make the music on the printed sheet yours." This is rank sarcasm. In other words, I'm playing the notes as I think the melody should sound rather than as it is written. I've been doing this kind of thing ever since I first took piano lessons when I was seven or so. "Playing by ear" has some advantages, but it's not an especially good way to learn to read sheet music or to play. I need to knock it off.

10 May 2011

Reader Andy found this - more evidence that fact checking is a lost art in the media (at least in Germany). You will notice that I got the correct patch design for Seal Team Six last week... that "Maquis" would have been a giveaway that something is wrong. "Maquis? Wait a minute. Isn't that some goofy Star Trek thing?"

My expectations for printed media aren't what it used to be, either, and as proof I offer Don Tracey's satirical Parrot Gun piece used as history in a trivia book about the Civil War. This one had me in stitches when I first learned of it... Guys shouting "Polly Want a Cracker?" whenever they fired the cannon - didn't that clue somebody in that this didn't actually happen?

I did some more work on the Garage Project yesterday, but drat! the paint for the cabinets isn't dark enough. I want more contrast. Back to the paint store tomorrow. I asked a question on Facebook: Is a garage that is nicely painted, organized and squared away a country boy thing or a city boy thing? A rugby friend offered that if the paint is in John Deere green, it's absolutely country. But as soon as I asked I had the answer: It depends upon the presence or (in my case) non-presence of NASCAR merchandise and poster art. I plan to find some Top Gear posters for my garage. I like the one with the Stig.

I sit in class all this week at work, a mighty struggle for somebody of my attention deficit qualities. I have a difficult time with meetings - or any occasion where people who have little or no concern about the passage of time talk, and you are forced to listen. The training is worthwhile, however. It's on Microsoft Sharepoint, a ghastly and impenetrably mysterious product we use heavily. As near as I can tell its primary use is to cause people to send me irate e-mails telling me that they can't see whatever document it is on Sharepoint we have posted and referred to. I then have to add them as users despite the fact that they are already shown as being users and have the necessary rights to view and edit the document. Perhaps this week's class will clear up that little reoccurring mystery and the whole "inherited privileges" feature.

The training is at a Learning Tree facility. Among IT professionals in the D.C. region, Learning Tree is known fondly for the presence of coffee and pastries in the mornings and Cokes and cookies in the afternoons, building up caffeine and sugar so everyone stays awake and jittery. Add a sedentary office job to an interest in computers and software with the Learning Tree food and you might predict that there are some truly monstrously-sized IT guys around, and behold, there are. I was in a meeting last week where I pointed out to the woman sitting next to me that the organization's biggest IT HEAVY HITTERS were present, average weight about 400 pounds or so.

And, sad to say, I am approaching that end state myself. Ever since I got back from London I have been beset by various problems and concerns (that I have not blogged about) and have looked to food for comfort. Not good. 150th Manassas in July is going to be a hot and horrible affair unless I lose some weight...

Tonight I have a piano lesson which will not go well. The recent presence of my son and daughter-in-law has been an enjoyable distraction and I haven't practiced much.

9 May 2011

Yard sales were great this Saturday morning... the weather was nice and this time I had my son and daughter-in-law with me! I bought some books - one lady had some great English history titles...

This is Iwo Jima week for me. I am now reading Flags of our Fathers by James Bradley, and last night I watched Letters From Iwo Jima, the 2006 Clint Eastwood film about the Japanese side of the conflict. I've only just stared the book and so have no comments yet. The film was quite good; depicting the part of the Japanese in the campaign, it reminded me a bit of the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front.

My complaint with the film is that it seemed to gloss over how difficult the Iwo Jima campaign was for the Marine Corps. The film seems to suggest that the island fell fairly quickly - this is far from the truth. Iwo Jima was a hard-fought campaign with many casualties on both sides; it took more than a month to win.

From wikipedia: "The battle was the first American attack on the Japanese Home Islands, and the Imperial soldiers defended their positions tenaciously. Iwo Jima was also the only U.S. Marine battle where the American overall casualties exceeded the Japanese, although Japanese combat deaths numbered 3 times that of Americans. Of the more than 18,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner. The rest were killed or missing and assumed dead. Despite heavy fighting and casualties on both sides, Japanese defeat was assured from the start. The Americans possessed an overwhelming superiority in arms and numbers; this, coupled with the impossibility of Japanese retreat or reinforcement, ensured that there was no plausible scenario in which the U.S. could have lost the battle."

I'm sure the wartime Marines would have appreciated wikipedia's glib assessment!

I started the garage painting as part of the Garage Project. Nothing like a fresh coat of paint to jazz up a room. Problem is, however, the gray Cari selected looks somewhat lavender on the walls, due probably to the color temperature of the incandescent light bulbs. Maybe I'll try replacing them with those intensely white new CFL bulbs... I would have gotten farther along with the paint, but I'm still recovering from the chest cold I have. The painting I did took a lot out of me.

I finished doing all my Lp digitizations. In other words, just about all of the rock Lps I want to listen to have now been digitized. So I put the turntable back with the stereo and the printer next to the computer, where it belongs. As for the classical music I have on Lp which I'd like to have in a digital format - I'll eventually get CDs for those. The difference is that the Lp vinyl surface noise, which is tolerable in rock music, is much less tolerable in classical music. The greater "headroom" (the difference between the quietest and loudest passages) of a CD is also another driver. The dynamics produced by a full symphonic orchestra are amazing...

After today I'm in a class week: Microsoft Sharepoint, software we use that, like MS-Word, seems to have a mind of its own. While I hate sitting in classrooms all day, the training is valuable since run into Sharepoint issues a lot of the time I use it, and sadly, we rely upon it so intensely. It's run by the LearningTree facility near where I work - they ply you with doughnuts, cookies and Cokes to sustain interest in the course material.

6 May 2011

Yesterday's head cold moved into my chest - as it almost always does - and now I'm holed up in my office with the door closed, having arrived at work two hours late. I took some NyQuil before I went to bed last night, and getting up when the alarm went off just wasn't in the cards, no way, no how. So I slept an extra two hours.

Yesterday I watched a French anti-war film from 1952, Forbidden Games, involving two children who steal crosses for a pet cemetery they constructed in an abandoned mill. The scene where the cute little five year-old girl becomes orphaned is particularly harsh: a German plane comes swooping down and shoots her parents - and the little girl's dog. It was a good film but not a great one...

I am now watching an Alec Guinness comedy from 1952, The Card (aka The Promoter); I really like these early Guinness films - they are very British and very wry.

Steven Spielberg is filming a movie about Abraham Lincoln in Virginia soon; interesting.

One of the interesting things about living in Burbank, California is the occasional Jay Leno sighting. Last week my friend Mike pulled into the parking lot of the library where his wife and daughter works and saw Leno and some other guy talking. Leno is well known for his vast collection of rare old cars (his warehouse is in Burbank, near the airport); this time he was driving an immaculate 1966 Ford Galaxie 500. On another occasion in 2005 Mike saw Leno puttering down the street in an honest-to-goodness Stanley Steamer! When we did the NBC tour in 2008, Leno's Audi sports car (I forget what model) was in his parking place.

I am trying to dredge up the art of Philip Featheringill on the Internet. Featheringill is known to me as a collage artist who did several Columbia Masterworks Lp covers in the early Sixties; I really like his style. His cover for a recording of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is especially well-known because the Lp was popular, but he also did other Columbia covers that were striking and original - here's one for a recording of Liszt. A detail from a recording of a work by Bela Bartok is above. He seems to have been primarily known as an indie label entrepreneur of Chicago jazz during World War II; it appears that his art was something of a sideline, but his jazz art is striking as well. I am a bit surprised to see that there isn't some definitive website about this fellow. Maybe I should do one in my copious spare time...

Tomorrow morning I'm doing my rounds with special guest yard salers my son and daughter-in-law... that ought to be fun. Then we have to get Sarah onto a plane for a 5 PM flight back to Utah. :(

Have a great weekend!

5 May 2011

I'm at work today, but just barely. I caught a cold and dragged into the office. So I've closed the door and I'm trying to avoid making contact with anybody! I think I'm going to pay a lunchtime visit to a drug store in Alexandria and get myself some DayQuil capsules and a box of Kleenex...

Last night an odd thing happened. At about 1:30 AM I cleared my throat in my sleep and it felt like I was gargling acid. So, awakened, I got up and pounded down a lot of water. Somehow stomach acid made it into my upper tract; I don't know why. A Barrett's Esophagus thing, maybe, or it could have been the vinegar in the barbecue sauce Cari made for dinner yesterday.

I am now reading the adventures of Rick O'Shay, Marshal of the town of Conniption (state not mentioned, but somewhere in the West). It's an odd sort of place... by the looks of it and by the way people dress and behave it's c. 1890, but every now and then a killer robot will walk into town, or the local Indian chief will complain that the TV set in his tee pee isn't working. It's the same sort of cheerful anachronism found in Roy Rogers or Gene Autry films. Was there ever really a place in the West after about 1930 where people, by and large, were unaffected by technology in this fashion? Where if one had to visit a place, say, ten miles away one would ride a horse rather than take a car? Curious.

The newsies are continuing to cover the killing of Osama bin Laden; I am pretty much done with the story. The guy is dead. Brave and fearfully lethal members of our armed forces dispatched him for us, and now it's time to move back onto what's really important: the economy and jobs, jobs, jobs. My political belief is that, with the exception of something like the defense buildup during World War II, the government cannot really create jobs. It can and should get out of the way of the private industry in job creation, however. I do not believe that lifetime politicians, lawyers or community organizers in love with the sound of their own voices are the answer. I think it would be helpful if the man at top is a proven businessman - which is why I'm inclined to favor Mitt Romney's candidacy. (Not Trump... never Trump.) Yesterday I read an insightful article by Charles Krauthammer, handicapping the odds of the various Republicans. He gave the Mittster 5-1 odds, stating that there was really only one thing in the way of his front runner status: his support of RomneyCare in Massachusetts. Well! I would have thought than an acute observer of the political scene would suggest that Romney's religion - which is also mine - was the one thing in the way. Perhaps now it isn't. Have we made some progress, here? (By the way, I like his assessment of Trump: "the Republicans' Al Sharpton.")

Because I'm an amateur student of history I must confess to some confusion about the role of government in business, and when I'm looking for answers I look to the past for precedent. I have read over and over again that high taxation is bad, and that it stunts job creation. After all, if you raise taxes on businesses it makes it more difficult for them to hire people - which has a ripple effect in economic wealth. But what happened in early 1993? The newly-formed Clinton Administration (made up of pro-big government Keynesians) and Congress passed the highest tax hike in American history. It was so controversial that it only passed in the Senate by one vote: Al Gore's, acting as the tie-breaker. It was so famously regressive and greedy Republicans had a field day in the press highlighting that, being retroactive, it "taxed the dead." But what happened to the economy? It slowed, right? Isn't that what taxes do? Well, no...the economy took off and remained strong up until almost the end of the Clinton Era, when it began to tank for George W. Bush. So what are we to make of this? The recipe for growing the economy now is a huge tax increase on the middle class? No... that doesn't sound right. I can only conclude that the business cycle is more or less independent of what Congress does. Or that the whole thing is so complicated that it can only be calculated by powerful computers crunching all sort of formulae and variables - in which case good luck in translating that into political action!

Gahhh... my face is feeling warm, now. Brigham out.

4 May 2011

We were talking last night about how little children struggle to learn English... When my son Ethan was very young, he thought that the singular form for the word for grown-ups was "dult." You can see why he'd think that: adult - a dult. We were dults to him.

When my daughter Julie was little, on one occasion she ran by a sprinkler in her bathing suit and proudly said that she didn't get any of the "sprinks" on her. Once again, it's logical: sprinks issue forth from a sprinkler. Sometimes my kids would struggle with a word: Ethan was trying to think of a color and finally, exasperated, said, "It's the color of an elephant!" "Oh, you mean gray," Mom said, laughing. "Don't laugh!" said Ethan.

Every now and then we'd drive by or mention Wolf Trap for the Performing Arts on Route 7 in Northern Virginia, and I thought it was clear by context that we were talking about a place where musical performances were held. But I asked my son, once, "What do you think happens at Wolf Trap?" Sure enough, to him it's a place where small, wily animals are captured. The world is frequently a confusing place to a child...

Last night I watched a cool old film I've seen stills from all my life but have never seen: The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), a German expressionist masterpiece. For a 91 year-old movie, it was pretty good, full of Jewish kabbalah mysticism and oddly tilted houses, gnarled stairways and twisty-turny streets. It takes place in 16th C. Prague, but it looks like the Hostenwall of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - same aesthetic. It's one of those early films where the blue eyes of the actors turn nearly white due to the non-panchromatic nature of the early black and white film stock (Civil War daguerrotypes are like that, too). It was also one of the very first major horror films, and bore striking resemblances to the 1931 Frankenstein film. I quite liked it.

While I was hunting around on the Internet reading articles about The Golem, I also came across mention of the 1910 Frankenstein, the very first filmed version. There's a famous intriguing still photo from it I've always seen in the monster magazines from my youth. I had always read that it was a lost film... not so! Not only does it still exist, but you can watch the entire film on youtube! It's only a short, nearly 13 minutes long, and you can't expect much. It is, after all, 101 years old. But it's a start, and it was the first.

I reworked a photograph and text of how Marilyn Monroe (nee Norma Jeane Baker) got her start when a Yank magazine photographer found her working in an aircraft plant in Burbank during World War II - here. I have begun the slideshow that my pal Mike and I will give in Burbank on July 9th; it's been assembled in my head for months. It's now just a matter of making it real. I think people will find it entertaining.

3 May 2011

Barbara "Ba-bwa" Walters confirmed my belief that "The View" is a reliable source of profound ignorance when she said that she would hate to be the Republican thinking of running against President Obama right now. Bear in mind, not just actually doing it, but even thinking about it!

If this talking head - make that lisping head - had consulted a calendar she'd see that, in fact, the election isn't until November 2012. And an accidental crack into a history book would reveal that despite his astronomical high popularity in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War victory, President George Bush still lost the election to Bill Clinton about a year and a half later.

The Clinton flacks said that it was all about the economy, and indeed, it was. Last time I looked, the so-called "misery index" is the highest under the Obama Administration than it has been under anyone since Jimmy Carter, who coined the phrase. That could change by the time the first Tuesday in November rolls around, and I hope it does, but that's what elects presidents, not sabre-rattling. It's an odd fact of American political life that despite the fact that Congress, not the president, controls the purse strings and Federal spending, the president, not Congress, gets to take the credit or the blame for the economy.

Liberals crowing about the Seal Team Six bin Laden hit assignment ("Bush couldn't do it!") is farcical. If President Obama had kept his campaign promises to these people there wouldn't be any troops, special forces or otherwise, anywhere in the Middle East to take out bin Laden. And, as I recall, the unending chant from the political Left all during the Bush Era was anti-war. While that has been silenced by the presence of a Democrat in the White House (strongly indicating that the objections to the war were political, not moral), the back-slapping blood lust on display by President Obama's supporters is like a dweeby Women's Studies professor donning the armor of Mars and brandishing his spear. (Supposing, of course, that there is such a thing as a male Women's Studies professor.) Or like John Kerry declaring that he's "reporting for duty." Please. And can anyone, keeping a straight face, suggest that there might be a member of Seal Team Six (who actually did the work of turning bin Laden into chum) planning to vote for Obama in 2012? My experience with the more aggressive elements of the military is that they're somewhere to the political right of Genghis Khan.

While this is a good time for President Obama, it is actually a much better time for our United States Navy, long may their tribe increase! Perhaps, in honor of the Blessed Event, one of their skilled pianists will play Chopin's Opus 35 Number 2 (the Funeral March) at the next Navy Band concert, while everyone grins broadly. Go Navy!

Well, enough of distasteful politics and on to something much more relevant: my garage. I put up a Picasa web album describing the continuing work. I think this week or next I'll start painting, as soon as I've gotten my drywall mud sanded smooth. It's amazing how many holes I put into those garage walls...

But before I do any of that I plan to enjoy the week that my daughter-in-law Sarah has with us. She drove out with my son Ethan for his start on his summer internship, and this week is dedicated to spoiling Sarah. We had a nice lunch at Mike's American Grill yesterday - I love that place - and she and Ethan will be my yard sale companions this Saturday before she gets on the plane back to Utah. Yesterday we thoroughly vacuumed out and cleaned their Nissan Xterra; Ethan calls it the XTerrible due to the higher-than-anticipated repairs needed on it. A pity.

2 May 2011

Cari and I watched my recording of the royal wedding on Friday night; I thought it was quite nice. Bizarre hats, of course, but it wouldn't be a posh English affair if it didn't have bizarre hats.

I thought it was cool that I knew where things were happening from my London visits - I even managed to spot my favorite portrait in Westminster Abbey, the medieval painting of Richard II near the entrance everybody was using. They put a bush in front of it, but I could still see it. What makes it unique is that it's the earliest oil portrait of an English monarch that is true to life and not idealized, as on a coin or a statue.

I also liked the London-wide performance of Jerusalem, the grand old hymn (used effectively at rugby matches). Gives me goosebumps. Any nation would be proud to claim it. But, of course, the official anthem of the United Kingdom is God Save the Queen, which was played with the usual striking fanfare. (Oddly enough I cannot find out who wrote that fanfare, but I think it was Sir William Walton.)

Saturday was nice! Convertible top weather, a few yard sales. I found two Christmas ornaments, a Neil Diamond CD for my wife and a 50th anniversary of the Osmonds DVD (2008), also for my wife, who was an Osmonds fan as a teenager. We watched it Sunday night... they don't really do my kind of music, but I have to give credit where credit is due: the Osmonds have had a long and enviable career, and while the media would have liked nothing better than to pounce on the members of the family - especially Donny - for any moral misstep, they haven't ever given the media the opportunity. That is impressive.

Cari had to work on Saturday so I drove over to Manassas and visited the museum in old town; I've never been there before. I learned about Civil War human shields, something I hadn't ever read about. I also took a walk through the woods of the Second Bull Run battlefield and visited an early - if not the earliest - Civil War monument, dedicated in 1865. All that time under the sun in the convertible gave me sunburned arms!

Last night my son Ethan and his wife Sarah arrived in town, having driven all the way from Utah - hooray! Sarah will be with us for a week then flies back, and Ethan spends the summer here working as an intern in D.C.

Over the weekend I also did some drywall patching as part of my continuing Garage Renovation, and moved a wall cabinet and got rid of the some peg board.. my goal is to make smooth, uncluttered surfaces in the garage, with all of my tools behind cabinet doors, not on shelves or hanging from peg board. I also plan to put up automotive posters, probably mostly of Volkswagens and cars I have owned. The work is progressing, but slowly.

Elsewhere in the news, Osama bin Laden is dead, found in a housing complex for terrorists in Pakistan, not a cave in Afghanistan. From wikipedia: "Between 2002-2010, Pakistan received approximately 18 billion in military and economic aid from the United States. In February 2010, the Obama administration requested an additional 3 billion in aid, for a total of 20.7 billion." I have a better figure in mind for U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan: ZERO. We're broke; we're spending more money than we have. Why are we creating a huge inter-generational debt load to give money away to nations which knowingly or unknowingly harbor our greatest enemies? If this isn't the textbook definition of insanity, I'd like to know what is.

Brigham's Blog