Love of My Life

Tonight Susan and I are driving down to Stark Restaurant in Pauls Valley OK to eat what we hope will be a fine dinner in celebration of our 45 years of marriage. Our anniversary is actually tomorrow, but we're celebrating tonight. Celebrating a love that has so deepened and rooted over the years that neither of us can contemplate life without the other. Being married to someone this long entwines you to them, like something the trunk of a tree will just encircle to itself over the years. Susan is so much a part of who I am and who I have become for loving her and being loved by her that it's utterly impossible for me to think of myself as separate from her. As I've said many times, everything good about me is in some way because of her. She is the love of my life, a phrase I wish were not so tired, but one which says all that needs to be said.

Yet Another List . . . But Not Quite

Following the lead of my dear daughter Tanya, who like me admits to a certain degree of discombobulation when she cannot think of anything to blog about--delighted I was, yes I was, to hear that somebody else besides me had the same difficulty. That is, a feeling of guilt and discomfort about not being able to conjure up something to write about. So imagine my thrill when Tanya writes two blog entries recently about things she likes and dislikes. Whoopee! I steal the ideas . . .

But are you ready for this? In the course of typing this entry, I distract myself on purpose by deciding it's a perfect time to send out half a dozen Postcrossing post cards. So I go through that ritual of getting the names, printing up the addresses, picking out the card to send, putting the postage, and jotting the message down on about half of them. Oh, and next I look up all the addresses in Goggle Earth, see exactly where this card is going, ya know.* Well, after stops in Germany (Bielefeld), Finland (Nastola), Texas (Rowlett), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam), I start looking in the ocean near Finland at some little bitty islands and gradually panned over to the North Atlantic, west of Iceland and I encounter the site of the sinking of the British heavy cruiser HMS Hood on 24 May 1941.** Although I vaguely remembered about this ship and her encounter with the German battleship Bismark, I didn't remember details. So I was amazed to read that out of a crew of over 1400, only three guys--three--survived. All were enlisted guys. (You can read bios with links to their names below.) Incredible.

HMS Hood in 1938 - She went down with all but three hands.

I was immediately struck by the monstrous loss of life and the unbelievable good fortune of these three young men. I mean what are the odds? (Well actually, to be exact the odds were .21 percent of being one of those guys.) They all went on to survive the war. I still cannot wrap my mind around such numbers. All those lives snuffed out with ramifications that are still rippling out even today. War is such a pitiless exercise.

The HMS Hood Association has a considerable web presence, with lots of information to get hung up in if you're so inclined. Below is the chronology of the sinking from the Google Earth site. I had every intention of attaching a shot of the Google Earth screen showing the site, but damned if when I tried to email the citation to myself (the only way I can see of getting the .jpg), the damn program tells me I am giving it the wrong account name. This is my Google account, for Pete's sake! I get mail there every day and have used same account name for oh, say over five years.

HMS Hood Sinking Chronology

16-21 May: Based on reports that Bismarck was likely to attempt a breakout into the Atlantic, the ship was more-or-less on alert. Strategies were planned and discussed.

22-24 May: At sea with the battleship Prince of Wales, and destroyers Acates, Antelope, Anthony, Echo, Electra and Icarus. The force proceeded to waters off southern Iceland in case Bismarck and the accompanying cruiser Prinz Eugen attempted a breakout into the Atlantic in that vicinity.

23 May: Bismarck and Prinz Eugen sighted by H.M.S. Suffolk in Denmark Strait.

24 May: Hood sunk in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. In the engagement, Hood, Prince of Wales and Bismarck all received damage. At 0600, Hood sank following a catastrophic conflagration/explosion resulting from a deep penetrating hit from Bismarck. Out of a crew of 1,418 only three (Ordinary Signalman Ted Briggs, Midshipman William Dundas and Able Seaman Robert Tilburn) survived. Despite the loss of Hood, the action DID achieve the result of effectively cancelling the German sortie: Though Prinz Eugen escaped, Bismarck was later defeated and sunk with a heavy loss of life. No convoys were lost to either ship.

H.M.S. Hood sank at @0600 hours, 24 May 1941, whilst engaged in battle against the German warships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. All but 3 of her compliment of 1,418 crewmen went down with the ship. It was the single worst Royal Navy ship loss of the Second World War.

*Have you noticed how this keeps one from doing the writing task?

**One of the many things you can do with Google Earth is mark shipwreck sites in the oceans of the world. That's how I found the Hood. Just by the by, there seem to be about ten times as many U-boat sinking sites than any other kind. Google needs to do some work in this area.

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I'll Have One of Those . . . and One of Those

My daughter recently had an entry in her blog which he entitled "Things I hate" – one of which was something like constantly gettting hung up with things on the Internet. I have to confess that I have that exact same weakness, and I also hate it. The picture above is an example the kind of thing I'm talking about. I ran across it at a site that somehow connected to Wikipedia – I know there's a bunch of those – that at one time or another I ran into and just recently ran into again.

What is it, you say? Well, it's a marketplace in the city of Praia, which is the capital of Cape Verde.* I don't know, but this picture strikes me as utterly fascinating. What of those root-like things in the center? And aren't you curious about what the lady on the right is buying? How much to those bags of beans cost? And what kind of beans are they?

By the way, I'm going to steal my daughter's idea and blog about things I hate. She also had one about things she loved. I was steal that idea too. Thank you, Tanya!

*I had to look it up . . . it's in the Atlantic, due west of Mauritania and Senegal.

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The "Fortnight"

Its full title is "Fortnight for Freedom." It began on June 21. What we're talking about here is two weeks of "non-stop nationwide teaching, preaching and public events to press" what the US Roman Catholic bishops are calling "freedom of religion." What the bishops are all exercised about is a requirement in the new healthcare law that institutions provide free contraception insurance coverage. Now, never mind the contraception is an issue that Catholics really don't give a hoot about for the most part. Never mind that the Obama administration has offered a workable compromise on the issue. And, oh, let's not mind that the bishops are denying this campaign has anything to do with partisan politics.

They have been forced to deny it of course because the secular press has been all over them. Why?  because to any normal person the fortnight for freedom looks like a nationwide "Vote Republican" exercise. It certainly does to me. The bishops claim it's about religious freedom, but if you'll pardon my saying so, that's a load of crap. In the same issue of USA Today that ran a story about the Fortnight, there is another story reporting that in the Philadelphia trial of Monsignor William Lynn, accused of facilitating the transfer of pedophile priests in that diocese, had not yet reached a verdict. This guy served as the Chancellor of the archdiocese, and of course he's the fall guy for the real criminal, the archbishop. And thus it's been all over the United States, the bishops have steadfastly refused to own up to their crimes. And these very same guys are now telling us about religious freedom! Give me a frigging break.

The local Catholic paper here in Oklahoma is full of Fortnight stuff. The local bishop* is careful to say that the debate is "not about contraception . . . not about religious freedom for Catholics only . . . not about the Church attempting to force anyone to do anything . . . not a fight that the Church asked for, but one which is been forced upon us by the federal mandate." And let's not forget the mandatory statement: "This is neither a partisan issue, nor liberal or conservative issue, but an American issue." 

What pious nonsense. What it all boils down to is supporting the Health Care Act is a blow to religious liberty, which is un-American, and which means you should vote for the party and candidate opposed to the affordable care act.

*You can find the entire statement here.

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Er . . . About our American Values. How 'bout Let's Not Spread 'Em Around

Now I have to admit to being a little surprised by this. In a recent Atlantic survey, in answer to the question "Should America focus on trying to spread our values to other countries around the world?" the answers actually came back relatively sane.

• 15 percent said yes
• 31 percent said US should try to learn other countries' values
• 51 percent said that the US should do neither one, spread or learn

 The article says that what this shows is that "American have a low opinion of this country's values, perceiving that they are in decline." In fact, 68 percent of those asked said that American values have weakened since the 1940s. And about the same percentage said they have declined since the 1970s. (I find this extremely interesting in light of the fact that the Republican party has controlled the country since the 1970s. Is it any coincidence that with the dawn of the Reagan years came the overweening influence of great wealth both in politics and in the culture? Influence which has continued unabated since.)*

So OK, a majority think our country's values are weaker than others. Why? These answers are really revealing. What they indicate is that the American citizenry knows what's going on. All of the factors cited by over half the people reflect the shallowness and venality of American society. And yet, even with this awareness, we seem hell-bent on keeping everything as shallow and venal as possible.

The people basically know what's going on

It would repay your reading the whole article.

*You cannot count Bill Clinton as a Democrat, in my opinion. Nor Obama, for that matter. For me, true Democrats are progressive democrats, and I don't think we've had one of those in office since Carter.

The Way It Was Ain't the Way

Here is James Kuntsler today in a weekly blog I never miss. He is referring to the Aspen Institute here.

    It's a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might be considered valuable. 

Let me observe that I've noticed the same thing about this "impotent and clueless leadership" in America. Indeed, the more you compare and contrast it with leaders around the rest of the world, the more clueless it does appear. As if everything is just going to be just like it was once we get the "recovery" to where it should be, that is, just like it once was.

Does it strike you as odd that in the face of completely obvious problems such as global warming, overpopulation, runaway militarism, creeping police-state, rampant poverty and unemployment, gross disparity of wealth distribution, crumbling infrastructure, a sick educational system, corporatism taking over everything, etc. that the best thing our leaders can tell us is everything will be fine just as soon as we get everything back the way it was? Isn't the way it was what got us here?

And One More Thing . . .

. . . this Writing Handbook I've been talking about. The last half of the book is full of information that writers need once they've gotten past the necessary stuff like parts of speech, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, abbreviations, and so forth. And that would be things like these sections: Unity, Coherence, Emphasis, Variety of Development, Interest and force, Exposition, Description, Narration, Argument (there's a whole section of this section about logical fallacies!) Now, I ask you, do kids in English classes ever get exposed to logic at all?  Would "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" make the slightest bit of sense? Judge for yourself. Illogical thinking is normative. Logic is a dying concept.

Would they learn the proper way to define things? "Define a word by giving (a) its general class and (b) the characteristics that make it different than other things in that class."

Would they learn about emphasis . . . in sentence, paragraph, theme?

And on, and on, an on.

I'm beginning to sound like a real geezer, but I'll tell you, brothers and sisters, the basics are still the basics. And I think we have more than enough proof that neglecting them when we're teaching kids is a guarantee that you're going to end up with a generation or more of people who at best achieve a barely functional literacy. Look around you. Does it fill you with confidence?

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The Way They Used to Do It

Back in the days before everybody started worrying about letting little Susie and little Johnny "expressing themselves" and to hell with spelling, grammar, punctuation, parts of speech . . . you know all that stuff us old people learned back in those decidedly non-progressive, not-up-with-the-latest-cutting-edge-educational-theory days in school, we had to employ books like the one I talked about yesterday. The Writing Handbook. [How would you like to diagram that sentence?]

So pedestrian it is too. What's this I see? The book divided into sections . . . and the first, lo and behold, "Parts of Speech." Before you're two paragraphs into the book, you have been exposed to names of all the parts of speech, all nine of them (including "exclamatory words"--what I learned and maybe you, too, as "interjections"--and "dummy subjects") plus gerunds, infinitives, and participles. By the time you've gone two pages, all these have been defined with examples:

A dummy subject (expletive) is the word it or there used simply to indicate that the subject is coming afer the predicate verb or to avoid awkward constructions.

It was plain that he was distressed.
There are no cars available.

 To tell you the truth, I don't remember these "dummy subjects"--they were just pronouns to me, I think--but the point is, before you started building with words, you learned about the bricks.

Next a section on "The Sentence." Of course. Also "Punctuation" and "Spelling." Yep, a whole chapter on correct spelling of words, a subject today that has become optional. It begins with, guess what?--Spelling Rules. Yes, rules. Here's the first sentence of this section: "Practically every rule of spelling has exceptions. But the rules given in this book hold often enough to make them worth your while." The very next sentence says "When in doubt about the spelling of a word, consult a dictionary. Only the dictionary habit ensures correctness."

This kind of thing would be considered radical off-the-charts today. Did you get that part about "correctness"? The notion that there is a right and wrong way to do this. Good Lord! What are we coming to?

[One more entry coming on this remarkable book.]

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Isn't This Magnificent?

Awesome

The New York Times ran a piece, "Taming Sentences," today about diagramming sentences.* I wonder when they stopped teaching kids how to do this? Long ago, I'll bet. Guaranteed: a vast multitude out there has not the foggiest idea what "diagramming sentences" even means. And the majority of that extremely vast multitude probably doesn't know what a sentence is either . . . but I digress.

Of course, since I'm as old as dirt I remember quite well learning how to diagram sentences when I was in school. I still have English textbook we used. It's called Writing Handbook (Chicago, 1953), and it's written by a couple of Jesuits: Michael P. Kramer, S.J. and Charles W. Mulligan, S.J. [Now in a second completely revised edition, would you believe?] After getting lost in this book for a few minutes, I decided I have to blog some about it, so stick around for some really interesting chatter about this. (And from where I sit now, I don't see how I can possibly restrict myself to just one blog on this subject of this book. So be forewarned; if you don't want to listen to anybody talking about a book called Writing Handbook, skip a few days.) I wish I could remember exactly what year in school we used this book. My guess is around middle school years. I do remember that we had to write all the time in English class. We did one-, two-, three-paragraph exercises. We did longer essays, and usually the subject was assigned.

But I am digressing again. What I really wanted to do when I started was simply to point out the magnificence of the diagrammed sentence above. It's from a 1904 Henry James novel entitled The Golden Bowl. Here is is straight up:

The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion — or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty.It is taken from a Henry James novel. I've never read one of these, actually, but if this sentence is representative, I don't want to.

I think I could probably diagram sentences again after just a little brush up. I remember being pretty good at it, but I was good at English, period. It was just never hard for me, and I could not understand how it could be hard for anybody.

*Actually it was the second article on the subject. The first, "A Picture of Language," is here.

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The Cheater Is Not Guilty

. . . in the courtroom, that is. He is in every other way. Roger Clemens, former major league star pitcher, was found not guilty in what appears to be the last in a string of trials that arose out of the steroid scandal in baseball. The government had even less luck with Clemens than it did with the other marquee cheater Barry Bonds. This trial was about lying to Congress during testimony in 2005, but everybody knows the trial was really about steroid use in baseball. And looks like we're at the end of that road.

There are a billion news stories out there about the verdict. This one makes the points I would underscore. "Count Roger Clemens lucky for many reasons. First, he can afford a good attorney or attorneys. Second, the star witness was a clown. Third, Andy Pettitte’s recent amnesia. [First time around he heard his buddy Clemens say he used HGH; this time he said "he might have misunderstood" that. Yeah, right.] Lastly, the Government, or more specifically Attorney General Eric Holder, had inept lawyers." Surely all of this is true. The main witness against Clemens was a low-life character who claimed to have shot Clemens up numerous times. He was doubtless telling the truth, but he was easy to destroy in the hands of Clemens' smart, expensive lawyers.

I don't for one microsecond believe that Clemens didn't juice up like half of baseball was doing during the steroid era (roughly 1990 to 2005). The numbers he put up between the ages of 35-44 (1998-2007) defy belief, unless a guy is on the juice. But he walks, and now the papers are full of all these testimonials from other players about how somehow after this Clemens has a clean slate and calling for "moving on" and --a lot of them Yankees, which was the team Clemens pitched for during most of those last years in the game.

Anyway. There's no doubt Clemens is a cheater, and I trust the baseball writers who vote for the Hall of
Fame members keep his cheating butt out. He doesn't deserve the honor.

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