Weapons of Improvised Paddling

Do you know what an amalgam is?  Neither did I until I read one of those adventure books designed for fourth grade boys.  As a child, I devoured the Hardy Boys, Mike M.A.R.S., Rick Brant, and Tom Corbett.  In one of them, the hero was held captive by the vaguely Russian bad guys.  I can’t remember which hero it was, or even why he had to be locked up, but I vividly remember that he was being held in a jail that was equipped with aluminum bars.  

I’m fairly sure that you will find such a jail only in fiction, since aluminum will bend with a hard look and succumb to metal fatigue fairly quickly.  Never mind, my hero was going to escape with his brain, not his muscles.  On the wall of the cell hung a cheap thermometer, which the boy-scientist dismantled and used the mercury to eat through the aluminum bars.  I was fascinated—mercury would dissolve aluminum?

Actually, yes, mercury will dissolve softer metals and the resulting mixture is called an amalgam.  During the Spanish colonial period, the fastest and cheapest method of refining silver ore was to mix the crushed silver ore with mercury.  The silver would dissolve out of the ore and the amalgam could be heated until the mercury would boil off leaving the silver behind.  Technically, this is known as the Amalgamation Process, but in the New World, they called it the Patio Process since Indians would mix the mercury and crushed ore together on bricked patios.  It was cheap and effective-as long as you ignored that that contact with toxic mercury caused the natives to die fairly quickly—and horribly—of degenerative nerve damage.  Even the fumes are deadly.

Which brings us back to the late 1950’s and early 1960’s when mercury was pretty easy to come by.  I remember a field trip during elementary school when my third grade class visited a manufacturing plant and we were encouraged to see how much of the heavy liquid metal we could hold in our hands.  Even the cheapest thermometer or thermostat was filled with the stuff and as children, we played with the fascinating stuff fairly regularly.  In retrospect, this may explain the music of the 1970’s.

Where was I?  Oh yes, my hero had just dissolved the aluminum bars of his prison with mercury and had made good his escape.  As soon as I read that—I just knew I was going to try this experiment.  And it didn’t take me long to break a thermometer and liberate a little mercury.  My home, however, was curiously short of aluminum bars for my experiment.  Was aluminum more expensive back then?  Harder to work with?  I have no idea, but I couldn’t think of anything in the house made of aluminum.  Finally, I remembered that my mother had just bought one of those new frying pans that were being advertised on television.  The Miracle Aluminum Frying Pan covered with DuPont Teflon©.

While I was confident that my mother would not want to stand in the way of scientific research, I damn sure didn’t ask permission.  No, I just spirited the pan to my bedroom, turned it upside down and applied a generous drop of mercury.  It is amazing to think that by today’s standards, my bedroom was a toxic ecological disaster site eligible for EPA superfund status.  This would not have been surprising to my mother, who frequently referred to my room as a disaster.  Fifty years later, it turns out that once again she was correct.

I can reliably report that the experiment was a complete success.  The mercury ate a hole through the center of the pan about the size of a dime.  I was elated—perhaps for a whole day.   Foolishly, I did not publish my results in a major scientific journal.  Nevertheless, the results were soon noticed by the administration of my research center.  Let us just say that my mother was not impressed.

That frying pan instantly became the spanking implement of choice at our house.  Whenever my mother got angry—such as when she remembered her new frying pan—she could get that pan to whistle through the air.  Every time she used that pan the hole in the bottom left a dime-sized blister on my backside.  Eventually, my ass was quite literally saved by the breaking of the cheap plastic handle.

My mother was not permanently unarmed: she soon found a replacement implement.  Someone gave me a toy—one of the bolo paddles with a long rubber band fastened to a red rubber ball.  The idea was that you could endlessly smack the rubber ball away and the elastic string would return it so that you could whack it again.  For some reason, this was supposed to be fun.

Was it fun?  Of course not.  Who in the world wants to spend an afternoon beating a rubber ball with a paddle?  This is almost as stupid as that crazy playground toy where you sit on a spinning metal contraption until either the centrifugal force throws you into the gravel or you throw up.  Or both.  The sadistic bastard who designed such implements of child torture was probably previously employed as a designer of men's underwear.

It took about a day for the rubber band to break—and about half that time for my mother to realize she had a replacement for the frying pan—after all, they did call it a paddle.  That little wooden paddle was terribly effective. 

Eventually, inspired by the broken handle of the frying pan, I figured out a method to dispose of the wooden paddle.  The kitchen stove had a pilot light under the white enamel surface.  While there was no open flame, that point on the stove was too hot to touch.  At night, while my mother was asleep, I left the thin wooden paddle directly over that hot spot.  Within days, I had baked the wood in that paddle until a hard wave through the air would have broken the wood. 

It didn’t take long; within days I did something that probably more than deserved a paddling.  When my mother swung that paddle at my backside, it broke immediately.  I screamed and launched myself straight up in the air like a missile.  When I landed on the floor, I writhed and tried my best to demonstrate that my back was broken.  My mother was horrified, and immediately cancelled the current spanking.  While I can’t say I was never paddled again, I think that was the last of bolo boards.

100% Recidivism

Flynn was one hell of a nice guy.  He was a little on the short side, had flaming red hair, and a smile that could charm the birds right out of the trees.  If you had called central casting and asked for a teen-aged Irish lad, they would have sent Flynn. There was only one thing wrong with Flynn—he was a thief.

I have never met anyone quite like Flynn—stealing was just in his nature, and you couldn’t have cut it out of him with a blow torch.  If you had worked overtime with a ballpeen hammer and a good masonry chisel, you would have eventually discovered that thievery was an essential element in of his framework—by the time you had removed all the dishonest parts of Flynn there wouldn’t have been enough material left to build even a politician.***

Flynn seemed to have no family, he was desperately poor, and he had only the most rudimentary basics of an education.  When I met him, he was the only white person living in an old public housing development in a part of Galveston Island where even the police didn’t like to venture.  Probably only someone as friendly and charming as Flynn could have pulled off living in that ghetto.  (He did, however, tell me that, on one particularly wild night, he had nailed his apartment door shut from the inside).

While I was the manager of the now long-lost Islander Beach Hotel in Galveston, I hired Flynn as a bellboy/gofer/flunky.  And Flynn was the best bellboy I have ever worked with—and the worst.  The problem was that he simply could not stop stealing.

There is an old joke that if you steal $5 you are a pickpocket and if you steal $500 you are a burglar, but if you progress to $50,000 you are promoted to cat burglar.  If you can run off with $500,000 you are a businessman while $5,000,000 makes you a bank.  The modern addition to the old joke is that the theft of $5 trillion makes you Congress.

Using that scale, Flynn was a pickpocket and it didn't take long for me to discover that Flynn was padding tips on room service receipts and stealing the occasional small item from the kitchen.  Hell, a car driving too slowly by the hotel might lose two lug nuts and the spare tire.  I should have fired Flynn immediately—but damn it, I sincerely liked the boy.  I felt sorry for him and kept giving him another chance.  Eventually, I think Flynn became a project for me—I was going to rehabilitate him and was far too stubborn to admit defeat.

I showed Flynn the rudiments of being a bellboy who worked the graveyard shift.  For a bellboy with an inventive mind and just a touch of larceny, these late night hours could be very profitable.  Within a week, the trunk of Flynn's car looked like a miniature gift shop.  When most of the hotel was closed, Flynn could very quietly sell a guest a bottle of bourbon, a deck of playing cards, a dozen condoms, or a six-pack of beer.  He kept a well-stocked cooler in that car, and long after the restaurant closed, Flynn could put together a pretty good meal of cold cuts and cheeses on a white table-clothed cart using the kitchen's best silverware and serving dishes.  The table would even sport a flower that Flynn had just cut from the hotel gardens.  More than once a guest was disappointed to discover that the real kitchen could not duplicate during the day the attractive meals that Flynn put together at night.

Flynn didn't steal from the guests (well, not their rooms, anyway).  I remember a Houston policeman who stayed at the hotel one summer weekend, who seemed to delight in being a rude and obnoxious asshole.  Somehow Flynn decided that the rules did not apply to rude cops.  When the policeman tried to leave the island to return to Houston, he discovered his car had lost all four wheels and the battery.

That became the pattern with Flynn: no matter how much I stressed to him that he could not, should not steal, sooner or later some circumstance would convince him that it was okay—that whatever situation was currently at hand was an exception to the rule.  If the Coca-Cola truck pulled up to refill the property’s vending machines, unless I physically held onto Flynn’s hands, that truck would leave missing six cases of Cokes and a two-wheeled dolly.  And holding on to Flynn’s hands would put your watch and wedding ring in peril.

Hotel work was addictive: No matter what the circumstance, somehow the next day you just had to be ready to rent all the rooms to the next set of tourist/invaders.  There was never an excuse for not fulfilling the reservations.  I wish all repairs could have been done during the middle of a weekday, but quite often you found yourself doing emergency electrical work in middle of the night.  The constant stress of solving endless problems under tight deadlines was a powerful addictive drug.  No matter what the problem, there was always a solution in time to rent that room.

It was late Saturday night when the hotel suddenly had a cascade of plumbing problems in the new wing.  There were no maintenance people on the property, so within ten minutes I found myself in the dark narrow spider-infested service chase between two rooms.  I was wrapped around pipes like a contortionist while Flynn held a flashlight and offered useless advice.

"Go down to maintenance and bring me a ¾” gate valve," I ordered.

Flynn was gone a few minutes and came back without one.  "We don't have any," he said.

"Damn it, Flynn!  I know damn well that I bought several last week!" I shouted as I shook a large pipe wrench in his general direction.  By now, I was drenched with cold water, and becoming increasingly aware of the spectacular number of spiders with whom I was sharing that 18" wide chase.  "Go get me a damn gate valve!"

I stayed busy trying to loosen an ancient rusted pipe union—I could only move that pipe wrench a few inches at a time due to the cramped plumbing-filled space—but it seemed to me that Flynn was gone for a very long time.  After what seemed like ages, he finally showed up and handed me an obviously used valve—it was rusty in places and had flecks old gray paint on it.  No matter--maintenance was full of old parts that could be reused, and while I was certain the hotel had new valves, I could use an old one.

The repairs were completed, the emergency was over, and I decided to drive home and get some dry clothes.  As I drove by the Texaco gas station next door to the hotel, I couldn't help noticing the collection of people standing beside the building staring at the torrent of water pouring out of the public restroom.  I would have given favorable odds and covered all bets that the plumbing in that bathroom was in desperate need of a ¾” gate valve. 

My rehabilitation project never was successful.  If he hasn't been shot yet, I wonder what prison Flynn is in.  Or does Texas have a congressman named Flynn?

***My wife—the Doc—says that paragraph is a little over the top even for a poor dumb ‘ol country boy.  I had to remind her that I’m writing a blog—it was some other feller named Mark who wrote scripture.

Chairway To Heaven

The following story is almost certainly apocryphal.  For the education majors among you, this means that if you believe this silly story, you will catch chicken pox.

It was a small Texas town with a somewhat fundamentalist church---the kind of church whose members were horrified with the certain knowledge that somewhere, somebody was having more fun than they were. The overly somber congregation was celebrating the opening of its new church building and everyone was in the sanctuary, loudly singing a hymn in celebration.  Well, actually, not that celebratory, for every hymn sung by this church sounded like a funeral dirge.  For one young man, this was always somewhat confusing, since the church as a whole professed to believe the Bible literally---except Psalm 98:4: no one, it seemed, ever made a joyful noise to the Lord (or anyone else).

Perhaps that is why the young man's mind was wandering---or, more accurately---it had run away from home.  The teen was sitting on the far left of the church, near the back.  (His seat had been chosen chiefly for its proximity to the bathroom).  Right then, however, he was transfixed by a large vent on the side of the church wall.  The vent was three feet tall and four feet wide and consisted of tiny little louvers that slanted upward, which prevented the boy from seeing what was being concealed behind the grating.  The boy was fairly sure (he had checked) that the vent neither blew air out nor pulled air in.  What was the purpose of the vent?

After church, the teen discussed the mystery with two friends.  Remember---this was a SMALL town, so the boys had to take what entertainment they could find.  Curiosity is the main motivating force for boys---at least until puberty kicks in, so the three boys agreed to ride their bikes back to the church after lunch and investigate. 

Using their pocket knives, it didn't take long for them to remove the screws holding the vent to the wall.  Behind the vent, was a large air duct, about four feet deep---large enough for all three boys to step inside and look straight up. They could see that the shaft rose up forty feet and then turned back towards the center of the hall.

Now, did you ever notice how solving one mystery seems to create two more?  The shaft went up and then turned.  Where did it go?  What did the shaft do?  The boys were determined to find out.

Climbing the shaft was impossible: the walls were simple wood studs and sheetrock---and they didn't have a ladder.  But boys are creative and they quickly came up with a substitute.  Folding metal chairs were brought from the nearby Sunday school rooms and placed in the shaft.

By not-so-carefully stacking one chair on top of another, the boys could climb slowly higher.  Within a few minutes the haphazard mound of chairs grew taller than the boys.  By then, the chairs had to be folded and passed carefully up to where each chair would be unfolded and wedged onto the top of the pile.  The stack of chairs could not fall over, because it was solidly wedged inside the shaft.

This improvised tower used a surprisingly large number of chairs.  Several Sunday school rooms were completely stripped of seating over the next few hours.  A rope to haul  the chairs upward was improvised by tying a couple of extension cords together.  All of this was hard work---something the boys would have assiduously avoided if someone in authority had requested them to do something constructive.  

There was a real concern that the job would not be finished before evening church service.  People would be returning to the church by six in the evening.  More and more chairs kept disappearing up that shaft as the tired, hot, and sweating boys worked their way up that shaft.  Finally, one of the boys could grab the top edge of the shaft and chin himself up to see into where the shaft turned.

"Well," he said.  "It goes three feet and stops!"

All three boys took turns chinning themselves up to see.  After working feverishly all Sunday afternoon, this was not a satisfying conclusion!  What the boys did not know at the time was that the church had planned on future expansion.  The ceiling was high enough to add balcony seating, and so air ducts had been built in for the future project.  The shaft, did indeed, lead "nowhere"---and since the expansion was never completed, the shaft never did lead anywhere.

Since the boys were out of time, and they could not dismantle their siege tower of chairs before evening church, they simply replaced the metal vent over the shaft opening and vowed to return the next week to return the chairs to their classrooms.  This was a nice plan, but it never came to pass.  The boys had a lack of foresight that one generally associates with youth or the US Congress.  When the evening service started, the lack of chairs was...well, noticed.

"How the hell did over a hundred chairs vanish?" roared a deacon.  This is almost as funny as when President Eisenhower interrupted a cabinet meeting with, “Goddammit!  We forgot the silent prayer!"

The church was in the middle of the small town, and it would have taken several men and a large truck to remove well over a hundred chairs---something that would have been noticed in a small community.  From that point on, security around the church increased and the church was kept locked between services.  There was never a chance for the boys to return the chairs.

The boy who had started the entire exercise felt more than a little uncomfortable about the whole affair.  Is it stealing if the purloined items never actually leave the premises?  The chairs weren’t hurt---indeed, you could argue that since, several decades later, the chairs that are still in that shaft are just like new, while all of the chairs not borrowed have long since worn out---placing the chairs in the shaft had preserved them.

The boy told his uncle about the problem.  His uncle was NOT a deacon in that or any other church, having led the kind of life that had prompted the original invention of religion.  The boy was more than hopeful of the confession's being peacefully accepted and, perhaps, even sanctioned by a sinner who had fought his own battles with that particular church.

“Fuck ‘em,” the uncle said.  “Do the lot of them some good to stand.  Those morons will think better if they ain’t sittin’ on their brains.  But if it really bothers you, I’ll tell them for you.”

It was not until years later that the boy learned that this meant that every so often, usually late at night, the uncle would call the pastor at home and roar into the telephone, “Up your shaft!” 

        

The Coach is Dead! Long Live the Coach!

It is a tragedy!  Enema U. has lost its beloved football coach, Coach Falter.  Somehow, a coachroach with a win/loss record that even France can best has been hired away by the NFL.  Not much work was done this week on campus as we all stood outside looking for a bright star in the east.

Truthfully, it was one of the worst NFL teams that hired him (and not as the head coach either) but still, he is gainfully employed and he is no longer on our campus.  Who knew that the path to promotion was abject failure and humiliation?  The rest of the university has always told our students that the correct method was hard work and achievement--no wonder our students neither believe us nor try that approach.

How will Enema U cope without the talents of Coach Falter--the innovator of the Hokey Pokey Linear Defense and the All-You-Can-Lose Tailgate Party?  And who will forget Coach Falter’s volunteer work as a safe driving instructor?

Now the university will begin the process of searching for a new coach.  Without a doubt, this means we will hire an expensive search firm, form a search committee, then hire the first yokel who will agree to move here and lose games for us while being paid the paltry sum of half a million dollars a year until he, too, can be hired away.  I’m not sure that I can remember all the coaches who have come and gone, come and lost, and lost and left.  As far as I can remember, we have not had a winning coach in the last three decades.  I wonder how much money we have spent over the years to lose.  It has to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Naturally, I have several suggestions.  Let me be the coach.  I’ve thought this over, and I am willing to sacrifice—I’ll do the job for only a quarter million dollars a year.  Why not?  As an alumnus, it is the least I can do for my alma mater.  And I think I can safely guarantee to lose at least as many games as my predecessors.  What was Coach Falter’s win/loss record?  3 in 1100?  Something like that.  I live in a house that was formerly the home of an Enema U football coach.  According to the neighbors, he had a losing record so bad that one Saturday night someone stole a pickup and deliberately drove it through the garage wall.  I promise, if I can’t equal that losing record, I’ll drive my own truck through that wall.  Remember, I’ll do it for half the money.

While we are making changes, it is time to re-brand our team.  We need a new image and a new name. Hell—the team needs to go in the witness protection program.  A colleague of mine (and I will not reveal Jon’s name) suggested that the team rename themselves the “Zombies”.  This name would allow a new motto:  “We get killed every week and we keep coming baaaack!”

While we wouldn’t have to change the rules much, the referees could be dressed as undertakers and every penalty would be a death penalty.  Yes, our football program is dead, and if we aren’t going to bury the moribund, then we must give it life—or perhaps just label it the undead. 

I think the students would enjoy dressing up as zombies.  (Some already do.)   I think students would be positively dying to attend the game.  I have to admit that I am getting tired of our present mascot: the Eneman.  Our new cheerleaders and mascot could be the Walking Dead.

Besides, I would attend the games myself just to hear the student body chanting from the stands, “We want brains!  We want brains.”

Are You Lojacked Tonight?

For decades, my wife, The Doc, carried a voice pager.  At all hours of the day or night, the little box would screech and then loudly announce, “Dr. Milliorn, please call the ICU.”  She was never out of reach from that little black box.  I loved it, being always able to find your wife was a great luxury.  I can remember thinking that pagers should be surgically planted behind the ears of brides shortly after the wedding ceremony.

Once, The Doc was shopping at the mall and I called that voice pager.  “Honey,” I said loudly.  “Don’t pass any more of those twenties.  The Feds are onto us.”

The Doc, like every other surgeon in the country, was an early adopter of cell phones.  And that, too, was a blessing for me.  I could always find her when I needed her—usually to tell me where I had lost something.  And other similarly incredibly important trivial nonsense.  I loved her cell phone.

I did not, however carry a beeper.  I liked my privacy.  I can distinctly remember the first time I went rabbit hunting and my damn cell phone rang.  There I was, miles out in the desert, enjoying the bright clean summer sunlight while I was getting very close to assisting a few bunnies in passing away from induced plumbism—WHEN THE DAMN PHONE RANG!  I should have shot it and been done with the damn things forever, I didn’t, and the infernal devices multiplied like, well, rabbits.

Now, we all seem to be as tied to our little electronic devices as if they really were surgically planted behind our ears.  And they are finding ever more intrusive ways to enter our lives.  With Google Maps and Google Earth, you can look into the driveways and backyards of every home in America.  Apple has an application built into every iPhone and iPad that will let you see where every device your family owns is located 24 hours a day.  I wonder how many divorces a year happen because a spouse can see where their partner’s phone is located.  Did I really intend to tie myself to a GPS device that tracks and records my movements? 

This constant communication and tracking has led to new profitable enterprises.  Since my movements are tracked, companies can now determine exactly how often, how long, and where I shop.  The census could never collect data like this.

Look at the ads with this blog.  (And please click on them--that’s what pays for the beer that fuels this blog.)  Do the ads have anything to do with a recent search you made on Google?  Are they trying to sell you something similar to what you recently viewed online?  Did you think that was an accident?

The government recently announced that it is spending $3 million on a pilot project to monitor Facebook to see if they can predict epidemics and possibly guard against biological warfare attacks.  So, it is your patriotic duty to post every sneeze and sniffle.  And rest assured, your government is truly concerned about your health.  At least digitally.

Large research companies are partnering with game companies to do online stealth research.  Marketing choices will be hidden within free online games where the player’s choices will be carefully recorded.  Why hire a small focus group when you can secretly exploit millions of people all over the world?

I thought the future was supposed to be flying cars and space stations.  I was promised colonies on the moon and robots.  How come all I got was a rechargeable leash?

Education Unplugged

It has been an interesting week at Enema U.  The students and the professors are still MIA, but the nuts and bolts of the university continue to loosen as the university carries on.    University work is done in committees, and a committee is a life form several notches lower on the evolutionary scale than Congress.

I think I have figured out the flaw in meetings.  The sane people are full of doubts while the crazy people are full of confidence.   Not only is there no shortage of crazy people on campus, but it seems to be a competition.

At one of the meetings this week, I listened raptly while people who do not teach for a living told me in great detail exactly how teaching should be done.  “The Sage on the Stage is dead,” they said.  “Lectures no longer work.”

This was followed by hours and hours of being told that the pedagogy of teaching has changed.  Somewhere along the line, I have really developed a dislike to the word ‘pedagogy’.  The people who use the word the most often, seem to teach the worst.  For those of you with honest jobs, if you don’t know what the word means, it is Greek for the act of having an intimate relationship with a poodle.

Theories of teaching seem to change faster than Kardashian boyfriends, but I have noticed something along the way:  as the methods of instruction improve over time, test scores and graduation rates keep dropping. 

I took classes from quite a few really good professors, scholars who taught me to love history.  Somehow they managed to do this without modern teaching theories or technologically advanced classrooms.  The difference, I am told, is that the student of today was born with technology, is used to technology and demands it in the classroom--and technology demands new methods of teaching.  Personally, I think the problem is that students need to put down the smartphone until they master the technology of books.

Somehow, technology seems to drive just about everything in education today.  Online teaching, digital textbooks, distributed learning… the list of new—and as yet unproven--methods of instruction grows regularly.  And I confess to using many of these techniques myself.  But I think that somewhere along the line we have come to value the technology more than the teacher who enjoys teaching.

Several years ago, I developed a media-intensive lecture on the Jim Crow laws and the slow birth of Civil Rights.  The lecture included scores of PowerPoint slides of Southern Blacks being denied access to the polls and more than one graphic image of a lynching.  Less than an hour before class started, I got word that the projector had been stolen from the classroom and there was no possibility of obtaining a spare.

The class was not cancelled.  From my pickup, I took fifty feet of good 1-inch rope to the classroom.  While sitting on the table at the front of the room, I gave my lecture.  At the same time, as slowly as humanly possible, I tied a hangman’s noose.  I never mentioned the rope or the knot, just tied it glacially slowly as I talked.  I don’t think those students blinked until the lecture—and that knot—was finished.  I have never given that lecture with the PowerPoint slides.

Socrates, some 2400 years ago, said that a school was a log with a student on one end of it and a teacher on the other.  That method still works.

The Elevator Races

The university this week is as quiet as the required textbook section of the bookstore.  Since it is snowing (it does that even in southern New Mexico every now and then) and it is two weeks until school starts, the only people hanging around the university are the staff and the unhappily married.   You would think that this would be a great time to get a little ahead in the new semester’s work, but logical thinking is so rare it should be categorized as a superpower. 

One of the few people working on campus today was the elevator repairman.  Every building on campus with more than one floor has—legally must have-- an elevator.  We had an interesting conversation—I must confess that I have long had a fondness for elevators dating from when I worked at the Flagship Hotel and took a short course on emergency elevator maintenance.  When the hotel’s insurance company offered a small discount on our premiums if we had someone who worked the night shift qualified to work on the elevators, as the resident manager, I was immediately sent off to class.

I love elevators and loved learning about them.  And I learned a few secrets about the kind we had in the Flagship Hotel.  Eventually, I took a few of those secrets, and a set of keys, back to the hotel where they turned into a new game for the amusement of a few members of the graveyard shift.

The hotel was seven floors tall and had two elevators.  Somewhere about one in the morning, an off duty policeman the hotel employed as security and I would make our way to the seventh floor of the hotel.  We stepped out of the elevator, and as soon as the doors shut, I would insert a small round key into the upper left corner of the elevator door.  If you look, quite a few elevator doors have this inconspicuous keyhole, particularly on the top, bottom, and middle floors. 

When you turn the key, you may slide the outer door of the elevator open.  This immediately stops the elevator car—if you time this just right, you may step off onto the top of the car.  And if you allow the outer door to slide shut, the elevator car immediately starts moving again with you on top of it.  Or in my case, starts moving with my friend and me on top of it.  Elevators not in use are programmed to move to prearranged floors.  In the case of two elevators, usually the cars will automatically return to the first and middle floors.  

As I said, the Flagship Hotel had seven floors, so the elevators naturally parked themselves at the first and fourth floors.  As we allowed the doors to shut, the elevator cars immediately began to move to one of these two floors.  Riding on the top of an elevator car through a mostly darkened elevator shaft is incredibly dangerous--the type of activity that would only be done by drunken fools.  A single misstep and you quite literally can fall to your death.  We loved it!  It was an intoxicating and wild rush!

The next step was to flip the switch on the control panel on the top of the elevator car.  Not every brand of elevator has this, and the later models have a hand held control panel that plugs in, so it is really doubtful that you will find many elevators still equipped with a control panel.  This is a pity, since flipping the switch took the elevator off automatic control and put it on manual control.  To be specific, the car was controlled by a joystick—you could send the car up and down from where you stood on top of the elevator car simply by moving the joystick up and down.

Elevator cars have multiple speeds depending on the height of the building.  If you started off or stopped a car in the highest speed, passengers not suitably braced for the sudden movement would most likely be lying on the bottom of the car.  If you were on top of the elevator, you could select any speed you wanted.  My friend and I always operated the elevator as if it were stolen and we were making our getaway.  In other words, that elevator car moved through the dark shaft like a stabbed rat.

Once the elevator was under manual control, we could manually send the elevator to where the other car was parked awaiting a call.  Carefully, one of us could step the four feet over to the other car.  This was simple if the other car was parked on the first floor—a little more “stimulating” if the car was parked on the fourth floor.  Elevator shafts aren't totally dark, light comes in around the cracks of all the doors on every floor.  The elevator cars leak light, too.  Still, there are a lot of shadowy dark places in an elevator shaft.  Stepping from one car to another is definitely crazy—hell, the other car can start to move just as you make you step across.  Don’t try this.

Now, once you have someone on both cars under manual control, you can race them.  If either one of you possess a single ‘Y’ chromosome, it is probably mandatory.  If you race them to the top floor, remember to squat down a little.  The movie Die Hard has it wrong, there is actually a little space at the top of the shaft even if the car is all the way to the top—say about three feet.  If you run the car too far up or down the shaft, the electric motor will automatically shut off.  If a car traveling upward at top speed stops suddenly, the momentum can actually lift you off your toes for a second.  And if you standing on the top of the elevator when this happens.…well, don’t do it.  This is stupidly dangerous.  Don’t lose your head over the game.

Even if you aren’t afraid of heights, racing elevators in the dark is a little frightening.  There is a certain amount of screaming going on.  This is especially true if you took your elevator car down to the first floor just as the hotel bar was closing and patiently waited until both cars had passengers before you switched the car over to manual control.  Every good race needs fans to cheer and yell.  NASCAR would be a lot more exciting if they took the drunken fans out of the stands and spread them evenly among the passenger seats of the race cars.

Actually, now that I think about it, everything I have written above (and quite a bit below) is a lie.  I never did this, and this is not the way elevators work and even if they did, it is dangerous and stupid and cruel.  And fun.

At this point, you are probably expecting a moral or some point to the story.  Something moving, uplifting, and down to earth.  Sorry, this is the way my mind wanders when it is between classes and it’s snowing.

The End of Facebook

Sooner or later, it seems, every form of communication eventually comes to the end to its usefulness.  Frequently the end is caused by abuse.  When I was a child, my extended family communicated by mail:  postcards and letters.  I still receive mail every day, but these days I routinely sort the collection at the trash dumpster.  There are two mail events I can no longer remember--the last day I did not receive any mail and the last time there was a real letter mixed with the daily flood of junk mail and catalogs from Barn Outlet and Pottery Gluck.

There was a long period when the telephone was the primary means of communications.  I can remember when a long distant phone call (now an obsolete term) was a special event.  A little over four years ago, I received so many phone calls advising me how to vote in the upcoming election that I wandered around the house ripping phones out of the wall.  Now, four years later, I have never gotten around to reattaching those phones.  Without phones, the house has been so much more peaceful that I'm contemplating chopping down the mailbox, too.

The fax machine at work is scheduled to be disconnected.  In the last year, we have received hundreds of offers for cruises, a few unsolicited restaurant menus, and no worthwhile messages whatsoever.  We probably should have unplugged the device years ago, it is inconceivable that there is still a business with a fax machine that doesn't also receive email.

Speaking of email, of course I still use it--I must get a hundred messages from students every single damn day.  While there is an occasional useful message, the vast majority of these are from a recently awakened student asking me about something that is clearly stated in the syllabus.  Between student emails and spam, it is getting harder and harder to find my important business offers from Nigerian widows.

And then, Facebook was born.  And I am beginning to wish it had been aborted.  Not only has Facebook detracted from the true reason for the internet (the endless sharing of cat photos) but it seems to have all but replaced all other forms of family communication.  There has been a noticeable drop in phone calls and email since Facebook has become a part of our lives.

Facebook was a useful form of communication between friends and family for a while, but now, sadly Facebook too, has become so overwhelmed with abuse that it is easy to predict its inevitable demise.  The two topics that every intelligent person is never supposed to bring up in polite conversation--religion and politics--now seem to dominate Facebook.

I get endless posts concerning gun control from people who have never owned guns, posts about abortion from people who can't get laid, and way too many posts about Social Security from people on it.   The latter seem to believe that despite their generation supporting a government that spent like drunken sailors, the only important task left for society is to support them in their interminable declining years.  If the World War II generation was the Greatest Generation, then Ours is the Grating (on my nerves) Generation.

Frankly, the endless public sharing of private opinions is getting tiresome.  People who normally pride themselves on a political philosophy too sophisticated to fit on a bumper sticker will, on Facebook, trivialize profound problems by posting a dozen word opinion that could only be the result of either inbreeding or a higher education.  This rudeness is slowly destroying social media.

Naturally, I have a solution.  The only salvation for social media is anti-social media.  We need a forum reserved exclusively for political and religious rudeness.  I propose that we call the new social media service Septic Tank.  We can reserve Facebook for polite messages between family and friends, reserving the new service for the opinions we would not espouse at a cocktail party.  Then, every time you feel the need to share some profound insight from your imaginary friend--religious or political--you can just drop it in your Septic Tank.

The Closed Shop Church

Dateline Chicago

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit today stripped the tax-exempt status from 1600 churches that participated in the "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" last November.  The pastors deliberately violated the provisions of the tax code commonly called “The Johnson Amendment” that prohibits tax exempt non-profit organizations operating under 501(c)(3) of the tax code from engaging in political activities.  The churches had sought to challenge the constitutionality of the regulations--specifically those provisions that forbid the churches from endorsing political candidates.

On November 3, the pastors of the 1600 churches deliberately endorsed political candidates in the upcoming election, thus setting the stage for a court challenge to the provision that the churches claimed illegally stripped religious organizations of their freedom of speech under the First Amendment.

Today, the Circuit Court disagreed and removed the tax-exempt status of the offending churches.  Lawyers for the churches said there would be no appeal of the decision.  According to one of the lawyers, “The churches have decided to appeal to a higher authority.”

In a surprising move, the 1600 churches today dissolved their 501(c)(3) status and immediately re-filed applications with the Internal Revenue Service as members of  501(c)(5) organizations, i.e. as labor unions.

"In this way," said Reverend Bill Clark, the new shop steward of the First Baptist Union of Chicago, "We will be able to continue to our political activities and retain our tax-exempt status.  This union can promise better long-term benefits than any other union!"

According to one of the attorneys acting for the churches, the move could very well be profitable for the newly formed religious unions.  "Remember," said the lawyer.  "Illinois is a closed shop state.  Everyone working in the state will be required to be a member, and their union dues will be automatically deducted from their paychecks.”

Protestant churches are busily reorganizing under the The American Federation of Churches (AFC).  In Boston, the former Archbishop Michael O’Malley--now union president,--announced that the local dioceses would be reorganizing under The Congress of Coordinated Catholic Parishes (CCCP).   

When Reverend Bill Clark was asked if the former churches’ parishioners would support the move to unionization, the new shop steward replied, “Why not?  This state has always supported unions, and this union can promise better longer long-term benefits than any other.  Besides, you can be a member of this union even while you are unemployed.  Hell, you can belong to this union even after you’re dead!”

Union President (Archbishop) O’Malley explained, “After all, all of us work for the same Boss.  We just haven’t met Him yet.”

If This Is A Test—Someone Flunked

It is final exam week at Enema U.  This event produces some mixed emotions from me.  On the one hand, the population of the town drops by some ten thousand students.  This means I can drive to work next week without some hormone enraged student driving so close behind my truck that it looks like he is trying to become my own personal and private proctologist.  For a few weeks, the town is very quiet.

The downside to exam week is all of the exam papers I have to grade.  All semester long, I can delude myself that I am God’s gift to education.  Then I grade the papers and realize that I am just some old fool at the front of the room.  This year is certainly no different.  Please don’t misunderstand me; the majority of my students work very hard and learn despite the meager abilities of the professor they have to endure.  A few, every semester, however turn in tests that indicate they spent most of the semester pursuing interests other than academic.

Students have given me quite a few original answers over the years.  According to one student, the son of Charlemagne was ‘Louie the Slugger’ and Minie Balls (the Civil War era bullet) was the name of a woman pretending to be a man during the war.  I also have been told that the first man to walk on the moon was Walter Cronkite and that Santa Ana was the patron saint of Texas.

A good student under the pressure of the exam suffered a total mental block while trying to remember the word ‘bayonet’.  While writing a stirring account of Joshua Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top, her otherwise brilliant essay had a slight comedic touch when she explained how his men counterattacked down the hill with their “long stabby things”.

Years ago, I had two different students who each wrote essentially the same wild story about the cause of the Spanish American War.  I knew they hadn’t copied each other--they were sitting too far apart--yet each of them had written a crazy story about how Spanish pirates sinking the Bismarck had started the war.  I just had to know how this had happened and had both students come to my office, where they admitted they had studied together for the exam the night before.

“Well, you see, we had your study guide, but neither one of us had a copy of the textbook” one of the students explained.  “So we asked my father and he told us how the war started.”

“By any chance,” I asked, “had your father been drinking?”

“Yes,” the student admitted.

“Then tell your father he flunked, too.”

I have never been able to explain an error that seems to come up every year.  Some student will explain in great detail how the military victories of Robert E. Lee were due to his brilliant tactic of hiding his army up among the branches of tall trees and waiting until the Union army was passing below.  Then—without warning—the Confederates would leap out of the trees, down on the unsuspecting Blue Coats.

I cannot explain how this peculiar answer seems to reappear annually.  I have carefully searched all my lecture notes on the Civil War, and while I do mention trees occasionally (fighting in forests, etc.) not once do I have a single soldier climb any tree.  Is there a movie or a television show that depicts something like this?  I am open to suggestions.

Research papers are not much better: using the wrong word is a frequent problem for students.  For two of the more commonly confused words, I have the world's smallest PowerPoint presentation.  The first slide shows a photo of a soldier  in a black silk uniform, a member of the Viet Minh, commonly called the Viet Cong.  Underneath the photo is the caption:  Guerrilla Warfare.  The second, and last slide shows a still from the movie Planet of the Apes, a gorilla on horseback carrying a rifle.  The caption is:  Gorilla Warfare.  Unfortunately, my students seem to use both phrases interchangeably.

This semester, I co-taught a course with Professor Holland.  One of the students had a vocabulary problem that Professor Holland corrected artistically.  Sadly, the student never picked up his corrected paper.  Maybe he will read this blog. 

For years, I have included a cartoon on the bottom of my final exams--usually a single panel ridiculing either education in general or something dealing loosely with the subject the class has studied.  What I intended to be something of an ice breaker, turned out to be the actual test for one student.  The student (I’ll call her Lisa because that was her name) wrote for two hours and filled an entire ‘blue book’ about the cartoon.  She actually din not answer a single question on the test!

Unfortunately, this semester was no different than previous ones.  Somewhere in New Mexico is a student who believes that an ‘ironclad’ is not an armored vessel from the Civil War but the type of shield used by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. 

The biggest surprise though was a student who completely misunderstood the test.  Ignoring the review session, verbal instructions, and even the written instructions, one of my students surprised me with a unique solution to the first section of the test.

While the student did use eight terms in his impromptu matching, and I am impressed by his unique-though ineffective—method of problem solving, I was shocked to learn that Oliver Perry suffered from such an obscure medical condition.

The Paris of the Prairies

A couple of weeks ago, while visiting Fort Worth, I got a chance to visit the old stockyards.  When I was a child, the city was nicknamed Cowtown and was the major source of beef for a large portion of the nation.  The holding pens were full of steers, the area hotels were packed with purchasing agents and ranchers, and the cowboys in the local bars drank Lone Star Beer and made million dollar deals.  Well, to be honest, the area had another quality—a certain smell—but the locals knew it was a natural by-product of four-legged gold.

Actually, Fort Worth had a lot of nicknames, and most of them were somewhat colorful.  In the 1870’s, a blue norther ripped through Texas and damn near froze ever last steer in the state.  (For the Yankees among the readers, that is pure Texan and translates to “A blizzard froze the cattle.”) Within months the town was in such a bad way that a Dallas newspaper published a story about a panther taking a nap on Main Street in front of the court house.  If the paper thought the town would take offense, it was wrong.  The townspeople adopted the moniker “Panther City” with a certain amount of pride.  To this day, the local police have a panther on their badges and the panther icon can be seen on local business signs.

When the railroad extended its tracks to the town, businesses flourished and mills, factories, and meat packing plants came to Fort Worth.  It was a fast growing community and was quickly called the “Queen City of the Prairies”. 

This success, however, brought with it a few problems.  Within twenty years, Fort Worth was celebrated for its stock yards—and equally famous for what was called “Hell’s Half Acre”, a red light district just outside the rail head that had been established for the cattlemen.  The Half Acre was infamous for saloons, gambling parlors, cut-rate hotels, and other assorted adult playgrounds designed to efficiently separate a cowboy from his wages.  To the cowboys, the Half Acre was heaven, but to just about everyone else, the town itself was called the “Paris of the Prairies”. 

A newcomer to the town could stand on a street corner of Hell’s Half Acre—now about five times larger than its name indicated—and watch infamous gunfighters, local courtesans, card sharps, cattle barons, railroad tycoons, and buffalo hunters all walk past in just about the time it took to have his pocket picked.  Pick the right day, and you could have seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wander by after they had their photo taken.

The town had more than its share of share of colorful—though violent—characters.  The locals tried to clean the town up, so they hired Fort Worth’s first marshal, a notorious lawman named ‘Longhair’ Courtright.  Courtright did a great job, sometimes arresting up to 30 men in one night.  Unfortunately, the town quickly found that fighting crime also hurt business and so they fired Courtright.  Within a few years, Courtright--now turned to crime--crossed paths with Luke Short and the Half Acre became the location for one of the most famous gunfights of the Old West.

Short, a close friend with such infamous gunfighters as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holiday, had sold his interest in the Long Branch Saloon of Dodge City fame, and moved to Fort Worth to become a partner in the White Elephant Saloon.  When Courtright tried to extort protection money from Short, a confrontation was inevitable.  The two met on Main Street and Courtright drew first, but he was slowed down when his gun got caught on his watch chain.  Short fired first, blowing the thumb off Courtright’s gun hand, making it impossible for the man to cock his single action revolver.  Courtright then executed a trick shot maneuver known as the “border shift”, tossing his gun from his right hand to his left.  (I’ve seen this trick done successfully on television quite a few times.)  By the time the gun got to Courtright’s left hand, Short had shot him in the chest four times.

But that was the old Fort Worth.  I visited the new city, and while I personally would have enjoyed seeing Luke “King of the Gamblers” Short shoot someone on Main Street, it probably would have been bad for the local business. The area around the old Stockyards is beautiful.  Now the saloons are great restaurants, the old hotels are trendy establishments for tourists, and what used to be adult pleasure palaces are upscale antique stores.  I was impressed.

I guess the only thing that really surprised me was the almost total lack of livestock left in the stockyards.  In a stockyard where there were once thousands of steers, now there was one lonely longhorn—but he had a job.  For $5, you could sit on him for about 15 seconds while you had your picture taken.  And you had to use your own camera.  There was a long line waiting to sit on that steer.

What a business plan--no overhead, no operating expenses, and only a single employee who works for grass.  And that steer earns a larger salary than most tenured professors at Enema U.  And while he is just as full of BS as the average professor, at least he has an excuse.

Warren Burnett, A Texas Original

Thirty years ago, I was working quietly one Friday afternoon on a new Unix computer network in my store in Galveston.  It was such a beautiful day that the entire town had found something to do other than work--on an island in the summer, weekends start early.  We hadn't had a customer in the store for over an hour, so it was a great time to spend a little time learning something new.  The Fortune 32:16 System was state-of-the-art, and my two technicians and I needed a little peace and quiet to learn the peculiarities of a new system.

So, I was a little peeved when the old man showed up on a bicycle.  An island collects characters (hell, I was there) and this had all the signs of a drunk, a crackpot, or another schizophrenic homeless person.  The store had already semi-adopted one of the latter: Elijah.  Elijah lived on the street and ate out of the dumpsters he found on a regular route around the island’s business district.  He was harmless, but would not let anyone get within 20 feet of him.  At the same time, he had once been a respected CPA before he had some kind of mental break.  Elijah was capable of walking up to your car window while you were stopped at a traffic light and saying something like, “If you re-file your last quarterly return with the state, you should get a nice reduction on this quarter’s remittance.”  Then he would run off to look for chicken in the Colonel’s dumpster.

Obviously, Elijah had spent a little time in my dumpster reading my mail.  I liked Elijah, so we left cans of tuna fish and bottles of Coca Cola on the loading dock for him.  But, while I could tolerate Elijah, I had no intention of the store becoming the clubhouse for all the lost boys on the island—my business was to sell computers, not play Peter Pan.  So, I wasn't happy to see this new character ride up.

He was a short old man in khakis with a dirty t-shirt and a long-billed fisherman’s cap, and was riding a heavy 1950’s Schwinn bicycle with an enormous ice chest tied to the front basket.  He needed a shave and it was more than obvious that he had drunk his breakfast.  He parked the bike, came about 5 feet into the store, and then loudly counted the number of people in the store.

“One, two, three.  Yes, three.” he said.  Then he went back outside to the bike’s ice chest, removed 4 bottles of beer, and brought them into the store and gave each of us a bottle.  I was beginning to like the man a little better.  There are only two types of beer:  those I buy and OP (Other People’s).  I prefer OP.

He was friendly, and despite being a little drunk, he asked the same questions that most of my customers asked.  Which computer was the best, could it do word processing, which printer was the best, etc.  I humored him and showed him the kind of computer that I owned personally.  And when he asked how much it cost, I gave him a ball park figure of $4000.  He nodded his head and left, pedaling his ancient bicycle down the sidewalk.  The three of us went back to work on the Fortune computer.

The next afternoon, a very large car pulled up outside the store.  It was a Checker Cab that had been repainted an electric blue and converted for personal use.  While it was being driven by a young woman about 30, we were a lot more interested in the well-dressed man in the back seat: he was the drunk from the day before.  And when the man came into the store, he gave me a check for $4000 and asked when I could deliver his computer.

The man was Warren Burnett, the legendary West Texas defense lawyer--someone soon to be a good friend and one of my best customers.  I think I eventually sold him over a dozen computers--quite a few of which he had us deliver to people as gifts.

Warren was famous for his cars, his planes, his celebrated trials, and for the staggering amount of good whiskey he could consume.  When Warren was working, he didn't drink—but when he wasn't working he could put away an amazing amount of alcohol.  His main office in Odessa was a giant dome.  When Warren hired my company to install computers in his office (including one on his desk) I was amused to find that he had converted the knee well under his desk into a private wet bar.

I remember one of Warren’s pet peeves was that while drinking, he would watch late night television and fall victim to those middle of the night infomercials.  The next day, he wouldn't remember much of the night before, but in about two weeks the UPS truck would show up and deliver a dozen Ronco Pocket Fishermen or a case of Ginzu knives.  I visited his office one day and he had a pile of Buttoneers on his desk.  Warren always was generous to a fault: even while drunk he always bought enough toys to share with his friends.  He always claimed he was going to sue these companies for preying on late night drunks, but I guess he never found the right precedent.

In his early days, Warren had been a prosecuting attorney--one of the very last in Texas who got a jury to give the death penalty for the crime of rape.  Then Warren became a defense attorney handling high profile murder and drug cases.  His quick wit and sharp tongue could filet a district attorney and he was famous for winning the cases that could not be won.

Lesser known were the cases that Warren Burnett defended for free.  He also represented Mexican-Americans fighting for school integration in the Rio Grande Valley, the United Farm Workers Union in West Texas, and various liberal causes in Austin, the state capital. 

The tenth anniversary of his death was just a few weeks ago.  Warren Burnett died the way he had lived: he was sitting with friends, rocking on a Texas porch with a bottle of beer in his hand, when he had a heart attack.  I bet he finished the beer before he died.