Occupy Something

I didn’t know there was a local Occupy Something group until I read a story in the local newspaper about a young woman who had, at the time of the story, spent three weeks camping in the park in front of the local city library.  This really surprised me; I was at that library a week ago and hadn’t noticed any sign of a protest.  I didn’t think we had any 1% types in our small town to protest against, in any case.

It turns out that we are a hot bed of wild and angry protest.    The dozen, well… half-dozen protestors were just boiling with rage as they cooked their Dinty Moore stew over on a Coleman stove.  If not rage, then they were at least filled with seething apathy.  I know for a fact that the dog that licked my hand could have turned violent--he had that wild feral look you only see in a demented cocker spaniel.

 There were several tables displaying literature, a few more tables for food, several propane barbecue grills, and half a dozen tents.  Except for the pamphlets, it looked like a deer camp.  I wondered about camp sanitation until I spotted one of the protestors walking back from the library.  What they do after dark, I have no idea.  Perhaps they depend on the kindness of the police station across the street.  Nah!  I’m sure that the Voice of the People wouldn’t want to take anything from The Man. 

Truthfully, it was a sad little protest.  They seemed mostly to be upset at the coming orgy of shopping on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving).  “Stay at home, don’t go to the stores,” explained one of the protesters from the comfort of a folding lawn chair.  “If you do go shopping, only buy things made locally.”

I think this is an excellent idea.  This Christmas, I’m going to only give gifts made locally.  Would you like pecans, chilies, or sand?   While I may not go shopping, I’ll bet my wife does.  You have a better chance of slipping a hamburger past a fat man than of getting the Doc to miss a sale.  If I stood between her and a 20% off sale at Tuesday Morning, she’d stomp a mud hole in me and never look back.

Other than being upset at large box stores, I’m not too sure what they were protesting.  There was a general sense of anger, but I’m not sure what they were angry about.  I did take a picture of a protest sign, but I’m not sure it really provides much in the way of answers.

I’m fairly sure the author of the sign does have a degree in Social Work.  That would explain the grammar and spelling.  And possibly the author’s confusion.

 Who promised her a free education?  Or free housing?  Or free medical care?  I work at a university and I want their paychecks to clear the bank.  I own a few apartments, and I expect rent.  And my wife, the Doc, wanted to be paid for medical care.  In actuality, the university doesn’t pay me much, my tenants usually have problems with the rent, and my wife only got paid about 50% of the time.  Maybe I should start my own protest movement.

I believe there is some confusion about the American Dream.  This phrase is frequently bandied about, but I don’t think too many people understand the concept, so let me explain.  You can count this as your free education.

In the days of Thomas Jefferson, the American Dream was to own a farm.  Jefferson did not trust cities or the men who worked in them.  If you drew wages, you would always be beholden to the man who paid you, and thus you could never truly be free.  But the owner of a farm could truly be independent and subject to no one.  Only a free man could be trusted with the reins of citizenship in a democracy.  Jefferson believed that a young man might have to work for a while, but eventually he could head west and start a farm of his own.  Obviously, there are a few logical holes in this plan: some don’t want to be farmers, somebody had to make the farmer’s iron plow, and eventually there is no more land to the west to “win.”

The American Dream changed over time.  By the beginning of the Civil War, the American Dream for many was to work and learn a trade until you could save up enough money to start a shop or a business of your own.  Ante-bellum America was full of small businesses; the largest employer in the country was the Baldwin Locomotive Works, where roughly 600 men worked.  You might start as an apprentice, but you could aspire to own a shop of your own.

Early in the Twentieth Century, the American Dream had changed again, to the desire to learn a skill, become a professional, and start a career.  This takes more education, but just as much work and forethought.

The American Dream has evolved constantly in our history, but a few of the details remain the same.  If you work hard, save for the future, and plan and put forth an effort, you can achieve independence and financial security for yourself and your family.  Nothing in the American Dream has ever said anything about something being free.  And it shouldn’t.  Anything that comes that easy is rarely worth keeping, and is never a dream that will inspire you to achieve.

I had a nice long talk with the protestors; I read their signs, took their handouts, smiled, and even wished them the best of luck.  I probably spoiled the effect a little when I got in my wife’s Mercedes and drove away.  Of course, they don’t know we bought it second hand.

Target the Trash

Volkswagen is sponsoring a new and fun initiative—literally.  It is called the TheFunTheory.Com and as the website explains, “This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

             

The whole idea is similar to Freakanomics--that behavior can be changed by altering the monetary incentives--but Volkswagen has decided that fun is a better incentive, at least in advertising, than cash.

One of the better examples of Fun Theory is a trash can that produces the sound effect of a falling whistling bomb whenever someone puts something in the receptacle.  The explosion at the end of the fall is worth the wait. 

I like this idea so much that I want to expand it.   If the addition of a simple sound effect will more than double the amount of trash put into a park trash can, what could we do for highway litter?  We need to think BIG.  And sounds!  And lights!

I call it the Trash Target.  Put a large drum on the side of the road and surround the drum with large metal rings so it looks like a bull’s-eye target.  Naturally, it needs a lot of paint (mostly red).  I picture something about ten feet across.  These targets could be put on the side of the interstate about every 50 miles or so.  Since every driver will want to legally dispose of the car’s litter even while driving alone, the targets should probably be placed on the driver’s side of the highway. 

Picture it with me.  You drive down the highway drinking Dr. Pepper and eating beef jerky when you see the sign:  “Trash Target Ahead 3 Miles.”  This gives you about three minutes to get your window down and reach under the seat for that empty bottle.  You have to time this right, gauge the distance, judge the speed and calculate for the wind—and you toss the bottle at the target.  As you pass the target, you check the rear view mirrors just in time to see the pulsing strobes and hear the klaxon.  A direct hit--success!

Naturally, most people will probably miss the target, so I suppose we should have some form of consolation prize.  A donkey’s bray?  A recording of the governor saying “Thank You?”  No, wait--that’s redundant.

I would imagine the ground around the trash target might get a little messy.  But at least the trash will all be gathered at one point instead of spread up and down the highway.  It should be easier to clean up that way.

In the spirit of Fun Theory, I have one more suggestion for your car:  a new ashtray.  A fun ashtray.  All you have to do is put a venturi (that’s a funnel-shaped intake that forces air through a narrow opening to create a vacuum effect) under the car, run the vacuum hose up into the car and have it come out of a hole mounted flush with the dashboard near the driver.  As you are driving along, just flick the cigarette anywhere near the vacuum hose.  The suction will suck up the ashes right out of the air, through the tube and eject them safely under the car.

I know what you are thinking.  No, it’s not going to start a fire.  It’s a cigarette ash, not a piece of burning coal.  By the time that the rushing air pulls that ash through about 6 feet of hose, then dump it under the car, those flakes of cigarette ash will be about as cold as a mother-in-law’s heart.

I don’t even smoke, but I’d be tempted to play with this thing.  I call it the Ash Hole.

Why Men Do What They Do

Sandy, a colleague of mine at Enema U, was bragging this week about her husband rescuing her from imminent doom: he changed a flat tire on her car.  I know and like Sandy’s husband—and I know exactly why he changed that tire.  And so does every other man alive.

It is absolutely amazing what men will do for…uh…women.  I maintain that women are the main reason that man has ever accomplished anything.   Continents have been explored, rivers bridged, and castles built--all for women.  The Taj Mahal is not the only monument built for a woman--everything created since the invention of the upholstered cave qualifies.

To be fair, man--alone without female companionship--would eventually have created a few other things (a list most likely limited to hunting, fire, and beer).  I am sure that one day primitive man would have sat around a campfire, sated after a large meal of burnt meat, and as he slowly sipped his beer would have daydreamed about inventing a large block V8 engine with dual carburetors.  And then that same man would have thought about how much work that would require and probably would have gone back to drinking beer.  Civilization, without woman, would have peaked at the invention of the barbecue.

Naturally, I will offer you a story as proof.  Whole broad swaths of this story are demonstrably and provably true.  There are a few details, however, that might possibly be a little hard to track down, so I am changing a name.  It probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out the guy’s real name--after all, I am using his real photo.  If you want to take the time, go for it.

Starting in the 1950’s and for the next 40 years, Red Adair was famous for blowouts (oil well fires).  Some of these oil rig fires shot flames hundreds of feet in the air.  Adair’s method of battling these fires was about as dangerous a job as imaginable.  First, a catskinner (that’s a bulldozer operator) would slowly approach the fire, with the rest of the crew walking behind the dozer to escape the heat.  An explosive charge was placed at the wellhead, and then the crew, all of whom were wearing special suits to protect them from the incredible heat, would withdraw.  With a large enough explosion, the fire could be blown out.  Then a new valve could be lowered onto the wellhead and Red Adair could fly home to Houston with a very large check.

Some of the fires put out this way are legendary. The Devil’s Cigarette Lighter shot flames 450 feet into the air for 5 months until Red Adair blew out the fire.  On average, Adair put out about 40 such fires a year.  After helping to extinguish the fires in Kuwait following the first Gulf War, Red retired.

In 1962, as Adair and his crew were flying back from one of those famous fires, a newsman and a camera crew were waiting for him on the tarmac at Hobby Field in Houston.  Live cameras were new, and this reporter was hoping to get a story big enough that the New York office might notice him and move him out of Houston and off to the big show back east.  It was a longshot, but just the year before, a local reporter named Dan Rather had taken a camera down to Galveston and reported on the approach of Hurricane Carla.  That story had earned Rather a job in Washington D.C.

As the firefighters got off Adair’s private plane and made their way to their matching red Cadillacs, the reporter, followed by his camera crew, ran up and shoved a microphone under Red’s nose.

“Why do you do such dangerous work?” the reporter asked.  Adair glowered at the man and walked around the microphone.  Before the reporter could turn around and face the live camera, Three-Fingered Wallace reached out with his mangled hand and pulled the microphone over to him.

Three-Fingered Wallace was a catskinner and had worked oil fires alongside Adair for years.  Driving that bulldozer was dangerous work, accidents were frequent, and in one of those, Wallace had lost two fingers. 

“Son,” he asked as the camera focused on him, “did you ever try to fuck a hungry woman?”

Why do men do what they do?  That pretty well sums it up.

It's Still 'Gee Whiz' To Me

Not long ago I was driving across West Texas.  It had a long time since Interstate 20 had been repaved and the tires hitting the sundried cracks in the asphalt produced a rhythmic thump like a cat in a clothes dryer.  It pains me to admit it, but the scenery isn’t much to look at either.  If you have seen one pumping station, the next few thousand aren’t much to look at.

That’s a straight and flat road, so either the monotony of the drive, or the constant thump-thump-thumping of the wheels lulled me into thinking about what this country must have been like a hundred years before.  There I was, driving my wife’s SUV just outside of Abilene, my iPod playing through the car's stereo, and the trip was being tracked on the car’s GPS, picking up signals from multiple satellites orbiting the earth in space.

Fairly fancy technology when you consider that this is pretty much the same ground my grandfather traveled in a covered wagon.  Has it really been so little time?

Recently, I told a student that my grandfather had been born in the nineteenth century; she looked at me as if I had just admitted to having personally participated in the Battle of Troy.  In her eyes, I must have been the very personification of old age.  Yet it is true--a little over a hundred years ago, my grandfather decided to move the family from West Texas east to Arkansas.  The family possessions were loaded into an old mule-drawn wagon and he drove the team the long trail to the rail station in Abilene.  There, the wagon was loaded and tied onto a flat car along with a wagon belonging to another family.  The fare to Arkansas cost each family $21.

The family did not do well in Arkansas, and in just a few years, the same trip was done in reverse, and the Milliorn family returned to West Texas.  I have no idea what happened, but it could very well be that my grandfather couldn’t adjust to the idea of farming with both good soil and adequate rainfall.  Within a few years after their return, my father was born.  So, my grandfather had traversed by covered wagon the area that I was driving through--twice.  I guess I was traveling about twenty times faster, and my version of a covered wagon had air conditioning and a few other amenities.

Somewhere along the line, all the high-tech gadgetry we all possess today fades into the background and we cease to actually see it.  At what point can I pick up my iPhone and not automatically think, “Gee Whiz!” in marvel at this impossibly clever device?  Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  But when does the magic wear off?  How many times do we have to see the trick before we stop being in awe of the magician?    

I know it is a generational thing.  Of course we take for granted the technology that was around when we were born, no matter how revolutionary.  I can remember when my nephews visited and looked in puzzlement at a rotary dial phone; they kept stabbing their fingers into the holes trying to push some non-existent buttons.  My sons cannot remember a life without cell phones and the internet.  But I can.  When did I stop being amazed?

It was at this point that I realized I had missed my exit by the same distance my grandfather could have covered in about a day with his covered wagon.  I really should pay more attention to my driving.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  So does a fall down a flight of stairs.

Splish-Splash, There Goes Your Cash!

Someone once described a boat as a hole in the water which you try to fill with money.  While I have no direct experience with boat ownership, I can tell you that owning a swimming pool is pretty much the same thing, it’s a hole in the ground that you dug with money so you can fill it with water.

After 25 years of owning a pool, I’m an expert.  And I have all the receipts to prove it.

Having a pool can be a lot of fun.  I have fond memories of teaching the boys to swim.  Warm summer days and lots of sun, laughter and cold beer.    I also have plenty of memories of endless hours of vacuuming half the sand of Arizona out of my New Mexico pool.  I can remember adding chemicals to the water until my backyard would qualify as a superfund site only to have the pool turn emerald green the morning of a party.   Somewhere, probably deeply buried in the filter, is a critical need detector.  When you most want to use the pool, this sensor will shut down the pump motor, short out the wiring, or burst a pipe.

Oh, the joys of standing in the deep end of your dry pool as you slowly paint it with rubber based paint!  Actually, this job isn’t too bad--after about ten minutes of breathing in the fumes, you start to giggle uncontrollably.  It’s pretty much the same effect as quickly downing three dry martinis on an empty stomach.  Getting the pool clean enough to paint isn’t much fun, however.  It’s sort of like scrubbing a bathtub, only its 27 feet long.  Every time we paint the pool, I try to convince my wife to let me decorate it.  I’ve always thought we should paint an image of a drowned person on the bottom of the deep end.  She doesn’t want to tempt fate.

Years ago, I was writing late at night--it must have been about 3:00 AM.  My head was in a fog, I had been at it too long, and so I took a break and walked out in the backyard.  The night was warm, it was a moonless dark night, and the pool had been perfect the day before.  I stripped off all of my clothes, left them on a chair and jumped into the inky dark pool.  It felt wonderful: the water was cool and skinny-dipping in my own pool in the middle of the night was perfection.  I was really enjoying it as I slowly swam across the pool—at least until I swam face first into the dead squirrel!

It was amazing—I could tell it was a drowned squirrel without even seeing it.  What kind of leftover evolutionary trait is it that allows a man to distinguish, with only his face, exactly what kind of dead rodent he has swum into?  Was this a useful skill for cave men?

I immediately did my Jesus Christ imitation and levitated up out of the water and walked—on the surface—to the edge and turned on the light.  Yep.  It was a dead squirrel.  Actually, it was the first one that we had ever seen in our back yard.  He probably came over for a swim.

Strangely, I’m not the only one I know who has had a problem with squirrels in their pool.  A few houses down, a neighbor had an above ground pool that mysteriously drained in a single night.  On investigation, it turned out that a ground squirrel had tunneled up into the bottom of the pool.  Poor thing was probably thirsty--but he probably didn’t want the whole 10,000 gallons.

Another friend of mine solved the pool vacuuming problem by buying one of those robotic devices that crawl around the bottom of the pool sucking up leaves and sand.  She looked out her window one afternoon and noticed that the robot wasn’t moving.  She went out to investigate, and you guessed it—it had sucked up a dead squirrel, head first.

Maybe we aren’t meant to have pools in the desert.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

In 1971, I was a house dick at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel.  In case you don’t know, a house dick is not a freelance fluffer, but a security guard.  I have written about the Shamrock before, and sadly, that is all that remains of the old hotel as she has been torn down.  When constructed, she was the largest hotel in the United States--18 stories tall and 1,100 rooms.  She had multiple night clubs, several bars, and a pool so large that guests were occasionally entertained with exhibitions of water skiing.

The hotel was built by a great old Texas wildcatter by the name of Glenn McCarthy who had won and lost a few fortunes in the heyday of Texas Oil.  To be frank, the oil wasn’t the only thing that was crude.  After Glenn had tossed back a few, he used to ride his horse through the 5.000 square foot mahogany-walled lobby.  That wasn’t too bad; it was when he took the horse up and down the elevator that a few of the guests (most likely Yankees) complained.

McCarthy had built the hotel to be his home; it is possible that is why it contained so many bars.  Glenn had a personal and very private suite on the 17^th floor with an exclusive elevator that only stopped at his suite and a small underground parking garage just large enough for 6 cars.  The entrance to the parking garage was in the alley behind the hotel, secured by a private gate that could only be opened by a security guard behind a very tall fence topped by barbed wire.

Show me a wildcatter who got rich on oil and I will show you one that will gamble his fortune on the next well.  Once that black gold gets into your bloodstream, you are unlikely to ever find a cure.  About six years after the grand opening of the Shamrock Hotel, still the biggest social event in Texas history, McCarthy had to sell the hotel to the Hilton hotel chain.

Let’s move forward to November 1971.  I was a starving student so poor that the only place I could afford to live was a dump of an apartment next to a cemetery.  Actually, this had certain benefits; my dates always received fresh flowers.  At night, I worked the graveyard shift at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel.  I guarded the alley.  This was a pretty good job, as I had a lot of time to study and very little else to do.  Very few people actually tried to steal that alley.  Even today, although the hotel is gone, the alley is still there.

Besides protecting the alley from theft and trying not to be eaten by huge packs of stray dogs attracted to the incredibly large number of industrial trash cans in the alley, I was also in charge of the two buttons that opened and closed the gate to that private underground parking garage.  By 1971, the only thing left of the old Glenn McCarthy days were wild stories and an impressive number of horseshoe shaped scars in the parquet flooring of the hotel.  While I worked there, his old suite was used by security-conscious guests.  During my employment, that private suite was used by Governor Ronald Reagan, Vice-President Spiro Agnew, Jerry Lewis, and…  Elvis Presley.

I really don’t remember much about most of those other guests.  When the Vice-President stayed, all I can remember is that a Secret Service agent walked my rounds with me.  This guy scared the pee-widdling crap out of me—by morning I was ready to confess to the Kennedy assassination.  This guy never said 10 words all night long, but somehow made me feel guilty about sins I hadn’t yet had time to commit.

Elvis was different.  That hotel was alive with the talk about his stay.  By the time I arrived at work, he was already performing at the nearby Hofheinz Pavillion.  Naturally, he was booked into the secured suite on the seventeenth floor, the private elevator was at the ground floor, the small private underground garage was empty and waiting for his chauffeured limousine, and I was waiting by the button for his arrival.  I was pretty sure I could handle this job, being proficient in the operation of both the open and the close button.  The hotel management was a little less sure--I got a call on the radio about every ten minutes.

A little after midnight, I finally got the call; Elvis was coming!  Within a very few minutes a long black limousine was in sight.  I waited until they pulled up to the gate and stopped while I carefully stared at the limo to make sure it was the right one.  Actually, I was just hoping to see Elvis--no one had actually told me what the car looked like and it wasn’t like I had seen a lot of black stretch limousines driving down that alley at midnight.  I pushed the button and the gate slowly opened.

The insides of that car were as black as a congressman’s soul.  I couldn’t see anyone inside; I couldn’t even tell if the car was occupied.  Then, just as the car slowly crawled through the gate, a hand appeared in the passenger side window, a white-sleeved hand waved briefly at me, and then the car disappeared down the ramp into the tunnel.

That’s it.  I hope you don’t feel too disappointed.  Yes, I had a brief ‘brush’ with Elvis—he waved at me.  There isn’t much left to the story.  I pushed the other button, the gate closed and I never got anywhere near Elvis again.

Well, it’s almost the end of the story.  About two minutes later, several cars pulled up outside by fence.  Almost a dozen middle-aged women climbed out of the cars as fast as their somewhat plump bodies would allow.  To a man-er…woman, they ran up to the chain link fence, clawed at it with plump fingers and screamed for Elvis.  A few even begged me to open the gate.

I can distinctly remember seeing Elvis wave at me.  A far more clear memory is me staring at those housewives and thinking…”My mom’s that age!”

Tough Enough Not To Wear Pink

Enema U is having its annual drive to help raise awareness in the fight against breast cancer; Spineless Enough To Be Coerced Into Wearing Pink Against Your Will Even Though You Damn Well Know It Is Pointless.  At least, I think that’s the name.

This is probably the point where I should point out that while I admit to being an insensitive brute, I actually do sincerely care about breast cancer.  My mother and my grandmother both died of breast cancer.  My wife, the Doc has performed countless operations for people suffering from breast cancer, both men and women.  I just object to group feel good exhibitions.

My university disagrees.  Half the administration is running around in pink t-shirts emblazoned with the words,  “Tough Enough To Wear Pink” while the rest are sporting sweatshirts that say “Cinco de Pink,”  Evidently, this is the 5^th year that “we” have done this. 

I’m sure the university doesn’t mean to stereotype people, but isn’t this  blatant macho challenge to men to wear pink a little over the top?  Do we really need to stereotype both sexes?  Next year, will we ask if women are feminine enough to wear a blue jock strap to help raise awareness of testicular cancer?

A lot of the research institutions involved in finding a cure for breast cancer are equally tired of the endless breast cancer walks, breast cancer runs, and enough pink t-shirts to keep half of China employed.   As one researcher put it, “If one more pink tschotske would cure cancer, we would be there already.”

It’s not like it hasn’t been tried.  Go to Amazon.com and search for the words “breast cancer” and you will find 51,000 cute little doodads for sale.  You can buy anything from pink golf balls to pink bracelets, each with a cute little pink ribbon and a promise to forward a microscopic portion of the sale price to some organization claiming to be a cancer institute.  There is a lot of green in pink.

Do we really need to raise awareness of anything related to breasts?  Almost everyone I know either loves them or has them.  Short of a telethon co-hosted by Hugh Hefner and Christina Hendricks, I think it’s been done.  Hell, two of my best friends are breasts.  If a few more million little pink ribbons would do it…. No, that’s just not going to work.  And aren’t we focusing on the wrong thing?

Heart disease kills more people, both men and women, than breast cancer.  But if numbers are not the point, maybe raising awareness of cancer actually is a good thing.  But enough of breast cancer, that has been done.  Let’s pick a new cancer, one that really does need more attention drawn to it.  That is why I am pleased to announce my new campaign to fight cancer.

Are you tough enough to smell like ass?  If so, please wear one of our new brown scratch and sniff ribbons for colorectal cancer.  Are you tough enough to get a colonoscopy?

Depression Impression

This country is either in a recession or so close to being in one that the difference only matters to television economists.  Despite what the talking heads on television say, however, this is nothing close to the great depression of the 1930’s.  The difference is not to be found in the endless statistics of the number of people out of work, the percentage of the underemployed, or even the numbers in poverty.  I think the real difference is in the attitudes of the people who lived during those difficult times between the two world wars compared with those of people today.

The history books contain a story about a man who was suddenly unemployed and found it difficult to adjust to the changes in his life.   Unable to find work, for three years he painted his house, over and over again.  This man wasn’t just passing time--he was desperate to regain a sense of purpose, to retain his pride.  I think this is the main difference: how the people of the Great Depression found ways to cope with the depression compared with the people of today.

I don’t have to resort to the history books to find examples--my parents told me of their own difficulties during that time.  My mother’s family lost their farm and moved to the giant metropolis of Plainview, Texas, where my grandfather could find work.  For the first time, my mother and her sisters lived in a town and had to get used to a new way of life.  She told me that one of the small ways the family coped was that they tried to ‘pretty up’ the trash in the garbage can waiting at the curb for the trash truck.

When my mother told me this, I thought it was hilarious.  “Why did you want to make your garbage look good?”  I asked.

My mother patiently explained, “We were poor, everyone was poor, but we didn’t want people to see the proof of it.  So we tried to make the garbage in our trash can look like we had more money than we actually did.  We would put the prettiest trash on the top of the can where people could see it.”

“What in the world is pretty trash?” I asked. 

“A piece of colored ribbon or a shopping bag from a fancy store,” she explained.  “But the prettiest trash was to show you could afford luxuries--something like a watermelon rind.  If you could afford a watermelon, you must be doing all right.”

Food as a luxury was something that must have been common in West Texas in those days.  My father had a similar story.  The farm he grew up on was not a financial success before the depression—when hard times hit it must have been only a few steps above hell itself.  My father was not quite a teenager when the depression hit.  Within just a few years, he would have quit school to find work and help the family.  For a while, however, he found a few odd jobs after school for small amounts of change.  He literally had to save his pennies.  If he was lucky, by the end of the week, he could finish chores on the farm and walk the few miles to town to spend that saved nickel at the small local grocery store.

In 1932, a nickel would buy quite a few things in there, but my father had two favorites.  Occasionally, he would buy a brown cardboard box containing five large white marshmallows.  I can picture in my mind my father describing that box and how he would open the lid and lick some of the powdered sugar off of one of the treats before putting the entire marshmallow into his mouth. 

Those marshmallows were good, and my father had a powerful sweet tooth his whole life.  I have no doubt that my father bought quite a few of those boxes over the years, but that wasn’t his favorite purchase.  Instead, he usually bought a can of cling peaches in heavy syrup.  A nickel for a whole 12 ounce can of sweet, sweet peaches!  Once the can was purchased, my father would sit on the curb outside the store and open that can with his pocketknife, and then slowly eat those peaches, one by one, until they were all gone.  Then he would carefully drink the syrup out of the can, making sure not to cut his lips on the ragged edge of the can.

Why didn’t he take the can home?  My father was one of eleven children.  His mother may have raised an idiot son, but that’s my uncle.

The Great Depression changed the people who lived through it.  It created values and built work ethics in those people that I’m not sure we will find in today’s generation.  I don’t think hard times will bind today’s people with a shared identity or a sense of accomplishment.  When the economy inevitably improves, will it have changed today’s people at all?

There is no doubt it changed my father.  He died fifty years after the end of the Great Depression.  When we cleaned out his kitchen pantry, there were 18 cans of peaches stockpiled there. 

Probably Incurable

For the last few years, Enema U has been conducting an interesting psychological experiment.  As the university is blessed with an abundance of surplus office and classroom space, the New Mexico State Psychiatric Hospital at Fort Bayard, in cooperation with the campus Psychology Department, has been testing a new form of treatment for the severely mentally ill.

The patients being treated share similar psychotic fantasies, the most notable being an incredible conviction of holding advanced degrees, of having vast amounts of specialized knowledge, and of being employed as professors of obscure yet vitally important arcane trivial subjects.  While generally harmless, these self-proclaimed “professors” are maniacally driven to “teach” the knowledge only they possess.   In most cases, this specialized knowledge actually amounts either to endless repetition of a minute amount of information or total gibberish, complete with an invented vocabulary.

Dr. Potluck from the New Mexico State Psychiatric Hospital at Fort Bayard has devised an innovative treatment situated on the campus of Enema U.  Why not group these patients into an imaginary department of teaching faculty?  Allow them to use some of the empty offices, conduct “research” as they wish, and even allow them to teach classes.  In other words, if the only way these patients could cope with reality was with the gentle fiction of being real academics, then humor them, observe them, and learn from them.

Office space was secured, the patients were assigned offices, and they even selected a department head from among themselves.  In almost every way, the patients behaved and acted as real functioning faculty.  Their habits were unusual, their dress strange, and their interpersonal skills almost nonexistent--In other words, they blended in perfectly with the real faculty.

The charade was so complete that even assigning these pseudo-faculty to teach classes was accomplished.  While some of the students in the classroom were actually attending physicians and nurses, most of the students attending the make-believe classes were actually students majoring in psychology.  According to one of these students, “It is amazing how long this patient can talk about absolutely nothing, almost like a real professor.  Sometimes, the nonsense almost sounds like it makes sense.”

Another student added, “Unless you listen to what they say, they act pretty much like everyone else on campus.  It is amazing--they really believe they are actual professors.  As long as you keep nodding your head and agree with what they say, it is pretty much like being in a real class.  I really feel sorry for them.”

The doctors have had to be creative with some forms of the treatment.  Group therapy sessions are called faculty meetings or committee meetings.  Many of the more severely affected patients are required to attend multiple such meetings each week.  Most of the patients take their arts and crafts projects seriously, even though most of the projects involve nothing more than chalkboards and finger painting.   The patients invariably call their creations “PowerPoint Presentations” and insist they are for their students.  Similarly, medications are often administered at after work drinking sessions.  Occasionally, you will even hear the patients referring to erstwhile Scotch as a “medicinal drink.”

Though generally mild-mannered and timid, occasionally patients suffer a relapses.  While still harmless, the patients are returned to Fort Bayard for treatment—usually shock treatment.  These absences are usually explained as sabbaticals.  Surprisingly, the patient invariably believes in these sabbaticals as well, frequently commenting after their return to the campus as “feeling recharged” or “energized and ready to teach.”

Dr. Potluck firmly believes in the efficacy of these experiments.  While the patients themselves are probably incurable, locked into endless cycles of denial and delusions of grandeur, they may provide the key to unlocking the secret to how these damaged minds function.  Close examination of the inner working of these poorly functioning brains may reveal how real academic minds work.

Dr. Potluck has recently revealed that one of the patients has promoted herself, and has just announced that she is now a Provost.

Teaching the Obvious

During World War II, the Army Air Corps trained navigators in San Antonio, Texas.  There was a critical shortage of classrooms, so a local movie theater was used for some of the instruction.  On the first day of training, the students were taken into the auditorium where a large globe was situated in the middle of the room.  While the students watched, an instructor with a long pointer indicated the lines of longitude and explained that every 15 degrees represented roughly an hour’s difference in time zones and that once you crossed the international date line, it was a different day.

Up in the balcony, another instructor was watching this whole process.  After 15 minutes of observation, he carefully watched the face of each student.  If he spied a student who appeared to be confused, a checkmark was made on a clipboard next to the student’s name.  Later that day, these students were dropped from the program and sent to an alternate training program.

The reason for this action was that after many classes, the Army had learned that the very idea of time zones and lines of longitude was a concept that students either learned in the first 15 minutes of instruction, or never really understood at all.   Any continued effort was generally fruitless and a waste of precious time. 

Here at Enema U, I sincerely wish that the same system were used in the various employee training programs for faculty and staff.  No matter what the subject, sooner or later the entire class is halted while someone, (probably a professor of Home Economics--or whatever they call it this week), has to be taught how to use a mouse.  Frankly, I wonder why we need these meetings at all.  The university is absolutely committed to teaching all academic subjects online, but somehow every time it decides to teach the faculty and staff how to fill out a simple form, this must be done in person.  Even the classes on how to teach online are taught in person….  Evidently, the administration doesn’t actually believe in online instruction, either.

On the other hand, could this be some form of advanced pedagogical technique?  Perhaps, making the class as long and boring as possible actually insures that the student will never forget the experience.  I’ve never tried this in my classroom, at least not deliberately, but I’m willing to experiment.  Here are my guidelines for the perfect boring training session.

1.      Make the training session mandatory, especially if the procedure you are teaching has not changed since the last mandatory meeting.  As you start the program, (a minimum of 15 minutes late), remind the class how important the training is.    Repeat this, but this time stress that it is very, very important.

2.      Use exactly the same jokes as last year.  This puts the audience at ease and makes them feel at home.  Then, as an ice breaker, make every single person in the room introduce himself to the room.  While pointless, it will let everyone know how valuable you consider their time.  People enjoy hearing total strangers mumbling incoherently about themselves, and--who knows--months from now, if you happen to run into the Senior Vice-President of Urinal Cake Rotation, you will know not to shake hands with him.

3.      No meeting is complete without PowerPoint--and be sure to give everyone a complete set of printed slides.  In this way, the audience can follow along with you as you carefully (and slowly) read every damn slide.  Everyone appreciates redundancy.  Everyone appreciates redundancy.  Of course, you could have just emailed this information, but group reading is so much more educational.  Besides, some of the attendees might be from the Education Department and may need help with the big words.

4.       Read slowly.  Not only will this insure that ten minutes of material will last an entire hour, but It practically guarantees that no one will actually pay much attention.  If you happen to have some tiny morsel of new information, it can be presented at this point to be certain that no one actually hears it.

5.      Have lengthy question and answer periods.  Everyone in the room will appreciate staying in the room while you explain (again) some minor point to the Professor of Home Economics who has her mouse upside down.

At this point, in any rational world, someone would come into the classroom and remove the Professor of Home Economics.  Her 15 minutes are more than up, and she will never understand the concept.  The rest of the class should be allowed to escape.   Until next year.

The Litter Box Is Here To Stay

The Doc and I are empty nesters.  Almost.  When I met my wife, she was pre-doc, and for a while we had only cats, then we had children and cats, then the children left and we have only cats again.  Maybe the only permanent things in our lives are the cats, uh… and each other.  The people come and go and the cats are with us in perpetuity.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but the cats are always weird.  When I met the Doc, she had a cat named HP.  Supposedly, this stood for Honey Pie, but from the way this cat acted, it was usually more along the lines of Horney Pot followed by Hugely Pregnant.  And it didn’t help matters that the cat was insane.  The Doc had found the cat in a cage in the Psychology Department of our university and the poor thing was liberated and smuggled to safety inside the roomy pockets of an army surplus field jacket. 

Unfortunately, it was soon apparent that the cat had been rescued after the experiments had been concluded.  This was a wild-eyed escape artist that seemingly could walk through walls.  Once, she pulled the screen off the kitchen vent and made her way into the neighboring apartment.  When the neighbors woke up, they promptly threw her out the front door.  And she just as promptly got pregnant.

My wife has always had a thing for rescuing cats.  Right now, we have Dust Bunny, a gray Siamese so cross-eyed that each eye is staring into the opposite ear.  My wife had to have this cat; we had to rescue him from the pound before the silly cat was put to sleep.  Eventually, I gave in to the inevitable and brought the pathetic thing home.  It didn’t take half an hour to discover why the cat was in the pound.  He’s not exactly blind, but evidently he can’t focus on anything.  He sees the whole world as full of large, blurry, weird, and frightening shapes.  As a consequence, the cat is terrified of everything.  He got his name because he spends the vast majority of every day hiding under the furniture with the real dust bunnies, the color of which resembles his fur.  Frankly, he has pretty much the same personality.

While the Doc was in medical school, we rented a three bedroom house where the pets greatly outnumbered us.  Besides a large collection of cats, (mostly the descendants of HP), we had a growing collection of tortoises that had been rescued crossing the highway.  These critters were about the size of a hard hat, and just about as lively.  Occasionally, we would bring one in from outside and let it terrorize the cats, who would refuse to get within a foot of the tortoise.

Once, for about a week, we had a rabbit.  Driving to work one day, I saw a large, fat rabbit hopping along the sidewalk.  Since I knew it was someone’s pet, and I knew it would get run over, I stopped the car to rescue it.  Why not--if we never found the owner, it would make great stew.  I had to chase that rabbit, finally catching it just before it tried to disappear under someone’s garage door that had been left open about 5 inches.  I took the bunny home and let it loose in the house.  As far as the cats were concerned, it was just an ugly cat with long ears.  I can’t say the rabbit made any friends, but there were no fights, either.  Eventually, I asked enough neighbors to discover the rabbit’s home.  Remember that garage door?  That’s where the rabbit lived--I had rabbitnapped him just inches away from his own home.  His owner let him run free and the bunny always returned.  

Shortly after Thanksgiving one year, one of the cats figured out how to overpower the magnets on the refrigerator door, in order to steal the remains of the duck we had cooked for the holidays.  Evidently, the remains of that bird were used in a soccer tournament as the cats played all over that house.  By the time we got home, the hard wood floors were pretty evenly coated with duck grease.  The Doc and I cleaned, scrubbed, and eventually buffed what was left of the duck into a shine on those hardwood floors.  It took a whole weekend, but eventually, we had a beautiful shine on that floor that no paste wax had ever given us. 

About a week later, the Doc and I were in bed about midnight, reading, when we heard a strange noise in the hall outside our bedroom.

Thump!  There was definitely a footstep in the hall leading to our bedroom.  We looked at each other wide-eyed and Karen reached for the phone on the nightstand.  Though the door was slightly ajar, nothing could be seen in the dark hallway.

Thump!  Whoever it was out there was getting closer.  I reached over to my nightstand and took out a gun.  This was obviously a home invasion, and I was ready to defend us.

THUMP!  This was impossible, the hall wasn’t that long!  Someone was playing with us, but the sound of the footsteps was still getting closer.  I held the gun in both hands, doing the best Weaver grip I could manage while sitting up in bed.

THUMP!  Finally, the door slowly--terribly slowly--opened up…  and opened up… to finally reveal that damn tortoise we had forgotten to put back outside.  Every time that tortoise took a step, his feet splayed out in all four directions, slamming the bottom of his shell into the floor.  That duck fat floor was not only shiny, but a little slippery.

The Keys to the Problem

It has been thirty years so I can safely tell the story--I think the guy in question is probably either dead or in jail by now.  In any case, I doubt if he could read.  And Hurricane Ike dealt a death blow to the hotel and now it’s completely torn down.

Thirty years ago, my wife was in a surgical residency in Galveston, Texas.  While Galveston is a beautiful place to visit—well, we didn’t really want to live there, but we had no choice if the Doc was going to complete her medical training.  There were very few jobs for a computer guy on a small island whose economy centered on the tourist trade.  Eventually, I was employed as the resident manager of the Flagship Hotel.

The Flagship was unique: a large hotel built on a pier extending over the Gulf of Mexico.  The entire hotel was, quite literally, on the water--actually over the water, with an ocean view for every room.  The Flagship was a great, old, weird hotel with a past that stretched way back into the days when the mafia ran the town, when prostitution and gambling were ignored, and when untaxed liquor ran about as hard and fast as the pounding surf under the hotel.

Those days had been the wild youth of the hotel, but when I ran her when she was a genteel and mature lady whose clientele were families and honeymooners.  About the only evidence remaining of her uninhibited youth was a trap door in my office where one of my predecessors could quickly dispose of the gambling paraphernalia in the event of a raid.  I never had to throw any poker chips down that trap door, but I did occasionally open the door for the view while I did paper work.

I liked the Flagship.  She was a fine hotel, but if there was any one single recurring problem, (other than the occasional hurricanes that eventually claimed her) it was the fact that the hotel was large while the pier it rested on was small.  To be specific, we only had enough parking for 90% of the guests.  And this was a large problem, since parking off the pier along Seawall Boulevard was absolutely impossible.

While the mob was long gone (mostly) from Galveston, there were no shortage of thugs.  A group of which had gotten together and bought a small lot on the main tourist drag just yards away from the entrance to the hotel.  Though the lot was paved and striped for parking, there were signs warning that no parking was allowed, and that violators would have their cars towed away!  Actually, that was the whole point since the lot was owned and operated by Five Thugs Towing, Inc.  At least, I think that was the name.  These gentlemen would tow your car to the far end of the island, and then charge you $85 for the return of your car.    Remember, this is thirty years ago, and back then that was however much money it was back then.  Roughly the price of a three bedroom house.  Or something like that-- my memory is a little fuzzy.  Whatever, it was too damn much money just to ransom your own car. 

This was legal, but about as ethical as putting a tiger trap in a school yard just to collect the used clothes.  And the five thugs who ran this operation were soundly hated by every businessman for blocks around.

When the hotel was full, we asked customers who could not find a parking space on the pier to leave their car keys at the front desk and we would double park their car at the end of the pier (keeping their keys so we could move the car if necessary to allow a blocked vehicle to escape).  This was a real pain, as the bellboys spent a lot of time moving cars around all night long.

One Sunday morning, after several guests had checked out and driven away, I gave a set of keys to a bellboy and told him to move the guest’s double parked car, a Camaro, into one of the empty parking spaces.  After a while, the bellboy came back and said there was not a single Camaro on the pier.  I didn’t believe him, so I double checked.  We did an exhaustive search--no Camaro.  I had a premonition that I knew what had happened, but I checked anyway.  The bellboy who had parked the car the previous night was new, and when I called him at his home, he remembered the Camaro.  He had found “a really nice place to park it in an empty parking lot across the street.”

I made the phone call, and sure enough, it had been towed by the Five Thugs.  The guy at the impound lot was laughing his ass off; I could have the car for $85.  There was no choice--the hotel was going to have to pay the fine, and hopefully bring the car back to the hotel before the owner found out about the  boneheaded mistake.  I got one of the bellboys to drive me to the impound lot in the hotel courtesy car.

The impound lot was damn near in the swamp at the west end of the island.  It was a large lot surrounded by a barbed wire fence containing dozens of cars, tow trucks, and one very angry guard dog.  Just outside the fenced lot were a small shack with a single tow truck sitting in front of it.  Inside the shack was a soulless cretin with his feet up on a desk, grinning like a drunken raccoon.  I ignored his laughing, paid him the extortion, handed him the keys to the Camaro and asked for the car.

The wrecker driver slowly stood up and picked up a huge loop of keys.  A piece of rope about three feet long with a hook at each end held dozens of key rings.  There must have been two hundred keys on that loop.  The driver escorted me out of the shack, locking it behind him, then went to the gate, unlocked it and drove the Camaro out, stopping to close the gate again, locking the guard dog and all the cars and trucks inside the lot.  Finally, he drove the car over to where I stood waiting.

“Here ya’ are, boy,” he said.  “Sure nice doing business with ya.” 

I got behind the wheel, shut the door and began driving back to the hotel.  Within a block, I heard a horn and a quick glance at the rearview mirror revealed that my thug was right behind me in the tow truck I had seen parked in front of the shack.  This wrecker driver seemed really upset, waving his arms, flashing his lights, and honking constantly.  There was no way in the world I was going to stop for this asshole, so I floored the gas pedal on that Chevy.

Have you ever driven a Camaro?  They’re nice.  That tow truck had a lot of power, but the Camaro ran like a stabbed rat.  It was a damn good thing this race was on a Sunday morning!  The streets were deserted with no pedestrians in the crosswalks.  That guy behind me was determined, and we tore across the island running the lights and ignoring the speed limit.  I beat him back to the hotel with just enough time to yell out the window to the guard at the hotel entrance for him to call the front desk and have the security guards and the bellboys out in front immediately.

As I braked to a stop in front of the hotel, a few of my employees were waiting for me (thankfully, for the wrecker driver skidded to a stop right behind me).  I got out of the car, left the door open and stood on the sidewalk beside the car.  The wrecker driver leaped out of his truck, ran to the car and jumped inside.

“Whar’ are my keys?” he roared.  “I know you didn’t throw ‘em out the window, I was right behind you.  You must have ‘em!”

Now it seems this poor schmuck had misplaced that big loop of keys.  The only keys he had in his pocket were the keys to the tow truck he had been driving while chasing me across the island.  Evidently, he believed that I had somehow stolen those keys.

“Gimme my keys!  You gotta’ have ‘em.  I can’t get back into the office.  I don’t have the keys to my house.  I can’t even feed my dawg!”  The voice was a little more pleading and a lot less demanding, but after several long minutes of searching, he knew those keys weren’t in the Camaro.  And he could see that I didn’t have them.  This was Texas in 1980.  I had on a white short-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans so tight you could tell if the dime in my pocket was heads-side up.  I couldn’t have put a fraction of those keys in my pocket without that man seeing them.

It took several minutes for that driver to finally give up and drive away to look for those keys at the impound lot.  Maybe he had dropped them there.  He had searched the Camaro several times, and begged me to tell him if I had seen the keys.  Eventually, he even offered to give me back my money--all to no avail.  I just stood there, shaking my head.  Finally, at the gentle urging of the security guards, he drove away.

I stood there until he was out of sight.  Then, I slowly walked towards the railing at the end of the pier.  I had really enjoyed that race across the island, even though I had been a little busy.  As soon as I had gotten into that car, I had noticed that huge key ring lying on the seat.  As I drove off, I had taken out my pocket knife and cut that rope.

I could just barely walk across that pier, but when I finally got to the railing, I took off my cowboy boots and slowly poured all those keys into the ocean.  I’ll bet they are still down there, right on top of all those old poker chips.