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.

Of all the thoughts and images that have sprung, in my mind, from the assassination of Dr. George Tiller last Sunday (31 May 2009), one leapt to the fore immediately, and has stayed there ever since.

The man was killed in a church.

Say anything you like about the religions that built the churches, or mosques, or temples – their avarice, their bigotry, their hypocrisy. I’m even likely to agree with most of it. But if there is any one thing that the houses of worship themselves have come to represent, it is this.

Sanctuary.

Hell, most of them are called “sanctuaries”, in whole or in part.

In Europe during most of the Common Era, Christian churches have been known as places of sanctuary, where persons in strife go for protection against their circumstances or their adversaries.

The principal is pretty universal. In pre-Christian Hawai‘i, a person who broke a kapu or otherwise offended the gods or their agents on Earth had the option of retreat to a pu‘uhonua (sanctuary, usually part of a heiau, or temple). Getting there was more than half the fun (to reach Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau, the refugee had to swim a fair distance across a shark-infested bay), but when (if) the offender arrived, the attendant priest (kahuna) would absolve the refugee from wrongdoing and release him [sic] back into the community, where he would be immune from harm. At least until the next time he offended.

To be sure, the principle of sanctuary has been both abused and violated throughout history. We the People of these Untied States, for example, are used to being told that, for certain Iraqi mosques, “sanctuary” is spelled A – R – M – O – R – Y, which is why those mosques are now one with Ozymandias’s lone and level sands.

Nevertheless, I think we relinquish the notion of sacred sanctuary at our peril. Which is why the death of George Tiller, a man whom I did not know, on whose attention I had no claim despite his position of prominence in our culture wars, continues to bother me.

For whatever it may be worth, a piece of music sprung into my head as a result of my reflections on George Tiller’s murder and the violation of sanctuary that the killer, and whatever sponsors he may have had, committed. Below, a link to a sound file of that piece of music (.mp3). The sound is not quite what I’d like, and I can’t add the lyrics; I’m at the mercy of my rather inexpensive music-writing software. Maybe one day you’ll get to hear it with live instruments/voices:

Sanctuary
Words: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, alt.
Music: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, setting IHL*

(* Latin [in hic loco], “in this place”. Pig Latin: drunken and crazy.)

Inscription: In memory of Dr. George Tiller, and of all those who have sought the sanctuary of a house of worship in vain.

Lyrics: (slightly altered from the original)

Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary,
Pure and holy, tried and true,
With thanksgiving, I’ll be a living
Sanctuary for you.

It is you, Lord, who came to save
The heart and soul of each one of us,
It is you, Lord, who knows our weakness,
Who gives the strength we hold in trust.

Lead me, Lord, from all temptation,
Purify me from within.
Fill my heart with your holy spirit,
Take away all my sin.

[Repeat v. 1]

For any who are interested in such things. The music is scored for oboe, English horn, and four-part choir. The oboe and English horn parts can be played by any number of instruments of similar sound quality, including flutes, recorders, or harmon-muted trumpets/cornets. I tried adding rhythm (guitar, keyboards) but didn’t care for the results, at least not yet.

Copyright as for this blog. Contact me or Quilly if you’re interested in the sheet music or whatever. Especially if you plan to make a million bucks off this thing. As if.

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

Back in February 2006, in only my second month as an addict a member of the blogosphere, I wrote something that I called, with great hubris and naïveté, “My Last Ever Post on Abortion”.

Its main point remains, in my mind, valid. Which is why I thought I’d never be writing on this subject again:

If we truly had concern for each other as people, we would recognize that abortion is a tool, available if it is needed. We would educate ourselves, long before the occasion arises, of what the tool is and what it represents. We would educate ourselves as to the costs and responsibilities associated with childbirth and child rearing, and realize that the cheapest and easiest way to manage those costs and responsibilities is to keep yourself, whatever gender you are, off the couch and out of the bedroom until you have the maturity, the social network, and (above all) the funds, to support them. Or are sure of your tools and strategies for avoiding fertilization. In other words, proper and thorough sex education.

I have caught some heat for this viewpoint, most often from women who tell me, “if we had to wait until men were ready to have children, there would be no children.” A moment’s reflection on the current human population crisis, and my response options to this critique shrink to one. “This is bad how?“

From commercial and religious interests, silence. Beneath their notice, I suppose:

But no. Sex sells. We have to have the right to live dangerously, or how would we ever get that SUV marketed? And we always have demagogues who are prepared to convince you, for their profit, that you can do whatever you want. Or to argue, for their profit, that their God is the sole repository of ethics in the world, and anyone who disagrees is automatically Satan, and oughta be dead.

Like George Tiller. Who, in case you didn’t know, was [sic] a physician who specialized in women’s health services. Including late-term abortions. Who survived several challenges to his perfectly-legal operations (abort, retry, fail …).

And who was murdered this morning (31 May 2009). While he was serving as an usher at a church service, for Christ’s sake!

Heinous as the murder was, it takes second place to the comments published by one of Tiller’s opponents in Kansas, which all but confess to ordering the hit.

I’ve come to see that the main point of my “last ever post on abortion” is flawed. Fatally flawed. It requires reason, a disinterested (to the degree that that is possible within the human condition) evaluation of the relevant information leading to a conclusion that is, in the light of that evidence, the best answer for all parties.

We the People do not want to suppress our emotions. We want, we demand, the right to feel, to act and respond according to our passions. That those passions can be manipulated, Adolph, does not occur to us. We will slam dunk over your puny little head, and chest-bump in celebration afterward. We will blockade your abortion clinic, and celebrate the resulting additions to the welfare rolls – or the suicide roster. If that humiliates you, tough shit. And if you try to do anything about it, we will take you out.

Perhaps you don’t care for this picture. So what will you do about it?

MURDER, n. What happens to human embryos that are subjected to abortion – and, what happens to those that are carried to term and born into this world unwanted and without adequate provision for their support. Most civilized societies profess to prefer quick, relatively painless means of dispatch to slow ones with torture. But then, this is America. See GUANTANAMO, ABU GHRAIB.

Thanks, Cooper, for the heads-up. I think.

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

“Damn!“

“Not unless you install a fish ladder. I’ve really got to get you thinking more about preserving wildlife.”

“My life’s already wild enough, thank you. Don’t you see what time it is?”

“Um … early? Like it says up top there?”

“Not early enough, cowboy. If I’m going to make it through (cough, cough) rush hour and get to my meeting on time, I’ve got to get my ass into gear here.”

“Like, how?“

“Whaddaya mean, ‘like how’?”

“I didn’t know donkeys had transmissions.”

“What?!?“

“Must be an automatic, I don’t see a clutch pedal anywhere. But I don’t see a drive shaft, either. So you’re going to have to explain to me about this ‘transmissions’ business. Emissions, now, that I’d believe.”

“Are you telling me I’m not keeping my a …”

“How should I know? This is the first I’ve heard about you keeping a donkey around the house. Do the landlords know about this? They start smelling something, that braying machine is going to be out on the street. Along with you and me.”

“Stop worrying about the landlords. They can put up with donkeys If they can put up with their own bull. Though they might have trouble with yours. Speaking of yours, would you move it, so I can get to work?”

“Because?”

“Because the landlords will toss us out on our donkeys if we don’t pay the rent!“

“Oh …”

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

If you’ve been following along with us here, you’ve probably noticed that, on occasion, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s labors, or his anxieties, keep him up all night. And how, on such occasions, Quilly may offer to rock him to sleep. With a real rock.

Ah, if she only knew.

There is, in fact, no shortage of rocks on the Hawai‘ian Islands. But they tend to come in only two kinds. Volcanic basalt, typically black or rust-colored, and coral, typically white. Graffiti on Hawai‘i Island’s Kona coast means doing your tagging in white coral on black lava flows.

You didn’t believe me, did you? See what you get when that happens?

Thing is, that coral rock only turns white after it’s been washed up on the beach and set in the sun for awhile. While it’s still underwater, it’s usually anything but white. Live coral, of course, still has coral animals on it, and they usually cover the rock part in brilliant colors, so that no white shows.

And after the coral animals die, the rock they leave behind still isn’t usually white. In fact, it fairly quickly turns green, usually.

Because the algae take over. Not only on the rock but in it.

The picture at left shows some of these algae as they appear actually inside the rock. To give you some idea of scale, the filaments are about half as wide as a typical human hair. The picture below it shows the same alga as it appears growing in a Petri dish. The rock it was in was invited to leave, and accepted the invitation, having seen what happened to the one that was sacrificed so that the first picture could be taken. That sacrifice was based on the laws of optics, which state that microscopes can’t see through objects much thicker than flat sand grains, and the laws of classical mechanics, which state that the head of a sledge hammer accelerated through a piece of coral rock will beget sand grains.

The alga does have a name. We think; more on this in a minute. Naturally, that name isn’t anything simple like “Fred” or even “Tebucky“. It’s Phaeophila dendroides, which means something like “branched shade-lover”.

So does all this mean anything, except to prove that certain Amoebae have rocks on the brain? Well, planet Earth has a whole lot of coral rock lying around, most of which has these algae in it. These algae get into the rock by dissolving bore holes into it with acid. This, of course, dissolves the coral, which consists almost entirely of the mineral calcium carbonate.

Let me restate that. The coral rock consists almost entirely of calcium CARBONate. (If you’re a global warming skeptic, you might wish to cover your eyes while you’re reading this next part.) Dissolving calcium carbonate gives off carbon dioxide gas – which you may have heard about in the same sentence as “greenhouse” lately. When animals like corals make calcium carbonate, they’re taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When these algae dissolve the calcium carbonate, they’re putting the carbon dioxide back.

And its possible that, as global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, these algae will grow faster and release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

You could say that, while we humans are chucking the fossil carbon into the air from oil, gas, and coal stocks that were millions of years in the making, these algae are (we think) chucking the fossil carbon into the air from carbonate stocks that were millions of years in the making.

The scale of the contribution that these rock-boring algae may make to global-warming-mediated climate change is unknown, because, by and large, we know little more about them than that they exist, and that there’s a whole lot of them out there. Which is why I have a lab with people in it who are smashing coral rock into flat sand grains, so we can start doing experiments to find out just what the heck is going on here.

We’re not even sure about that fancy name. The algae that go by the name of Phaeophila dendroides are found literally all over the world, from the North Sea to Antarctica and everyplace in between. But even though they all look alike, they do not act alike. They act, in fact, as if there’s, not one, but several different kinds (”species”) out there.

Therefore, about two hours ago when I started to put this post together, I was sitting in front of a map, trying to work out which population of these algae belonged to which part of the world, and what name should be assigned to each population. Assuming the next rounds of experiments confirm that these namable populations exist. Of such questions and deliberations is my professional life made.

Maybe Quilly did try to rock me to sleep with a real rock, and I never noticed …

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

Maybe tomorrow …

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

He: Damn that Captain Cook!

She: Why?

He: Because, before he got here, there weren’t any ants in Hawai‘i. Now, there’s almost 50 different kinds! All brought in by some haole trader or other.

She: And we care why?

He: Because they’ve gotten into the potatoes, that’s why.

She: Oh good grief. I’ll clean off the shelf while you …

He: … ask for a moment of silence.

She: A moment of silence?

He: Yes. Let us spray …

A few minutes later.

She: Did you get ‘em?

He: I think so.

She: Then what are you staring at?

He: This critter running around lost between the shelf you cleaned and the trail I zapped.

She: Critter? What critter?

He: What else? Little orphan antie …

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

This post is slightly revised from one that first saw the light of blog in 2006. Here in Hawaii, where just about every location that is not a tourist trap or an arm of government is a military base, there are a hundred skilled trumpet players, so getting a professional to play “Taps” at a Memorial Day function is not a problem. In the more rural parts of America, the situation is different …

The trumpet player was trying to relax. Which was one reason he was so tense.

It was Memorial Day. The parades would start in an hour. They would visit little plaques in each of the six villages of their small town on the Maine coast, each plaque in its turn. Some marching, a prayer, a wreath, three guns, Taps.

Taps. The bugle call. It sounds so simple, so easy. But it is not easy. Oh, no. Those high notes are hard to reach, those long tones hard to hold. One butchered phrase turns beauty to agony. And most amateur players butcher several of them. He was an amateur, he knew the risk. He also knew that they were counting on him to get it right. And he’d managed to leave the house, at an hour too damned close to dawn, without caffeine.

He needed to think of something else for a minute. He turned on the car radio, hoping to catch the sports flash. He missed it, as usual. The station was sports talk, and the announcer was just then accepting a call. “Hi, how are ya?” Every caller said the same thing. As if the physical and emotional condition of the announcer had not been on display coast to coast for most of the preceding three hours. As if the caller cared. He turned the radio off.

He turned in to the high school parking lot where the band members were gathering. It was a small town, a small band, and not much of a band. Practically all the members had gone to that high school, had marched in the high school band under the same tyrant teacher. Their number was shrinking now. Some were infirm; others had passed on. Most of the ones who were left were retired. There were not many younger folk. The high school had not had much of a music program after the tyrant left them; those few who had learned to play instruments had other kinds of music in mind. And they weren’t going to be caught dead in the white trousers that, with the red polo shirts, the band had adopted as its uniform.

Most of the band members were assembled into groups, gossiping. The same cliques and families as in 1962. Or was it 1862? Some of those groups had long pedigrees. The order of music had not changed in three years. About half the members did not know the order. Eventually the band president got the players to line up in marching order. Having established who was to stand where (making allowances for the three absent members who would meet them at the first site, which was hard because some of those present kept asking whether they should stand “here” or “there”), she finally got them onto their bus, a school bus. It was a class party.

The trumpet player was from away. They left him alone. He was grateful for this. He was still trying to relax, get ready for “Taps”.

The school bus found others; eventually, there was a small convoy. One bus had the band. Another held the color guard from the local coast guard station, and a detachment of four Marines, the firing squad. In yet another, veterans from the American Legion post, about a dozen. Most had served in World War II or Korea; their coming to attention was now falling victim to arthritis, to osteoporosis. This year there was a single veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a woman. It looked as if the Legion had adopted a Girl Scout. At a few of the stops, there were veterans in cars; at others, a band from the middle school, or an elementary school; at one, a fair number of scouts, girls and boys, with flags. There were spectators, some places more, some fewer. A few tourists downtown, otherwise they were all locals. Not many had flags.

At every site the busloads poured onto the street, about 500 yards from the little plaque that was their destination and their purpose, and sorted themselves out. A chaotic process. The trumpet player thought of iron filings shaken out into a tray and then brought into contact with a magnet, a weak one, not big enough for the job. The retired Air Force major general in charge got the color guard and firing squad organized and then called the parade to order. The order almost always caught the band by surprise; it scrambled madly into formation from its chat groups and got started on its march just a few seconds after it was too late. The trumpet player forgot about it. He needed to be ready. It was almost time.

Some marching, a prayer, a wreath, three guns.

Taps.

The trumpet player, hidden under dark glasses, closed his eyes. He blotted out the ragged red-and-white band, the Legion color-bearer who could no longer hold the American flag highest, the tempestuous, oblivious children in the adjacent playground.

He played. And as the first phrase rose over the parade ground he saw tents, long lines of Civil War tents along the Potomac River, the bugler sounding for them a call they’d never heard before. Then the tents became stones, long lines of white stones at Arlington National Cemetery, which became crosses, long lines of white crosses in a D-Day cemetery in France. One of those white crosses had his name on it, his blood underneath it. A bugler stood beside it. He was that bugler. He lifted the high note over the cross, and it became a pile of Manhattan rubble. And then a pile of body bags, pulled off a transport newly arrived from Iraq. As the last of the call faded away, the bodies were buried under new white stones. Silence.

It was over. The band boarded the bus for the last time and headed back to the high school parking lot. A few moments of mutual congratulations and thanks before the chat groups reformed. Final greetings as they packed their instruments into their cars and headed off for families or American Legion barbecues: “Happy Memorial Day”.

Happy Memorial Day. The massacre of Antietam in the style of Currier and Ives. Ike Eisenhower as a smiley face over the D-Day beaches. “Have a nice day” inscribed on the archway of Abu Ghraib prison. Party ribbons on the lines of white stones. As if …

The trumpet player merely nodded, picked up his trumpet case, and headed for home.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Patient: So you think you can help, Doc?

Physician: Yes, I think so. Here’s a prescription for the pain you’ve been experiencing.

Patient (reads): As … pi …

Physician: Occasionally you’ll get heartburn from taking these, so we’d better get you to take these antacids to counteract that.

Patient: OK. Can I go …

Physician Hang on. Your cholesterol readings are high, that could be contributing to what you’re feeling. And besides, you’d be at increased risk of heart attack or stroke if we left this alone. So you’d better take this medication too.

Patient: Criminy! The price on this one will induce a heart attack!

Physician: Well, I considered an anti-anxiety medication, but I was beginning to think you had enough … Oh! I knew I was forgetting something. The anti-cholesterol medication means you can’t have grapefruit juice, so I’ll need to make sure you get a vitamin C supplement. Here.

Patient: Where?! I’m out of pockets!

Physician: Right. You’ll need a calendar and one of these dispensers, so you can keep track of all these pills. Including this one, which will help ensure that you absorb the vitamins OK. But be sure you manage the dosage just right, or you could experience neuralgia.

Patient: Which is?

Physician: Pain …

Patient: Doc, wouldn’t it be a whole lot better for everybody if I just went home and died?

Physician (horrified): Not for me!

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

“Well, the Governator’s been dropped in it now.”

“Yep. The voters – all seventeen of them – turned down his budget-saving (well, kinda) propositions. Except for the one that whacks the idiot state legislators in the wallet.”

“Which just proves that they’re idiots for standing for election in the first place. So the state’s bankrupt now, I guess. When’s the cavalry riding over the hill to the rescue?”

“Sorry, that was the other guy who went from the movies to the Governor’s Mansion. This time, you’re more likely to see a predator. With foreclosure papers.”

“Man! Arnie’s gotta do something! But what?“

“Well, he promised he’d make cuts. He’ll have to deliver now. Starting with the name of his state.”

“The name of his state …”

“Yeah. Calithreenia.”

“Cali what?“

“You heard me. Cali-three-nia. The place simply can’t afford four of ‘em right now, so one’s gotta go. The citizenry had better hope that the ship of state gets righted soon, or they’ll have to make it Cali-two-nia to have any hope of a Federal bailout.”

“Well, bruddah, at least now I know what state you’re in.”

“You mean, besides Hawai‘i?”

“Yeah. Looney tune-ia!“

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

“So where were you, bruddah?”

“Timbuktu.”

“You went with somebody?”

“No, I traveled alone. Why?”

“You said you went to this Timbuk place too. So somebody must have gone with you. You tryin’ to keep secrets?”

“I don’t think so. Any tabloid reporters follow me around, they’re gonna get bored, and they’re gonna go broke. It’s ‘Timbuktu’. One word. And it’s a real place, in Africa. Deep in the desert and miles from nowhere. But that’s not where I went. I just had a meeting on the mainland.

“Back when my hair was your color, though, we’d call anyplace that was far, far away Timbuktu. Especially if we couldn’t reach it. Like, auntie’s on Maui, but I can’t afford the plane fare, and it’s too far to swim, so she may as well be in Timbuktu.”

“That’s hard on your auntie.”

“Could be worse. She could be in Cleveland.”

“Dealin’ needlework to basketball players? No sale. But I got a question about this Timbuktu place.”

“Yeah?”

“What happened to Timbukone?”

“Huh?!?“

“Yeah, you know, Timbuk One. If there was a Two, there had to have been a One, right? So what happened to it? Did an army sack it, or a sandstorm bury it, so they had to build it all over again?”

“It went obsolete.”

“Obsolete?”

“Yeah. They gave it a new number when they upgraded it to PS3. Added a couple of levels. It’s more of a challenge to get to the city now, and it’s harder to survive once you get there. Real easy to die of the heat if you’re not careful. And that’s before the guys with the guns show up.”

“I’m sorry I asked. This is getting, like, really far out.”

“You mean, like Timbuktu?”

“No, like a really good ballet dancer.”

“Ballet dancer?”

“Yeah. In a Timbuk tutu.”

“Enough already …!!”

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

She: What’re you doing?

He: Research.

She: Business or pleasure?

He: Well, um, it’s like this.

I was writing a report on an organism that we have in our collection. The records say that the organism was collected in “St. Joeseph Bay”, Florida. I didn’t believe that there was any such place as “St. Joeseph Bay”.

So I looked it up.

And I read about a place called “St. Joseph’s Bay”, which was named after a Florida ghost town. It was a boomtown, until a yellow fever epidemic wiped it out.

Yellow fever in America? I didn’t know we had yellow fever in America.

So I looked it up.

And I read all about yellow fever epidemics in these United States. Including a big one in Philadelphia in 1793 that chased President George Washington and the rest of the US Federal government out of town, and killed the first husband of the woman who later became President James Madison’s wife. And a whole bunch of others, that continued right up until the time that Carlos Finlay of Cuba figured out how to control the disease.

Carlos Finlay? Who the howpeculiar is Carlos Finlay? And I thought that discovery was made by an American, Walter Reed.

So I looked it up.

And I read that Carlos Finlay did indeed figure out that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, and he did it twenty years before Reed did. In fact, as Reed himself reported, repeatedly, all he really did was test and confirm Finlay’s findings. Which the rest of the world had ignored. But then, I suppose, Finlay didn’t have a big ditch (the Panama Canal) to build. Reed did. And what Reed rediscovered allowed Army Surgeon General William Gorgas to all but wipe out yellow fever in Florida, Havana, and Panama.

Gorgas? Wasn’t there a Civil War general – a Confederate, no less – with that surname? What are the odds …?

So I looked it up.

And I read that William C. Gorgas was indeed the eldest son of Josiah Gorgas, a Pennsylvanian who joined the Confederacy because he had married the daughter of an Alabama governor, and it was probably more than his life was worth to try to remain loyal to the Union. Gorgas spent the war in Richmond as Chief of Ordnance, in which role he proved to be about the only truly effective administrator the Confederacy had. Johnny Reb didn’t have a uniform, he didn’t have shoes, he didn’t have rations. But he did have guns and ammunition.

For which I always figured that Josiah Gorgas finished the Confederate Revolutionary Civil War at the end of a hempen rope. But this might possibly have made it difficult for William Gorgas to come into this world.

So I looked it up.

And I read that, not only did Josiah Gorgas not face execution for being perhaps the person most responsible, after Robert E. Lee, for making … um … that war as long and bloody as it was, he wound up as President of the University of Alabama. Where the library was named after his wife.

Wasn’t it the University of Alabama that only started recruiting African-Americans to its football team after it got beat by an integrated University of Southern California team coached by John McKay?

So I …

She: And did you finish that report?

He: What report?

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

We are convinced that the difference between our [present misery] and the happiness we seek lies in a stranger’s pocket. – Doug Pascover’s The Prattler.

I heard the story I’m about to tell many moons ago, from the pulpit of a church in Friday Harbor, in Washington State, USA. The story could have originated in any one of a hundred communities along the rivers and streams of the American Pacific Northwest, down which the logging companies raft their logs to (for example) the great sawmills on the shores of Puget Sound.

The good citizens of this particular community, so the tale begins, had taken to collecting the logs that had broken free from the rafts and washed up along their shoreline, and using them as sources of fuel and lumber.

branded log

Now, a Judeo-Christian theologian of a disputatious turn of mind would likely turn to Leviticus 19:9-10, and start lecturing on the applicability of its provisions to the situation of branded logs washing up on the shoreline of a needy town downstream of its “fields”.

But the preacher that blew into town one fine day didn’t do that. For whatever reason, he bypassed verses 9-10 and went straight to v. 11. “Do not steal.” Upon which subject he preached, his first Sunday behind the pulpit. To loudly-voiced approval by the townsfolk.

So loudly was he acclaimed that he was certain his message had gotten through, and the logging company would soon be getting back its escapees. To his chagrin, he discovered that branded logs were still vanishing from the town’s shores and winding up in stoves and treehouses.

A month later, therefore, he strode to the pulpit and, more powerfully than before, preached “Do not steal.” The acclaim was deafening. The preacher’s fame, already considerable, skyrocketed. His mastery of the Word of God won him a seat at every table in the town, a voice at every debate.

And the logs kept disappearing.

The preacher was amazed. “What part of do not don’t these people understand?” He resolved that he would try once more, and this time, he would make sure that the good citizens got his message.

The fateful Sunday arrived, and he declaimed, with all the homilectical skill and emotional force at his command, “Do not steal other people’s logs.”

The next morning, the preacher was riding one of those logs downstream, wearing nothing but a coat of tar and feathers.

He eventually settled down and raised a large family. His children migrated far and wide.

But they gained their greatest fame in California. Where they preached how state budgets could not be balanced unless each citizen shared the burden of increased taxes and trimmed services, unless all citizens stopped taking anything they could grab from the stream of state spending and “returned the branded logs”.

And they suffered their father’s fate.

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

This post appeared on Felloffatruck Publications back on 21 March 2007. It’s being pulled from the archives for a reason …

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

I’m going to make a small wager that most of you kind folk who visit Quilly and me from time to time have been to college, and for a greater purpose than to wander the campus and ogle the pretty girls/boys. Which means you’ve crammed for a test here and there. Probably all night. In a blind panic. At least once.

C’mon, ‘fess up. Even I did it. Mind you, I didn’t want to. But the gf was convinced she needed to stay up and study, and dammit if she was going to pull an all-nighter, then so was I. Misery shall have company or else, buster.

Rocking the books around the clock is a particularly collegiate rite of passage, one of the latest and last of the childish things that one is supposed to put away when you walk out those gates for the last time, with your maturity, and your next ten years or so of debt payments, securely rolled into that scrap of faux parchment. Something you did, and never hope to do again.

Oh, wait, did I just write a never? Ooops …

Welcome to academia. Those lovely ivory towers full of boys and girls who never did grow up, who didn’t get the memo that all-night crammings are something you’re supposed to have graduated from. The hallowed halls that people who are supposed to be smart spend years trying to get into, only to find that the endless streams of papers to write, reports to fill out, and (especially) grant proposals to peddle (which is what your salary depends on in a market that was bad ten years ago and is now twice as tight, if you haven’t found a pork barrel to feed from), means that, guess what? You’re going to be pulling all-nighters.

It does, unfortunately, make some sort of sense, these all-nighters. To put together the longer trains of thought that feature in this business, with every fact illustrated and every utterance on the the topic in seventeen languages meticulously referenced and footnoted, takes time and concentration.

Which the typical office environment, even in academia, doesn’t supply, what with everyone from the babies of double-income junior academics, to prospective freshmen, to colleagues with coffee cups and writer’s block, to deans seeking volunteers for useless committees, to potential big donors wondering how the hell come that machine isn’t going 24/7/365 and giving him some prospect of a return on his investment already, knocking on the door every five minutes.

And the next thing you know, you’re up against deadline for getting that paper into that book, or getting that proposal downloaded or (heavens! there are still Luddites in the halls of academe!) photocopied and mailed. Which means you, yes you, are going to be staying up all night.

Like for instance. I’ve been doing some work on these guys. If you’ve seen anything like them before, you’re doing pretty well. They’re arguably descendents of the first green plants that ever lived on this planet. And that’s a little more than just a bunch of eggheads yelling at each other about it. Y’see, some of these guys were so abundant back, oh, 300 million years or so ago, that they died in great masses and decomposed into this slimy stuff. You’re probably burning some of this in your Buick right now.

And if you’re lucky enough to play with some of the expensive toys that I do, you might even find that the surfaces of these swimming cells are covered with delicate scales that are far smaller than the eye can see.

I’m supposed to be some sort of expert on how to catch, grow, and identify these things, and some folk wanted me to write a paper for a book on them. So I did, sent it in, and waited for them to send it back. Which they did – but by then I was distracted by other things. Like finding food. And when you’re distracted, it’s hard to keep all the thoughts you need in a row to make the writing go well, the illustrations fit the topic and be executed with a reasonable degree of quality control. Until the editors want it now.

Presto. Up all night.

Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be academics.

   – O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Awhile ago, I was riding a bus in downtown Honolulu. I know I was riding a bus, because I had the leisure to observe my surroundings. Observing one’s surroundings while driving in Honolulu is an excellent way to wind up either with a harp or without a gecko. Not recommended.

Anyway. I’m observing my surroundings while the bus is stopped at a light. Milliseconds after the light turns green, a young fellow steps up to the intersection and pushes the pedestrian-crossing button. You know, the one that tells the traffic light, sooner or later, to stop the cars and flash the “WALK” signal for the pedestrians?

And pushes it, and pushes it, and pushes it, and pushes it …

“OK, machine. I’m here. I’m ready to cross the street. You will do my bidding. NOW.”

Never mind that traffic on this street, a major thoroughfare, is backed up halfway to LA. That it’s moving for the first time in what seems like half an hour, thanks to the very same traffic light that Our Young Fellow is risking a repetitive strain injury on. No. The I AM at the corner is annoyed that there are red lights between him and the beach at Waikiki, and he wants them gone. This instant!

How selfish.

“Damned if I know how. The way the world’s stocks are being depleted, soon ain’t nobody gonna be able to sell fish, ‘ count o’ because they ain’t gonna be no fish to sell.”

“So stop fishin’ until the stocks build back up again.”

“You kiddin’?!? I got kids to feed, and mortgages on my house and my boat to pay. Not to mention my new truck. Just look at the chrome on that baby. I don’t know nothin’ else, so I’ll fish ’til the day I die, or the fish are gone. And I’ll thank you to keep the gummint off my back until I need ‘em to pay my bills for me when the fish that the bloody scientists were too stupid to keep stocked are gone.”

“Isn’t that a little …”

“Hey. I don’t see nobody refusin’ to buy Filet-o-Fish burgers.”

Now, I know that the Beatles were ahead of their time, but did George Harrison really know about memes in 1969? Yes, yes, the pedants say the word should be pronounced “meme, rhymes with dream”, not “me-me rhymes with see me”. But the latter pronunciation certainly fits. What are those questions for, if not to tell everyone about “me”? Though a person new to the blogosphere (if there is anyone left out there who’s new to the blogosphere) could look at one of these things and say how selfish …

“I answered that question already! Don’t you ever listen?”

Sheesh. Where is that Grundir when we need him?

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