SmokeSound

Reports are that huge crowds are gathering in the streets of Cairo, shouting demands that their President leave.  Leave!  Leave!  Leave! Personally, I do not know whether he ought to leave, or not.  The whole Islamic world is going through a massive shift--one might very well call it a cultural revolution--from a medieval mind-set to something that more resembles what Europe has already gone through.  Historians say that just as Islam was founded about 600 years after Christianity, many of the changes that have already happened to the "Christian world" happen to the "Islamic world" later.   Both Christianity and Islam have had their "medieval periods", when nationhood was really just a form of being a religious community, when the rulers claimed to represent God in political community.  They supported, or pretended to support, religious nationhood.  Christians hear that claim very clearly in the chants of Islamic nations today, but once it was ...

Everybody loves a good war. As Mort Sahl said during the Vietnam War, "It's a dirty, rotten little war, but it's the only war we've got, so we ought to be grateful." I am in war against a rabbit.  A real rabbit.  Not one of those Easter bunny rabbits, but a genuine, wild, "red in tooth and claw" rabbit:  the kind that attacked Jimmy Carter when Jimmy was in a rowboat.  Jimmy beat the beast back with an oar. I use a coated hardware cloth.   Last winter--if I may be so brash as to call it that in Tucson--in a fit of frost and glacial outreach, some of the plants in our yard froze their appendages.  I trimmed the plants back, sure and certain that the root systems and stems would send out new branches.  They have:  small, tender, flavorful leaves and stems.  The rabbits found them.  Actually, I think there is only one rabbit, or perhaps a pair.  I am not conversant with rabbit distinctions and unique markings or gender indi...

There is, still, a big problem with unemployment.   Our bridges and highways need a lot  of work. Our schools are about 20th compared to other nations. We are crippling college graduates with debt payments.  Congress hasn't passed an actual budget since Moses or Hoover. And what do Republicans do?  Regulate women's vaginas! People are angry at government.   So what do Republicans do about that?  Try to make it difficult for people to vote! The Republican Party gerrymanders voting districts.   It finds really clever ways to make Hispanics second-class residents when simply throwing them out does not work.  The Party dismisses young people.  It harrasses Black voters.  As George Carlin said almost twenty years ago, it treats women like brood mares.  It defends fertilized eggs except when the eggs are chickens, and acts as if newborn babies are quite tough enough to provide their own daycare and pre-school education. ...

Arizona cars have only one license plate, at the rear.  Sometimes people put personal messages where, otherwise, a front license plate would go.  Carl did.  His "front license plate" reads: You can bet your sweet dupa I'm Polish. Then Carl went to bat, laid down a bunt, and ran to first, where he either slipped, or bumped the first baseman, and took a tumble, and knocked himself out.   He warned us. They are keeping Carl overnight at the hospital to monitor whether there might be damage they cannot see.  The whole team will breathe easier tomorrow.  Carl is a treasure, with a knot on his head.   The Old Timers don't play baseball just for the game. They also play for each other, care for each other, fear for each other, and cheer for each other.  

Paula Deen is from Georgia.  It is said that she sometimes says racist things.  Try to imagine that! I suspect that most of us have said racist things.  I say, "suspect" because I cannot absolutely prove that most of us do.  There may be someone, somewhere, as pure as the notion of God who has never had a racist thought.  If so, that same person may be blind,   and never have heard the rest of us talk.   I do not know enough to explain why racism is so common.  I do know enough to understand that it is ignorant, and stupid, and perverse.  It is everywhere, and every once in a while, I hear myself say something that is smeared with racism, and I cringe.   I do not know whether Paula Deen really believes that white people are better or worse than black or brown people.  She ought to know better, because it is ignorant, and stupid, and perverse to assign a value to people because of their skin color, or the color of their eyes, ...

I think his name was Lukas.  It was almost fifty years ago. He is the only genuinely ambidextrous person I have known.  He was neither left-handed, nor right-handed.  He was both.  Maybe neither.   I watched him take notes in a meeting.  Sometimes he wrote with his right hand, from left-to-right on the paper.  Sometimes he wrote left-handed, from right to left, tilting the notepad the other way.  His secretary told me she had to learn to read script both ways, sometimes on alternate lines.   Our newest grandson, whose name is Jao, is just a bit over a year old.  We have wondered whether he will be left- or right-handed.  We have not wondered, as seriously, whether he will be ambidextrous, because we assume he will be left or right. Is it plant or animal?  Is it male or female?  Was that a hit or a miss?  Is that particle here or there?  Is that idea right or wrong?   I used to belong to a churc...

It be called, "sequestration".  Congress could not come to an agreement about anything; not even that Congress itself ought to be sequestered:  hidden away.   Then the gentle-men and hardy-women in Congress came upon a splendid plan:  "Since," they admitted, "we cannot agree on a budget, let us dig a trap in the road up here.  Let us agree that if we do not come to our senses about a budget, we will just cut almost everything 40%.  That is so dumb that even we will have to do something!" They were wrong.  It was not stupid enough to get their attention.  Almost everything has to be cut 40%. Then, incredibly, something stupid happened.  Congress got what it had planned.  Now every time we have a wildfire, or it is time to open a park gate, some dumb public employee says that they are short of money.  "What do you mean, 'short of money'?", Congress asks.  "Whose dumb idea was that?" "The President is to blame!",...

Well, that is retirement for you!  Nothing to do!  No lesson prep.  No grading.  No committee meetings.  No personnel issues ("Personnel issues" is such a nice way to say. . . .  Never mind!)   Oh, there is a grandson; the latest one.  There is, in fact, a whole stable of the little critters.  The latest one is like an eager colt with semi-cooperative legs, but with record-setting ambitions.   The sewing machine has been to the shop, and is humming like a Tesla.  Mari has made serious excavations into her quilting stash.  Our dining room table, which for years was a worktable in a bakery on Water Street in Decorah, Iowa, is a well-traveled table.  It acquired a Scandinavian-style trestle at our home in Decorah, moved with us to Tucson, then back to Iowa, again to Tucson, then to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and is back in Tucson, again.  It has, once again, been commandeered as a quilting table.   "I ha...

"Science" is both a very plain, and an extremely complex exercise.  Science is to try to understand the world, using our brains. Science forms hypotheses:  tentative explanations for something.  A hypothesis is an invitation to test an idea.  Right from the beginning, science admits that it is damned difficult to understand things, and that no idea should go untested. "What," science asks, "would show that this hypothesis is false?"  If someone, anyone, can think of a reason why the idea cannot be true, everyone groans and cheers.  They groan because they want to understand, and hoped they had found something.  They cheer because they do not want to support something that cannot be true. When a tentative proposal for how something works stands up well to the scrutiny of fact, it sometimes gets elevated--linguistically--and is called a theory.  A theory is just a hypothesis that has taken on all comers, and is still standing.  So we h...

There is nothing that dehydrates ones innards more thoroughly than paying bills, and negotiating with termite assassins--both of which I did this morning.  So, since I was out and about, anyway, after negotiating I spoke seriously to myself and decided to look for a brewery, not so much because I needed a brewery, but because I needed a brew.   I recalled reading reports about a fine, rustic brew pub on the south side of downtown.  I knew it was located in a nondescript building, but still I had trouble finding it.  I ended up parking across the street, seriously studying the faded signs on the "facade".  "Facade":  dare I be so grand?  But I had found it!  Not the name:  the name was on a water tank behind a large tree.  What indicated the location were two young women in shorts standing at a table outside.  There weren't any customers out there.  It was too hot.  They were getting away from customers.   The bee...

It was time to renew the pickup registration.  I went to the local DMV office.  You know the routine.  They gave me a number.  K692.  I sat with forty or fifty other people staring at a board, waiting.   Finally they announced my number for a hole in the wall in the other room. "Do you have your Emissions Report?", she asked me.  "No."  "You have to have that before you come here," she said.   She told me where the emissions testing site was:  on a frontage road in the middle of a construction zone.   Two hours later, I was back, again, and they gave me a new number:  K699.  Half an hour later, they called my new number, for a hole in the wall in the other room.   I did arithmetic as I walked.  "K699 minus K692 is K7," I calculated.  "One every seventeen minutes.  On the average."

Pretty exciting!  It is getting to the time of the year when it might rain, again. It rained last year.  In fact, on the day when we drove into town, on our move back from Minneapolis, it rained so hard that we could not get up the hillside to our house.  El Camino del Cerro--The Highway of the Hill--had so much water crossing it that we had to wait for the dry season to begin, an hour later.  I waited at the gas station. In the meantime, we have not really had any rain worth noting, but we have had snow.  I took Jao  outside, where a snowflake fell on him, and explained that there were places where the snowflake was several feet deep.  Ever since,  whenever I say "rain",  he has shrugged and given the look that says, "Oh, Jesus!  Another 'riding to school on a pony in a snowstorm' story".   But I am serene in the confidence that the monsoon season nears, again.  It says so right on the front page of the newspaper. ...

By a margin of six votes (8-2), there is now both evolution and climate change in Kansas.  The Board of Education has spoken with a commanding voice! Up until now, Kansas did not have climate change.  They had  only  weather; lots of it, much of it very hot or very cold.  And even their weather was pretty much something left over from Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska.  But now they have endorsed genuine, long-term climate change.   There are rumblings--pretty much unsubstantiated and cut from whole cloth (I have no idea what that means:  it is something dredged up from a very old mind)--that the Board plans to import as much weather as they can from San Diego.  Well, that makes sense!  I have been in Wichita.  San Diego weather is precisely what they need! And evolution!  Do not forget that evolution has now come to Kansas!  It will no longer be necessary for God to be blamed for new strains of flu, or for drug-res...

It isn't the warm weather that is the problem.  It is wanting, but not being able, to take a nip of the only sane and civilized remedy to hot weather that wears one down. Since we live out toward the edge of known civilization, in a hilly area that probably made the water district worry about pressure at the top of the hills, there is no city sewer system.  Twenty or thirty years ago, when these houses were built--and for that matter, still today--houses have septic tanks.  Everything goes out to the septic tank, where the roots from every plant within sight wait for raw nourishment.   Yesterday, our septic system refused to accept donations.  We tried those plastic bottles of battery acid, or whatever it is that Home Depot and Ace Hardware sell, but the system behaved just like the Republicans in the House of Representatives and refused to do anything except mutter and belch.   Today the plumber came.   "Where is the septic tank?" , he asked....

"Here!" , he said.   "If you don't mind, I'll use that!" Up until about then, the chair had been Mari's, for almost as long as there had been Mari.  The original finish had been nibbled away, and the original material had signs of a lifetime of intent and neglect, but that had been taken care of, not too many years ago.   All it lacked was a kid who could swing a leg up, and look around:  Jao.   "About right!" , he said.   "Are you through with that newspaper, over there?  I thought I might sit here and rock and kind of crumple it.  Fit right into this museum.  We don't have a front porch, do we?"

That is what I do whenever I can:  I drive across town to watch the Tucson Old Timers play baseball, three times a week, all year long.  I do not make it three times a week, but most of the time I do.  Once I was a member of the team:  now I am an emeritus.   "Why," I  regularly  ask myself, "do I drive for almost an hour, to stare through a cyclone fence three times a week?"  I have not asked the question long enough, or seriously enough, to give really good answers, but I do know these things: 1)  Baseball is a fine game!  It is not quite as complex as life itself, but it makes a fine analog.  It is a team game.  Nobody can play baseball all alone.  The best baseball player in the world--should he or she suddenly become a member of a team--cannot win a game alone, or for that matter, even play the game alone.  It takes teamwork.   Baseball is not like rolling a ball down a wooden alley.  It is no...

We've got our work cut out for us now! Everyone knows that John Boehner is a god-awful Speaker of the House, and that almost anyone else would be better, but now his House colleagues have revealed that God wants John right where he is!  Oh, Lordy, Lordy! As it is reported, "Several Republicans, after a night of prayer, said God told them to spare the speaker."  Even so, quite a few Republicans did not listen to God, but John edged back into place as the House Blockage. It does, in fact, cause some of us to tremble, tremble, tremble, to realize that God is making his almighty and all-wise will known in ways that practically only Moses or St. Paul, Mohammad or Joseph Smith might have claimed, up until now, but I suppose that perilous times require perilous methods.  I will be the last to question the wisdom of the Almighty, using the Republican Party to accomplish all his works and ways, because they have a solid record of doing nothing useful, but we all know that G...

We have added a jib to our house; something to haul up at the bow, so that when the monsoons come we can compete. My long-term goal is to cut down all the trees in the back yard, and get up a proper spinaker.  Our roof will be in Oklahoma before the sun goes down.