When It Rains, It Pours

Monday, July 24 – Dear Diary,

As you know, our garage door opener stopped working in the spring. Was it late May? Early June? I can’t recall, because I didn’t write it down. Anyhow, I finally got around to buying a new garage door opener! The old one was so, well, OLD! This one can be opened from an app on my iPhone! It is so modern, which means, there are so many things that can go wrong with it! Maybe I will install it tomorrow.

Tuesday, August 1 – Dear Diary,

The new garage door opener has been sitting on the floor of the garage for more than a week, but at last, I have decided to install it. It looks like this is a three-part job: (1) take out the old opener, (2) assemble the new opener, and (3) install the new opener. I completed parts (1) and (2) today, but ran into a snag with part (3).

The old garage door opener had a skinny rail. The new one has a thicker rail. There is a piece of electrical conduit that is in the way of the new garage door opener. (The old opener just barely fit past the conduit.) I am going to have to re-route that conduit. That’s enough for today. As Scarlett O’Hara used to say, “Tomorrow is another day, Batman.”

Wednesday, August 2 – Dear Diary,

I started thinking about my conduit problem last night and came up with a brilliant idea. The garage has only one electrical outlet in it, and that outlet is completely taken up with the freezer and the garage door opener. In order to use any power tools in the garage, I would have to disconnect one or the other. And the previous owner used an extension cord zip-tied to the door rail to power the old garage door opener. What a mess! So, I made an executive decision: since I have to move the conduit anyway, I will rewire the garage, adding a couple of extra outlets, including one in the ceiling near where the new garage door opener will be located. I figured out which supplies I needed and popped off to Lowes. After shopping for electrical supplies, I was so fatigued that I took the afternoon off.

Thursday, August 3 – Dear Diary,

My plans to finish the wiring of the garage today have hit a snag. I knew the walls of the garage were made of cement blocks, but that shouldn’t be any trouble: I recently had my masonry bits sharpened, and they work pretty well on brick and block. I didn’t count, however, on encountering concrete in the ceiling. Apparently, the ceiling of the garage was finished with precast slabs of pre-stressed concrete. Why in the world did the builder choose that material? Was the garage designed to double as a fallout shelter? Even my recently sharpened masonry bits had trouble with the ceiling. Eventually, I was able to drill the holes I needed, but it was a struggle. I am not exactly Charles Atlas and pushing that drill overhead against 71-year-old concrete took its toll. I did finally install the ceiling outlet but decided to call it a day after that. I can do the rest of the wiring tomorrow, and then install the opener.

Friday, August 4 – Dear Diary,

One day, one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren may find this diary, so I will refrain from venting here using the extensive vocabulary of profanity that I have collected over the years.

I started fresh in the morning, and by noon had completely wired the new outlets in the garage. The previous day’s struggles with the concrete ceiling faded from my memory as I approached the end of the wiring side job. Then I tested the outlets with my meter: they all showed 120 volts. Perfect. But then I plugged in the freezer.

It didn’t come on. With the freezer plugged in, my meter showed not 120 volts, but 5 volts.

Had the freezer suddenly gone bad? It was several decades old, after all. But I needed to confirm, so I found an old drill, one that is not battery-operated. I plugged it into the outlet and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened other than a noise that sounded like a drill struggling, in vain, to turn.

@#*&%^$#@!

I tested all three outlets, with the same result. Clearly, I had done something wrong, so now it was time to troubleshoot.

I began slowly and methodically, disconnecting the outlet farthest from the incoming power line. That did not restore power to the other two outlets, so I disconnected the ceiling outlet. Nothing. I disconnected the third outlet and connected the drill directly to the power line feeding the garage. Nothing.

The nasty realization of what had happened began to dawn on me. The problem was with the line feeding the garage. That meant that my wiring was fine and that I had essentially taken it all apart for no good reason. But it meant something even worse.

It meant that my old garage door opener stopped working, not because it was broken, but because of the power line feeding the garage. I had done all this work for nothing!

@#*&^$#@!

I needed to confirm this diagnosis. If my conclusion was accurate, then the freezer, though plugged in, hadn’t worked since the spring. We don’t keep anything in the freezer but bags of ice and ice packs. When I opened the freezer, I found about three inches of water in the bottom. My diagnosis was correct.

I had a problem similar to this before, in a house I owned decades ago, so I knew how to fix it. But in the course of troubleshooting the problem, I discovered something that worried me. The garage outlets are fed from the living room outlets. The new garage door opener pulls 6 amps, and the freezer, 5. That is a total of 11 amps, on a 15-amp circuit breaker. If Kathy has some of the living room lights on at the same time as the television, and the freezer compressor kicks in while I am opening the garage door, we will kick the circuit breaker.

We really need a new circuit just for the garage.

I am so disheartened! I need a day or two off. At any rate, I am through for the day.

Saturday, August 5 – Dear Diary,

I took the day off. We visited Mount Mitchell and had a nice lunch in Burnsville. I feel better about the garage job. I have made up my mind that tomorrow I will repair all the damage I did yesterday, and then start afresh Monday.

Sunday, August 6 – Dear Diary,

Today I completely repaired all the damage to my wiring I caused on Friday when I started troubleshooting the problem. I really hate doing the same job twice, but at least now it is done. Tomorrow I will run a new line to the garage.

Monday, August 7 – Dear Diary,

I ran a new power line to the garage. My first stop was Lowes, where I bought yet another hundred dollars of wiring supplies. Copper is so expensive now! Thanks a lot, you Tesla owners!

On the very few occasions when I thought about growing old, I imagined myself as a dignified older gentleman. I never once thought that I would be sweating and sore, pulling Romex as if I were an eighteen-year-old electrician’s apprentice. But the job had to be done, and I didn’t have an eighteen-year-old electrician’s apprentice to hand. I had to fish-tape the Romex through a portion of the ceiling in the basement, which is absolutely NOT my favorite part of wiring. But I completed the job, and everything worked on the first try.

So, after all this, I am back to where I was a week ago: I still have yet to install the garage door opener itself.

I really, really can’t wait for school to start again, because I need a break!

Mount Mitchell

Sadly, I must begin this post with a correction. In my last post, I wrote the following sentence: “We have Mount Mitchell (6,684 feet elevation), the highest mountain east of the Mississippi, and by logical extension, east of the Rocky Mountains.” While it is true that Mount Mitchell is the highest mountain east of the Mississippi, Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills (South Dakota) mountain range is both east of the Rockies, and taller (by 558 feet) than Mount Mitchell. To be fair, the graduate school at the University of North Carolina, the school that granted me a Ph.D. several decades ago, made the same mistake on its website. But that is no excuse. I should have been a bit more careful in my research. Mea culpa.

In other news, Kathy was shocked to learn that I am not always right.

The tale of Mount Mitchell begins with Elisha Mitchell. He was a Connecticut boy, and a Yale graduate. As best I can tell, his undergraduate degree was in chemistry, though he clearly had a great interest in geology. Back in the early nineteenth century, the scientific disciplines were not as separated as they are today. After graduation, he taught in preparatory schools in New York and Connecticut and took a brief time out to take a theological course in Andover, Massachusetts. He returned to Yale as a tutor, and the next year was recommended for a teaching position at the University of North Carolina. In January of 1818, he arrived in Chapel Hill as a new mathematics and natural philosophy professor. In 1825 he took on the responsibility of teaching chemistry, geology, and mineralogy, the subjects he taught for the next 32 years. During this time, he also completed the geological survey of North Carolina that his predecessor had initiated.

Mitchell is buried at the summit of Mount Mitchell, and the photo of the plaque on his grave is shown below. I note two things from the plaque: first, that the word “university” is misspelled; and second, that he possessed a Doctor of Divinity degree. Try as I might, I could find no record of Mitchell’s theological studies, aside from the one course he took in Andover. I discovered that the degree was honorary, conferred on him by the University of Alabama. He was, however, a real reverend. He was licensed to preach by the Congregationalist Western Association of New Haven County, Connecticut, and was ordained Presbyterian minister by the Presbytery of Orange in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

His geological research often brought him to the mountains, where he made his mark by measuring the height of Black Mountain, which was later renamed in his honor. At the time it was taken for granted that Mount Washington, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, was the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River. Mitchell proved conclusively that Mount Mitchell was higher than Mount Washington.

Senator Thomas Clingman, of Clingmans Dome fame, challenged Mitchell’s result (that Mount Mitchell was the highest peak east of the Mississippi), so Mitchell returned to Mount Mitchell in 1857, to confirm his measurements. Regrettably, he died in an accident on the mountain, leaving confirmation of the accuracy of his work to another scientist.

At the summit of Mount Mitchell, we enjoyed the 64 degrees Fahrenheit temperature. After descending to the Blue Ridge Parkway below, the car’s thermometer registered 85 degrees. The view was excellent, as we did not have the overcast conditions we did when visiting Clingmans Dome, a peak we could see from the summit. Additionally, we had a very good view of Mount Craig, the second-highest peak east of the Mississippi. Mount Craig was only one mile away. Unfortunately, there is no road leading to the summit of Mount Craig. The park employee I spoke with told me that to reach the summit of Mount Craig, one had to hike on foot. I love history and the mountains, but not enough to do that hike, with its challenging grade, on foot. You may be surprised to learn that I did NOT build this body with exercise.

I hope you enjoy the pictures below. Kathy, Lucy, and I had a very nice time on this brief day trip.

Mount Craig

Clingmans Dome is in the distance, at the right of this photo.

The antennas are on Clingman’s Peak (not to be confused with Clingmans Dome). The building below it is a restaurant.

Clingmans Dome

From birth until about three weeks before my 26th birthday, I was a citizen of the state of North Carolina. Since last year, I am once again a citizen of North Carolina. Although I lived in Georgia for the longest period of my life (33 years), I have a soft spot for North Carolina, primarily because it was my home during my formative years. I know its history better than I know the history of any of the other three states in which I have lived, and that history, at least during my childhood, revealed one big inferiority complex.

My seventh-grade NC history textbook was unsparing. Compared with Virginia or South Carolina, we lagged behind in terms of shipping. We had only one major port. We did not have enough inlets into the sounds, and the sounds were shallow. We suffered periods of poor leadership. We were slow to adopt a system of public education, and during my youth, the teachers were woefully underpaid. (Compared with the state of Georgia, they still are.) We suffered from a lack of decent roads and railroads.

If you have ever seen the movie 1776, you get a hint of an inferiority complex in the North Carolina delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The North Carolina delegate who had a speaking part in the movie was Joseph Hewes. Votes were taken by colonies, each colony casting one vote only. The roll was called in alphabetical order, but every time the NC delegates were called upon, Hewes deferred to South Carolina, and ultimately voted exactly the same way as Edward Rutledge of SC.

And let us consider our presidents. The first North Carolinian elected to the White House was Andrew Jackson, born in North Carolina but recognized by Tennessee because he moved there as a young man. He gave us the Trail of Tears. Our second was James K. Polk, born in the Charlotte area and educated at UNC, but also recognized as a Tennessean because that is where he began his political career. He is the only president of the United States to have been a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. The third was Andrew Johnson, whose birthplace, a log cabin, was on the NC State University campus the last time I visited there (some 45 or 50 years ago). He, too, moved to Tennessee, and we are quite happy to let Tennessee have him, given that he was a drunk and the first president to be impeached. This was back when impeachment was a rare thing, and actually meant something.

Even our liquor laws are near-verbatim copies of Virginia liquor laws.

Because of this complex, North Carolinians of my childhood bragged about whatever we could. We were not a completely backward state. We had fine universities and an outstanding research park. Why, we even claimed the oldest public university in the land! The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the first public university in the country to hold classes and produce graduates, but even that title is contended: the University of Georgia was chartered before UNC. We had the very first flight of a heavier-than-air craft that took off and landed under its own power! The fact that the inventors were from Ohio didn’t seem to matter. We rid the world of the pirate Blackbeard! The fact that we harbored him for years is hardly mentioned. We revered the few celebrities who came from North Carolina. This explains my fascination with Ava Gardner, who was born in the same county as yours truly, and now lies buried there. And, of course, Andy Griffith is proudly claimed by us.

But Mother Nature smiled on us and gave us solid reasons to brag. We have Mount Mitchell (6,684 feet elevation), the highest mountain east of the Mississippi, and by logical extension, east of the Rocky Mountains. Mount Craig is a close runner-up to stately Mount Mitchell (6,647 feet elevation), just about a mile down the road from Mount Mitchell, the second-highest peak east of the Rockies. And to rub salt in an open wound, we also have number three: Clingmans Dome, at 6,643 feet. To be sure, Clingmans Dome straddles the North Carolina/Tennessee state line, but the summit is in North Carolina, by just a few feet.

We have it on our calendars to visit all three. We began with Clingmans Dome. And, if any of my high school English teachers happen to read this, no, I did not leave out an apostrophe. This is the official name of the peak.

Thomas Lanier Clingman was a politician, a scientist, and an explorer who, along with UNC professor Elisha Mitchell, measure the elevation of various mountain peaks in western NC. The official guide published by the Great Smoky Mountains Association fails to mention Clingman’s later adventures, that of Confederate General in the Late Unpleasantness, which means that, sooner or later, the mountain will be renamed, as we continue to commit the sin of contemporaneity. But I digress.

We used to own a mountain home in Gatlinburg and to get to that home from Madison, GA, we took US 441 through Cherokee and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The road to Clingmans Dome intersects US 441 in the park and is about 7 miles long. As many times as we rode by that intersection, we never made the side trip to the Dome: we were always in a hurry to get to our destination. Now we live in Asheville, and Clingmans Dome is about 80 miles from home. It was an easy trip.

The only slight disappointment was the weather. Those of you suffering through the heat wave would appreciate the 65-degree Fahrenheit temperature we experienced at the summit, but that cool temperature was a result of the low-lying clouds that created visibility problems. Still, the visibility did not interfere with our enjoyment of the day.

The observation tower is the unique architectural landmark at Clingmans Dome. It is about 45 feet tall (which means that the observation tower is about four feet taller than the summit at Mount Mitchell), and you reach the tower by going up a spiral ramp that rises at about a 12% grade. To get to the ramp, you hike a good little way up a grade that is a good bit steeper than 12%. It is not the toughest hike I have ever undertaken, but it could be tough if you have physical ailments.

On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see 100 miles from the tower. We could not see anywhere near that distance. Twenty miles would have been a stretch.

The only downside to this little trip is that dogs are not allowed at the summit, on the path to the summit, or for that matter, on most trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We had to leave poor Lucy home this day.

I hope you enjoy the pictures below.

Every now and then the clouds lifted a little.

Kathy seems to be managing the hike to the summit very well.

The path to the summit was well paved, but, unfortunately, not level.

A view from the observation tower.

A look back at the spiral ramp.

Clingman’s grave is in the Riverside Cemetery, Asheville.

Sulphur Springs

First, let me address the spelling of “sulphur”. In American English, “sulfur” is the preferred spelling of element number 16. “Sulphur” is the spelling found most often in the non-scientific literature outside North America. Because the places I address in this essay use the spelling noted in the title, I will use “sulphur”.

For centuries, sulphur water has been considered healthful and restorative. Recent research seems to indicate that there is some scientific basis for believing this to be true. The American Medical Association does not yet recognize the benefits of bathing in sulphur water. European medical practitioners seem to be a little more broadminded, and balneotherapy (the treatment of disease by bathing in thermal mineral waters) is widely accepted there. Generally, bathing in sulphur water is supposed to be very good for skin diseases, allergies, inflammation, arthritis, and “detoxification”. I maintain a neutral position on the question, although I am convinced that my morning soak in the hot tub is good for my joints.

The ingredient that modern researchers credit with whatever wonders sulphur water might possess is hydrogen sulfide, or H2S. That is also the odorous compound in rotten eggs. If you have ever driven through White Sulphur Springs, WV, you know the smell well. The smell is not that onerous, as both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are alleged to have benefited from the waters of that town, as well as other presidents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nearby, in Virginia, are the towns of Warm Springs and Hot Springs, also renowned for springs of sulphur water and visits by presidents, potentates, and lesser creatures, such as members of Congress.

Asheville, North Carolina, is in a geologically similar region to these three famous towns, so it did not surprise me completely to discover that Asheville once had a sulphur spring that, for a brief while, attracted tourists seeking the waters for rejuvenation. And thanks to Asheville Junction: A Blog by David E. Whisnant, I know more of the history of Sulphur Springs and where to find what is left of it. If you have any interest in this sort of history, I encourage you to read his blog. What follows is a very brief summary, including some pictures.

(Note: the picture at the beginning of this post was taken by Dr. Whisnant, and is about seven years old. The other pictures in this post were taken by me yesterday.)

The spring itself was discovered in 1827 by landowner Robert Henry, or by his slave, Sam. About seven years later, Henry’s son-in-law, Robert Deaver, constructed a wooden hotel near the spring and opened Deaver’s Sulphur Springs. It catered to the South Carolina plantation owners who visited Asheville in the summers to escape the heat of the low country. This successful health resort came to a fiery end just before the War Between the States.

Around 1887, Edwin Carrier bought the land and built a brick hotel on the ruins of the first hotel. Though constructed of brick, the Belmont (earlier known as Carrier’s Springs) also succumbed to fire in 1892. But the spring remained.

The neighborhood of Malvern Hills grew up around the spring, and during 1925 - 1926 the Malvern Hills Country Club was built over the spring. When the country club was demolished in 1980, the concrete pavilion over the spring was all that remained of Robert Henry’s discovery.

As you can see from Dr. Whisnant’s picture at the top of this post, and my photos below, the pavilion is in bad shape, covered with vines and tagged with graffiti. You can see that the spring yields very little if any water. The water you see may have been from recent rains. I could not detect the least bit of hydrogen sulfide in the air.

After our visit to the spring, Kathy and I lunched at a restaurant on Haywood Road, in West Asheville, where I happened across the small monument marking the end of the line for an electric railway that connected West Asheville to Sulphur Springs. According to the dates on the monument, it ran for only two years before Carrier’s hotel burned to the ground. The line continued to run for another 42 years after the fire. The fare was five cents.

Sulphur Springs is designated a Historical Landmark. If you wish to see it for yourself, enter 233 School Road, Asheville, NC, 28806 into your GPS. A little parking spot will hold one or two cars, maximum across the street from the spring.

Sulphur Springs may be just a small piece of Asheville’s history, but no part of history is insignificant.

Fifty By Seventy

I was not a child that dreamed of travel. When shown a picture of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, my first reaction was “flying buttresses . . . wow!” not “I must go see that in person sometime.” I was pretty well satisfied with life in the (then) small town of Clayton, NC. My family did a little bit of traveling, usually to see relatives or to go on camping vacations, but we limited our travels to the southeastern portion of the US. By the time I graduated high school, I had visited only eight states: North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.

College and graduate school kept me too occupied to travel. When I married the first time, the honeymoon added Maryland and Pennsylvania to my list of states visited, but the vast majority of the country remained unexplored by me.

My first professional job was with a company headquartered in New York. Between visits to the corporate office and projects in New Jersey and Delaware, I added another three states to the list. But it wasn’t until 1980 that the travel bug bit me. That summer we pulled a pop-top camper to Yellowstone National Park. We took a different route going to and coming from the park, and, while in the vicinity, added a side trip to Idaho. By the time we returned from that trip, I had visited an additional 13 states. My total was now 26: I had visited more than half the states.

That is when the idea of 50 by 50 hit me: my goal was to visit all 50 states by the time I was 50 years old.

My work involved some travel. Thanks to job-related travel, I was able to add all of New England and California to my list. After changing jobs to one with a heavier travel schedule, I barreled through the States like crazy. By the time I was 47, I had visited 46 states.

I then became a high school teacher, a job involving almost no travel. That did not matter. I was missing only four states: Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska. A vacation to Las Vegas could easily knock out three of the states, leaving me only an Alaskan cruise away from my goal. Surely I would fit these two vacations in before hitting the half-century mark.

But I didn’t.

Fifty came and went, and I still was at 46 states. In fact, when all the fifties were in the rear-view mirror, I was still at 46 states.

At age 60 I remarried, and the honeymoon destination was pre-ordained: Viva Las Vegas, baby! After several days in Las Vegas, we rented a car and spent a week or so in Arizona and New Mexico. Forty-nine by sixty!

My life as a married man became very busy. We started a hot sauce company. We became involved in the rental property business. We became grandparents. We buried parents. Somehow or another, 50 by the end of the 60s just didn’t happen.

I turned 70 late last year. When Kathy brought up the subject of our 2023 vacation a few months ago, we locked horns. She wanted Greece, and I wanted Alaska. We compromised on Alaska.

I write these lines while on the MS Westerdam. We are three hours from docking in Juneau. Kathy scheduled a couple of excursions in Juneau, while I have plans for the obligatory meal. (A state doesn’t count as having been visited until I’ve had a meal there.) Later we will visit Sitka, Ketchikan, and Victoria, BC. Kathy is especially excited about Victoria, as she has never been to Canada. I assume the trip will go well, so I end this discourse here. I will probably post a few pictures with the blog.

Fifty by Seventy, at long last!

Mendenhall Glacier, near Juneau

Sitka

Ketchikan - Note that Kathy is rubbing my belly.

Another Ketchikan photo in which Kathy is yet again rubbing my belly. She must think it brings good luck.

Victoria, BC

“Hey, Rocky, where is Victoria, BC?”

Seattle, Pike Place Market

The first Starbucks, at Pike Place Market, or “People standing in a long line to buy burnt coffee from the original.”

Da Bears

Kathy and I have been visiting the Asheville, NC, area since 2012, and in that span of time, we have seen many bears. That changed, at least for me, when we bought our retirement home here at the end of 2021. Kathy continued to see lots of bears, especially on or near our property, but I missed them.

It was a bit frustrating. I saw evidence that the bears existed: an overturned trashcan here, a collapsed chain link fence there, a destroyed bird feeder over yonder, but I didn’t see the bears. Consider this typical day from the summer of 2022. Like most couples, we paid movers to haul a bunch of stuff to our new home that we subsequently threw out or donated. My summer included near-daily trips to the dump or trips to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. One day, returning from the dump, Kathy rushed out to tell me that I had just missed a big old bear strolling down our street. “It couldn’t have been more than three minutes ago!” Three minutes late!

Or consider testimony from our next door neighbor, Justine: “Did you see that bear that just went down the street? That was absolutely the BIGGEST bear I have ever seen!” Kathy saw it, but I missed it.

I know there are lots of bears in the Asheville area. A biologist with the NC Wildlife Resources Commission was quoted earlier this year as placing the Asheville area bear population at around 8,000. This is up from fewer than 1,000 bears in the 1970s, thanks to a management plan that went into effect in 1981. Surely some of these bears must visit our home, but I never see them.

Last Christmas, my eldest gave us a Garde Pro animal camera. It took me awhile to mount it: the instruction book was quite thick, and to be honest, it intimidated me. But eventually I got around to reading the instructions and mounting the camera. The mounting strap that came with the camera was fairly short. The only tree small enough to accommodate the short strap was a dogwood in the side yard. We kept the camera there for a good bit, but unfortunately, we didn’t see any animals, other than bats. One night a bear came on our front porch and destroyed another bird feeder, but this was all out of range of the camera. That convinced me to buy a longer strap.

I relocated the camera to a massive tree in our front yard, with the camera pointed at the front steps and front porch of the house. For several days we checked the camera only to see the nocturnal antics of neighborhood cats and raccoons. Then, one day, there it was: a relatively young bear climbing onto our front porch, looking for the birdseed that we take in every evening. That video is here.

As you can see, the bear spends a bit longer than a minute on the porch. He goes to the railing at the end of the porch, and stands on his hind legs as he surveys his domain. Finding no birdseed, he eventually leaves, after taking a bite out of a leaf on our small key lime tree.

Well, that was most certainly exciting, but it didn’t qualify as “George sees a bear”. Still, I had a sense that my encounter with a bear could not be too far distant in the future.

I came to within eight minutes of seeing a bear stroll through our front yard. The video of that is here.

You can hear Lucy going absolutely nuts in the house as the bear intrudes on her property. I believe that someone must have been on the street when this occurred, as I can hear clapping, in an attempt (I think) to scare the bear off. The next video on the camera was of Kathy and me returning home from dinner, some eight minutes after the bear came through. On that video you can hear Lucy still barking at the long-gone bear.

So I was getting closer and closer to a real live bear encounter, but as the old saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. When would I see a bear on or near our property in real time?

The answer was “very soon”. Part of my morning procedure is to retrieve the SD card from the animal camera to see the animals that visited us the night before. I was doing that very recently when I heard a snort. I looked over to the vacant lot next to our house and saw two bears: a cub, and her mother. I called for Kathy, and she joined me. She said, “You know, mama bears are pretty protective of their cubs, and they can move very quickly over short distances. That mama bear isn’t very far away.” I replied, “I know, but I’m okay. I only have to outrun you, not the bear.”

Sometimes I worry about Kathy’s sense of humor.

So that is it. After nearly a year in the house, I have seen a real live bear up close and in person. I still check the animal camera daily, but the thrill and anticipation are now somehow different. I have seen da bears. It is all downhill from there.

I Thought I’d Made A Mistake, But I Was Wrong

I sincerely hope you are never cursed with the desire to collect handguns. Unfortunately, I have been struck with the curse. My first handgun was purchased purely for self-defense. So was the second, as the first proved to be a bit on the heavy side for everyday carry. But from the third firearm on, I have been collecting handguns that strike my fancy. Mind you, every handgun in my collection can be used for self-defense, but that is not really why I bought most of them.

Yes, I can read minds. You are asking a question: how many handguns do you own? The answer is: all that I need, but not all that I want.

Recently I bought a Bond Arms Rough and Rowdy derringer. Those of you who grew up on the westerns of the 1950s have seen the derringer in action, usually in the hands of a slick poker player, who, of course, invariably cheats at cards. The derringer is a very small pistol that typically holds only two shots, one in each of two barrels stacked one on top of the other. If the picture I am painting with words is not sufficiently clear, please refer to the photograph at the top of this article. I took that photo from the Bond Arms website. For reference, the barrel on the derringer is three inches long.

Bond Arms makes derringers in a variety of calibers. For some reason, I decided to buy a 0.45 caliber model. And, since the 0.45 and 0.410 bore shotgun shell have similar base dimensions, this derringer can also be loaded with 0.410 shells. I soon discovered I was much more accurate with a 0.45 load than a 0.410. But at the beginning, I was accurate with neither.

The derringer is a small gun, and the 0.45 is a big round, so this baby kicks like a mule. It took awhile to overcome the kick. At first, I could hit the paper target with a 0.45 round (nowhere near the center), but I completely missed with the 0.410 round. I laid the blame to the fact that I was using a 0.410 designed for self-defense: it contained only three plated discs, and a mere 12 plated BBs. I needed more BBs!

Practice did finally make perfect. (Actually, that should read “perfect practice makes perfect”, but my practice was far from perfect.) After a couple of weeks at the range, I was able to hit the target where I wanted to, with either a 0.45 or a 0.410. But it took concentration, and it occurred to me that if I really needed this gun for self-defense, I would most likely not be in a situation where I would have time to concentrate.

Then a plan slowly crystallized in my brain.

I decided to use the derringer as a defense against carjacking. Instead of loading it with standard or defensive shotgun shells, I went with number 7 ½ shot. Each one of these BBs weighs about ½ ounce. This is not a load you would normally use for self-defense. It is not even a load you would use for hunting. I doubt I could kill much of anything with this load. But the beauty of it is that there are 292 BBs in each shell. Two hundred ninety-two! So, if someone tries to carjack me, and I fire this at the miscreant’s face, with that many pellets, several dozen will find their mark. Because of the spread of the BBs, I will not even have to aim, just point and shoot. The carjacker will be wounded, probably not fatally, but that should be sufficient to put an end to the carjacking.

You may have read that Asheville has a crime problem. It does. Our mayor and most (if not all) of the city council are “progressives”. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, they decided that we were spending way too many tax dollars on the police. They cut police funding, and what you would expect to happen happened. I think the politicians in charge of the city are intellectuals. After all, George Orwell once noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” The long and short of it is that I no longer go downtown unarmed.

I thought I had made a big mistake with this purchase, but I was wrong. The derringer has its place, and that place is in the car.

Hugh Talmage Lefler

The April 26, 2023, issue of the Wall Street Journal contained a column by Danny Heitman, who regularly writes for the Baton Rouge Advocate. The article, entitled “I’m Revisiting the Books of My Youth”, explains why age and experience made him a better, more appreciative reader than when he was a student.

I have experienced something similar. During my college and graduate school years, I focused on math and science courses. I cared little for the traditional liberal arts courses and avoided all that I could. As a result, when I graduated from my liberal arts college, I did not possess a liberal arts education. For the past 48 years, I have been trying to rectify that defect in my education by reading extensively outside the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

It has not been easy. I am currently struggling with Plutarch’s masterwork, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Some of the chapters are excellent, even gripping, and some are not. It is the sheer length of this work that is killing me: my copy includes 876 pages, two columns per page, of small type. Amazon tells me that a copy printed normally comes in at nearly 1200 pages. By comparison, Amazon tells me that Tolstoy’s War and Peace (another book I’ve never read) clocks in at a bit over 1100 pages. Sheesh!

But some of my reading is really quite pleasurable. Consider, for example, my seventh-grade North Carolina history textbook written by UNC Kenan Professor of History Hugh T. Lefler (1901-1981).

In 1959 Lefler wrote North Carolina: History, Geography, Government, the text that we used during the 1965-1966 school year. I recently purchased a copy online and re-read it cover to cover. It was a joy to see history written plainly, free from the current ideological idiocies afflicting what is supposed to be our intellectual class.

The book was written for school children, but the writing is not boring for an adult. (A book written for seventh-graders in 1959 could pass for a book written for today’s twelfth-graders.) Lefler pulled no punches. He freely discussed the problems that North Carolina faced in its development. An absence of inlets, only one reasonably-navigable river, shallow sounds, and a general dependence on both the Virginia and South Carolina colonies hampered its growth. North Carolina also suffered from periods of poor leadership. The state was slow to adopt a system of public education, and suffered from a lack of decent roads, and later, railroads. All these defects Lefler reported factually.

But Lefler did not fail to mention the positives as well as the negatives. Unit 13 is entitled “How People are North Carolina’s Greatest Riches”. This struck a responsive chord in me. The economist Julian Simon once noted that our system of calculating GDP neglected the positive contributions made by humans: when a calf is born on a farm, the GDP goes up by a very, very small amount, but not so when a human is born.

The photographs in the book are simply great. The Zebulon B. Vance monument in Pack Square, Asheville, was removed before I moved here, as Vance was one of the wartime governors of North Carolina during the late unpleasantness and therefore one to be canceled. The color photo of the monument shows the impressive nature of the memorial, and reminds me of what we have lost to the politically-correct fascists.

This essay is running a bit long, but I must note a couple of items in closing. I turned to the index to look up “Civil War”. This is what I found:

“Civil War. See War for Southern Independence”

Indeed, throughout the book, one never sees the words “Civil War”. When he did not use the term “War for Southern Independence” he used “War Between the States”.

The chapter on the governance of the state beginning with the year 1868 is entitled “A Period of Bad Government”, which is undoubtedly true, and stated quite frankly. In the section entitled “Corruption by Lobbyists” I found the following:

“’General’ Milton S. Littlefield was much to blame for this. He was a carpetbagger from New York who had become a leading citizen of Raleigh. He knew how to get the members of the legislature to vote for the laws that he wanted.”

Note the absence of scare quotes around the word “carpetbagger”. There was no “alleged” about it. Littlefield was a carpetbagger, with all the negative connotations that term carried with it. I suspect that most students today do not know the meaning, much less the origin, of the term.

I believe that my pleasure in reading this book is due to the fact that Lefler really did love the state of North Carolina and the United States of America and that he was not afraid to allow his love to show in his writing.

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!