Artistic Destruction

The Georgia Guidestones are no more.  The quarter-of-a-million-pound granite artwork, sometimes referred to as the American Stonehenge, was so badly damaged by a vandal’s bomb last July that the government toppled what was left of the megalith this week.  

The nineteen-foot-tall granite tablets were inscribed with a message to the future in ten languages, sort of a modern-day Rosetta Stone.  While exactly who detonated the bomb is unknown, the act was most likely motivated by the losing gubernatorial campaign of an idiot who ran on the platform of leaving up Confederate monuments while tearing down those that were “obviously used for satanic rituals”.  Part of the message inscribed on stone was: “Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts….Avoid petty laws and useless officials.”

No doubt it was the attack on useless officials that upset the would-be politician.

In June, a young man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art and smashed three 2500-year-old Greek artifacts valued at more than $5 million.  When he was finished wielding his hammer on the artifacts, he called the local police and calmly announced, “Hey, I’m in the Dallas Museum of Art.”

At left is one of the artifacts the vandal smashed, a 6th century B.C. Greek amphora.  Think of the history that has passed since this vessel was created.  It survived the Peloponnesian Wars, the Age of Alexander the Great, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and… 

Never mind.  It was destroyed by a 21-year-old moron who spent a total of 12 minutes in the museum after using his hammer to break through the glass of the museum’s doors.  When questioned by the police, he explained that he did it because he was “mad at my girl.”

In October, an American tourist at the Chiaramonti Museum in Rome calmly asked for an audience with the Pope.  When told that was impossible, the man became irate and knocked a 2,000-year-old bust off a pedestal, smashing the piece on the marble floor.  When the 50-year-old tourist saw guards rushing to apprehend him, he knocked a second statue to the floor.

Added to these, consider the other recent attacks on our shared cultural heritage:

• The ongoing debate about whether or not street art by Banksy should be left in situ or removed so the work can be seen in a museum now must deal with a new trend—the graffiti by Banksy is now almost immediately a target by other graffiti artists hoping to get their work in the news.  
• Museums of contemporary art and costumes are horrified by Kim Kardashian’s recent appropriation of a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe to wear at the Met Gala.  (My distaste of actually typing the word ‘Kardashian’ is mildly assuaged by the fact that spell check has never heard of her.  Wish I hadn’t.)
• An art exhibit at the Musée Picasso in Paris consisting of a blue coat with pockets filled with postcards depicting the works of Picasso was stolen by an elderly woman who had a tailor alter the coat to better fit her.  She was a frequent patron of the museum and did not mistake it for a simple garment.
• 
  Two ‘boisterous’ children smashed a $64,000 glass sculpture of the Disneyland castle on exhibit at the Shanghai Museum of Glass.  The parents’ claim the event was an accident is belied by security camera footage of the parents using their cellphones to record the children smashing the sculpture.
• The historic Spanish steps in Rome were damaged when a Saudi tourist tried to drive his Maserati down the steps, crashing into a wall and breaking off a piece of the travertine marble.  Two weeks later, two American tourists attempted to ride motorized scooters down the steps.  Technically, one of the scooters made it to the bottom, but it was driverless.
• Vandals in the Koonalda Cave in Southern Australia have destroyed cave art that dates back more than 22,000 years.  The authorities are still searching for the vandals.

It is no accident that these attacks on artwork are escalating, since in the last year, public art has been a frequent target of protestors trying to make international news.  The protestors-turned-vandals are usually trying to make some form of statement about the environment, but this in no way justifies the attacks on priceless art.  Not only does this form of protest do nothing for the cause the protestors claim to care about, but it cheapens the artwork targeted in the minds of the public.  In the worst case scenario in which the artwork is destroyed, the vandals have robbed the world of a piece of its history and its heritage.

This year alone, protestors have glued themselves to four different paintings in England to protest the use of petroleum.  The irony that the glue they used is a petroleum product evidently escaped them.  In addition, more than two dozen famous paintings have been attacked, including works by Picasso, Vermeer, and Klimt.  Buckets of mashed potatoes were thrown at Monet’s Haystacks.  Pea soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s The Sower and tomato soup was smeared across his Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers.  A man disguised as a wheelchair bound woman smuggled a cake into the Louvre so he could smear it across the Mona Lisa, though I forget what unrelated cause he was supposedly protesting.  Bedwetting by bald cross-dressers?

We already lose too much art through non-preventable causes like wars, natural disasters, and the inevitable wear and tear of time.  There is nothing we can do about the art that went down with the Titanic.  We tried and failed to protect all the treasures stolen during World War II.  Museums flood and Notre Dame burns and we all suffer.  These kinds of losses that we can’t stop are bad enough without our having to worry about idiotic vandals.

Many paintings have recently been protected from vandals by thick unbreakable glass—so far, anyway.  But such protests always escalate—otherwise they become mundane and fail to garner sufficient Twitter clicks and Facebook ‘likes’.  So, the “protestors” will keep at it, growing ever bolder and using more extreme tactics until, inevitably, we will permanently lose more priceless treasures somewhere.  And these attacks will continue to trivialize the value of such works in the minds of the public.  

The only way to stop such vandalism is to vigorously prosecute the vandals.  Unfortunately, none of the events listed above (with the exception of the Dallas museum incident, which has yet to come to trial) has resulted in more than small fines, partial restitution, or community service.  

Art theft is a white-collar crime and thus it gets fairly lenient treatment.  If you are convicted of stealing a million-dollar Picasso, chances are that you will receive a more lenient punishment that the guy who robbed the local convenience store of $300 and a pack of cigarettes.  You will note that a conviction for an attempted bank or convenience store theft carries the same punishment as a successful bank theft.

There is a reason that these protestors throw soup at Mona Lisa and do not stage mock holdups at banks.

If we treated the theft of art the same way we treat the theft of an equivalent amount of cash from a bank, this would help deter art crime.  We should also treat the destruction of art as severely as the theft—in both cases the public has been deprived of the art.  And so it follows that we should treat the attempt to destroy art by vandalism exactly the same as the destruction of art, and prosecute accordingly.

If we did that, it would send a powerful message that we value our cultural heritage and will do whatever is necessary to protect it.

The Newspaper Headline

Like every good Texan, as I grew up, I both knew of and actively participated in the rivalry between Fort Worth (good) and Dallas (evil).   Usually, the rivalry took the form of jokes and the occasional high school football games, but occasionally you heard stories about how both cities competed in attracting new businesses.

The rivalry started almost a century and a half ago, when a lawyer heard that a railroad was about to lay tracks to the then tiny village of Fort Worth.  The lawyer quickly relocated, hoping to prosper as the village grew.  Unfortunately, the railroad changed its mind and decided against laying tracks to the town, so the lawyer moved to Dallas where he wrote an article for the Dallas Daily Herald stating that there was so little activity in his former home that a panther had wandered into the village at noon and had taken a nap in the middle of Main Street.  For weeks, said the lawyer, the chief topic of conversation in Fort Worth was to point at the middle of the thoroughfare and say, “He slept rite thar.”

In the end, Fort Worth had the last laugh, since not only did the railroad eventually come to the town, but the community gleefully adopted the panther as its mascot.  Early in the twentieth century, Amon Carter, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, used the panther as the paper’s logo.  Carter, an enthusiastic booster of his city, supposedly always packed a lunch when business forced him to visit Dallas, so that he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel in that city.  It was Carter who labeled Fort Worth as “Where the West Begins,” a slogan that still appears on the masthead of his paper.  The paper did not print the rest of the phrase, “Dallas, where the East peters out.”

Today, I live in a New Mexico town that has an ongoing rivalry with a city just 40 miles away, just across the border in Texas.  As businesses flee the heavy taxes and extensive regulations of California, they are relocating across almost al of the Southwest.  Almost all southwest states and cities are eagerly competing to bring home new jobs to boost their economies and expand their tax bases.  Unfortunately, New Mexico is not part of the competition.  

Businesses are definitely flocking to cities in Texas.  Every time I drive south across the border, I’m amazed at all the new businesses and warehouses being built along the interstate.  Unfortunately, the new construction dramatically stops at the state line, heading back north, into New Mexico.

Have you seen the satellite photos of night lights in North and South Korea?  South Korea is ablaze in lights, but North Korea is as dark as the grave, with only a dim glow around Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.  Unfortunately, the satellite photo of the New Mexico/Texas border is starting to share some of the same characteristics.  The photo at left shows the two communities separated by the state border.  The long line leading south and north of the brighter city is Interstate 10.  The red arrow points to the point where the interstate reaches the New Mexico border—the point where almost all commercial activity simply stops.

Businesses are highly unlikely to move to New Mexico for some very simple reasons.  This is a closed shop state with very strong labor laws favoring unions, despite the fact that the only large unions in the state are for school teachers and public employees.  California and New Mexico are the only closed shop states in the southwest:  the rest are right-to-work states, and all of those have expanding industrial bases.  It doesn’t seem to be a hard test, but it seems clear that our state is flunking.

New Mexico has relatively high business taxes, extensive anti-business regulations, and a state legislature so unstable that if a lobbyist spent $50 on an advertising campaign, the state would repeal the law of gravity.  These conditions are unlikely to attract new businesses, despite the state’s having an educated workforce, a low cost of living, cheap land, and great access to transportation.  The state also shares with California the dubious distinction of having run off a number of good-sized, well-established businesses.  Some of those formerly New Mexican businesses have relocated just across the border in Texas (and one even took its employees with it—a further loss to the tax base of a state that had no excess tax base to lose).  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the most valuable export from this state is not pecans or green chile: it is our college graduates, who have been educated at state expense and who must leave the state to find good-paying jobs they cannot find here.

All of the above came to mind this week as I read the local newspaper.  While cities across the southwest are competing for new industry, at right is a front page headline from one of the largest cities in New Mexico.   Happily, the city has a new tattoo parlor that must employ two or three people.  Now, all our problems are solved.

Hey!  Did you hear that a coyote wandered out of the desert into town and took a nap on Main Street?  He was rite thar.

The Other Jab

With rapidly ebbing enthusiasm, I watched several politicians making speeches this week.  I am somewhat shocked to learn that our elected officials evidently do not understand the difference between fiscal policy (actions taken by the independent Federal Reserve) and economic policy (actions and policy set by the president, Congress, and regulatory agencies).  Congress can only effect economic policy and seem to have little idea of the effects of such policy.  Perhaps this is why Congress, the White House, and the Federal Reserve have so frequently worked at cross purposes for the last two years.

One of the policies that various politicians emphasized was a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act (the name was obviously chosen by the Federal Bureau of Anti-Aptronyms) that will limit the cost of most insulin and insulin-related drugs to Medicare recipients to a maximum of $35 a month.  

While I certainly sympathize with those who have diabetes and genuinely wish the cost of insulin were much lower, this new act will not accomplish what Congress desires.  The actual result will be:  1.  The cost will be transferred to the taxpayer.  2.  The availability of insulin will decrease.  3.  The measure will not lower inflation but possibly raise it.  4.  The cost of insulin will rise.

Let’s take those points in order.

Instead of Medicare recipients paying the full price of insulin, they will now pay a maximum of $35 a month, with the balance to be paid by Medicare.  The pharmaceutical companies will be paid a “negotiated” price and the burden of payment will just be shifted to taxpayers.  While this may be a laudable goal, inflation is not caused by just consumers spending, but by the total spending going on in the economy, and this includes the government.  Since the recipients of this Medicare benefit will have an increase in their discretionary income, their increased consumption of other goods and services will drive inflation upwards.

Inflation is always caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  It doesn’t matter where the dollars come from—if these conditions exist, the result in a free market is always rising prices.

The bill gives Medicare the right to “negotiate prices” with the pharmaceutical companies producing insulin.  Since Medicare will certainly not negotiate higher prices and private insurance companies usually peg their maximum payments to equal those of Medicare, Medicare is essentially setting price controls on the sale of insulin.

Once price controls have been implemented on any product, the availability of that product always diminishes.   All goods are produced up to the marginal cost of production and if that cost is set lower than the market price, the amount of production must decrease.  Any government action that would attempt to coerce manufacturers to produce goods below cost—a clear violation to the 5th Amendment—would simply force the company out of business.  

Government’s putting a price cap on insulin will inevitably lower production, resulting in an inevitable shortage of insulin.  The timing of this new Medicare policy is problematic, as there is already a world-wide shortage of insulin.  The rising middle class in emerging nations increasingly has access to more food and enjoys the luxury of a less active lifestyle, which two conditions together result in an increasing number of people with diabetes.  Already, more than 20% of the people with diabetes worldwide come from China and India and this trend will certainly increase in the future.  Even without price controls, a worldwide shortage in insulin is inevitable.  

Even if the shortage did not exist, the lack of free markets and effective methods of distribution means it is all but impossible for enough insulin to effectively reach the growing number of patients needing the medicine in most of Asia and Africa.   A good case in point would be a recent study in Mozambique, which showed that even when large quantities of insulin were rushed to the country, over 75% of the supply remained in the capital, resulting in sever shortages in the rest of the country.

Shortages of a product, even without increased worldwide competition for the product, will raise the price of the product.  Whether the goods are sold on a black market or sold  in markets without price controls, the average price will go up.  There are good studies of the effects of government-imposed price controls all the way back to the time of Hammurabi and without exception, attempts by governments to dictate prices result in shortages and higher prices.  

What can be done?  There are two possible ways to ease an all but inevitable crisis.  Government regulation—particularly by the American Food and Drug Administration—could ease restrictions on the creation of competing companies manufacturing insulin.  Today, three multinational companies—Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Company, and Sanofi—control 99% of the $21 billion global insulin market in terms of value and 96% in terms of volume.  Throughout history, the most effective way to lower prices while increasing quality has been through increased competition.   Insulin was discovered 97 years ago, so there is no reason why there should be so few pharmaceutical companies producing the medicine.

Unfortunately, the imposition of price controls will make it even harder for new companies to begin profitable production.  The three existing companies producing insulin welcomed the new Medicare regulations since it guaranteed they retained their market share and created massive roadblocks for competition.

The only other possibility of reducing the insulin shortage is through increased medical research, not only for a cure for diabetes, but for a generic version of insulin—something that does not yet exist.  Biosimilar insulins are also available but are not yet effective enough to reduce the need for insulin.  More money is needed for research and innovation, but the traditional source of such funds (private market investing in order to secure future profit) is impeded by government controls on market prices.

Since it is far easier for politicians to simply claim they have solved difficult problems than actually solving them….  Don’t expect to see the number of diabetes deaths worldwide to drop anytime soon.

In the Dark

One of the few benefits of being a retired university professor is that I can take classes without paying tuition.  I’m not sure how many of my former colleagues take advantage of this perk since I have yet to encounter a single retired faculty member in any of my classes.  After years of telling students that education is important, it turns out that phrase was just a mantra.

Note.  To be fair, Enema U also gives retirees a “special price” on parking permits.  Since the price is exactly what they  charged for a regular permit, I guess the special part is that they didn’t raise the price.

Free tuition means that I get to study interesting subjects besides history, that frequently look at the same events from different perspectives.  For example, consider those periods of time that historians call ‘boom or bust’ cycles:  economists tend to call them, “periods of economic expansion or contraction.”  What is fascinating is that the two disciplines do not agree on when, why, and how long the periods lasted.   Anthropologists and art historians have different views on how those events shape culture, and I’m sure that if I ever became an education major I would learn that they have never even heard of those events.  

A while back I wrote about a research trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.  The country has been suffering from a water shortage for years.  Whether this is a result of climate change or due to the simple fact that if you cut down a rain forest it is no longer a forest and it stops raining is still being debated.  Regardless of the explanation, the capital’s water utility company had a unique method of rationing the water.  

About an hour before sunrise, the town’s water supply was turned on for two hours and only two hours.  The town’s water pressure was a little on the anemic side, so as the water slowly refilled the pipes through the city, the escaping air made an eerie moaning sigh.  The sound was impossible to sleep through, even if every inhabitant were not planning to get up and fill buckets and assorted containers with sufficient water for the day.  

There were several consequences of this water rationing.  Unless you ate in a large, well-established restaurant that could afford to install a large water tank, it was reasonable to assume that your eating utensils were cleaner at breakfast than at supper.  I also learned that it  is far better to brush your teeth with a bottle of beer than with Coca Cola and I learned that one of the reasons the locals hated the American Embassy was that embassy  had its own well and flaunted it by hosing down the sidewalks in front of the building every day at noon.  

Of course, another consequence of having your morning sleep interrupted daily by that unnaturally low moaning noise was that the town had a spectacularly high birth rate.  As one resident explained it, “At that hour, it is too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.”

Unfortunately, the water situation has gotten worse since I visited thirty years ago.  Today, the water is only being turned on once a week and the city is contemplating changing that to only once a month.  As a consequence, the birth rate will probably plummet.

I was reminded of this about a week ago, when one of my economics professors stated that there was a definite correlation between the availability of electrical power, rising productivity, and a declining birth rate.  Naturally, I trust all the professors at Enema U, so I promptly researched this myself.  Sure enough, there are well-documented studies, done not only in the United States as the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) brought electrical power to remote homes, but also recently as the power grid was extended into the remote regions of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ghana.  Regardless of the location, when communities were able to use modern lighting and electric-powered appliances and tools, productivity increased dramatically while the birth rates invariably dropped.

The increase in productivity is easy to understand.  Better tools meant more work was accomplished more quickly and more effectively.  Less obvious is that the use of electricity for home heating and cooking eliminated the long hours necessary to gather wood, freeing more time for productivity.  The increase in productivity is obvious, but why the drop in fertility?

There are several studies done to answer just this question, almost all of which offering theories that suspiciously confirm the convictions and desires of the groups funding the studies.  Groups promoting the laudable goal of increased access to contraception have studies that show that, as access to radio and television reached women, this caused increased the knowledge of family planning.  Unfortunately for proponents of this theory, the drop in fertility in third world countries today almost perfectly matches the drop in fertility during the 1930’s when the American Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to American farms and ranches.  None of these homes had television nor was information about fertility and contraception being broadcast on the radio.

Other countries offered other, very reasonable explanations for the drop.  In Indonesia, for example, as remote villages connected to electrical power, the birth rate in “electrified” villages declined 24%.  Indonesian authorities attributed most of the decline to the significant number of hours the villagers devoted to watching television.  Similar conclusions were reached in Ghana and Bangladesh:  increased television watching was the chief reason for the drop in their birth rates, and it had nothing to do with the wider availability of knowledge about contraception.

The real cause seems to be a little less technical:  Before electricity, there are far fewer things to do for recreation in the dark.

Hearing Bells

A good place to start would be to admit right up front that I do not believe in the paranormal, psychic ability, or anything close to the supernatural.  I don’t believe in anything that cannot be measured and explained by science.  

Recently, I read an article about people making split second decisions, guided only by a “gut feeling” that resulted in the people avoiding a disaster.  Events such as not boarding a plane that subsequently crashed or leaving a party moments before a catastrophic fire or an earthquake.  Almost all the stories could be explained by either random chance, human nature, or the veracity of the tale in question.

Some of the stories, and the ones that I am about to relate, just show that given enough contact with people, it is possible to develop the ability to interpret human nature, to be able to detect a pattern in the way people interact with you and make a prediction, perhaps subconsciously, on what is about to happen.

For many years, during college and for several years afterwards, I worked in the hotel business.  Over the years, I think I did just about every job imaginable in a hotel, from boiler mechanic to manager, bartender to short order cook.  It was a hell of an education in human nature since it is a sad fact that people behave their worst while on vacation.  I remember a sign in the basement of the old Shamrock Hilton that said, “Vacation is 2 weeks where people are 2 tired and 2 sick 2 go home but 2 broke not 2.”  

More than once, while working in my office behind the front desk, I would notice someone checking into the hotel and without alerting the desk clerk, picked up the phone and called security to send someone to watch the room the new guest had been assigned.  Sure enough, within minutes, someone would be caught trying to sneak the television out of the room while the new ‘guest’ was calling the front desk to report that the television was missing from his room.  The good news is that over the years, the hotel stopped over a dozen people from stealing televisions.  The bad news is that every single time, the person trashed the television by throwing it to the ground before attempting to flee.

I wasn’t the only person in the hotel that could somehow just know that someone checking in was about to do something stupid.  After working with people, sometimes it just seemed like you knew in advance.  Collectively, my staff and I called this “hearing bells”.  

A perfect example of ‘hearing bells’ came one night at the old Flagship Hotel in Galveston.  I was the resident manager, generally responsible for the hotel's operation from dusk to dawn, at which time the general manager would take over.  The Flagship had a very nice night club that featured live music and was very popular with the locals.

Note.  The poor old Flagship is now long gone.  The Flagship was an unfortunate victim to multiple storms and was finished off by Hurricane Ike.  The photo at right shows the hotel and some of the hurricane damage.

One Saturday night, the bar was very busy, but I happened to notice one very attractive young woman with extremely long black hair sitting alone in the bar, and not seeming to have a very good time.  I stopped at her table and asked her if she was okay.  She assured me she was, so I continued my way through the bar and back to the front desk.  A few minutes later, she came out to the desk and asked us to call her a cab.

Resisting the urge to scream “Cab!” at her—a frequent temptation—I called the local taxi company and asked for Tony.  The hotel had a special relationship with Tony, we threw a lot of business his way and in return he took special care of our guests.  Not coincidentally, he drove the only cab that my wife, The Doc, used to go back and forth from our house to the hospital, making sure that she reached her door safely.  The hotel gave Tony a lot of business.  

Tony arrived and picked up his passenger.  I gave him the signal to take special care of her and he nodded before he drove off.

Hotels do most of their accounting work at night, and that night the books were a little off and I spent some time helping the night auditor finish her work.  About an hour after Tony had left with the mysterious young woman, a desk clerk brought me an envelope and said Tony had brought back a message for me.  I opened it and the letter inside was a suicide note from the mysterious woman with the long black hair!

After calling Tony and getting the address of the young woman, I called the police and left the hotel myself, driving to the young woman’s house, arriving at roughly the same time as both the police and Tony.  Knocking on the front door got no response, but all three of us could smell gas.  As the police officer called both the fire department and the gas company, Tony and I forced the front door.

Like many of the houses in picturesque Galveston, this was an old wooden building with wooden sash windows and old open flame gas heaters.  The gas had been turned on in the stove and the heaters, but none of the appliances were lit.  As Tony and I raced around the single-story home opening windows and doors, the policeman carried the unconscious woman outside.  An ambulance crew was successful in reviving her and transported her to the hospital where I later learned she spent a week in the psych ward under observation.  

When Tony asked me why I had singled her out for him to transport and watch, all I could answer was that something about her made me hear bells.  

About a month later, there was another similar event.

The Flagship was built over a long pier stretching out from the shore over the Gulf of Mexico.  At the end of the pier was a small wooden dock for fisherman and a small shop that sold snacks and bait throughout the night to the fishermen.  While technically part of the pier, it was a separate business and had no ties to the hotel.  

About four in the morning, I was at the front desk helping the desk clerk block out rooms for the incoming reservations.  The lobby elevator opened and a well-dressed man in his fifties, obviously a guest of the hotel, stepped out and came to the desk asking where he could get a cup of coffee.

Right around the corner from the front desk was a small table with a pot of coffee and cups for guest use that was prepared each night as the bars closed at two in the morning.  Before the desk clerk could direct the guest to the waiting coffee, I told him that the nearest coffee was at the bait shack on the end of the pier.

The guest smiled, thanked me, and walked out the front doors heading towards the end of the pier.  Ignoring the bewildered desk clerk, I called the security shack at the entrance to the pier and directed the guard to follow the guest.  Then, I called the police.

I didn’t see any of what followed as I remained inside the hotel, and the police arrived too late.  According to the security guard and the poor clerk running the bait shop, the man bought a cup of coffee, pleasantly discussed fishing for a couple of minutes, said goodbye, and walked towards the exit.  Then he sat down in the doorway, pulled a revolver from inside his jacket and shot himself in the head, dying instantly.

We later learned that the man had left no suicide note and had not awoken his wife as he quietly left the room.  She had no idea why her husband had committed suicide and as far as I know, they never did discover what had driven the man to kill himself in such a bizarre fashion.  According to his wife, it had been his idea to come and spend the weekend at the beach.  Though people committing suicide in hotels occurs fairly frequently, this case was unique.

As for me, well, I spent half the day explaining to openly skeptical police over and over again why I had phoned them before he pulled the gun from his jacket.  Though I was later frequently wary about the behavior of other hotel guests, I never again told anyone, particularly the police, that I “heard bells”.