R Blog

The First World War

W.W.I is not a war that interests Americans. World War Two is our favorite war. But W.W.I is extremely important to our history and it offers lessons about war, diplomacy and politics we haven’t learned yet. But, even more, it is poignant in the immediacy it brings to our reactions to the rising casualty toll in Iraq. What value do we place on an individual life? How many lives are we willing to sacrifice to support the ideology of a faction of our country?  How long are we willing to stand by our government? And, what does it mean to “support the troops?” To date we have 1500 dead and 11,000 wounded in action and an unreported number of soldiers injured and ill as the result of non-combat situations. Of course millions died in W.W.I. Thousands more suffered grievous wounds and mental injury. Shell shock was one of the big stories of The First World War and its aftermath. The carnage was incredible. Thousands and thousands killed in single battles. Battleships sunk with two thousand men lost in seconds. Trenches across the breadth of France filled with mud and soldiers for four long years. Daily bombardments. Poison gas. Huge warships that could launch one ton shells at another ship miles away. I seem to read a lot of books about war or which have war or the military as their background. Recently I’ve read several books about The First World War—The Great War. The war to end all wars. One of these books, The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell tells the story of the trenches, their impact on the men who lived in them and the sources of their motivation and ability to persevere. Fussell is a brilliant scholar and writer who gets inside the heads of the W. W. I soldier. (Read a more extensive discussion of The Great War and Modern Memory here on
Bookends.
The second book covers the naval history of W.W. I. Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie is a gripping, exciting account of the naval war which, for the first time, involved the huge new battleships—the dreadnoughts. (Read more about Castles of Steel  here on Bookends, my other website.)
These two W.W.I nonfiction works will give you a good overview of that war by land and by sea.

iPod, she Pod, you Pod, we Pod

Certain to become its own verb like “google” and “tivo”, I have begun working on a conjugation having, along with my girlfriend Linda, joined the ranks of the 22,000,000 persons with little white strings dangling from our ears. The iPod is so amazing that one should buy one just to reward the brains and vision that created its dazzling design and overwhelming technology. At this moment, lacking a firewire, I am loading our son and daughter-in-law’s CD collection into iTunes on our old Powerbook one CD at a time. From there we import the songs to the iPod in a process that is nearly seamless. It is a bit labor intensive to do it this way but I am deriving other benefits. My computer is on the third floor, some twenty-three steps from the first floor. With each album taking about twenty minutes to load on my G-3, I figure I can do more than twenty albums a day. Twenty trips to the top floor is more steps than we took the other day to climb the Bunker Hill Monument. iPodexercise. It’s not necessary to load all these CDs yourself. You can hire it out. Call a company like iRip, they send you a special box. You select your CDs and mail them with your iPod to iRip and for about a $1 per CD they will take care of loading your iPod for you. This could get expensive if you have a large collection. Besides, loading them yourself keeps you in touch with the breadth and depth of Apple’s accomplishment. You can do a number of interesting things with the iPod. We bought the 30gb iPod Photo which will also warehouse our digital photos for quick viewing or playing on our TV. We also added an iTalk microphone that attaches to the top of the unit. This turns your iPod into a tape recorder. The suggestion is that you can use it to take dictation, make verbal notes, etc. We actually got it to record baby noises and baby talk. It works great. Some are concerned about the explosion of listening devices. Political commentator Andrew Sullivan, a self-confessed iPod cult member, is worried and wrote about it in the Sunday Times  asking the question,
“Does the proliferation of white wired ones forebode the end of society?” Recently, he reports, he forgot to take his iPod on a trip. At first, “Panic. But then something else. I noticed the rhythms of others again, the sound of the airplane, the opinions of the cabby, the small social cues that had been obscured before. I noticed how others related to each other. And I felt just a little bit connected again. And a little more aware. Try it. There's a world out there. And it has a soundtrack all its own.”
Well, yeah. But not everyone goes around plugged in all the time. And, besides, I don’t wish to hear the sound of an airplane again as long as I live. It is unbelievably cool that you can have a huge library of music, books and personal recordings in your shirt pocket, easily retrievable and playable anywhere. How great is it? Before the day is out I will have captured a nearly complete collection of Beatles albums. A hard day’s night, but worth it. Around here they’re calling me grandpod. Or, my street name—gPod.

Wankers of the Week

Using the least vulgar definition of a wanker that is, “a detestable person,” let us consider three nominees. First there is Barry Bonds. Judged by many to be the greatest baseball player of all times who it is alleged used steroids, had a mistress (in addition to a wife) for nine years and laundered cash to avoid paying income tax. None of these things may be true. Time will tell. But, in the meantime, Bonds is complaining that the media has brought him down.  It’s their fault. They were out to get him and now they’ve done it by, one presumes, reporting the statements of others from court cases and grand jury testimony. Bonds has not denied culpability. He just whines. And this is what qualifies him as a wanker. In his most detestable display he asks a TV cameraman to widen his shot during an interview to show his fifteen year old son so that the public can see the pain the media (not he) has caused his family.
We can quickly move to Mr. Tom DeLay, Republican House Majority Leader, an all-American wanker whose recent pontificating on the Terri Schiavo case brought tears to his own eyes. This week the LA Times reports that when DeLay’s father was on his deathbed, (but still alive), The Hammer, as he is known in Congress, agreed with other family members to pull the plug. “A spokesman for DeLay says this was a different situation. "The only thing keeping her alive is the food and water we all need to survive. His father was on a ventilator and other machines to sustain him," said Dan Allen, DeLay's press aide. There were also these similarities: Both stricken patients were severely brain-damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared from being kept alive by artificial means. And neither of them had a living will.”
I thought DeLay believed in erring on the side of life. Wanker.
Our final wanker is Maurice Greenberg, for many years perhaps the most powerful and influential executive in the insurance industry. Mr. Greenberg doesn’t know when to quit. He is now 80 and still hanging onto power. Next week he is supposed to be deposed by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. Greenberg, who is thought to have manipulated earnings, is apparently considering taking the 5th. His board is suggesting they will fire him if he does. The value of his company, AIG, has declined 45 billion dollars since Spitzer began his probe. See Insurance Fraud. There are too many wankers running round loose.

Detective Fiction 101

Book marketers like genres. They love to talk about niches. If your book doesn’t land in a niche, it falls between the cracks—forgotten; unread. That’s why detective fiction is so popular with booksellers. They know what shelf to put it on. A deeper question is: why is it so popular with readers? One answer is that a lot of it is pretty damn good. Really. Some of the best stuff being written is in crime novels. Of course, many of them are trash and unreadable. I don’t like to read bad books. They are a waste of time. But you can find good crime novels by the box full. So where does one start to sample really good detective fiction? I have some interesting suggestions which you can read  here on my Bookends weblog. Avid crime fiction readers may not have heard of Inspectors Frost and Ghote, two very unique, effective and entertaining creations of British writers R. D. Wingfield and H. R. F. Keating, authors whose only trait in common is a desire to be known by their initials.

Don't Play With Guns

Snopes.com reports on a story that a DEA agent accidently shot himself while giving a lecture to a class of school children. Make sure to watch the chilling video as the agent continues his lecture and attempts to use his "accident" to make a point. The video link is in the Snopes.com article. Thanks to Lewrockwell.com for the link. Don't know whether to laugh or cry about this one.

How to Read the NY Times

The last time I read the New York Times everyday for an extended period was 1968, my last year of active duty. I had a boring job with nothing to do. Part of my job was to supervise two NCO’s and a few airmen who also had nothing to do. The New York Times was a lifesaver. It took all morning to read. Since I was the captain, I got first dibs. I would begin at 8:30am with a cup of coffee and read every word. The big paper would take me up until around 11am when I could break for lunch. Mondays were particularly good as we had Sunday’s huge edition as well as the Monday paper. I have always been fond of the NY Times for helping me through that long, long year. I still check their on-line edition each day. But the on-line version is nothing like the hard copy. For one thing you can’t see those full page ads, the broadsheets. These ads, the full page ones, are the most interesting part of the paper. Some days are better than others. Today, for example, there is only one full page ad which touts Farrah Fawcett’s show debuting this evening. Last week my favorite full page ad was for a conservation group which is trying to drum up public support to force the new owner of the historic Plaza Hotel to save the public rooms from his planned condo development. The full page ads tell an interesting story through the week. On Sunday, of course, there are broadsheets for the new movies and for department stores—Macy’s, Lord and Taylor, etc. A full page ad in the Times starts at around $24,000. Four color process can increase this into the mid thirty thousand range. You have to be serious to spend this kind of dough. Telephone companies must have lots of money. The broadsheets often advertise cellphones. Yesterday, for example, Cingular touted the fact that they have the largest free mobile to mobile community. I was surprised to learn that there are 48 million of us Cingular/ATT types calling each other for free. I wonder how long this will be allowed to continue? You can almost imagine the top executives of Cingular brainstorming ways to renege on that deal. Not to be outdone, Sprint has an eye-catching watercolor rendering of a golf fairway and green. They are bragging up their partnership with the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) and claiming that, “With Sprint, business is beautiful.” I didn’t quite see how golf and cellphones mix though I have played with people who talked on the phone while I was trying to hit and that isn’t so beautiful. The nonprofit ads are often the most interesting. The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund is soliciting donations with their ad because they want to give $11,000 to each spouse and $5,000 to each dependent of fallen heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan. They report that 1000 children have been left without a mother or father. $11,000 doesn’t seem like much though I understand it’s more than the government benefit. Financially, it turns out to have been better to have been a fallen hero at the World Trade Center than a dead soldier in a Bush war. The dependents of 911 heroes are collecting sums in the millions. Another nonprofit is Water Advocates whose full page ad exhorts the reader to do something about the world’s bad water. The headline in large letters is, “I Thirst.” Then they explain that, “Each day water-related diseases kill 3,900 of the world’s children.” Water Advocates is dedicated to increasing American support for safer water world wide. The NY Times bought an ad for itself, or maybe it was free. They want college students to “Network to enrich your college experience.” To do this you go to http://www.nytimes.com/college. Pharmaceutical companies have huge ad budgets. GlaxoSmithKline, a large pharma says, “Breathe easier for free.” You take their asthma control test then ask your doctor if Advair is right for you? Then, maybe, you can take advantage of a free trial offer. Another pill tease. UBS  (wealth management, global asset management, investment bank) asks us in their full pager to “Imagine a global financial firm with the heart and soul of a two-person organization.” Tried for a couple minutes, but wasn’t able to do this. And, finally, a broadsheet almost demands that we read, “The unforgettable new novel by the author of Enduring Love and Atonement. Ian McEwan. Saturday. A magnificent novel.” Now that’s an author who is getting some support. They’ll have to sell about 10,000 books just to pay for the ad.
If your eyes are tired you can still gets lots of information from those great big full page ads in the NY Times.

Boston’s Freedom Trail

Boston is pretty smart. They built the Freedom Trail, a two and half mile meandering that leads from Boston Common past historic buildings of the Revolution, Paul Revere’s house, famous old churches and cemeteries, Bunker Hill and ends at the USS Constitution. The trail takes the guess work out of touring and provides incentive to finish the whole tour. We walked the entire route today and then some on our first ever visit to downtown Boston. Boston has been missing from our repertoire of Eastern Seaboard cities. We’ve done NYC, Philly, Providence and DC. And now Boston. It’s a bit difficult for Linda and I to do a long walking tour together as we have conflicting interests. I am an exterior tourist. She leans toward the interior. Today we were able to affect a compromise and strike a happy balance, enjoying the variety of architectural facades while also experiencing selected interiors—a Starbucks for soy chai, a Godiva’s Chocolate for the aromas, an Orvis to see if the clothes look as good in person as in the catalogue and a Crabtree and Evelyn “because I never get to go into one.”
I love public transportation, something the West Coast sorely lacks. It was a real treat, as we started the morning, to walk a block from N and K’s house to a train station and climb aboard. A real conductor wearing a blue conductor suit and a conductor hat with an old fashion coin dispenser strapped around his waste sold us our tickets ($3.25 one way). We had our choice of riding forwards or backwards as the train cars had half the seats facing one way and half facing the other. The seats were comfy vinyl with three on one side of the aisle and room for two on the other. There were coat hooks and luggage racks. The cars were clean but the windows appeared to have been sandblasted. It was hard to see. But then, train tracks never run through scenic areas. North Station shares space with the Fleet Center where the Celtics play. Very convenient to go to an event there when residing in Belmont or other towns along the MBTA line.
We took a right turn out of the station and headed for Beacon Hill where Senator Kerry lives. We didn’t see him but it’s a really nice neighborhood. Tight streets with brick row houses stacked against each other. Resident parking permits required from 8AM to 8PM. Parking is at a premium in Boston. On the backside of Beacon Hill is the Boston Common, a large park with squirrels, playground and ice rink. There’s a visitor information booth and a guy in a Colonial costume standing outside tried to convince us to take his 3/4 mile, 90 minute walking tour. Twelve bucks. He claimed it would be great. But we decided that he was moving too slow and might tell us more than we wanted to know. We pressed on, finding the red stripe on the sidewalk that led us towards the Old State House, the Park Street Church and the Old City Hall where Linda had her photo taken by a donkey statue.
The red painted stripe alternated with a double row of red bricks inlayed into the sidewalk. Boston is recovering from a long, snowy winter and the red line was obscured in places. Occasionally we lost the trail but soon picked it up again. We  arrived at the Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the historic Boston marketplace that has been revitalized into a shopping and food circus. It was lunchtime and it was busy. The food booths offered a wide variety of choices. Business people were there for lunch as well as tourists. We chose the Bombay Club and picked up somosas and masala dosa and admired the snappy red polos they wore with the Bombay Club logo, the head of a temple dancer offering a namaste. An excellent bargain a $13 which included a mango lassi. It was nice enough to sit outside and after lunch were pleased to find clean restrooms. We plodded on across a construction area that will be the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Boston has a huge public works project underway called the Big Dig. They are putting what was  an elevated highway cutting through the downtown completely underground. The space formerly occupied by the elevated highway will now become the Rose Kennedy Greenway and a 30 acre park will wind through the city. On the other side of the soon to be greenway is the Old North Church, Old South Church district aka the North End which based on the names of the restaurants there appears to be an Italian neighborhood. From here we walked across the Charlestown Bridge and the Charles River to Charlestown, sight of famous Bunker Hill where the Battle of Bunker Hill wasn’t actually fought.
It was fought on Breed’s Hill... too confusing. Read a book or something to get the details. However, there is an obelisk commemorating the battle operated by the National Park Service. It’s 294 steps to the top and we made it even after walking four miles to get there. Old Ironsides, the famous three masted heavy frigate—the USS Constitution—was closed, so I have to go back. We caught the 3PM train after hoofing it to North Station and by 3:20PM were relaxing at home. Excellent exterior touring with only just a touch of retail walking. A very satisfying day.

Farrah Fawcett: Carved and Starved

The full page ad in the New York Times Magazine today caught my eye.
“She’s no angel,” it proclaims above a photo of very youthful looking, very skinny Farrah Fawcett with her classic mop of curly blond hair. Farrah is wrapped in a slinky shift with her hands pressed together in a namaste greeting. Trailing behind her is an angry looking devil’s tail cuz she’s no angel. Reality shows are here to stay...for awhile longer apparently. Farrah is the latest entry. Reality TV isn’t exactly new. We’ve had The Real World for almost ten years now. What is kind of new is celebrity reality TV. The Osbournes probably got it started. Anna Nicole Smith jumped on the bandwagon. Kirstie Alley has a quasi reality show capitalizing on the fact that she is now horribly fat. So, Farrah is getting in on the craze and letting TVLand follow her around with a camera for our viewing enjoyment. “Superstar, mother, daughter. lover, artist, cook. She’s many things that will surprise you—but she’s definitely no angel. Everyday with Farrah is extraordinary, and now you can take a peak into her intriguing adventures.” That’s what the PR says. You can actually go here and view clips from the first two shows and make a determination as to whether or not her adventures are intriguing. I think it’s intriguing that a 58 year old actress carved and starved enough to make time stop at say, age 29, and who really hasn’t had much actual show business success since Charlie’s Angels (“she’s no angel”; get it?) and that famous poster, is able to maintain herself as a celebrity and household name. This shows the power of prime time television and press agents. I think it’s also intriguing that in several of the scenes we see Farrah at table but never eating. I don’t think it’s intriguing that she is back together with an overweight, always irritating Ryan O’Neal who does look his age and then some. On the other hand you can look at Ryan and imagine what Farrah ought to look like if she weren’t carved and starved.

More on Dog Poop

And while I’m on the subject of dog poop I feel compelled to report that today I was able to conduct field trials on the Mutt Mitt a bag designed for the express purpose of picking up doggy doo. The Audubon Sanctuary has a Mutt Mitt dispenser and I decided to try one out. Thank you Audubon. On today’s walk there were three fecal deposits. Two by Zonk and one by Daphne. I was able to use Mutt Mitts on two of them. On the third load I fumbled in my pocket through the collection of assorted plastic bags and found a Dogipot, a biodegradable bag that, up to now has been my favorite. I have enjoyed using the Dogipot on our visits to see N and K because of its toughness and consistency. Rarely does one find a hole in a Dogipot. The Dogipot is a nice. dependable bag but it has one very unnerving defect. Dogipot comes on a roll, like produce bags. And, very much like produce bags it is often hard to find which end to open (even with large arrows pointing the way) and, finding that end, difficult to find entry into the bag. N has developed a technique of blowing the Dogipot open. I am unable to do this and have to lick my fingers to squeeze the plastic edges apart. Frankly, licking my fingers just before picking up the poo poo is something I would rather not do. Enter the Mutt Mitt. It has two ply plastic construction. That is, the Mutt Mitt is twice as strong as Dogipot or a produce bag. And Mutt Mitt has a cleverly designed cuff around the bottom of the bag with two and a half ply construction. An extra half a ply where it really counts. The manufacturer describes this feature as a “patented gusseted bottom.” I have to tell you that I love the patented gusseted bottom. It gives one so much additional protection against the dreaded brownish finger. Whatever the cost, the patented gusseted bottom is worth it. Add to this the two quart capacity of the Mutt Mitt and one is ready to follow even the largest dog into the park or woodlands. A case of Mutt Mitts (900 units) is only $62. And their 100% cotton t-shirt is a bargain, and a conversation piece, at only thirteen bucks. (Anyone with a serious interest in doggy poop bags from around the world should check out this site. )

Belmont, Massachusetts

Belmont, Massachusetts has a motto. It’s “The Town of Homes.” Not very jazzy, but appropriate. We’ve walked for miles around this small town on our two trips here and one must admit there are homes everywhere. Nice homes. Lots of two story colonials with white as the prevalent color. The streets meander. There is no grid and Belmont seems to have more than one business district. We are located on the side of Belmont Hill, a low ridge that rises up from the Charles River flood plain onto a plateau that leads to Concord, Lexington and Carlisle where This Old House is doing their big project this year. Architecture dominates our setting on the hillside.
First there is a view of the Boston Skyline five or six miles distant. Down the hill is the Gothic looking town hall and other municipal buildings including the police station. The train station is a short distance away providing quick access to the city. In Belmont Center there are five or six banks, a fire station, pharmacy, Filene’s department store, a handful of restaurants including Starbucks, an independent bookstore, toy store, women’s clothing, realtors, dry cleaners, hair dressers and assorted professionals. Belmont Center serves the homes. There are no tourist stops. On the other side of the train tracks (both sides of the tracks are nice in Belmont) there’s a library, Post office, more offices and churches and a small town square. On the hillside, old frame houses are scattered randomly on side streets and along Concord Road. This is a fairly posh neighborhood. The Governor of Massachusetts lives up here somewhere.  The narrow track that runs uphill is a “private lane.” I think this means “unmaintained.” Lots of chuck holes. Along the way lives a lethargic old dog who lounges outdoors in all weather on a doggy mattress. Just past old dog is a black, cocker-looking thing with a bad temper who lays in wait for poor leashed D. who is frustrated twice a day in her thwarted desire to rip that black dog into little puppy pieces. There are two connector trails, walking easements that get us from one neighborhood to another without having to cross busy Concord Road. The second one takes us through a vacant lot to the entrance to  Belmont Day School a K-8 private school which doesn’t advertise its tuition on the website. Apparently, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. We often walk through the school grounds at pickup time when the mother/chauffeurs line up in a wonderful collection of new SUVs and vans to collect the kids. The campus backs up on the woods owned by the McLean Psychiatric Hospital which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. They have many, many acres of woods and fields above their large campus. Apparently they have not always invited the public to walk and ski through their grounds but now they are courting the favor of Belmont citizens in a desire to get approval for expansion. After wandering the trails of McLean we can cross Concord Road and make our way to the Audubon Sanctuary, 87 acres of “urban oasis” with two and half more miles of trails. The Audubon has a big sign asking visitors to pick up dog crap. They even have a dispenser that distributes very nice plastic pick up bags and a garbage can for disposal. Yesterday there was a fresh pile of poop right next to the sign. We are very good about picking up the poop and leave the house with a pocket full of plastic bags—shopping bags, produce bags, bags that cover the newspaper. Even special biodegradable dog poop bags. A walk with dogs is all about poop. Will they poop? How much will they poop? Where will they poop? Will we have enough bags? How far will we have to carry the poop? There is a technique to picking up the poop, turning the bag inside out and double bagging it without getting anything on your fingers. Snow adds to the problem because you end up with poop filled snow balls and, thus, a bag of ice to tote for miles. We can return downhill the way we came or loop around through an even fancier neighborhood with large house on another private lane, muddy and full of holes. This route takes us past several large estates and back into town. On the return trip the dogs, having pulled me for several miles, are now calm, no longer making gagging noises as they strain against their choke chains. They are glad to be going home where they will begin waiting for their next walk in the Town of Homes.