I Am So Happy!

It was very difficult to find a house in Asheville. Kathy looked pretty much full-time for about eight months before reaching an agreement with the owner of our house. Finding the right house, even in periods of economic chaos, is possible, but it involves a lot of hard work.

I sold the house in Madison and stashed the money in the bank. When we approached our moving date, I proposed to Kathy that we use a part of the profit from the sale of the Madison house to buy something that each of us wanted. Kathy wanted a hot tub, and I wanted a generator.

I had good reason to want a generator. A few years ago, the remains of a tropical storm passed through Madison, with the result that we lost power for 76 hours. The weather was warm, so we were not in danger of freezing to death, but we dearly missed air conditioning. I ended up disposing of the contents of two refrigerators and one freezer. And, given that the weather was warm, the act of reading by the light of a (heat-producing) Coleman lantern was torture. I was very happy to see the return of electric power.

A few years later, we spent the Christmas break at our cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains. This was the year that I experienced my first white Christmas. The mass of snow eventually killed the power to the cabin. We were able to stay warm by using the fireplace, but there was only one fireplace (in the living room), so the bedrooms were freezing cold. Worst of all, we were running low on food, and the roads were impassable. A couple of days later, the power was restored, and the roads eventually cleared, but not before we had sympathetic thoughts about the Donner party. If we had lived there full-time, we would have had a freezer full of food. And given the loss of power, we probably would have lost a good bit of that food.

So I have been keen on having a generator for a while. One of our new neighbors told me a story that cemented my desire to go into the electric generation business. A few years ago, on Christmas Eve, a tree fell on our next-door neighbor’s house, taking down a power line. The neighborhood was without power for three days. Can you imagine that happening at Christmas?

I ordered a permanent, gas-fired generator capable of powering the entire house in May. It was installed in June. The lady who sold us the generator told us that, upon the loss of power, the generator would wait a few seconds (maybe 10 to 15) before kicking on, but when power was restored, the generator would just quit, and the transition back to the grid would be seamless. We tested it after the installation, and it seemed to work. And every Wednesday at noon, the generator goes through a self-diagnostic to see if it is indeed ready for action. But the only time the generator actually turned on was in late August. The electrician was upgrading our service in anticipation of wiring Kathy’s hot tub, and he killed the power to the house. About 15 seconds later, the generator kicked on. It was a shocking experience for the electrician. (Yes, pun intended.)

And there we have it. I waited all winter in vain for the power to go out. I was going to be a bright island of light, and heat, and television, and internet, is a vast ocean of darkened houses. But it never happened. I was disconsolate. Kathy tried to keep my spirits up, telling me that it was a good idea to spend the price of a small automobile for a piece of equipment that sits silently, waiting. But I was getting discouraged.

Friday evening we were getting ready to go out to dinner to celebrate Kathy’s recent birthday when suddenly the house went dark. About 15 seconds later, the generator kicked on, and power was restored. Oh Happy Day!!

My joy was short-lived. About two minutes after the generator kicked on, the power was restored, and the generator went silent. The transition was, indeed, seamless.

We could, of course, have survived those two minutes without electricity, but for some reason, those two minutes made me the happiest man in Asheville.

The Seventies Are Over

I used to enjoy high school football quite a bit. My little high school, under the direction of Coach Glenn Nixon, managed to field excellent football teams year after year, teams that were fun to watch. But my four years at Wake Forest University pretty much took all the joy out of watching football.

During my senior year in high school, Wake Forest was the ACC football championship team, although it earned this title with just a 5-4 record. The next year, my freshman year at the school, Wake won one game. The next year, my sophomore year, Wake won one game. In the third year, my junior year, Wake won one game. Finally, during my senior year, things changed: Wake failed to win a single game but did manage to pull out one tie.

(Our basketball team wasn’t much better: I used to joke that the fellows who couldn’t make the football team manned our basketball team.)

As a matter of fact, the only athletic team that performed decently during my stay there was the golf team. You might have expected that from the school that could claim Arnold Palmer, Curtis Strange, and Jay Haas as golf team members. Both Strange and Haas were at the school during my time there, and Golf World labeled their team as “the greatest of all time”. Unfortunately, not even these great players could make golf a game that I enjoy watching. Dear old Wake Forest pretty well-ruined athletics for me.

So, you will not be surprised to learn that during this past NFL season, I managed to watch only one game – the Superbowl – and that was only because Kathy insisted that we host a Superbowl party.

The party was great. We invited three couples, and all three showed up. We ate, we watched, we made fun of the little sperm dancers during the halftime show, and we all agreed that Superbowl LVII was one hell of a game.

The problem for me was in the planning stage. I haven’t thrown a party of any sort in years: that is Kathy’s domain. But I became concerned when she started talking about the amount of beer she planned to buy. It seemed to me that she was aiming low. She bought a 12-pack of local beers. (Asheville is home to a large number of microbreweries which, I am told produce excellent beers.) Kathy and I do not drink beer, so the 12-pack was for the six guests. It seemed to me that 12 beers for the six guests was cutting it a bit fine. Why, I said, back in the seventies just two beers per person would be considered insulting. That wouldn’t even get us warmed up. I went out and bought a second 12-pack of local beer, and worried that this was still not enough for a party.

In addition to the beer, Kathy bought a bottle of wine. One of the guests brought a couple of bottles of wine. We had enough alcohol, but was it in the right form?

As it happens, the guests enjoyed the wine, and drank exactly zero brews. I guess we no longer party like it is the 70s. What has become of us?

If you are ever in Asheville, stop by. We have a cold beer with your name on it. Come soon: I hear that fresh beer tastes better.

Kay Parker, RIP

Last week I learned that Kay Parker died last October. She was 78 years old. That is just too young.

She was born in Britain and moved, at age 21, to the United States, where she eventually became a celebrated actress in pornographic movies. Her career in the porn industry was relatively brief, probably a bit less than 10 years, but impressive. She was the polar opposite of Traci Lords, the under-aged porn star who nearly crashed the entire industry. (Since Lords was under-aged when she filmed all but one of her movies, the masters and all copies had to be recalled and destroyed, as they constituted child pornography.) Kay was in the vicinity of 33 years of age when she did her first sex scene on-screen.

Thirty-three is a bit old to be getting into that business, so she was naturally cast as The Older Woman, the mature woman, sometimes the divorced woman, and was almost always paired with younger male stars. Wikipedia states that she is best known for two movies: Dracula Sucks (1978) and Taboo (1980). I cannot comment on the first one, as I have not seen it. I have seen Taboo, and her performance in it is memorable.

Acting skills are not that highly prized in the porn business, but to me she came across as a reasonably good actress. After she left the porn industry she did a little mainstream acting - The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, for example - so I suppose her acting skills were up to snuff. She seemed to enjoy her work. (If she didn’t, well, she really did have acting skills.) What struck me about her is that she just seemed to be comfortable playing herself. She was a naturally pretty woman.

After getting out of the business sometime in the mid-eighties, she did PR work for a video distribution service, wrote a memoir of her time in the industry (Taboo: Sacred, Don’t Touch), and eventually became a spiritual counselor.

The family did not release the cause of death. IMDb lists the cause of her death as cancer.

The golden age of porn is often given as a 15 year time span, from 1969 (the release date of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie) to 1984. I am inclined to date the beginning of the golden age to 1972, with the release of Deep Throat. But regardless of your starting and ending points, I am safe in stating that Kay Parker was one of the gems of the golden age of porn.

She seems to have been happy with her life. Is there a better epitaph than that?

Pete, Mike, and I

Back in the fall of 1971, Pete hailed from Jacksonville, Florida, Mike from Charlotte, North Carolina, and I from Clayton, North Carolina. We met on the campus of Wake Forest University as freshmen. We were friendly acquaintances: each one of us decided to major in chemistry, which placed us in a group of about 30 or so. By the end of junior year, we had spent a fair amount of time together in relatively small classes and labs.

I spent the first three years living on campus, and I really did not want to spend my senior year in Taylor dorm, again. I am not sure where Pete and Mike lived their first three years, but by the end of our junior year we all knew we wanted to go off-campus. That was a problem. Apartment owners near the campus wanted us to sign a year-long lease, but the school year was only nine months long. No student really wanted to throw away money on rent for the summer months.

I believe it was Mike who came up with a solution to the problem. He knew someone who wanted to rent an apartment for the summer only. We had the friend sign the lease, and we swore a blood oath to be good tenants for the remainder of the lease period. Problem solved.

It was a two-bedroom apartment. Pete had a bedroom to himself, while Mike and I shared a room. It was a nice apartment, too. There was never any excessive noise, no loud stereos from neighbors shaking the walls. I have the impression that not all the tenants were students: one day, in the parking lot, I ran into my quantum mechanics professor, walking his dog (which was the size of a small horse). I don’t know if he lived in the complex, but he lived close by, at the very least.

The lack of noise suited us to a tee. We were all serious students. Pete planned to go to medical school, Mike to dental school, and I to graduate school. Don’t get me wrong: we were in our early 20s and we believed, in a perverse sort of interpretation of Ecclesiastes 3, that there was a time to party hearty, which we did. But that time was limited. Our primary goal was to graduate with good enough grades to pursue our post-graduate plans.

We graduated on May 19, 1975. Wake required each student to walk across the stage, receive the diploma, and shake the hand of the President, James Ralph Scales. Thus Wake Forest graduations are fairly long, drawn out affairs. After the festivities, we three repaired to the apartment, cleaned it out and cleaned it up, and left, each on his own merry way.

That was the last time I saw Pete. He attended medical school somewhere in south Florida, and eventually became a dermatologist. I saw Mike one time after that. He and I both ended up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sometime during my first year there, while walking down a street, a little sports car pulled up beside me with Mike behind the wheel. We chatted for awhile, promised to get together again, and never did. He graduated from the dental school at UNC, and moved to Iowa, where he has a thriving dental/orthodontic practice. As a matter of fact, in 2012, the Midwestern Society of Orthodontists honored him with the Earl E. Shepard Distinguished Service Award.

This week the alumni magazine, cleverly named Wake Forest Magazine, arrived in the mail. I got around to looking at it last night. I read this magazine from the back, because that is where the class notes reside. The articles in the front almost never interest me, unless they happen to be about the history of the school, or some of the characters who attended the school. One of the first things one encounters at the back of the magazine is the obituaries. And there it was: a notice that Pete died last summer.

The magazine did not go into detail, but I found his obituary online. He died of a fairly rare blood disorder. It doesn’t seem fair, but that is life. And death.

My first thought was to contact Mike, but I soon put that idea aside. We haven’t spoken in nearly 50 years. What would I say to him? I haven’t spoken with Pete in nearly 50 years, and the likelihood is that I would never have gotten in touch with him, had he lived. Yet the news of his death troubles me. I am not sure why.

Surely there must be a point to this tale, but what is it? We live in a world of instant communications and almost unlimited access to data. After all, within 5 minutes online I located Mike and found an address and telephone number where I can contact him. In spite of technology, we do not keep in touch. My roommate from sophomore year lives in the area. We got together a couple of years ago, possibly three, with the promise to keep in touch. We haven’t. We have the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips, but part of that wisdom, the importance of friendships and the human touch, we ignore.

I must do something about that.

Tom Eventually Goes Home

He was lionized by William Faulkner as perhaps the greatest talent of his generation. He influenced several writers who came after him, including Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth. On the other hand, in the January 15, 2000, issue of The Los Angeles Times, we find the following comment: “I have ‘Of Time and the River’ on my shelf,” says Vera Kutzinski, a professor of English and American studies at Yale. “I just reread part of the first chapter, to reassure myself that he was as mediocre as I thought he was.” The late Harold Bloom, also of Yale, once wrote: “One cannot discuss the literary merits of Thomas Wolfe; he has none.” Dinitia Smith, writing in the October 2, 2000, issue of The New York Times, dismissed him with the following: “Today he is known mostly as a novelist for late adolescents . . .”

So what is the truth about Thomas Wolfe? I do not know, because I never read any of his works. But I plan to read his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, soon.

Last year Kathy and I moved to Asheville, NC, which was the hometown of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe died in 1938, a few weeks short of his 38th birthday. That was more than 84 years ago, so it is doubtful that there is anyone still alive in Asheville who knew him. Nevertheless, the city fathers seem to be proud of their native son, if only in an obligatory way. My guess is that he generates more excitement among tourists than among natives.

The boarding house his mother owned and operated is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, next to the visitor’s center, and nestled between a couple of high-rise buildings in downtown Asheville. The boarding house, “Old Kentucky Home,” appears in the novel Look Homeward, Angel as “Dixieland.” As you can see, the house is in good repair, despite the efforts of an arsonist several years ago.

What is not in good shape is the cabin in Oteen where Thomas Wolfe stayed during his last visit to Asheville.

Look Homeward, Angel upset the folks of Asheville a good bit. There were around 200 local characters who made thinly veiled appearances in the novel, which was published in 1929, just before the stock market crashed. As a result, he did not return to Asheville for eight years. In 1937, just one year before his death, he rented a cabin in the Oteen section of Asheville, preferring to stay out of town, perhaps to avoid the wrath of the locals. The cabin is in disrepair, as you can see. While it is designated as a local historical landmark, there is not a single sign directing tourists to see this place, perhaps because it is a safety hazard. According to the natives, the cabin has been in this shape for a while, with apparently no action from the city to salvage the cabin.

This is why I noted that the city fathers seem to be proud of their native son, if only in an obligatory way.

The angel that provided the title for Wolfe’s first novel actually exists. Wolfe’s father, W. O. Wolfe, a carver of gravestones, had the angel in his storefront to attract business. It was eventually sold, and installed over a grave in the Oakdale Cemetery in nearby Hendersonville, NC.

Wolfe died young as a result of a form of tuberculosis. He died in Johns Hopkins Hospital where he was being treated, but he was buried in Riverside Cemetery, in the Montford area of Asheville. There is a little pot in front of the tombstone, filled with pens from fans.

(That must be an Asheville thing. William Sydney Porter, aka O. Henry, is also buried in the Riverside Cemetery. His flat tombstone is covered with coins, presumably in the amount of $1.87.)

Wolfe’s first novel was delivered to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, with a word count of approximately 333,000 words. Its original title was O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life. The final product, renamed Look Homeward, Angel, came in at around 150,000 words. This tells me that Wolfe was a man of too many words. I do not enjoy flowery prose, so I am not sure I will enjoy this novel. But I feel compelled to read it.

I will let you know what I think of the book at the end of the year. Do not expect to see it as my book of the year.

Christmastime, 2022

As is the tradition these days, we send to you our Christmas, 2022, Newsletter. Don’t worry, it isn’t a sappy “Our lives are so wonderful!” newsletter. Merry Christmas to all of you!

2022 Book of the Year

The year has not quite ended, and I suppose it is possible for me to finish another book by year’s end, but I doubt that will happen. I managed to read 19 books this year, not quite my goal of two per month, but a better effort than that of 2021. Here is my report.

1. Books that were a waste of time

There were two. The first was The Radio Operator, by Ulla Lenze. This is a work of fiction, originally appearing in German, that is based loosely on real events during World War II. Maybe it was better in German, but I doubt it. The second was On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. This was a big hit in the 1950s. For the life of me, I don’t know why. A colleague at school suggested that the reason may have been its shocking (to the 1950s crowd) description of sex, drugs, and the bits and pieces of profanity scattered about. It is tame stuff by today’s standards, so it came across as episodic and, well, pointless. If only I had those hours back!

2. Massive books that, ultimately, were worth the effort.

There were three. I reviewed Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven E. Koonin, in a previous blog post, so enough said about that one. The Second World Wars, by Victor Davis Hanson, was a new way of looking at World War II. Hanson assumed that the reader already had a passing familiarity with the history of that war. He focused on the real reasons for the Allied victory, which to oversimplify, were two: American’s industrial capacity, and the Soviet Union’s ability to sacrifice millions of its citizens. I do recommend this book quite highly.

The third book in this category was a bit of a surprise. Written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health was quite a piece of work. The footnotes must have numbered in the thousands. Kennedy took a magnifying glass to Anthony Fauci’s entire career in public health. Fauci’s record is that of failure, going back to his days trying to find an AIDS vaccine, through to the present. Kennedy made clear that Fauci was more concerned with Big Pharma than he was with the public health. Why? Follow the money. He spent a lifetime on the federal payroll, and retired a millionaire. If what Kennedy says is true (and again, he documents everything), then we were fools ever to take this guy’s advice about anything.

3. History and Pseudo-history

There were nine. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, by Jason Fagone, actually dealt with a husband and wife team of code-breakers who started as amateurs and ended up as the go-to professionals in the business. Elizebeth (not a misspelling) Smith Friedman, a Quaker school teacher and Shakespeare expert, and her husband William Friedman, a geneticist with a fascination for codes and ciphers, became the experts on code-breaking during both world wars. It was a pleasant read.

So was The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America, by Matthew Pearl. (Why do books need such long subtitles?) Pearl engaged in a little hyperbole when he claims this kidnapping shaped America, but it fascinated me. I had no idea that Daniel Boone’s daughter had been kidnapped by Indians, or recovered, and for that matter, that Daniel Boone himself was kidnapped for a few months sometime after rescuing his daughter. I guess my understanding of the history of Daniel Boone was shaped by an early 1960s television show starring Fess Parker.

The book did vaguely remind me of something else I had read: The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper. I had to re-read that novel. It does seem to have been loosely based on the kidnapping of Jemima Boone.

Having moved to the western North Carolina mountains this year, I felt compelled to learn a bit about the history of this region during the war for Southern independence. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War, by John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney did a nice job of filling that gap in my knowledge. And having moved to the Old North State, I took the opportunity to see an historic site that I had wanted to see all my life: Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hill, and the site of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. That was a thrill, which pushed me to buy The Wright Brothers, by the late David McCullough. It was an excellent read.

I am not a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, but the Jon Meacham biography And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle gave me a new appreciation of the 16th president. The Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, by Howard Blum, was entertaining, but I knew the outcome of the plot, and it really never seemed to amount to enough for a book. I enjoyed Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, by Earl Swift much more than I enjoyed The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses, by Dan Carlin.

4. Politics

American Marxism, by Mark Levin was a well-researched and well-written book. It was not easy reading, but worth the effort. A somewhat easier read was On Being Conservative, by Michael Oakeshott. If you want a single work that offers good justifications for the conservative habit in politics, try Oakeshott.

By far the best book in this category was The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. Unlike other presidential (or other political) memoirs that I have read, Coolidge writes with modesty. Like the man himself, his autobiography has the virtue of brevity. He told the reader about himself, but didn’t spend chapter after chapter on the minutiae of each of his presidential decisions.

5. Just plain fun

Somerset Maugham is one of my two favorite British authors (the other being P. G. Wodehouse), so it was a pleasure to read The Painted Veil. The book is nearly 100 years old, but holds up well. And my final selection is A Mathematician’s Apology, by G. H. Hardy. There is very little math in it. As per the title, Hardy attempts to explain why he saw mathematics as a field worth devoting his life to, if I may be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition. Mathematics as art: I see that.

6. The Book Of The Year

In my opinion, it has to be The Wright Brothers. And yes, I know it was published six years ago, but since this is my blog, I can pick any book I wish for the Book of Any Year!

Happy reading in 2023!

“We’ll Always Have Chantix!”

I guess there were lots of items on my plate this past August 25, as I missed a significant anniversary. No matter, I will celebrate on December 25. On that date, it will have been 15 years and 4 months since my last smoke.

I began smoking when I was 16 and finally stopped a few months before my 55th birthday. There were plenty of reasons to stop all along. Health is usually the number one concern, but I never felt any health effects from smoking. That could change later in life. The price of tobacco kept going up and up, thanks to punitive taxes. Smokers were treated like moral lepers. We were consigned to small outdoor areas, even in foul weather. I can remember a brief stop-over at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. It was winter, and I went outside to smoke a quick bowl of pipe tobacco. It was 17 degrees below zero, and I wondered if the bowl of my rather expensive pipe would crack due to the extreme difference in temperature inside the bowl and outside. It was not fun to be a smoker.

In the end, I quit because of a woman. She lived in a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, and I lived in Madison, Georgia. We saw each other for a total of seven weeks spread out over three years, two or three weeks at a time. It was a transcontinental and transpacific fling that was destined not to last. But I did quit smoking because of her.

I was to visit her in the resort town of Coffs Harbour, NSW. I booked my flights, then sat down to do some serious time accounting. I was looking at a bare minimum of 19 hours without a smoke, assuming that one layover gave me a chance to get outside to smoke, and get back through security before the next flight. More realistically, I was looking at 24 hours without smoke. I knew I couldn’t survive that long. That big old 747 would be making an unscheduled landing on some south Pacific island, where the local constabulary would then board the plane to remove me in handcuffs for smoking in the lavatory. No, I couldn’t do that. My only chance was to quit permanently.

The year before, in 2006, I read an article in Chemical and Engineering News on addiction. The nicotine addiction portion of that article was not reassuring: the most successful treatment for smoking cessation was, at the end of one year, only 20% successful. That treatment was Chantix, which required a doctor’s prescription.

Interesting side note: you can no longer get Chantix in a pharmacy: the brand was discontinued after a recall. The recall was for high levels of nitrosamine in the product. Nitrosamine is carcinogenic. For some reason, I find that hilarious! Cigarettes are carcinogenic, and the most successful treatment for cigarette addiction was carcinogenic!

Back to the tale. When I told my doctor that I wanted a prescription for Chantix, he muttered something on the order of “It’s about damned time!” Then he told me that if I was serious about quitting, I would take Chantix for four months.

I started on Chantix the 25th of August, 2007, just about three weeks before my trip to Australia. It was expensive: it was about the same amount of money per month that I had been spending on tobacco. So much for the money I would be saving by not smoking! But I immediately faced a dilemma. My first prescription would run out at the end of my first week in Australia, and no pharmacy there would refill a prescription from a US. pharmacy. If I wanted to continue with Chantix for the four months my doctor recommended, I would have to get a refill before leaving on my trip. That meant laying out another fairly sizable amount of dough. Do I do it, or do I take a chance?

In the end, I took a chance. My one month on Chantix was all that was needed. I haven’t smoked since then.

As for the woman in question, we last saw each other in 2009. We had fun together: in Coffs Harbour, in Hawaii, and at stops up and down the east coast of the US. But this was the very definition of a long-distance relationship, and we all know the common wisdom about long-distance relationships.

But the relationship was worthwhile. Although the relationship died a natural death, I quit smoking because of it, and that ain’t chopped liver.

“Frankly, My Dear”: An Update

It has been two and one-half years since the post entitled “Frankly, My Dear . . .” (May 3, 2020), which is a good time, I think, for an update.

For those of you who do not remember, the original post dealt with my obsession regarding the collecting of movies and television shows. At the time, I admitted that I had 3,046 video files (movies and television shows) that I had not yet viewed, and that it was unlikely that I would live long enough to see them all. In fact, my handy dandy pocket calculator told me that if I view one video per day, every day, I will have viewed them all by August of 2028.

Alas, the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-glay. We are 941 days later (as of November 30, 2022), and I have viewed 858 of the original 3,046 video files. This leaves me with 2,188 videos yet to watch.

Instead of watching one per day, I have been averaging about nine videos every ten days. This doesn’t seem like much off the pace, but it compounds over 2 ½ years. If I can get up to watching one per day, I will have viewed them all by July of 2029. So a ten per cent reduction in watching these shows has put my schedule back by 11 months.

To boost my spirits, and to get back on track, I think I will dive into the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I have all five seasons! And each video is short!

Unsettled Science

I am not one who believes that the climate has not changed. Indeed, I know the climate has changed, and will continue to change. There is a reason why Greenland is called “Greenland”, and not “Snowland”. The very terms “Ice Age”, “Little Ice Age”, and “Medieval Warm Period” are reminders that the climate changes continually, and not always in one direction.

About mankind’s contribution to the change in climate, I am much less certain. I do not discount mankind’s contribution as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, but I have some serious problems with the magnitude of that contribution. Specifically, I have trouble seeing how the small amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has such a huge impact on greenhouse warming.

According to the federal government, we set a record for carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere in 2021: 414.72 parts per million (ppm). For non-scientists, this is 0.041472%, or, as a fraction, 0.00041472. This is a tiny number compared with, say, the amount of oxygen in the air (19%) or nitrogen in the air (80%). Let us put that number in perspective.

Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, NC, the home football stadium for the NC State University Wolfpack, has 56,919 seats. If that stadium represents the atmosphere, then about 45,535 seats would be taken up with nitrogen gas, and about 10,815 seats would be taken up with oxygen gas. That leaves only 569 seats for all the remaining gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, at a concentration of 414.72 parts per million, would take up less than 24 seats.

The composition of the atmosphere changes a bit, depending upon the weather (which is not the same as climate). On a day that we southerners would consider to be nice and temperate (77 degrees Fahrenheit, 50% relative humidity), the water content in the air is about 1%, or 569 seats in Carter-Finley stadium. Water is also a greenhouse gas. Since the concentration of water vapor is about 24 times that of carbon dioxide, why are we worrying about carbon dioxide, when water seems to be a bigger contributor?

I could not get answers to my simple questions for a very long time, and I was beginning to feel lonely and unloved. After all, the United States seemed willing to turn its economy upside down on the advice of a 15-years-old Swedish teenager with no scientific training. I sat around the house, waiting for the University of North Carolina to recall my PhD.

But I have read a book that makes me feel much better. What follows is not the fallacy of appeal to authority; that is, I am not asking you to believe the author of the book simply because he is credentialed out the wazoo. I give you his credentials simply so you will know that he is not a radical right-winger, and not a “climate denier”.

Dr. Steven E. Koonin wrote the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. His BS in physics was from Caltech, and his PhD in theoretical physics is from MIT. He was a professor at Caltech for nearly 30 years, as well as a vice president and provost for some nine years. Currently he is a professor at New York University, with appointments in the school of business, the school of engineering, and the department of physics. Best of all, he was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, where he authored the DOE’s Strategic Plan (2011), and the first Quadrennial Technology Review. And as this will have some bearing later on, he wrote the book Computational Physics (1985), which is the foundational textbook for building computer models of complex physical systems.

Unsettled is several hundred pages long, and well documented with a raft of footnotes, so I cannot summarize all of its major points. Please, read the book for yourself to get a good picture of what is wrong with current climate science. I will focus on two points.

Koonin is a careful reader, and he tends to double check everything he reads. When the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) releases a new report on the status of the climate, we generally see extracts from the summaries written for policy makers, and reporters. Koonin is never satisfied with the summary, and he investigates the wording of the actual report. Often, he checks the sources quoted in the report. What he finds is that the “executive summary” is usually not an accurate reflection of what is contained in the report. Sometimes low confidence predictions are stated as facts, and on occasion, the original research papers referenced in the report are misrepresented. He tends to bring these faults to light in newspaper editorials. I have read a few of his contributions to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. So point one is that not everything we read about climate change is true.

Point two: Koonin has very serious problems with the computer models used to predict changes in climate. None are accurate. None. And yet we are basing our energy policies (and as a result wrecking our economy) on inaccurate model predictions. He notes that we have very accurate climate data going back to the 1980s, and some reliable data before then. When the various climate models are set to begin in 1980, with data (not predictions) from that time, and allowed to run, we find that every model vastly over-predicts the temperature rise. If the models were accurate, they would have predicted the temperature rise we have seen in the last 40 years.

There is much more to the book than just these two examples, and I feel that I have done his many arguments an injustice. So do not take my word for it. Get the book, and if you are feeling funky, chase down the papers in the hundreds of footnotes in the book.

And then, relax. The globe is warming, but the end is not near.

The Great Remove

I moved to Madison, Georgia, in the summer of 2005. I was not sure whether I would stay: the job that I had landed just might not be all that great. Because of that uncertainty, I rented an apartment. After one year, I decided to stay. True, the job was not all that great, but Madison was lovely.

In 2006, I bought a three-bedroom home on a quiet street. There was a fourth room that could not be counted as a bedroom, because it did not contain a closet. That room became my office. The house was perfect for the two of us: my dog Ronnie, and me.

Ronnie and I lived there, happily, for a fair number of years. In 2013 I married Kathy, and she moved in with us. Kathy is a big city girl, and Madison, with its two stoplights downtown, is not a big city. Still, she succumbed to its charms and seemed happy there.

Ronnie was very happy with Kathy. Ronnie was a Lab/Chow mix: he looked like a Lab but had the temperament of a Chow. He did not like most people, but he fell in love with Kathy, and stayed in love with her until he passed in 2018. Ronnie’s ashes are still with us. He sits on a shelf in the living room, keeping guard over Kathy until this very day.

My misgivings about the job in Madison were sound, and in 2012 I parted ways with the company. I began to work in Decatur, Georgia, at a school that was about 55 miles away from my little home in Madison. I had a choice, of course: sell the home and move back into the city, or suck it up and enjoy the commute. I chose the latter. I would leave the house every morning somewhere between 5:00 and 5:30, just to avoid the Atlanta area rush-hour traffic. Atlanta during the rush hour (which lasts approximately three hours) is surely a first-order approximation to hell on earth. Why put myself through this torture? There is a one-word answer: Madison.

Madison has a fair number of antebellum homes. There are a variety of stories as to why General Sherman (wash my mouth out with soap for saying his name) did not burn the city. I think I know the real reason, but whether I have the right story or not does not matter. These antebellum homes, the small town atmosphere, the friendly people, the great restaurants, all combine to make this a fantastic place to live. I do not know whether the city has an official slogan. The unofficial slogan is “We will not become another Gwinnett County!” For those of you who are not familiar with the disaster that is the Atlanta Metro Area, Gwinnett County, a suburban county, had at one time the highest growth rate of any county in the country. It is now a total mess: commercial buildings everywhere, houses everywhere, strip malls everywhere, apparently with no planning or forethought. The city fathers of Madison are doing everything within their power to prevent that from happening there.

Last fall, Kathy and I had a discussion about my job and our future. She was ready for me to retire. I was not. We eventually reached a compromise of sorts: semi-retirement in a bigger city. That city would be Asheville, where her two children and one grandchild reside. I informed my school, and while she looked for a suitable home in Asheville, I looked for a job. We succeeded on both counts. I am a part-time teacher of mathematics and chemistry at a private school here in town (a mere 4.8 miles from our home), while Kathy found a house that would satisfy both of us.

The Great Remove from Madison began last summer, and has just now concluded. While there are a few boxes to be sorted and only two rooms still to be organized (my workshop and the garage), the move has officially ended. I can say that because now we have North Carolina driver’s licenses, North Carolina plates on the vehicles, and new voter registration cards. Kathy has already voted, having taken advantage of the slack voting laws in the state that seem to encourage voting fraud. I, on the other hand, prefer to vote on Election Day, and not during Election Month. I will perform my ritual act of civic responsibility Tuesday, at the local Presbyterian church.

The Madison phase of my life has ended. I still miss that little town. But I am not fond of living life while looking in the rear-view mirror. I will enjoy Asheville, even as I miss Madison.

Memorable Students

I began teaching rather late in life – at the age of 49 – but of all the jobs I’ve had, teaching is the best. My present high school is my fourth, and the job is still enjoyable.

When I began, all those years ago, I often wondered what it would be like to see the name of one of my former students in the newspaper, or to hear of that student on the television. That has now happened to me, twice. It is not the experience I thought it would be.

I have been cleaning out files following my move to Asheville, and I ran across a picture from my very first year of teaching. The school that first hired me was a very expensive school: the year I left that school, it charged the same tuition as my alma mater, Wake Forest University. Wake is a private college, and it is not cheap. My first high school was likewise private and absolutely not cheap. It did offer some advantages to those who could afford it, including one-on-one classes. It is remarkable how much progress a student can make if he or she is the only student in the class.

The picture I found was of a student in a one-on-one class with me. He was at the board working problems, while I was sitting in a chair next to the board, offering guidance. I guess it was a photo for the yearbook. At any rate, it ended up in my files.

That particular student, in that one-on-one class, came to us during his senior year. He was barely a senior. He had spent the prior year in a boot camp school, so he had a lot of catching up to do. His grandparents had some spare cash and agreed to pay the very high tuition for all private classes. As I recall, it took the entire senior year plus three summer sessions for this young man to acquire enough credits to earn his diploma. He graduated in late August, and I thought nothing more of him.

Until, that is, the October following his graduation. One morning in October, I cranked up my computer as usual, and opened a web browser. I had set the home page of the browser to the local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This once-proud newspaper now barely exists, but at the time it was the go-to newspaper for the Atlanta area. My browser opened up, and what did I see but a picture of my student. My first impression was that, since graduating from high school, he had acquired a tattoo of his initials on his left bicep. The reason the tattoo jumped out at me was because his bicep was flexed. That tends to happen when your wrists are handcuffed behind you.

This young man had made the news for murdering his grandfather, and nearly murdering his grandmother. Both were cruelly beaten. I am not clear on motives, but as a naturally suspicious fellow, I suspect that drugs were involved. At any rate, this young man showed up one Monday morning at a bank, trying to cash a check for $50,000 written on his grandfather’s account. The teller was suspicious, and alerted the manager, who alerted the police. The check, as it happens, was forged. When the police arrived at the grandfather’s house, they found his bloody corpse, and the nearly-dead grandmother.

Sometime later the newspaper reported that he had struck a deal. He avoided the death penalty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole. As far as I know, he has been in prison since then. The murder happened when he was around the age of 19. It is truly a waste of a life.

I never did hear if his grandmother recovered.

The second memorable student is another student from that first, expensive school, and what I am about to relate occurred maybe ten years after I had left the school. The only thing memorable about her during her years at the school is that she dressed every day in black, in a style the kids referred to as “Goth”. Other than that, there was nothing about her to indicate that one day I would hear about her on the television news.

I had taken my mother to visit her only living sister. My first morning there, while sipping on a cup of coffee, I heard a news report from one of those morning feel-good shows that all the networks air. I didn’t pay any attention until I heard the name of the person involved: she was my former “Goth” student. On the bright side she had not murdered anyone. On the downside, she sat by while a man died, and she did nothing.

This former student had become a very high-priced call girl on the west coast. One of her clients was a married man with five children who was an executive with a well-known tech firm. She had joined him one evening on his boat at the marina. She sipped wine while he overdosed on heroin. The security cameras from the marina captured this on film. After a while, she stepped over his body to get another glass of wine. Finishing her wine, she left without checking on him, or without calling for an ambulance.

Prostitution is still illegal in California, so they nailed her on that charge. Whether she payed any price for leaving the tech exec there to die without calling for help is a question I can’t answer. As it happens, she was a Canadian citizen, so after she completed her prison sentence she was deported.

Those are my two experiences with former students making headlines. While I wish all my former students good luck and great success in their careers, I no longer wish to see any of them in the news!

Well, Throttle My Body!

I have owned a bunch of automobiles, too many to count, really. All but my current ride, from the 1961 Oldsmobile Delta 88 to the penultimate 1999 Ford Ranger, were manufactured in the 20th Century. In 2015 I bought a two-years-old Ford F-150, my first, and thus far, only vehicle manufactured in the 21st century.

I love my pickup truck. But it has a little problem: it consumes throttle bodies. I have just installed my seventh throttle body on a truck that I have owned for a mere seven years.

Now a throttle body is not exactly a complicated piece of engineering. Back in the Dark and Dismal Days of my Youth, the throttle body (a flat, circular butterfly valve) was built into the carburetor and connected to the gas pedal by a mechanical linkage. When you pressed the gas pedal, the butterfly valve opened, allowing more air into the carburetor. Nowadays, with carburetors a thing of the past and fuel injection all the rage, the same little butterfly valve is located between the air filter and the intake manifold, and of course, it is no longer controlled by a mechanical linkage. No, in our wisdom, we have made this another electronic device, and it communicates vital information (via an air flow sensor and the throttle position sensor) to the automobile's computer.

You can see the problem: when the linkage was mechanical, all was right with the world. But now that the bloody thing is electronic and in contact with a computer, we have no end of troubles. So it is that, prior to my first throttle body replacement in 2015, I had never heard of a throttle body. Now it is the center of my fixation.

I once wrote a letter to Ford Motor Company's vice president of vehicle component and system engineering. I include a portion of that letter below. The letter was written in September of 2019.

"In the spring of 2015, when I bought my 2013 Ford F-150, I had never heard of a throttle body. A couple of weeks ago the Ford dealer in Asheville, NC, installed the fifth throttle body my truck has had since I purchased it. I strongly suspect that the previous owners, who purchased the vehicle new, traded it in for the same problem."

"Apparently this problem is not unique to my F-150. I say that because, back in the spring of 2016, I had to wait for two or three weeks to get my third throttle body installed. There was a nationwide shortage, which I assume meant that other F-150 owners were sharing in my woe."

"I thought the fourth throttle body, installed in the fall of 2016, was the lucky one. After all, I had never made it past six months with the others. Three years was a record. But, alas, three years was its life span."

"I know that Ford Motor Company has a stable of top-notch engineers in its employ. You don’t have the bestselling pickup truck for 40 years running without excellent engineering. Somewhere in your organization is a very bright engineer who knows the story behind these faulty throttle bodies. Better, he knows exactly what I need to do to make a throttle body last."

"Please, find that engineer, and have him contact the service department of Athens Ford in Athens, Georgia. Please have him tell the excellent mechanics there just what they need to do in order to fix my throttle body problem for once and for all."

The vice president had his minion contact me by telephone. He wanted me to take the F-150 to a dealership so they could read the part number for him. I took a photo of the part number, instead, and texted it to him. He assured me I had the latest and greatest all-problems-solved throttle body in place.

That was two throttle bodies ago.

Monday I saw the first symptom that my throttle body was dying: a wrench appeared on my computer display. The F-150 has two different signals indicating something is wrong. The first is the "check engine light" which, when lit, means "you're in trouble." The second is a wrench that appears on the computer display. That one means "you're in deep trouble." So the wrench appeared, along with a loss of acceleration. I drifted over into a parking lot and turned her off. She restarted, and as always with the throttle body problem, she allowed me to get home, but the wrench and the loss of acceleration are warning signs that you are living on borrowed time. Keep driving, and you will eventually be stranded.

Perhaps Asheville is like every other city: everyone is short of workers. The Ford dealership couldn't take me until mid-September. I tried other garages, and the earliest I could get in was the Tuesday after a weekend festival, two weeks away. I need the truck to haul a trailer to that festival, so that was no good. I had no choice but to fix it myself.

My son suggested I order the part from Amazon, which I did. I ordered it Wednesday, and it was here Thursday. It was 50% of the price the last Ford dealership charged me for that part. I watched a 6:49 YouTube video, "Suki's Shop," which showed me how to change the throttle body. Suki did the whole job in about seven minutes. It took me 57 minutes, but I'm not complaining.

Two thoughts occur to me. I have always used Ford replacement parts, as the job has always been performed in a Ford dealership. I just installed a third-party part. Maybe these third-party parts don't have the Ford defect in them that makes them fail frequently. Second, if this one does fail in another six months to a year, maybe I should just buy a spare throttle body and keep it in the toolbox of the F-150. I'll bet I could replace the next one in less than 57 minutes.

The results from a national experiment

Please note that the data displayed in the graph are from that radical, right-wing rag, The New York Times.

Local Hero

Salena Zito is a national treasure. She writes for the Washington Examiner, the New York Post, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and her columns are generally uplifting and inspiring. What else would you expect from a column that she calls "Dispatches from The Middle of Somewhere"? ("In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the 'middle of nowhere.' This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.") Her recent column in the Washington Examiner is well worth the time spent reading it. It reminded me that I spend too much time worrying about our self-inflicted wounds of inflation, gasoline prices, food shortages, and addiction to opioids, and not enough time dwelling on the good things that happen every day. This column is my attempt to make up for my past posts that, quite frankly, could depress a hyena.

This is a true story about a local hero. Very few people know about his heroism, and with good reason: it occurred nearly 23 years ago. Our hero was, at the time, 11 years old.

The lad was spending some vacation time with his father, on South Beach, Bald Head Island, NC. He struck up a friendship with another lad of approximately the same age, and found himself at the beach with his young friend, and the young friend’s family. His new-found friend had a half-brother, approximately 18 months of age, a mother, and a step-father. The mother and step-father were in the ocean, enjoying the calm seas, the toddler was in a trough or ditch in the sand, about a foot and one-half deep, that ran along the beach, parallel to the shore, and the two 11-years-old boys were sitting on the beach nearby, doing whatever it is that 11-years-old boys do.

A bit further out to sea, a big barge came drifting by. Big barges create big wakes. The folks out in the ocean noticed the wake, but by the time it came ashore, it created some excitement. The wake moved much further up the beach than the normal wave action, far enough to fill the ditch or trough containing the 18-months-old toddler with water.

Mothers are observant creatures. The mother of the toddler may have been floating out on the ocean, but she saw immediately what had happened, and she realized she would not be able to get to shore in time to save the toddler. So she screamed, in a voice recognizable by one and all as the voice of panic: “GET MY BABY!”

Our hero had not noticed that the toddler was in danger, but the voice of the mother made him look around. He saw what was happening, then turned to the toddler’s half-brother, expecting him to spring into action. But the half-brother sat frozen. So our hero, who later said “I just did what I was told”, hopped up and raced over to the trough.

He plunged his arm into the water at the point where he last saw the toddler, but the toddler was not there. The water in the trough was moving, probably towards the sea. Our hero moved a few feet down the trough and tried again, this time feeling the toddler’s arm. He pulled the toddler out of the trough: the poor little fellow was spitting up water. Shortly thereafter, the mother arrived and did what mothers do: she took command of the situation. The toddler survived, with no ill effects, and the mother was extremely grateful.

After the vacation, our hero returned home to his mother in Atlanta, who soon received a phone call from Ojai, California, inviting the young hero out to the toddler’s home. The young hero flew out to visit with the family, and had a grand old time.

In the intervening years, our hero would hear from the family occasionally, but with the passage of time come the transitions of life. Our hero graduated high school, went off to college, did some traveling, and eventually settled down in Asheville, NC. In those pre-social media days, it was difficult to keep up with folks who moved around the country, and our hero lost touch with the family.

Recently, the half-brother found our hero on social media, and contacted him. A few days later, our hero received a very nice letter from the mother of the “toddler” (now in his mid-20s), and, more surprising, a hefty check. The letter, which our hero shared with me, was one of the sweetest, most sincere letters I have ever read. The mother once again thanked our hero for giving her the opportunity to spend the last twenty-something-odd years with her younger son. She thinks of his actions on that day frequently, and offered words describing a gratitude that can never be fully expressed. She invited him to visit the family, now living in Mexico. Our hero wrote back. Their connection has been re-established.

This, my friends, is America. It is the lad who did something heroic, thinking he was only doing what he was told. It is the mother who recognizes that life is fragile, and that, but for the actions of an 11-years-old child, she would have received a wound that would never heal. It is about gratitude, and humility. It is about personal connections. It is about bringing us together, not pushing us apart.

It is the exact opposite of social media.

The Onset of Wisdom

Every generation that follows ours is doing something wrong. It has always been that way. The World War I generation (my grandparents) undoubtedly thought that the World War II generation (my parents) was filled with ne'er-do-wells, while the World War II generation knew that the Baby Boomers (my generation) were lost causes. What is it with all this loud music, long hair, dope smoking and the like? We Baby Boomers are, of course, sure that our high standards are not being met by the generations that followed us. (Forgive me, but since I do not know the differences between Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, the Millennials, etc., I will just lump them altogether.) But I do see a glimmer of hope in the current generations of younger people. About that, more later.

My favorite philosopher, Clint Eastwood, had a classic line in one of the Dirty Harry movies: "A man's got to know his limitations." There is not an elected politician within a 100 mile radius of Washington, DC, who knows his or her limitations. Acknowledging one's limitations is not how one gets elected. For proof, see the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Government's first response to any problem is "We've got to do something!" In many cases, though, there are very few things the government can do to help a situation, but very many things a government can do to make a situation worse. In the case of this pandemic, the government threw its considerable resources behind developing and bringing to market quickly a shot, orginally thought to be a vaccine, for the Wuhan Flu. That was one of the few things the government could do to make the situation better. Many of you will argue the opposite, and I can certainly see your point.

Most of the rest of the government's response, in my opinion, only made matters worse. Shutting down the economy and forcing people to isolate was a disaster. A recent study from Johns Hopkins University makes that point. Some of the recommendations that we still follow today - masking, social distancing - had little basis in science. But the worst effect of all this was the transfer of power to the Federal government, at the cost of our individual liberties. That happened because the population was dreadfully fearful of the Wuhan Flu. And that was primarily the result of a press corps that slanted the news to hype the fear. Everyone fears death, and the death toll from the virus (we were told) was horrendous.

Within the last couple of weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been a bit more forthcoming regarding the statistics on death from the Wuhan Flu. We discovered that some of the deaths attributed to the virus were deaths in patients caused by something else: the patient tested positive for the virus, so the death was listed as due to the virus. And in a remarkable bit of honesty, the director of the CDC discussed the role of comorbidities, other illnesses that contributed to the fatal nature of the infection.

In an interview on the television show Good Morning America, the director of the CDC discussed Covid deaths between December 2020 and October 2021 for those who had received two jabs. Of those who died, 100% had at least one risk factor or comorbidity. Seventy-eight percent of those who died had at least four comorbidities. If these are the numbers for those who were "fully vaccinated", what are the numbers for the "unvaccinated" who died? One can imagine a similar trend: those who are weakened by other risk factors are more likely to succumb to the virus. This, by the way, is true of influenza in general.

And there are the deaths caused by stupidity. The governor of New York issued an order requiring nursing homes to take patients who had tested positive for the virus. A couple of other states did something similarly stupid, placing those who were contagious in a population with the pre-eminent comorbidity: old age.

If the goverment had been honest about the statistics, and if the press had shed its "If it bleeds, it leads" mentality, there might have been less fear of death from the virus, less power transferred to the government, and a more rational approach to the pandemic.

I have talked with students who, to this day, are frightened to death of catching the Wuhan Flu, even though there is little reason to be afraid of dying from the disease. I have seen students withdraw from their classmates and become less social. I knew one student who committed suicide during the pandemic, though no one can say with certainty that the suicide was a result of the pandemic. The atmosphere of fear is the worst of the pandemic's outcomes for young people.

But there is hope that the current generations of young folks are turning a corner. Recently I witnessed two examples of young people who have had an epiphany. The first has to do with the Wuhan Flu, and the second has to do with government power in general.

I know a young lady who believed the recommendations the various government agencies issued. She had the shots, she wore the mask, she socially distanced, she did everything requested of her. She did not get the Wuhan Flu, but she did suffer some medical consequences that her doctor believes are associated with the Wuhan Flu shots. She now wonders why the government pushed hard for everyone to be jabbed when the long-term consequences of the shots were unknown. And now that we are beginning to see some of the medical consequences of the shots, all the while noting that the shots seem to be ineffective against the omicron variant, she asks why does the government continue this push to get the jabs?

She is beginning to see that our government is not the fount of all wisdom. She sees that this is not a kind and benevolent government, but a government intent on forcing its citizens to do as it wishes.

A student of mine, taking an economics course, had to do a bit of role-playing. His teacher assigned the student a job, earning excellent money, and told the student to take this money and plan his life. Based on data from government websites, the student “bought” a house and a brand new muscle car. He was living the good life, until one of the other students in the course pointed out that the student had not deducted taxes from his imaginary paycheck. After the taxes were deducted, the student went from buying a house to sharing an apartment, and the new muscle car gave way to a second-hand Toyota Corolla. He no longer had the disposable income to travel, or to attend concerts, and the like. He then asked the key question: where does all this tax money go?

These two members of the post-Baby Boom generations are beginning to experience the onset of wisdom.

And It's Another New Year!

Happy New Year to you all! My thoughts on the year that will pass away in a couple of hours are pretty much the same as my thoughts on the year that preceded it: goodbye, and good riddance!

I had high hopes for 2021. The Wuhan flu vaccines were brought to market just after the November elections, and I was pretty sure that would cure all my problems. Enough people would be vaccinated, and the world would return to normal. Boy, was I wrong.

I debated with myself about getting the jab. My health is good, and in all my years I've never taken a flu shot. It has been almost 40 years since I had a case of the flu. My immune system seems to be up to snuff, which is probably one of only two advantages to spending 10 years of my life as a road warrior. (The other is lifetime Medallion status with Delta Air Lines, a consequence of flying one million air miles with them in a span of 10 years.) Plus, at the beginning of the year, vaccines were scarce, and there were older people in poor health who needed the jab more than I did.

In the end, I decided that it was worth a couple of shots for life to return to normal. By the end of March I had received the jabs, and was waiting for a return to normalcy.

We finished the school year under masking and social distancing requirements. Fortunately, graduation last May was a maskless affair, with the promise that the new school year would be normal.

About a week before our pre-school-year work days, I received the email that ruined my year: we would have to wear those ineffective and useless masks. Fortunately, social distancing, while required, was pretty much observed in the breach.

Why do I hate the masks so much, aside from the fact that they are useless? I am partially deaf, and have gotten along for years by lip-reading. I cannot do that with the idiotic masks on my students. Plus, the damned things fog my glasses, and get to be pretty irritating by lunch time as my beard stubble starts to appear. And of course, the most irritating thing of all is that for the last 18 months or so, the only place I have worn the mask is at the school. We follow whatever the CDC says, which I believe is a colossal mistake. But the vast majority of my life these past 18 months or so have been maskless, and yet here I am.

Things got worse. Whereas last school year we were allowed to take the masks off when out of doors, a little in to the school year we were informed that we had to wear the masks out of doors. We follow the CDC. The question is, do they follow the science?

Hoping against hope that the booster would help the world return to normal, I took the third jab. That was a complete waste of time.

The latest variant, Omicron, is spreading like wildfire. It is killing next to no one. Two days ago Bloomberg News had the following headline: "US Covid Deaths Are Falling As Omicron Cases Surge". That really didn't answer my question, which was how many deaths from the Omicron variant have we seen in the U.S. It took awhile to find the answer. It is almost as if no one wants to publish the figure. The figure I have is through Christmas Eve, and that figure is ONE: A Harris County, Texas man who, they helpfully tell us, was unvaccinated.

This is what an intelligent biological scientist would have predicted. Darwin's survival of the fittest is at work here. The Omicron variant spreads rapidly but is not as likely to kill off its host as the other variants. Both these mutations help its survival. And its rapid spread seems to be crowding out the Delta variant.

I have two points to make, then I will leave you to your celebrations. The "vaccines" are not vaccines in the traditional sense of that word. When I received the Salk vaccine, life returned to normal. No more mid-day naps, which were thought to protect against polio, and likewise no restrictions on swimming at a public pool, which also was thought at the time to be a breeding ground for the polio virus. And as far as I know, excluding the disastrous batch of vaccine made by Cutter Labs on the west coast, no one who had the vaccine ever caught polio. (Some 40,000 cases of polio occurred because Cutter Labs failed to inactivate the virus properly.) That cannot be said of the current "vaccine". I heard the Vice President on a video clip the other day, and at first I thought she misspoke. But she repeated this at least twice: everyone she knew who caught the Wuhan flu had been vaccinated. That is less like a vaccine and more like our traditional flu shots. It is a roll of the dice with a flu shot, and some years as many as 60% of those who received the shot still catch the influenza. So, I suggest we stop calling this a vaccine, and call it what it really is: a flu shot.

Point two: the relative ineffectiveness of the vaccine against these recent variants, and the evolution of the virus to a highly transmissible but less deadly strain, means the pandemic is over. It is now endemic, meaning it will be with us forever, like the swine flu, the Spanish flu, the Hong Kong flu, and all the others. Which means that it is time for us to return to normal life and quit hectoring our fellow humans who choose not to get the jab, or to wear a mask, or to wash hands as if suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. We are going to be living with the Wuhan flu forever more, so get used to it.

I wonder how many years it will take the CDC to reach that obvious conclusion?

The Book of the Year

Back in my single days - before cable television and streaming channels - I entertained myself by reading a book, or listening to the radio, or watching a movie. I would read a book nearly every week. On weekends when I did not have a date, I would listen to the John Batchelor Show out of New York (WABC, 770 AM in those days - he is on WOR, 710 AM these days). His weekend shows featured book reviews, and very often on a dateless Saturday night I would find myself at the computer, ordering the books I heard reviewed that night.

Now, I am lucky to read a book every month. Books compete with the great variety of mysteries one can find on the streaming channels, and most nights, the books lose out to these television mysteries. So I was rather pleased to see that, as of this writing, I managed to read 16 books this year.

Four of the books dealt with world wars. The York Patrol, by James Carl Nelson, was a detailed look at the action that won acting Corporal Alvin York his Medal of Honor. The Secret War, by Max Hastings, examined the intelligence communities of World War II, and how the various enemies (and on occasion, the allies) spied on each other. Operation Vengeance, by Dan Hampton (my most recent read) was a riveting account of the operation that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor sneak attack. Since the P-38s used in this operation took off from the island of Guadalcanal, the introductory chapters that detailed the invasion of that island gave me a new perspective on Guadalcanal's importance. But the most enjoyable World War II read was I Marched With Patton, a memoir by Frank Sisson.

I managed to read five novels. A Good Marriage, by Kimberly McCreight, and Every Vow You Break, by Peter Swanson, were okay. I have a tendency to finish a book that I've started, so that is why I stuck with these until the end. I'm sure they are fine, but just not my cup of tea. I've already mentioned in a previous post the Graham Greene novel The Power and the Glory. I enjoyed that novel, as I did 1984, by George Orwell. In light of today's political environment, 1984 seems less like a novel and more like a book on current events. But the best novel I read this year was undoubtedly Find You First, by Linwood Barclay. I will not spoil your enjoyment, should you choose to read the novel, by giving you any further details. I consider the premise behind this novel to be fascinating.

I read Natasha Trethewey's memoir Memorial Drive for two reasons: I once lived near Memorial Drive, and the Wall Street Journal sent it to me free as partial compensation for the exhorbitantly expensive cost of a WSJ subscription. It was just okay. The same can be said for Just Show Up, by Cal Ripken, Jr. I know, as I write this, that I will receive grief for this comment from a friend of mine in Maryland, but that's life. Jocks tend not to write great books, even with the help of ghost writers. And although I admire Cal Jr., he is still a jock, and I am too old to be inspired by a locker room pep talk, especially when it is a book-length locker room pep talk.

That leaves five books. I am going to classify these books as historical works. I mentioned W. J. Cash's book The Mind of the South in an earlier posting, so I will say no more here, other than the fact that I'm glad I finally finished that book. I took an online course from Hillsdale College on the Book of Genesis, by Moses, so I re-read all 50 chapters. This time around I read the New English translation, a 1970 Christmas gift from my parents and my brother. That translation does not contain the beauty of the King James Version, but it is much easier to understand. I managed another biography of John C. Calhoun, by Margaret L. Coit, and her attention to detail in John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, leaves me in awe of historians who write well. N-4 Down, by Mark Piesing, kept me on the edge of my seat. It is the story of the loss of an Italian lighter-than-air craft that was engaged in exploration of the North Pole. And it answered a question that had never before crossed my mind: whatever became of the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen?

I have saved the best for last: Beyond, by Stephen Walker. I grew up knowing every detail that was possible to know about the Mercury 7 astronauts, and the troubles the United States had in catching up to the Soviet Union in the race to conquer space. This book provides a look at the other side. The story of Yuri Gagarin's history-making ride atop an R-7 missile, the most powerful in the world at the time, gave me a new appreciation for his sheer courage. He changed the world forever, and he should never be forgotten. Walker did an outstanding job of research and writing, and he published it on the 60th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. I highly recommend it to you.

The Great Digital Disconnect

My stepdaughter owns a short-term rental in Bryson City, NC. The unique feature of this unit is that there is no internet, and no decent cell phone signal. She named the house "The Digital Disconnet" and it stays rented all the time. Apparently our digital world, with its 24/7 connection to the universe, is so stressful that a little time away from it all is the mark of a true vacation. I often wondered what it would be like with no digital connection to the outside world. I found out last weekend.

A week or so ago a crew was out in our neighborhood, with their spray cans of paint, marking the locations of electrical, water, gas, telephone, and cable lines. (In Madison, these are all underground.) I knew that some digging was in our future, but I didn't know exactly where. The Thursday before last weekend, I received a text message from Spectrum, our internet provider, informing me that we were in an area of internet outage, but that they were working on it. As I drove into the neighboood, I saw the problem: Georgia Power looked at all those lawn markings, pointed to the one that said "George's Internet," and decided to dig there. The Spectrum truck was in our driveway, but there was precious little he could do until a crew came out to repair the internet cable, which was cut, by the way, in four places. Georgia Power wanted to make sure that I would be without internet.

While waiting on the repair crew, which came Friday, the tech decided to check my modem and the connections down at the junction box in front of my house. The took some cabling apart, looked at it, muttered about how dirty it was, and left it disconnected.

All this was inconvenient, as I had a Zoom meeting with parents scheduled for that evening. I ended up doing the meeting in the cab of my truck, parked within wifi range of the Quality Inn at Madison.

And so passed Thursday night, the evening of the first day without internet.

On my trip home Friday I received a text from Spectrum, telling me the repairs were completed. So I was a bit peeved when I arrived home to find that I had no internet. Yes, the cable had been replaced. No, the tech had not returned to reconnect the cables down at the junction box. I called, and the folks at Spectrum told me I could get an appointment at 5:00 PM. The problem: it would be 5:00 PM MONDAY. I burned up the rest of my high speed cellular data by watching a television show on my phone. At that point we were without both internet and high speed data. The data we did have was at a much reduced speed. It reminded me of the old AT&T EDGE network days.

And so passed Friday night, the evening of the second day without internet.

Saturday we had a festival to work. If you have never attended the Bostwick (GA) Cotton Gin Festival, you do not know what you are missing. My favorite columnist, Salena Zito, recently wrote a column about small towns and their festivals. This festival could have been featured in her column. I love small-town American, and that means I love the little crossroad of Bostwick. Once we had a couple of dozen cotton gins in our county. As far as I know, the one is Bostwick is the only remaining operational gin in Morgan County. It is fascinating to see it run.

We used our credit card reader and app to sell products at the festival. Even on reduced speed, we were able to accept the credit cards offered to us. We returned home, and watched a film noir that I had previously recorded: Touch of Evil, a 1958 Orson Wells thriller. The big inconvenience was not being able to ask Alexa what the weather would be like on Sunday. That and having to drive to the Pilot gasoline station to tap into their internet in order to upload the most recent blog posting.

And so passed Saturday night, the evening of the third day without internet.

On Sunday, the lack of internet became a problem. We are working on a project, and we needed to be able to both upload and download documents. This required two trips down to the interstate: we used the Dunkin' wifi in the morning, then the Pilot wifi in the afternoon. By evening, we were exhausted, but reasonably happy. We have a couple of items to put together to finish the project, but that will have to wait for another day. The dog needed a bath, and that took precedence. We had dinner. We read. We went to bed early.

And so passed Sunday night, the evening of the fourth day without internet.

Monday morning, well before sun-up, I was at school, and received a text message from Spectrum telling me that my internet had been restored, and that I should press "3" in order to cancel the scheduled Monday afternoon visit by my local repair tech. Not having fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I politely declined to cancel the service call, which was a good thing. When I arrived home, I was still without internet, but my friendly repair tech showed up on time, and an hour or so later, I was back in business. It turns out that the Friday afternoon technician simply failed to reconnect some cables at the junction box in the yard. Had he done so, I would not have gone the weekend without my digital connection to the outside world. The tech checked everything: the junction box, the box on the wall of the house, the connections inside the house. He did a great job. I wish he had visited me on Friday.

I celebrated by watching an episode of “My Life Is Murder” and an episode of “The Americans”. I further celebrated with a dinner of Whoppers (2), Coca-Cola, and vanilla bean ice cream. As you can see, Kathy was out of town.

Thus ended Monday night, the evening of the fifth day without internet.

I've had my digital vacation. The most refreshing part of this vacation was its end.

The Guy In The Basement

I have mentioned in the past that I suffer from tinnitus. A bit more than a month ago, Kathy was outside, chatting with a neighbor, the Gladys Kravitz of our neighborhood. Kathy happened to mention that I have been having trouble with ringing in the ear, and Gladys popped into her house, did a search on her computer, then sent a text to me containing the link you see pictured at the top of this article.

In the event that you cannot make out the details of the photo, it is a photo of a woman with a clove of garlic shoved in her right ear. That’s right: a clove of garlic in the ear.

*Sigh*

In 2018, the US spent on average $14,891 per year, per pupil, for the 12 years of primary through secondary education. The same year, the US spent on average $15,908 per year, per pupil, for post secondary education (college, community colleges, technical schools, etc.), and $33,063 per year, per pupil, for graduate and post graduate education. We spend a ton of money every year on education.

So why do we still have people on this Earth who can be suckered by witch doctor medicine?

And it isn't just medicine that fools people who should know better. Surely you have seen the internet ads that tout some previously secret method for cleaning toilets, or tightening loose skin on the face and neck, or saving hundreds of dollars on automobile insurance, and the like. There have been so many ads featuring baking soda and apple cider vinegar that I no longer even look to see what these two miracle chemicals are supposed to do. I gather, from the ads, that baking soda and apple cider vinegar must solve about 5,237 household problems.

I lay the blame for this gullibility to the nature of our citizens. We are all slightly rebellious, and generally distrustful of authority. So when an internet ad begins with “the major drug companies don't want you to know about this simple cure for [fill in the blank]”, we are naturally inclined to say “Yeah, screw those bastards!” And we end up with some of our citizens walking around with garlic cloves in their ears.

So, where do all these implausible ads come from? I have a theory. I can't prove it. You can't disprove it. In other words, it is a perfect theory.

Somewhere there is this not-quite-middle-aged chap, a college graduate, with something on the order of $100,000 in college loan debt. That is why he lives in his mother's basement. The reason he has made no progress on his student loans, and hence lives in his mother's basement, is that he has no useful skills. His degree is useless. Who needs a degree in the Transgender Anthropology of the Hakowiee Indians, or Critical pre-Columbian Queer Feminist Theory? The poor fellow is bitter: he has no future, and he chastises himself for not majoring in, say, English. At least with an English degree he could go door-to-door explaining Shakespeare for tips. But no, there he is, in his underwear, in his mother's basement, scouring the internet for some porn he hasn't yet viewed.

"Why me?" he asks. “I'm a lot brighter than most of those mouth-breathers who know nothing about Jacques Derrida's contribution to post-structuralism, or Michael Foucault's theory of the historical, non-temporal, a priori knowledge that grounds truth and discourses, thus representing the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. Why, then, am I such a loser?”

Let me count the ways.

As the weeks in the basement become months, he begins to lose confidence in himself, until he actually begins to sound like John Blutarsky, aka Bluto in Animal House: “Christ. Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f***ing Peace Corps.”

But then, he has an idea, a brilliant one, an idea that will restore his sense of self-importance. He will show just how stupid the mouth-breathers are. He will come up with the most idiotic ideas he can imagine, post them on-line, and then watch to see the mouth-breathers take the bait.

And that is why we see ads touting garlic cloves in the ear to cure tinnitus, vinegar and baking soda enemas to cure prostatitis, and nonsense like that.

As I noted, it is the perfect theory.

You can buy the theory, or not. But please, PLEASE, when you look at those internet ads that promise the simplest of cures for mankind’s most perplexing problems, stop for a second before clicking on the link, and remember that fellow, in his underwear, in his mother's basement.