R.I.P. Mexico

Evidently, I’m going to be attending a lot of funerals.   Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead at a funeral.  Years ago, I swore I would never attend anyone’s funeral unless he came to mine first.

But the sheer number of recently dead is absolutely staggering, I can’t ignore them all.  You see, 20,000 friends of mine have died in the last year, and probably that many will die this year, too.  I’m talking about Mexico, of course.  Over 20,000 people have died in the drug war in Mexico during the last year, and no one is discussing an armistice.  This is going to be a long war.

I’m not the governor of Alaska, but from my house I can see another country.  Okay, I have to stand on my roof, and it’s Mexico, not Russia.   I wish it was Russia, because I have always loved Mexico.  I’ve traveled in Mexico for over 40 years; by train, bus, and car.  I’ve worked there and taught courses about the country.  I’ve eaten the food, drunk the water, among other things, and taken advantage of a few other assorted pleasures.  And in every case, Mexico’s peoples have given me far more kindness than I deserved.  This is a beautiful country with amazing people.

It has always been amazing to me that so few of my students know anything about Mexico’s history.  Everyone can name several battles of the American Civil War, but how many can name even one battle from the Mexican Revolution?  This revolution was just a hundred years ago, there were at least a million casualties out of a much smaller country, and a lot of the battles happened right on the US border.  You can see the site of one of them from my roof.

Now, it looks like Mexico is going to have to go through that level of violence again.  And this time, most of the guilt belongs north of the border.  Mexico is suffering and dying from violence because America will not simply recognize the stupidity of our drug laws.

Our drug laws make criminals rich, undermine the legal system of our neighbors, swamp American courts, jail a larger percentage of our citizens than any other country, and put an incredible economic strain on our public finances.  I am at a loss to find anything positive resulting from our drug laws.  Somehow, we as a nation have convinced ourselves that our laws are preventing people from using drugs.  Maybe this is because our government keeps telling us that we are making major progress in the war on drugs.  Stop and think about this, do you really believe there are fewer people using drugs today than 30 years ago?

Several years ago, my son, not What’s-His-Name, but the The-Other-One, told me that within blocks of our home, he would have no trouble purchasing any form of drug or alcohol that he might want, with one exception.  He even knew where to get a Cuban cigar.  What he couldn’t get was a pack of cigarettes.  Now that’s the kind of progress that completely justifies the billions of dollars we have spent on the “War On Drugs” during the last 39 years.

This idiotic phrase, “The War on Drugs,” came out of the Nixon Administration.  That alone should give you a clue about how well the program is really working.  I have no idea why, long after we have rejected almost everything else Richard Nixon stood for, we have continued this idiotic war.  While our government still claims we are winning this war, it should be painfully obvious that if we had fought World War II as effectively as we are fighting drugs, this blog would be written in Japanese.

I’m tired of paying way too much money to fight drugs.  Some estimates say we have now spent more fighting drugs than we spent fighting Viet Nam.  But it’s not just the taxes; fighting drugs costs a lot of money that we can’t really notice.  How much extra is my home owner’s policy because I have to insure against someone crawling in my window to steal my TV so he can buy drugs?  How much extra is my car insurance?  How much extra cost is built into the price of everything I buy to cover some part of a policy that cannot conceivably work?

And forever more, why are we making criminals rich?  Illegal drugs are expensive drugs.  This is why we hear of cocaine cartels and marijuana cartels but no one has ever read a story about French wine cartels.  This is why my son can buy a Cuban cigar and I can’t find a decent bottle of Beaujolais. 

Remember Al Capone?  He got rich because we made alcohol illegal.  As he often said, “I am just a businessman, giving people what they want.” 

Making drugs illegal does not make them disappear, if we can’t keep drugs out of federal prisons, how could we keep them out of Los Angeles?  If drugs have to be in our society, do we really want criminals to profit from them?  Does our government have some secret economic stimulus program for gangs?

Let’s ignore all of this.  Let’s ignore that the government doesn’t have any business telling us what we should do with our own bodies.   Let’s ignore that there are more drugs around today than before we started this silly policy.  Let’s ignore that we jail so many of our own citizens that China has lectured us about civil rights in the United Nations.  Let’s ignore rich criminals and an ever larger police force.  I’ll give you another reason to think about changing the rules of this war; Mexico is losing its war on drugs and my friends are dying.

If we have problems with the present government in Mexico, think what it will be like when the drug cartels take over in Mexico.

The Lizard Of Oz

Last night, my honorary granddaughter, the Munchkin, and I caught a late night showing of the Wizard of Oz on cable. She was completely mesmerized. I doubt if she blinked until Dorothy was back in Kansas.

This definitely was not my first viewing. When the boys, What’s-His-Name and the The-Other-One, were little, they would become fixated on a single movie and repeatedly watch it until even the cats would hock up a hairball as soon as the boys shoved the tape into the VCR.

When the boys were a little older, they became fixated on Memphis Belle. After a couple of hundred viewings, I had nightly dreams about bombing Munich. This used to make me feel guilty, at least until I visited Munich. Now I wish I could have the dreams again.

I’m not sure how many times we watched that movie, certainly enough for my wife and me to lip sync the parts along with the actors. Enough so that it was not at all uncommon for the breakfast table conversation to center around the various merits of the B-17F as compared to the Lancaster. For several years, however, long before the Memphis Belle, the boys were hooked on the Wizard of Oz, or as the boys called it, the Lizard of Oz.

I know we watched that movie at least 200 times. I got where I could identify individual munchkins. (The guy dressed in green plaid must be the director’s favorite; he is in almost every scene.) All of us, the boys, my wife and I could mouth every part with perfect timing; we could have acted out the entire movie by ourselves, including Dorothy, the witch, and the flying monkeys.

Actually, my wife and I didn’t mind watching the movie as we’ve always enjoyed it. Now that I think on it, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who didn’t love the movie. If you are old enough to remember phones with dials, shoes without Velcro, or when a one pound coffee can actually contained 16 ounces of coffee, you probably remember when this movie was shown just once a year on TV. The network would advertise it for weeks and on the night it was shown, every kid in America was ready. Just before the show started, the mothers of America would say in unison, “Now if this is too scary for you, you don’t have to watch it.”

Damn straight that witch was scary, but there was no way a kid would admit it to his mother. A thing like that would get you talked about. My mom would tell some other mom about how I had gotten scared, then that mom would tell it to her son, who probably was just as scared, and the next thing you knew your entire year of third grade turned into living hell.

It is amazing the extent that this movie has soaked into our culture. Can anyone go a whole month without hearing one of these phrases?

• Toto, I don’t think we're in Kansas, anymore.
• Not nobody, not no how.
• We’re off to see the wizard.
• I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog, too.
• If I only had a brain…
• I’m melting! Melting!
• Ding Dong, the witch is dead.
• Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
• The Great and Powerful Oz has spoken!
• Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

There is something comforting about an old and comfortable movie. According to my wife, we watched the movie on our honeymoon. And we may have for all I know, that’s not the part of the honeymoon I remember.

After 71 years, think of how the world has changed. When the movie premiered in the summer of 1939, FDR was president and you could buy a new car for under $700 and for an extra dollar, you could buy 10 gallons of gas. Hamburger was fourteen cents a pound, and a new house was less than $4000. In Europe, Hitler was lusting for Poland while the rest of the continent was as nervous as a Chihuahua in freeway traffic.

After all these years that movie is still wonderful. Somehow, the topics the movie deals with; family, home, courage, and the triumph of good over evil, will be with us forever.

One thing has changed however; in today’s world, if Dorothy was to find men without brains, hearts, or courage, she wouldn’t be in Kansas. She’d be in Congress.

Term Limits

Slightly over two years ago, I walked around the house pulling the phones out of the wall. I got tired of people calling me and telling me how I should vote in the upcoming election. I still have a phone line, there are just no working phones in the house. Since then, it has been so peaceful that I’m considering chopping down the mailbox.

I doubt if this would work. Lately politicians have been knocking on our front door. I probably wouldn’t mind if we didn’t have such a sorry herd of candidates. Almost anyone could dig a pit somewhere out in the desert and catch a better crop by accident. Failing this, there seems to only one possible solution to chase the foxes out of the henhouse: term limits.

But aren’t term limits a violation of my freedom of …of …something, perhaps speech? Probably. The whole idea of term limits seem to be that every individual believes he or she alone can be trusted to vote correctly and everyone else is a moron. I don’t think I have ever heard someone lament, “Help! Stop me before I vote again!”

Term limits have been around a very long time. (Do you feel a history lesson coming on?) Ancient Greece placed a limit of two single year terms on a member of the council, while Rome put a limit of one term for a Consul. Both civilizations then barred those politicians from ever holding office again. If we practiced such a system, most of our politicians would be thrown out of office before they could figure out who paid the best bribes.

And term limits have frequently been the case south of the border- a region that has experienced far too many individuals wanting to be President-For-Life. Latin American constitutions frequently limit presidents to a single term, and newly elected presidents just as frequently ignore this. Both Cuba and Venezuela used to have such a provision….

Mexico has had such a limitation since the Constitution of 1917 was written, and no president has successfully broken this tradition. The one president who sat out a term and ran again was assassinated before his inauguration. Assassination might seem a somewhat draconian solution to term limits, but no one can doubt its effectiveness.

For six years, the president of Mexico has almost unlimited power, in the not too distant past, he could even select the next president. The only power absolutely denied to the president for the last hundred years has been reelection. Perhaps Mexico doesn’t actually have a president: this system has been more appropriately called a six year monarchy.

Obviously, this system wouldn’t work in America; we certainly don’t want to give our politicians more authority. Giving more power to elected officials would be as dangerous as giving a wino $50 all at once. You could kill him.

It’s not like term limits have never been tried in the United States. William Penn wrote them into the Pennsylvania Charter of Liberties back in 1682. More recently, in 1951 the 22nd Amendment passed, limiting presidential terms to two. Since then, there has been little traction in passing some form of term limit for national office. This explains why the turnover rate in the U. S. House of Representatives is 7%, only slightly better than the 5% turnover rate for the British House of Lords, whose members serve for life.

I asked a friend, a veteran of Chicago politics, what he thought of political term limits. Horrified, he said, “Absolutely not! Let them serve their full term just like any other prisoner.”

This was an innocent mistake, as my friend probably thought that every state used the “Chicago Term Limits Plan.” This is a simple system, one every state should adopt. From now on, all politicians shall be limited to two terms. The first in office. The second in jail.

So Many Bands, So Little Music

This is a strange time of year around the university. During the summer, the place resembles a ghost town. I miss the students, the rest of the faculty can stay away a while longer.

There are very few classes, this is a time to rewrite lectures, rebuild the computers in the lab, and read. And read. And read. I love summer reading the way a small boy loves a puppy. I guess that’s sort of obvious. This blog is a year old, and in the previous 52 entries, about every fourth one mentions a book.

The population of the town drops by thousands during the summer; many students go home, and some of the faculty go back under their rocks. Suddenly, I can drive to school without three cars behind me all trying to become my personal proctologist. In total, the town becomes peaceful and quiet.

Well, until next week. Once a year, the university turns the intramural field over to the Warped Tour. It is difficult to use peaceful and Warped Tour in the same sentence.

For those of you who don’t know, Warped Tour is a touring music festival. Bands play for ten hours, thirty minutes each, on ten different stages. Each band has an incredible sound system, by the end of the day; somewhere near a hundred bands will have performed. At any given moment, perhaps a half dozen are playing simultaneously.

I won’t pretend to like the music. Individually, each of the bands sound like someone is trying to break up a pillow fight in a sorority house by banging a bass drum with a cat. When several play at the same time, it sounds like freight trains having sex on Normandy beach. The level of noise causes compressions in your chest, pitiful little birds attempting to fly over the field fall from the sky stone dead, and Hugo Chavez holds a press conference proclaiming to have proof of the American secret earthquake device.

At least, this is what it sounds like to me. I should point out that my office is across the street from this sonic abattoir, I have no idea what it sounds like if you actually attend. I suspect that no one does, since if you were present, you would be deaf for the rest of your life.

I’m sure the event will be a lot of fun. Southern New Mexico in June, a field without a single tree, tickets cost $33, and you cannot bring any outside food, beverage, or water containers into the event. No doubt the concession booths will be manned by cheerful and generous people whose only concern will be to ensure the enjoyment of every person wishing to attend. They will probably give away free cotton balls so their patrons can attempt to staunch the blood pouring from their ears.

Why New Mexico in June? Do they hold a similar concert in Alaska in January? Are misery and pain part of the enjoyment? Why hold the festival when most of the students are out of town? Wouldn’t overcrowding enhance an event such as this?

Unfortunately, most of you will miss the concert. Don’t worry. Amazon sells a compilation CD for $8. Of course, to get the full effect, buy 5 copies and play all of them at the same time. Inside a phone booth.

Its Not That Hot - Part Two

It is the early 1960’s, Saturday night about 9:00 PM; my family is gathered in the living room. Naturally, we are watching television. Have Gun Will Travel just ended and any minute we will get a close-up of James Arness’ butt. For some reason, Gunsmoke, my dad’s favorite show, always started with Marshall Dillon’s ass filling the screen. And every week, my mother would promptly say, “Why don’t his pants have a seam down the middle like everyone else’s?”

For years, that was only half the ritual, first there was an announcement, “The following show is brought to you in LIVING COLOR!” Immediately, my mother, my brother and I would begin chanting, “Color! Color, Daddy! Color!”

Well, I assumed his ass was in color, but this is the way it looked at my house. Look at that picture! Why don’t those pants have a seam?

The horrible situation that we were trying to shame my father into correcting was the family’s lack of a suitable television; a color TV. We were convinced that we were the last family in America still watching a black and white television.

Looking back, I have no idea why we thought we had to see that ass in color. As you can see, it really didn’t look that much different, but my family was convinced that a new color television was a necessity of life.

A similar activity is now occurring at my house, but it involves air conditioning. According to my wife, this is the last house in the in the country south of the Arctic Circle that has not ditched the rusty old swamp cooler in favor of refrigerated air conditioning. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read last week’s blog.

Now, every time my wife hears the weather report, she reminds me of our need for better air conditioning. She does not start chanting, “Air conditioning! Air conditioning!” However, she does give me what I call the Gregor Mendel Look. If you aren’t married, the Gregor Mendel Look is the angry stare a woman gives her husband while remembering that he donated half the chromosomes to their children.

I have a great reason for not wanting to make the change, actually, about 6000 reasons, that being about what it will cost. My wife has about 85 reasons why we should, that being the inside temperature.

“Honey, remember all those pioneers who settled New Mexico.” I say, “They did it without air conditioning.”

“Yes,” she answers. “All those pioneers—they’re dead. That’s what people did back before air conditioning, they just died.”

Frankly, she has a point. I have always wondered about the sanity of those early pioneers. I have this mental picture of a man driving his ox-drawn covered wagon. Day after day he sits in the seat of that wagon, facing the afternoon sun, intent on a better life somewhere in California. Suddenly, he comes to the dried red sand of western Texas. It’s as hot as a pawn shop pistol. There’s no water, no shade, no trees, and no neighbors. This is the kind of land where buzzards pack a lunch as they fly past it.

“Honey,” he yells as he climbs down from the wagon. “Let’s live here!”

I have thought about that moment more than a few times. Why didn’t his wife get down off that wagon and brain him with a frying pan? What route could this wagon have taken from the east where a sun baked desert was the best ground they had seen since crossing the Mississippi? Was this pioneer couple thinking of starting the first commercial lizard ranch?

I suspect my wife will eventually get new air conditioning; I have two good reasons to believe it. First, I’m descended from that idiotic pioneer. Secondly, my father eventually bought my mother a color television.

Its Not That Hot - Part One

It’s summer time in the desert. No clouds, endless sunshine, and perfect temperature. Well, perfect if you normally winter in hell. We also have zero humidity; dogs are chasing fire hydrants, we staple envelopes closed, and the local cactus is moving north for the summer.

Because of this, most houses use two forms of air conditioning, one of which would not work in the rest of the country. We use an evaporative water cooling system, colloquially called swamp coolers. Basically, this is a large box on the roof where water is poured over some form of filter. Fans suck dry air from the outside, force it through the wet filter, and then blow it down ducts into your house. Along the way, the air picks up a lot of humidity. No refrigeration, no Freon, and a very low operating cost.

Surprisingly, it actually works fairly well. It works right up to the point where it doesn't work at all. It will pretty much lower the inside air temperature about 20 degrees. If it is 88 degrees outside, it can make the house a little chilly. As I write this, it is 106 outside and about 86 inside. This is where the second system comes into play; cold beer.

Okay, swamp systems aren’t perfect, but they have certain benefits. They leak until the roof gets water damage, something that otherwise is pretty hard to do in a place where every time it rains, awestruck people double the average church attendance. Swamp coolers have about as many moving parts as ’57 Chevy, one of them is always squeaking, perpetually sounding like a flock of canaries. Most importantly, this is the only way a house around here could develop a serious mold problem. All the fun of living on the gulf coast without the cheap seafood. With endless sand, we have the beach; we just don’t have the ocean.

This New Mexico method of cooling is not exactly efficient. People living anyplace else in the world would probably change over to something that actually works, but here, swamp coolers are actually a sort of hobby for some people.

What fun! Tomorrow, I get to climb on my roof, adjust the float valve, oil the squirrel cage, patch the roof where the idiotic float valve has flooded the roof too many times, and the while wondering why in the world I use a cooling system from the 19th century while living in one of the harshest environments in the United States that isn’t actually on fire.

Why? Well, first off, the damn swamp cooler is simple. If a dust storm rolls it off my roof into the neighbor’s yard, I can probably knock it back into shape with a ball peen hammer. Forty years ago I was an engineering major at the University of Houston. While I can’t say I remember everything, I did learn the cardinal rule of engineers; Bash to form, file to fit, and paint to cover. I can do that.

The second reason to keep the stupid cooler is cost. If my neighbor won’t give it back after the dust storm deposits it into his flower bed, I can buy a new one for $300. Last time I got a quote to convert the house over to refrigerated air, it was roughly $6000. Alternatively, I could buy a new cooler and have enough left over 800 six packs, and still have enough left over for a new book.

The best reason not to switch is… It’s the calendar. We don’t need air conditioning during the spring, fall, or winter. That takes care of two months. During all ten months of the summer, the temperature only rises above 95 for about two months. And there is no way in hell I’m climbing on that roof during the day when the temperature is that hot.

I did that a few years ago. When it is 100 degrees on the ground, it is 130 on the roof. I climbed up to fix one of the endless water leaks, leaned against the blistering metal swamp cooler, and the matches in my pocket caught fire.

That was several years ago, but I doubt if anyone who lives within a block has forgotten the time their neighbor was screaming on the roof of his house waving a pair of burning pants.

The Lighning Cooker

My son, What’s-His-Name, taught me a cute trick about nuking a white grape in a microwave the other day. It takes too long to explain, but if you are really interested, you can see how to do it here. It seems the internet is full of ways to turn your microwave into a personal incinerator or self defense weapon.

Not that I’m complaining, I play with my microwave myself. Take a CD you would like to destroy, place it on top of a coffee cup you have turned upside down and nuke it for 5 seconds. You’ll get a better show if you do this with the lights turned off. Don’t think of this as childish behavior, this is a creative process. You are either producing abstract art or Christmas tree decorations for Iron Man.

I showed one of the Munchkins at work how to do this trick, next thing I knew half the video library had been turned into wall decorations.

Actually, I have long been fascinated by microwaves. I can remember the first time I saw a microwave. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what it was.

Forty years ago, during my freshman year at college, I worked at the Shamrock Hilton in Houston. The Shamrock was a great old hotel, it was the hotel featured in the last half of the Rock Hudson movie, Giant. I had a great job; I worked the midnight shift guarding the alley. As a guard, I did such a great job that even today, 23 years after the hotel has been torn down, my alley is still there.

The hotel employed well over a thousand employees, all of us grossly underpaid. Since it was impossible to leave the hotel for lunch, and certainly none of us could afford to eat in any of the hotel restaurants, the hotel had an employee cafeteria in the basement. Every day, each employee was given $1.50 in special tokens to use in the cafeteria. Unfortunately for me, by the time the midnight shift rolled around, the cafeteria was closed, all that was left were special vending machines that only accepted the tokens.

Luckily, one of the machines sold cans of chili. I have to admit that I thought vending machines that could sell you a can of chili were pretty amazing. I had no idea such wonders of sophistication even existed, but that was nothing compared to the incredible box they had to heat up your chili.

Now cold chili is an abomination, something on a par with the weird things that Yankees do to their chili, such as adding macaroni or potato chips. Luckily, there was an oven there. The only way I knew it was an oven was the little plastic sign attached that listed the heating times for the various foods available.  Accordingly, I opened the can, put it in the microwave and turned the dial on the timer to two minutes.

Bzzzzztt! Cool! It cooked the chili with lightning bolts! Bzzzzt! Crack!

I had never heard of such an amazing invention, but there was no denying that it really worked. In two minutes, those little lightning bolts produced a hot steaming can of chili. The machine did leave little black burn marks all over the edge of the metal can, but those little lightning bolts really did a great job. The machine did have one serious flaw, it was a little delicate. In about a week, I had to eat my chili cold, the lightning bolt cooker had died.

A few days later, there was a replacement machine, but within about a week or two, I couldn’t get it to work either. For a while, there was a steady procession of replacements, Wolf Brand Chili and I killed each and every one of them. Eventually, someone put up a large sign, I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it was brief, profane, and educational. I reluctantly learned not to put metal in a microwave. At least not in one I needed to cook my lunch.

I’m still fascinated with microwaves. About a week ago, I was in a local convenience store late one night. Since it was late, the clerk was restocking the store. In the back of the store, on a shelf, was a microwave. Next to it was a small unopened cardboard case of 24 microwave popcorn packages. What would happen if I put the whole box into the microwave and set the timer up to about 10 minutes?

Would the whole machine explode? Would it catch fire? I’ll let you find out for yourself.

Going Up?

There is an interesting website called Urban Word of the Day. This could be described as an updated version of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. The main difference is that the words are submitted by the readers, in essence forming a dictionary that you write yourself.

Today’s word is elevator reflex, which the site defines ”as the urge people get once inside an elevator to stare compulsively at the ascending numbered lights (usually on top of the elevator doors) either because they are truly convinced this will speed up the whole 'process' or they are simply socially-awkward beings who can't bear to look at random people in the face for 30 seconds.”

The Doc, my wife, suggests that this is an inaccurate definition, that elevator reflex refers to people who enter an elevator as soon as the doors open without checking to see whether the car is going up or down. People push a button, the car arrives, and they get on only to discover the car is traveling in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go. Seconds later, the car they actually summoned arrives, going in the right direction, opens its doors and no one gets on, usually to the great annoyance of the people waiting in the elevator. The elevator industry calls this a phantom stop. I like this name, especially since the History Channel will eventually get around to producing a one hour show claiming phantom stops are proof of paranormal activity.

It saddens me to say this, but both the people at the Urban Word of the Day site and my wife are wrong. Elevator reflex actually refers to the irresistible urge people have to push an already lit button. Years ago, while working in the hotel business, I attended a short elevator maintenance class. Among the fascinating tidbits I learned was that the average wait in a building with a properly designed elevator system is 30 seconds. Frustration sets in shortly after this point and chances are the person waiting will push the button again.

Why do people do this? Are they trying to impress upon the button how sincere they are? If you ask them, they will say something along the lines of, “The button might be busted.” This nonsense is even harder to understand, if the button is busted, why push it at all?

By the way, the strangest part of that elevator course was surfing the cars; riding on top of the elevator cars. Elevator surfing is incredibly dangerous, you should never, ever consider doing it as several people die every year while doing this reckless activity. Unbelievably fun, especially if the shaft is dark, but don’t even consider it.

I have been thinking about elevators all week. The university has had a couple of power failures this week and my building has an elevator. Unfortunately, we didn’t catch anyone.

Elevators reveal a lot of strange behavior in people. Lots of studies have been done about where people position themselves in the car. The key factor is maintaining personal space. If there is only one person on the car, he will stand in the middle; two will move to the back corners, the third person who enters takes the middle, and so forth. In general, the pattern tends to follow the same pattern you see on the sides of dice.

There are a couple of sex based variations to this rule. An alpha male techno-geek entering a car will move directly in front of the controls and remain there no matter how many people enter the car. Women entering a car will frequently cross their arms in an attempt to claim a little more personal space.

I’ve always liked the anecdote about Alfred Hitchcock and elevators. If he rode on an elevator with a friend, whenever a stranger boarded the car, Hitchcock would begin a long description of an unusually bloody and violent murder scene. The gruesome story would continue until the somewhat freaked stranger got off the car. Hitchcock called this his elevator story.

I remember an old Candid Camera gag where actors would face the wrong direction in an elevator, standing with their backs to the door, for example. Anyone else entering the car would stand facing the same direction. Halfway through the elevator ride, the actors would turn 90 degrees and face a side wall. After a long pause, all the other people on the car would turn and face the same way.

Remember the elevator in my building? For years, the elevator car had a certain design flaw. My building has a basement and three floors, but for some reason the indicator lights inside the elevator were numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. In other words, the ground floor was represented by number 2; the basement was number 1, etc. This is not a big mistake, but people looking for the third floor usually got off on the second floor and almost everyone trying to leave the building took an unscheduled trip to the basement. Hilarious.

Eventually, some new dean had this “fixed”. Some people have no sense of educational tradition.

Raising Small Sick Children

Small children are always sick. Seems like What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One were sick several times a week, if not more. And a cold could rebound between my wife and the boys for half a year. As soon as one of them got well, one of the other ones would share the virus again and it would start up all over again. Typhoid Mary has nothing on this family. Why can’t children share toys as easily as they share germs?

And the fevers! A small boy can go from feeling perfectly fine to having a fever higher than his IQ in less than five minutes. Then a half hour later he wants to go outside and play, the fever is gone and he wants to know if he can have a sandwich!

Not that the boys didn’t really get sick occasionally. The dark angel of projectile vomiting visited our house more than once and both boys got sick enough occasionally that they were like a French submarine; they leaked at every orifice. We had the usual bouts of chicken pox, the galloping galontis and the creeping crud. Thankfully, nothing serious and nothing that stuck.

The sicknesses that I remember the most, however, were the far less serious ones. The ones that happened an hour before the school bus came or when it was someone’s turn to wash the dishes. I work with some people who regularly come down with the brown bottle flu or suddenly need to take a mental health day. These were the kinds of illnesses my boys came down with the most frequently.

Or sometimes, the boys saw the Doc or me take a couple of aspirins and suddenly they needed medicine, too. Within 30 seconds they had developed more symptoms that a convention of hypochondriacs. They were dying!

Luckily, the Doc and I found an all purpose cure for every disease unknown to medical science. I don’t even remember where we found the cure, but I think it was at one of those roadside novelty shops next to a highway. You know, the kind that advertises both gasoline and fireworks for sale. For a dollar, you can go out back of the shop and look at the “Thing” that lives in a cage. Well, sometimes it floats in a big glass jar, but you get the idea.

In the novelty shop, amidst all the genuine Native American kitsch made in China, there was a real treasure: a bottle of candy labeled as fake medicine. A hundred green candy peas in a plastic bottle with a medicine bottle style lid. The perfect all-purpose Wonder Drug!

Now before I tell you the rest of the story, I know what this week’s hate mail will be about. “You should never teach children that medicine is candy!” Oh, shut up! Every damn cough medicine on the market tastes like cherries, I can’t even describe the flavors they put in children’s vitamins. You want to blame someone, blame Mary Poppins. She’s the one who put a spoon full of sugar in the medicine.

The point of the story was that the boys didn’t think those peas were candy, they actually believed that every one of those peas was a powerful drug that combined antibiotics with painkillers and a dash of Pepto Bismol. We told them over and over again it was strong medicine. We kept it in the medicine cabinet and every time we used it, the Doc and I would hold serious conversations in front of them about the proper dosage. Hell, I saw many a sore throat cured with just one pea, if What’s-His-Name wanted two of them, he would have had to cough up a lung.

The peas did perform miraculous cures. The-Other-One once reattached a leg with… no that’s not quite right. But both boys made the school bus fairly regularly. And painfully scraped knees stopped hurting pretty quickly with the right dosage. Of course, any minor injury was much more painful if there was an audience for it.

We still have the bottle. Well, we did. I have previously written about how I suddenly became a grandfather-to-be. This precious child, the Munchkin, now occasionally needs medicine. So I passed the heirloom bottle down to The-Other-One. I have no doubt it will be equally effective for another generation.

The Cycle of Life

I am waiting to hear word from Oslo about my upcoming Nobel Prize. Okay, the awards aren’t due for months, but the Scandihoovians can vote an extra early award for special circumstances. After all, it is not often that in a single moment of clarity an individual not only clears up one of life’s greatest mysteries but discovers a new life form.

My discovery started several weeks ago when I began searching through my desk for my magnifying glass. (I have noticed as I get older that the manufacturers of frozen burritos keep printing the microwave instructions in progressively smaller typeface.) I couldn’t find the magnifying glass, probably because every drawer was filled to overflowing with ball point pens.

Last week, I needed a red pen. I was grading final exams and several of the blue books needed smiting. In search of a suitable weapon to use, I ransacked the desk… and the ball points were all gone. It turns out that you can smite blue books with a pencil. Not quite as satisfying, but effective.

A few days later, I’m hanging shirts in my closet. Every single shirt I owned was either on my back or hanging in my closet, yet I had several dozen extra wire coat hangers. Where did they come from? And stranger still, a few days later, where did they go? Suddenly, I had more shirts than hangers!

(Note. This reminds me of something that really needs a comment. My son, What’s-His-Name, is married. His wife, the Teach, believes that shirts may only be hung up if all the same colors are grouped together. It would be unkind of me to say that this foolishness is possibly a little OCD. So I won’t say that. But, Teach, you are anal enough to suck up a sofa cushion.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. Lots of ball point pens, no hangers. Something else was strange about the laundry. Half of my socks are missing. How in the world does this happen? I am damn near certain that every single day, I come home from the university wearing two socks. I can’t be losing them. I could understand it if I was losing shoes… No, my socks are disappearing, too.

Being a little absent-minded, I decided to make a list, so I went to my desk for a pad of paper and …ALL THE PENS WERE BACK! My first thought was that my wife was playing tricks on me, but then I remembered that the Doc had her sense of humor surgically removed during her second year of medical school.

It took me days to figure it out. And during that time, the hangers came and went, the ball point pens ebbed and flowed and I think I am down to three mismatched socks. Socks never come back.

And then it hit me; something was eating the socks. The socks were food! Here’s the way I see it. Earth has been invaded and there is an alien life form of shape shifters that are living and multiplying among us. What we think of as ball point pens are in reality egg cases. They incubate harmlessly in desk and kitchen drawers, under sofa cushions and in glove compartments. Obviously they select dark and warm locations for the eggs to hatch.

Eventually, the eggs hatch and out emerge and change their shape to match, as you’ve probably guessed, coat hangers. On their trip to the closet/nursery to hide out, they stop by the laundry basket for a snack. Not wanting to appear obvious, they only eat one sock from each pair. Then they jump into a closet and hide. This is the larval stage.

I am still working on the pupal stage, but I think it may be old cake pans and pie plates in the kitchen. I could be wrong; I did notice we seem to have more garden tools than I ever remember having used. But I am sure of the next stage.

Once the aliens get to the adult stage, this iron based life form is mature enough to try and blend in with their environment, so they take multiple forms. It is difficult to spot them, but if you are careful you can spot them around your house. Do you suddenly have an extra old bicycle behind the garage? Is there a rusty barbecue grill in the back yard you don’t remember having before?

A few of them may even leave your house to migrate to other locations. What else could explain all those ugly Volkswagens on the road?

Raising Small Children - Part Three

One of my sons is color blind. Not What’s-His-Name, but The-Other-One. Basically, he cannot differentiate between red and green, most of the rest of the colors are not really great either.

My wife and I discovered this at one of those interactive museums where the children are allowed to touch the exhibits and play with anything they want. Along one wall there was a collection of pictures, each a weird pattern of colored dots that revealed a number. If your vision is normal, you saw one number. If not, you saw another.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. If your vision is normal, you will see the number 70. Those with red/green color blindness will see the number 29.

Looking back, this really shouldn’t have surprised us that much. For years, we had allowed him to pick his own clothes out for school, and most days he left the house looking like something Walt Disney would dream up if he dropped acid. Let’s just say his clothes clashed.

His socks rarely matched, but so what? He’s male. Hell, I looked down one day in class and discovered my shoes didn’t match.

And I remember telling the boy on more than one occasion not to eat a green banana. Trust me; don’t let color blind people pick out your produce.

Somehow, even with all these hints, we didn’t know he was color blind and naturally, neither did he. I was shocked and he couldn’t have cared less. I guess you can’t miss what you don’t know.

As he got older, his being color blind was obvious. One day he was mowing the grass in the front yard and ran the lawnmower over a large piece of red cellophane. It might have been the wrapper off a box of chocolate. Instantly, there were several hundred pieces of red confetti all over the green grass. Since the little bastard had run over it on purpose, it seemed only fair to make him clean up the mess, and it was the kind of mess that you could see a block away.

You could see it a block away, unless, of course, you were color blind. I couldn’t make him pick up the little pieces of red plastic, because it was impossible for him to find them. Thankfully, we have two sons; I made What’s-His-Name do it.

Still, as the father of a color blind child, I knew my duty. Immediately, I started teasing the crap out of him. I missed not a single opportunity to make fun of him, tease him, or taunt him. Obviously, I did this for his own good, since I knew other kids would tease him at school and I wanted him to be immune to this. Besides, it was fun.

It turned out, however, that being color blind has its own rewards. Did you know that color blind people are practically immune to camouflage? This ability to see things that are trying to hide may be the evolutionary explanation why there seem to be so many people with red-green color blindness. Maybe thousands of years ago, these were the best hunters.

I got a great first hand exhibition of this several years ago. I decided to install a camera to watch the pool from an ivy covered wall on the patio. The camera was tiny, and several times while running the wiring, I “lost” the camera and it took me a while to locate it again among the ivy. A small black camera hidden in the dark spaces between the green leaves is invisible. To most of us, anyway.

When I finished, I sat down with a beer to admire my work. The-Other-One walked up and almost immediately asked, “When did we get a camera?”

I still tease him about his shirts, but to tell the truth, sometimes I wish I could borrow his eyes for a while. It would be interesting to see the world as he sees it. And I could let my wife, the Doc, pick out my shirts.

In Reference To

Now that the semester is nearly over, it is letter writing season. Students regularly show up hoping that I will write them a letter of recommendation so they can either get a job or enter a graduate degree program. Now that the economy has turned sour, I am writing a lot more of the latter. The job market is cold, while the ivy halls of academia are heated at taxpayer expense.

For most of my students, such a letter is not a gift, but an earned right; if you work your ass off in my class, the least I owe you is a small letter of recommendation. For many others, it is a Christmas gift they are stealing from a parked car at the mall.

My biggest problem is that I simply don’t remember most of these students. “I took your class in Military History,” they say. Yeah, that narrowed it down to about a thousand people, most of them about your age… How do you write a great letter that says nothing?

I wish there were an accepted code used by academics that would seem to be positive, yet actually told the reader the student in question was the intellectual equivalent of a turnip. Men have such a code; all you have to do is say that the woman being discussed has “a wonderful personality” and every man present will know her appearance would stop an eight day clock. You can say this right in front of your wife, and not understanding the code, she will just smile and nod her head in agreement.

Since there isn’t such a code, I would like to start one. From now on, when you read a letter of recommendation that states the student “came to class regularly” it actually means the following:

Dear Sir or Madam:

The bearer of this letter was my student for one or more classes. I can’t remember exactly how many, since he sat in the back row, fell asleep, slumped in the seat, and was all but invisible. I can attest that the student was present at one or more final exams, since I distinctly remember introducing myself.

Unfortunately, this student has delusions of adequacy. To be perfectly blunt, I would not use this student for breeding stock. Actually, come to think of it, I believe he used to study animal husbandry, until they caught him at it.

This student evidently wishes to enter your program in search of a graduate degree. In all honesty, I believe the student has two motives: First, there are no math prerequisites for a masters degree in the Sociology of Range Science Education Literature. To be fair, this is the same reason he sought an undergraduate degree in History.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, this student wishes to postpone his inevitable entrance into the fast food industry as long as possible. Since it seems likely that his parents will prefer to write checks indefinitely as opposed to having their son live at home, your department can probably count on this student to remain enrolled through his post-doctoral years.

Our Athletic Director assures me that the student will have his ankle bracelet removed next week. And I am fairly sure he is no longer contagious.

I urge you to admit this student, as our entire department is looking forward to his future career. Somewhere else.

Sincerely yours,
Mark Milliorn

Great Moments in Teaching

Finals start within a week, another semester is almost over. This is a great time to look back and think about all the great moments in teaching. After all these years, my rewards for hard work with my students are my memories.

About a dozen years ago, I was teaching a weekend class on the History of Argentina. The class met every Saturday morning for three hours. Argentine history is more than a little interesting, but the kind of student who willingly gives up a weekend tends to be a little on the interesting side.

So there we were, I was talking, the students were pretending to be listening, all was normal and all of us were probably thinking about lunch when suddenly I noticed that a young lady in the second row of seats was wearing a necklace. A necklace that was moving. Right about the time I figured out she had a snake wrapped around her neck, the girl sitting next to her saw the snake, too. It turns out that screaming is contagious.

Eventually, I found out the snake was the young lady’s pet; an Argentine Boa. Since it was from Argentina, she thought it would a welcome addition to class, and I guess it was, since the class ended a little early.

That’s not the only time an animal has livened up a classroom. A few years later, in the same room, a class got a little active for a completely different reason. A young lady in the back of the room suddenly jumped to her feet, screamed, and started pawing at her chest. She eventually got her sweatshirt down and began digging under her bra.

I can’t say that anyone was scared, but everyone was powerfully interested. I was fascinated. Eventually, the young lady pulled out a baby hedgehog. She was raising the little critter and had been carrying it around inside her bra to keep it warm when it had bitten her.

The university used to have a great classroom that though it had over a hundred stadium style seats, only had a single door at the front of the room. Anyone who came late had to enter at the front, interrupting the lecture, and go up a single center aisle to a seat.

I was teaching a survey class composed of mostly freshmen and sophomore students, one of which was unique. This young lady was going through a Gothic phase; lots of torn black jeans, black fingernails, assorted piercings and shiny dangling chains and lots of jewelry. What you really noticed, however, was her hair. Almost every single class, it was a new color, and none of them were to be found in nature. Since she came to class late, every single damn day, it was not hard to remember her. If you are talking about Thomas Jefferson and someone shows up dressed all in black with electric blue hair, trust me, you’ll remember her.

One day, about ten minutes into my lecture, she showed up with fire engine red hair. Well, if fire trucks were covered with glowing red neon lights, it would be fire engine red hair.

“Come on in, Red.” I said. “We were waiting for you.”

She smiled, went to her usual seat, the far back corner and I went on with my lecture. From that day forward, I always called her Red, regardless what color her hair happened to be. This went on for weeks, and I thought I had seen every possible color of hair. I was wrong.

Towards the end of the semester, one day she showed up, late as usual, with a new style. She had shaved her head; she was as pink and bald as a newborn’s butt. Bald, that is, except for a small circle of hair above each eyebrow that she had dyed black. And, she had used something, possibly Elmer’s glue, to fashion them into small devil’s horns.

For several seconds, the room was absolutely still and silent. Then, I roared with laughter, deep loud belly laughs. I couldn’t help myself, if I had even tried to hold it back, my heart would have burst. I rattled the ceiling tiles and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Naturally, because I was laughing, the whole room roared with me. Every time I thought I could get hold of myself and stop laughing, someone else would giggle and I would start up again. And this would set everyone else off again.

“Stop it!” I thought. “Get hold of yourself. Be professional! Think of dead kittens, think of sex with your grandmother! Think of accidentally spilling a bottle of Laphroaig Scotch.”

The only thing that finally stopped us was the simple lack of strength to laugh anymore. I don’t remember if I ever started lecturing again, and it probably doesn’t matter. No one who was in that room that day will remember anything but Red… and her horns.

And those are the moments that reward you in education, knowing that you make a difference.

Damn Yankees

As a child, I was encouraged to believe that Yankees ate their dead.

Yes, the Civil War had been over not quite a hundred years, but somehow the topic was still fresh in Texas. This feeling was encouraged by countless TV shows and a weird revival of Civil War clothing and toys in the stores. As a child we rarely played cowboys and Indians, we refought the War of Northern Aggression. And the South invariably won these reenactments, in part because the Northern army, Texas Division, was pitifully puny; we only had one Yankee kid for miles around, he was forced to fight alone.

Actually, this one poor child didn’t do much fighting; all I seem to remember were his lengthy and dramatic death scenes. This kid could die better than anyone I’ve ever seen, staggering and flopping around for 10 minutes while moaning piteously. His deaths were a glorious conclusion for every victorious battle for, at least the way we kids interpreted history, the south never lost.

Predisposed to hate the north by geography and popular will, I was greatly encouraged by my uncle, who besides providing me with the information that northern funerals were a buffet, filled my head with incredible lies about the world outside of Texas. Actually he believed there was little of value north or east of Fort Worth.

You can imagine my horror when my Dad announced that the family was taking a vacation, by car, to Illinois to visit a preacher friend of the family. Now, I was a product of Texas public education, but I was pretty sure Illinois was a suburb of New York, for damn sure in Yankee territory .

I remember very little of the trip up to Illinois, probably because I spent the entire trip with my nose in a book, but when we arrived on the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois I was fascinated. This was a real city, and for a country boy, there were amazing sights. We stayed in a motel, with a pool. And I had never seen so many cars and stores and people. Best of all, right across the street from the motel was an ice cream stand!

Now, I knew all about ice cream, and I had bought it before, but I don’t think I had ever seen a small store whose sole business was to sell ice cream. My father gave me a dollar and let me go get two cones for myself and my brother. When I went to the corner, I found another modern marvel of urban life. There was a sign there that said, “Walk” and “Don’t Walk”.

I’d seen traffic lights, but a lit sign that would help you cross the street was simply amazing. This must be what they meant by city conveniences. I waited until the sign said I was safe, crossed the street and bought two ice cream cones (chocolate) and then stood on the sidewalk and waited until the sign said it was safe to cross. I stepped off the curb….and got promptly rammed by a Chevy. I got knocked a dozen feet and the damn ice cream cones went flying.

I was killed. No, wait, that’s not right, but it felt about like that. Frankly, it hurt, my whole left side felt like it was being eaten by ants. I just lay there in the street trying to get my breath back. The driver, a worried woman, hovered over me and started asking questions about 20% faster than I could hear. Ever notice this about Yankees?

Before I could get my eyes uncrossed, a policeman and a rather large crowd had gathered around me, everyone was talking at once and asking me questions. The policeman helped me over to the curb and I just sat there scared out of my wits. This was more people than I had ever seen in one spot outside of church and rodeo.

“Are you hurt?”

“What’s your name? Where do you live?”

“Are you okay?”

“Where does your father work?”

Obviously, my uncle had been right about Yankees. They have lying signs, they ruin your ice cream, they hit you with cars, and then they want to know every blasted thing about you. And as sure as shooting, Dad wasn’t going to give me another dollar for ice cream.

Well, I was only about 10 years old, but even a kid knows you don’t lead the enemy back home. I wasn’t about to tell them where my family was, these Yankees would probably line the whole family up and hit 'em with cars one at a time. So I stood up and started walking, and not towards the motel across the street.

And, of course, the whole crowd, including the policeman, started following me. Looking back, it’s easy to see what these good natured folks wanted, they wanted to make sure I was okay; they wanted to tell my folks what had happened to me. And, no doubt, they wanted to go through my pockets and get the rest of that dollar: fifty years ago two ice creams cones only cost twenty cents. Damn Yankees.

Well, there I was leading the enemy away from my family, sacrificing myself to spare them…except I wasn’t. I got once around the block, ended up right about where I had started and simply had to sit down because my side hurt. The policeman promptly walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder; I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

It was about this time that my father came looking for the idiot child who took half an hour to walk across the street and back. He found me as soon as he came out of the motel room, I was not exactly hard to find as I had a rather impressive, and slightly official, entourage. Dad always said later that he wasn’t exactly surprised to see that crowd around me and that the policeman’s hand on my shoulder looked sort of natural.

I saw my father and tried to motion him off while trying to send the mental message, “Run! Save yourself!” It was no use, before long, the enemy had surrounded my father, too.

Everything quickly got better.  I got a ride to the hospital and x-rays showed no fractures. I had a world class bruise, and eventually, even got the ice cream.

Two weeks later, I told my uncle the whole story. Predictably, he thought the tale was hilarious and equally predictably, he provided the story its moral.

“Boy, don’t watch them lights, watch the cars,” he cackled. “Them lights ain’t never kilt nobody.”

A Small Anecdote About Colonel David Hackworth

The statute of limitations has run out, so I can probably get away with telling this story.  Besides, as a historian, shouldn’t I help spread the truth?

Ten years ago, the History Department at my university had a conference on the Korean War.  Southern New Mexico is a popular retirement area for the military, so this was a conference that would be popular with local veterans.  There were so many attendees, that the conference was held at a local hotel’s largest ballroom.

A large conference needs a guest speaker, someone with name recognition, someone like… Colonel David H. Hackworth.  To say that the late Colonel Hackworth was controversial is an understatement of the largest order imaginable.

Colonel David Hackworth was a highly decorated combat soldier who enlisted in the Merchant Marines during World War II at the age of 14.  When the war was over, he lied about his age, again, so he could enlist in the U.S. Army, serving in the occupation army at Trieste.  When the Korean War started, Sergeant Hackworth volunteered for the first of two tours.  Serving in the 25^th Infantry, he earned a battlefield commission to lieutenant.  After the successful raid on Hill 1062, he earned a battlefield promotion and the command of the 27^th Wolfhound Raiders.  By the end of the Korean War, Hackworth was a highly decorated captain.

Hackworth served with distinction in Vietnam, eventually retiring from the Army as a Colonel.  During his career, he was awarded over 90 combat awards and citations.  Among his awards were eight purple hearts.

After the war, Colonel Hackworth became a successful businessman, a bestselling author, and a journalist for Newsweek Magazine.   Colonel Hackworth passed away five years ago from cancer, probably related to the defoliant Agent Blue, which the United States used during the Vietnam War.

Colonel Hackworth was a plain spoken and articulate critic of the way the Korean War had been fought, and his opinions had been clearly stated in several of his books, so the conference was a great success.  Everyone wanted to hear his views on the Korean War, and he did not disappoint his audience.  I won’t pretend to be able to accurately present the colonel’s views, but let me sum up by suggesting that, in his view, the contributions of the United States Air Force in the Korean War were not… helpful. 

Colonel Hackworth told the old joke about how the only way some infantry units could tell that the Air Force was fully cooperative, perhaps even participating, in the war was by the numerous times they were bombed by mistake.

When his speech was over, Colonel Hackworth left the ballroom and appeared, at least to me, to be making a direct advance on the hotel bar.  On the way, a tall white-haired Air Force Colonel intercepted Colonel Hackworth, “Colonel, I served in the Air Force during the war.  I disagree with several of the things you said about the Air Force.”

Colonel Hackworth replied, “Really?”  Then he decked the Air Force colonel.  Hackworth wasn’t nearly as tall as the Air Force colonel, so he had to really reach up to hit him, but he did a great job.  One hit and the colonel hit the ground with busted glasses and a bloody nose.

I have always thought that this pretty well settled the question of which was more effective; the Air Force or the Infantry. 

Hackworth continued on to the bar.  My boss spent the next half hour trying to convince several people that no one really wanted to call the police.   I didn’t hear much of that conversation: I was in the bar, too.

Great Dying Words

Yesterday, I was reading the local newspaper and came across the obituaries. Yes, I know what you are thinking: once again it was a miracle, everyone died in alphabetical order.

Newspapers never print the last words of the deceased. And this is a shame, for some last words seem to encapsulate a person’s whole life in just a few words. Queen Elizabeth had some very sobering last words, “All my possessions for a moment of time." Probably the most truthful dying words of all time.

Shot as he drove home from visiting his mistress, Pancho Villa said, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something important.” Even after his incredible life, at the end, he had nothing really to say.

Of course, sometimes the irony simply drips. During the Civil War, at the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, General John Sedgwick said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…” Pity he wasn’t an elephant, for a Confederate sniper’s bullet killed him before he could finish the sentence.

Food seems to be on the mind of some people as they die. Lou Costello, the obese half of the comedy team Abbott and Costello, said, “That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.”

Or take the last words of Kit Carson, the famous explorer of the great southwest; “I wish I had time for one more bowl of chili.” I’m surprised this hasn’t been used in a TV commercial for Wolf Brand Chili.

Lots of dying words involve alcohol. Everyone knows of at least one teen-aged flower of American youth (blooming idiot) who, shortly before dying spectacularly, said to his friends, “Hold my beer and watch this.” This happens often enough in the South that it is a rite of passage.

But alcohol also figures prominently in the last moments of, for lack of a better word, normal people. Humphrey Bogart’s last words were, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.” Or take the example of Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record . . .”

But these words only tell part of the story. What happened after these words were spoken? Why was the person dying? Imagine how much more interesting those obituaries would be if the newspaper would tell how the deceased died? Remember the golden rule of blogging: Bad Decisions Make Good Stories.

Let me tell you how Jack Daniels died. Yes, that Jack Daniels. I leave it to you to imagine why, but Jack couldn’t remember the combination to his safe. Eventually he was so frustrated that he fetched the safe a great rattling kick. This didn’t faze the safe much, but it injured Jack’s toe, and within a few days he died of blood poisoning.

And what were Jack’s dying words? “One last drink, please.”

Every now and then, someone’s dying words almost predict their own death. Take Isadora Duncan for example, who some have dubbed the ‘Mother of Modern Dance’.

This talented and beautiful woman died in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was known to wear long, flowing scarves that would often be seen flutter behind her in the wind. On her last day, her friend picked her up in his convertible, and she said to her friends, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" (Goodbye, my friends, I am off to glory!). As the car raced off, her scarf became caught in the car’s wheel spokes. Isadora died instantly from a broken neck.

These stories are all famous, but there are thousands of great dying words that history doesn’t record simply because the dying person wasn’t famous. Here are a few of my favorite great dying words that aren’t famous:

• What is that?
• Did you put that back together right?
• Is it loaded?
• Oh, shit!
• I’ve always done it this way.
• Only one way to find out…
• No guts, no glory. 

Maybe history should record dying conversations. My favorite would be the last conversation a man had with his wife as he slowly passed away.

“Honey,” the dying man gasped. “I want to confess something to you. I slept with both your sister and your mother.”

“I know.” His wife answered. “Now lay still and let the poison work.”

One Picture and Less Than a Thousand Words

I recently attended a very nice wedding. It has been a while since I was at a wedding.  You can tell you’re getting older when you attend more funerals than weddings. I had a hard time finding my official wedding tie, I had to break down and wear my official funeral tie. Now that I think about it, I’m going to make the funeral tie my permanent wedding tie, because I have decided I’m not going to anyone’s funeral unless he comes to mine first.

It was a beautiful wedding, something everyone noticed as nearly everyone was taking pictures of it. Which got me thinking about digital cameras.

According to the briefest possible Google search, 100 million cameras are sold in the US each year. Since they have been selling for a while, this must mean there are more cameras in America than steak knives. More numerous than strange people at Wal-Mart. And never again is there a possibility of anything happening in the world without a half dozen cameras recording the event.

I suppose that as a historian, I should be thrilled. There are countless events throughout history that needed to have been recorded, yet for undeniably selfish reasons, not a single person was thoughtful enough drag out his cell phone and use the video camera. What were Caesar’s last words? What did Father Hidalgo really say in his El Grito speech? Was Cleopatra beautiful, or as ugly as a mud fence?

I won’t have to worry about that ever again. Now, I could go five miles out into the desert and whisper something to a jackrabbit and view the conversation on YouTube the next day. No society in history has been as self-obsessed with recording the day-to-day trivia of everyday life. Years ago, only important events were photographed. Are we recording every minute of our lives in an effort to make them more important? Validation through photography?

Back to the wedding. It was certainly a memorable affair. A beautiful bride and, surprisingly, a beautiful bride’s maid. Normally, the bride’s maid’s job is to wear the ugliest dress to be found on the bargain rack at the Salvation Army store. A hideous bride’s maid will make any bride look more attractive. At this wedding, the bride’s maid was almost as attractive as the bride. A wonderful wedding, and everyone took pictures.

Why? There was an official photographer with an extremely expensive camera taking pictures. I don’t know very much about photography, but he looked competent to me. Evidently, no one else had any faith in him for they were taking photos with cell phones and little digital cameras.

Even someone who doesn’t know much about photography knows:

• The tiny little flash on a pocket sized digital camera will only reach 10 feet.

• The maximum range of a cell phone camera is about 6 feet. If you take a picture of anything farther away than the other side of the table, you are creating abstract art.

• If you take a photo of yourself with the camera held at arm’s length, you get a picture of a large nose with giant nostrils. You should avoid this method unless you actually have a large nose with giant nostrils, then you could use this technique to explain your ugly photos.

• Handheld low resolution video cameras take shaky enough movies to make a test pilot puke. For God’s sake, didn’t you see The Blair Witch Project?

Those are the things I know about photography, but I have a few questions. Why do little digital cameras make such a racket? Why do they make a little whirring noise as if they were advancing film? Most of them have a digital shutter, shouldn’t they be completely quiet?

This fascination with shutter noises started with George Eastman, one of the pioneers in photography. In George’s opinion, the noise the camera produced when you released the shutter was a distinctive “Ko-Dak!” Engaging in a little onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents, he named his company Eastman Kodak.

Why do people immediately take the same idiotic poses every time you point a camera at them? They put their heads together, use a smile completely unnatural, and stare wide-eyed at the camera. This pose never happens naturally. When you enter a room, do your friends bump heads together and grin like clowns?

Is it just me, or do photos distort your memory? When I go on vacation, if I take pictures, all I seem to remember are the places where I took a picture. Without photos, I seem to remember a lot more. Do cameras record events or distort them? Do real memories only live on glossy paper?

Nah, it’s probably just me. Why else would they have sold 100 million cameras last year?

Hell Holds Regular Faculty Meetings

I have previously written about faculty meetings, but the events of the last week have convinced me that I did not do the subject justice.  At one point in my life I was afraid that the structured university life might smother teachers.  Now, I am afraid it doesn't smother enough of them.

For the last several days, I worked on a lengthy blog wherein I compared the average faculty meeting to a screaming pack of howler monkeys. What I wrote was vicious, cruel, and utterly true. I have decided not to use it for fear of slighting the monkeys.

I have to admit, I do resemble this picture a little.  The beard is getting a little gray.

In some ways, faculty meetings remind me a little of flying; long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. Well, perhaps the better word is horror.  If our students ever found out what we do in these meetings, they would not take our courses unless they were paid.  Why are these meetings among supposedly educated people so acrimonious?  Imagine a convention of Tourette's sufferers.  

My colleagues are gifted, intelligent people.  These are, for the most part, kind and good-hearted people who evidently have forgotten the definiton of civility.  I'm not exactly sure what it means, either, but to paraphrase Mark Twain:  Civility means concealing how little we think of our colleagues while simultaneously conealing how much we think of ourselves.

Henry Kissinger once proposed a theory, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." While Henry is undoubtedly correct, I think there is more to the problem; I think university professors suffer from positive feedback.

Most machinery operates with negative feedback. Imagine you are designing a robotic hand to pick up an egg. As the mechanical fingers grip the egg, sensors in the fingers would send a signal back to the motors to apply less force until at a critical point the motors would stop.  Your mechanical hand would delicately hold an unbroken egg.

Now imagine that we reverse the wiring so that the harder the fingers grip the egg, the more force would be applied. The egg would be almost immediately crushed in the tightly clenched fingers of the mechanical hand. Machinery controlled by positive feedback oscillates wildly out of control.

Now consider the students in a classroom. They trust the professor, they believe in him, and they have paid a lot of money to listen to a wise teacher. The paying part is very important, ask any carney; the marks won't believe unless you make them pay. Most of the time, the students should trust the professor, but sooner or later he is going to say something outrageous, something incredibly stupid... and the students will either believe him or in an incredible act of kindness, not point out how the professor has lost touch with reality.  

And not correcting the professor is the equivalent of positive feedback. The professor will feel free to be even more outrageous in a future class. Over time, his opinions and his beliefs will inevitably suffer some drift. You don't have to teach very long before you believe that you, and you alone, are brilliant. While I personally am immune from this disease, many of my colleagues are sick, sick puppies. I know.

A meeting room full of people each determined to prove his brillance is not exactly a happy place.

Still, outside of the occasionally interesting, if not very logical, arguments faculty meetings are boring. So, in self defense, I have found a way to pass the time. I have devised the Official Faculty Meeting Bingo Card. If, poor devil, you ever have to attend such a meeting, just print out this card and listen carefully for someone to say any of the following educational buzzwords.

If your meeting lasts more than about 30 minutes, perhaps you should refrain from yelling Bingo! until you black out the entire card.

Does Anyone Understand Women?

Francis Bacon wrote a beautiful line: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” 

Bacon obviously meant that it is the imperfection that makes beauty stand out, but the statement is probably just as true about all beautiful and wonderful things.  And it certainly applies to my wife, the Doc.

I married the Doc for a very simple reason; she was the smartest woman I ever met: A wonderful wife, great mother, talented woman, and about as strange as a purple puppy….With stripes.  I guess the strangeness was the bonus.

Shortly after marriage, I discovered that women and men shop differently.  Most men are hunters.  When we need something, we call the mall, find the store that sells it, go straight there, kill it with a credit card, tie it to our pickup truck, and drive home.  It’s a simple straight forward system that has worked since the mastodon.

This is not even close to the system that women use.  They are gatherers.  Take shopping for shoes, a pair of white high heel dress shoes for example.  I would rather try to kiss the front end of a speeding bus than go shopping for shoes with my wife.  Any man that finds himself in a similar situation should at a minimum take a book, possibly a hip flask.  

Step one in shoe shopping is to go the biggest shoe store in the mall and ask for a pair of white high heel dress shoes.  The clerk will bring a pair of exactly that, the husband will feel briefly hopeful, but the shoes will be rejected for some obscure reason discernable only by the wife.  The poor clerk will then bring almost every shoe, in every available color, that is anywhere close to the appropriate size. 

This act will be repeated at every shoe store in the mall.  If your town has more than one mall, it will be repeated at all of them.  If there is a nearby town within an hour’s driving time, you can take your show on the road.  At the end of the day, no shoes will have been purchased, but your wife will pick up a knitted blouse in blue.  She has two dozen identical blouses, but with clothes, wives try to collect the entire set.

The next day, without you, your wife will go back to the first store and buy the first pair of shoes she tried on.

And while I am on the subject, I do not think any man understands his wife’s shoes.  Why are there so many of them?  Why do they cost twice as much as a good pair of hunting boots when you put three pair of them inside one good hunting boot?  And why do women willingly wear a pair of shoes that would permanently render them lame if they were to walk across 100 feet of open ground?

Men, as a rule, don’t understand the whole used clothes thrift store thing, either.  I neither want to wear someone else’s used clothes or sell any of my old clothes as long as three threads hold together.  

Women seem to go through stages of life that can be defined by luggage.  When I met the Doc, most of her possessions could fit into a grocery bag.  I remember us suddenly driving from Houston to Florida on a whim.  I think she grabbed a poncho and her purse and we were off for a week.  No plans, no reservations, and neither of us had ever been there before.

Now, a weekend in the mountains requires the logistical support of the D-Day invasion.  She has enough luggage to fill an SUV.  If I were a polygamist, I would have to drive a bus.

Men will never understand women: all you can do is try to understand one.  Unfortunately, we rarely succeed.

A Good Cigar is a Smoke

I don’t smoke, and I’m not trying to make apologies for those who do. I don’t want my boys; What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One, to smoke. And there can be no doubt that smoking is bad for you.

Having said all that, I sure miss a good cigar.

To be fair, I never smoked cigars all that regularly, as a vice, it was more of a treat than a habit. But there were certain times that a good cigar was a deeply satisfying and intensely pleasurable experience. I guess that is what I miss.

I’m a terrible skier; I have broken way too many bones and joints. (When people tell you to evacuate because a hurricane is coming, listen. A hurricane is an IQ test: Don’t flunk like I did.) But skiing is fun, so I just do it badly and slowly work myself down the slope. I bought a bumper sticker at a truck stop and put it on the back of my ski jacket; “This Vehicle Makes Wide Slow Turns.” And I make frequent stops on the side of mountain as I have been known to sit in the middle of a slope, half way down the hill and just admire the view. At such times, a good cigar, and perhaps a little brandy from a pocket flask, is one of the great pleasures in life. Two miles above sea level, bright New Mexico sunlight, and a view that stretches for endless miles: glorious.

For me, cigars are always better when the weather is cold. Yet, I can remember a few exceptions. In Honduras, I watched them hand roll my pura, a cigar made entirely with local tobacco, before I smoked it. Does everything taste better when it is made fresh?

Certain activities, such as golf or playing poker are wonderful with cigars. And I can remember a particularly great cohiba I enjoyed while a friend and I flew a twin engine Navion to Pennsylvania.

Ayn Rand wrote a marvelous passage about smoking, albeit about cigarettes, in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

Ayn used a lot of symbolism in her books, it has been suggested that she used cigarettes as a symbol for, besides power and capitalism, sex. If Freud was correct about cigars being a phallic symbol, she obviously had a few disappointing relationships. Forget the cigarettes, let’s pretend she was talking about cigars. Now Ayn is a little closer to the truth. A cigar does seem to focus your attention a little better, aid your concentration, and perhaps let fly your imagination. The mind seems to find comfort in the familiar steps of trimming a cigar, lighting it, the measured flick to drop the ash off a cigar, and the slow exhale of aromatic smoke.

There is a great story about Winston Churchill and cigar ashes. While sitting in parliament, he wanted to distract everyone’s attention from a speech being delivered by a member of the loyal opposition. As the speech began, he elaborately lit a long cigar, and began to blow large clouds of smoke. As the ash began to grow, Churchill continued to blow billows of smoke, but did not flick off the large growing ash. More and more people began to watch the ash, it was growing impossibly long. Before long, the ash on the tip of the cigar was well over two inches and still growing. At this point, the poor chap making the speech could have juggled kittens and no one would have noticed.

Churchill never did flick the ashes off that cigar, he couldn’t have. Before attending that session of parliament, he had cut the head off a long hat pin and shoved it down the middle of the cigar. As the tobacco burned, the pin held the ashes in place.

It’s hard to imagine certain people without a cigar. Originally a light smoker, after General Grant was victorious at Fort Donelson, people all over the country sent him ten thousand cigars. Groucho Marx and Winston Churchill liked large cigars. Clint Eastwood liked those long thin cigars. Bill Clinton evidently likes a flavored cigar.

Even while I was smoking cigars, I knew that eventually I would have to stop. For as long as I could, I took comfort in the false hope that quitting was something I didn’t have to worry about while I was young, there was still time to quit, but not now, not this year. My first real clue that time was catching up with me occurred while slowly jogging up a small local hill. An elderly woman ran right by me like I wasn’t moving. I didn’t mind being way too out of breath to catch her, but the rock I threw missed her by ten feet.

The actual end to my enjoyment of cigars came pretty quickly. I was in a book store and walked by a magazine rack. There on the cover of Cigar Aficionado was a photo of Demi Moore smoking a nice cigar. That was it. I knew that if Demi and I had something in common outside of breathing; one of us had to change. Unfortunately, it was me. I never had another cigar.

I have to admit that occasionally, I still want a cigar. While playing poker, shooting pool, or hiking on a mountain I regularly experience an intense desire for a good cigar. For about a minute, I would kill a nun with a ball peen hammer for a cigar. Thankfully, the feeling passes after a while. Nuns everywhere are probably grateful.

About a hundred years ago, Vice President Marshall said what this country needed was a really good five cent cigar. Today, give me a cigar that cures cancer, strengthens my lungs, and will mow my grass.