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Closing Thoughts  (12/31/01)
I believe to my core that good will triumph, if for no other reason than it wouldn't make sense for this noble exercise of humanity to end otherwise. I also believe that we are approaching a dramatic turning point in how we conduct ourselves, both individually and as a community. I think we've gone over the falls, and it's whitewater to the horizon.

Bits & Pieces  (12/30a/01)
Speaking of ineptitude at the airports, UAL mechanics voted 99% to authorize a strike. It wasn't likely to happen, since the White House had signaled that the president was ready to order a mandatory cooling off period. Which makes it all the more foolish for the employees to make the threat. I mean, if you had a ticket to travel on United over the holidays, wouldn't you irate just at the thought they might strike? And wouldn't you wonder how good these mechanics could be if they acted so stupidly?

Government Media Control  (12/30/01)
I believe in government intervention, when it is informed, and when market forces control circumstances to the detriment of the public. In the area of media-slash-communications, the government has fallen down badly on the job. Their decisions have written a virtual blank check for the corporate powers to put on what they want with little or no oversight. The result has been the opiation of great masses of double-digit IQers who consume without producing, who think with their viscera, and are malleable to manipulators who sell them lies couched in action and painted with glitter.

Deep-Breath Time  (12/29/01)
But as with most places today, the trash level has risen, concomitant with the burgeoning population, and Southern California has gotten more than its share, in part because it’s close to the border of a poor nation, and because it also represents a beacon of opportunity to many in America. Tinseltown, orange groves, warm temperatures, and manifest destiny have attracted zillions to what might be a lovely spot, without all of the people. There’s not enough clean air or water to sustain those who have chosen to make Sprawlangeles their home.

Lifting the Tent Flap  (12/28/01)
There might be a break in Florida. A Saudi princess was arrested for beating her maid. Princess Buniah al-Saud, the 42-year-old niece of King Fahd, was charged with aggravated battery on her live-in maid, Memet Ismiyati, 36, an Indonesian citizen. The arrest was delayed while local officials checked on her claim of diplomatic immunity. Her embassy said yes, but our State Department said no, so she was pokey'd without bail on the felony charge.

That Slow China Boat  (12/27/01)
A man twenty-five years my senior was climbing his way back up the more arduous high road; he could have taken the low road, which is flat. I said, "Good afternoon," with appropriate vocal qualities to indicate my wish that it should be so for him, beyond the general observation of the day. He’d just finished a steep 100-yard hill, and was still in the process of regaining his full breath. He declared with a smile, "There is no boat to China today."

Early Admission  (12/26/01)
Henry is not only very bright — he aced Roxbury Latin School on his way to Cambridge — but he also is a jazz ace who plays at least two instruments; he paints, plays sports, and most important, he's a way-cool dude. He must get some of those qualities from his eccentric California uncle. Let's see...not the music, not the painting, not the sports, and not up to the level of way-cool. Hmm. Well, um, I took Latin.

Christmas Travel (2)  (12/25/01) *** Merry Christmas ***
Proof that this particular cross has my name on it alone is the fact this is Linda’s favorite time of year; she lights up like a Christmas tree. She gets to play and shop and bake, which she is wont to do, and I get to sit in the motel room, listening to classical music on the radio, keyboarding appropriate opprobrium at the worthy, and missing my dawg. Otherwise, my task is to wear a smiley face, which always lurks pretty close to the surface anyway, especially after a first blush of chardonnay — or Merlot or scotch or vodka — and inevitably, methinks, it will be a good time had by all.

Christmas Travel (1)  (12/24/01)
I could blame it on being in the Southland, that grotesque, plague-like sprawl that is known loosely as Los Angeles, where the synapses originate in the brain stem, and everyone seems to think (sic) that’s just fine. Get food, drive fast, look ridiculous. It’s kind of a religion; unspoken, devoutly if pervertedly worshiped, if you can believe without thinking. Hey, sounds like a plan, to people who would lead by the nose instead of the mind.

Bits & Pieces    (12/21/01)
The Perky One won, more because NBC didn't want to lose her to another network than she was actually that good, or really any good. She was more of a habit than a draw with many viewers, and that's how they decide things in television these days. Regrettably, Couric will be admired for scoring a big win, which makes you wonder why Anna Nicole Smith was castigated for her courtesan romp.

Random Observations   (12/20/01)
I think most people with double-digit IQs and a sense of decency would like to tell Saudi Arabia, Guys, you abuse women and teach terrorism. You are brutal and racist. For too long we have kow-towed to your unenlightened ways, because you have petroleum. How crude. Now, thinking more clearly, and convinced that we can develop solar energy successfully — as if on a wartime footing — we're telling you instead of drilling into your sand, go pound it.

Ashcroft, A.G.   (12/19/01)
Ashcroft is probably to the right of Bush and Cheney, though not by a lot. They like him because his reactionary iconoclasm gives them cover. My guess is that they will pay out as much rope as they can, until the loopy Ashcroft goes too far, and then they will let him "twist slowly, slowly in the wind" before they cut him down. After which they'll attack the Real Americans for having hounded him out of office. Crazy, huh?

Powerless Sagacity   (12/18/01)
What does our prandial sagacity have to do with the governor's race? It's probably not enough to say that California is likely to be the economic engine on which the country will ride out of the recession, whenever. Or that the state, when it was chugging along fat-dumb-and-sassy a year ago, was maybe the fifth largest economy in the world. Not that we formulate U.S. foreign policy, but we could certainly be looking harder into solar technology.

Items   (12/17/01)
The airlines have some strange way of doing things anyway, and the hepped up security consciousness pushed them over the edge. Southwest has a system whereby they randomly search a number of their passengers, which means going through the luggage which has already gone through airport security, and getting electronically frisked. Of the group we saw "selected" there wasn't one who fit a terrorist profile, at all. I'm told other airlines do this as well.

Bits & Pieces   (12/14/01)
Not likely to recover is Enron, which has been mowing down its employee ranks with a black-cloak'd scythe. Not everyone, however. The once substantial energy trader is going to pay $55 million to "persuade" 500 employees to stay for 90 days. That comes to $110,000 per hanger-on for the three months. Nice work if you can keep it, though the thousands of people who were pink-slipped don't have such generous feelings.

The High of Flight   (12/13/01)
It's difficult to describe the thrill of flying at the controls of a small plane. I make that qualification about pilots because there are some veteran airline jockeys who are probably bored out of their minds, at least most of the time. Indeed, my aviation guru lady — lady should probably come first — describes flying as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Audrey means the take-offs and landings. But she doesn't mean it about the boredom part.

De-Pranking Teens   (12/12/01)
Four Israeli teens are under house arrest for having created and distributed the Goner worm last week. Early estimates of the damage from their "prank" were in the $8 billion range but have been scaled back to about $5 million. The lower figure is ridiculous, considering the distribution of the virus. It took me five hours to get things back to normalish. The standard sentence for such a crime is five years, but only half that because they are juveniles.

Why Is Las Vegas?   (12/11/01)
It's difficult to adequately diss Las Vegas because most sentient beings wouldn't understand why it was necessary, while those who actually go there on purpose do so with vigor. In other words, the intentionals wouldn't begin to understand when I say that Linda and I spent sixteen hours in this sewer, almost half of it in our hotel room, and it felt like we were in a foreign country; a sick one, like Haiti or Bosnia. Built by gangsters, run by deprivers of the depraved, this is what Hell would feel like to anyone with a sense of decency, intellect, and hope.

All in the Details    (12/10/01)
Details, as in the re-opening of the Boston Strangler case. According to a new forensic report on one of the eleven rape-stranglings committed in the early 1960's and confessed to by Albert DeSalvo, he didn't do it. The DNA evidence is clear. It should also be noted that despite his confession, there was no physical evidence placing DeSalvo at the scene of any of the murders, he didn't look like the suspect described by witnesses, and he was never on the 300-name suspect list.

Commune-icate    (12/07/01)
There are a lotta folks out there who just don't seem to grok the essential concepts of communication. They think it's just about them, or they don't think at all. My hackles rise over a wide spectrum of failure, from the people who create forms with spaces that don't fit the required information, to those who haven't learned the how's and why's of email. And mostly, I can't stand people who don't hit the ball back over the net when it's their turn.

Judicious Overrides  (12/06/01)
Had the makers of the movie "Dumb and Dumber" been politically-minded, they might have thought to add dumbest. They would have been referring to the American military, of course. Not our actual soldiers-'n-sailors-'n-fly-boys, but the administrative side of the Five-Side Funny Farm. They were asked by the family of the American Airlines pilot whose plane was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11^th if his remains might be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. They said no.

S'il Vous Plait  (12/05/01)
If they had known what they were doing, they would have said sure. Why not? They still make money on the deal, they make me happy, and the people who get the calendars are impressed, not only with our photography, but what They can do with color copying these days. And if she really did need to say no, the manager should have come over herself and given me some corporate nonsense about policy. At least they would have had a shot at keeping a customer.

Wild 'n Wooly  (12/04/01)
No, your honor, I was guilty, she said. But she took another shot at judicial patience, claiming that she had been coerced into pleading guilty by her attorney, J. Tony Serra, the notorious headline chaser. Serra says he might have been a tad forceful — why does he still have a license? — but the judge wasn't having any of it. Olson continues to give the anti-war movement a bad name.

Bits & Pieces  (12/03/01)
I do like that they are requiring that people who take these jobs be citizens of the good-ole USofA, which is a problem for 80% of the scanners today at SFO, who are mostly Filipino. They were so unhappy that they talked about a work stoppage on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. They didn't, but had they, I would have deported the lot.

Knee-Jerk Notions  (11/30/01)
The current cloning discussion is bringing the loonies out of the woodwork. They're ready to shut down scientific research immediatement! because they think legions of Stepford wives may be climbing out of their pods to take over the species. And the fervent certainty of their insistence, which crosses the infamous "red flag" line, suggests that their concerns are not only baseless, but objectionable to the intellect.

Lay Enron Lay  (11/29/01)
Hey, ya lie down with dogs and you're likely to get up with fleas. Especially in the oil business -- considering that they are poisoning the world, hardly a moral recommendation -- and more especially in Texas, where ethics sits a rung below deep-thinking and clean air. Maybe I missed it, but I haven't heard a lot from Bush-Lite or Premier Cheney about Enron or Lay. Of course, what can they say, since they probably think that the worst Enron did was get caught.

The Problem Solver   (11/28/01)
It’s a feeling of exultation. Of victory celebrated with relief. Of a moral triumph, in addition to a strategic success. When the black clouds of doom are rolled back, and the sun first stabs through, then floods the valley with life. These are epiphanies, comparable to high school graduation or the excitement of early petting — whichever came first — and they define an important transition in life, from fear to courage. I’m speaking of course about the triumphant joy one experiences after overcoming a computer problem.

Show Biz Uglies   (11/27/01)
My money is on Riordan to beat Davis in November of Aught-Two, if the 71-year-old Republican's health holds out and His Eminence Grise stays his hairspray course. As for Burton and Brown, who need the spotlight like sharks need to swim to stay alive, they may change seats, but it's hard to see them wielding the same power, or enjoying the work, the way they did before.

Cheap But Plentiful   (11/26/01)
At the local Kneemen-Marxist — they still haven't taken down the Wal-Mart sign — people started lining up for the opening many hours ahead of time, and it was a cold night. In fact, all 600 spaces in the parking lot were full an hour before the doors opened. It sounds awfully lemming-like, in a sniffing-rodent kinda way, and you'd have to think that if someone in charge were looking at some easy cuts in the population, little would be lost by sucking this crowd right into the mulcher.

Miscellany   (11/23/01)
Most of the town's 350 residents already be holdin' heat. They passed the measure 'cause they feared their sacr'd secon'amen'ment rights might gonna be plucked, though there was no apparent instigation of, or indeed rational explanation for, the fear. Wonder who complained before they shot 'em.

Good for the Pilgrims   (11/22/01)
The drive back to Redding on Wednesday night was a moose, what with so many of the folks who normally would have flown deciding to drive to their Thanksgivings instead. The normal ninety-minute drive from San Francisco to Sacramento was five-'n-a-half hours. I listened to my colleagues and stayed into the evening to work on the program.

Foursome   (11/21/01)
It was an act of mindless selfishness and stupidity that affected huge numbers of people who were going about their lives with enough concern about the state of the world to have to endure the added and unnecessary disruption by this thoughtless cretin. People missed appointments, blew opportunities, lost income because of this man. Vacations were lost. Some people couldn't get to once-in-a-lifetime events. And all because this primitive was breaking rules so that he could go to a college football game.

The Point of Sale   (11/20/01)
I'm all for tidy piles of books, but when you see the same folks making a line for several minutes, you've got a problem, pal, and if you don't do something about it, you're gonna make your customers wonder why they are squandering their hard-earned time and lucre in your establishment. For the time it takes me to park, wander the store, and then to stand in line, Hey, I've long covered the cost of postage, and often saved sales tax.

Women for Oil   (11/19/01)
Okay, I'll get off my soapbox. But consider what an extraordinary turning point in history this might be. If suddenly the women of the world said, No more second-class citizenship. That through the Internet and fallen veils, there suddenly began a sea change of freedom for women that even the princes and emirs couldn't stop.

Disjecta Membra   (11/16/01)
Another negative about driving are the trucks, whose sleepy, drugged, and angry drivers think they know the road but make mistakes. Like the ole fellar the other day, hauling forty cattle on the rain-slicked asphalt at fifty — he says — when the signs said forty. He was only slightly injured, but several cattle were killed, and traffic was blocked for hours. No doubt he's already back on the road again.

Items    (11/15/01)
A not surprising rejection by Israeli Airlines of a request by ultra-Orthodox Jews of priestly heritage that they be allowed to fly inside body bags to avoid becoming "unclean" when traveling in planes over Jewish cemeteries. These folks aren't supposed to go near cemeteries anyway, and a recent ruling by their higher-ups accorded air rights, so to speak, to the cemeteries, as well. It was they who suggested the plastic body bags in flight as a solution.

Our New Friends  (11/14/01)
There is such an enormous chasm between them and us. It's not like we can just ship in a bunch of Pokemon and Prilosec and all will be hunky-dory. These people have different interests and concerns, probably not wholly in line with our own. We will have to find a meeting place, where we can mitigate their bellicosity and perhaps even situate a few opportunities to raise the dismal levels of sub-species consciousness.

Sifting for Facts  (11/13/01)
They describe the man as an "opportunist", as in taking cover from all of the September 11^th furor, but they don't indicate why he is doing this. What is it an opportunity to accomplish? Drop bigger bombs on Afghanistan? Solidify support for Israel? That's not clear. They do think the mad mailer is a loner type — hey, honey, wanna come see how I mix up anthrax in the bathtub — and probably inoculated himself before he started messing with the stuff.

Bits & Pieces  (11/12/01)
We've apparently scored enough to get the Northern Alliance jazzed. They've been going up against the Taliban tanks on horseback. Probably not entirely by choice, but apparently with enough success to claim significant territorial gains. We live in such crazy times. Doncha jus' gotta think that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are gonna come out against our allies.

Domestic Crusades  (11/9/01)
The other hand belongs to someone else, and it is behind my back. Not holding a gun, or at least not pointing at me; but They could. They are ready to dip into my pocket and look in my wallet, listen to my telephone conversations, check out my email and voice mail and garbage. I hope They and those who would supervise Them have the sense to distinguish between people who are dangerous to the laws and principles of the United States, and simply people they disagree with on social and political issues.

The Hound of the Busterville  (11/8/01)
As fond as I am of most everything Sherlockian, this one hundred year anniversary I will celebrate quietly, likely unshaven, with my wife and dawg, nicknamed for the occasion, The Hound of Busterville. He puts up with a great deal, but as he's forgotten how to hunt, he puts up with it. But no, I won't make him wear my deerstalker hat this year.

The Aught-One Vote  (11/7/01)
When I heard how high the turnout actually was, before I received some perspective from the county clerk, I thought, way-cool, they're not just pasting flag decals on their trucks. They're serious about our country. There was plenty of time to register to vote since the attack. Wouldn't it have been a fine show of patriotism had the polling places been crowded with new voters from sea to shining sea?

Amo...Amas...Amat...  (11/6/01)
Much of our primary language — the roots of which are essentially European — is constructed from Latin, just as much of our scientific jargon is from Greek. Not a lot of young people today would opt for a year of Latin, even with great legs dangling from the desktop, but it certainly would make for a more educated, thoughtful, stimulated society fs more people understood the real meanings of just half the words that came out of their slack-jawed mouths.

No Lights On  (11/5/01)
If there is an essential task of parents it is to kindle and grow that mind. But when the parents don’t do their job, if the child shuts part of its consciousness, it’s not likely to be resuscitated; certainly not to its original potential. The regrettable fact is that some people don’t grow this integral part of themselves. For reasons usually found in early childhood, they decide that it is safer, or otherwise better for them, not to reach out, but to withdraw, to cocoon, to hide in a shell.

Falling off the Sword  (11/2/01)
I had lunch today with my pal Bruce, his lovely wife and their brand new daughter. She was born four days after the attack, in a changed world. Bruce, who's a dear, thoughtful fellow and well-grounded in aikido and other Eastern ideas, has a serious need for this world to get its act together, for their lovely young infant. We won't be here when she is our age. We have to make sure that the planet she inherits is as gloriously munificent as the one we arrived at a half-century ago.

No Avenging Angel  (11/1/01)
Is it possible to disassemble who we are to the extent that we might unravel some knots? Or is our mental structure so tightly wrapped that we could never find our way deep enough? Is our organization of thought tied up so far back in our development that it is inaccessible? From my experience, the answer is possibly. From the looking I've done, I'd say we can get closer to the trigger mechanisms of our learned-or-not "instinctive" responses.

Miscellany  (10/31/01)
Luckily, she was in a row back, and the fellow who did sit next to her was Jack Sprat. But it seems to me unfair that people over a coupla hundred pounds — fat or not — should maybe have to pay for two seats. My suggestion: a chart by the gate, such as the charts that show the size of a legal carry-on. This chart for people. If you're too big so that you would encroach onto the next seat, bang-zoom, you bought it.

Falling Like Bombs  (10/30/01)
According to new surveys, public confidence in the conduct of the war against, um, against...the war in Afghanistan is dropping with the bombs. In both the U.S. and in Great Britain, our staunchest ally. Apparently a whole lotta folks are realizing that the bombing is doing very little to hurt the Osama and Taliban. At the same time, concern about the germ warfare being waged without a wrinkle on our soil is proliferating like spores at the post office

Bits & Pieces  (10/29/01)
Haven’t we seen this before? Remember how our warships pounded the German defenses in advance of hitting the beach at Normandy, and how fierce was the German fire still. More recently, the Soviet Union thought their superpower superiority would win the day in Afghanistan, and they are no longer a country, let alone a superpower.

Weak-End News  (10/26/01)
I’m just gonna hazzard a guess that I’m right about this, because it’s only a surmise. But if you are a fellow news-traveler who watches the wires regularly, you can almost tell when Friday afternoon rolls around on the East Coast. The headlines stop changing as quickly. By mid-afternoon West Coast time, it’s like every editor in New York has put up a screen saver that says "went to head" and has slipped away for a coupla elbow-bending cold ones at the local quafferia.

Powers of Observation  (10/25/01)
The big problem in science is that our little white lab-coated friends set up their experiments to test a hypothesis, and very often have a range of results — in not downright specifics — already locked in as probabilities. Which is fine in certain circumstances, but can be very limiting in the overall warp-’n-weft of real-life events.

Leaves and Sand  (10/24/01)
I was asked recently if I thought the greatness of our country was in our geography. I opined that as extraordinarily wonderful as is the land from sea to shining sea, it is more the people that defines what is special about America. It's not that you can't find fine people everywhere, but there is something special about their deliciously-purposeful, freedom-ringing spirit that has been recognized by observers around the world from our very conception as being uniquely American.

Security Succor  (10/23/01)
Linda was flying back from Los Angeles, and found herself sitting next to a drunk. When she made it plain to him that she was not to be his conversation piece, he turned to a young man on the other side. When the fellow was equally unresponsive, the drunk became abusive, calling him a possible terrorist. The young man summoned the stewardess, who told the drunk that if he continued to bother the man, she would have the pilot turn the plane around.

Reaffirmation  (10/22/01)
For those of you who think it's wiser to stay at home, on the ground, not opening your mail, um, you may be smarter 'n me, but you're missing some fine opportunities. There are cheap seats and lotsa deals on rooms in a lotta places where normally it would be more expensive to go and to stay. Also, and this has nothing to do with our post-terrorism era, I had a quite decent meal on the plane coming out, which is not a reason to take a trip certainly, but might pry open a rusty corner of the mind.

The Less Friendly Skies  (10/19/01)
Under dire warnings of security lines stretching into the next county, I dutifully got to the airport this time two hours before my flight was to depart. Twenty minutes later, I had not only parked my car in the long term lot, shuttled to the terminal and gotten through security, but I had bought tea and a muffin and had parked my butt in one of a vacant sea of seats across from my gate.

Paternal Muster  (10/18/01)
What little I know about my father's own path, has mostly come through my sisters, who, irony of ironies, don't get along with him nearly as well as I do. As I live 3000 miles away, and have for the past two decades, my relationship with him has developed through distance and absence. I think in his own mind he thinks I've changed, and perhaps I have. He has mellowed a little, and isn't as tightly wrapped as he used to be.

Between War and Peace  (10/17/01)
The point is that from our airports to our mail system, our country is in teetering on the edge of chaos. The economy is in a tailspin, even though some wishful-thinking propagandists trumpet less-bad news as good news. That's like saying everything is fine when you've fallen off a cliff because you haven't hit the bottom yet. But I have a plan that will help staunch the red ink hemorrhaging, and get our nation back on the right track again.

Ow Meow  (10/16/01)
He's in cat heaven, Linda remarked matter-of-factly. She was referring to Mr.Cat, the grey feline who'd been her cat for twelve years and on Friday went missing. He didn't show up on the counter begging for Linda to share her milk. He didn't meow his way between my legs insisting that I divert from whatever I was doing to feed him again. He was an outdoor cat in a rural area which features coyotes, mountain lions and bears.

Ready, Don't Aim, Just Fire  (10/15/01)
Of course, these things happen, when you have all these bombs and missiles and you're playing war games -- they call it training -- something's gonna go wrong. Like the Iraqis hitting our naval vessel with the Exocet missile killing three dozen American sailors. Oops, sorry, 'cause that was back when Iraq was on our side against Iran. Or like when one of our naval vessels blew an Iranian civilian airliner out of the sky by mistake.

Cybercychosis  (10/12/01)
You should be able to reach a smart computer or a warm body if you hit "reply" -- no bogus addresses that don't go anywhere and no redirection to confusing web sites. If you hit "reply" and type "remove" on the subject line, your e-address needs to be (1) plucked from their files, and (2) they need to notify the source of that address that the addressee requested removal of their name the list.

Miscellany  (10/11/01)
Driving down the interstate, we passed a bunch of trailers and campers, which you do when you're driving eighty and they're driving seventy, or more slowly. Whether self-propelled or lugged by large pick-up trucks, these hulking pod-like creations are like aluminunized armadillos, half-shimmying, half- waddling their bulky way between the lines. There is certainly nothing sleek about them; not a hint of alacrity or poise.

Faux Columbus Day  (10/10/01)
I know that Ole Chris has lost some of his shine, what with his slaughtering Indians and stuff. And a lotta folks think he falsely upstaged the Vikings, while others rue that he was himself upstaged by Amerigo Vespucci, name-wise. Fol and de-rol, the undisputed fact is that he sailed to the Western Hemisphere when most people didn't have a notion that it even existed. I would put that at the top of my Columbus list.

My Wind and a Prayer  (10/09/01)
It is almost too much to hope that mankind — what we fondly refer to as civilization — will retool into a peaceful world community. Not so long as guns and money control the program. It may just be, however, that despite my ineptitude at forecasting better weather — my wind and a prayer — I just can't imagine that we've come all this way to fail. At some point, we need to take control of our lives, and live in harmony with the grass and the rain and each other.

Bits & Pieces  (10/08/01)
The leak spewed almost 300,000 gallons of oil onto two acres of surrounding wilderness, and the clean-up effort will be massive. It is an example of how thoroughly vulnerable we are in this country. Imagine if the ACLU, Jane Fonda, and the gay baby whales were really mad us, as Jerry Falbadly has warned. You don't want to imagine what real terrorists might do.

The Constraint of Terrorist Moles  (10/05/01)
Perhaps most important is that it is the safest, most logical course of action, since while we have been unable to infiltrate the terrorist organizations, they have likely got moles in all of ours — the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and all the other letter jumbles that spend huge sums to be left in the dark. Since the alphabet organizations would know of our plans, so would the terrorists.

On Yer Own  (10/04/01)
That last epistle went out just before it was time to make dinner for Linda, and as I clicked the send button, I felt something of an internal sigh of relief. The kind that comes from serving up that three-two pitch with bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. Except of course, in this situation, I want to hit a home run not strike out. The pitch is on the way.

Taking Off Hump Day  (10/03/01)
Wednesday, by the way, is named for the ancient Germanic god Woden, who was considered Mercury-like, for his quickness and eloquence. Another good reason to have the day off, so that we can attend political debates and other sporting events. Which makes the point that leisure industries would surely back the idea.

Kabul Rescue Mission  (10/02/01)
I caught a CNN clip of an Afghani man beating a woman in the street because her veil had slipped. Commented a CNN observer, it was as though he were beating a farm animal. Not in my world. People don't hit living creatures that way. With such contempt and brutality. There is a suggestion floating around the Internet that Osama should have a sex-change operation and be forced to live under the Taliban.

Shame on Manuel  (10/01/01)
Linda tried to buck up Eyad's spirits. She suggested early on after the attack that he change his name and lose his accent. I understand her viewpoint, and if he wore a beard and turban, I think conformity might be the better part of discretion. But I happen to like his accent, and think losing it would be a bridge too far in the wrong direction. Most native born 'Mericans don't speak as goodly as Eyad.

Heart of the Community  (9/27/01)
A couple years ago, two young men, brothers, allegedly shot to death two men, probably for the men had been in a relationship for sixteen years. The trial has been postponed until next year, but much of the evidence against the brothers has come out, and it will be tough for them to escape conviction. Facing trial by the feds for setting fire to several synagogues in Sacramento, the brothers recently pleaded guilty to various counts and received substantial sentences.

Collaborating with Nature  (9/26/01)
I realized that the shift from confrontation to cooperation was really at the very core of human beings. And that this transformation we find ourselves in — New Age, Aquarian Conspiracy, higher consciousness — is about a revolutionary change in our psychic posture. Instead of regarding each other as competition — which probably traces back to primitive times and scarcity — we want to view people as collateral assets in a significantly larger venture than simply putting food on tonight's table.

Danger and Opportunity  (9/25/01)
I'm all for rounding up every terrorist. Step one should be to petition the World Court to stop terrorism, enfranchising it with the power and resources to arrest, try, and punish world criminals across the globe. That way, the world would know that justice is being done, and we wouldn't have to suffer the victimhood of their revenge. Also, if they don't get them all, well, we can reconsider our position then.

Back in the Air  (9/24/01)
On the day of the bombing, all aircraft were ordered to land immediately. The Cessna Skyhawk in which I had earned my instrument rating had been grounded the nine days since. The windshield was dusty, and the battery needed a boost to turn the prop. This I discovered after a longer than usual pre-flight check of the aircraft. There was no evidence that it had suffered during the hiatus. No bird's nest under the cowling, which happens sometimes, just over night.

Messages for the World  (9/22/01)
There was a bright spot at the end of the week, a supra-media star-studded television extravaganza featuring many of the top names in entertainment. They sang, they talked about acts of heroism, and raised funds for the victims. There was no applause -- Congress, take a lesson -- and no posturing, just sincerity, humility and heartfelt contribution. And the script was remarkably intelligent -- Bush, take a lesson. One codicil, if they raised a million dollars for each of the victims, it would be what the Pentagon spends in a week.

Scoundrel's First Resort  (9/21/01)
The problem is that just because someone has an opinion — even though they have a perfect right to it — doesn't mean what they think is worth dried spit. Even when the whole dang country is madder 'n a Texas twister slappin' rattlers and wants blood, the fact is that not everyone is ready to shoot first and (not) ask questions later. A huge percentage of proud-to-be Americans are quite ready to wait until we know who should be on the receiving end of our vengeance.

Reflections at a Golden Age  (9/20/01)
Five times I was wrong, so far. I'm pretty sure that Saturday was the last time we'll see triple digits this year, I told her. Er, um, she began to protest, but backed off when I reminded her that it was my birthday and she didn't have to protesteth too much. (Well, it wasn't really my birthday, but there's a zone around the actual day, which stretches from Stonehenge to the International Dateline.)

Everyone into the Tent  (9/19/01)
In truth, the only way to respond to the mindless slaughter is to make sure that these people didn't die in vain. What greater memorial could they ask for but that they shall be the last victims of such terror? That the world shall come together to make itself inhospitable to those who would cause such unnecessary grief. Let's start there.

Like a Good Penny  (9/18/01)
Sometimes they arrive for an intense few weeks or months, like a professional gig or an amoral relationship in the seventies. But there are others who show up, and you think they’re done, but they show up again. If only to keep me on my toes — to be alert for more surprises — there are folks who with a phone call or now an email will insert themselves into my consciousness, and derail whatever is my then train of thought.

An Uninformed Democracy  (9/17/01)
If Jennings, Brokaw, Rather and the other seven-figure primpers had told us about the mercenaries and psychotics we hired to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, we might have objected at the time. Instead, taxpayer dollars went to the training and arming of these beyond-the-fringe extremists who are likely the ones responsible for the hijackings and murder.

Course in Justice  (9/14/01)
The state of California requires that people who want to renew their concealed weapons permit have to take a re-education course. Not to catch up on any changes in the law, but, ostensibly, to make sure that people who have such permits know what they need to about gun safety. I say ostensibly because most of the people up here in the rugged North State think the only reason for the requirement is to discourage people from renewing the permit.

Let's Get This Right  (9/13/01)
That's why this notion of war is not a practical one. As quickly as every wants to declare war, though on whom is a nagging issue, the fact is that we can't fight one that we can win. After nuking Kabul and Islamabad and the West Bank, we're still going to have upset survivors elsewhere who will vow revenge.

Early Observations on the Bombings  (9/12/01)
The cowardice of attacking civilians instead of leaders -- even when those citizens are enfranchised to elect those leaders -- is the depth of depravity. The only possible deterrent is to raise the personal cost -- suicide is not exculpating — and at least one observer suggests that summarily executing the immediate families of the terrorists might have effect. Perhaps their entire family. Or their village. Or their country. You don't want to leave anyone who might retaliate to our retaliation.

Delving the Depths  (9/11/01)
We talked about politics, as in the Greek meaning of the word, management of the community, and rued the way it plays out in Redding. How big money interests dominate most decision-making, which is probably true in most places, but how here in Redding, there is little to balance it out. Where, I ask, is the voice of people who say we should simply consider what is the right thing to do? The silence is deafening, even with all of our churches.

Items  (9/10/01)
The DFG managed to put the kibosh on a measure that would have allowed people to own ferrets. "There's almost a ferret psychosis in the Department of Fish and Game, and I just don't understand it," said Jeanne Farley, Executive Director of Californians for Ferret Legislation. "But like any civil rights issue, when you have so much right on your side, the issue just won't go away."

Who Is Redding?  (9/07/01)
The guy's plan all along has been to drag Redding kickin'-'n-screamin' into culture-land, and he is viewed as arrogant and conniving for his efforts. His goal is to make Redding as a destination city for a class of tourists above the beer-barfing jet-ski yahoos who play a not insignificant role in the community's financial well-being.

The Stevenson Mind  (9/06/01)
I remember the election of ‘56, and how we were the only folks in the neighborhood to sport a Stevenson bumpersticker. I was six at the time, and too young to have any idea about who he was, only that we were outside of the mainstream. The beginning of an endless stream, it seems. But with this note from Paul, I skimmed through some of Stevenson’s quotations and was duly impressed by not only his depth and grasp of the then-and-still critical issues, but also his wit.

Thar He Blows  (9/05/01)
As I don’t know the root of my fury, I have a modicum of distress that it will continue to manifest itself in such occasions until I learn how to prevent eruptions. Indeed, their only purpose is that I might learn more about myself so that I know where from comes the force, and how not to have the experience actually surface. And wouldn’t it be grand to know how to channel that energy into something productive instead?

As the World Throbs  (9/04/01)
This has been the foundation reason for the Cold War for the past half-century, but it defies reality. The Russians wouldn't want to invade Europe anymore than we would invade Canada. Europe is Russia's primary trading partner. They are culturally bound. And the only way Russia could hold Europe is if everyone was dead, which kinda doesn't make a lotta sense when you think about it.

Econometric Malfeasance  (9/03/01)
The fact that these trimmings of the corporate waistline are happening in such large lops at so many companies in so many different industries suggests that a lotta economic prognosticators were suckin' on the same pipe. Perhaps inhaling the intoxicating fumes from the smoke-'n-mirrors campaign the Bushies ran last year. The same puffery about how well the economy was doing that the Gore propaganda machine spouted.

Purposeful Parenting  (8/31/01)
It is difficult for me to let off the hook the parents of children who bring guns to school and shoot up the place. Whatever their reason for having children — or for no reason at all — they have created offspring which/whom they are failing to teach the rules of social intercourse. Inevitably, the lack of societalization results in a congenitally-haphazard approach to the physical kind of intercourse, and the cycle continues.

Scoundrels and Tragedies  (8/30/01)
At risk of being slotted as a racist, or of losing my already-tarnished liberal credentials, I do believe that there is such a qualitative difference between breeding and rearing ensuing generations. I think of my sisters’ children, who are all exceptionally bright and wonderfully talented. My sisters and their husbands invested themselves and the caring required to produce marvelous young people any of us would cherish as friends.

Items  (8/29/01)
This is offered as background -- mostly not relevant probably -- to a small news item about the selection of a new head of the local Martin Luther King Jr. Center. He's not black, he's white. And he's a Jew. Kinda cool, methinks. They have also renamed their organzation -- Shasta County Multicultural Center. Such openmindedness could only occur in a small community, where people are more about people than dogma.

The Southland  (8/28/01)
Freeway seems like such a misnomer. There may be no cash toll, but the cost in time, fuel, pollution, and patience must be enormous. Multiply that by the millions who follow this script everyday, many beginning hours before dawn and not getting home until well after dark. Surely this is not an indication of good mental health. Where the way is clear, many people make up the time, flying down the pavement, slashing across lanes, at more than 80 miles-'n-hour. A preponderance of them are young women driving tin cans.

Miscellany  (8/27/01)
No one should be surprised to learn that Milo has a history of mental problems. His wife told the press that things get a bit dicey with her husband when he refuses to take his medicine. Uh, huh. So I’m wondering what the flight school musta been thinking to take him on as a student. Perhaps Cuba’s foreign minister put it best when he said Havana realized that this was not deliberate provocation and promised to returned what was left of the plane, "down to the last screw."

Bits & Pieces   (8/24/01)
The Vatican research team has compiled a 35,000-page dossier on Mother Teresa in their ponderous plod toward beatification. I don't think they probably included much of Christopher Hitchins' writing on the subject. This is always sorta a done deal from the start. But that's a lotta research; overkill, one might say. Like the military. Don't air it out; drown it instead.

Required Volunteerism   (8/23/01)
No, I don't think they just sit on their fat butts watching television all day, although a number are certainly afflicted with sloth. Considering the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and violence, ya gotta think that The System is not entirely successful in inducing welfare recipients to raise themselves. The current make-over rate is dismally low, probably under 20%. Which suggests that there is a certain endemic element which lacks the motivation to rise above dependence and needs to be coerced off the couch.

Heaven on Earth   (8/22/01)
Another interesting perspective I recently came across in "Chop Wood, Carry Water" when I opened it up again after many years to show the contents to a new friend. There was a short piece about a man who found himself in a new world where everything was taken care of for him. But he had no work. He had thought it was heaven, but discovered it was hell. Indeed, what is the point of consuming precious temporal resources if we are not making the best use of our whole being.

That Bird Can Hum   (8/21/01)
The orange, pink, and lemon gladiolas — sprinkled by a soft shower from the humble life-bestower — shouted "free food and HBO" or something like that; enough to attract a hummingbird at tea time. I watched the flaring of the tail features as it stuck its snout down the throat of the achingly ripe flowers, scratching at the petals with its delicate claws, it’s wings thwupping helicopter-like 50 to 80 times a second, intoning its obvious if inferred joy at the glad reception.

Same Train, Different Stations   (8/20/01)
What has happened over the past two years? The tide of my hope has risen and fallen and is maybe rising again. My faith in a quick transformation is slipping precariously over the lip of reality. I've lost twenty pounds. And I can fly in the clouds. Most has been discussed in writings along the course. There are no major revelations to announce, flack-like, on this coincidence of completing a second circuit 'round the sun.

Pretty Little Plowshares  (8/17/01)
Linda has her eye on what is currently referred to as The Gun Range. It’s the remainder of shelf that was carved out of the sloping hillside on which was built the foundation of the house. Extending about a hunnert feet past the hot tub and the edge of the existing garden, this area was once used for target shooting. Perfect for the practice, the ledge descends into a deep gully, and on the other side is untrammeled woods.

Bits & Pieces   (8/16/01)
An unidentified elderly couple drowned on an erstwhile flight from the Florida Keys to Cuba. They chartered a small plane that advertised mile-high sex, and once airborne, tried to hijack the plane to Castro-Land. They struggled with the pilot, and spun the plane out of control into the sea. The pilot got out. His passengers, who apparently inflated their life preservers inside the plane -- against all recommendations -- went down with the ship.

Sanity and Survival  (8/15/01)
What if the world community discovered that a sizeable minority was professing deistic adherence to the notion that the world was going to come to an end? And if a central point of this belief was that all infidels were expendable, and that it was glorious to take a bunch with you on your way to meet your maker? Could the rest of the world community say, "Now look, this isn’t working for us. You have a right to share this planet but not to impinge on the rights of others to live here as well." What if that message didn’t get through?

Degrees of Ornery  (8/14/01)
I’m glad I’m mostly here at the house working, instead of dealing with the oven as one may aptly describe a car. The air conditioning takes a while to chill out the interior. A lotta folks put screens behind their windshields, but whether to block an insignificant amount of sunlight or to make a fashion statement is not always clear.

Rectal Flashlight  (8/13/01)
Maybe it’s just my paranoia, but it looks like the whore’s review is cheapening yet further, as their editorial approach seems to be shifting from meaningless to offensive. They have always filled a third of the front page with something eye-catching, usually flames, crushed vehicles, plaintive Christians, or bright flowers. And their headlines are equally market-driven, with banners about stem-cell research, to incite the overly-holy, or trenchant observations like "Consumers looking for discounts."

Miscellany  (8/10/01)
For those of you who think I’m too hard on the fishwrap that masquerades as a local newspaper, uh, uh. I only report a fraction of their transgressions. For instance, beneath a photo of a bull on his last legs in Pamplona, they headlined "Killer cutlery." And then beneath a photo of officials surveying the work-in-progress at the new food court-to-be at The Mall, they headlined "Grub Hub".

Vacation from What  (8/09/01)
I can appreciate that it’s summer, and a lotta folks think that means kickin’ back, but I’m a tad concerned that George the Younger needs to get his batteries recharged. Apparently life is tough for a globe-trotting figurehead, even though he was doing little more than putting in appearances and trying, futilely, to remember his lines. Remember all of the naps that Reagan had to take?

Items  (8/08/01)
When I read of a new dinosaur having been discovered, my mind immediately metaphorized to the Republican party, and that paragon of anachronistic thought, Tom DeLay, who seems to be on the wrong side of almost every issue. The House Majority Whip, DeLay recently commented on the abundance of oil and gas in our country, more than enough to resolve any energy needs: "We have unlimited supply. We just haven’t found it."

Mourning Television  (8/07/01)
In a coupla hours, I was treated to Judge Judy — who plumbs depths Dr. Laura never imagined, and in a more grating voice, if you can imagine — and two Judy-wannabes, doling out judgements against the dumbest and sleaziest people they could get to perform. Even if none of their stories was true, the fact that they would present themselves in such sordid circumstances stretches the bounds of credulity as well as decency. Sex, drugs, and serious crimes.

Bits & Pieces  (8/06/01)
It’s tough when the boss puts his foot in it, and tougher still when the boss is The Veep and it is the White House that has to make the correction. Said Cheney in a Fox interview, "If you've got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they have hard evidence of who it is and where they're located, I think there's some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting."

No Privileged Confessions  (8/03/01)
I certainly don’t know if the teen was telling the truth, or whether the guys who did the time had done the crime; the judge didn’t think so. My issue is that as holy as anyone wants to get with religious rites, the fact is that criminals should not be able to confess their sins, get absolution, and leave others in jail. Nor, for that matter, should a man of the cloth be allowed to withhold information about a crime, even when other people aren’t convicted for that crime.

Flying Low with the Press  (8/02/01)
"Hey, Audrey, was that your student who flew to Cuba and landed upside down?" I was referring to a new student pilot in the Florida Keys who had taken off on his first solo, after only two weeks of training, and instead of circling the airport and coming in for a landing, he had flown 100 miles to Cuba where he flipped the plane over trying to land on a beach. "No," responded Audrey, "but Charlotte (not her real name) just made an off-airport landing."

Free Expression of Ignorance  (8/01/01)
The problem with charging racism all the time is that it deters people from discussing real problems, as it alienates the very people most likely to have something to contribute to finding solutions. Concomitantly, the hesitancy to call a spade a spade breeds tacit acquiescence to lower standards which telling the truth would help to raise. The result over the nearly four decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act has been an exorbitant decline in our public education process, and only marginal improvements in the daily circumstances of many people whose plight was being addressed.

Crime Beat   (7/31/01)
The day after the wedding, mom shot the new bride in the head twice, for which the 47-year-old was sentenced to consecutive terms that will keep her in prison for at least the next 35 years. The new daughter-in-law survived, though the two bullets are still in her skull, and so she spends her days watching television and looking forward to her physical therapy. She and Winn’s son have initiated divorce proceedings, by the way, and there will be a custody issue over their three-month-old. Do the math.

Bits & Pieces   (7/30/01)
One of their reporters thought to try out his version of style in a front page article on Redding firefighters suing the city to force arbitration. He wrote his lead as "One-point-two million dollars. That sizes up the gulf between the city...." But in the next paragraph he reported that while the city was offering $3 million, the firefighters were seeking a $4.8 million deal. Musta been a typo; no one’s math is that bad.

Getting the Message Or Not   (7/27/01)
One of the best action films ever made, "The Guns of Navarone", was on TBS, which has gotta stand for "Too Bad, Sucker". The movie runs 167 minutes, and the network ran it during a three-hour block. No, they didn’t shove in only 13 minutes of commercials; more like three times that much. And where did they get the time? They chopped out pieces of the movie.

The ReF-Word   (7/26/01)
If you’ve never done it, wiping everything off the hard drive can be an emotional experience. Both bad and good. It's wrenchingly physical, and also expiating; at least for someone like myself who spends countless hours using the computer to write, design, create, and sometimes make money. It would be like removing the personality of C3PO.

Yo, Nephew   (7/25/01)
Remember that you are never in that much of a hurry. Nothing is worth an accident. You don't want to hurt anyone else, or cause others to screw up and get hurt. When you get angry or frustrated, as you inevitably will during your time on the road, just take a slow, deep breath down into the bottom of your belly, and say to yourself that you hope that the other people around you also keep their calm. You don't want to be part of someone else's accident either.

T-Not-for-Tony Ball   (7/24/01)
Most adults would like to play by those rules, so it is somewhat ironic that the children don’t seem terribly engaged. Not one of the players in the several games I attended appeared to have any awareness about what was going on around him or her. Indeed, few of them were even watching the game, and if any of them understood what was going on, it didn’t show in their play. I say that descriptively, not pejoratively; that’s where I would have been at that age.

Dear Sierra Club   (7/23/01)
You folks at the Sierra Club are particularly ostentatious in your solicitations, sometimes sending 9x12 envelopes. Hey, recycle ‘til the cows come home, but wasting paper is wasting paper. Your approach is getting so old-hat that few people probably even open your mail anymore. I have a post office box, and after checking the farrago that fills it every few days, I wind up dropping most of it unopened into a trash receptacle.

Bush-Lite Bumblers   (7/20/01)
It would probably be unfair to blame George Bush for the entire mess that is the first eighth of his administration, even though he holds the title of Chief Executive. In truth, the man is little more than a figurehead, Cheney is in charge, and those under him making and implementing the decisions in his name show all the finesse of a ham-handed harpist. From pushing Jim Jeffords out of the Republican party to the spy plane fiasco, their record is one of unnecessary missteps and glaring omissions.

Bad Condit Discharge   (7/19/01)
I think it’s probably natural for men to be attracted to attractive young women. As Nero Wolfe observed, it’s not thinking but the activity of nerves in the spinal column. Human beings, when acting responsibly, manage those urges. Those who fail to demonstrate that basic level of social conscience should be ineligible for leadership.

War Consciousness  (7/18/01)
"Why don’t we just bomb them into the stone age?" I suggested with youthful exuberance. My father looked down, as he did when I did something egregious, which sometimes seemed like breathing. He would gather his thoughts briefly and then look at me coldly. After a moment, the truth would be delivered. My mother would simply show her sorrow, mostly that I had failed again, and a lot because she didn’t like to see my father so unhappy, especially with his son, again.

SFO: Surely Fogged Over  (7/17/01)
The solution to San Francisco’s airport problem lies elsewhere, as in geographically. As in, where the fog doesn’t live on the ground on a regular basis. The best answer is to create a new airport facility further away from the coast, and develop high-speed rail lines from it to Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. Just as other cities around the world have done; because it is the most practical answer.

Bits & Pieces  (7/16/01)
The incident touched a nerve felt around the world, but it still took six months to catch the man. Also, when he was in the Navy, he had been seen clubbing a stray dog to death. Good for the judge, that he ignored the county probation department’s recommendation for probation instead, based on his "taking responsibility" for the crime. Makes ya wonder what it would take to trip their trigger, and who else might be slipping through their cracks.

God-Bothering Boxes  (7/13/01)
I’m not a religious person. My parents weren’t, nor were theirs. Most of my sisters aren’t, nor are their children. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of virtuous fiber woven throughout our family; these are morally muselix folks if there ever were any. But it’s more thoughtful and deliberate spirituality than the kind they feature in church these days, and likely always did. And that makes sense when you think about it.

Rub-a-dub-dub  (7/12/01)
Miss Jenna, who reminds me of Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed grown up and grown clever, didn’t have to appear in court, per state law; she was represented by an attorney. How nice for her. Let’s sanitize this experience as much as possible. President’s daughter or not, ya gotta think that anyone who gets into trouble with the law should have to appear before the bench; especially young people. Not having to appear makes it all appear to be some sort of game.

Burp If You Love Fido  (7/11/01)
Ya gotta think that if cats and dogs had been of a more economical size, we’d likely be eating them as we do now cows and pigs. Can’t you see the drive-thrus advertising purrfectly delicious cat sausages, and best-bark-burgers? Of course, that raises the question of what we would do for pets, now that the erstwhile be sitting on our plates all au gratin.

Bits & Pieces   (7/10/01)
Under the heading I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you comes this item about the Secret Service trying to get back fake money they’d given to film makers for use in their movies. Ain’t gonna happen that all of the ill-lucre is returned. About a billion dollars worth was blown up during the filming of "Rush Hour 2" in Las Vegas, and some of it got away. Into the hands of people not associated with the filming. And what did they do with it? They spent it.

The Lame-o from Modesto  (7/09/01)
The blood is in the water. Republicans are eyeing this conservative district as a possible gain in 2002. Democrats are also checking their rosters and weighing candidates according to political primogeniture and/or pocket depth. Even if the young woman turns up with a good explanation that doesn’t involve Condit -- hey, he can dream, can’t he? -- Condit must be only days away from acknowledging what everyone else already knows -- that his political career is over.

The Mis-Humane Societies  (7/06/01)
One guy went back to the armored personnel carrier they were driving to get a pole and a net. They managed to nudge the critter from his perch in the tree, and when he fell, it was on top of one of the men, who handled the situation without a hint of plomb, shaking and gyrating, certainly not the way they taught ‘em in Racoon Apprehension 101. And the racoon got away.

On the Path   (7/05/01)
I think of the Charles Shultz Peanuts character, Pigpen, who was constantly surrounded by a cloud of dust; was he bringing it with him, or was he being carried by it? Are we each living in a unique bubble of time-’n-space circumstances, with only so much real choice? Is our range of options limited to a pre-destined route? Yes, you’re going to San Francisco, but whether you travel the Interstate or the back roads doesn’t really matter.

Bits & Pieces   (7/04/01)
From the "Ca-Ca Occurs" file, Lucerne Valley (CA) School Superintendent Jim Wheeler had one of those days when the unemployed parents of five burst into his office, handcuffed him, announced they were making a citizens’ arrest, forced him into their Chevy Blazer and drove off. Deputies stopped the Blazer after what must have seemed ten very long miles away, and freed Wheeler, who escaped the whole mishagosh with only some wrist rash.

The Nature of Nature   (7/03/01)
Over the past several days I’ve noticed a great number of birds outside my window. They’re coming for the water in the dishes beneath the plants on the deck. I suppose word gets around the avial grapevine somehow; especially when it’s so dry so early. Now I must figure out a plan to keep Mr.Cat from enjoying their company, too.

"Everyman"? We Wish  (7/02/01)
People said that Lemmon portrayed America’s "Everyman"; sometimes funny, sometimes serious. Indeed, his characters often pushed themselves out of comfortable nests, whether it was Felix Unger escaping his cleaning obsession or Frank Pulver taking on the captain. Though the demons might have seemed small and personal, the journeys were about conscience and consciousness.

I'm Sorry, We're Dead   (6/29/01)
A new telemarketing center opened in Redding, and I’m told that the parking lot sees more drug-dealing than the average school yard; and the hard stuff. Oh kind sir, maybe they have to be meth’d up to take the rejection. Aha. One of these days a flavor-of-the- month quack is gonna go on Ricki Lake and call it Aggravated Telephonic Syndrome, suggesting maybe these people could get workman’s comp, or sue themselves for a gazillion dollars.

Medi-Skill  (6/28/01)
Also in the first go-round, the authorities found a bullet lodged in the skull, but unable to determine a recent entrance wound, didn’t have reason to declare that it was the cause of death. When the body was shipped to a university lab, it was discovered that there was a second bullet in the torso. Which makes suicide ever so unlikely, and has prompted the sheriff’s office to consider the death "suspicious".

Items  (6/27/01)
It’s too bad Mexican authorities don’t read our newspapers. Or maybe they do. For whatever reasons, they have decided to hire the FBI to upgrade their own law enforcement investigating-type skills. That’s like Russia asking NASA to help them put a probe on Mars.

Now Through the Clouds  (6/26/01)
If you’ve ever climbed off a smallish boat onto terra firma, you are probably aware of the experience of sea legs. You feel kinda wobbly, as your legs try to adjust to a stable, non-rolling environment. Same thing happens when you climb off a trampoline. And for me, it can be hours since I flew, but when I’m sitting at my desk, one of us is gently rocking back and forth. I think it’s pilot.

Bits & Pieces  (6/25/01)
Pardon what may appear to be coldness, but one must think there had to have been signs that this woman was a bit over the edge. Like the suicide attempt two years earlier. Another clue, though to what I don’t know: the children were named Luke, Paul, John, Noah and Mary.

Mad about Maddy  (6/22/01)
She is Maddalena Serra, the proprietress and the creator of some of the finest food to ever grace a palate. She also does a little radio and has her first cookbook coming out this summer. Plus she tends a garden out back that provides special treats for her diners, and when she’s not running, hiking, working out, yoga-ing, and has time, she paints, and does so marvelously. Not everyone who knows how to cook has a good eye; Maddalena does, and it shows in her art on the walls of her restaurant as well as on every plate set before her grateful patrons.

Higher Ideals   (6/21/01)
The fear of losing one’s moorings is a dangerous disease, and it seems to be approaching epidemic proportions. Public life is looking loonier than ever. The standards of behavior that were once a given have become porous. This is not a good thing. Laws don’t matter a whit if the members of the society don’t have a basic allegiance to the underlying premises of these laws.

Nucuelar Disarmament  (6/20/01)
Bush is quoted as saying "I had no idea we had so many weapons....What do we need them for?" which is good news that he’s concerned about it, but it is not a terribly encouraging indication of how much he knew and knows about this ship ‘o state at which he is at the helm. Maybe it was a proverbial wake-up call, and the man who pronounces the word "nucuelar" will actually do something about the obscene proliferation of this lunacy, promulgated in large measure by his father, particularly in his role as CIA chief, when he doubled the estimates of Soviet strength to force higher U.S. armament.

A Real Beaut  (6/19/01)
With the exception of Linda’s victory in the Miss Fontana beauty contest, um, just a coupla years ago, I’ve never thought such events did a very good job of identifying what was truly beautiful. Almost by definition they would select some chippie who looked as plastic as Barbie. Maybe all the parts in the right places, perhaps an exuberant abundance of smile, but nothing engaging, or usually even alluring about her. Perhaps they think we are still looking for a princess for the pedestal; more likely the psycho-goddess of chaste.

Bits & Pieces   (6/18/01)
Also criminal-ish, Columbia Pictures has had their pants pulled down for the second time in a week. First it was learned that in their film promotions, they quoted a critic saying favorable things about their movies, only the critic was a pigment of their imagination. Now it turns out that in their broadcast commercials they used their own employees pretending to be movie-goers who had just seen and were now gushing over a Columbia picture.

That Ain't No Burnin' Bush  (6/15/01)
Speaking in Madrid on the first stop of his European sales tour, Bush called the 1972 ABM Treaty "a relic of the past." Not to pick nits, but few relics aren’t from the past, unless you’re talking about Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms. And there are a whole bunch of relics (from the past) that a lot of people respect, like the Magna Carta, not to mention the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Opportunity for Change  (6/14/01)
If the lord high judge were shining beneficence on Shasta County, he would say, drop the charges against the lawyer ‘cause the whole mess has gotten messier. Then he would say, Guys, I think we need to look at our police training again, with an eye toward better equipping the officers in matters involving people who are distressed and agitated. It may be that they have good cause for their discombobulation, and empathy would serve better than aggression.

No Skin Off This Sheep  (6/13/01)
So what does the Skool Stuperintendant do? She lowers the bar to 60% for language and 55% for math; for these are junior high questions. Instead of 90% of the blacks and browns failing, 75% would. You can imagine all the folks what would be jumping up and down, and screaming about how this is a racist commie conspiracy and not fair. Hey, don’t take my temperature, Doc; I’d rather not know.

Prey of Peace  (6/12/01)
There is some irony in the grossly primitive nature of both "sides" in that they’re fighting for a patch of sand that is truly only esoteric in value. And I think back to a friend’s comment about the Falklands War, when he said that if they had taken all of the money spent fighting and divided it among the populace, they all could have taken their share and gone to live as rich people somewhere significantly more habitable. Perhaps Kosovo, Haiti or the Sudan.

Up, Up and Nearly Away  (6/11+/01)
My first thought was oops. High winds make it difficult to hold heading, and much of the instrument work on which I was to be test meant flying racetrack holding patterns and narrow course lines and set altitudes. My second thought was, Well, if there is a wind, it will give me a better test.

Death Be Not Loud  (6/11/01)
Of course if we really wanted to punish McVeigh, we would not put him to death but have him live out the rest of his days in a small concrete cell, with just enough to sustain him. Until he would likely kill himself. But maybe there’s a need for terminal-type closure here, as in no more pulse. At least it will help to put the outrageously exorbitant coverage to rest.

It Does Take Rocket Scientists  (6/08/01)
NASA is more about public relations than space exploration, and the proof is in the putting; the putting of people in space when machines would get there faster, accomplish as much or more, and for a lot less money. A lot less. Fully 90% of the money NASA squanders is spent figuring out how to make a mission human-possible. They believe that unless they use live bait, the media will ignore them.

The Evil that Men Do  (6/07/01)
It’s one of those lines that sticks somewhere in the cerebellum and won’t go away until it’s had its way with you. Some lines have been planted for more than forty years, and every so often I will hear them replayed in the mind’s ear. What brings this to mind is looking at a newspaper clipping and a note I’d made about another story.

Three for the Seesaw  (6/06/01)
Every now and then, one comes across a lead sentence in a news article that tells the whole story. Such clever writing is rare, in part because there are so few new stories that lend themselves to such capsulization, but mainly because most by-lines are held by reporters, not writers. The New York Times is known for its writers, and I’ve earlier quoted Steve Erlanger who wrote brilliant pieces on Chechnya, including one with the line, "If Pyrrhus were a Russian, he would recognize the landscape."

Consider the Source  (6/05/01)
Sometimes people say something that is just so beyond the pale that one must infer that the speaker has suffered a synapse detour. I think of Cruz Bustamante, California’s Governor-Lite, whose tongue curled wrong-ways ‘round the letters and he said the "n" word in a speech. Or The Boy from Hope saying he didn’t inhale. Or Slick Willie sayin’ he didn’t boink The Plumb Beret. Or Hillary Clinton saying it was a right-wing conspiracy.

To Friends Departed  (6/04/01)
Both men stood outside the norm, remarkable in their openness, and thus challenging to those who would remain hidden. Both men set standards to be lived up to, though neither forced them on others. They are missed by good people, which is the sign of having made a positive mark out of a lifetime.

Don't Spin the Bottle  (6/01/01)
It could be very useful for parents everywhere to learn what drove the Bushettes to drink. Something did. As it reportedly did their father, though since he won’t talk about it, it’s hard to know what effect, if any, it had on his daughters. Mr. and Mrs. President might want to have a private life, and they should, to some extent. On the other hand, they were elected to the White House, with Laura and the girls performing the role of dutifuls during the campaign. It wouldn’t be difficult to make the case that they were probably the margin of victory for Bush-Lite.

Bits & Pieces  (5/31/01)
Said Kurt Vonnegut in Fates Worse than Death, "One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now, along with the religious revival and plutonium, is all the people who are getting divorced because they don’t love each other anymore. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don’t respect your mate anymore — that’s when the transmission is shot and there’s a crack in the engine block."

The Bingo Buss  (5/30/01)
This truly is the red man’s revenge. If they aren’t scalping these sheep, they’re at least fleecing them. People tossing away pots of money, which amounts might not seem huge, but which could certainly be better spent on teeth, for example, and something healthy to bite into, instead of the salt-’n-grease slop with which they fill their trough. Not that they would, of course. Mostly likely they would invest in another premium channel on the cable television system.

Instrument Training  (5/29+/01)
After my lesson this morning, I wondered how anyone has ever earned an instrument rating. My flying today, after nearly fifty hours of training for instrument certification, was sloppy toward inept. Not dangerous by any means, but by every measure, I was earning a failing grade. Off course, too high, too low. Ick, pew, I stunk. And my test is scheduled for next week.

Fear Only the Indifferent  (5/29/01)
She was attacked several times over an hour by a man with a knife. It was three in the morning, in a middle class residential neighborhood in Queens. People heard her screaming, as she tried to drag herself to a doorway, pleading for help. Police discovered that at least 38 people had heard her. They did nothing. The March 1964 incident quickly symbolized people’s unwillingness to get involved.

Homeward Bond  (5/28/01)
Returning from our trip to England last March, I felt like breaking out into song. "This Is My Country" and "God Bless America" were in my heart and on my lips. I probably would have started singing out loud, but for fear I might have been tagged as some kind of mental case, even in San Francisco. But the fact is, I was most happy to be back in the Good Ole USofA. For all of our problems, and we’ve got a long row to hoe, we’ve gotten a lot right in our first few hundred years.

Are We There Yet?  (5/26/01)
Gimme a break. First of all, who in their right minds — and granted, we’re playing with a limited audience here — would ever think to buy a second, let alone five more, TV Guides. And second, TV Guide will have a cover worth collecting when people ask for Firestone tires again.

Jus' Seems Crazy  (5/25/01)
If there is a place today that chaos calls home, it has to be Afghanistan, where the malignant psychopathy of the ruling Taliban seems bent over backwards to move the world’s most backward nation higher up into the ignominy of their reign. If ever a group could get everything wrong, it is the fundamentalists who appear to be intent on pushing every possible button of civilized sapiens. These people — armed by the U.S. in the war against the Soviet Union — are crazier than coked cockroaches, and significantly more dangerous than Khaddafi or Hussein ever dreamt about.

Dawn's Early Light  (5/24+/01)
We’d be in a lot better shape if more on Capitol Hill were independent of the major parties. Party affiliation should come long after public interest, justice, integrity, dignity, and honor. Their allegiance should be to their constituents to listen and lead for the benefit of our whole nation, and a secure and growthful future for our children’s children’s children. Regrettably, the poison of campaign financing has shifted the priorities of those who would represent us. Perhaps the Jeffords move will be the first step toward cleansing our election process.

Nero Wolfe  (5/24/01)
The 1976 film featured a wonderfully intelligent script, including lines like, "To be broke is not a disgrace, it is merely a catastrophe." And "I have no talents. I have genius or nothing." And "I prefer ignorance to presumption." And "I have all the simplicities, including that of brusqueness." And "One can dodge folly without backing into fear." All before the first commercial break.

Darkness at the Edge of Now  (5/23/01)
We are in a time of less brilliance. We talk a great deal about education, but do very little. Television defines the culture. Intellectualism falls from disrepute into irrelevance. Our alleged news sources provide little illumination of the critical issues. Thoughtful brows are furrowed. And a reptilian mindset has emerged from dank soil under a flat rock and is enjoying the heat that has replaced the light.

Rain, Rain Come and Stay  (5/22/01)
Highs forecast over the next few days reach over the century mark, which is an esoteric way of saying it was very hot ten degrees ago already. These are the readings we don’t usually expect to see until July or August. And the griping isn’t about the discomfort in going outside, or having to worry about what in the car will melt, explode or otherwise be destroyed in an oven. It’s about the fire danger.

The Price of Greed  (5/21/01)
While I righteously assert that the nation would benefit from the approach outlined above, I think that getting representatives from places like Nebraska or South Carolina to even consider such ideas is less likely than Davis’ hair getting mussed in a force-five hurricane. Ain’t gonna happen. But maybe here in The Golden State — whose motto is Eureka! — there might come a time when rising desperation and cohones somehow meet, and something simply has to be done.

Clime of Punishment  (5/19c/01)
It’s ironic that both Reno and Freeh had pretty good reputations before coming to Washington, and both are exeunt in disapprobation. That’s what happens when otherwise decent people allow their moral compasses to shift; their priorities change, and inevitably there’s a slip twixt the truth and the lip. And in the end, how different are they from the crack mom or the fallen hero or statue smashers?

The Bad Guys Can't Win  (5/19b/01)
For a long time, I’ve thought that the reason why I am here, on this planet at this time, is to participate in a shift from the corporate materialist bellicosity to the wonder of what we are capable of once we have eradicated poverty, cleaned up the pollution, and stopped fighting. What with "experts" saying that the smartest among our species only use 10% of our brain, ya gotta think that My Oyster Earth would be a marvelous garden of unstoppable delight if we could realize the power of our minds to comprehend and create.

Nothin' Doin'  (5/19a/01)
George Bush stands on the very threshold of greatness, but he wont step into it. It’s not in his character. He doesn’t have the sense of self that would weigh purpose over the pap he’s been getting from his friend-advisors. It wouldn’t occur to this man to think outside the box, to sample the opinions of others, to ask people he doesn’t know or who have contrary opinions what they think and why; or to do some independent research and figure out what he’s got wrong and what the opposition has right. Just as an exercise.

The Relevance of Religion  (5/19/01)
Why is it that our preachers can’t find the words to reach the uneasy and convert the spiritually malodorous? Where is the purported power of the purposeful provider that we can’t be called to the same page? Why do we continue to have war? Why do we allow children of our same species to go to bed hungry? Why is it acceptable that some of the parishioners beat their wives and children?

Clearance Sale  (5/18/01)
I don’t want to presume to suggest what actually happened, but it is one of those stories that has a certain smell to it. If she was as awful as Blake’s lawyer is saying, you think maybe poor Beretta — that’s what his television character was called — might have been pushed over the edge and lost it emotionally and then fumbled it physically. On the other hand, that’s mostly based on information from Blake’s lawyer; hardly an impartial observer.

Prescription Pad  (5/17/01)
A titanic battle raged last week before an FDA panel deciding the fate of three antihistamines. The gladiators, some of the biggest, were the drug manufacturers and the insurance companies. The insurance folks — the people who bet you’ll never get as sick, and then argue every point — were asking that Claritin, Allegra, and Zyrtec be sold over the counter instead of by prescription. The drug companies countered that that was dangerous; that people wouldn’t go to their doctors enough and find out that they were really sick.

TV Watch (Or Not)  (5/16/01)
In moments of desperation, I may switch to the satellite, in denial at the paucity of program offerings. And sometimes I’ll find something worth a stab, like Politically Incorrect, and I’ll pop in for a visit. In truth, the sky over the hot tub reveals a far more interesting story, but on this particular night we were in the middle of an unseasonably early heat wave. So I plunked down into my far corner of the couch and watched. That the time not be wasted, I made a few notes.

Learning All the Way  (5/15/01)
Perhaps, too, it is an apology to those who think I’m spending too much verve on boy-toys. My excitement is not about planes and guns, however, but about the process of learning and what they teach. Though a lot of people think that learning stops with the sheepskin, my life would be empty without new information, deliberately acquired. As both subjects are new to me at fifty, there’s plenty to keep my plate filled.

Bits & Pieces   (5/14/01)
The FBI coming forward with new McVeigh documents apparently withheld during the discovery phase of the trial is just kinda breathtaking. It’s hard to imagine that they could come up with an explanation that anyone would believe or which would even make sense. The FBI’s record of incompetence rivals its penchant for misconduct. Take your pick.

The UnAmerican House Activity   (5/11/01)
We’ll go over this step by step so that those who have their night-vision goggles scanning the horizon for black helicopters of invading Jewish commies can follow the story. We’re talking about the United Nations. For decades from its inception, the United States pretty much controlled the organization. But as more countries took form and more people around the globe decided that they while they wanted U.S. aid they wouldn’t suffer our dicta, control started slipping away.

Dogging a Pal  (5/10/01)
When I heard the rifle shot, I whistled for Buster, thinking this would make him feel better and take him away from his scent. I also wanted to make sure that he was all right; that the neighbor, not a leading intellectual light, might not have mistaken Buster for a mountain lion. It didn’t take long for the burly blond to come bounding up the road. I knelt down and stretched my arms out to him. He flew right by me, up the drive toward the house.

The Other St. Pete  (5/09/01)
Linda will be co-presenting on collaborative divorce. She will travel for days each way and be away for two weeks, all for a two hour presentation. Well, not just that, of course; she will have the opportunity to meet people — many of them from the dear old U-S-of-A — and proselytize about collaboration instead of confrontation in family law matters. Particularly, how to resolve the end of a marriage in a dignified fashion.

Reading Comes First  (5/08/01)
When you are wondering what is the best thing you can do for your child, the answer is to get him reading as early as possible. All of the experts — and common sense — say that talking and reading to a child is what’s gonna get that little one reading quickly. For those who know the joy of reading for pleasure, this isn’t confusing, but for all too many people, reading is a chore. Or impossible. In most cases, they weren’t read to or encouraged to read for themselves when they were children.

Bits & Pieces  (5/07/01)
Don Hewitt, the 78-year-old continuing executive producer of "Sixty Minutes" has weighed in on the issue of televising an execution. "You put a guy on a gurney and stick a needle in his arm. People watch that on ER every week. What's the big deal? He goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. It doesn't seem so terrible to me." Um, well, not quite like ER, though most people probably wouldn’t realize the difference. Hewitt allowed as how he wouldn’t air "a guy going to the gallows or being fried in the electric chair." Ah, discernment.

Chinks Tonight   (5/05/01)
The Chinese government charges that our president is weak, and that all this nonsense over the spy plane mishap and a new Taiwan protection policy were just signs that the Bush-Wuss craves media attention. They say that he is plotting to spend them into bankruptcy, the way we did the Soviet Union, by and launching the new national missile defense (NMD) shield, which would require a massive new military buying program. They might refer to the new Star Wars as "The Pantywaist Shield". That would confuse a lot of people still tracking their logic.

Brain Drano  (5/04/01)
The DA attributes 90% of all crime in Shasta County to meth, as in methamphetamine, what aren’t specially drug-making and -selling crimes are burglaries and auto theft perpetrated to raise money to buy the stuff. Seems like it is a situation that’s out of control up here, and there doesn’t seem much that local authorities can do about it. Oh, the feds are opening up a local DEA office, whoop-de-do, but as long as it cost $7,000 a pound here and can be sold for $35,000 there, then it’s going to be seriously problematic trying to close down the industry, here or anywhere with those kinds of margins.

Don't Think about It  (5/03/01)
The other voice is the ego, the personality created by the self as an interface with the rest of reality. Buffeted over the years by the many and conflicting winds of the real world, the ego has developed its own purpose, which is not always in accord with the inner self. Most people live in their egos, thus often painfully. The alternative is to relax the ego as you would a muscle spasm. As the ego relaxes its death-grip on your godhood, it begins to redefine itself into a quieter, perhaps less controlling role.

A Question of Priorities  (5/02/01)
According to the latest from Children’s Defense Fund, more than 12,000,000 American children live in a three-person family where the income is $13,290 a year. That probably doesn’t sound extreme in extremely rural places where they raise their own food and are perhaps on the smallish side, but with the higher costs of an urban area, that means that everyone is going to bed hungry.

Good Government, Twice  (5/01/01)
Kudo two goes to the donkeys and the elephants in California, where legislators normally at loggerheads have come together to support a good idea. Conservative Republican Jim Brulte has agreed to carry a bill supported by the legislature’s strongest gun control advocate, a Democrat, and supported by Democratic Attorney General Bill Lockyer. It is a measure that seeks to make information available to law enforcement agencies to close a significant loophole in previous gun control efforts.

Right Decision, Wrong Reason  (4/30/01)
The Democrats are mighty glad that Arnold decided to not bow in. His popularity would have swamped reason, as well as any and all opponents, both Republicans and Democrats. For the elephants, this means reverting to a clearly second tier. Not in terms of quality of candidate but rather win-ability. William the Younger -- Son-of-Simon — has tons of money and a highly-strokable ego. Termed-out Secretary of State Bill Jones is the titular party stalwart, but he has little to recommend him and no money to market it.

Twins  (4/28c/01)
Not facing that problem, and hoping to overcome their own considerable challenges are Kimberley and Beverley. The nine-month old twin girls don’t have serious last names at the moment because they are mixed up in a custody squabble. It started when Tranda Wecker — possibly a nickname for tramp — sold her two girls through the Internet. Twice, to two different couples, one American and one British.

Capital Failure  (4/28b/01)
Even Nevada -- where dice-rolling is a way of life -- is considering a moratorium on executions. A measure was on its way to passing through the legislature the other weekend as the state put to death a man who screamingly proclaimed his innocence until moments before the lethal cocktail was shot into his arm. Strange thing was that the man, a South African who had been convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend boyfriend in 1997, didn’t have to die.

The Stupremes  (4/28a/01)
Okay, when I read this I thought, how can you say an arrest is warranted under the circumstances. Then I went and looked up the actual wording and discovered by warrantless, Souter was saying that a warrant hadn’t been issued for her arrest, and that was Constitutionally okay with the fuliginous five. Guys, think! Do you really think that an arrest was warranted — in real people’s language — under the circumstances?

Tai Wan On  (4/28/01)
For most of the last coupla decades, the U.S. government has — with the benediction of both sides of the aisle — enunciated an ambiguous policy, in which we didn’t say that we would actually get involved, but we would sure get mad enough so that if we thought about it hard enough and wanted to we would. That meant less strutting required by the U.S. and Taiwan, and less pushing the Armageddon envelope by the ChiComs, as they are still called unaffectionately in some hell-bent quarters.

Done with the Wind  (4/27/01)
Maybe if they thought of themselves as American-Americans they would consider themselves and their forbears part of an extraordinary shift in our now-one nation, celebrating that we went from slave-holding to not, and isn’t that a grand thing! Led the world, we did. Fought in the streets for civil and equal rights, too. For that struggle to have been necessary, we had to have gotten it wrong in the beginning. Now we have it right, more or less.

Leadership USA  (4/26/01)
The best you can say about all of these people — who comprise the titular leadership of the United States — is that they’ve done nothing much at all. In normal times, if ever there are any, that would mean that they haven’t caused a lot of damage. But we don’t live in normal times, and their failure to act when change is needed has been destructive.

The Winkest Leak  (4/25/01)
The program is a cross between ABC’s genial "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" game show and CBS’s all-but-bloodthirsty "Survivor", a series in which deceit and conniving are the requisite talents for a bunch of cheesy strangers competing for a single prize. On "The Weakest Mind", the questions are not multiple choice as they are on Millionaire, and therein also not as silly at the beginning. Like "Survivor", The Mindless vote each other off, but not before the wicked pitch tries to stir up animosity among the animals.

Something's Rotten in Peru   (4/24/01)
Obviously, the CIA checked and double-checked and figured that they could put the entire blame for the incident on the Peruvians failing to follow procedure. Caught up in the excitement of their denial, the Peruvians said they didn’t fail, not realizing that if they did indeed follow procedures, then their procedures were wrong, and it was still their fault.

Miscellany  (4/23/01)
First, this item about short-timer Timothy McVeigh in correspondence with PETA, the over-the-edge animal rights organization. PETA had contacted McVeigh and suggested that maybe he didn’t need to eat meat in his would-be-heralded last meals. McVeigh, who killed 168 human beings including many children when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City five years ago, wrote that he appreciated their position but disagreed with it. Plants feel pain, too, he noted.

Rattler (2)   (4/20/01)
The rattlesnake lay just five inches from the vulnerable vein-ridden underside of my forearm. I reached around it and over it before I saw it, and then let out a whoop that could have been heard by a discerning ear many miles away. But the snake didn’t hear it. I thought he was dead. I collected myself and headed inside for my camera.

Spring to Life  (4/19/01)
Maybe it’s because the economy is so adynamic; we’ve got tourism, government, and a whole slew of workers serving the vast blue-’n-grey army of retirees who now call this place home. Many of our seniors — as we so gingerly call them — Winnebago’d up here on holiday, and later decided to relocate here when they stopped working. They sold their houses in San Bernadoo and bought as good or better in Shasta County for a fraction of the price.

Dsssst!  (4/18/01)
My allusion is to the fact that when you turn onto a new path there are going to be changes, some of which might be quite beneficial. On balance, it seems as though extending Daylight Savings Time through the entire year might be a good idea. At least it would be worth a try. Say you do it for a coupla years, and accidents go down and business improves....

Ooh, Ooh Yahoo    (4/17/01)
Yahoo shoulda known better in the first place there was gonna be a storm of protest. Did they think it would just be a small tempest? Of the Internet that isn’t shopping, ranting, or research, half is porn and the other half is controls. It doesn’t matter a hoot that Yahoo was going into the porn business, as far as access; it was the principle of the thing.

Flying Rant  (4/16/01)
The seats on the 777 are far more comfortable than those in the 747, which suggests that the folks doing the designing and operating can get it right sometimes, and should more often. The bottom line is how many seats are being filled, of course, and fewer seats mean fewer bottoms in them. Hey, raise your hand; who wouldn’t spend another hundred bucks for a better seat on an 11-hour ride?

Bits & Pieces  (4/13/01)
The irony is that while the majority of every color think that The Boy from Hope was a good president — despite all evidence to the contrary — they are assaulting him as though it were a national sport, now that he is out of office. And of particular note in this case is that Clinton always did so well among black women; at the height — or depth — of the affair with The Plump Beret — Clinton was polling over 90% support from them.

Done Hisse'f In     (4/12/01)
I discovered the depths to which a high-powered station could reach in producing what they called news and which anyone with a hint of journalistic sensibility would find emetic. An example of the detritus that formed the staff was a newswriter — that was his job category — who spent the days after Christmas pouring over the wires, searching for what he considered the archetypal holiday horror story — "Father carves up family with new electric knife."

Bully for Them   (4/11/01)
I can appreciate that it’s a tough world out there and that children need to be taught to fend for themselves so that they are ready for the challenges of the business community. I mean, that’s the theory. Personally, I don’t think the abuse really pays any dividends. I think children should be protected from bullies of any and all ages, not merely sheltered, but helped to better manage the situation. As should it be effectively explained to bullies the disadvantages — immediate and long-term — of coercion.

Spy Planes or Children   (4/10/01)
Hey, maybe Junior should ask his dad to go fix things. After all, George the Elder was ambassador to China. And Director of the CIA. People as narrow in their thinking as are the Bushes, Powell, Cheney, Rice, and Duh Spooks are inevitable dupes of their own mismanagement. Hopefully, their track record of tomfooleric incompetence will run its course without too much more damage.

Faithless Government  (4/09/01)
Now if you say it quickly, and don’t let your mind set down anywhere on it, it sounds like three different problems. But in fact, they’re all waste, they’re all mismanagement, and they’re all fraud. Of course that’s piddlin’ compared to the wastefraudmismanagement over at the five-sided funny farm, where that $40,000 disappears every thirteen seconds.

Liberal in Extremis  (4/06/01)
This is just another of those policy-versus-reality issues that helps me to see why such dogmatic liberals are so easily despised. Just as easily as are worthy-cum-mindless conservatives. Thank goodness the lines between the two camps are beginning to blur — at least in objective minds — as have the differences between donkeys and elephants narrowed to the point that we are under the hoof-pads of great ugly greedy beasts which see it’s client base as a footpath to personal advancement.

Britain Great  (4/05/01)
In Rye we stayed at the Mermaid Inn. This was an establishment that was re-built in 1450. It has been updated flawlessly, without exorcizing the resident ghost, who didn’t make an obvious appearance while we were there. Rye is a wonderful little town of 2,000 residents, that enjoys a special feeling of friendliness and comfort. It is where we shall plunk down for a month some time, and immerse ourselves in the culture and the warmth.

Bits & Pieces  (4/04/01)
Pish-tosh to those who think I’m politically incorrect. Sure, it’s natural that someone who lost his sight when he was 13 and now at 32 has climbed a lotta mountains around the world would want to climb the highest. Following 12 teammates with bells tied to their jackets and Sherpa guides. I hope no one dies in this ascent attempt. It would underscore my increasingly acerbic attitude that not everyone gets to do everything, and being the only or the first or the most isn’t necessarily the measure leading a full life.

It Could Happen  (4/03/01)
The whole rest of the world is chastising Bush for going back on his campaign promise and violating the Kyoto agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by power plants. Bush says our economy comes first. Bush thinks its all right to have arsenic in our drinking water; bottoms up. Bush is back to sabre-rattling with Russia, expelling dozens of diplomats purported to be spies; they’re all spies, as are all our diplomats. Bush has rechilled the thaw with North Korea, and now one of our spy planes collided with a Chinese jet fighter and had to land in China.

Behind the Plane  (4/02/01)
Unfortunately, one of the first tasks was flying steep turns, which requires keeping the altitude the same while executing a 360-degree turn in a tight 45-degree bank. Now I know how to do that, but I failed to perform it well. Instead found my stomach rising up behind my teeth. No, I didn’t have to take emergency measures, like reach for a receptacle, but it did color — green — the rest of the flight.

The Tide Turns...More...Again  (3/30/01)
Yep, after a tough coupla months, I’m beginning to feel a weight lifting from my shoulders. This is not a narcissistic Atlas thang, just my personal travails of traveling. In truth, I have no reason to complain. In truth, I have every reason to be pleased and patient. I’m working on it. At least I find the lessons are more informative than punitive.

Earning Brand Loyalty  (3/29/01)
I wash and dry all of my own clothes, as I have done since I left home, except when I lived without a washer and dryer. Since I don’t iron — for quaint and unexplainable religious reasons — I don’t wash my button-down shirts; I send them out. But I do the rest, from socks to sweatshirts to jeans, and I learned early on that they can all be done together in cold water. With little or no risk of sharing colors and things, most of the time.

Closer to God  (3/28/01)
When you think of the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, or now the Albanians and the Macedonians, to the casual observer, there seems to be an enormous amount of hatred and ferocity, passed along generation to generation, over something which in the general scheme of a hardscrabble existence should seem particularly insignificant. It calls to mind the line from comedian Richard Jeni, that they’re "basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend."

Trying Hard Enough  (3/27/01)
I struggle to internalize a posture of greater being. Not superiority per se, but the kind of all-god’s-chilluns magnanimity that an adult might exercise with a confused child. For reasons that I don’t understand, I find it nigh to impossible to incorporate this philanthropy. I know that it does no good to hold negative thoughts toward people; it just eats at my innards, tearing me down. All too often, the best I can do is distract myself with other thoughts.

Children and Guns  (3/26/01)
Is that what it’s all about? Nerve? Bravado? Is that how we score points with our friends? Does it take courage to kill children in the hallway of your school? Is it a mark of superiority, or some special talent? Because it’s not just a problem that people watch this crap on television and joke with their friends about blowing people away. The deeper, far more dangerous issue, is that these are the standards that the children publically share.

Miscellany  (3/23/01)
If you don’t see it on television, it’s not real. At least, that seems to be the posture of advertisers these days. Consider the new offer for a pill for yeast infections. Now you can "Kiss those creams goodbye". Okay, I get the point. I just wonder at the proposed rite of passage, so to speak. Reminds me of a story out of Atlanta a while back about a woman who sued the maker of a spermicidal jelly because she got pregnant. She got pregnant, it turns out, because she consumed the product on her toast.

Why We Read Trash  (3/22/01)
I hesitate to bring this to the library for fear of equally disappointing an unsuspecting reader. Maybe this goes to the next yard sale. There people will at least read the jacket, which in the first sentence says, "Shrouded in legend and lore for centuries, the mysterious lives of the ancient Druids continue to invoke fascination to this day." It’s a clue.

Spring Be Sprung  (3/21/01)
Wind is all too common a feature, year around, spinning about looking for a way to exit the end of the valley. Whether it is slashing winter rain against the windows or whistling a dry knife through the tinder in the fall, we are rarely airless. Sometimes the winds fly through here at more than fifty miles an hour, and that’s never good. The dry wind is not only a fire hazard, but it gets on peoples’ nerves in the worst way.

Items  (3/20/01)
Apparently some pharmaceutical companies — which often are the exclusive supplier of certain drugs — simply stop making them. The reasons can range from a cut-off in ingredient supplies to diminished profits. But does it make sense for the nation’s well-being to hang in the balance of such caprice? Shouldn’t there be some federal oversight, to make sure that necessary drugs remain available, without interruption? I’m not a big fan of excess government, but if we are otherwise at the mercy of greedy or incompetent pharmaceutical companies, I say, rein ‘em in, now.

Stockin' Up  (3/19/01)
This upper-strata economic boon over the past eighteen years has a lotta folks truly confused, and concerned. They were never clear on what was going on, although they pretended to be, sagely nodding their heads when they didn't understand, and passing along the same information to others, as though sharing something of value. So the confusion isn't new, but the posture is shifting, and it's moving toward the arena of angst.

Swim the Big Pond  (3/16/01)
We’re not holding our breath for one of the airlines to see the light by the time we’re flying, but are smiling pretty at all concerned that they might postpone any job actions until after we’ve returned from across The Big Pond.

News Bits  (3/15/01)
John LeCarre must have thought he was fantasizing when he depicted the insanity of the spy game, allegedly through fiction. Actually, he probably gave them more credit than they obviously deserved. My guess is that most of the yahoos engaged in this undercover game were as obtuse as G. Gordon Liddy, whose sense of right and wrong is as perverted in a normal moral human sense as that of any psychotic who toys with Armageddon.

Bush Still Won  (3/14/01)
Nothing is going to change with the facts. If we’d demanded decent candidates, if the political parties weren’t merely power brokers but truly represented national constituencies, if Cheney’s heart had given him more trouble earlier, if Lieberman weren’t so slobberingly sanctimonious, if the news media approached their work as journalists, if half the eligible voters hadn’t refused to vote for president — then the outcome would likely have been different.

Stand-UpAmericans  (3/13/01)
The fact is that the poor and minorities are undercounted. Mainly because they are either illegal immigrants who are afraid of being deported, they don’t want to be called for jury duty, they’re criminals, they don’t like government, or they’re just plain stupid. So their numbers are lower than actual, and less aid than is due to them flows to their communities. And by the way, most who do register to vote do tend to do so as Democrats. The bottom line, then, is that the bottom line is both political and inaccurate.

Olio    (3/12/01)
Thinking he could successfully shift the blame to professional wrestling, the boy’s attorney and the mother refused offers from the prosecutor for three years plus probation. It is expected that the sentence will ultimately be reduced through a clemency plea to the governor. Maybe in exchange for time served by the lawyer and the mother.

Bits & Pieces   (3/09/01)
At a mall in Sacramento, a shoe store got busier than it wanted to last weekend when 200 people showed up to buy 80 pair of Air Jordan XI Retro sneakers. Mall security had to call in more than 80 sheriff’s deputies in a vain attempt to keep order, and the whole mall had to be closed for more than an hour. Ya think they should have known. The same thing happened at malls in Oakland, Cincinnati, and Toledo.

Holy War (sic)   (3/08/01)
Despite global condemnation — including by Muslim Malaysia — the leaders of what has long been considered the most backward nation in the world have destroyed or damaged some of the world’s most extraordinary art treasures. Some of these statues, which date back to Alexander the Great, stand over 170 feet high and were carved out of sandstone cliffs. Reports say that Japan is threatening to cut off economic aid to Afghanistan. Again, the wallet may have more influence than the soul.

Just Kidding   (3/07/01)
Apparently the 15-year-old high school freshman was scrawny and frequently found himself the butt of jokes. But according to reports, he shot people apparently at random, hitting fifteen, killing two. We would probably react differently had he marked those who had been teasing him. And we probably wouldn’t be as upset if the boy hadn’t been grinning as he fired at his classmates. He may not even have known the people he shot. What is clear is the deliberation of his act. He apparently went into the boys room to load his gun, several times.

Nekkid on Stage   (3/06/01)
The purpose should be to illuminate rather than shock; to earn attention rather than demand it. Many of the people who live in the Redding area moved here to the distant rurality of the North State to escape the crass neon culture of the big cities. Not that they have a right to escape altogether, but if education is the goal, then perhaps the path might wander through identifiable culture in a demonstration of intentional talent.

The Saturday Rag   (3/05/01)
The Board of Supervisors and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown are approving a measure which will allow city workers to collect up to $50,000 in taxpayer money for sex change operations. Supervisor Mark Leno — founder of the Transgender Civil Rights Implementation Task Force, I kid you not — is a major proponent of the measure. He and other supporters of the new benefits say that such operations are not elective surgery. Probably no more so than their lobotomies.

Ragbag   (3/02/01)
Not rich is the Loew’s Corporation. They’ve hacked up the cost of seeing a movie in Manhattan to ten bucks. It’s still only eight in Brooklyn, but seniors and kids had their tariff hiked a quarter to a sawbuck. In Los Angeles, a Loew’s price increase is gonna make the cost of a ticket nine dollahs. It’s probably lower in LA because of the competition from the ongoing performance art of the pedestrians.

The Crown Jewels   (3/01/01)
But wait, didn’t we spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy? Yes indeed we did. And Russia, too. Yet if we had spent those trillions on productive growth and education, we’d be at the center of a very different world today. And Russia would not have to count as some of her primary assets an obscene oversupply of nuclear weapons, as well as the scientific minds that designed them. There is danger every moment that some will get greedy — or just too hungry — and find a terrorist buyer.


The Tide Turns...More...Again  (3/30/01)
Yep, after a tough coupla months, I’m beginning to feel a weight lifting from my shoulders. This is not a narcissistic Atlas thang, just my personal travails of traveling. In truth, I have no reason to complain. In truth, I have every reason to be pleased and patient. I’m working on it. At least I find the lessons are more informative than punitive.

Earning Brand Loyalty  (3/29/01)
I wash and dry all of my own clothes, as I have done since I left home, except when I lived without a washer and dryer. Since I don’t iron — for quaint and unexplainable religious reasons — I don’t wash my button-down shirts; I send them out. But I do the rest, from socks to sweatshirts to jeans, and I learned early on that they can all be done together in cold water. With little or no risk of sharing colors and things, most of the time.

Closer to God  (3/28/01)
When you think of the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, or now the Albanians and the Macedonians, to the casual observer, there seems to be an enormous amount of hatred and ferocity, passed along generation to generation, over something which in the general scheme of a hardscrabble existence should seem particularly insignificant. It calls to mind the line from comedian Richard Jeni, that they’re "basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend."

Trying Hard Enough  (3/27/01)
I struggle to internalize a posture of greater being. Not superiority per se, but the kind of all-god’s-chilluns magnanimity that an adult might exercise with a confused child. For reasons that I don’t understand, I find it nigh to impossible to incorporate this philanthropy. I know that it does no good to hold negative thoughts toward people; it just eats at my innards, tearing me down. All too often, the best I can do is distract myself with other thoughts.

Children and Guns  (3/26/01)
Is that what it’s all about? Nerve? Bravado? Is that how we score points with our friends? Does it take courage to kill children in the hallway of your school? Is it a mark of superiority, or some special talent? Because it’s not just a problem that people watch this crap on television and joke with their friends about blowing people away. The deeper, far more dangerous issue, is that these are the standards that the children publically share.

Miscellany  (3/23/01)
If you don’t see it on television, it’s not real. At least, that seems to be the posture of advertisers these days. Consider the new offer for a pill for yeast infections. Now you can "Kiss those creams goodbye". Okay, I get the point. I just wonder at the proposed rite of passage, so to speak. Reminds me of a story out of Atlanta a while back about a woman who sued the maker of a spermicidal jelly because she got pregnant. She got pregnant, it turns out, because she consumed the product on her toast.

Why We Read Trash  (3/22/01)
I hesitate to bring this to the library for fear of equally disappointing an unsuspecting reader. Maybe this goes to the next yard sale. There people will at least read the jacket, which in the first sentence says, "Shrouded in legend and lore for centuries, the mysterious lives of the ancient Druids continue to invoke fascination to this day." It’s a clue.

Spring Be Sprung  (3/21/01)
Wind is all too common a feature, year around, spinning about looking for a way to exit the end of the valley. Whether it is slashing winter rain against the windows or whistling a dry knife through the tinder in the fall, we are rarely airless. Sometimes the winds fly through here at more than fifty miles an hour, and that’s never good. The dry wind is not only a fire hazard, but it gets on peoples’ nerves in the worst way.

Items  (3/20/01)
Apparently some pharmaceutical companies — which often are the exclusive supplier of certain drugs — simply stop making them. The reasons can range from a cut-off in ingredient supplies to diminished profits. But does it make sense for the nation’s well-being to hang in the balance of such caprice? Shouldn’t there be some federal oversight, to make sure that necessary drugs remain available, without interruption? I’m not a big fan of excess government, but if we are otherwise at the mercy of greedy or incompetent pharmaceutical companies, I say, rein ‘em in, now.

Stockin' Up  (3/19/01)
This upper-strata economic boon over the past eighteen years has a lotta folks truly confused, and concerned. They were never clear on what was going on, although they pretended to be, sagely nodding their heads when they didn't understand, and passing along the same information to others, as though sharing something of value. So the confusion isn't new, but the posture is shifting, and it's moving toward the arena of angst.

Swim the Big Pond  (3/16/01)
We’re not holding our breath for one of the airlines to see the light by the time we’re flying, but are smiling pretty at all concerned that they might postpone any job actions until after we’ve returned from across The Big Pond.

News Bits  (3/15/01)
John LeCarre must have thought he was fantasizing when he depicted the insanity of the spy game, allegedly through fiction. Actually, he probably gave them more credit than they obviously deserved. My guess is that most of the yahoos engaged in this undercover game were as obtuse as G. Gordon Liddy, whose sense of right and wrong is as perverted in a normal moral human sense as that of any psychotic who toys with Armageddon.

Bush Still Won  (3/14/01)
Nothing is going to change with the facts. If we’d demanded decent candidates, if the political parties weren’t merely power brokers but truly represented national constituencies, if Cheney’s heart had given him more trouble earlier, if Lieberman weren’t so slobberingly sanctimonious, if the news media approached their work as journalists, if half the eligible voters hadn’t refused to vote for president — then the outcome would likely have been different.

Stand-UpAmericans  (3/13/01)
The fact is that the poor and minorities are undercounted. Mainly because they are either illegal immigrants who are afraid of being deported, they don’t want to be called for jury duty, they’re criminals, they don’t like government, or they’re just plain stupid. So their numbers are lower than actual, and less aid than is due to them flows to their communities. And by the way, most who do register to vote do tend to do so as Democrats. The bottom line, then, is that the bottom line is both political and inaccurate.

Olio    (3/12/01)
Thinking he could successfully shift the blame to professional wrestling, the boy’s attorney and the mother refused offers from the prosecutor for three years plus probation. It is expected that the sentence will ultimately be reduced through a clemency plea to the governor. Maybe in exchange for time served by the lawyer and the mother.

Bits & Pieces   (3/09/01)
At a mall in Sacramento, a shoe store got busier than it wanted to last weekend when 200 people showed up to buy 80 pair of Air Jordan XI Retro sneakers. Mall security had to call in more than 80 sheriff’s deputies in a vain attempt to keep order, and the whole mall had to be closed for more than an hour. Ya think they should have known. The same thing happened at malls in Oakland, Cincinnati, and Toledo.

Holy War (sic)   (3/08/01)
Despite global condemnation — including by Muslim Malaysia — the leaders of what has long been considered the most backward nation in the world have destroyed or damaged some of the world’s most extraordinary art treasures. Some of these statues, which date back to Alexander the Great, stand over 170 feet high and were carved out of sandstone cliffs. Reports say that Japan is threatening to cut off economic aid to Afghanistan. Again, the wallet may have more influence than the soul.

Just Kidding   (3/07/01)
Apparently the 15-year-old high school freshman was scrawny and frequently found himself the butt of jokes. But according to reports, he shot people apparently at random, hitting fifteen, killing two. We would probably react differently had he marked those who had been teasing him. And we probably wouldn’t be as upset if the boy hadn’t been grinning as he fired at his classmates. He may not even have known the people he shot. What is clear is the deliberation of his act. He apparently went into the boys room to load his gun, several times.

Nekkid on Stage   (3/06/01)
The purpose should be to illuminate rather than shock; to earn attention rather than demand it. Many of the people who live in the Redding area moved here to the distant rurality of the North State to escape the crass neon culture of the big cities. Not that they have a right to escape altogether, but if education is the goal, then perhaps the path might wander through identifiable culture in a demonstration of intentional talent.

The Saturday Rag   (3/05/01)
The Board of Supervisors and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown are approving a measure which will allow city workers to collect up to $50,000 in taxpayer money for sex change operations. Supervisor Mark Leno — founder of the Transgender Civil Rights Implementation Task Force, I kid you not — is a major proponent of the measure. He and other supporters of the new benefits say that such operations are not elective surgery. Probably no more so than their lobotomies.

Ragbag   (3/02/01)
Not rich is the Loew’s Corporation. They’ve hacked up the cost of seeing a movie in Manhattan to ten bucks. It’s still only eight in Brooklyn, but seniors and kids had their tariff hiked a quarter to a sawbuck. In Los Angeles, a Loew’s price increase is gonna make the cost of a ticket nine dollahs. It’s probably lower in LA because of the competition from the ongoing performance art of the pedestrians.

The Crown Jewels   (3/01/01)
But wait, didn’t we spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy? Yes indeed we did. And Russia, too. Yet if we had spent those trillions on productive growth and education, we’d be at the center of a very different world today. And Russia would not have to count as some of her primary assets an obscene oversupply of nuclear weapons, as well as the scientific minds that designed them. There is danger every moment that some will get greedy — or just too hungry — and find a terrorist buyer.

Bits & Pieces   (2/28/01)
For those who lost relatives and friends in this remarkably pointless act of terrorism, watching McVeigh die might help to get a degree of closure. Then again, McVeigh will end his suffering, while that of the victims will continue forever. If someone close to me had died in that obscene blast, I wouldn’t want their killer to end his weariness, but to sit in a small cell without distraction until he drowned in his own tears.

Everyday Epiphany    (2/27/01)
It was one of those quiet lightbulb events. Kinda like when you turn on the windshield wipers and suddenly you can see. It was on one of those long drives between Redding and the Bay Area, flyin’ down the interstate on cruise control, with Lorraine Hunt giving ever fair breath to Handel’s Theodora and Marc Cohen walking in Memphis. There’s a certain vibe on which I set my soul and the miles melt away.

From Dinosaurs to Politicians   (2/26/01)
We must remember that politicians, like dinosaurs are less about posterity and more about posterior, as in, sitting pat. Term limits have made it more difficult to spend a lifetime supping at the public trough, but most pols still haven’t figured out that they could get in a lot of service in a few years, if that was their purpose. Instead, they are focused almost exclusively on keeping their seats, or switching to a sinecure in the other chamber.

Implausible Denial   (2/23/01)
That’s the way these people operate. They do whatever they want. When they get caught, they paint a hang-dog expression on their face, rue ‘til they’re blue in the face, and go do it again. There is not a shred of actual remorse, except at getting caught. It is the polluted ethos of trailer trash, the kind of people who are both of the Clintons, even though she came from upper crustier environs than did her marital Arkanslime.

The Great Divide   (2/22/01)
And when you consider the basics of being human, we also live in a positive-negative world -- in nature and by choice. The first thing we do with our consciousness is differentiate between our self as the observer and the rest of the world which we observe. The first instruction we get from the outside world is approval-disapproval, love and anger. The first response to our behavior is good or bad. The first distinction among our peers is boys and girls. Aha, you say, I knew this was leading to sex, but no. Let me explain.

Check 'Yes' for Crazy   (2/21/01)
There’s also the concern that not everyone will answer these questions honestly, if the true answer is "yes" and they really want their guns. As the woman at the local gun store explained to me, it’s so if someone lies and they catch ‘em, they’ve got some paperwork to throw at them. While I understand the concept, I don’t know that paperwork errors or lies are going to be the big problem with someone who shouldn’t have one getting a gun.

Oops Periscope   (2/20/01)
The true tragedy is that the NTSB investigated the earlier incident and came to three main conclusions, which the Navy refused to accept, and which resulted in the latest, avoidable tragedy. The safety board said that submarines should effectively scour the surface using sonar and periscope before arriving on it; there should be shorter watch hours because unnecessarily tired sailors were gonna miss stuff like other boats; and the Navy should call for the Coast Guard and civilian assistance immediately upon any accident in U.S. waters.

Bits & Pieces   (2/19/01)
Folks in the Redlegs’ city have it all figured out. At least two of them do. Seems a commercial photographer was looking for pliant models who would work for free. Gets together with a deputy coroner and — yep, you know what’s coming — the yahoo photographed dead people "posed with syringes, sheet music, a key and other objects", according to the news account. He was turned into police by a local film processor.

Beneath the Fold   (2/16/01)
And finally, for those thinking this is just the time to visit Afghanistan, don’t be expecting a glass of sparkling ice water with your meal. The country is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years. Yes, in addition to lacking any sense of consciousness, they have no water. So the governing Taliban — which is Afghani for "totally nuts" — has ordered all good Muslims to pray for rain. Not everyone is good, apparently. Already, 100,000 have fled to neighboring Pakistan.

Attendant the Crown   (2/15/01)
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of expectations. If you were a died-in-the-wool donkey booster, you probably liked Clinton despite it all, and there’s very little that Bush will do right. If you supported peace in the Middle East, you weren’t likely to be pleased with the Sharon victory; that it was a landslide must have been additionally disconcerting. Personally, I’m trying to keep an open mind about the future under both duly-elected leaders.

Foreign Policy Fiasco   (2/14/01)
The head of our military forces on Okinawa is in deep diplomatic kimchee for sending off an email to a bunch of colleagues that referred disparagingly to most of the top officials of the host country. Not aware of the imprecation that you don’t write down what you don’t want anyone else to read, Lt. Gen. Earl Hailston had emailed 13 fellow officers on the island and referred to the governor, both vice governors, and most of the rest of the island hierarchy as "all nuts and a bunch of wimps."

Space Wars   (2/13/01)
Let me offer some cogent examples of why every thinking American should clearly see and fully understand the scam. Let’s start with our own much-lauded Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld. Until he was named to the post, Rumsfeld was part of a Congressionally-mandated commission which urged in a newly-released report that space be viewed as a "top national security priority." Uh-oh, you say; wait it gets worse.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep   (2/12/01)
We be havin’ a blizzard. A rare event for Redding, snugged up into the northern end of the Sacramento Valley, even for us here at Casa Linda where the altimeter climbs with us to 1100 feet. After a quarter-inch of rain, the temperature fell, the drops got bigger and slower and whiter. An hour later, it started to stick. The plants and branches are whitening. Visibility is less than a half-mile. It’s a rather beautiful tableau, in its own stark, colorless way.

People in the News   (2/9/01)
Older or not, she’s won all six of her pro bouts by knockout, while the youngster is unbeaten in eight fights with seven knockouts. Of course, I think anyone who tries to jar the brain loose from the skull of another person is demented, especially when they offer their own cranium as bait.

Bits & Pieces   (2/8/01)
As for the game itself, though I wasn’t a Giants fan, the little thought I put into the contest amounted to I wanted New York to beat the Baltimore Ravens because the team’s owner, Art Modell, had moved the then-Browns from Cleveland so he could get himself a nice new stadium and bigger revenues. The Cleveland fans, being more into their team than are those in some cities, were crushed. I imagine a bunch of folks watching from their cold caves on the shore of Lake Erie felt the same way. We and the Giants lost.

Paying for Value   (2/7/01)
There is mold in the bathrooms, and in the elevator we rode in for two days, the ceiling access plate was pulled back, leaving the controls exposed. Also a tile was missing from the elevator floor. It may just be coincidence rather than management style, but the Hyatt puts a couple of plastic bottles of water in your room, which you are welcome to open fat four bucks a pop; local telephone calls are a dollar; and trying to circumvent usurious rates with a toll-free access call will also cost a dollar. Last time we stay there.

Tragically Greek   (2/6/01)
My father, Laius, sent his only son away to prep school, ostensibly for a better education, but the more driving force was competition for my mother. It was one-sided competition. If he’d been paying any kind of attention, he would have realized that my mother was merely protecting me from his irrational wrath, and I had been all the while pursuing a filial relationship with him.

Wither We Dither   (2/5/01)
Ashcroft upset a lot of people, including a popular singer with decidedly Fonda-esque leanings who observed, "We live in a great country. We allow a woman the right of choice over her own body. We have some basic gun-control laws. We have affirmative action. We have laws that protect the environment. We have separation of church and state. We have laws that guarantee protection of civil rights and liberties. Why would we allow the chief law enforcement officer to be a person who doesn't believe in any of these laws?"

Ups and Downs and Downs   (2/2/01)
We did the whole ugly divorce by email. To give credit where credit is due — although it feels like meager compensation — I never struck back at him. Even when he was throwing around lines like "Familiarity truly does breed contempt." I’m glad that I’m in a position where the money is not critical to my survival, though it certainly would have helped with Christmas and floating me toward the next assignment, somewhere over the horizon.

Crazy Is as Crazy Does   (2/1/01)
Mr. Bush cut off funds to all international family planning agencies that supported abortions. Not only is it a political error, since most people favor choice, but everyone with an I and Q knows that over-population is perhaps the most critical problem we face. Pander to the anti-choice extremists some other time. I’m sure if you asked them they’d say that their pogrom doesn’t take in other countries where all the offspring come out in different colors, can’t speak English, and go on welfare.

Come the Revaluation  (1/31/01)
With the boom of the economy and more pockets to pick, many business owners and managers went for the greater numbers and lowered their doing-business-with requirements. Maybe they don’t know better themselves. Maybe there will rise a new crop of quality-conscious purveyors of goods and services. Maybe I’ll just have to buy my way into the stratosphere.

Kinda Says It All  (1/30/01)
PS: The Hallmark commercial ended with the announcer saying the two children grew up, and recounted how he waited at the train for Freddie to come home from college. Then we see a beautiful young miss step off the train, when most of us were expecting Freddie to be a guy, of course. Good spot.

Lawfulness  (1/29/01)
President Pond Scum also let it be known, we are told, that it was all right for White House staff to commit pranks on their way out, like taking the "w" keys off of keyboards and leave messages for the incoming Bush staffers. Hohoho, isn’t the Boy from Hope a card? Nope, but he’s still a boy. The pranks got out of hand, truth be told, with phone and computer lines cut, and among other vandalistic acts. Some were severe enough to warrant prosecution, though it is unlikely that Slick Willie will be caught in this net either.

Winter Rain  (1/26/01)
After a long dry spell, the winter rains have finally visited in their drenching mode. It’s not showers or sprinkles, or even your basic rain. And though it doesn’t reach the feverish pitch of a tropical downpour, there’s a certain continuing, heavy relentlessness to this North State outpouring from the winter heavens that gives you the sense that if there were more sky from which to fall there would be more rain.

Bits & Pieces  (1/25/01)
Another Granite State lawmaker has his foot in it. Ron "Tony" Giordano has admitted that he and the law were on different sides, a fact that he hadn’t bothered to reveal to voters. Seems he did jail time, twice, in Massachusetts in the early Eighties for five check-forging convictions and one for stealing handcuffs. He also had a different name at the time: Ron Gordon. Isn’t that a vice versa?

Grab Bag  (1/24/01)
I used to be an ardent New York Yankees fan, and can still tell you who played every position back in the mid-Sixties. But when Steinbrenner came in and took the sport out of the business, it was no longer a game. Kinda like mercenary gladiators. If I was in Mill Valley and the weather that Sunday afternoon was halfway decent, as it often is in January, Pal Peter and I might be out on his fifth-of-a-sailboat, plying the waters of San Francisco Bay.

People in the News    (1/23/01)
Mama's firm has taken in more than a half-million dollars from campaigns supported by Willie Brown, including one sponsored by "San Franciscans for Responsible Planning". About his wife, the mayor said, "She laughed and said something like, 'You finally got caught.' Then she said, 'You better treat that kid just like you treated your other kids.'" Bet Jesse wished he lived in Baghdad by the Bay.

Bush Be the Man  (1/22/01)
It was a grand confirmation of our more than two centuries as a nation to watch George Bush take the oath of office as our 43^rd president. In his acceptance speech, Bush talked of moral issues and individual responsibility, of compassion and civility, and it was a good thing. We can certainly hope down to our very roots that this man and those who will advise him — including his wife — will help him to deliver on our dreams to restore our United States to purpose and greatness.

Gray...Grayer...Blackout  (1/19/01)
There are already photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight to electricity, and with some work and mass production, they could be cost-effective power generators in a couple of years. The question is storage, and I would bet Bill Richardson’s left nostril that if you looked in the vaults of the petroleum companies, you’d find designs for batteries that would work just fine, once we run out of oil.

Sherlock Holmes Meets His Maker  (1/18/01)
Holmes didn’t understand why Doyle didn’t continue to write his stories. Doyle explained that just as a reporter covering the same beat risks getting stale, he took a break from the Holmes account to keep his edge. He wrote other stories, such as the series with Professor Edward Challenger, that included The Lost World. Doyle admitted that his wife thought it would build demand if he put Holmes "on the shelf for a while."

Marconi Macaroni  (1/17/01)
KQMS makes a pile of money for Regent — indeed, it likely covers the losses of four of the FMs and still sends money home. This is because the economy is flush, and advertisers don’t really have anywhere else to go. Yes, most of the audience have the same number of teeth as IQ, but there are some thinking folks sprinkled around among the listeners, stuck in their cars or hoping to get an accurate weather forecast. The hope is in vain, however. They pre-record the half-hourly weather forecasts so they can be free to cover the latest traffic accident. A few weeks ago, ole dulcet tones informed us that there was a possibility of showers; it had been pouring for an hour.

Driving the Wild One  (1/16/01)
The Big Sur Coast is one of the most beautiful natural monuments in the world. That bulldozers managed to carve out a two-lane road between the pounding sea and the heavens was quite an accomplishment, but not a final one. Highway One is frequently down to one lane — or is closed altogether — when the hillside above drops huge boulders and tons of rock onto the roadway below, or the hillside below slides down into the ocean. The horizontal variation of a 500 foot drop might be only the length of a car, or less.

When Parents Fail  (1/15/01)
If there is a point to this point, perhaps it is a concern that we don’t seem to have a plan for providing people with the information they need to conduct their lives successfully, on even the most basic terms. When I was very young, the first level of instruction that I received was to look both ways before I crossed the road. When Gerry Ford was president, we all realized how important it was to wear a helmet during rough activities. But not everyone seems to have gotten what seem to be very basic messages.

Retire the Spooks  (1/12/01)
We later discovered that Diva J. Edgar was skirting the rules, and there don’t seem to be any rules that the others haven’t been ignoring outright and with impunity. That’s because when it comes to intelligence, those with the title practice it the least. Not only the spooks themselves, but their titular over-seers in Congress and the Administration. They affect the supercilious Gordon Liddy posture that they know more than the rest of us, and all decisions should thus be theirs. For the greater good, you know.

Miscellany  (1/11/01)
A 15-year-old British girl wants bigger boobs for her next birthday; bigger than her parents who think it’s a good idea. They are in the plastic surgery referral business — one can only guess what that is — in the UK, and they think that it will help boost the girl’s confidence. The doctor who would do the operation says the girl should wait until she’s 18, until her boobettes are fully developed — what a concept! — before she consider surgery. Maybe instead of silicon, they’ll take the useless fat from between her parents’ ears.

None for the Road  (1/10/01)
It’s true that sometimes otherwise wonderful people simply make a mistake, once, but it’s forever. I think we need to have some distinction so that we aren’t jailing too large a segment of the population. I suggest that the second time a person gets caught driving while drunk he lose his driving privileges for ten years, but if he is in an accident, he spends that time in prison.

Bits & Pieces  (1/9/01)
An anti-depressant drug may enable people not to shop. Apparently it is too difficult for some people to simply not go into stores, and researchers have found that the problem is more about depression than what they refer to as an impulse-control disorder. This condition — found in two to eight percent of the adult population and nine times more often in women — is one of those flavor-of-the-month dis-eases that shouldn’t require any treatment beyond self-discipline.

I'm Tryin', I'm Tryin  (1/8/01)
I’m sorry, Mister Bush, this is tough for me. I don’t see as you have any kinda passion for this job, other than holding it. I never heard what was driving you to this office. What you wanted to do in it and with it. What you thought could be accomplished. Maybe I missed it. Because I’m not part of the ideo-sycophantic crowd that bandwagons on the notion that one man can’t get the job done. How easy to dismiss the successes of even the bad presidents.

Future Bloom    (1/5/01)
Perhaps you’ve seen the Bill Murray movie called "Groundhog Day", in which every morning that he wakes up, it’s February 2^nd all over again. Nature is infinitely patient. Evolution moves things along. I gotta think that at some point, we will discover our purpose and take appropriate control of our lives. It will take a shift in consciousness, of course, on a scale of the fish climbing up onto the beach. What Einstein called, "a new way of thinking."

Sunshine Instrument Flight  (1/4/01)
This instrument training is a kick. No, I’m not planning to become a commercial pilot; I think you have to shave every day and wear an uniform and be polite to stupid passengers. But with the fickle nature of clouds on the California coast, knowing how to flying when you can’t see adds a considerable number of options to one’s flight planning. Of course, you have to be able to see the runway at some point, but not until you’re within a half-mile and maybe a few hundred feet above the threshold.

Bang, Bang, Click, Click  (1/3/01)
If you think you’re hearing opposition to gun control, hang on to your holster just a moment. I favor certain control of certain guns, but I oppose laws that fail in their practical intent and serve only to discourage an intelligent discourse on the subject of reducing firearms crimes. There is far too much screaming about gun ownership in this country, when we should be dealing with how to prevent the wrong people from getting near them. Like the software tester in Massachusetts, or the killers who executed seven people in a Philadelphia crackhouse.

Fishwrap  (1/2/01)
Unfortunately, this isn’t a movie, and at the Redding Ridicule, pomposity sucks the life out of creativity. They make mistakes but don’t grow. The tank trap who edits our paper has his own personal agenda, his favorites and his enemies. His ongoing feud with the sheriff and other civic and business leaders damns his rag into irrelevance. In all fairness, he does occasionally write a decent editorial, but they seem to escape him only infrequently, like the inadvertent release of bad gas.

Out with the New  (1/1/01)
I offer my deep appreciation to Cheryle and Duck, Baby Dave and Bonnie, and those others of you out there at the other end of this tether. You don’t like everything you read in these columns — wouldn’t hat be boring — but you keep reading, and you encourage me to continue. It is the essence of purpose, and for wherever it leads, thank you.


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