Arizona Conservative

Time to move on -- part two

2010-03-20T06:19:00.033-07:00

I took a vacation a few weeks ago, back to where I was born (SF Bay Area). While it was good to see some of my old haunts as a kid (San Francisquito Creek, Perry Lane) it made me think: Damn, when did I get old?

My wife and daughter had never seen where I grew up, and my wife had to go to the Bay Area to attend the GDC (Game Developers Conference), so I figured -- what the hell. I hadn't been back to the Bay Area since I left for Arizona shortly after the 1989 World Series earthquake.

I was born in Palo Alto in the early 1950s, and my mother was a confirmed Bay Area inhabitant. As a kid I got to see many of the things that my mom valued as a kid. For me the most important things were the San Francisco Zoo and Steinhart Aquarium (I subsequently worked at Steinhart for years on and off, including and after the summer of 1970, mainly with the herps -- that's reptiles and amphibians for Ann Coulter Official Chat members, and others who just can't make it past STDs).

Anyhow, Dr. Earl S. Herald ran Steinhart Aquarium in the 50s and 60s, and also was the host of a show called Science in Action, which I never missed. While Dr. Herald was an ichthyologist (that's a scientist who studies fish, for ACOC members) he regularly had herps on the show too. I believe that the first time I had ever heard of an Elephant's Trunk Snake (Acrochordus javanicus) was when Dr. Herald was hauling one around on stage. I started a correspondence with him when I was eight, telling him how much I enjoyed his program and asking him questions about various creatures (usually reptiles), and he ALWAYS wrote back. These days a busy man like that would just funnel letters from some kid off to his secretary so that she could shoot off some form letter, but not Dr. Herald. Anyhow, I kept writing to Steinhart through high school, and then my dad arranged for me to get a summer job with a friend of his in the San Francisco Bay Area, salary, room and board included. One weekend I went up to San Francisco, and dropped in at Steinhart just to see if I could volunteer. Karl Switak, the supervising herpetologist at the aquarium who had also responded to my letters for years, knew who I was immediately, and I was set up as a volunteer on the spot. And what an experience it was.

While volunteers aren't supposed to have anything to do with venomous reptiles, I was tossed a set of keys which allowed me to have the run of Steinhart Aquarium, and told "If you get bitten, I don't know anything about it!" At the age of 17, I got to work with things I had only read about since I was a kid: bushmasters, Gila monsters, mambas, big constrictors, Old World vipers, rattlers of every species including the largest: the Eastern diamondback -- I remember one they had in a box in the holding room had a head that was about as wide across as a human hand. That's a big snake. Also in that room was a full-sized adult indigo snake (Drymarchon corais) -- the largest species of non-venomous snake in the US. It remains the only one I have ever handled. And that was just in the holding room, which had more stuff in it than most zoos had for a display collection. Additionally, there were about six or so species of cobras at Steinhart when I was there, including a king cobra measuring about twelve feet or so. At Steinhart I got to experience the feeling of king cobra intelligence -- these were ancient displays, and working behind the reptile panel I would occasionally glance at the big door at the end of the panel. It had a round porthole in it through which you could keep an eye on the king, and invariably, while I was working, it was keeping its eye on me. I would often find it looking at me through the porthole as I worked, and its expression definitely showed something like intelligence...I'm not the only snake person to say this, either. The king cobra's diet consists primarily of snakes (hence its generic name, Ophiophagus -- that's Latin, for ACOC members -- meaning snake eater) and so one of my jobs when I wasn't at the aquarium was to cruise the roads looking for roadkilled snakes to toss into the freezer at Steinhart to thaw later for meals. And remember I'm talking about antiquated exhibits here -- modern exhibits for cobras such as this have a remote door that you can raise up to allow the snake to access a darkened hide box. You pull on a cable, the snake notices the door, and naturally wants to go into the dark to be away from the public. Once the snake's in there, you drop the door to keep the snake in there, and then you can safely service the display. Not at Steinhart -- to feed the king cobra you would look through the porthole to make sure it wasn't right at the door, yank the door open, fling a thawed snake into the cage and hopefully slam it before the snake got out into the hallway with you. Usually it would snag its dinner in mid-air, and you were off the hook, but I've gotta tell you that this feeding method wouldn't be allowed at today's zoos.

Anyhow, the old Steinhart Aquarium was a wonderland for me -- a teenager whose whole life's desire was to someday be a famous herpetologist. With its neoclassical structure, built after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (in 1923, I believe), Steinhart Aquarium was a magnificent building, with columns, a whale fountain in front, and a huge swamp area with alligators, crocodiles, and alligator snapping turtles right in front of you when you walked in the door. I got to climb around in the swamp, feed the gators, occasionally capture an alligator snapper to haul to the Aquarium roof for some sun to kill fungus on its shell, and I remember donning a yellow rain slicker so that I could haul a young harbor seal up to the roof for the same reason. I was trusted and felt valued by the staff. At the age of seventeen I was living a dream, and working at Steinhart Aquarium remains the highlight of my life.

After the 1989 earthquake damaged the Aquarium, rather than repair it, they decided to rip the entire thing down, and in the place of its magnificence we have a modern thing that looks like an Erector Set gone mad -- Renzo Piano the architect notwithstanding, it's just one more concrete and steel building, but at least it has this really neat plant-covered roof. There is almost no reptile collection. The current thing in zoos and aquariums is multi-species exhibits to illustrate relationships between organisms, and that's what's at the California Academy of Sciences now (Steinhart was always THE main part of the Academy, but how they can continue to call it Steinhart Aquarium astonishes me). You be the judge -- here's the old Steinhart:

and here's the "new" one:

The whale fountain's gone, the columns are gone (except for replicas inside the building, which are just heartbreaking), and it made me realize that, yes indeed, forty years have really passed by since my seventeenth summer. That summer I got to see the musical "Hair," and the movie "Easy Rider." I had my first experience riding on commuter trains alone to a big city, and learning how to successfully make it across the city on public transit. My boss took me around Alcatraz in a sailboat, and I watched the Indians, who that summer were occupying the island, hanging their laundry in cell windows. And that summer I got to work in what once was possibly the greatest public aquarium in the US -- certainly on the West Coast at least -- and I was trusted to work with venomous snakes that could kill you easily and fairly quickly. I haven't even really talked about the fish collection, mainly because herps were my primary interest, but when I wasn't working with herps, I was crawling over shark tanks on a catwalk, or feeding a huge sea bass or alligator gars, or maybe just spending a few minutes with Butterball the manatee, scrubbing his back with a deck brush. Steinhart Aquarium was an amazing place, and now, green roof notwithstanding, the soul has been removed. I'm not at all sure that Ignatz and Sigmund Steinhart, the original source of funds for the building of the aquarium, would be very pleased at the place now.

There's an old saying, which I am sure you probably have heard: You can't go home again. Perhaps it's true...I'll never visit the Academy of Sciences again and sort of wish I hadn't seen what they turned it into. My old house on Perry Lane, where I grew up across from Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and prominent druggie) is still there. If you've ever read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test you're somewhat familiar with my neighborhood in my era. My grandfather built that house, which once had a HUGE Victorian-style greenhouse full of orchids in the backyard. The house, surprisingly, looks much the same, although it was once behind a hedge which hid most of it:

but the huge oak tree that was once in the middle of the street is gone now -- my mom proudly told me that her first date ran into that tree -- dead of disease, and a new little one has been planted to replace it:

with a little plaque commemorating it -- when I was a kid it was Perry LANE, not Avenue:

I went to other places from my youth, too, and they had changed -- an example is the Pulgas Water Temple. The Pulgas (Spanish for "fleas") Water Temple is a structure that was built at the end of the aqueduct that channels water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the Yosemite Valley to the Bay Area.

After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the residents of San Francisco decided that they needed more water so that they wouldn't have to watch their entire city burn down again, and so Yosemite was screwed up by damming off a valley to make a reservoir. While this would NEVER happen in today's ultra-sensitive enviro-society -- the most they do these days is screw up pristine desert by building acres of windmills -- the Water Temple was another spot from my youth that's been changed irreparably. When I was REALLY young, the inside of the temple was an open hole, where kids could watch the staggering amount of water swirl and gush inside the temple as it reached its final destination all the way from Yosemite. Then, in the 70s, I suppose, they put a screen over the top, probably after some druggie jumped in the hole or something, but the water still flowed. Not too long ago they decided to stop the water flow to the temple so that the water could be treated somewhere else before it went to Crystal Springs Reservoir. Now why they couldn't treat the water AFTER it left the temple is a mystery to me, but I'm just one of the uneducated masses. So now what you have is a really ornate structure with a screened-over hole inside. At least they haven't torn the quote with the Biblical plaque off yet, but who knows -- they might switch it out for a plaque commemorating Obama's election. That would make as much sense.

I suppose this kind of change, often for the sake of change alone, is always to be expected, but it makes me wonder: rather than "you can't go home again," perhaps it should really be: you shouldn't go home again. Old memories are sometimes best left as they are, without any updating. However, as the title of this post notes -- perhaps it was just, again, time to move on.

At least San Francisquito Creek, where I scrounged for lizards and three-spined stickleback (a type of fish, again for ACOC members) as a kid looked about the same:

So not everything was different. But, I've gotta say, while I showed my wife and Katie my old neighborhood, and wanted them to see it, and while not all of it changed -- I think that will about do it for memory lane. Getting old, folks.

Happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

2010-02-12T08:56:00.007-07:00

Today Abraham Lincoln would be 201 years old. I view him, and many of the historians consistently do also, as the greatest president in the history of the United States. He grew up in the middle of nowhere (at least it was the middle of nowhere in the early 1800s), had no more than a fourth-grade education (and not much of that), and pretty much taught himself how to read, write and speak effectively.

People back then, when Lincoln was president, were no kinder to him than they are to presidents in modern times. He was called a "nigger lover," "the perfect baboon" (this by his very own, and useless General McClellan), and constantly threatened with assassination. He was in the habit of staying at the Soldiers' Home outside of Washington, rather than the White House during the hotter months, and on one of his solo rides to the house had his top hat shot through and knocked off his head (henceforth he was accompanied by a military escort). His wife, Mary, did her very best to drive him mad with her irrational behavior, but he took it all in stride and continued to work for the good of America, not wanting to be the president under which the Union would dissolve. Under his watch, the United States of America was reunited and slavery was ended in the country for all time.

There are probably more books in existence about Abraham Lincoln than about any other person on the planet (unless you want to tally up JFK conspiracy-theory books). Many praise him and/or simply chronicle his life. But then there are those revisionist historians who, having apparently nothing better to do, make up disgusting theories about how Lincoln was supposedly a homosexual based on the fact that sometimes lawyers shared beds while riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit in the backwoods of Illinois, there being few establishments where one could obtain a room while making the rounds of various courtrooms. There are the rabid Lincoln-haters who blame him for any number of ills inflicted upon the US economy, or for federalizing the government, or tramping on the Constitution (his suspension of the writ of habeus corpus is commonly brought up, ignoring the fact that subsequently he was found to be justified in doing this by the Supreme Court, being thrust into an emergency situation that called for emergency actions).

I find Abraham Lincoln to be, in my opinion, the greatest American, the greatest statesman, and the greatest president in our history. There are those who, possibly because they will never be thought of as great at all, feel that it is necessary to spit on his memory in an attempt to feel more important. It pains me to see that the only American who has his birthday honored these days is Martin Luther King, Jr., which was accomplished by combining Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays into a single amorphous "Presidents Day" and thus avoiding increasing the number of federal holidays. It apparently was more important to pander to blacks by doing this, even though King might possibly have not been famous (or free, for that matter) had Abraham Lincoln not been born; in fact, I believe that MLK would object to this being done to Lincoln's birthday if he had any way to comment on it.

President Lincoln died at the hands of a southern sympathizer and racist fanatic named John Wilkes Booth, and the world was poorer for it. He never was able to do things like travel to California or to Jerusalem (as he once stated he would like to have done once he was through being President). The nation was deprived of his gentle and humorous wisdom and his absolute belief that the USA was, and would continue to be, the greatest nation in the world's history. Often people play the game: "If I could spend an evening talking and having dinner with a historical figure it would be..."; many people choose Jesus as this person, possibly because they think they're supposed to think that way. The way I look at it, I'll be spending eternity in Jesus' company. Whether or not it makes me look bad to nix an evening with Jesus in favor of one with Mr. Lincoln, I've often wished I could spend a day in the company of Abraham Lincoln, just to hear his stories, jokes, and anecdotes, and to experience his personality in real life. However, while Lincoln never chose a particular church or denomination, I trust that he's waiting for us now, and perhaps I'll get to spend some time with him after all.

If you want to read some good books about Mr. Lincoln, I'd recommend these:
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin -- great on Lincoln's presidency and his cabinet
Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald -- excellent overall biography unsurpassed except by the next one:
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame -- the newest biography with access to heretofore unknown material -- two huge volumes that I couldn't stop reading until I was done.

About the assassination of Abraham Lincoln I recommend:
Blood on the Moon, by Edward Steers
American Brutus, by Michael Kauffman
Manhunt, by James L. Swanson

One good book that I wholeheartedly recommend on the mindset of Lincoln's wife, Mary, is:

The Madness of Mary Lincoln, by Jason Emerson -- just an excellent work by a very meticulous researcher.

I hope that you will give some thought to Abraham Lincoln today on his birthday, and that, if you are only basically familiar with the life and death of our 16th president, you will be inspired to learn more about this great man.

God bless his memory.

Herp

Time to move on

2010-02-11T17:11:00.006-07:00

After my father died, and a little soul-searching, I decided to take a little time off from the work world, finish up some classes that needed finishing up, and do some things that I always wanted to do. Hence the new motorcycle -- I know, I know, it's one of those things old guys do in a vain attempt to recapture their youth. However, since I COULD do it, I did it, and I'm glad to say that, other than a slowing of reflexes requiring me to look a little farther ahead than I used to, I don't seem to have lost the ability to ride.

It's been about twenty years since I rode my last Beemer, and not wanting to own any other brand, and BMWs being so costly, I had just about written them off. But I bit the bullet in October, and now I'm getting my skills back, slowly but surely. In fact, I may be riding to California to have a custom seat made this month, and I'll see if I can navigate the freeways there. Ain't looking forward to that, but I'll deal with it.

Things have changed on BMW motorcycles since I first started riding in the 70s, some for the good and some for the, well, not-so-good, but the good outweighs the bad. More horsepower, more bells and whistles (anti-lock brakes and automatic suspension adjustment on a motorcycle!). Missing is the hand work that used to be apparent in the pinstriping, etc. But all in all, I can't complain.

The one thing that has changed in the twenty years I took off from motorcycling is -- assholes with cellphones. Twenty years ago there were no cell phones, or at least not like we know them now. It was bad enough that people twenty years ago could look at you and just not have it register that you were actually driving a motor vehicle. But that was only SOME people. Now it seems that the majority of people driving the roads spend half of any drive with a phone jammed on their ear, talking about very important things like Buffy's coming-out party or "wow, I think that guy in Biology class is cute," etc. I find I spend a lot more time making absolutely sure that the drivers around me aren't semi-comatose and actually do notice me.

The good thing, and luckily I've been quick enough, is that with the massive amount of horsepower vs. the small amount of weight involved in a motorcycle means that, given a couple seconds of warning I can rocket the hell out of the way of cars careening into my path. I do have to say, however, that the time has come for law enforcement officers to be authorized to shoot to kill cell phone-using drivers. We'll see about that.

So, I'm semi-retired, I guess. Next month we're heading to the Bay Area to revisit my home where I grew up, and I have a tour arranged where I used to work at the biggest public aquarium on the west coast. I'm sort of excited about seeing things that I saw when I was a kid, although the aquarium has been completely overhauled. I hope they saved some of the old structure. And San Francisco Zoo (Fleishhacker's Zoo when I was a kid) should largely be the same -- old-time structures for Pachyderms, Lions, etc.

Lots of things happening, and there isn't an internet flamer that can bother me anymore, so life's looking pretty good about now.

Love,

The rejuvenative power of Christmas

2009-12-12T04:22:00.010-07:00

This will be my fifty-sixth Christmas. That's quite a number of Christmases under my belt. As the rush began this year, as it does every year, I tended to avoid thinking about it, because real life continued to intrude: problems with students (and parents who find it easier to blame the teacher than to discipline their little darlings), demands from school administration, and a constant struggle to keep up with grading papers and to maintain the gradebook. My father dying in September. Problems with my brother, the "executor" of my father's estate (a position I turned down originally because I thought that having an involved family member in a position such as that was a mistake), who declared, after I objected to the fact that in over a month's time passing I had gotten one sentence from him about how affairs were proceeding which amounted to "Don't worry about it," that he had no interest in maintaining a relationship with me after everything was finished(I'm now just dealing directly with the lawyer, and my brother can continue to think of himself as Very Important, which seems to be essential to his personality).

I've made starting plans to go to the Peruvian jungle next year on a hunt for bushmasters -- the largest venomous snake in the Western Hemisphere and the largest pit viper of them all -- because capturing one has been a childhood dream as yet unfulfilled. It sounds as though I'll be going with just a guide, and a cook and interpreter, into the middle of nowhere for two or three weeks -- I'm not a tour kind of guy, plus I doubt they'd let you capture and photograph big venomous snakes on tours.

Lots of things tend to wear you down, and to put aside the things you found important as a younger person because "real life" is more "important" than "childish things," but Christmas always reminds me of these things, brings them back to me, and makes me realize that it would be a shame if one let trivial (or perhaps not so trivial) occurrences in one's life erase the beauty and meaning of Christmas. And so, each December, I force myself to haul my butt out of the morass of self-pity, the "what-ifs," the "should haves," etc., and to remember what Christmas means to me.

I remember, around this time every year, what my Christmases were like as a youth. They looked like the photo up there at the top of this page: smiling mom, huge tree with BIG lights and tinsel, nativity scene on the mantel, and my dad's old World War II olive green GI stockings hung on the fireplace screen, full of things from Santa. And I continue to wait for Santa every year, because as far as I am concerned (let me go on record as saying this to the World Wide Web) Santa Claus is real.

I see Santa in children's eyes around this time of year, my daughter's eyes particularly. There's magic in just saying the name, Santa Claus, for me. When I think about Santa, I am instantly transported to a time where I had no interest in, or knowledge of, politics, wars, or the bad things people do to each other just because they can do them. I remember the smells of my mom's Christmas cookies, and the sights, on Christmas morning, of a huge tree that Santa Claus magically brought to our house every Christmas Eve, where before there was a plain living room with perhaps a few Christmas cards as decorations but nothing else. Santa also brought candy canes, and left a palpable presence in our house that I could almost feel, as I realized that the great Christmas saint had actually been in our living room, and had taken the time to do something nice for yet another family.

I tend to forget that presence over the year following Christmas, and, upon reflection, have come to think that's a shame. The Christmas feeling, fleeting as it is, should not be fleeting at all, but remain in one's heart throughout the year, and it's sad that this feeling tends to be driven out or squashed by events that really should have no effect upon one's happiness at all. It comes back to me occasionally, if only as a brief thought passing through my mind, when I smell cinnamon (my mom's spice of choice at Christmas) and I instantly think of this time of year, even in July. I think, at those times, the things I'm thinking now: how sad it is to have that Christmas Feeling driven out of one's life every year, when it is that sort of feeling that should help to sustain us. To give us hope for the future. Yes, Santa is part of that feeling; he will always be intertwined, in my heart, with the story of the Christ Child's birth, and I have always associated the presents brought by Santa Claus with those given to the Child in Bethlehem by the three wise men.

As I begin a new chapter in my life -- that of retiree, young enough to enjoy things I've always dreamed of, be it bushmasters, Australia, England and the sparkle in my daughter's eyes when she thinks of Santa -- I hereby resolve that Christmas will never leave my heart. God bless it. God bless Santa, whose visit I will await with as much excitement as I had as a kid. And God bless us -- every one.

Herp

Reflections on my dad

2009-10-03T05:22:00.006-07:00

My father died on September 21st, and I have had some time to reflect upon what was a long and unique life for the person who was Frank Ford.

My relationship with my dad was off-and-on. Never a warm man, my father was a child of the Great Depression, having been born in the first half of the 1920s to a mother who didn't want him, since she wasn't married, and shipped him off to his grandparents to be raised by them. He never liked his mother as a result, but adored his grandmother, as it was she and his grandfather who raised him.

My father grew up poor, often half-humorously telling me that until he grew up the only part of the chicken he ever saw was the gravy; stories were related about spending an entire day in a movie theater for ten cents, with a bag of overripe bananas picked up from the trash at a fruitstand for refreshment. His grandfather dressed him in clothing picked up from second-hand stores, and he told me that when he joined the Army Air Corps to go into World War 2, the best thing about being in the service was the food.

Dad ended up being a bombardier, with a lot of missions under his belt in the European theater of the war (more than was necessary to complete his obligation) and he was about to go to the Asian theater when the bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered.

He went home, met my mother, and lived a fairly frugal existence with their new daughter, Kathleen (my daughter is named for my sister, who is now deceased). My mom had a pretty interesting family, which I might talk about in a later post, but all I can say is, for many reasons, she was the best thing that ever happened to my father. She stuck with him through his moods, through spending money on things that he wanted but that they should have saved, and finally moved to a farm in Oregon with him and all of us kids because he decided he wanted to be a farmer.

I will say that growing up on the farm was the best thing that could have happened to a boy who was surrounded by my grandfather's books on natural history (my grandfather on my mother's side was famous in his own right, having been integral to helping the Japanese reseed the dead US west coast oyster beds in an attempt to revive the oyster industry there). When I wasn't working with animals, I was out catching them. We had a rock quarry where I could practice target shooting, and lots of snakes and lizards to catch. We had ponds where ducks would stop on their way to the game refuge adjacent to our land, and so we always had wild duck in the freezer, as well as quail and venison. It was a lonely way to grow up for most people, but my dad pretty much disliked everyone, and it suited him, so I suppose some of that tendency rubbed off on me.

My mother died a few years ago, and I was there holding her hand in the hospice when she went. Dad, who was always the big macho guy, pretty much went downhill after that, and my brother talked him into selling his home in California and moving to miserable weather in Laramie, Wyoming. Looking back on it, I think my father would have been better off staying in California at an assisted living place, but my brother, who is sort of a bigshot (or perhaps thinks he is, and makes sure everyone hears about it), talked him into leaving, and the rest is history.

My father was a one-of-a-kind guy. Hard to live with, but who gave me a few moral underpinnings that are valuable, mostly around the ideal of keeping one's word. He gave me a few other tendencies that I probably could have done without, such as holding grudges until they shovel dirt over me, but I'm working on that. He wasn't happy without mom, and he's probably better off now. And now all that's left of my immediate family is my brother and myself, and since my brother's too important for anyone to talk to, for all intents and purposes my family is my wife, my daughter, and me, which suits me fine.

I'll miss my father, but it also makes me look upon one's life a little more closely. All the things he did, all his experiences, all the things he collected through the years, and POOF, when you die all the material things mean nothing at all. It makes you realize that your life on earth probably means very little compared to what your life will be like after you pass on -- at least if you make the right choices. All I can say is: I hope my parents made the right choices.

Farewell, Dad.

Summer vacation's coming to an end for this old teacher

2009-07-17T17:09:00.024-07:00

This picture is one of the reasons I live in Arizona -- a spring in Arizona's Huachuca Mountains in the southeastern part of the state:

But, as Diane in the old TV show Cheers used to say, I digress.

In a couple of short weeks I'll be back at school working on my room and getting my materials in shape. It's been a fun summer, although I had to forgo doing one of the things I had planned (real life intruded in the form of plumbing repairs and forced me to spend my money elsewhere). But that's OK -- there's always next year.

I found out one thing about my daughter: Katie will probably hate the Tower of Terror at Disney's California Adventure until the day she dies. I didn't think it was all that bad, but she did. My wife said Katie's lips were blue when we got off that thing. However, she's not a wimp!

We had our friends from England make their yearly visit to us for a couple of weeks, and we went to Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains to stay at a bed-and-breakfast there. Also became acquainted with the people who run the Southwestern Research Station in Cave Creek Canyon near Portal, AZ, and we'll probably be staying there next year. I knew the director in 1972 (Vince Roth, since deceased) and a number of other researchers who worked there on studies. Southeastern Arizona lends itself well to natural history studies, which is why the American Museum of Natural History bought this spot and made it their western outpost in 1955 -- lots of wildlife and being secluded makes for a perfect study area.

Just for fun I took Katie and Ian with me to road hunt for snakes outside of Portal. For those who aren't familiar with this pastime, it can be hours of boredom interspersed with an occasional discovery. What you do is this: find an old, well-established highway, hopefully not heavily-traveled, and the shoulders must not be graded (in other words you want the vegetation to come to the edge of the road; I'll explain why shortly). You choose a section of this road, hopefully a section that runs through country that you have previously scouted out in the daylight hours that looks promising for snakes. I forgot to mention: you drive back and forth on this section of road for as many hours as you can hold up. The purpose -- to find snakes on the prowl for food.

Snakes aren't any stupider than people when it comes to needing shelter from the sun. In the summer months it gets much too hot in the deserts for a hungry snake to be out in midday, so they alter their behavior and emerge after dark. As they're cruising looking for something tasty to eat (oh, heck, I'm being anthropomorphic here -- they're looking for a food item of the correct size that smells right), they may happen upon a road, and for snake hunters this is when having vegetation that comes up to the edge of the blacktop is crucial. If a snake reaches a wide gravel shoulder, it seems to realize that crossing it makes it conspicuous, and they won't cross that to get to the highway as often. If the snake pops out of the grass onto the highway, well, there it is.

Why would a snake be on a highway at all? Well, being ectothermic (cold-blooded is really a misnomer, since snakes wandering around in the desert may have warmer blood than we do -- the environment determines their blood temperature, which is what ectothermic means: outside heat) they like roads that are warmer than the air around them. If the highway has soaked up enough heat to be warmer, the snake will go onto the road, and stop to enjoy the temperature. They'll still cross highways which are colder than the air, but they have no reason to stop, which makes for lousy road hunting nights.

So, for good road hunting conditions you need:
1. Poorly traveled roads with vegetation coming to the road's edge
2. No moon or little moon (snakes are more conspicuous to predators on a brightly moonlit night, which is probably why you don't see as many in a full moon)
3. NO WIND. Windy nights are almost certain doom for snake hunting.

Anyhow, in England they don't do any such thing (being cold, plus having a lousy variety of snakes) so Ian found this interesting. It happens like this: after driving for about forty-five minutes, your eyes get blurry as you scan the road for snakes. Snakes show up white on the road, and are generally easy to spot if you're experienced, but even the most experienced snake hunter starts seeing things after driving for a while without result, which ends up in slamming on the brakes for banana-peel lizards and fanbelt snakes (which really don't even look right, because they aren't white at night in your headlights, but after a while you are just WILLING that object out there to be a snake, so there you are). This night was a good one, however, because from the start of the drive we found snakes up the wazoo -- but unfortunately almost all of them were Mojave rattlesnakes. Note that I say "unfortunately" not because they're dangerous, but because they're common. However, it was interesting for Ian to note that, no, rattlesnakes don't chase you, even when you're annoying them with a snake hook while you're trying to pitch them off the highway to keep them from being mowed down by a semi. All you ever hear around here are people who are terrified of being "chased" by rattlesnakes. A rattler's top crawling speed is around three miles per hour. A toddler does better than that. Even if they DID chase you, if they actually caught you, you probably would deserve to die. Or you might be dead already, as slowly as you ran away.

Katie, my seven-year-old sidekick (she knows the word "sidekick" as a result of watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with me; in that movie he had a little Asian sidekick named Short Round; therefore she has decided to call herself Short Ford, which made me laugh uproariously when she first said that), got out of the truck, snake sacks and tools in hand in case I needed them, and got her first really good look at big rattlers in the wild. She followed my instructions not to get too close, and they made a lot of noise for her as I tossed them off the highway, which impressed her. I have a feeling she's going to be following in my footsteps in a few years, unless boys impress her more than snakes. If nothing else, teaching kids about things like this is GOOD for them. They learn that most of the scary stuff in movies is BS, and that gaining a healthy respect for wild creatures is far better than being terrified of them. Knowledge is power; an old over-used saying, but true nonetheless. I grew up being not much afraid of anything, because I learned how animals react in given situations and have always been careful to stay within those parameters. Oh, no animal is like a robot; they're all individuals. Even snakes. Every one can act SLIGHTLY differently, but I can tell you this: after about forty years of working with rattlers, mambas, bushmasters, Old World vipers, cobras, you name it, I've yet to be "chased" by a snake. Oh, I've had lots of them take swings at me, generally because I've annoyed them beyond what they think they need to accept. But they are unable to leap through the air, and typically can only strike about a third of their length. You learn to judge these things. Here's a Mojave (no, not Mojave "Green", just Mojave -- I don't know WHY people insist on that "Mojave Green" label. They aren't green!) Rattlesnake that we found that night:

Not a bad snake, and by the time I got it off the road it "sang" very well for Katie. I don't like pissing animals off, but given the alternative of ending up a pancake after an encounter with a car, I figure it's better off.

So, Tower of Terror notwithstanding, Katie is a pretty cool kid.

Anyhow, Ian went home with some stories to tell. We went up into the mountains at about 9000 feet at the base of a rockslide where northern twin-spotted rattlers live. Huge slide, and to get around on it to find snakes requires a lot from an old guy who normally lives at about 1000 feet above sea level. Here are some shots of good old Arizona for people who think that it's all desert:

An Arizona ridge-nosed rattlesnake (our state reptile) shot I took a few years ago in a different mountain range, but typical of what the ground cover looks like in high-elevation Arizona -- I'm posting this for my friend Rebecca:

Us having a picnic in a Douglas fir/ponderosa pine forest at about 9000 feet in the Chiricahua mountains:

My sidekick Katie telling me to go ahead up the rockslide, lol:

and a little higher-up view from the middle of the slide:

Not much desert to look at, is there?

Anyhow, between Disneyland, and our trip to the mountains (and to Roswell, NM, to visit the aliens) plus starting off the summer by taking my wife to a Fleetwood Mac concert (I never listened to them much, but I had to admit I was impressed by Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work) it's been fun. But now, it's back to work.

I had to take the Arizona state exam for teachers of history. Passed it, which is lucky, because I'll be teaching world history on top of earth science and biology this year. I'm also finishing up teaching requirements for ELL teaching (English Language Learners). So teachers' summers aren't all fun and games. But it's all been fun. And I've gotten a lot of toys this summer: new Toyota Tundra, an entire set of authentic Indiana Jones stuff to wear, from the whip to the hat and the jacket made in England by the people who made Harrison Ford's jacket. Plus this really cool guy:

Arnie now graces the top of my piano. A figure of Indiana Jones with the idol in his hand (from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the best of all the Indy movies) is on the other end, and Spiderman and the Green Goblin battle in the middle.

It's been a fun summer. Now to see if I can have a good school year. I hope!

P.S. Hey, I forgot one other important thing -- we went to the Smokey Bear Museum in Capitan, NM. Smokey was an ever-present part of the lives of my generation when I was a kid. He was a real bear, and was buried here when he died at the National Zoo. Katie is carrying on his message: "Remember -- only YOU can prevent forest fires!"

We've been abducted!

2009-06-17T13:58:00.004-07:00

We were just innocently visiting Roswell, New Mexico, with our British friends who expressed a desire to see the site of the 1947 crash site, and I pooh-poohed it until we looked up and ... and I'll be damned! The captain of the saucer looks like Ron Paul!

Nah, we're OK. Just a fast note here, while I'm thinking about it. Good snake hunting near the Chiricahuas for a couple of nights, and even caught a nice little Arizona alligator lizard next to our cabin. A few days more in alien country, a visit to Carlsbad Caverns, and then back home for a week of resting up. Even if it has to be in Phoenix.

Now if I can just get out of this spacecraft...

We survived Disneyland!

2009-06-06T17:24:00.008-07:00

Not a cheap vacation, but one of the best times I have had, if only just to watch Katie go nuts at the place. Four and a half days at the Happiest Place on Earth, and really I have to admit that I enjoy myself every time I walk in there. I tend to be a little nostalgic about things that were created personally by Walt Disney, and so attractions like the Enchanted Tiki Room (opened in 1963), Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion always hold a special spot in my heart. And best of all, those are Katie's favorites, too, with Pirates holding the top spot. An exciting thing (for me, anyway) is hearing that they are planning to bring back Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, Disney's audioanimatronic presentation of Abraham Lincoln talking, standing, gesturing -- when I took my mom in there years ago (she's a sucker for American history like I am) the tears started flowing down her face when Lincoln stood up and began to speak. I did write to Disney personnel after I went to Disneyland last October, pointing out that taking the Lincoln exhibit out of operation just as his 200th birthday was being celebrated probably wasn't the best move, so I am glad that he'll be back. This does mean, however, that I will probably have to go back there this year to see President Lincoln all over again, if my wallet holds out.

Several notes for Disneyland vacationers: if you're planning to stay at the Disneyland Hotel, once the premier hotel for Disneyland enthusiasts, you might want to rethink that option. The Best Westerns across the street give you breakfasts. The Disneyland Hotel gives you coffee at 6:30, at which time I have normally been awake for about two hours. The big selling point for me was the idea of taking the monorail to the park and avoiding the huge lines outside the front gates, but the blasted monorail was either late or out of service more times than not. They really need to work on that thing. In any case, when I go back, I'll save a few bucks by staying at a Best Western motel where they will actually feed me in the morning, and I'll just count on waiting at the front gates.

Upon coming back, I had to take an Arizona state test on World History for my teaching work. We'll see how I did in about a month. Once that was over with, I got to pick up my new truck. Yep, a new one. Still hooked on Toyota Tundras, so I decided to get a new truck once my 2006 turned 30000 miles. I could have kept the old one, but the new ones have a lot of things my old truck didn't have, not to mention it was new, lol.

Now I was expecting Katie to be thrilled at a new vehicle, but she yelled at me for getting rid of her old friend Bob the Truck, and it took a while for her to get over it. However, I just had sidesteps put on, and finished it off by having a bedliner sprayed in, and she's warmed up to the new one now. She decided to name this one Indy, which I think isn't a bad name at all.

So, since I always like to take a few photos of new vehicles before they get rock and door dings, here's Indy:

I'm going to try to keep this guy for about five years this time, instead of three. Unless I get rich, which is doubtful. He'll get his trial run on our vacation with our British friends to Roswell and Carlsbad Caverns. I think he should do nicely.

So, anyhow, the first vacation installment is done, I got new toys, and life's good. Despite Obama, who I try not to think about. At least when I go back to Springfield, Illinois in July to visit Lincoln sites I can be comforted by the fact that he's not in town anymore, even when he's having a $40000 date with his wife at the taxpayers' expense. I can't believe guys like that telling US to economize, and he blows THOUSANDS to take his wife to a show with full Secret Service protection, and...

Aw, hell, there I go thinking about the guy again.

Nuts on that stuff. Disneyland was fun, and so's my new truck. I'm going to be out making a really big carbon footprint with Indy in preparation for getting taxed to death for doing it. Burn that gas! Be greater than God and destroy the planet (yeah, right)!

Have a nice day, folks...

Herp

What a summer!

2009-05-28T17:42:00.004-07:00

Hasn't even started yet, and boy do we have plans. After a year of teaching high school science (with an attempt at teaching a class of junior-high kids to write) we're going to Disneyland! Four days in the Happiest Place on Earth (and I can definitely use a happy place after a school year of attitude problems) -- and we're even going to stay in the Disneyland Hotel. Never stayed there before, and the prospect of just getting on the monorail into Disneyland and avoiding a million people waiting at the gates is pretty cool. We're all pretty jazzed about that. But wait -- there's more!

Once we get home, we get a week to recuperate, and then our old friends from England come over for their yearly two-week visit. They always get to pick what they want to do, and this year it's Roswell, New Mexico! LOL, gotta love those aliens. Works out pretty well, because we have relatives in Roswell, and we haven't seen them for a while, plus it's not all that far from Carlsbad Caverns and some pretty good Billy the Kid stuff (Lincoln, NM is a hot spot), so it should be a good short trip. Plus they're bringing me my yearly supply of Earl Grey tea from Fortnum and Mason, not to mention an authentic Indiana Jones shirt and pants from the place in England that makes the stuff for the movies. Can't complain! I've just about got every piece of authentic Indy gear I can find, right down to the hats and the Mark VII gas mask bag that he used in the movies, not to mention the jacket, whip, and holster, so this ought to set me up pretty good for this year's Halloween -- plus I may have to start wearing this stuff, just because, when it cools off later in the year (that leather jacket looks great in the movies, but it ain't summer-in-Arizona apparel).

I haven't done anything of this scope in one summer since I've had summers -- and boy, there have been a lot of summers in my life -- and I'm looking forward to it. I hope it will be fun for my daughter, too. Making memories -- that's really what life is about. Let's hope there are some good ones this year.

Herp

Happy birthday to my sister -- the anti-role model

2009-04-04T05:51:00.003-07:00

I was talking on Skype the other day to my old childhood friend Becky (we were around 5 years old when we first met) about my big sister Kathy. Kathy was my best friend as a child. We did all sorts of stuff together; she called me "T" and whenever I had a problem she was always there to help me sort things out.

We grew up together on a farm in Oregon; I don't know if she particularly liked it or not, but she did have her own horse (which she couldn't ride for beans) and was a pretty normal girl. Until she went to college at the University of Oregon.

This was back in the '60s; the heyday of Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society. Whatever happened, my sister was sucked into the maw of leftist philosophy, and turned, seemingly overnight, from a normal farm girl to a fist-shaking, snarling protester, who hated capitalist pigs, sexists, racists, the "pigs," the establishment, etc.

I was due to go to college in 1970, and her present to me was to send me a little essay by some guy, whose name escapes me, entitled "The Student as Nigger." This was to get me ready to crap on all of my college professors and to begin attacking anyone over the age of thirty as members of the establishment or white devil slavemasters (or whatever came to mind that sounded protest-appropriate). I sent my sister a letter telling her that I wasn't interested in such things, not having been indoctrinated yet, and not to bother sending me anything else like that. She was offended, and a few years later told me that my response to her "sounded like Dad." I was, and am, still annoyed over the transformation of my sister from a normal girl to a nut, all due to leftists.

At the time, I was too young to have formulated a political philosophy, but if I were to trace it back to the beginning, I would say that my sister's complete personality change when she went to college was the trigger. For years afterwards she would send Christmas presents back to my mother that had been sent to her children, saying she didn't want her children to accept anything from her evil parents. The only time she ever came around and made an attempt to be somewhat polite was when she was short of cash. Otherwise, there she was in Canada. Yep, Canada. During the Vietnam War she married a draft-dodger and moved to Canada. My dad, a WW2 vet, didn't think much of that. Then she dumped the guy, got pregnant by a black guy, and ended up with HIM. Again, my father (possibly the prototype for Archie Bunker) didn't think much of THAT, either, and Kathy pretty much became a non-entity.

I don't remember hearing from her for years; then one morning at work I got a call from my mother. Kathy had been killed in a fall from a horse (I told you earlier she couldn't ride for beans). Apparently she'd been tossed onto her head, just like Christopher Reeve would be some years in the future, but she was dead just about as soon as she hit the ground. And the last I remembered hearing from her, it was seeing my best childhood friend yelling and spouting epithets about our family, all a result of leftist ideology. And I realized in a flash that, being suddenly gone, there would never be a time where Kathy and I could sit down and make up, or reminisce about growing up. She died hating her family, estranged from all of us due to leftist ideology, and went to her grave shaking her fist. And for that I can't forgive leftists.

So I suppose, on Kathy's birthday: April Fool's Day, the 1st of April -- I can say that I trace my disgust with leftists to a horseback-riding accident years ago. Leftists took my sister away, and turned a young, impressionable girl into a screaming harpy, and with her death, all chances of a reconciliation ended. But no biggie for them; lose one footsoldier but there are millions more to indoctrinate.

Happy birthday, big sister. Sorry I lost you. Was it worth it?

Well, spring break is almost upon us again

2009-02-25T17:47:00.005-07:00

What used to be called Easter Break when I was a whippersnapper has been made more politically-correct. Oh well, Easter isn't until April this year anyway. My science students are no doubt looking forward to a vacation from school and from me. I actually thought that's how I'd feel during the Christmas break -- oops, winter break -- but I found out that I missed the students more than I figured. And because we spend so much of our lives together, I think it was something of a relief for them to get back to normal and be in the classroom again. They'd never admit that, but I'm pretty sure it's true.

Anyhow, my daughter turns 7 during this break, and we have a nice party planned, coupled with overhauling her room and buying her a big-person's bed. She's growing like a weed. Kids -- man, they're expensive. But my daughter's worth it, so what the heck.

Over the years some things that seemed supremely important to me have fallen by the wayside. Running internet forums are one of those things that make me think "Why in the hell did I ever enjoy that?" I think I've learned a few things, one of which is that the greatest gift I've ever received is my daughter. She believes in me when life's tough on me, and she looks to me for protection. As long as I'm able to stand, I'll fulfill her expectations or die trying, so I figure she'll be just fine.

What I really worry about is her future in a post-Obama world, where everyone believes that the government owes them everything. I'm really not sure how this mess in Washington is going to turn out, but I think that compared to Obama, Bush may come out of this looking like one of our better presidents after all. We haven't been attacked, although it's not a foregone conclusion that we will continue to be safe, particularly with Mr. Sit-Down-And-Talk-Unconditionally Obama at the helm. I have a feeling that, at our expense, President Barack Obama is going to be forced to grow up rather quickly. I just hope they don't have to nuke Phoenix before he wises up.

Anyhow, in this rambling post, I'm looking forward to spring break, my daughter's birthday, and her smiles. And I'm praying to God that she will inherit an America similar to what I was taught when I was a kid. I think the shock may turn the USA back to being mostly conservative, and for that, President Obama, I will thank you.

Herp

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

2009-01-15T17:03:00.008-07:00

In the rush to deify Barack Hussein Obama, and to see his birthday disappear in an amalgam of "Presidents" whose birthdays are celebrated on "Presidents Day," apparently to make room for people of the correct color to have their OWN holidays, I think it's being largely forgotten that the greatest statesman and President in US history (southerners, sorry, but the war's over) would be 200 years old this year.

Lincoln has his supporters and detractors. Neoconfederates constantly talk about Lincoln the Tyrant, who misused the powers given to him by the Constitution of the United States. They claim that it's all his fault that states' rights have been trampled by the federal government. But they seem to forget that there were a couple of things at stake back then: the Union falling apart, and slavery as a disease in a country which ostensibly believed that all men were created equal.

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room cabin in Kentucky, poorer than the proverbial churchmouse, and had less than a second-grade formal education. His prospects for success were almost non-existent, and, if not for his brilliant mind and love of country, he would no doubt have been some hayseed living out his life and dying in some shack in the backwoods of America somewhere.

Oh, I know there are the screamers out there, typically from the South. They've never gotten over the fact that they overreached and lost. They claim that very few Southerners ever owned slaves, and that the war wasn't about slavery anyhow. What they choose to ignore is that while, yes, only the wealthy owned slaves, every Southerner viewed ownership of slaves as a birthright that they hoped someday to fulfill. One of the premier conservative scholars of today, Dinesh D'Souza, wrote a great article entitled Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman? in which he reminds people of a speech never mentioned in the South's revisionist history where slavery and Lincoln are concerned; this speech, given by CSA Vice President Stephens, is reported on by D'Souza thusly:

This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In his “Cornerstone” speech, delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, at the same time that the South was in the process of seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was “fundamentally wrong.” That premise was, as Stephens defined it, “the assumption of equality of the races.” Stephens insisted that, instead, “our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth.”

Abraham Lincoln originally hoped to stop slavery from spreading to states where it did not as yet exist, which is why the South freaked out and started bailing out as soon as he was elected. They didn't need to do this, as Lincoln never went along with the strict abolitionists until the South forced his hand. He didn't want to be the President under whose watch the Union dissolved, and once the southern states seceded, it went hand in hand with the reason they seceded: fear that Lincoln would abolish slavery. He came to realize that "a house divided shall not stand," and that the Constitution did not say "all men are created equal, except for Negroes." And for Lincoln, that was the end of the discussion.

While some point to Lincoln as striking a serious blow against states' rights in favor of centralized control by the federal government, it's still a fact that state constitutions override federal control where laws are concerned. Gun control is a prime example of that, to name one thing.

Lincoln had a solemn promise to protect and defend the Constitution, and to keep the United States of America whole and inviolate. At the cost of many of his countrymen, all due to the bull-headedness of the south, I might add, he succeeded, and ended slavery with the passage of the 13th Amendment in the bargain. Either, Lincoln said, the Constitution works for all people, or it works for none of them, and regardless of all the freaking out by people over his suspension of habeas corpus, later found to be necessary for the President of the United States to carry out his sacred duty to the country in emergency circumstances, Lincoln DID preserve the Union, and WAS the Great Emancipator. Whether or not there are people who believe that Lincoln did all this just to be a tyrant, and in fact, as Lincoln's law partner Billy Herndon noted that Lincoln's ambition was "a little engine that knew no rest," (hell, he was in politics -- what do you expect?) Lincoln loved his country and kept her in one piece.

So, Barack Hussein Obama may very well be deified, as noted, as being the first black president, regardless of his qualifications for the job. But is this important because of his qualities, or simply because of his skin color? It would seem to me, when it has been reported that about 90% of blacks in this country voted for BHO, that there's racism involved, but, by God, not by whites. You see, ALL the blacks in the US could have voted for BHO, and if all the racist evil white devil slavemasters had voted for McCain, Obama would have lost by sheer numbers. What does this mean? It means, dear friends, that a whole bunch of white people voted for Obama. Hopefully this spells the deathknell for White Guilt in this country. But one thing that blacks need to remember on February 12 -- they need to ponder the fact that, had there been no Abraham Lincoln looking out for the constitutional rights of ALL people in the USA, Obama probably wouldn't have been in any position to run for ANYTHING.

It seems to me that Martin Luther King, Jr. would want blacks to celebrate Lincoln's birthday on this 200th anniversary, far and away above celebrating the godlike "accomplishment" of Barack Obama. And King might want to remind blacks of the line in his "I Have a Dream" speech that we hear constantly at this time of year -- you know, the one about dreaming about his little children one day being judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.

In this day and age, when it was outright stated by blacks that if you didn't vote for BHO you were racist, how do you think people were judging Obama? Do you think King would approve?

In any case, in this year celebrating the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, you might want to give a little thought to the man who made this event possible, regardless of the motives of the voters involved. I urge you to go to http://www.abrahamlincoln200.org as a starting point, and do a little research on the life of this great man, who embodied the Great American Story.

Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln. Let's just hope he's up to doing the job, whatever color he happens to be.

Herp

We've made it through another Christmas

2008-12-31T06:20:00.003-07:00

Not that I'm happy about that, by any means. Christmas has always been, to me, at least, as Scrooge's nephew noted, "...a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." (Note: ACOC "moderators" apparently don't go along with this, although they have left me alone for a while now).

Christmas brings back memories of my youth as though they happened just the other day. My brother always got the cool stuff, from guns to, once, a live iguana that we found crawling around in the Christmas tree as ornaments crashed to the ground.

Oh, I got cool stuff too, but most things I can barely remember. I suppose the best things I took away from Christmases past have been memories, which have faded a bit with time but which will never disappear the way old Christmas toys do. It's why cinnamon is still my favorite spice, and why I call vanilla extract "the secret ingredient" -- Katie now calls it that as she helps me bake things -- because these smells conjure up memories of my mom as she got ready for Christmas.

My father always said that "Christmas is for kids," but I don't believe that my mother felt the same way. After we all went our separate ways and were no longer at home for Christmas, my dad's sole contribution to the season was to stick a cardboard tree up on the wall in lieu of an actual tree. I think he realized, when we had him to our house for a Christmas after my mom had died, that he should have taken her feeling into account more than just celebrating his own curmudgeonly tendencies.

My mother instilled a love of Christmas in me, entwined with stories of the Nativity (even though she wasn't a religious woman, she had no doubt what we were celebrating at Christmas, and was sure that we all knew what the holiday was about) and with Santa Claus. Life was different then: when we went to bed on Christmas Eve, the living room was normal, that is, no tree, no decorations (other than any cards my parents might have received, a Nativity scene, and our stockings -- big olive-green jobs left over from my dad's service during WW2) hung on the screen by the fireplace). When we woke up in the morning we found a veritable wonderland: huge floor-to-ceiling tree, covered with lights, tinsel (the real metal stuff) and candy canes; at the other end of the room a big Lionel train was roaring around a track (I've never figured out the train-under-the-tree thing; no room for presents if that had happened). Yep, except for the train, which Santa kindly assembled for my dad every year, Santa brought everything, including the tree. I make it easier for him these days and supply the tree myself, but I often think about how astonishing it was for me when Santa Claus did it all.

My daughter, I hope, will be brought up with my love of Christmas, and will pass it on to her kids. As long as I am around, I hope to pass on traditions to her, or at least preferences (notably big lights and tinsel -- none of those wimpy twinkle lights for me, and for God's sake a REAL tree as opposed to those plastic things).

My mother passed on Christmas baking to me, which my wife is very pleased about, and I look forward to that part of the season, too. Katie, I have a feeling, will be helping me out more and more as the years go by.

The most wistful time of the season begins, for me, at the moment the last present is unwrapped and the wrappings have been disposed of. "What now?" I think. All the buildup to Christmas is done away with in a flash, and I realize that it will be another whole year before we see the holiday again. It's sad in a way, but a relief to my wallet, to know that I won't have to worry about unique presents for a year (or paying for them). My daughter was so upset, two weeks before Christmas, crying that Christmas was still too far away; I wonder if she has begun to think how far away it is NOW.

Oh, well, it was a good one. And it gives me something to look forward to again, as it does every year. And, as Tiny Tim observed: God bless us, everyone.

Why are they following me?

2008-08-29T05:14:00.004-07:00

EEEK! I don't get it! Everywhere I go, there's someone with a weird or really scary username following my every move! I comment on a forum -- I'm a midget! My wife posts a YouTube video using my account, and I poisoned my dog! I'm asked to moderate a forum, and people get e-mails telling them I'm an evil bastard who banned Ann Coulter from her own website! AIIEEEEEEE!

No, folks, I'm not paranoid. In fact, I find it even a little entertaining that, two years after a "coup" to remove the EEEEVIL HERP as Coulter's administrator, they can't let it go. Now it would stand to reason, if these were normal humans, that once they got rid of someone they'd say "Whew! Now we can get on with life and never have to even think about this guy again!" But these apparently aren't normal humans. Because of a lack of accountability, and running short of butterflies to pull wings from (I hear they do this, by the way) they use this as some sort of entertainment when times are slow at the Coulter forum. And times apparently ARE slow. You see...

The "moderators" there, apparently drunk with power, ban people who post things on other forums favorable to me, or who post anything at all that they don't like on other forums for that matter. This is a policy that's starting to rankle more than a few people. It's not that this is a surprise, as I've pointed out this behavior in the past. However, they've apparently ramped it up a bit, which is good news for our little forum at Outcast Conservatives . The disaffected and crapped-upon seem to have found a forum where normalcy is back in vogue. One of them is apparently as astonished as I am that these people are so -- um -- nuts that they just can't let it go, and posted this at OC:

This is unbelievable!!!

Who in the hell has the time (or inclination) to stalk someone across the internet, through Youtube , or whatever, just to criticise or taunt someone who isn't even addressing them in any way?

Sheeesh! It is just flabergasting how petty and inane some people can be.

Your house looks fine to me....it looks 'lived-in" and warm.....but... who the fu*k should care besides you guys? Why should it bother anyone what your house looks like anyway?

And your carpets.....? What kind of loser looks at a fun video of your little dog having fun with a bug and notices your carpets, anyway? I didn't notice your carpets. I was looking at your little dog having fun!

Some people are just sick. I mean....truly sick! And if these were assholes that Herp has pissed off in the past, then I suggest that this proves that Herp's instincts about them were correct all along.

It's always nice to feel vindicated!

Yep -- when they run out of anything else they can think of to come up with, by golly they make fun of someone's carpets! Yep, you read it here, folks: CARPETS. WOO!

Now, Robert Schaufelberger, Coulter's webmaster, told me almost two years ago upon my ouster that this harassing behavior wouldn't continue. As many can attest, it has continued. I don't, as noted above, understand it. And I never know when it's going to show up. I can go for a while on the net without a peep, and then, boy, post a dog video and it's THE BIG OPPORTUNITY! We're talking two years, folks, and they haven't gotten over me yet. Could it be that they miss me? Could it be that they have too much money and want me to have some of it in exchange for continual false attacks upon my reputation? Hey! Maybe this will turn out OK after all!

Come on by Outcast and post your stories about how the very kind, upstanding, and ethical "moderators" at ACOC continue to bully, harass, and ultimately ban people for doing nothing other than not being allowed into the "in" crowd. Might be fun!

I'll just keep collecting information until I can start counting my money.

Herp

Man -- back to school again!

2008-08-09T19:21:00.002-07:00

In two days I start at school teaching writing, Earth Science and Biology to high school students. Up to now, it's been up to the eighth grade, but these guys -- I dunno.

It was a little daunting to think about, but Meet The Teacher Night at school wasn't too bad, and they weren't all that scary. Coupled with the fact that apparently the last teacher had the knowledge of a rock and the personality of a turnip, I left feeling a little bit better about my chances.

I will say these high school kids are a different breed than what I had to deal with over the past few years. I'll have to toughen up a bit, but I have the feeling that if you show them you mean what you say, but that you're fair about it, they'll eventually figure out the routine (and so will I!).

First week's under the belt -- grading a chapter test this weekend, and we'll see if they figure out that it's probably a good idea to listen to the material in class and to study rather than to play with the new teacher all class period. In short, I don't have a lot of hopes for the first scores, but I figure it may snap a few of them back to reality.

Ah, high school.

Been a while...

2008-07-18T07:27:00.011-07:00

Not to let down my two readers, I figured I'd better write up something here before they decided I was deceased.

Well, I survived the Indiana Jones overkill of a couple months ago. I will say this -- the new movie revived interest in the older ones, and this time around mass-marketing was in full swing, new toys abound, and even a computer game came out based on all of the previous movies. We never had this stuff in 1981. So my action figures are back up to speed, got a new Herbert Johnson hat from the hatters in London (they made the ORIGINAL one for the first movie, and my wife decided I needed it -- it was so expensive I am sort of afraid to wear it), and I'll be all set to dress up as Indy again when I take Katie trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Yeah, I like this stuff, what can I say. This oughta give a few people something to guffaw about, lol:

Top of my desk:

And some Indy stuff:

Anyhow, it's my wife's birthday today, so she gets to goof off. I'm making her favorite birthday cake from childhood -- a red velvet cake (TWO OUNCES of red food coloring in that thing!) with cream cheese frosting. She got breakfast in bed, too. And they say I'm not a charmer!

Cake after attack by wife and child:

I TOLD you it was red.

I took my state biology exams last week in preparation for my new job as a high school science teacher, and next week will consist of mass-producing lesson materials for the students, and working up lesson plans for at least the first month of school, so this weekend I am goofing off. We had visitors for a MONTH of our summer break -- our friends from England and then my dad after they went home, and it will be nice to get back to the regular routine of being slovenly again. No more cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. I'll be able to walk around my house in my boxers without wondering if I'm being uncouth.

In the interest of rambling posts as things occur to me, there's also this:

I also have been informed that my S&W 500 magnum isn't a real sidearm, which I find interesting. Actually, I suppose you could call it a chestarm, since you normally carry it in a holster that straps across your chest. But apparently there are people who think these little 9mm semiautos are REAL guns. You know, the ones like Martin Riggs used in the Lethal Weapon movies, where he empties three or four magazines and three or four people die for the forty or so rounds he's shot at them; the pistol sounds sort of like "bip! bip! bip!" (It must be noted that my concealed carry weapon is a Browning Hi-Power, which is a 9 mm weapon and is MUCH easier than a guy my size trying to hide a 6 1/2" .44 magnum, which is my weapon of choice if I have the option, so I'm not AGAINST semiautos.)

I do have proof positive that a 500 magnum is, indeed, a real gun, and I thought I would share it with you:

If people are happy believing that they will get into real firefights that look like the fake ones they see in the movies, let them be thrilled with their self-delusions. I have it on good authority that:

a. Most gunfights happen in a dark room where the opponents are 12 or less feet apart (you generally don't have the option, as in the movies, to hide behind oil drums and crates, reloading, in a warehouse or swing from things hanging from the ceiling while firing under your armpit at bad guys in your home in real life) and

b. If you empty a magazine or two at a bad guy, the police, should you have actually HIT the bad guy with a round or two, will expect you to account for all other shots fired and to justify why you sprayed the contents of your pistol all around your house. If you're happy with that, great. Now if you are lucky, and all 15 rounds went into the bad guy, I look forward to your explanation of why that is so in a court of law.

Now ME, I like large caliber revolvers. They're mechanically simple, and can't jam. My idea is this: One shot and the guy drops. You can simply piss someone off by emptying a smaller caliber weapon into someone who's all hopped up on some substance, but it's hard to come back in a meaningful fashion if the homeowner dots your eyes with a .44 magnum or larger. The automatic owner: "bip! bip! bip! bip! bip! bip! bip! bip! bip!" *sound of either the magazine being ejected or the homeowner being clubbed to death by a pissed-off perp (if the pistol hasn't stovepiped first)*

The large revolver owner: "WHOOOM!" "Thud."

So, let's see: do I want a gun that I will have to empty at someone in a panic situation, or do I want something that will drop the guy with one shot, no matter where I hit him? Hmm, let me think about this. Gee, I think I'll go for the one-shot gun. Silly, I know.

In short, gun experts, you can all be happy with your Kimbers and those pissant plastic Glocks. I like big Smiths. They're big, they're heavy, and they crack engine blocks and kill Kodiak bears. I look at it this way: if you need a gun that has a 9-17 round capacity, you probably shouldn't own a gun, because your shooting skills obviously suck, and a lack of self-confidence is shown by carrying a gun that can hold a bucket of shells.

I'm going to write to Smith and Wesson, I think, and tell them there's some guy out there who thinks a 500 magnum isn't a real gun. I wonder if they'd pitch in for straitjacket rental.

Oh, well -- happy birthday, dear wife -- and may you have many more.

Enjoy your cake!

Herp

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of CGI

2008-05-26T15:44:00.017-07:00

It was sort of a letdown this week -- seeing my cinema hero Indiana Jones back in action after an 18-year (or is it 19?) hiatus. I couldn't believe it had been that long, until my wife told me to look it up. It seemed like about five years ago that Indy and his dad went in search of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Man, does time fly.

I was first talked into going to see Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1981 by my friend Clarke. He was the guy who called me nothing other than Herp for our entire association; in fact, it was so habitual that his mother thought my name WAS Herp, and SHE always called me that, too. Oh well, I digress. A bit. Back in those days, about 27 years ago, I guess, I was a bit more energetic, and I loved guys who could do all the things onscreen that I could only dream of doing. I had seen some commercials for the movie, but it looked a bit far-fetched for my taste. Clarke, however, knew me better than I apparently knew myself, and insisted that I go downtown to see it. Skeptical though I was, from the moment I saw Indy running away from that big rolling stone ball in that Peruvian temple I was hooked.

And his girlfriend, Marion -- man, she had spunk. The bar fight scene with Indy, Marion, and the Nazis and their native toadies -- best I've ever seen.

It also had yet another thing going for it: I have always been fascinated with explorers and Egyptology, ever since I had read Howard Carter's three-volume set on the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Carter, a British Egyptologist backed by a wealthy benefactor (the Earl of Carnarvon -- his castle, Highclere, near London, is still in the family) with a passion for ancient Egyptian relics, lived in the days when there were bandits and grave robbers hanging out near the Valley of the Kings where most of the Pharaohs had their tombs. Carter, a superb and systematic researcher, once tracked down a group of bandits hacking their way into sarcophagi down in a hole on a slope overlooking the Valley, and pulled their rope up, not giving it back to them until they agreed to stop digging. He allowed them to emerge from the hole emptyhanded, with his gun trained on them to keep them from changing their minds before they left. Anyhow, Tut's tomb, which HAD to be somewhere, had eluded every digger for about a century, but Carter, after systematically searching in the Valley, found the first steps down to the sealed, heretofore undiscovered tomb in 1922. When he broke a hole in the wall and shoved a candle through it to test the air, all he could see was the glitter of gold. Carnarvon, waiting impatiently behind Carter, asked him if he could see anything; it was all Carter could do to gasp out: "Yes -- wonderful things!" But Carter wasn't alone in feeding my fantasies: there was also a fellow named Roy Chapman Andrews.

Roy Chapman Andrews was a paleontologist for the American Museum of Natural History in the early years of the 20th century, and is widely regarded as the MODEL for Indiana Jones. Andrews organized huge expeditions in search of dinosaur eggs (he was the first person to find them) and fossils through China's Gobi Desert, with trucks, camels and horses, and was routinely attacked by bandits. They also had a campsite they referred to as Viper Camp, which found their tents overrun by snakes. Andrews ALWAYS wore a ranger hat, and packed a revolver and long guns (no whip, as far as I can remember) but I do remember him writing about one occasion when he was outrunning bandits on horses by putting the pedal to the metal in his big truck, and as he looked in the sideview mirror, one of them took a shot at him and vaporized the mirror as he was using it to look back at them. I believe he shot at least one bandit in his career, due to Mongolian bandits constantly trying to rob and murder people out there. He didn't appreciate it. Andrews was no lightweight, and in those days scientific exploration was a LOT more colorful than it is today. Here's a quote from one of his books:

"In the [first] fifteen years [of field work] I can remember just ten times when I had really narrow escapes from death. Two were from drowning in typhoons, one was when our boat was charged by a wounded whale; once my wife and I were nearly eaten by wild dogs, once we were in great danger from fanatical lama priests; two were close calls when I fell over cliffs, once I was nearly caught by a huge python, and twice I might have been killed by bandits."
—Roy Chapman Andrews
On the Trail of Ancient Man
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926, pages 20-21

Here's the real guy:

So with true life stories like that under my belt, it was only natural that I would be attracted to Indiana Jones and his adventures. He could do it all. He'd get beaten, thrown down holes, shot, swing across pits with his bullwhip, and he'd always keep going. Indiana Jones is the kind of person that most guys wish they could be.

After all the years of speculation that there would be yet one more Indy adventure after Last Crusade, I had sort of written it off. It had been too long ten years ago, and so when this one came up, I was astonished, and wondering how Indy had weathered all that time. I found out, mostly to my disappointment.

The problem with all of us is that we get old. We don't want our heroes to get old, too -- we want to live through them and to have things be just like the old days. It's why I read favorite books again and again: the characters are just the same now as they were when I read the books at age 15. On camera, however, that's a tough job.

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones is now (if we go by Harrison Ford's true age) 65 years old. He's gray, which I can live with, and he's in good shape for his age; he wears the same size outfit now as he did in 1981, so that in itself is amazing. That being said -- he still looks old. His trademark whip was used, what -- once or twice in the movie, and that was it. We have a young "sidekick" who swings with monkeys and has improbable swordfights between moving vehicles, and we have a hero who survives a nuclear blast at ground zero by shutting himself into a refrigerator. Ugh. The original, and best in my estimation, movie of the series was Raiders. Sure, you have to suspend a lot of disbelief to expect ghosts to come out of the Ark of the Covenant and vaporize Nazis. But a lot of that stuff could have been done without special effects, and WAS: being dragged behind the cargo truck (although it was done at slow speeds and speeded up for the movie); swinging across chasms with a bullwhip as a tool, climbing on top of huge statues and bashing through temple walls with them. This movie: Area 51 and aliens? Russian bad guys (we could relate to them when I was a kid during the Cold War, but most kids today are clueless about the Soviet Union; everyone STILL understands the Nazis, who make much better villains)?

Lucas doesn't get it. Us old-timers who remember movies being done without CGI point to Raiders of the Lost Ark as a good example of a minimal use of this stuff, for the simple reason that it was NEW then. They did a hell of a movie without it. This movie: the WHOLE thing was computer graphics -- at least it seemed like it. Lucas (and Spielberg) had an opportunity to make a plausible story that brought Indy back for one last romp through the desert with plausible relics, and instead we get half the Peruvian jungle swirling around and taking off into space. And a really stilted line, to boot: "Knowledge was their treasure." Weighty stuff. Whew. Or should I say P.U.? Lucas and Spielberg forgot the original "feel" of the series, and threw everything into the CGI pot to make money. It would have made money anyhow, fellas. Trust me. And guys like me would have one more good memory. As it is, I was looking at my watch through most of the movie. Not a good sign.

It's time to close down the series before they damage old fans' memories of Indy any further. The bright spot, as far as I was concerned, was seeing Karen Allen again -- she looked great. Indy, however, made me feel old. That's not the feeling I hope for when I follow Indiana Jones on a trek through tombs and temples. I want to feel young again, and that's why I loved Indiana Jones. For a couple of hours I could identify with him, and live his adventures onscreen. For that, I guess I'll have to fire up Raiders of the Lost Ark on my TV again. This one wasn't a keeper -- I'll buy it to round out the collection, but I doubt I'll have a huge urge to watch it again anytime soon.

I say bring Raiders of the Lost Ark back to the big screen for one month-long engagement in select theaters. I'll see you there.

Herp

Moving on

2008-05-13T17:38:00.003-07:00

Well, after an interesting year at my private Christian School teaching four grades of science, language arts, health, current events, and Christian learning I've accepted a job teaching high school science. I've dealt with the youngsters for so long that I am a bit apprehensive about teaching bigger kids, but I like the subject, and I think I can do it, once I crack the code of dealing with high-schoolers.

And my daughter will go with me, on the small kid side of the school, so I will still have her around to cheer me up on bad days. Plus I'll have company.

Nice new, big school. Modern facility, and good stuff for my daughter to do as far as gifted kids go (I think if she's not gifted, she's extremely bright).

So, anyhow, got my contract, started loading all my stuff into the new classroom, and I should be good to go when school starts in August. It will be interesting -- the first time I have taught exclusively science since I changed careers. I guess we'll see how it goes.

First up: I will teach them that to be genetically considered a midget, a human male must be 4'10" or shorter. Oh, and that hobbits don't exist, regardless of those who fantasize about such things.

Herp

Time does fly...

2008-04-13T11:11:00.013-07:00

Yesterday I went to an event at my old zoo, arranged for a reunion of zookeepers who all worked together at one time or another. I left the place due to unbearable internal zoo politics (zoos are famous for that, I believe I can safely say) about seven years ago, and haven't been back since (other than a short visit with my daughter a couple years ago). But then a chance e-mail I sent to an old lead keeper thanking her for her help way back when put me on the list to be invited to the Rezoonion.

Not all that long before I left the Phoenix Zoo, my old head keeper, Gene Mohney, died of a heart attack. Until that point I think it was pretty much taken for granted that I would carry on in Gene's place once he retired. I know he said about as much a few times; his wife asked me to give the eulogy at his funeral, which was pretty tough, and the whole place was in tears. He was like the dad I would have chosen, should I have had the chance to choose; no one knew more about the inner workings of animal minds than Gene, and he learned it from the ground up, being the original, one and only, keeper at Phoenix when it first opened as the pet project of the Maytag (washers/dryers, etc.) family in the early '60s. He knew nothing about animals, other than his pets, when someone asked him if he wanted a job -- he told me that at the time he was working as a house painter -- and went on to be a self-taught expert on everything from orangs to big cats to the flagship species of the Phoenix Zoo: the Arabian oryx. This isn't a great shot, but it's a through-the-fence photo of an off-exhibit oryx barn where these animals are mixed and matched, according to optimal genetics, where they can breed and produce more (you can click on the images to enlarge them, if you didn't already know that):

The reason I posted this shot from yesterday is to get a look at the animal, once the emblem of the Phoenix Zoo because Phoenix was chosen to breed the animal, picked over other zoos competing for the privilege, mainly because our hot climate most closely rivaled the animals' natural temperature range. Under the Phoenix Zoo's breeding program, managed by Gene for years, Phoenix took the total world supply of Arabian oryx from around NINE individuals to around 1200 released back into the wild. For those who consider zoos to be nothing more than animal prisons, this refutes that. If not for zoos, the Arabian oryx would be history, viewable only in old books.

One of the reasons I, not primarily interested in hoofstock, took this shot of the old barn for nostalgia's sake, was a memory of helping bloodtest a bunch of oryx. You can see an animal in the left of the photo -- notice those three-foot sharp horns. They can put those easily through half-inch plywood if they're annoyed, so we had to grab an animal by having about six keepers jump on it at once, and each of two keepers would shove a short length of garden hose on a horn to keep the animal from skewering the keeper holding the animal.

For some reason I always got the butt end, which invariably got slammed into the barn wall when the animal tried to back away from the keepers holding it. Once I got slammed a bit too hard, but I didn't know it until we released the animal, and I said, "OK, next!" and reached up for the bar holding the gate closed at the entrance to the barn, and my arm didn't move. The animal had popped my arm out of the socket. I managed to snap it back in, sort of Lethal-Weapon fashion, but whenever I raise it above shoulder level, my arm makes all of these cool popping noises, ten years or so later. I guess this is my keeper souvenir.

You have to love animals to be a keeper, and most keepers don't care for the rest of the human race other than those people who are ALSO keepers. Those, for the most part, they tolerate. Keepers typically aren't all that social, and most of us would just as soon have a zoo to take care of that wouldn't allow the public through the gates. After about the three-thousandth time of having some zoo visitor yell "What kind of animal are YOU?" at you when they manage to catch you out on exhibit cleaning something, you just start wondering if humans are very necessary, or at least if these people who yell this stuff really think they are the very first person whoever thought of such cleverness.

There are wonderful memories from my time as a keeper, and when I went to this reunion I wore Gene Mohney's old zoo shirt with the oryx emblem on it -- a present from his wife to me after he died. For one more time I put on the khakis and went back to the zoo. It was like going back in time, and I could hear the siren song of the zoo calling me, no question about it. At 55, however, could I hack it? When I worked for Phoenix originally, for seven years I was a relief keeper, which isn't the temporary job it sounds like. Relief keepers are born, not made, I think. To work relief, you have to be trained in every area of the zoo, and know every animal's needs as well as the animal's normal keeper knows them, and it's no LESS than 40 hours, and if something escapes at the end of the day, you stay until it's taken care of. You have a key that universally gets you into every building, closet, storage locker, etc., because if there's an animal escape you are the go-to guy who knows where crates, nets, bags, boxes, capture tools, etc., are, and you are ALWAYS included in animal captures. It is one hell of an exciting job. One day you work with rhinos, lions, tigers, giraffes, baboons; the next it might be coyotes, rattlesnakes, and Gila monsters, and the next day it might be elephants and orangs, like my old friend Bessie here with her youngster:

Bessie is a reason why, of most animals kept in zoos, I am somewhat ambivalent about keeping great apes in captivity. I've worked with every animal group on the planet, I figure, but of all the animals we keep in cages or enclosures, the great apes (I've worked with chimps and orangs) know the difference between inside and outside. And they remember you. I worked with Bessie there, on and off, for about 7 years. Once I left the zoo, I didn't go back and peek in on her for five years. Typically after zoo visitors blab away at animals for hours or days straight trying to get them to look at them for pictures, the animals absolutely ignore them. That was the case on the day of my visit, and I walked up through the crowd and said "Hey, Bessie!" in a low voice. She immediately sat up, looked around, locked her eyes on me and threw me a palm branch from her exhibit like she was throwing a spear. The crowd all turned to look at me with wide eyes. I shrugged, and walked away after a while. I've seen a chimp that worked with one of my co-workers about 25 years before, hadn't seen her in all that time, and when the chimp was shipped to our institution and laid eyes on her old long-lost keeper, she stuck her hands out, made cooing noises...great apes are so close to humans in their perception. You just gotta be around them to realize it. You really do get attached to the animals you take care of, no question, even animals like this guy:

You don't get recognition out of animals like this 100+ year old male Galapagos tortoise, but he used to chase me around his exhibit begging until I popped one of those pads off the prickly pear in the background and fed it to him. Their jaw strength is such that they just shear big crescents out of those pads.

As a zookeeper, you don't have to see humans for at least half the day if you don't want to. You're behind the scenes, cleaning, feeding, and observing. It's quiet. No one gives you any lip. And you think to yourself: I get paid for messing around with animals -- doesn't get much better than that.

Anyhow, as it turns out, the whole administration at the zoo has gone through some changes, and the old director is gone. I wasn't a fan of that guy, but the keepers all seem happy with the new one, to whom I was introduced by the staff vet and executive vice president of the zoo, an old friend of mine from my previous keeper days. They told me to keep in touch, and that there just might be something coming up.

I did love my job. Could I do it again? Views like this reminded me of the old days:

That's the back entrance to the old reptile exhibit and aviary -- I often entered via that gate. Since my day, the reptile exhibit has almost been gutted, and drastically needs an overhaul. I hope they do it, and I wouldn't mind being the reptile keeper again, SHOULD they do it. I do figure I have a few good years left in me, I guess. We'll see what happens.

Once a keeper, always a keeper. And to my old friends Laura, Tawny, Terri, Tracey, June, and all the others who passed through my life at the zoo...who knows. I might be dressed up in the khakis all over again.

Sometimes this teaching gig ain't bad!

2008-03-27T10:51:00.010-07:00

Well, folks, while you're all slaving away, I'm one of those overpaid teachers who gets a spring vacation. Actually, since I teach at a Christian school, it's EASTER vacation. And in Arizona, you can't beat the weather. Wait -- out-of-staters, I'm exaggerating. Rattlesnakes attack you when you're eating lunch, and Gila monsters meet you at the airport when you start to get off the plane. Oh, and scorpions are everywhere. You don't wanna come here.

Now that's settled -- Katie and I have had a lot of fun messing around this week. She went out looking for snakes with me one morning, and we went out to a big mountain preserve to scout out an area where I'm taking the whole junior high population on a field trip next week. Spotted a few lizards (whiptails, sideblotched lizards), a snake (desert patchnose), and Katie got a refresher course on what plants not to touch in the desert. There are quite a few of those, actually. Once upon a time, Ann Woodin, author of the old book Home is the Desert, noted that a friend of hers stated: Everything in the desert stings, stinks, or sticks. I suppose her friend wasn't far off.

That cactus is well over 100 years old. I believe they don't even get their first arm before they're about 50. I was thinking about the maximum age estimated for saguaros, and noted to my students that there are more than a few of them in this state that were growing when Thomas Jefferson was president. And you thought that only big redwood trees were old!

Then we have my favorites: any of a variety of plants called cholla:

Chollas have a unique way of reproducing themselves. All the spines on the one in the picture are barbed. One type of cholla (pronounced CHOY-a), called the teddy bear or jumping cholla, is REALLY spiny. Almost furry in appearance, that's where the "teddy bear" moniker came from. As for the "jumping" part: cholla have sort of segmented branches, and the barbed spines catch on animals walking by and pull segments of the plant off to hitch a ride on the poor animal until it scrubs them off on a rock a few miles away. When you brush by these plants, no matter how lightly you do it, the spines will hook on you, thus giving people the impression that the cholla segments "jump" at you. Where the plant segment is dropped, a new cholla begins growing. Unique way of plant propagation, but sort of hard on the animal. I should know. Once upon a time I wasn't looking where I put my feet (not smart in the desert) and kicked a fallen cholla segment with my cloth sneakers. It stuck like a growth, and the spines penetrated all the toes of one foot right through the cloth. Those things are so sharp they go into human skin like a needle into butter. Anyhow, I sat down to remove the thing from my foot and, once again, not looking, SAT on another cholla segment. So now I had a growth on my butt, too. By the time I got everything off, I had no pants on, and no shoes on, and was yanking the rest of the spines out of my clothes before I put them back on, when OF COURSE a group of hikers strolled by, snickering at me standing there in the middle of the desert barefoot and in my boxers.

It's been a fun week, though. Got a chance to reconnect with my daughter outside of the school community, and just to mess around. Tomorrow we're going to take her bike out to the park, and she'll ride while I do a little coinshooting in the park (metal detecting). And Saturday, I'll finalize my lesson plans for the upcoming week. Argh.

However -- end of May, I'm off for a couple of months. I think I can live until then!

Happy Easter!

2008-03-22T14:51:00.003-07:00

I broke down, after having The Passion of the Christ in its cellophane wrapper for over two years, and decided to watch it yesterday. I was sort of shamed into it by one of my students in the 6th grade, whose mother, a rabid anti-Harry Potter fanatic who believes that there are "real magic spells" contained in the writings of J.K. Rowling (she didn't take me up on my offer of a hundred bucks to get one of those "real" spells to work), showed her 11-year-old son (my student) the movie. He saw nothing wrong with it. I'm conflicted, personally.

For years my standard Easter movie has been the 1959 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, starring Charlton Heston and with a wonderful supporting cast which included Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Sam Jaffe, and Jack Hawkins, among many others. It's a timeless depiction of a man's story on the periphery of the story of Jesus, and how they intersect and the man, Judah Ben-Hur, gains a new faith, remarkable after everything he and his family have gone through at the hands of the evil Roman tribune Messala. I believe Ben-Hur still holds the record for Academy Awards, and with good reason. It was the last of the true blockbuster movies from MGM, right at the beginning of the surge of television ownership. A huge movie, with all the stops pulled out, just the chariot-race scene alone took over a year to film.

At the end of Ben-Hur, we see Jesus being whipped and dragging his cross to Golgotha (or Calvary, depending on your preference), and he is crucified. But here the similarities to The Passion become a bit extreme in their divergence. In The Passion of the Christ, one has to watch different implements being tried on Jesus, both front and back, whipping and scourging him until his body seems to be one open wound. My guess is that Gibson got it down a bit more accurately, but it was so intense, and so brutal, that I had to take periodic breaks. It was extremely tough on me to watch, and I was a bit glassy-eyed at the movie's end.

With Ben-Hur, I find myself with tears in my eyes, and uplifted. With The Passion, I have the same tears, but I find myself dwelling on the inhumanity of the gleeful tormenters of Jesus as they shred his body. It wasn't enough just to crucify him; they had to make him look as though he had been through a huge garlic press. There is no disrespect intended with that description; it's about as close as I can come to what he looked like when he finally died on the cross. With the Passion, I feel sorrow. Not very uplifted. Just stunned.

Perhaps I'm wimpy, and I have posted this question on Outcast Conservatives, but is it really appropriate to show this movie to 11-year-old kids when it damn near kills a 55-year-old man to watch it?

I doubt that I'll be watching The Passion again anytime soon. I note that Mel Gibson released a new version, entitled "The Passion Recut," with less of the violence, possibly because he, or his audience, shared the same concerns I have. In any case, one thing it DID do for me: it made it impossible for me to again rationally repeat the words "he died to save us from our sins" as though he just died. Jesus was tortured, mutilated, and slowly allowed to die, hanging on a cross. I'll never just be able to mindlessly gloss over the thought of his sacrifice again, and God forgive me for having gotten used to the idea so that it seems as just another part of the liturgy. If Gibson's treatment of the events of the death of Christ shocked a few people into believing, then I guess the movie did its job. I think I'll revert to the Ben-Hur tradition next year.

Regardless of what you watch, or what you do, may God bless you all on Easter, the celebration of the event upon which Christianity stands or falls: the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. He's waiting for all of us who believe.

On the subject of older dads...

2008-03-16T10:40:00.010-07:00

Six years ago on St. Patrick's Day, we had a surprise arrival. Well, sort of a surprise. At 49 years old, I hadn't really considered starting over with kids, having had my first ones fly the coop a while back. My wife surprised me at a dinner party, and once the info had sunk in, we got it checked out and, yep, we had a youngster on the way.

One of the things I found out about myself was that the second time around wasn't as scary as the first. I didn't believe Katie was going to die with every cough or sniffle. At the time I was working on getting a post-baccalaureate degree in education, and so I stayed home a couple days a week with Katie and substitute-taught on the other days. It was a life-altering experience for me. Not only wasn't I disconnected from my daughter's upbringing, but I got to use her as a guinea pig for information I needed in classes like Educational Psychology.

However, Katie has blown our expectations out of the water -- because we apparently didn't expect enough. She surpasses anything I could have imagined in her intelligence -- I only half-jokingly tell people that she'll think I'm stupid in a couple years. Her reading is fluent; she's going to finish first grade when most kids start it, her vocabulary is about fourth-grade level right now, and her oral reading has more expression and correct emphasis than most adults who read aloud (not a common thing these days). She doesn't blow by unfamiliar words when reading -- if she doesn't know what they mean, she'll ask for the definition. I prided myself on my reading ability at an early age. Katie is carrying on the tradition, and I hope for great things for her.

So, even though, on her 6th birthday, she'll be getting all the packages, she has given me the present of my lifetime. She goes to the same school where I teach, so we go to work and come home together every day. We talk about everything from Yoda to rhinos ("Dad, it's not a 'rhino!' It's a RHINOCEROS!") and we listen to the same music (she thinks the Doobie Brothers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Eagles are cool, not to mention Neil Diamond). She has her own lizard, likes snakes, and has told me she wants to learn to shoot when she gets bigger. And sometimes, late at night, I find myself in her room, just watching her sleep, and wishing for her all the contentment and fulfillment that she can have. As a parent, you wish you could foresee the future, and can protect your kids from anything bad. I know this isn't possible, but I think she's well on her way to growing up to be someone special. Or even MORE special, I should say.

So -- to the once-newborn in my arms in that picture (my wife's stepdad took that picture about ten minutes after Katie was born, and caught me telling Katie she was going to grow up to be a Republican nun -- and I'm not Catholic) who is now growing up rapidly -- thanks, on your birthday, for believing in me, for thinking I can do no wrong, for running to me when you have a problem, and for making me realize that there are a lot of things more important than bad people who invent stories about me on the internet. I don't think they'll be taking THIS present away from me.

I love you, Katie.

Dad

Well, the Oscars were boring...

2008-03-03T16:58:00.003-07:00

And Daniel Day-Lewis, as predicted, took Best Actor honors (these days they call it "Actor in a Leading Role" so as not to hurt the self-esteem of the LOSERS). The rest of the winners were a hodge-podge. The Best Picture of the year was No Country for Old Men, I believe (not what was predicted).

What I find interesting is that very few people watched the show, although it's not all that surprising. No one saw any of the movies, other than Juno apparently (which took Best Screenplay). The Academy wants to pick "good" movies rather than movies that did well at the box office. This means that few people have an interest in seeing a show about movies they've never seen. I heard on the news that the ratings for the show were lower than they have ever been. And no one was particularly stupid onstage, so even THAT source of entertainment was taken away from me. Argh.

What really bugs me about the Oscars these days is that "And the Oscar goes to...." stuff. As opposed to: "And the winner is...", which is what they did before they started worrying about hurting some millionaire star's feelings. Life is just too weird these days.

Anyhow, I struggled through the whole show. And I'll probably do it again next year, masochist that I am. You can tell that, between work and home, my life reeks of excitement.

So, not a very exciting blog update -- but perhaps next year. My daughter's birthday is coming up this month, and THAT should be exciting.

OK, so I'm boring.

2008-02-23T16:32:00.005-07:00

I'm watching the Oscars tomorrow night. I know most of the people who are reading this are rolling their eyes, and I expect a few photoshops of me to immediately start floating around the web as a result. Perhaps I should hold a contest. The one of me as Elmer Fudd seems to appear occasionally, so perhaps that was the pinnacle.

In any case, my mom was a film buff, and turned me into an OLD film buff. I don't like modern movies all that much anymore. I think the last one that really entertained me was Tombstone. Other than that, when The Shawshank Redemption lost out to that vapid piece of crap Forrest Gump for Best Picture, that sort of spelled doom for AMPAS (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) as far as I was concerned. Having a best picture like American Beauty, another perverted piece of garbage, hasn't helped. However, I do believe that I have seen every Oscar broadcast since I was a kid in the fifties. I haven't missed one, which makes my wife roll her eyes at me and tell me that she'll see me in the morning.

Movies like Saving Private Ryan, The Shawshank Redemption, Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, etc., PROVE that quality movies without some perverted societal message or loaded with nothing but perversion or profanity can still be made. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen much these days. So why do I watch?

Well, I come from the days when the Oscars had some fake Indian ("Sacheen Littlefeather") come up and refuse Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar. When periodically someone like Vanessa Redgrave would get up there and make an ass of herself decrying "Zionists." I even remember the famous occurrence when streaking was all the rage in college, and a naked streaker raced across the stage behind actor David Niven, who, without missing a beat, wondered aloud why someone would want to show off "his shortcomings" on international television.

I am always hopeful that someone will once again make a fool of himself/herself on stage and give everyone something to chuckle about around the water cooler the next day. So that's probably the main reason I watch what has become an almost interminably boring program. I keep hoping for a return to former Oscar "glory," I guess. Why doesn't it happen?

Well, my opinion is that no one is really a BIG star these days. The ones who are left from the old days are rapidly dying off or are getting a bit long in the tooth for glamorous roles on the silver screen. One day we have someone everyone talks about -- the next day they're in rehab after throwing their poodle out the window on the freeway because someone made them mad in traffic and they were on a bunch of drugs taken with a water glass full of booze. And no one can remember who the hell they were two weeks later; for instance, who was that youngster who died of mixing drugs a week or so ago? The name meant absolutely nothing to me, but I DID see a few gasps for this unknown actor on various message boards. Wasn't like losing a Bogie, or a Gable, or a Jimmy Stewart, though, was it?

Don't get me wrong -- stars had lots of problems way back when. Bogart was always getting into squabbles, as was Frank Sinatra. Stars committed adultery as a matter of course. The difference? I dunno. Perhaps they could (or the studio execs could) manage to provide a buffer with which to smooth over the private lives of stars and keep their screen personae intact. Regardless -- if you ask anyone who their favorite STAR is these days, I'd be surprised if any standout names come up. They're here, and they're gone. The longest-running name I see for this year's Best Actor nominees is Daniel Day-Lewis, and that's really not all that long.

I will say, however, Halle Berry, a couple of years ago, almost fulfilled my expectations. She shouted away on stage as an apparently self-appointed representative of the black race in film, saying that blacks were finally getting a fair shake. This was from a girl whose black dad, when Halle was a child, ditched her WHITE mother and her, leaving Whitey to raise her on her own. I'll never figure out logic like this. I wonder if she ever remembered to thank her mother.

Oh well, in any case, I'll be watching on Sunday, February 24. With my fingers crossed. At least we can hope that the entertainment will be better than that shown by any of last year's movies.

Now in May, look for 65-year-old Harrison Ford to reprise his role as Indiana Jones. I'll be prepared to suspend disbelief for that one. As a 55-year-old, I want to think I can still do all the stuff that Indy does. Well, maybe not. But it's fun to think about.

Photoshop, anyone? One of me as Indy?

:)

Herp

Does the tiger attack prove that zoos are dedicated to the suffering of animals? Bonnie Erbe thinks so. Hey, Bonnie -- you're a dipstick.

2008-01-01T16:26:00.001-07:00

You know, I subscribe to political cartoons from caglepost.com, and somehow I noticed, on the sidebar, an article heading entitled The Future of Zoos. Being an ex-zookeeper interested in the events surrounding the death, by tiger, of a "poor, innocent kid just going to the zoo on Christmas," I took a peek at it.

This broad just HAS to be a PETA member. Here's some of her column:

A smaller percentage of Americans, enlightened to the suffering animals endure in captivity, mourn as well not only the passing but the life of Tatiana, the Siberian tiger who escaped her cage under the inadequate supervision of zoo authorities.

This terrible and unnecessary loss of life, not just human but animal as well, was not Tatiana's fault. It was the immediate fault of zookeepers who managed her. On a grander scale, it was the fault of a public that continues to demand the right to view wild animals on display.

It is a public that ignores the misery it imposes on the beasts subjected to a dolorous existence indeed.

This was bad enough. As a keeper, if we had maltreated or neglected ANY of our animals we would have been out on the street in about five minutes. But then she continues:

One wonders in this era of virtual reality whether zoos and conservation societies that keep animals on display in artificial, urban environments are still necessary or a sad carryover from a bygone era? The Wildlife
Conservation Society is quick to point out, as noted above, that its captive gorillas are procreating and therefore perpetuating the species. This is critical work. But the same enormous resources needed to keep them alive unnaturally could instead be devoted to preserving native habitat for these animals, protecting against poaching and disease and allowing them to reproduce on their own.

The San Francisco zoo visitor Tatiana killed would still be alive today if the visit had taken place virtually. So would Tatiana. The two she mauled would now be unharmed. It's a question we ought to rethink as technology has changed so much else: has it obviated zoos?

At that point, I had had enough, and here is posted my response to that article (urged to do so by my wife, and thus making for an easy fast blog post, lol):

It's a common misconception, perpetuated here yet again by Ms. Erbe, that animals need hundreds or thousands of acres in which to roam in order to be "happy." First of all, that's stupid, and shows a lack of knowledge of nature beyond occasionally watching Animal Planet. Animals have three needs: food, water, shelter. All these needs are met in zoos, ending an animal's unending (in nature) search for enough calories to stay alive. In nature, when an animal eats its fill, it STOPS MOVING to conserve those calories. It would be stupid for an animal that didn't need to fill those basic needs to keep walking, walking, walking. It JUST DOES NOT HAPPEN. Animals in zoos have it MADE, except for having to deal with the general public.

Additionally, happiness, folks, is a human emotion. Applying human emotions to animals is called anthropomorphism, and downgrades what the animal actually IS, because people who think like this constantly compare them to humans rather than valuing them for what they are.

As a past keeper at the Phoenix Zoo, which is largely responsible for captive breeding and reintroduction to the wild of the Arabian oryx, I get tired of all the bleeding hearts who think animals should be "free!" Yes, animals should be free. However, most zoo animals these days are traded between zoos, rather than collecting them in the wild as was the old way. Should zoos simply release animals that have never SEEN the country from which their genes originated, because the Ms. Erbes of the world demand that this be done to avoid forcing them to have a "dolorous existence"? You want to guess how long a zoo animal would last if we sent it back into the wild to be "free," and it encountered an animal of the same species who grew up out there? Would YOU like to have been the one to stop soldiers in the Middle East from slaughtering the last of the wild Arabian oryx? How about the giant panda (everyone's favorite "cute" zoo animal)? Want to order the Chinese government to stop cutting down the bamboo corridors that allow the animals to eat as they migrate up and down slopes with seasonal temperature change? How much luck do you think you'd have in "educating" these people? HA!

I'm looking at the last section here, which says, in part: "The San Francisco zoo visitor Tatiana killed would still be alive today if the visit had taken place virtually. So would Tatiana." Yes, that's true. So would both be alive if the visitor hadn't tormented the animal until it had had enough.

As a former keeper I saw visitors pitch such things as lit cigarettes, prescription drugs and syringes into animal exhibits. We once had some classy guy use the heel of his cowboy boot to crack the shell of a Galapagos tortoise. I also saw some mother throw a soiled disposable diaper in with the elephants, and one was munching away on it for a while until I could retrieve it. You want to blame someone? It's convenient to blame zoos, and not the jerks who torture animals for their own enjoyment, but I'll tell you this: it's high time people realized that zoo animals aren't playthings, or tame; they are wild animals that happen to live in a zoo. The guy who died no doubt triggered something in the tiger that is hard-wired in the species.

San Francisco Zoo (formerly Fleischacker Zoo) is the zoo of my youth, before I moved to Arizona. I'm still alive, possibly because I was raised by parents who would have beaten the snot out of me if I had tormented caged animals. I'll tell you one thing: Ms. Erbe, your apparent disdain for zoos, in many ways the LIFEBOAT for species extinct in the wild, is misplaced.

Oh, and one other thing: I bet the friends of the dead guy aren't going to abuse any more animals at zoos in the near future. Call it a teachable moment.

An update: Tiger Brothers Had Slingshots.

From the NY Post article:

January 1, 2008 -- SAN FRANCISCO - Two brothers who were injured when a tiger attacked them at the San Francisco Zoo had slingshots on them at the time, a source said.
An empty vodka bottle was also found in a car used by Amritpal Dhaliwal, 19, and his brother, Kulbir, 23, on the day of the mauling, which left 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. dead, according to the source.

The discoveries could be an indication that the brothers may have taunted the 350-pound Siberian tiger before it leapt from its grotto.

Damned dangerous zoos.

Well, Happy New Year! (I hope.)

2007-12-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm jumping the gun a bit, but I'll be asleep by ten at the latest. My wife and I were talking, and we figured we haven't made it to midnight in about fifteen years. I mean, who cares, anyway? Whoooeeee, tomorrow it will be 2008. Neat. As far as I am concerned, New Year's Eve is simply an excuse to get polluted. And with the DUI laws these days, you'd not be the sharpest knife in the drawer if you were to try to drive home with a snootful on New Year's Eve.

I will admit, I was motivated a bit at the end of 1999, because of all the dire predictions about how society as we knew it would be completely disrupted as a result of Y2K problems (took me a minute to remember that abbreviation, as inconsequential as it turned out to be). I mean, we heard horror stories for five years or more leading up to New Year's Eve 1999, I STILL couldn't make myself stay awake until midnight, and the next morning I woke up, expecting dead computers and digital appliances. I expected never to be able to get my cash out of the bank, and major explosions or malfunctions of half the machinery in the United States, and what happens? Not a DAMNED THING, that's what! All these freaked-out people annoyed me for years, trying to terrify me into believing that I needed to get all my cash out of the bank and bury it in the back yard, and learn to do math on an abacus or something. Possibly that's when I said that enough was enough about all these doom-and-gloom people.

I swear, if life's going good, sooner or later some CT wingnut is going to show up and tell me that life as I know it is going to end tomorrow. Reminds me of those old bearded guys walking around with signboards on city sidewalks that said THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR! Did it happen? Hell no! And this sort of behavior has never stopped. If it's not Y2K, it's the environmentalists telling us that we are destroying the earth -- assigning Godlike powers to pissant humans. We couldn't destroy the earth if we detonated every nuclear device on the planet simultaneously. It's BS, and they know it, but Greenpeace has to find a way to keep their pockets lined, and so we're stuck with "recycling," crappy engines with ultra smog control in cars that have less guts than a go-cart had in the '60s, you name it. And when it all turns out to be BS, they just go on to the next "life as we know it will end" scenario.

For instance: anyone remember the oil tanker Exxon Valdez crashing in Prince William Sound because its skipper was drunk on his ass? Immediately it was claimed that the damage from the spilled oil was so bad that life would, for all intents and purposes, cease to exist in Prince William Sound for the foreseeable future. They sent a bunch of environuts out there to clean all the oily birds up, and they sprayed detergent on the rocks to get the oil off of them, and, according to author Bjorn Lomborg in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist the damage created by the cleanup was harder, by far, on the Sound than the damned oil spill was! But nature's resilient, no matter how Godlike our ability is to destroy the planet (insert sarcasm emoticon here). They claimed that the Sound would NEVER fully recover. Once it had been determined a few years ago that the fishery industry in the Sound was better now than before the oil spill, we didn't even hear an "Ooops!" from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Just dropped the story like a hot potato, they did, and moved on from there to the next tragedy of the Earth's lifetime.

So if I'm grumpy, I have reason to be. I'm inundated by kooks with agendas, all trying to convince me that something bad, devastating, or at least sinister is going to happen at any moment, and that it's inevitable. Conspiracy theories abound. Wanna know why I HATE conspiracy theories? Because of things like the overreporting of Y2K and the Prince William Sound oil spill, that's why, especially when, after they've annoyed the living hell out of me for years and then when the crises turn out to be nothing at all you just never hear them mention it again, and they make up another one!

So, in this rambling post, I wish you all a Happy New Year, free from stories about how the government is trying to control the food supply by exterminating bees (that explains why we had to roll our windows up in the truck today to keep them from swarming into the interior). Free from yet another Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. Free from the latest revisionist historian holding forth on how bad or perverted Abraham Lincoln really was.

If I can have just ONE YEAR, before I die, where REAL problems are found and can be solved, rather than these "tempest in a teapot" scenarios, I'll die happy.

Oh, and by the way -- I just got off the phone with my dad, who lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Seems, after my brother talked him into moving there so that he could be close to my brother, my brother pretty much ignores him. But that's not the main problem. He called me up and told me he can't stand it anymore and wants to move out here to Arizona. It was about 8 degrees below zero when he called. Last year he missed a week of Christmas with me because the Denver airport was buried in about three or four feet of snow. I thought about telling my dad to cheer up, because "global warming" would take care of all those low temperatures for him. I mean, Al Gore's got it all figured out, right?

Yeah, right. I told Dad to get a plane ticket and that I'd pick him up at the airport. WHY? Because global warming is bullshit, and that's my MAIN wish this year -- not to hear those two words -- global warming-- come out of anyone's mouth for at least a year, starting tomorrow.

So, again, Happy New Year -- free from nuts with weird, baseless theories designed to turn the brains of thinking people into mush. Think I'll be looking over my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist again. And I urge you to buy a copy, and demand that the paper used be virgin paper produced from trees found in old-growth forests.

Herp

Well, another Christmas has come and gone

2007-12-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

Every year it's the same: frantic preparations, often involving months of planning, to get everything ready for Christmas. The perfect presents for loved ones, plans for what Christmas dinner will be, whether or not there's enough wrapping paper and bows around, you name it. And then -- it's over. It's always sort of a bittersweet experience for me. Everything went great, Katie and Suzie were happy, dinner went off without a hitch, and no major catastrophes occurred. Santa was good to us, as always, and Katie was thrilled with her new Squawkers McCaw.

So now the tree sits, forgotten unless I think about clicking the lights on. It's always reminded me of that Hans Christian Andersen tale about the Christmas tree: first decorated with candles and ornaments while children danced around it and admired it, and then unceremoniously pitched downstairs into the coal bin. My wife says I'm depressing, and it bugs her whenever I mention the Andersen fairy tale, but I'm always the one who has to wish the tree goodbye at the recycling center, and it's sort of depressing.

Christmas always reminds me of my childhood, and I associate it with good smells (cinnamon, particularly) and with my mom, who was the one who instilled a love of Christmas in me. I doubt I'll ever outgrow it, which I think is a good thing. The rest of the year I have enough time to be grumpy, or to worry about things that can't be changed anyway, but at Christmas I have a lot of time to reflect on all the places I've been over the years, and the events that have brought me to this point in my life. I have regrets (who doesn't?) and I have triumphs to remember, also. The one thing that never leaves me, however, is that Dickensian feeling I get when Christmas comes around (A Christmas Carol is one of five must-have books that I would take to a desert island if I were forced to do so).

And now that we have five-year-old Katie to celebrate Christmas with, it reminds me, no matter how much garbage I have to deal with in the rest of my life, that there are some things that transcend all the garbage. It's energizing watching the wonder in a kid's eyes when they run to the tree on Christmas morning, and they take in the view of all the presents, and the candy canes that Santa brought while they were sleeping. It takes me back forty years or so to see it, and brings back that feeling within ME, too. It's hard to know that I will have to wait another year to get that feeling back, but I'll get by. What I really hope, however, is that I have created another Christmas junkie in my daughter, and that she will have good memories of ME, as I have of my mother, when Christmas reappears in her adulthood long after I've gone.

For now, I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful Christmas, and that none of you are too old to believe in Santa. Once that goes away, it's all downhill from there. And as Charles Dickens's character, Tiny Tim (not the goony dude, now mercifully dead, with the falsetto and stringy black hair, but the little crippled boy) observed:

God bless us, every one.

In defense of REAL Christmas trees

2007-12-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

Year after year it gets worse. More and more people talk about their "Christmas trees," which actually are the equivalent of plastic and metal ornament hangers. I remember when these things started taking hold a fairly long time ago, but back then they really looked bad -- bad as in they looked like a bunch of big, green, furry pipecleaners attached to a central stem. Now they're just an affront to my sensibilities, not that this matters to anyone.

As an example of my background, I offer a picture of me in about 1954 or so in front of our family Christmas tree.

Yep, that's me in diapers, with a great, big floor to ceiling tree with BIG lights on it. Oh, and a nativity scene placed in a built-in niche over the mantle of the fireplace (horror of horrors -- I'm sure this will offend some Muslims somewhere and spur on complaints).

The first picture, at the top, is our current tree. I have some of the same strings of lights from the '50s passed down from my mom (you see her in the photo, now dead). They still work, braided cloth insulation and all, with METAL clips to hold the Bakelite sockets on the branches. None of that plastic stuff. Yes, I use, horror of horrors, those C7 bulbs -- I suppose they'll be banned anyday as hazardous, just as REAL lead tinsel -- called "icicles" by most these days -- was banned long ago. That in itself sucks. It's not as though I ever knew anyone who ate tinsel. The old stuff hung down wonderfully, and there was an added bonus: when we got bored with watching our Lionel train zooming around the track, you could string it across that three-rail track, turn the transformer on and enjoy a bunch of sparks as it shorted the thing out and blew a fuse. My brother and I loved that. My dad, however, was always wondering what the hell was going on with the fuses, and accused my mom of running too many appliances in the kitchen at the same time.

Anyhow, during college I endured another abomination: twinkle lights. They exist now in many forms, with people expressing horror that I still use the big ones. Nuts. As a child of the fifties, twinkle lights on a Christmas tree are about as enjoyable as hanging used teabags on your dog or something. Lights on a Christmas tree are supposed to be reminiscent of the original custom: putting CANDLES on a tree (I suppose my wife, ten years younger than me and therefore immersed in the twinkle light culture, considers herself lucky that I didn't grow up in the 1800s and follow the candle tradition). Anyhow, there is NO WAY that twinkle lights remind anyone of candles. Those big C7 bulbs are what I grew up with, and my wife, early in our relationship, after a feeble stab at wanting a compromise of running twinkle lights up the trunk of the tree and letting me have the big bulbs on the outside -- my mouth dropped open in horror at that thought, as I remember -- has given up and assumed that we will, indeed, have the big lights on our tree. And actually, I think she's grown to like them. You'll be proud to know that I did indeed make my own compromise: in her youth they had little things called bubble lights on her tree, so I added a few here and there to the strings of lights. Oh, and I let her have blinking big bulbs here and there. However, that's as far astray from the Christmases of my youth as I have gone, and it's really not all that bad.

Besides the style of the big lights, people are horrified at the thought that anyone who uses them in combination with a real tree (a tree being an actual organic object) is hovering close to wanting to commit suicide. The numbers of people who use real trees at Christmas are dwindling, which probably explains why it costs around $60 - $80 these days for a decent eight-footer. They only sell about a half-dozen of them in the US, if I can go by what everyone tells me. NO ONE I KNOW uses a real tree. It's NUTS! Christmas these days reminds me of a spoof book I own, published at the time of one of the traveling exhibitions of King Tut's relics in the US, entitled Motel of the Mysteries. In that book, a future archaeologist discovers and excavates what he claims is an ancient funerary complex (actually a 60s motel called the Toot 'n' Cmon Motel). In one of the "chambers" of this complex, he finds a miraculous artifact from this long-dead civilization -- which was driven to extinction by the country of USA (pronounced YOOSA) being buried under an avalanche of junk mail -- the "plant that would not die" (a plastic plant). When I see these Christmas "trees" I always think about that plant.

Here's the deal: I've never had a tree go up like a Roman candle, and I've never known anyone else who did, either. I'm astonished that the sacrifice of living trees hasn't also been banned after protests by Greenpeace, but now that I say it, who knows?

Christmas, as they say, comes but once a year. If I wanted to look at a fake plant, I could go sit in my doctor's office. Children need the sights, the sounds, and the smells (as in an actual tree smell) of Christmas. They grow up soon enough.

Screw fake trees.

Next up: people who consider it baking to go to the store, buy a tube of Pop 'n Fresh dough, and cook pieces of it on a cookie sheet as opposed to, as noted in the last post, actually mixing flour and sugar up with a couple other things and MAKING THEIR OWN (gasp -- what a concept!).

Ssanasipreh (or: thoughts on the maturity of sock puppet accounts)

2007-10-28T05:24:00.004-07:00

Note: this post was so good I thought I'd resurrect it. I may do that from time to time. Herp

It's interesting to me -- for years I was the primary administrator for Ann Coulter on her forums. Made a lot of enemies for insisting that posters follow the rules and guidelines, apparently. When a bunch of them got to Coulter and whined about my bad behavior like liberal girly-boys (Ann should appreciate that one) after my having worked for her for free for over half a decade, she threw me and the rest of my fellow admins out on our collective ears. And that was fine, as it wasn't my forum. I had dedicated quite a lot of my life to protecting Coulter's Christlike (as in: once you agree to do all her work for her, she doesn't talk to you again for about 2000 years) image, and once they finally managed to get rid of me (they gleefully called it a "coup" at the time) one would think it should have been enough for them. Apparently, however, my very presence on the Internet damaged their psyches and self-esteem so irreparably that they feel the need to follow me around the net just to remind me that they're still out there.

There are various sites out there, social clubs pretending to be weighty political sites, where the members demand the right to insult and degrade people. Mob rule is FUN! Once the dust had settled and a few of us began yet a NEW site to throw around political issues for discussion, a few people went NUTS, lol. I've always maintained that the best revenge against someone who harms you is to do well, and to ignore them. In this case my belief holds true. They just can't stand it. It kills them to think that I give them less thought than I do to my morning assblast, and that, believe it or not, life went on for me. About ten seconds after I ended my association with those people.

"Ssanasipreh" is one of the latest sock puppet accounts (note to newbies: "sock puppets" are alternate accounts created by posters who dishonestly don't want people to know who they really are, typically created to either "spy" on forums or start problems, no matter how momentary) started on Outcast Conservatives, a small political forum where people are invited to discuss the day's issues. Yes, there's a section where you must be a member to participate, but the rest of the forums are viewable by the public, in case they're interested (in other words, to "find out" what's being said, all they have to do is click on the link to the forums -- they don't NEED to create an account). For the most part I've found that smaller forums are better forums. They're a lot less work, and you can get to "know" people a little more -- at least as much as one is able to "know" anyone on the internet. The forum was recently completely restarted due to a corruption in the database, and this allowed formerly banned people to reapply as members. I have been assured that I am "self-absorbed" and that the above sock puppet account had nothing to do with me ("Ssanasipreh" is "Herpisanass" spelled backwards, but yes, if that account had nothing to do with me, I am sure that person is being truthful. Unless they're just delusional, or perhaps my favorite: being purposely obtuse) but rather that they wanted to keep up with what we were doing over there. I may be an "ass," but there seem to be more than a few people out there with psychological issues.

When this phenomenon started, I posted once on people like this, terming them the "Bandar-log." For those of you not familiar with the term, let me enlighten you.

Once upon a time, among his other writings, Rudyard Kipling wrote a couple of books called The Jungle Books, part of which involved the adventures of Mowgli, a boy who had been raised by wolves in the jungles of India. As Mowgli was taught the various greetings he was to make to the different "people" (animals) he would encounter in the jungle, he had occasion to get tired of getting swatted around by his teacher, Baloo the Bear, for not learning his lessons properly, and ran into a bunch of "nicer" people -- the monkey people, called the Bandar-log by the rest of the Jungle-People, whom he decided he liked better than his mean old teacher. You see, the monkey people played all day and had all sorts of fun, instead of being mean and evil like old Baloo, who required Mowgli to follow things called rules. Unfortunately, when Mowgli happened to mention his new friends to Baloo and Bagheera the panther after he had gotten over his fit of temper at Baloo, his teachers were not happy. I'm going to tie this all in shortly -- trust me. To preface the remainder of this post, however, let me fill you in on something: most of my detractors are apparently literature-challenged. When I originally made these observations, I was, of course, ridiculed because "Wasn't The Jungle Book a Disney cartoon? -- har, har, har, now Herp's quoting CARTOONS! Guffaw!" -- which alerted me to the fact that there are a lot of people out there who only watch cartoons and videos and never read any of the classics, of which the Jungle Books most certainly are part. The literature-challenged may have problems with this post, so I'm taking a big chance here. In any case, readers, this refers to passages in an actual book (an object you use to do something called "reading") written by Kipling in the late 1800s. That Disney made a kid's cartoon out of pieces of it has nothing to do with Kipling's observations about the Bandar-log, which are drawn directly from knowledge of mobs such as those who feel the need to get people of substance (in contrast to themselves) to notice them. An excerpt:

" Listen, man-cub," said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. "I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the Jungle -- except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the Jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten."

Baloo continues:

"The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle-People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads."

He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches and they could hear coughing and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thing branches.

And a little more:

A fresh shower came down on their heads and the two trotted away, taking Mowgli with them. What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectly true. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up, there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross each other's path. But whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger, or bear, the monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts at any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they would howl and shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle-People to climb their trees and fight them (this sort of reminds me of a few people at Patriot's Corner, actually; they're always wanting us to go there and "debate" them, otherwise known as running the gauntlet -- Herp) or would start furious battles over nothing among themselves, and leave the dead monkeys where the Jungle-People could see them.

And one final observation, which fits what I think about these sock-puppet kooks (this is after the monkeys kidnap Mowgli and drag him through the trees away from Baloo and Bagheera):

The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to the upper branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: "He has noticed us! Bagheera has noticed us. All the Jungle-People admire us for our skill and our cunning."

So -- "Gatlin," and "Crockett," and "Kate" (God forbid I didn't mention her, as she was crushed that I didn't when this new blog started), not to mention "Ssanasipreh," or "Susanne" -- I have noticed you! I have indeed acknowledged the Bandar-log of the internet, of which you are a proud part, carrying on a proud tradition. As it has become apparent that your life's desire has remained to get me to notice you, I have. I hope this makes your day!

Now go throw nuts and shit at someone else for a change. Whaddaya say?

Oh, and please feel free to howl with triumph.

Love,
Herp