Oh wow, it’s my birthday today and I forgot – as I really don’t care to remember anymore. It’s on one hand, now I feel better and I’m getting in better shape, and on the other hand a race with Father Time – with increasing aches and pains. So in this clip, Monty Python’s Not quite dead yet! 51? I feel 40. I’m feeling better!”
Quiet Moments
When I decided to quit trudging through life in a perpetual work -commute-weekend chores-church-work cycle, it became something of a mission to find a hobby, activity, or project, that a fifty-one year old man could enjoy. It’s even more of a challenge with a perpetual dearth of money.
Exercise costs very little so it is a favorite. Or more recently, hiking. Now I am in decent shape, as I go to the gym. sometimes less frequently that I should, but in the last two years I routinely have been to the gym for an hour or so three times a week. But there is something about being outdoors and away.
I have (re)discovered hiking. Day hikes such as one I spent this morning. I decided to start by hiking the county parks in the East County. I have been to Flynn Springs several times, and to Lindo Lake, but I let Google discover that I had never been to Louis Steltzer County Park in the East County which was closer somewhat than driving out to Ramona or to Torrey Pines State Beach So my dog Sydney and I hiked to the Steltzer summit trail this morning. It was a decidely modest-exercise hike – until the final third of a mile to the summit which probably was the most heart-pounding exercise I had outside of the gym elliptical machine this year.
"Fair Winds and Following Seas"
I retired from the Naval Service yesterday. After 26 years of service, though 23 were separated from the previous three by seven years. Very humbling as I was honored to have family, shipmates and friends in attendance and participating. Several notable facts: my co-retiree and the senior officer in the official party, an Admiral-select – in itself singularly remarkable – were both former enlisted men who had become Chief Petty Officers before Officer selection. Also, this was the first, or most likely first, instance of retirement awards bestowed by the brand-new Commander, TENTH Fleet, and third, the first instance I am aware of a dual, simultaneous flag ceremony. Flawlessly performed.
Acknowledging the signs comes grudgingly
When you misplace your reading glasses at this age, you need Grace. From your peers at work, social circle – though they too may be hunting for their own at the time, and from your children. There’s a running joke from my peer review committee when we critique test procedures I’ve developed, that I need larger font, to read what I wrote — when it’s displayed by projector! And when I inspect circuit cards, my co-worker and I share an “I spy” or pocket magnifying glass – when we forget our respective glasses.
Though we all now are focusing on better health, by going to the company-sponsored gym near work, aches and pains aren’t any longer “signs of weakness leaving the body”, as the Marines are fond of saying, but decrepitude! Rotator cuff, “tennis elbow” tendon strains, the padding around the midsection – are all reminders that I’m never seeing forty, nevermind 25 again.
Now where was I going with this?
And I realize I must keep putting new information in my head to keep the outflow at some sort of control. It’s like real-life, where politicians are grateful for every new catastrophe or Lindsay Lohan debacle – I guess that is a natural catastrophe too, come to think – for the public to collectively forget the failures of the last government effort. I am studying more and practicing new technologies, designed for keeping up with my young engineer peers at work.
Now if I only could remember why….
Politicians are often stupid; lawyers think Juries are more so
Combat veterans have another reason to be outraged by arrogant wannabees. In an article, New York Times, May 18th., that reveals the Connecticut Attorney General has been trading on a wartime history that is indefensible. As a veteran, if you find it irritating that a former President was a Guardsman who was guarding the rear, ticked that another silver spoon-fed politician as a vet twenty years earlier detailed conduct of combat soldiers before Congress, angered by a third who continues shabby treatment of veteran issues as a legislator when touting military service as a POW that other former POWs question. But for this politician to arrogantly believe it is cachet today to be a combat veteran, in order to win votes and approval – incredible! For a lawyer turned politician to continue the practice of creatively manipulating juries/voters through inferred, implied and crafted speech – has no understanding that facts are all available to be researched on the Internet.
Conspiracies of the Formerly Silent Majority
Politics. A contest of will between “the public” and the “the public servant”. In 2010, the public is roused out of a stupor, and demanding that our Government return control to the the governed. In California, we have a governor’s race whose candidates are a jostling to demonstrate who has more dirt on the other, platitudes and restating the problems rather than indicating solutions. At the national level, the Government has spent all the money that China is willing to lend us AND is giving away more Monopoly money to prop up governments which are also full of corruption and idiocy.
The much maligned, abused and ignored public has been growing in vocal and ballot-opposition. WE THE PEOPLE have far to go. There is still a general contempt in the halls of power for us. The news media is beginning to see where their bread is truly buttered; little at a time, the tide of contempt for a politically-savvy and ground-swell body-politic is reversing. The Arizona citizen is absolutely correct in demanding a government put some teeth in the regulations that our federal government does not have the will to enforce. In California we should demand the same commitment from our leaders – but the small lobbyist groups which in truth are the unelected government have held sway far too long. In Washington, all the bureaucracy has destroyed our future. The talk of improving conditions economically is refuted by reality. Flooding the cable channels with foolsih drivel will not put food on my table or gasoline in my car. When there is no job to make the money that the government plans to siphon from us, a government job or handout is just monopoly money.
I should advise that we all take a realistic if jaundiced eye at all the chaos of our present, I plan to carry on outwardly as usual, but become self-reliant more and more. I have cut the bonds of servitude and silence, and invite the reader to join the Formerly Silent Majority!
In the near-future, could be me!
Thanks to Jeff Bacon’s BROADSIDES cartoons, I can always find some dead-on nautical humor. When I attended an Admiral’s Call in 1999, we celebrated birthdays of the oldest and youngest Sailors that month – the youngest one had been born AFTER I graduated high school. Do Not EXCLUDE, but INCLUDE! ( Part One)
I propose that we send a message to the world. EVERYONE in the world will be declared an American by President Obama’s power under Executive Order. There will no longer be any reason to have a national debt — we are never going to pay the debt owed, to Americans — unless they are General Motors, Wall Street Executives or George Soaros. Everyone else will be left overtaxed and undersatisfied.
Instead, let’s do what the rest of the world does. Military service is mandatory – either by conscripting children as in some insurgencies, or by a poorly paid and trained armed force. Training and equipment are kept to private mercenaries and militias. The remaining troops are to be used for political ends.
As far as criminal-justice, we adopt the progressive pattern of latin american, south asian, or african legal systems. Prisoners are fed and cared for in the rat-hole prisons by their families who either pay or perform in prison-run brothels to feed their relatives. If you want anything from the bureaucracy, you bribe the official sufficiently. Violent criminals are executed or shipped off to Hezbollah, Afghan terror camps, or to France. Sex crimes are a matter of opinion – or state-sanctioned means of cowing the population. (End Part One)
My Ant Can Kick Your Weathercenter Uncle’s Butt any Day!
Ants are a heck of a lot more accurate than weathermen on TV. Monitoring these ants diligently preparing their nest and moving material and food to and fro, I have received confirmation that they know environmental changes before we do.
In April 1900, an article in the New York Times appeared to confirm the practice – in the age of science / dawn of a new century – noting the behavior of insects including bees and ants, to predict weather fairly reliably. A hundred ten years later, and we might still find our superior technology at a disadvantage. This past week, in a particularly cloudless day, these Arizona ants were busy preparing for a downpour, (corroborated by similar observation over a number of years) which by the following day proved to be accurate. And despite the weatherman on TV stating that there was a minimal chance of precipitation in the following 24 hours, the ants proved to be the ones prepared.
If technology and wizardry can be outdone by an insect, it doesn’t say much about our Global Warming paranoid- environmentalism, now does it? I may listen to the TV News, but in a cloudless sky, my money is on the ants predicting whether or not to bring my GoreTex with me tomorrow.
Art Historian? No, but I slept in a Holiday Inn Express….
If I had the money to jump on a plane and jet across the country this week for the heck of it, there’s a lecture series I want to attend. Of course, I have no particular training as an art historian or artist, but I know the subject of this lecturer’s presentation, Edwin H. Blashfield , muralist. I doubt there is a single one of my peers who hasa clue who he was or what a muralist does. Forty years ago, I lived a few years on Cape Cod in a mid-18th Century home which at the turn of the 20th Century was the home and studio of this artist. What began as a curious find of a large book full of his work in pictures and lithograph prints at the house became a small collection of prints and books he wrote today. In several state buildings, courthouses and libraries from the MidWest to Washington, DC and New England, his work is prominently featured. Here’s the editor’s new book on Blashfield edited by Mina Rieur Weiner
Can you appreciate the Irony
Viet Nam Veteran to Be Sold Out for Environmental Fines Does everyone believe Big Government is the salvation of the common man? Here’s a Vietnam veteran living off-the-grid in San Diego County whose property is up for auction to pay fines for not clearing brush (fire hazard). Seems his property was in the area of the big wildfires of a few years ago, but was not harmed by the flames. He has been levied, but did not pay nor remove the offending brush. Hmm, isn’t this just another case of Government apathy toward veterans –except when Government wants to make a buck?
View fm Gila Monster Way
“FOR SALE”. A lovely A-frame home on 5 acres with view. Reason for moving? The neighborhood is getting crowded. Not really. Seclusion is perfect for authors, poets, horse-people, eccentrics, Democrats.
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 