In his post for yesterday (23 November 2009), O‘ahu blogger Ian Lind, among other things, relates a story about how reporters who used to work for a newspaper in Seattle are having a tough time finding paying jobs in journalism.

Lind is himself a ‘former’ journalist who used to do reporting for one of Honolulu’s two major newspapers. Well, they used to be major newspapers. One of them is now a tabloid, while the other, though it’s folded like a traditional newspaper, is about half as big and is printed on toilet tissue. So it’s no surprise that the travails of career journalists, and indeed of journalism as a career, have gotten his attention.

But it’s not like these travails come as a surprise to Quilly and me.

Y’see, both of us, had interest in, even dreams of, careers as reporters, once upon a time.

Quilly’s tale is hers to tell, if and as she should choose to tell it. Suffice to say here that an editor sent Quilly out for an interview, and when that interview didn’t yield gossip that would allow the editor to crucify the interviewee on his paper’s pages, facts be damned, he sacked Quilly, and a dream ended.

Oh – did I mention that this took place in the context of a university course in journalism?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s dream was broadcast journalism, specifically radio – television requiring that one’s appearance doesn’t instantly turn viewers to stone, thus depriving the station of advertising revenue. It was not a serious enough dream to displace the prime directive – an academic career in the sciences – but it was an itch to be scratched in the music, news, and sports departments of campus radio stations. On occasion, it even provided some minimum-wage, graveyard-shift income.

And it came to pass that the campus radio station of a Division I university in a major market chose (and obtained permission) to broadcast home basketball games, live. For one glorious season, an amoeba provided color commentary on men’s games – including one contest with Wooden U. where the crowd was so loud, it was impossible to hear oneself think, never mind speak.

That same amoeba was also the play-by-play “voice” of women’s basketball. I studied charts and stats, interviewed coaches and players, and was having a blast.

Then, at the end of the year, the team collapsed, embroiled in catfights between players and coaches, with (if I remember correctly) intimations of physical wrongdoing on the part of at least one coach.

And I was blindsided. Heard exactly nothing about it until the story broke on “real” media.

Unlike in Quilly’s case, no program director descended on me, irate that I didn’t ‘get the dirt’. None had to: I sacked myself. It dawned on me, finally, that I wasn’t doing any kind of job as a reporter (though in my defense, this was campus radio, essentially a club, and I was at the time supposed to be 100% engaged in getting my Ph.D.), and that I wasn’t getting any pay for being a shill. Another dream ended.

Six months later, I left that major-market city. And, except for occasional interviews in my capacity as a working scientist, I never again stepped in front of a microphone.

Both of us, Quilly and I, had run afoul of the ‘dirty laundry syndrome’. Journalism died for us because neither was willing to chase after the gossip, the racier the better, that is the only stuff for which most readers/listeners/viewers will pay. (Oh – did I mention that both of our stories took place 25-30 years ago?)

One of the laid-off journalists quoted by Ian Lind wrote:

There are very few opportunities to do the sort of important work that the old [newspaper] invested in, because it is expensive and unsexy. The point that it is important to society has become irrelevant.

On reading this, I could only think that here is a baby boomer, one of the aging children who grew up thinking the media is the message and are only now figuring out that media and message are not about what the messenger wishes to say, but about what the customer wishes to buy.

As you most likely know, Quilly’s blog is partially for hire. The sponsored posts she writes bring in a few pennies here and there. Not long ago, she was presented with an offer that would pay her more than usual. She investigated – and discovered that the opportunity was linked to a full-time blogger who runs nearly 30 sites.

All of them pornography.

When challenged on this, the blogger responded (I paraphrase):

These sites make money. If you’re serious about making a living writing online, this is where you need to be.

One begins to understand how societies throughout history have moved to ban activities such as this.

Such bans provide journalists something profitable to write about that isn’t T&A.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In the center of the Upper Campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa, there is a green space. A quadrangle of pedestrian walkways canopied by rain trees, known as McCarthy Mall.
Every hour on the hour, when classes are in session, a human tide washes over the footpaths, a tide of students passing from lecture to lecture, of faculty passing from meeting to meeting. For ten, for fifteen minutes, the tide is at the full, then it abates, leaving the mall empty but for its trees, and in peace.

Not even the wrack of the human waves is visible during these ebbs. Not too long ago, as budget cuts threatened to cancel classes and terminate faculty, chalk scrawlings mussed the rigid order of the pavement, calling the partisans to arms. Now, however, though the finances are no better and none of the arguments has been resolved, the chalk is gone, and the only messages on McCarthy Mall advertise the reggae bands performing at the weekend campus concert.

As the noon hour approaches, a solitary woman appears at the Koko Head (east) end of the mall, near the library and the cafeteria, major traffic points. She plants a sandwich board in the middle of the principal walkway, and takes her station next to it. She is short, slender, slightly stooped, very gray, a woman likely nearer 70 years of age than 60.

The papers and posters on her sandwich board proclaim socialism. Socialism as it was when it galvanized entire student bodies on campuses throughout the United States, students who vigorously debated the ills of their own political system and the benefits of systems not their own, and often were sufficiently convinced that they knew better than their elders that they would drop in on the administrators of the universities that they were attending and commandeer their offices for awhile.

Students who were young when this woman was young.

She will speak with you if you show an interest in her or her message. Every once in awhile, a person will stop. An old friend, judging from the clothes and graying baldness, or a first-year student, judging from her clothes and the trapped! expression on her face.

But most of the time she spends alone in the noontime tide. Practically everyone rushes on past, ignoring her melodies or perhaps not hearing them, her folk tunes on vinyl drowned out by the ska and techno-pop on their iPods.

I watch her from the library veranda, and as I watch, I hear songs for aging children.

This is one.

Lyrics

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

We were making spaghetti sauce, and had gotten to the point of adding the seasonings when we discovered that we didn’t have all the herbs we needed. It was late and the stores were closed, so I went next door to try and borrow some …

Well, no.

What I’m really borrowing is the time since around 9 HST on the morning of 26 October, when Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba came within inches of becoming a somewhat large and rather messy hood ornament. That car pretty much had me dead to rights. And I don’t mean the 300-pages-and-a-book-deal, Kim Harrison / Charlaine Harris kind of dead, either.

If you live in southeast O‘ahu and wish to get to Chaminade University or the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa by bicycle, you have a choice of routes.

You can take Waialae Avenue. Or …

You can take Waialae Avenue.

That’s because, between the mountains of southeastern O‘ahu and the deep blue sea, there is room for exactly one east-west road, the Kalaniana‘ole Highway. Which is almost as wide as its name. That one road morphs abruptly into the eastern end of O‘ahu’s (ahem) Interstate Highway System, from which bicycles are verboten. From this trap, there is but a single escape.

Waialae Avenue.

Which passes through a shopping mall, then rises 160 feet in two stages to the crest of a hill, which marks the beginning of a mile-long business district, at the end of which are the Chaminade and UH-Mânoa campuses along with two private high schools.

City planners, of course, recognized the needs of the bike riders who had no choice but to take this route to some of the busiest places in town, and designed the road with wide berms for the required riding lanes. Right?

Silly malihini.

The berms, where they exist at all, are narrow and full of potholes, drains, and other obstacles. Bicycles are, according to the rules of the road, vehicles just like buses, semis, and Hummers, so the sidewalks are legally off-limits. Not that it matters, because, at several places along Waialae Avenue, there are no sidewalks. Including one location, with neither berm nor sidewalk, in which traffic coming from the left (me) must merge with traffic coming from the right – at 60 mph straight off the (ahem) Interstate. All of this at a 10% grade going uphill.

The sidewalks that are in place are frequently narrow, even rougher than the street pavement (sometimes, they are mere dirt tracks) and are full of pedestrians and cyclists who either have never heard of the road rules or choose to ignore them. Pedestrians have died from being run over by bicyclists on sidewalks. Crede expertum: I lost a scientific colleague in precisely this way.

I am told that, in the vicinity of the UH-Mânoa campus, special road rules legalize bicycle operation on the sidewalks. See “pedestrians have died”, supra. My bike remains on the street, riding with the flow of traffic, like the vehicle it is in law and in fact. And where I am safer among the cars than among the heedless riders and wanderers on the sidewalks.

At least, that’s what I thought I was.

Have I mentioned yet that Honolulu is officially acknowledged to have the worst rush-hour traffic in the United States?

Which probably made the driver of the car Koko Head (east)-bound late for class. He – I know it was a ‘he’, I saw the whites of his eyes – saw a tiny gap in ‘Ewa (west)-bound car traffic, and gunned his blue sedan into a left turn across that traffic, into the Chaminade University access road.

And straight at Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, who had already entered the intersection and was legally entitled to the right of way.

I believe the ‘defensive driving’ program instructors call this kind of thing “dead right”.

I still don’t know how we avoided contact. Some combination of me pedaling for dear life (duh) and his fancy wheel turning. Whatever it was, he’s not having to defend himself against a charge of vehicular homicide.

And I’m writing this blog entry on borrowed time.

I suppose somebody will ask what I’m doing on a bicycle at all, never mind on such a hazardous route as Waialae Avenue. Can’t I afford to drive?

Well, no, I can’t. On a practical level or a philosophical one. You may remember, I once figured out it would cost me around US$14 a day to own a car if it never left the driveway. Last I knew, Hawai‘i was in a recession so bad, the state has had to close the public schools. So how is it that all these people can afford to drive?

And I have written that all efforts to thwart anthropogenic global warming are futile unless we start by slashing our use of resources, not by some token Hopen Hagen handwaving amount, but by three-fourths of present-day levels. I wonder if my blue sedan driver is one of those young people who enthusiastically attends “save the planet” rallies, then gets into his car – by himself – and drives home.

Besides. We keep hearing about how fat and unfit We the People are. It has always bothered me that people of a certain lifestyle – including many folk with whom I have worked – drive themselves back and forth from their jobs and then go off to some fancy gym or club “for exercise”. If I need exercise, I get as much of it as possible as part of the job or the commute. Anything else is rubbing it into the faces of those who have no choice about the “exercise” bit; they do it if they wish to eat.

So, in the morning, I will be back on the bicycle, back on Waialae Avenue. If I’m going to be on borrowed time anyway, I may as well see how much my credit will stand.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

On this date in 2001 in America, our greed caught up with us.

The first time this decade, that is.

I don’t think I need to tell you about the second time. Unless of course you’re one of these people who’s driving a Lexus down Honolulu’s Kal Highway, instead of pushing a bicycle and collecting unemployment while the collecting’s good, lest the Governor People decide that unemployment benefits are putting too much of a burden on Lexus drivers and cancel the program.

Once upon a time, I’d go out with a bugle and play “Taps” in remembrance of when the first World Trade Center tower was struck. I won’t be doing that here. That would be 02:46 Hawaii time. The wee small hours of the morning. The neighbors would beat me up, smear me with pork blood, strap me to a leaky wa‘a, and consign me to the sharks.

I vividly remember sitting in a church on the evening following the 9/11 attacks, and asking that we examine ourselves, to remove the logs from our own eyes before we talked about the specks in anyone else’s. And I was shouted down. By everyone. Including the liberal pastor.

I vividly remember the rally in the local YMCA the following weekend. When I saw Konrad Lorenz’s militant enthusiasm up close and personal, and felt, with profound fear, as if I were witnessing Hitler returning to life.

We the People of the Untied States of Amerika chose not to pay attention to how our avaricious sucking up of the world’s resources had made us a target. We embraced, instead, the concept of revenge. Of racking up massive deficits to fund that revenge. Of inventing massive schemes to rack up profits and pay off the deficits.

Derivatives, for instance.

We permitted the transformation of our airports into cattle drives and recycling centers. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by prancing idols and dancing stars from the deterioration of our infrastructure, the politicization of what used to be minimally-partial sources of information (e.g. the sciences), and the dissolution of our politics into armed camps, Rush …

I have squandered my resistance on a pocketful of mumbles such are promises. – Paul Simon, “The Boxer”

On this 11th of September, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 3000 points from its low point in March 2009. Sighs of relief from the Lexus drivers.

Meanwhile, the Internet is flooded with calls for donations from someone, anyone, to save local and university libraries.

One American in ten, near enough, is out of a job. Only massive mortgaging of the futures of our grandchildren – on top of the massive mortgaging already incurred in the name of vendetta – has prevented that from becoming one American in five. So far.

Debate over ways to fix the national disgrace that is our current health care “system” focuses, not on facts and figures, but on soundbites and video clips from demagogues on all sides, screaming at each other. Because the demagogues know that real facts and figures will drive Us to prancing idols and dancing stars, while screaming will rally the troops (see “militant enthusiasm”, supra).

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. – Abraham Lincoln, 1838

So – how long before we take the gun from our own heads?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba was attracted to science from an early age. One of my first memories – I might have been seven – was announcing to my mother, as we were sitting in the parking lot of our favorite corner store, “I’m going to be a research scientist.”

Today, I’m a research scientist. Gaudeamus igitur, eh? I mean, how many seven-year-old physicians and lawyers were truck drivers and file clerks when they turned 40? Rather more than became physicians and lawyers, I reckon.

“Be careful what you request in life”, the cliché goes. “You might get it.”

That seven-year-old research scientist also spent a lot of time in the woods. Alone. Picking berries, catching toads, sniffing flowers, looking for snakes and salamanders under rocks and old boards, and being annoyed (not to mention freaked out) when he got ants instead.

Why alone?

Because people scared me.

They still do.

Nature is predictable. It’s safe. The mayflowers would always bloom in May, unless it had been an early spring. It was a challenge to find them, and a delight to succeed. The black-colored blueberry bushes were always in a patch next to the Indian fern where the fire trail turned into the woods, and they would always have their berries in early August, unless the bushes were too far under the trees, in which case there would be no berries. The salamanders could only be found under boards that were damp but not rotten, and they would be gone by first frost.

People, especially kids my age but many adults too, were unpredictable, dangerous. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to go for walks in the woods to look for ring-necked snakes with me, though most of them didn’t. It was because, at any moment, without warning, they could transform from smiling companion to snarling monster, demanding to have things that could not be had (usually, that week’s fad toy) or demanding to do things that were forbidden, like running around yelling, or playing poker for money, or deciding that the greatest possible graduation gift is a hit of cocaine. Do as we want, they announced, or you’re mean, or chicken, or (worst of all) boring.

Mean, chicken, boring children tend to go off by themselves for walks in the woods to commune with the box turtles. When there still were box turtles.

Nature, I found, doesn’t try to manipulate you. It just is. Pay close enough attention, and you can discover what each part is and how it works within the system. Giving you information that no amount of bullying will make untrue.

And when I discovered that there was a whole group of people, the scientists who (the advertising brochures said) put their emotions aside to discuss, dispassionately, the workings of Nature, judging your interpretations of it, not on the eloquence of your oratory or the caliber of your handguns, but on your mastery of the data you present – well, I said “Sign me up, that’s for me!” …

This morning (31 August 2009), a colleague sent around a series of discussions published by leaders in the field of organismal evolution, one of the areas in which I work. It was immediately clear that there was nothing dispassionate in the tenor of these discussions, and, in some cases, there was noting resembling data either. It was a bunch of grown men calling each other mean, chicken, or boring. And meaning it, if one accepts the accompanying note that says “they hated each other”. I have seen enough towering egos in action, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, to accept it.

And with one of these discussions, there was another note, which acknowledged that one of these men was a “first-class debater” – so good at his trade that “he doesn’t lose”.

Now, I can relate to not wishing to lose. I do not do losing very well. People who mean well keep trying to remind me that baseball players who fail at the plate 70% of the time wind up in the Hall of Fame. I want 50%, or I will be angry with myself for not taking enough batting practice, not studying enough films of the pitchers, not ingesting the proper, um, vitamins. In scientific terms, I expect that the data I gather will be enough to win the argument, or I have failed to gather or interpret the data correctly. And if I fail, I feel that I have no recourse in honor or justice but to slink away in shame, never to bother anyone else ever again.

But, a debater who doesn’t lose? In the sciences? That person is not putting the data first, he is putting himself first. After all, a debater is judged, not by the data but by the presentation – in formal debate, the speaker may have to persuade an audience to support a position that he himself thinks is totally hellacious. If he pulls it off, he wins – in despite of even his own interpretation of the data.

If emotive persuasiveness is a hallmark of a leader in my field, then Adolph Hitler was the greatest scientist that ever lived.

Had I known that, after the years of study and financial sacrifice that allowed me to become a research scientist, I would still be surrounded by the kinds of bullies who scared me when I was a kid picking berries in the woods, bullies who set policy on the basis of coercion rather than on dispassionate analysis of hard data, I’d likely have become a truck driver or file clerk and saved myself a lot of trouble.

I might yet.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Once upon a time, in the dark years BT (Before Twitter), there lived in the Heartland of America a college football gridiron coach by the name of Woody Hayes. A coach who was famous for his victories, and also for his hates.

* Michigan. (This was when there still was a Michigan.)

* Sideline photographers.

* The forward pass. Of which he is said to have said, “Only three things can happen, and two of them are bad.”

This is how Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has come to think about blogging “in his own person”. Most of the things that can happen are bad.

The post can sound whiny. Which may accurately reflect my personality, but I’d rather not front-and-center that, if you don’t mind.

Or, it can sound as if I have “the answers”. As if. A person who, these days, needs Quilly to remind him which name he’s supposed to be signing to the checks is not someone who should be suggesting Solutions to the world’s Problems.

But I heard something this morning that’s been tugging at what’s left of my mind all day, and I’d count it a favor if you’d let me talk through it with you.

The “thing” was a lecture (a sermon, really) on the theme of “The Decline and Fall of Christian America”. Yes, Newsweek had a cover story on this topic three months ago. Yes, I don’t normally pay any attention to Newsweek. The main point of both the magazine article and the sermon was “lots fewer Americans call themselves Christians these days, and what are we going to do about it?”

To which my first reaction was “Um … celebrate?” After all, We the People have allowed ourselves to be ruled, for the past eight years, by certain persons who have identified themselves as “Christians”, and what have we got to show for it?

* Vietnam in the desert? Make that two Vietnams in two deserts? (And it looks like Osama bin Laden, like Ho Chi Minh, will die, a hero, of old age.)

* A hole in the map where Michigan used to be?

* And another one being sawed out for California?

The news, seems to me, is not that there are fewer people going to church, but that there’s anybody going to church. If, as our speaker suggested, Christianity and atheism are competing for Our attention, maybe the atheists should be given a shot at running things on the grounds that they could hardly do any worse.

The problem with atheists, however, is that they tend to be individualists. Especially the intellectual atheists of the sort that Richard Dawkins (for example) champions. The sort that Dawkins himself has likened to “herding cats”; for whom the most congenial organization, after “None”, would be Conan Doyle’s Diogenes Club, where no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other. Not exactly what you need when you’re trying to rally the troops to fight internal and external battles.

Effective religious organizations are wonderfully good at rallying the troops, of providing a sense of belonging for their members. For good or ill, depending upon whether you belong to Desmond Tutu’s group or Jim Jones’s.

So why aren’t the mainstream churches doing any of this rallying? It’s not like nobody’s looking to belong to a group where some incarnation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in charge, if the increasing numbers of mostly young people who identify themselves as “spiritual” are any indication.

Trouble is, those increasing numbers of young people are listening to hip-hop, and are likely to consider Nearer My God To Thee a little lame. Not to mention sermons without either special effects or a point that makes sense (unless you’ve spent six years in that church’s Bible study classes).

In return, the parishioners who have spent the six years in those Bible study classes are saying “We put a lot of time and effort into making this church what it is. We like it this way, it’s staying this way. We’re not listening to any Eminewhosis. You want to be with us, you’ll sing Nearer My God To Thee with us, and like it.”

Which might possibly have been a better sell if the generation insisting on “church as it is” hadn’t been the one that blew the country’s budget with amoral business practices and avaricious, and ultimately failed, wars, and blotted Michigan off the map. That young people aren’t willing to follow such a lead should come as exactly no surprise to today’s graybeards and bluehairs, who came to their majority chanting the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty“. What goes around comes around.

So, in this Amoeba’s opinion, the mainstream churches (including many of the evangelical ones that sprang up in the heyday of the Christian Wrong Right) will dwindle, while new ones (that may or may not be “Christian”) will spring up to take their place. Full of people who wish to be spiritual.

It’s not like this sort of thing hasn’t happened before. Did you know that, in the dark ages BT, even longer ago than Woody Hayes, Nearer My God To Thee was considered radical church music, on the order of today’s hip-hop? It was radical music (based on tunes from popular music of the era) for the radical breakaway (from the Church of England) church of John and Charles Wesley – today’s staid old “mainstream” Methodists.

What goes around, comes around.

(Forgive me for suggesting this … but if God, however you imagine her, is as all-seeing, all-knowing, all-encompassing as We proclaim, isn’t it just a teeny bit presumptuous, arrogant even, for us to say where She will be putting us after we die? Whom are we really worshiping …?)

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Too much to do. Not enough time to do it. Even if there were time to post, nothing that I deem to be post-able comes to my mind. What’s left of it.

Change is unlikely anytime soon.

The focus is on “job”. I’m sure you’re not surprised, especially if you too are trying to stay off the bread lines in this economy. An item in today’s news (17 June 2009), reporting that the unemployment rate in these Untied States now stands at 9.4%, is focusing the focus.

It reminds me that, back in February, I wrote:

… the graphs tracking unemployment rates in the US over the last year are tracking pretty closely those of 1929-1930.

They still are.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

It has become a cliché of advertising. The tropical beach, used to sell a tropical product, like rum or Hawai‘i. Where the viewer stands or sits on white sands and looks out over an ocean that is so brilliantly azure, it can’t be real. Must be digitally enhanced.

The real views in Hawai‘i actually look like the advertising. When the sun is out, anyway. Which it is, most of the time.

But not on this late afternoon in early March 2009. At an hour where the sun is usually mixing its pigments for the benefit of a myriad of sunset photographers, clouds have sent the painter home early. The art class is dismissed, except for the students who work in charcoal. They have a subject fit for their tools: a graphite sky, its black lowered brows threatening heavy weather. No, not threatening; promising. A sky like any that heralds an ocean storm over the vacant Oregon coast, or a lake-effect blizzard over the foreclosed homes of Michigan, or a nor’easter over the empty mills of Maine. “For this”, mutter the mainland artists, “I could have saved the airfare.”

The sky scene fills the windows of the oceanfront restaurant. Inside, there is light and noise, the sounds and smells of food and wine and people. For the restaurant is full, indeed there are people waiting in the entry hall, seeking a place. The seated customers trade small talk with each other, and jokes with the smiling servers, and both the air and the spirit are warm. They are guests of Prince Prospero, and life is good.

And none of them is looking out the window at the dark sky, at the spectre that seeks entry.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Ever since your friendly neighborhood Amoeba got addicted to started posting on blogs, way back on New Year’s Day (really) in 2006, I’ve been told by various people – and still more, by my blog stats – that folk view what I write as, er, challenging. Intimidating, even. I’m not naming names, Thom …

I don’t try to be intimidating. Really I don’t. It’s not like I go around wearing sabres for hands, or a Hannibal Lecter mask, anything like that. Not during daylight hours, anyway. I may not be the life of the party, but I try not to be its death, either. Until I’m tired and I think it’s time for you to go to bed. Then, I might go “the Blob” on you. But I can’t help that, any more than a werewolf or The Incredible Hulk can. At least mine’s a more passive kind of resistance.

“Is he alive?”

“He was a minute ago. Here. Pass the potato chip bowl in front of his nose. If he grunts, feed him, he’ll be OK; just don’t let him scarf down the whole thing. If he doesn’t, call 911.”

So where does this “intimidating” thing come from? OK, I’ll admit – if brevity is the soul of wit, my posts are hip waders. And yes, I use simple, common words like “cyanobacteria” and “fermentation” and “gluons”. But you should see some of the humdingers that Quilly has been throwing out into the blogosphere lately. And no one’s called out the National Vocabulary Guard on her! Not yet, anyway.

I’m afraid I come by this sort of thing naturally. People were calling me a walking dictionary in the second grade. It wasn’t the best way to make friends and influence people then, either.

But I have to tell you something. These days, I sit at a table on a regular basis with scientists who make me look like I never graduated from kindergarten. I wonder what kind of names their classmates were calling them in the second grade.

I suppose the real reason I write what I do is, that’s the kind of stuff that comes out when the fingers hit the keyboard. And the kind of writing that gets hits, dearest Quilly, does not.

But I also worry that there’s less and less connection between the world of that table I sit at and the rest of humanity. If what I write is too dense, what about their stuff?

And if we’ve lost the ability and/or the willingness to read, discuss and understand more challenging concepts – well, isn’t that when people step in to sell us drugs, or cult religions, or risky subprime mortgages?

Really. I’m not trying to scare you.

Or am I?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

The scientist rolled up to the bicycle stand at the university early on a weekday morning, a weekday morning just like any other weekday morning, and prepared for the ritual.

He slung himself – actually, he staggered – off the bike (he was ashamed that he had difficulty dismounting from a machine that was prominently labeled “comfort frame”), and walked the front wheel level with the battered slats of the rack.

He shrugged off his backpack, to his back’s relief, and set it down next to the two-wheeler. He reached into his trouser’s pocket and pulled out a keycase. He reached into the side pockets of the backpack and pulled out a cable and a D bar. He threaded the cable through the bicycle’s front wheel and the near slat of the bike rack, ensuring both were engaged, and pulled the end towards the central post of the bike frame. He threaded that end of the cable onto the D bar, and inserted the bar through the back wheel and the central post so that both were engaged. He inserted the key into the D-bar’s crosspiece – which by itself accounted for nearly half of the backpack’s total weight – slid the crosspiece onto the D-bar, and locked it in place. He removed the key and returned the keycase to his pocket.

Into the pockets of the backpack that had held the bike lock, the scientist slipped the front and tail lights that he had removed from their fastenings on the handlebars and seat post. He secured the pockets, and slung the backpack back onto his back – a back now drenched with the sweat that had sprung from his body in the few minutes since he had dismounted from his eight-mile ride. He reached for the pressure clip that bound the seat to the frame, opened it, and pulled out the seat. There was no room for the seat in the backpack, so he carried it in his left hand as he checked the fastenings of the bicycle one last time, and walked to his office and laboratory a hundred feet away.

He stepped to the door and, as the signs on the door told him to do, or else, he entered the magic numbers into the keypad. The light flashed green, he turned the knob and entered. A chiming reminded him, as if he needed reminding, of the box around the corner that he needed to visit in the next thirty seconds and enter a second set of magic numbers, or else. He did so; a final chime assured him that the forms had been obeyed, and he had leave to be in his own space without screaming alarms and disgruntled peace officers.

Out of his pocket came the keycase, again. Next to the key for the bike lock was the key to the scientist’s office door. The door yielded to the key, he opened the door and stepped into his office. Into their assigned places on the bookshelves went the bicycle seat and the bicycle helmet, sunglasses tucked inside. Onto its assigned place on the floor went the backpack, from which the scientist drew the clothes that he would change into once he had dried off enough for the change to do any good.

As he was toweling himself off, considering the needs of the day and, at the end of it, the need to do the lock and key stuff all over again in reverse order, he thought of the time, a generation and more ago, when he asked his father why he never locked anything. His dad had replied “because I’ve never lost anything, so why bother locking?” And he thought of another day, some years later, in a faraway place, when he went to lock something and was sharply told “Don’t do it.” “Why not?” “Because if you leave your place unlocked, the locals will leave your stuff alone. If you lock up, the folk here will rob you blind.” He had left his things unsecured, and nothing had vanished.

There are still places in these United States where doors are seldom locked. Once upon a time, the scientist had lived in such a place, and had vowed never to leave, never to go to a location where the defining objects of civilization were those that bore the name security. Circumstances had dictated otherwise. And now, in the name of stuff, some of which was wearing the top-hat-and-tails name intellectual property, he was living his own personal orange alert.

It just didn’t seem right.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

For those who track their religious beliefs back to the survivors of this guy with an ark, Bill, God is an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Being who, basically, is in charge of everything. God is also, according to these same people, unknowable. Which calls the “omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent” business into question, doesn’t it? I mean, how do we know?

What was that? That’s where priests, prophets, and messiahs come in? Riiight. Great work if you can get it. Though I’d recommend proceeding with caution in the vicinity of large rocks or crucifixes.

Anyway. You’d think that an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Being who (according to priests, prophets, and messiahs, not to mention the occasional university professor) loves and cares for each one of us – even you, George – would know how to get that message across just the eeensiest bit more effectively. Instead … I really don’t have to go through the list, do I? Just the I’s should suffice, if we need that much. Iran. Iraq. Ireland. Israel …

Think a minute. How many times have you heard friends and acquaintances tell you about their search for the “right” church/synagogue/mosque/temple/coven? How often have you heard that line without benefit of any company but your own? You’d think that a universal message would be, well, universal. Wouldn’t have to be marketed like pickles.

But then again, maybe it does.

I know, and if you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time you might have guessed, that I’m uncomfortable with, er, enthusiastic styles of worship. You know, where everybody’s jumping up and down, the pastor/worship leader is trying to get everyone to shout Amen! every ten seconds, all that. The stuff you mostly see on television these days. Complete with its production values.

Perhaps that’s ’cause I was raised a Yankee, in the cradle of Yankee Puritanism. Where everyone goes to church on a Sunday morning, plunks down in a pew and goes to sleep for an hour. OK, maybe not, but it might look that way. And sound that way, especially the way the reader reads the Bible passages. In a flat drone. Why? It’s not because Professor Jones can’t read. It’s because the Word of God (we won’t go into whether the Christian Bible is the Word of God right now, ‘kay?) is complete and sufficient by itself, it needs no help, no coloration, from puny humans, thank you. This is church, not Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, sir. Who are you, putting your ashes and dust ahead of the Word of God?

Want to put yourself on the outside at a funeral, in a church that traces its heritage to the Pilgrims? Shed a tear. That’s trouble, Jack. Vain glorification of the flesh. Aunt Mabel’s ashes and dust are with God, and soon so will yours be. Stand ye still and silent before God’s will.

Yankeedom did a lot of grumbling and sniping about people who engaged in pentecostal worship. Outsiders, they are. Slaves to the flesh. Damned by God, and don’t you go visiting with them either. At least the Puritans aren’t in charge of things in Massachusetts any more. Back when they were, this sort of trouble could get you killed.

Now, if some of these Puritan folk had actually bothered to read the “word of God”, particularly the book of Acts, they would have discovered (most likely to their horror) that the worship practices of the Christian apostles looked a whole lot more like pentecostal enthusiasm than their own brand of faith. Not a whole lot of sitting quietly in pews and reading scrolls in a monotone, but plenty of prophesying and speaking in tongues and general carrying on. To hear tell, these guys got emotional! And “emotional” packed the houses. Then and now, if the profits of the megachurches is any indication.

Only one problem with emotions. You get a bunch of people all riled up, they’re not altogether likely to sit back and ask, like Bill Cosby’s Noah, “how come you want me to do all these weird things?” Like, maybe, standing in church on a summer’s day and pretending to be fireworks shooting off into the sky.

Or maybe burning crosses in an Outsider’s yard.

Or maybe invading foreign nations on false pretexts.

Maybe colorless Bible readings aren’t so bad after all. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Yet another repost. This one dates back to 30 January 2006 and the first incarnation of Felloffatruck Publications; I had only been blogging for a month back then. Earlier drafts of the poem date back another couple of years.

Qoheleth (translated into English as “The Preacher”, “The Teacher”, or “The Speaker”) is the name/title of the author of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes. You know, Vanity of vanities, Turn, Turn, Turn, and all that?

It seemed an appropriate moment to bring this one back.

================

Qoheleth emeritus

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

- Ecclesiastes 12: 12b (NRSV)

 
The professor sat in his office under the sun, it was empty but for the echoes of earnest literary babble on the small corners of thought.

He had had disciples, they had shared coffee and controversy and vowed to be the army that would show their world the error of its ways.

Most of them now sold insurance, one was aiming missiles at middle easterners, and at least two had, so far as he could tell, ceased.

His eyes strayed to the blotch on the wall, where his fountain pen had been the collateral damage of rage against editors whose obtuseness had blocked his progress to publication and promotion.

At that moment a boombox rapped past the open window, making its millions.

He had written a paper proclaiming in solemn footnoted jargon that Gertrude Stein had begotten Snoop Doggy Dogg – which one would be remembered, which one would condescend to his office.

It wasn’t even his office anymore, all his solemn footnoting had earned him was defeat in the space wars – literary babble had changed its tempo, a new conductor was wanted and he was to make the room.

She came in, jamaican strutting, to claim her own. He asked her what she studied.

Postcolonialist social text, sir

she said with pride and heat, and she would have assailed him with the theme and variations of her dissertation, but the professor prevented it.

May your work give you pleasure.

And while she gaped in non-assimilation, he handed her the key to the empty office and went home.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.

- Ecclesiastes 9: 11 (NRSV)

 
  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

This tale, a true story of my fitness for the profession I now hold, first appeared on Felloffatruck Publications on 3 January 2007. Folk seemed to enjoy it at the time. Perhaps you will too, even if you’ve already seen it.

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I am a scientist. Yes I am. You can look it up. Have been all my adult life. And I have wanted to be one for as long as I can remember.

At almost any other time and place in the history of the planet, I would never have become a scientist. Science was not a paying profession until the 20th century, and even then, entry to the fields of science, along with most of the other “intellectual” spheres, was (is) restricted to people with money. And the family into which I was born didn’t have much.

But in the aftermath of Sputnik, they were taking even impecunious folk like me. And I had all the other prerequisites. An ability to remember arcane facts. A consuming interest in things no one else even saw. The social skills of a pithed frog. And the common sense of … well …

It is 1974. I am about to embark on a six-week field course in the out islands of the Bahamas, to study the biology of the desert and the coral reefs. I selected my college because they had such courses. Little did I know that the charismatic teacher who taught them was about to lose his bid for tenure because he didn’t publish, and his teaching was more fluff than substance. I might have known this if I’d paid any attention to the records of the people on the faculty of the Biology Department. I might also have known that the Biology Department was so seriously overloaded with students, the degree program was on the verge of collapse.

But if I had actually based my life’s choices on common sense, I would have gone into accounting, or driven a semi, and I’d actually have a few bucks in my pocket now. And you wouldn’t have an amoeba looking up at you from the bottom of the tree of life.

Back to 1974. I have never before traveled outside of New England. I have never before traveled on a commercial airliner. And I’m sitting with my ticket in the departure lounge at Boston’s Logan Airport, waiting for my classmates and my professor to show up.

Which they don’t. They all left for Nassau yesterday. I have no clue that this has happened.

So I get on the plane, fly to Nassau via Miami, and go to the hotel I’ve booked, expecting to catch up with them.

I don’t. They’re all in another hotel. I have no clue that this has happened.

By this time, I’m in a panic. I figure I’m late and they’re all wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to. Remember, this is 1974. No cell phones. Not that I could have afforded one. The college took my life savings and said “Tuition payments. You sucker.” I should have told them right then and there to take their school and shove it. National Merit Scholarship or no National Merit Scholarship. I didn’t. I am a sucker.

So now I’m alone and scared in a foreign country. I get myself on a plane to Long Island, our study site. The airstrip is on the north end of the island. The study site is in the middle, some twenty miles away. There are no buses, no taxis. As if I had money for either. I start walking. Me and my bags. In sneakers. No hat. No water. In a desert. People have died of exposure walking the roads of Long Island. I have no clue that this can happen.

I don’t get very far before a fellow stops and offers me a lift. This is a plot complication. On the one hand, I desperately need a ride. Especially if the driver knows where this place is that I’m supposed to be going. On the other hand, I am violating a Commandment. Thou Shalt Not Hitchhike. Thou Shalt Not Accept Rides From Strangers. I violated the rule once, back in Boston. He was gay and looking for pickups. I never ran so fast in my life.

Somehow the dude convinces me that it’s safe to get in the pickup. I am not molested. Not least ’cause I’m sitting in the back. We drive to the camp, where I expect to meet the professor and my classmates.

I don’t. They have taken a boat to Long Island. I have no clue that this has happened.

I do meet the couple who are in charge of the campsite. We are expected. “Where are the rest of them?” I dunno … They show me the place we are to stay. It’s got four walls, a concrete floor, and a roof. That’s it. No heat pump. No feather beds – there are a couple old mattresses shoved in a corner. No showers. No running water. The toilet’s a long-drop outhouse out back. The prof promised “primitive”. He delivered. What’s more, the place looks like it hasn’t been occupied since the course was last taught, two years ago.

It’s still early afternoon, and there’s nothing else to do, so I grab a broom and start sweeping up. I don’t touch the mattresses. There are visions of centipedes, scorpions and tarantulas dancing in my head. Especially tarantulas. We will be returning to the tarantulas.

I don’t recall what if anything I have for dinner that night. I must at least have gotten water from somewhere. What I’m mostly concerned about is nightfall. Having nothing in particular to sleep on, and wondering what might be crawling out from under that pile of mattresses. And realizing that, sooner or later, I’m going to have to go out, in the dark, and use that outhouse. It was spooky enough in the daylight. At night? Those mattresses will be sterile by comparison.

It’s midnight. There’s no longer any help for it. The outhouse it has to be. And I’m going to have to park my can on the can. With great trepidation, I grasp my pathetic little flashlight and head out the back. I enter, scanning the premises carefully for signs of life. There don’t seem to be any. So I make the usual preparations and have a seat.

Suddenly, right underneath me, there is frantic scurrying and rustling. I pop off the hole like a Mexican jumping bean on a griddle, grab the flashlight and look back at where I’ve been. The rustling gets louder … and a long jointed leg sticks out of the hole …

Tarantula!

On a shelf of the outhouse there is a can of insecticide. I snatch it, aim the nozzle at the seat and start spraying. I empty the whole can in that outhouse, behaving all the while like the last American soldier on the Bataan Peninsula, emptying his machine gun at the Japanese Army that is descending on him. If I’m going down, you’re going with me!! At last both I and the can are exhausted. I dress, reeking of Raid, and escape back to the relative sanctuary of the concrete floor of the cabin.

The next morning, I go back into the outhouse intending to examine the wreckage. Nothing. It’s as if the previous night had never happened. Not so much as a dead fly. I learn later that the leg in the night probably belonged to a land crab, which wouldn’t have been affected by the insecticide, rather than to a tarantula. I also learned that the natives consider the tarantulas to be harmless. But they were scared to death of the centipedes. Which can take you out. I have no clue that this can happen.

About midday, the prof and the rest of the students show up. With the food and the gear. The place is transformed almost instantaneously. They tackle the pile of mattresses as if there was nothing in them. There isn’t. By nightfall, the class is well underway.

It was a great time. We bonded and shared – well, most of us anyway. And practically everybody in the class was going to honor our soon-to-be-departed prof by going on to graduate school and becoming famous marine biologists in our own right.

What most of the others eventually became was restauranteurs, or insurance agents, or truck drivers. I’ve lost track of several of them. Like the one I was assigned to “buddy” on a skin-diving trip one day. Five hours this guy stayed out in the water on a hot tropical afternoon, with me tagging along begging him to return ’cause I was getting fried, but refusing to leave him because that would violate a Commandment.

He returned to base unscathed.

Me? I spent two-and-a-half of my precious six weeks in the Bahamas flat on my stomach, nursing severe second-degree burns across my neck and shoulders.

Years later, one of the technicians working in my laboratory – who graduated from the same college I did, but two years later – was fond of saying that, in order to get a Ph.D., you have to check your common sense at the door.

I didn’t have any to check.

– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Another repost from Felloffatruck Publications, this one from 30 March 2008. Two reasons for bringing it back to light. One, Quilly’s posts on our visits with sea turtles get visited from time to time, and they link to this one. Which now you can read again (once the links get fixed). Two, a lot of people on O‘ahu are up in arms right now about an idiot (I hope only one) running around killing sea turtles for no apparent reason. I mean, it wasn’t too long ago when Quilly was swimming in a North Shore lagoon and felt a bump on her side.

Anyway, it just seemed like a good time to resurrect this story.

===============

On our recent two-day trip to Hawai‘i Island (the haoles call it the “Big Island”, not realizing – or, perhaps, not caring – that the kanaka maoli don’t necessarily appreciate having a name that means “homeland” dissed in this particular way) …

As I was saying. On our recent trip to Hawai‘i Island, Quilly hoped to see turtles. So, on the one day of the two on which I wasn’t working, and as she’s already related, we went to a place where we expected to find some – the promises made by our hotel’s advertisements having gone the way of most promises made in advertisements.

And it came to pass, as we were walking along the shoreline near the heiau, I was able to stand and point and say:

“Sea turtle!”

“Where turtle?”

“There. Turtle.”

The embarrassing part of this story (not counting the Young Frankenstein ripoff) is, the two of us, including yours truly, The Amoeba, the Grand Protistan Master of Marine Biology, walked right past the spot where the turtle was – while other people were watching it – and never saw the thing. If I hadn’t happened to look back at a moment when the animal had its carapace above water, and watched the rock move …

For the next half hour, we sat and watched while this turtle, a mere fifteen feet away (it’s illegal to get any closer), paid attention to nothing but feeding its face. It’s illegal to get any closer, because the Green Sea Turtle is an endangered species and is protected by international, Federal, and Hawai‘ian State laws. Not that those laws stopped one kid from grabbing a turtle while we were there, and hoisting it into the air for his dad – and any wildlife officers in the vicinity – to see.

That face-feeding looked like hard work. There didn’t seem to be much more than bare rock for this oceangoing herbivore to eat. While we were considering this observation, I happened to look down into a crevice that was too small for a turtle to stick its head into. And saw this.

Most of the seaweeds growing in this crevice were limu aki‘aki, known to scientists (for the moment anyway, see *FOOTNOTE) as Ahnfeltiopsis concinna. Limu in Hawai‘ian means “seaweed”, and limu aki‘aki is one of the types favored by both sea turtles and humans. Though the humans usually prefer limu manauea, limu huluhuluwaena, or ogo with their ahi.

Where the turtles couldn’t reach, the limu growth was luxuriant. Where the turtles could reach, however, all the limu stalks were bitten off at the base:

Fortunately, this limu can form new growing tips from the bitten ends, and also can grow new stalks from a flat base that’s stuck like paint to the rocks. They must grow just fast enough to keep the turtles fed.

Around the corner, we found a sandy beach where turtles had hauled themselves up on the beach to bask themselves. There’s a lot more to this simple sentence than meets the first reading.

For one thing, sandy beaches are not all that common on the shoreline of Hawai‘i Island. Hawai‘i Island has, not one, not two, but three active volcanos on it. Most of the shorelines are black volcanic rock, from the lava flows that these volcanos spew out from time to time. A natural sandy beach is a thing to be cherished – and the one at Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau certainly was. So cherished, in fact, that the ali‘i claimed it for themselves. Only the nobility were permitted to walk it and land their boats on it. To the common people, the beach was kapu.

It still is. Ropes and signs prohibit the mere tourists from striding the sacred sands. Not only as a sign of respect to Hawai‘ian culture, but more importantly (given what Americans have historically felt about anybody else’s, especially English, nobility), as a sign of respect to the turtles, who will only haul themselves up on beaches where they feel they won’t be pestered while basking in the sun.

Apparently, the “basking in the sun” business is something of a mystery to people who study the Green Sea Turtle. Of all the half-dozen sea turtle species, the Green is the only one that indulges in sunbathing. I searched the Internet for awhile, and found nothing other than arm-waving explanations (such as “they like getting warmed up in the sun just like us”) for this practice.

I venture to suggest something.

Here’s a shot of our friendly grazer with its back out of water. You might notice that the back of the shell (carapace) looks less clean than the rest of it.

In fact, it looks like there’s stuff growing out of it.

Well, there is. Algae. Quite a bit of it. And it’s not like the turtle can reach back with a wire brush and scratch itself there to get rid of it. In freshwater environments, there are algae (for example, in the green algal genus Basicladia) that grow only on the backs of turtles. And their growth can get kinda frightening.

Like this.

So what’s a poor turtle to do, if it doesn’t want to turn itself into a floating seaweed garden? It can’t bite the algae off, it can’t scrape it off. What’s left?

Burning it off. That’s what. Hence the basking.

And the need for people to leave the blessed turtles alone while they’re basking. So the beaches where the turtles haul themselves ashore are kapu. Which is fine with me.

Time constraints prevented us from getting into the water with these turtles. I understand that’s quite an experience. Maybe next time.

*FOOTNOTE: The scientific name of living thing X is supposed to serve both as a label with which to identify X, and as a clue to the other living things to which X is related. With many forms of life including algae, this practice causes lots of problems. Mainly, because most algae were given scientific names based on what they look like, and in recent years we’ve found that algae which look alike may be no more closely related to each other than you are to the pineapples you just had for dessert.

I looked up DNA sequences that have been obtained from algae identified as Ahnfeltiopsis concinna, and compared them to DNA sequences from other closely-related marine algae. I found that species placed in the genus Ahnfeltiopsis are not all closely related to each other. Which means that at least some of the algae now assigned to the genus Ahnfeltiopsis need to be placed in some other genus – in other words, they need a new scientific name.

It turns out that, according to the DNA sequences I investigated, Ahnfeltiopsis concinna belongs to the same group as Ahnfeltiopsis linearis, the “type” (more or less, the first-named) species of Ahnfeltiopsis and therefore the “benchmark” for correct assignments of species to this genus. So it looks like I can keep Ahnfeltiopsis concinna as the correct scientific name for limu aki‘aki, right?

Wrong.

Because that same group of species also includes plants identified as Gymnogongrus griffithsiae, the type species (benchmark) for the genus Gymnogongrus. Which genus was first described in 1833; Ahnfeltiopsis was first described in 1992.

That means that I need to throw away the name Ahnfeltiopsis entirely, because it’s a synonym of Gymnogongrus and was published later, and change the scientific name of limu aki‘aki to Gymnogongrus concinnus [sic] …

If and only if the specimens from which the DNAs came that were assigned to Ahnfeltiopsis concinna and A. linearis and Gymnogongrus griffithsiae were in fact correctly identified – an if that is by no means a sure thing. And if and only if other kinds of analyses (including those from other DNA samples) give the same answer as the one that I looked at.

There are smarter and better informed people than I working on this question as I write. Meanwhile, I’ve got a headache. I can just imagine what you’ve got, dear reader. If you got this far.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This blog entry was first posted on Felloffatruck Publications on 23 February 2008. It’s the only review that ever appeared on this site. I reposted it on 27 July 2008, firstly ’cause it attracted a fair bit of interest at the time, including from a person at Lexmark, and secondly ’cause, after six months, things had only gotten worse. And traffic on this post and elsewhere on the Web suggested that lots of other people were having trouble too. Naturally, after more than 10 months, we finally got the thing to work. If you’ve found this post while searching for up-to-date comments on this printer, read this post first. And if you’re having connectivity issues, be prepared to check, and possibly replace, your wireless router.

==============

First, the review. Then, my explanation for why I’m doing it here.

The Lexmark X4850 Printer is one of those “inexpensive” (a duke’s ransom instead of a king’s; the street price would still, even with what’s happened to food and fuel prices lately, buy a couple of week’s worth of groceries for a family of four) 3-in-1 jobs – copier, printer, scanner. Its extra wrinkle is that it’s supposedly wireless. Set it up and send your print jobs from anywhere within the range of your wireless network. Sounds like a great idea if your home or office has a wireless network already going, eh?

BZAAAAAT!!!

After two weeks of wrestling with it, with both a Mac OS10.4 and a Windows Vista system, I can safely tell you, that, if you’re in the market for something like this, buy something with a good old fashioned USB or Firewire connector, and forget about spending the premium for a wireless connection that DOES NOT EXIST.

I must have tried to install the printer driver for this thing about seventeen times. The actual driver installation was flawless, so far as I can tell. The problem came with the wireless setup. Half the time, the Setup Utility for wireless would tell me that the configuration failed. OK, back up and start again. Uninstall, reboot, reinstall, fail, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Oh, it worked! Cool. Print something.

Y’think? “Word cannot find the printer.” If Word (or any other utility that will allegedly print a page) doesn’t just simply hang. Force quit, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Troubleshoot. Computer in wireless mode sees the IP address of the printer, all other systems are supposedly GO. Fine, machine, so Print something. Nothing.

OK, it’s the router. Don’t know where the router instructions are, don’t have the patience to dig them up. Bedtime.

Which is where the situation got left until Quilly tried to print with her Windows Vista machine. Same problems, same conclusion. Until she hooked up her computer to the printer via USB, printed a page, and two came out. The printer had read the file in wireless mode and placed it in the print queue, but refused to activate the queue until it was wired to a computer.

It so happened that Quilly’s problem was solved by rebooting the computer and the printer enough times so that both machines stopped standing at opposite ends of the room, arms folded and looking anywhere but at each other, and condescended to communicate.

But meanwhile, my Mac got a case of the dreaded flashing question mark and had to go to the shop, from which it returned with a new hard drive, a new Mac OS 10.5.1, and not much else. It didn’t need all that ruddy inconvenient data and software anyway. Including the 4850’s printer driver. Which I reinstalled. For all the good it did. The computer and printer still won’t talk to each other via wireless. And now, they won’t talk to each other over the USB cable either.

Just maybe some one of you out there has a high enough geek quotient to understand what’s happening and what to do next. My experience with people paid to have such a geek quotient can be summarized by “ka-CHING for him, wasted time and money for me”. And a recent websearch suggests that I’m far from the only one who has had this experience lately. The only thing I’ve worked out to do that doesn’t spit in the face of the law of diminishing returns is:

a) Don’t buy Lexmark products again.

b) Tell everyone not to buy Lexmark products – certainly not this one.

Now, silly me (the “explanation” part of this post starts here), I thought the place to post this review was, not on my blog, but on one of the many “product review” sites that are out there. After all, type in “lexmark X4850 review” on your favorite websearch engine, and these sites are what come up first. And, begging your pardon, I don’t want to tell just you regular readers “Don’t buy this piece of crap”. I want to tell everybody.

So I start writing down on one of these sites just what I told you.

Then I looked down at the bottom of the page …

“Please register to post your review.”

Oh no you don’t, donkeybottoms. I know a ka-CHING when I see one. Not to mention a spam gateway. You can keep your filthy, sewery hands the [string of expletives deleted] out of my pockets. You’ll disturb the moths.

I must have looked at half a dozen of these sites. Same thing every time.

So, fine. The review gets posted here. For all the good it will do. Might as well be a gnat in the basement of the Lexmark corporate offices. But, for all you “glass half full” people out there, I guess I got to tell somebody. Lucky you.

Why do we put up with this stuff anyway? I mean, how many times do we have to hear about people making more money than most countries from computer products that don’t work?!? In case you didn’t know:

Bill Gates, according to the 2007 Forbes magazine estimate, is worth, by himself, around US$56 billion.

The 2006 gross domestic product for the State of Hawai‘i – the entire frickin’ state – was $58 billion. Fourteen US states – and 125 countries – had 2006 GDPs less than that of Hawai‘i.

The If Windows were a car gag has to be a decade old now if it’s a minute (see also here, and tell her Quilly sent you), but what’s changed from:

Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

Eh? Especially the “you would simply accept this” part?

Quilly and I had a conversation not long ago about a blog post from a person who was complaining bitterly about the price for her season tickets to some sports team or other – not to mention the parking, the concessions, the this, the that. “When”, this person asked, “is this all going to end?”

The two of us came up with the same answer at the same time.

When you stop buying the tickets.

Excuse me while I shut this blog down, turn off the computer, toss it in the bin, and go look for pencil and paper.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.