Part 2: The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru

29. March 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Air Navy, History

(This is going to be a three-part story: I had other projects today and could only finish this second part.)

The newly-rechristened Krait, with the old unreliable engine now replaced, had a full crew at last for Operation Jaywick. A chief engineer, Leading Stoker Paddy McDowell, a WWI Navy veteran, and an assistant engineer, another experienced sailor, Leading Seaman “Cobber” Cain. They also had recruited a radio operator, Leading Telegraphist “Horrie” Young, and a cook: Corporal Andy Crilley, a soldier who was about to be discharged on medical grounds but wanted to stay in the war. Meanwhile Donald Davidson had also selected five men from a pool of naval volunteers that he had personally trained for months in mission-essential skills: the art of silently maneuvering the Folboat canoes in all kinds of water, rappelling, navigation, stalking an enemy, the use of weapons, both bullet and bladed, as well as care of and use of explosives. The five chosen were not just skilled in those deadly arts, but also mature, steady and temperamentally suited for a grueling mission in which teamwork would be essential.
By early August, 1943, the Krait was ready to depart Cairns for Exmouth, on Australia’s western coast, carrying a mixed and eccentric crew of soldiers and sailors … but to where after that, exactly? Only Lyon, Davidson, Page and Carse knew their eventual destination: Lyon because he was overall in charge, and Carse because he was now commander of the deceptively ordinary Krait. The Krait’s four holds were packed jam-full of supplies; basic food and water, including rations sealed into tins which could be cached for the raiding party somewhere on land. Lt. Page had been a third-year medical student before the war, and as such, would be their doctor in a medical emergency. (The medical supplies also included rum, whiskey and gin – for celebrating if the mission was successful, and cyanide tablets in the dire event of failure and capture by the Japanese.)

A stock of English and American cigarettes was also part of the cargo, along with a quantity of Dutch gold guilder coins, should it become necessary to offer bribes to susceptible locals. The heaviest items of cargo were the whole reason for the Krait’s secret journey: forty-five magnetic limpet mines, 150 pounds of plastique explosive, and 200 grenades, along with sufficient ammunition for the Krait’s assortment of Lewis and Bren guns, and side arms. Another precaution; items like cooking pots, plates, sunglasses and toothbrushes all be of Japanese make – lest something dropped overboard give the game away to an alert and suspicious Japanese. Engineer McDowell had served in WWI Q-ships – armed warships disguised as harmless merchantmen, in order to entice submarines to surface, and was wise in the way of this kind of marine subterfuge. Once departing from Exmouth and on the way north, every man would be required to apply brown skin dye and dress in simple cloth sarongs, the better to serve the illusion of the Krait as a harmless and ordinary trading vessel.

After a fairly uneventful transit from Cairns across the top of Australia, the Krait arrived at Exmouth, with not much more drama then those unaccustomed to the open sea being vilely seasick. They intended departing north on the 1st of September, 1943. Within minutes, though, the propellor shaft broke; the Krait sailed the following day towards the Lombok, after swift repairs made by the mechanics of an American submarine repair ship, conveniently anchored nearby. (The American mechanics advised them that the repairs probably wouldn’t hold up for very long and to get permanent repairs done as soon as possible.) “Ta, thanks!” was pretty much the response, and Ted Carse turned the Krait on a heading north, towards the Lombok Strait, between Bali and a chain of islands that terminated in Flores and Timor.
It was only at that point, far out at sea, when Captain – now Major Lyon – called the crew together and formally told them where they were heading. Likely this only confirmed what they had long suspected – an attack on a port well inside Japanese-held territory. Once through the Lombok Strait, they would skirt Borneo, until well into the Java and South China Sea, avoiding any contact at all with other ships and boats, even the smallest, which might challenge them and give the operation away. Three two-man teams would be dropped off on an island close to Singapore; Lyon himself, with Donaldson and Page, with three of the trained volunteers – a fourth team to be held in reserve. After that briefing, they put away their uniforms, applied brown dye to their skin – which was rather more convincing on some of the men than others – and put on sarongs. From then on – no drinking or smoking, light discipline would be enforced rigorously at night, and all trash discarded overboard would be put into sealed, weighted tins, so as to leave no trace of their passage. They would also, when near land, keep as quiet as possible, knowing that voices and sound carried far, over water. They also broke out and deliberately dirtied a Japanese flag, before raising it in place of their Blue Ensign.

(Again—to be continued. I pulled a lot of detail on this from an account by Ronald Mckie, The Heroes, which in turn was the basis for a TV miniseries. The story of Operation Jaywick and the later and disastrous Operation Rimau are well-known in Australia – but not so much in US pop cultural knowledge of operations in that part of the world.)

The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru

27. March 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, History, In the Navy

When I came around to writing a novel set in the World War II timeframe a couple of years ago, one of the main characters spent the war years, first in Malaya and then Australia. This meant a deep dive into the war along the southern Pacific front, and life in Australia during that period. We Americans had Pearl Harbor, defeat of our military in the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, Wake and Midway, Guadalcanal and Tarawa; Australia had the loss of their troops in Singapore and Malaya, the occupation of Sumatra, Japanese air raids on Darwin, and the war next door in New Guinea.
The fall of Singapore struck a particularly heavy blow to the Allies in 1942: so close to Australia, with many personal and economic connections. Refugees from British and Dutch interests in southwest Asia fled in the direction of Australia and India in anything that could float and escape the deadly notice of the Japanese. One of those fortunate vessels was the Kofuku Maru, a 70-ft Japanese-built wooden craft, with a mainsail and an engine. It was constructed in the late 1930s to support the fishing fleet based out of Singapore, bringing water and food out to the fishing fleet, and collecting the catch for sale in the marketplace. Confiscated by British authorities after war broke out, by early spring of 1942 the Kofuku Maru was under the command of a volunteer Australian merchant mariner in his sixties named Bill Reynolds. Reynolds was tasked with evacuating civilians from the Malay peninsula, first to Sumatra, and then to Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

During this fraught period, Reynolds met up with a British Army intelligence officer, Captain Ivan Lyon, who was on pretty much the same mission – organizing an escape line from Singapore to Ceylon and India. When it became clear that Singapore would surrender to the Japanese, Reynolds made one last trip, all the way to Ceylon. At some point, someone accustomed to thinking ahead realized the sneaky possibilities in using a relatively slow and decrepit-appearing Japanese-built boat which no one in the maritime Far East would look at twice. Supposedly, Reynolds had already noted that Japanese aircraft attacking refugee boats fleeing Singapore ignored the Kofuku Maru. Perhaps Reynolds said so to Captain Lyon.

Lyon was career Army, from a family of career soldiers. He was driven and intense, rumored then to be connected to the Bowes-Lyon family, whose younger daughter was then Queen of England. (He wasn’t.) Lyon had been stationed in the Far East for nearly five years, long enough to have had an Oriental-style tiger tattoo on his chest. He was very familiar with the territory, having spent a lot of leisure time sailing. He was married to the daughter of a French official in Indochina, with whom he had a baby son. Wife and child were interned after the ship they were traveling on was intercepted and turned over to the Japanese.

After the surrender of Singapore and the occupation of much of the south-western Pacific by Japan, the Kofuko Maru was sent to northern Australia, into the inventory of a shadowy joint Allied intelligence operation that went by the noncommittal initials ZES, for “Z Experimental Station” or sometimes “Z Special Unit”, based at a nondescript compound near Cairns, Queensland. Bill Reynolds and Ivan Lyon also gravitated into the “Z” organization, a varied collection of people with outside-the-box notions about how to fight the Japanese which had been accumulating by a kind of organizational osmosis as 1942 wore on. One of those notions was generated by a member of “Z” who had formerly worked in New Guinea as an oil exploration geologist and knew the territory well. He suggested a strike at Japanese supping in the port of Rabaul, using teams of agents in two-man collapsible canoes, called Folboats, dropped off by submarine at a distance from Rabaul. The teams would hide out on a nearby island, paddle into the harbor at night and attach magnetic “limpet” mines to selected ships, mines timed to detonate hours later. Planning and training for such an attack got underway, but never came off; the fighting bypassed Rabaul, and the “Z” command echelon eventually canceled that project as risking too many resources for not much gain.

But the novel notion of limpet mines and Folboats remained in play – just that the focus of such an operation moved to a new direction: Singapore. About the time that the Kofuku Maru arrived at the “Z” compound – Captain Lyons began recruiting a team; a mixed lot of Australian and English soldiers and sailors. The Kofuku Maru needed a new engine, one which wasn’t held together with spit and bailing wire – and now she had a new name: Krait, after a small and deadly venomous snake common in India.

Recruited to captain the Krait was a veteran sailor and navigator named Ted Carse, who when asked in the initial interview if he could take a ship from Melbourne to San Francisco replied, “I could take her anywhere.” He had graduated as a naval cadet at the end of the first war, served in peacetime for ten years, got out of the service, and then knocked around the world as an able seaman, among several other eccentric career paths. Carse had barely made it back into military service, due to chronic bronchial troubles, but in the war emergency of 1942, warm, breathing and experienced was good enough for recruiters. Another key recruit to the team as Lyon’s second in command was Royal Navy officer Donald Davidson, of whom it was said that if Edmund Hillary hadn’t climbed Mt. Everest first, Donald Davidson would have. He was a maniac for physical fitness and an expert canoeist, an able outdoorsman, and had worked in Burma and the Far East for years. Australian Army Lieutenant Bob Page rounded out the officer cadre on what would be called Operation Jaywick. Page was the son of the son of deputy administrator on New Guinea, captured by Japanese, and assumed to be dead in sinking of a Japanese prison ship. Like Lyon, Page had very personal reason for animus against the invading Japanese.
(To be continued….)

Advice Unspoken

26. March 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Air Force

This week, my daughter had to get a new veteran ID card, since she had her VA disability upgraded. Yes, service in the Marines for two strenuous hitches came at a physical price. She made an appointment at the Randolph AFB ID section to bring in all the supporting paperwork, and then we were reminded that my original issue blue retiree ID card wouldn’t be valid after the end of this month, never mind that it was supposed to be valid indefinitely. So she suggested that I come with her to the appointment and see if the issuing office couldn’t process both of ours at the same whack. This necessitated bringing Wee Jamie along, in the folding Cocomelon stroller that he is about two inches from out growing entirely.

Anyway, her appointment was early enough in the business day that there wasn’t much of a crowd, although I expect there will be a rush this week of retiree veterans like myself, replacing our old blue veteran ID.

To our relief, they were agreeable to doing both of our ID cards on the same appointment, even if I was a last-minute addition to the schedule. The tech processing our new cards was a female airman one-striper – competent and well-spoken, but seeming so very, very young. (Baby troops are so cute when they are little, and just barely housebroken…) Anyway, there was a bit of amusement when she initially read my daughter’s documents as having been a Marine at the rank of captain, and both my daughter and I burst out laughing. No, we were both NCOs and fiercely proud of it, although I expounded a bit on how sometimes certain people in certain skills have an invisible, much higher rank than their actual pay grade. The example I gave was that of a CID NCO, and of my own, when I was doing the regular radio news program at AFKN-Seoul.

I should have mentioned other specialties which have the invisible higher rank in the grand military scheme of things, and thus are sought out and respected by those in the know: the junior enlisted computer or mechanical expert who is gifted beyond all expectation, the clerk who can sort  out the most stubborn administrative tangle, that one NCO who knows everyone and plays the system like YoY o Ma plays the cello – they have an invisible rank and respect far beyond their actual stripes. My daughter added another piece of advice, which may have been more relevant to the Marine Corps, which run maybe 3% female, than to the Air Force, which stood at 13-15%. Her suggestion was to network extensively with other female NCOs, when our baby troop achieves that rank …and then we finished up getting the new ID cars, and left, with Wee Jamie still behaving very well.

But as we left, I thought of all the advice that we could have added; that a female NCO rightfully ought to keep her personal life a mystery to co-workers. That when suggesting some new process or way of doing things to a supervisor, one ought to volunteer to do the hard work on it yourself – because there will inevitably be work involved with a new process. That there are only about six different ways to do anything at all in the military, all of them about equally efficient, and usually it’s just a matter of habit and inertia that favors one above the other five …

Then I remembered that we were about old enough to have been mother and grandmother to the young one-striper, and realized that – well, there are some things that one has to figure out on ones’ own to really, really stick.

Be to her, Persephone,

All the things I might not be:

Take her head upon your knee.

She that was so proud and wild,

Flippant, arrogant and free,

She that had no need of me,

Is a little lonely child

Lost in Hell,—Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee:

Say to her, “My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here.”

 

Prayer To Persephone – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ouroboro-ed

20. March 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Geekery, That's Entertainment!

The ouroboros was an ancient iconographic depicting a snake or a dragon biting on it’s own tail, and used to symbolize a mad variety of concepts in different cultures: birth, death, the continuity of life, disorder, yin and yang, infinity, circular reasoning, elements of alchemy … basically, a handy and interesting picture of some kind of circular concept. The notion of an organism busily munching down on it’s own substance also occurred to me on contemplating the likely movie disaster that will be the live-action version (with CGI-generated dwarves, so exactly how live-action is it, really?) of Disney’s Snow White. Which hotly-anticipated disaster is finally lumbering into the port of general release this week, where it is expected to crash into the dock and immolate. Not only may it likely crash and burn itself, but also the future career of Rachael Zegler … who might be able to sing and dance, but otherwise off-screen seems to have all the charm and tempting appeal of a liverwurst sandwich forgotten in the back of the employee’s break room refrigerator for a month or so.

So, no – won’t be darkening the door of the multiplex anytime soon for this expensive and much-delayed botch job, or waste hours watching when it goes appears on streaming video (as it probably will, and in record time.) As a somewhat creative person, who has long been in the business (if you can call it that) of providing diversion and entertainment, I have often wondered … why? Why go through the long, expensive process of doing a live-action movie version of an animated feature film anyway; following a carbon-copy of the script, duplicating the animated characters with actors which sort of resemble them, and copying the background scenery and setting with artfully designed sets.

Well, obviously, doing a live-action version of a popular animated movie must have paid off in the past, or Disney wouldn’t have done it more than once. Someone in the accounting department of the House of Mouse must have tallied up the expenses and projected profits and calculated a win. I guess there is also an element of proving that yes, it can be done. It probably also makes sense to remind the audience of Disney-created characters, images and stories, a decade or so after an animated feature has made bank, and to get another bite of the merchandising apple … but creating a world through animation has really no limitations. Even movie magic can only go so far, in a live-action duplication.

There is another downside to the live-action restyling of animated movies, and I wonder if anyone at the higher echelons at the House of Mouse has considered it. And that would be the routine practice of a live version, rather than putting the creative energy and the expense into a new animated creation, rather than just retooling a past product. There is a whole world of folk tales out there, heroes and heroines, stories, fables, amazing deeds and colorful backgrounds for original and new creations. To be fair, Disney has dabbled with a few of them. They did so very well with Mulan, with Moana, Encanto, Coco, and the Lion King; why not come up with more stories based on international folklore and backgrounds, rather than burn money doing live-action versions, as they did and are with the first two named? How long can the creative serpent come around and consume itself in reworking older creations? How long can the serpent continue, when there is nothing original and new? Discuss, if you are interested.

(Jamie the Wonder Grandson loves Moana – so did my niece and nephew, when they were his age … and no, not the least interested in the live-action version, if it is ever completed and released.)

Things Change – Not Always for the Better

16. March 2025 · Comments Off on Things Change – Not Always for the Better · Categories: Ain't That America?

’m trying to fire up a schedule of book events for 2025, this year, since Wee Jamie is old enough to be taken places that don’t interrupt his schedule too much. One of the multi-author venues that I had previously enjoyed doing was the West Texas Book and Music Festival, in Abilene – I think we made the road trip, hopscotching along back-country roads north from Junction, through Ballenger…… to Abilene at least three times. I liked it at least as much for the chance to take pictures of back-country Texas, as I did participating in a community-supported book event, with other authors, and people who liked books, and wanted to support authors, reading books, libraries and generally the community. The West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene had enough juice to invite writers who had been heard of outside of Texas as guest speakers – Elmer Kelton was one, who unfortunately passed from this vale of tears a bare month or two before I had a chance to meet him at the Festival in the fall of (gasp!) 2009. I did meet Paulette Jiles and Scott Zesh the following year, and we got some lovely photos of a balloon festival which was being held in Abilene the very same weekend.

We stayed two nights in a tiny cabin at a KOA campground in Abilene, which was the cheapest option available to us – yes, I am not so well-known that I have expenses paid. This year, for various reasons, we could afford the road-trip and two nights at a hotel or campground, so I looked up what was going on, as far as book festivals go, in Abilene – but it seems like that event has withered up and died, without a trace on social media. The Covidiocy canceled the event for 2020. I had a reply to an inquiry last year that they were already full-up, thanks for asking. I made a mental note to ask about this year, but ll the links that I have are dead, or go to the civic website.  From what I can tell, it may have been incorporated into the big yearly book event in Austin. A deep sigh, and on to investigating other small book festivals.

On the note of things that change and not for the better, my daughter and I, with Wee Jamie went to spend a Saturday in Fredericksburg. We went by way of Blanco and Johnson City, where we had done market events, and from Johnson City over so-called Texas Wine Road, through Stonewall, Grapetown and thence to Fredericksburg, with a stop at Wildseed Farms, hoping that their wildflower meadows would be in bloom – alas, too early in the year. I did see a few shy bluebonnets in a sheltered, sunny verge, and all the redbud trees are in full flower, but nothing much in comparison to what will be out in lavish bloom by the end of April. As a diversion, we counted wineries along the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg – we came up with a total of 73, although we might have double-counted some and missed a few others. The whole of Route 290 seems now to be a prolonged and long party spot these days, which might account for a great many mildly sloshed people all along Main Street.

Fredericksburg has changed, since the first few times we visited, in the late 90s – and I’m not certain it’s for the better. Maybe I just liked it when they rolled up the sidewalks at sundown, save for a few restaurants on Main Street. The Fredericksburg Herb farm was really a herb garden with candles, perfume and skin-care items for sale along with seeds and herbs, and not under different ownership as a luxury spa. The old five and dime, which didn’t take credit cards and was about the last normal retail outlet on Main, is now an upscale retailer of expensive western wear (I scoped out a pair of $700 dollar women’s boots there and winced). The Christmas store also changed hands – now upscale boutique fashion items instead of Christmas things and garden décor. A big ultra-modern new luxury hotel took over what had been a very pleasant Beaux Arts-style two-story shop building, renovated it out of all previous experience and attached it at the back into a whole new ultra-modern sprawl. Rustlin’ Robs, Dogologie (the store for all things dog, which always has a dish of water by the door for their canine friends), Der Kuchen Laden (the best little housewares shop in Texas) and the Peach House are still there, which is reassuring. But the retail outlets, restaurants and businesses have spread from Main Street to Austin and San Antonio streets, replacing the modest little early 20th century cottages and older houses. About the only good expansion that I can see is that of the Museum of the Pacific War, which went from the old Nimitz Hotel and an open-sided pole barn a few blocks distant, to a big new complex and expanded outdoor complex where they state WWII reenactor events. At a book event there a few years ago, one of the members told us that there are now more B&B beds in the downtown area than there were regular homes. I can believe it, especially after this last Saturday.

We walked up several blocks, and crossed Main Street to walk the other side, noting the crowds, and also noting that there weren’t many families with children, and hardly anyone walking with a dog on a leash or in a doggie stroller. It seemed like it was more spring-break/party city, than a quaint, old-fashioned Texas country small town with an attractive and historic downtown. My daughter says – perhaps next time, we should visit during the week – not on a Saturday or a holiday. The brush fire getting going in the afternoon of that day in the hills north of town didn’t help our mood much, what with pale beige clouds of smoke piling up like clouds, and the occasional siren on a brush fire truck roaring through town. We drove home, looking over our shoulders almost all the way.

A Serious Case of the “Mehs”

06. March 2025 · Comments Off on A Serious Case of the “Mehs” · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

It seems that the Oscars Awards happened last weekend. Was there any reason to watch four solid hours of entertainment industry self-congratulation, aside from seeing if any aspiring starlet would parade in a completely transparent dress without any undergarments to speak of. On the day following, just about all the stories about the Oscars on my guilty pleasure of a mainstream newspaper, the English Daily Mail, concerned the fashions – or the bad taste displayed thereof – on the red carpet. There was only a single story or two about the movies and the awards garnered. Although the National Establishment Media organs try to sound chipper and upbeat about the broadcast and streaming audience for the Oscars … general interest in the event seemed pretty restrained.

None of the movies up for consideration this year seemed to have made much of a splash in general release. No long lines at the theaters, no splashy cover stories in national magazines, no repeat customers telling their friends ‘you must go and see this movie!’, no packed theater showings for weeks and weeks and weeks. It seems as if whatever movie-going audience is left these days has a serious case of the “mehs.” As a commenter on another thread about the Oscars said, not only had they not seen a single one of the nominated movies – they hadn’t even heard of most of them. They appeared briefly on the multiplex marquee and then went to streaming video. A few weeks ago, the theater roof collapsed during a showing of the Captain America movie. Well, it was at an 8 PM showing on a weeknight, but there were only two people in the place for a first-run movie, which may be a sad reflection on how ‘meh’ that recent releases have become. One of the most savage comments that I saw was that the movie was so bad that the theater itself decided to commit suicide.

I’ve begun to wonder if the whole Hollywood movie and entertainment industry has been committing slow-motion suicide itself, over the last ten or fifteen years. The insistence on expensive blockbusters, the lack of originality, reliance on established comic books and well-established franchises, a tendency to let inexperience take the helm of such highly-visible and expensive projects, the insistence on preaching (assume Critical Drinker voice) “the message” – indeed, beating the audience over the head with “the message”, until the audience stays away in droves, fleeing to their archive of classic (and often much more entertaining) movies and series, foreign imports, or to gaming … repeated sexual-abuse and harassment scandals, the fact that many of the creative (or at least, well-established) Hollywood personalities are really awful, horrible, abusive people. That so many of them came out for Harris/Walz was just the sour cherry on top of the whole rancid package.

So – how much longer can the downward spiral last, while mainstream audiences flee? Will there be more independent productions, or will a kind of renewal take place? Place your bets … and have you seen anything good on screen lately?

Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After

28. February 2025 · Comments Off on Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, History, Old West

Lately I have been refreshing my memory and knowledge of Gold-Rush era California. Relevant volumes are already fringed with small postit notes, making it easier for me to come back to a particularly vivid description of a place, a curious character, the presence of someone later-well-known, or an interesting yet little known turn of events. For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was in California in 1848, as the aide to the American military governor, perhaps – or maybe not – afire with impatient envy of his fellow West Point classmates who were serving in the active theater of the war with Mexico. I had wanted to work him in as a walk-on character in The Golden Road, but my main character’s adventures never intersected with WT Sherman, except for delivering a newspaper to his house in San Francisco.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to the history of the Gold Rush happened towards the end of that first year, 1849. It seemed as if half the world rushed into California, by land, sea or a combination thereof, eager to start collecting gold nuggets as big as peas and beans (or even bigger) off the ground. Some intrepid gold-seekers came through Mexico, or across Texas and New Mexico Territory, but a substantial number came by the established route; starting from the various jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri. Such adventurers surged along the Platte River to Ft. Laramie, over South Pass, to Fort Hall, the Humboldt River, then up and over the last hurdle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At a point in present-day Nevada, the route deviated into several branches.

Those travelers – worn-down by the last few hundred miles through desert, low on supplies, having lost draft animals to hard-use, near-starvation and low-grade harassment by Indians – looked for an easier passage through the high mountains than the difficult Truckee route. They also hoped to avoid the ghastly experience of the Donner-Reed company of three years previous; caught in deep snow, with cannibalism the only alternative to death by starvation. Many chose a slightly easier passage toward the south called the Carson pass. But a portion of the late-season 49ers were diverted north, on a cutoff advertised as a short-cut to the northern gold fields – a short-cut talked up by rancher and entrepreneur Peter Lassen. Which it was, sort of … but it led through the Black Rock Desert and equally hard, waterless country, which demolished morale, supplies, and physical endurance of ‘49ers who were close to the end of all those. (A smaller, very misguided and disjointed company went even further south and blundered into – and out of the Death Valley – rescuing themselves by pluck, luck and the courage of several able members of it.)

The concerted rush of desperate and stressed overland parties arriving at the end of the traveling season gave cause for concern to the then military governor of California. That was General Persifor F. Smith, who seems to have been an able and well-thought-of regular Army officer; an indispensable, experienced but competently colorless man. Around August of 1849, General Smith received the intelligence from arriving overlanders that many parties still on the trail had fallen well behind – and horrifyingly, those parties contained many women and families. Such were still on the far side of the Sierra Nevada and likely to be in deep trouble – and deep snow, since blizzards usually began in late September. Everyone who came overland knew they had to be over the mountains by October, when heavy snow began falling in the high ranges.

General Smith swung into decisive action; he pulled $100,000.00 from his government budget earmarked for civil matters, and $12,000 in donations from residents and businesses in San Francisco, many of whom knew of the perils of the overland trail from previous personal experience. General Smith tasked one of his officers, Major Daniel H. Rucker, to head up the relief effort. Major Rucker was then 37 and had served on the frontier for the previous twelve years. He had married into the wealthy Cherokee Ross family, while serving at Fort Gibson, but his wife had died, leaving him with two surviving children. He was promoted to his rank for conspicuous gallantry in the Battle at Buena Vista, during the recent war with Mexico. Most importantly for this mission he was then serving as a member of the Quartermaster Corps and experienced in managing supplies and transport. He was also a good friend of frontiersman Kit Carson and would eventually be the father-in-law of Philip Sheridan.

Early in September, Major Rucker arrived in Sacramento, the nexus for travel to the gold mines, and the traditional terminus for the overland trail. He had planned on dispatching a pair of well-equipped caravans of pack-mules to follow back along the Truckee and the Carson pass trails, and had purchased wagons, draft animals and supplies and hired men. They would have plenty of food, and plenty of extra animals, resupplying and assisting the lagging, hungry travelers as they went … and their orders were to go as far back long the trail until they were certain there were no more straggling travelers. In talking with recently-arrived ‘49ers, Major Rucker learned to his horror that a substantial number of emigrants had been decoyed onto the new Lassen cutoff, on the assumption that it was a short cut. It wasn’t – and it ran through desert and mountains even more desolate than the 40-Mile desert between the Humboldt Sink and the Truckee River. Immediately, Major Rucker organized a third supply-and-rescue caravan with himself in the lead.
The first relief force worked their way along the Truckee route. By early October, they were able to assure themselves that there was no one else needing help, and they moved to the Carson route – thirty men and a hundred miles, where the need was dire. Not only were those late travelers in danger of repeating the fatal experience of the Donners and the Reeds in the snow – they had already lost their draft animals and run through all their food supplies, trudging through the desert on foot, carrying what little they could salvage. Some had been surviving by salvaging flesh from dead oxen and mules. But the last party on the on the Carson trail were still in good order and assumed that they still had plenty of time. They took some convincing from the rescue caravan to ditch some of their gear and hurry the women and children along. That party, once brought to see reason, made it over the mountain pass and safely into the settlements by the time the first winter storms began late in October.

Major Rucker and his team, meanwhile, were heading north, where another epic of snow and starvation was about to unfold. Not only was the Lassen trail even rougher than the Truckee and Carson routes – but it dumped out a good two hundred miles away from the gold fields. Practically everyone who followed it to the end wished that they hadn’t – and many suspected (with reason) that Peter Lassen had played it up in order to enrich his own enterprises from the passing traffic on the trail. (Lassen was killed by parties unknown, a decade later, under mysterious circumstances.) Rucker’s team, working back along the trail encountered the most heartrending scenes of sickness and deprivation. In his after-action report to General Smith, Rucker wrote: “A more pitiable sight I had never before beheld. There were cripples from scurvy, and other diseases; women, prostrated by weakness, and children, who could not move a limb. In advance of the wagons were men mounted on mules, who had to be lifted on or off their animals, so entirely disabled had they become from the effect of scurvy.” Being a stalwart gentleman of that era – as well as a widower and father – must have lent special urgency to Rucker’s determination to assist as many stricken and desperate travelers as possible. By the end of November, his people had rounded up the last of the stragglers along Lassen’s trail and conveyed them to relative safety. Of course, they weren’t able to save everyone who ran into trouble on the last months of 1849 – but they were seen as rescuing angels by many men and women – who were pretty certain they would have died, otherwise. Among the families rescued by Rucker’s task force were the parents and older sister of philosopher and idealist Josiah Royce.

When Daniel Rucker died in 1910, he had served for 45 years, almost all of his service after 1850 in the Quartermaster Corps, including throughout the Civil War. Eventually he was promoted to the post of Quartermaster General. He married again, the year after the eventful rescue mission in California – it was a daughter of this marriage who later married Phillip Sheridan. Should the DOD ever move to restore the Rucker name to Fort Rucker, they couldn’t do any better than naming it after Daniel Rucker, Army Quartermaster General.

The Great Unraveling

24. February 2025 · Comments Off on The Great Unraveling · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Media Matters Not

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collection of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.
And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

It may very well turn out that we all were – just as it has turned out that USAID grants went out to support practically every cause beloved by progressives nationally and world-wide. To non-governmental organizations playing hopscotch with international migrants. To champion the causes of LGBTWXYZLOL-whatever, around the world in our own back yard and in our elementary schools. To progressive media voices, like the BBC. What the ever-loving H-E-double hockey sticks? Don’t those smooth-talking euro-snob Jew-haters get enough moola from their own government, they have to vacuum up from us as well, like a coke addict snorting a line as long as the US-Canada border?

And while I’m on the topic of our very own dear media, what about the ongoing slaughter of careers and the driving rain of pink slips falling at CBS and NBC? Joy Reid, Lester Holt and a other expensive performers are being pried out of their comfortable sinecures. Personalities whom I have never particularly followed and only hear about when they have been spectacularly stupid on camera and the conservative blogosphere takes notice. I imagine their superiors pried them loose, like a dentist with an impacted molar – but why now? Is it because top management at the various media enterprises have suddenly realized with the election of Trump that a large chunk of the public ignores them – and they have not anything like the power that they thought they had? Have they figured out that advertising on their programs was money wasted, and business sponsors know it? This is a new world for our national establishment media organs, where CBS Sixty Minutes counts for naught, and a podcaster like Joe Rogan may have put Trump and Vance over the top with an important segment of the voting public through doing searching, free-form long format interviews.

Or could it be that laundered government funds were holding up our own media, at least as much as paid advertising? Now that such funds are being short-stopped – is that another reason for the collapsing of our media’s house of cards now that the gravy train has come to a halt?
Comment as you wish and have knowledge.

In At the Beginning

18. February 2025 · Comments Off on In At the Beginning · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Memoir, War

Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood-of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

We were relieved when it was all ended in 1972 – you have no idea of how the horror lifted, or maybe you do, if you are of an age to remember. And then horrified by the pictures of the scramble to get Americans and those Vietnamese citizens unfortunate to be American-adjacent and thus fearful of North Vietnam reprisals barely three years later. It seemed as if all the horrors were crashing in on us and the South Vietnamese again. The mobs of frantic Vietnamese at the gates of the embassy, helicopters loading up and taking off from the pad on the roof of the US Embassy, small boats laden to the gunwales with frantic Vietnamese families setting out from the shore in hopes of being rescued by ocean-going ships waiting offshore … The North Vietnamese had won, after all – and was there anything that we could do for people who had been our allies?

It seemed that there was something that we could do; the pastor of the church we attended at the time sent me as a representative of our congregation to a meeting to discuss what steps our denomination could take to sponsor refugee families through the auspices of Lutheran Social Services. Within weeks, I was neck deep in a local ad-hoc organization since we decided that our congregation did not have enough resources to sponsor refugees. By sponsorship, I mean that everything to assist a family or two of Vietnamese refugees over their first months or years in the US would come out of our resources: rent, fitting out a residence with the bare necessities, food assistance, transportation, finding employment, schooling, language lessons if necessary, and help coping with various bureaucracies.
So our church clubbed together with several other congregations and some local chapters of fraternal organizations – the Lions club was one. We took stock of what we offer and informed Lutheran Social Services that we thought we could sponsor a large extended family of up to 25 people. (It was our understanding that was the greatest need – support for large families.) We were informed several weeks later that we would be sponsoring three small families and three single young men – teenaged boys, really. We quickly found a small house and two apartments to rent and decided that perhaps the boys would best be situated with volunteer families, since the rent for three residences for two or three months was all that we could afford. It all worked out well, in the end – one of the families and the single young man who came to live with us stayed in touch for decades afterwards. They all found jobs, bought homes, built lives as Americans. A mostly happy ending, as these things go.

I must reiterate that all this support, monetary and otherwise, for the refugees that we and other local churches sponsored was the direct responsibility of our various local community groups. There were no grants of money passed on to us by Lutheran Social Services, although a congressional act passed in May, 1975 allocated funds to each of the national refugee assistance organizations based on how many individual refugees signed up to be assisted by them. Those funds amounted to $250 per person, adult and child. That specific sum sticks in my head for a particular reason; at least one of the assistance organizations in 1975 just passed those funds on to individual refugees overseen by their agency as a gift: pin money to help them start new lives. Word got around concerning this generosity, and the father of one of our refugee charges asked us (demanded, really) – why didn’t his family receive $1,000, for himself, wife and two children? We passed the enquiry to Lutheran Social Services and received their answer; their decision was to use the funds granted by Congress to help cover unforeseen and out-of-cycle needs like extensive and expensive medical care needed by some refugees. It was their way of doing things. The complaining refugee father continued demanding what he believed to be his rightful due and eventually changed agencies to get it. We were honestly glad to be rid of him, and rather sorry for his wife, who was sweet and shy and possibly rather embarrassed by her husband’s cash-grab.

When I read about how NGOs like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have since made bank out of getting government funds to resettle refugees and cart migrants all around the country in large groups, I am certain that 1975 was when the corruption of organized charity began. Refugee resettlement became a matter of getting a generous payout from the government, rather than depending on the efforts of small self-organized groups in local communities to help refugee clients settle into the US. Resettlement became a means of fattening on some of that big-government cash; a vital part of the refugee/migrant funding complex. Discuss as you wish.

Live Not By Lies

11. February 2025 · Comments Off on Live Not By Lies · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not

It’s often been observed that many great scientific discoveries, as well as evidence of criminality often begin with someone casually glancing at some kind of anomaly, saying to themselves “Hmmm – that’s odd!” and curiosity drawing them into taking a closer look at the matter. Such was the case when an activist for matters to do with native American tribal identity (these would be the folk who used to be called Indians of the feather variety) was watching a TV interview. The activist was one of those who specialized in unmasking so-called “Pretendians” – those who claim Indian descent for reasons of social advantage or monetary gain. (Yes, looking at you, Senator Elizabeth Warren). Remarks made during the interview, by singer-activist Buffy St. Marie triggered a “Hmm, that’s odd!” reaction. Those remarks concerned St. Marie’s search for her real parents among a Canadian First Nations tribe, and the circumstances under which she was adopted by a white American couple as a baby. “Gee,” thought the activist, “That’s what all the other Pretendians say!”
That may not have been the absolute beginning of the thread-pull which unraveled the tangle of St. Marie’s decades-long claims, but it had the same eventual result.

It must be a horrible and soul-destroying thing to have invested so much of her life and career in a pretense such as that, even as it brought her opportunities and fame. She was and is talented; no denying that, but one does have to wonder if she would have been quite as famous if she remained plain old Beverly Santamaria, a plain old Italian-American girl from upstate New York. It would have seemed like just a small thing at first, a ready temptation to polish one’s image in the press, just to stand out as a little more exotic, a bit more romantic, a bit more authentic in the early years on the 1960s folk scene. Considering again, though – the burden of living a lie, always aware of the media-sharpened sword of Damocles suspended on a thread over one’s head In the end that must be soul-warping; thinking of the additional lies required to perpetuate that pretense over decades.

They say the road down to hell is paved at first with attractive materials. But as involved, elaborate as the pretense eventually became, so must have the gnawing secret fear that perhaps one day, it might all come tumbling down, just as it finally has in the last few months. The Canadian government has revoked the honors bestowed on her. The proof must be iron-clad that she is Beverly Santamaria, and not a Canadian Piapot tribe member adopted by an American couple through curiously untraceable international governmental shenanigans in 1941. It seems, additionally, that her own son has taken a DNA test, as has her surviving sister – and yes, it turns out they are close blood kin. Which completely invalidates the adoption tale. (More background here, in this documentary.)
I think the ugliest aspect of what would have begun as only a little padding of the ethnic resume is how St. Marie treated her own birth family – a family who otherwise might have taken very real pride in having a talented and famous member. About the time that she began appearing on Sesame Street, her brother Alan went briefly public, protesting that she was not Indian, not adopted at all, but born naturally to his parents, and brought up as his blood sister. In response, the already famous and well-established personality unleased her lawyers on him, threatening to smear him publicly as an abuser and child molester. There was no way to defend against such a threat, although it appears that no one else in the immediate family gave any credence to the accusation. There would be no way to prove the accusation false; doing so would be messy, public, protracted and would likely cost Alan Santamaria his career and his good name anyway. So the Santamaria family were terrified into silence after that, a silence which continued until recently.

What an ugly, spiteful way to treat your family – because they could and would have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that your public persona was a complete lie. Comment as you wish.

The Handcart Saga

07. February 2025 · Comments Off on The Handcart Saga · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far west – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the mid-west to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

The epic of the handcart companies followed on the initial founding of Salt Lake City, and the various other settlements in Utah Territory – a stretch of wilderness between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, first encountered in 1846 by early travelers to California following a new route established by would-be explorer Lansford Hastings.
Brigham Young may not have been the dazzlingly charismatic, mesmerizing visionary that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon or LDS church (Latter Day Saints) had been – but his talent for organization and giving scope to the talents of other people with the same set of skills and vision approached the supernatural. There were many off-beat religious movements, sects and idealistic communes in existence in the US in the first half of the 19th century – Millerites, Owenites, Shakers, the Onida and Amana Colonies, various Fourier societies – but the LDS which Brigham Young led was the most successful and longest-lasting of them all; it is still vigorous and growing, unlike most of the other 19th century idealist communities.

During the 1840s and 1850s, wagon train pioneers heading west to California and Oregon usually transported family, goods and required supplies in wagons most often pulled by two or three pairs of draft animals. That was also the means most often utilized in the first decade of emigration by LDS converts and believers to Utah. However, by the mid-1850s straited circumstances and shortages of funds hampered efforts to bring LDS emigrants to Utah, while at the same time an enormous backlog of converts built up in the British Isles and on the continent. Hundreds had come by ship to the east coast, and then by train as far as the mid-west – but then, how would they make the last 1,300 miles? Brigham Young conceived the notion of light two-wheeled carts, pulled by the converts themselves on the last leg between the railhead at Iowa City and Salt Lake City. Each cart company would be accompanied by a few regular wagons, carrying supplies, bedding and tents. And most wagon-train emigrants in earlier years had walked much of the trail anyway … so there was a cheaper solution for LDS believers, eager to get to their Zion.

So potent was the desire to bring these converts to Utah, matched by the organizing skills of the leadership, that it was accomplished. Not without some hardship and the usual setbacks, but three companies, for a total of 800 souls departed on their long journey in the summer of 1856. They were all shepherded by experienced teamsters, or returning LDS missionaries, all on foot and pulling their few possessions in carts (four or five persons to a cart was the estimation). Unfortunately, two more handcart parties, the Willie and Martin companies (so called for their leaders, James Willie and Edward Martin) departed in mid- or late August … against advice, and too late in the year to make it to Salt Lake City before winter set in. There were about a thousand men, women and children in the two groups, most being recent immigrants, unaccustomed to the frontier, and scantily equipped for bad weather.

A cascade of miscalculations by the various authorities at either end of the trail, bad decisions by leaders in the companies, and misfortune along the trail resulted in nine hundred men, women, children and babies becoming stranded by winter near present-day Caspar, Wyoming. One company lost the draft animals to pull their supply wagons to a stampede of buffalo. They had to lighten their carts – of heavy clothing and bedding that might have provided more shelter against winter … when winter then closed down on them. They were cold, starving, sickened and worn down by exposure to the elements and the hardships of walking and pulling the carts. A survivor later wrote that fathers pulled the carts with their small children on them, right up until the day before they died.

There was one fortunate aspect to this purgatory of cold and misery – rescue was on the way. A fast-moving small party of LDS missionaries returning to Salt Lake City had overtaken the two lagging parties. They arrived in Salt Lake City early in October, and informed LDS leaders that there were two more large parties still on the trail. Brigham Young and his leadership council were sensible men – and were horrified to receive this intelligence. They could look at the calendar and read a map. Volunteers for a rescue party were called for at once, and dispatched east along the trail. The Willie company was found first, camped on the Sweetwater River near South Pass. Half the rescue party stayed with them, while the other half pushed on to find the Martin company, a hundred miles farther east. The surviving members of that company had eaten nearly the last of their meagre rations, were exhausted, sick and starving, many of them crippled by frostbite. It was a tale of suffering with a toll of casualties only second to the Donner-Reed party, but without the gruesome element of cannibalism. At least 200 of the Willie and Martin companies died and were buried in mass graves along the way. Only an equally heroic rescue effort kept the toll from being even higher. It seems that most survivors rose above their suffering, viewing it later as a test of their faith and dedication. While only about 3,000 LDS converts journeyed to Salt Lake City in handcart companies before the arrival of the railway made that means of travel redundant, the experience of the handcart companies remains, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of LDS Iliad.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
John Newton – Amazing Grace

Considering Media Teflon

28. January 2025 · Comments Off on Considering Media Teflon · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,All they will call you will be “deportees“

Oh, pity the poor establishment media folks, the woke clergy, and the professional bleeding heart progressive activists, all making woeful faces and lamenting regarding the round-up and repatriation of masses of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s as if they all honestly believe that the masses of illegals are all doe-eyed innocent widdle cheeeldren and humble suffering agricultural workers, all packed off by their cheating employers once the harvest season is finished. The bubble in which these sentiments are enshrined as gospel is being severely battered over this last week as it becomes apparent that many, many Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and incomes welcome the ICE roundups and deportations with cheers of rapturous approval. Imagine that.

See, it looks like the various prog bubble-dwellers could burnish their luxury beliefs without feeling in the least inconvenienced by the realities posed by mass quantities of illegal immigrants, especially those who compounded their illegal status by piling additional criminal behavior on top. Not just sex-trafficking, murder, rape, robbery, and drug-dealing, but identity-theft, driving without a license, insurance, or knowledge of traffic laws, and defrauding social services. Swamping working-class neighborhoods, overburdening schools and health-care facilities to the point of being untenable, depressing wages for lower-end unskilled work, bringing in diseases that hadn’t been current in the US for decades. Ordinary folk in working-class neighborhoods were catching the brunt of all this. To a lesser extent, so were those paying for auto insurance, especially in cities and states where, if you were T-boned at an intersection by a driver running a red light you could count yourself extremely fortunate if that other driver were sober, licensed and fully insured, or best two out of three.

I’d guess that the rapturous approval of the deportations this week is precisely because those being frog-marched onto the big airplane are the criminal scum of the scummiest, whose absence from these shores absolutely no one will miss, save for perhaps their addict customers, their fence for stolen goods and maybe an addled activist, and whatever NGO was paid for bringing them here in the first place. The addled activists are lamenting that practically everyone else is deeply unsympathetic to their laments, and demanding of decent folk that they collude in sheltering the illegals … as if they really were the poor widdle cheeeldren and downdrodden field workers …. Instead of being the criminal scum of the earth. Good luck with that line of reasoning. Really. Good luck, because you’ll need it.
I’d also guess from the lightning-speed at which local law enforcement, ICE, and the Boarder Patrol dropped on the various criminal scum that a lot of people in law and border enforcement had, like Koko the Lord High Executioner, their little lists of those who wouldn’t be missed. Very accurate little lists, of who, and when and where they could be most expeditiously found.
I suppose that once the stock of illegal alien criminals is drawn down, they will start on the illegal widdle cheeldren and the field workers – but by that point, perhaps they will have already self-deported.

On another aspect of the Trump administration, one week and a day in – I am also hugely amused at the Teflon aspects of J.D. Vance, as his vice president. Our establishment media has become so accustomed to Republican political operators who never bite back, or who tended to snivel like third-graders giving up their lunch money to playground bullies, that they seem quite discombobulated by J.D., who wasn’t even much a Trump fan at the first. The usual media crew can’t sanctimoniously score off him as a child of privilege, giving his hard-scrabble rust-country background. Can’t call him a raaaaacist, as he is married to a woman who is very obviously Indian. Can’t sneer at him for having studied at a no-name university, the way they sneered at Sarah Palin. All that – and he gives as good or better than he gets. There was a comment this morning on an Instapundit comment thread which pretty much sums it up: With JD, the Sunday shows are like shooting fish in a barrel. Not much of a challenge for him, but entertaining nonetheless. 🙂
Comment as you wish.

Rare and Fine Books

22. January 2025 · Comments Off on Rare and Fine Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Geekery, Local

(A break today from matters political.)

Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.

A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.

Digital printing and POD became a thing shortly after we became partners, and I set up an account with Lightning Source to serve clients who didn’t have the wherewithal to pay north of $15,000 for Alice’s schedule of services but still wanted to get their book out through Amazon and other on-line markets. I predicted accurately that such clients would soon become very thin on the ground, given the rise of digital printing and competition from existing POD publishers. We could not perhaps, supply such an elegant and high-end volumes as had become her standard through that subsidiary imprint – but we could work with clients who wanted the same high degree of editing, lay-out and covers, as well as distribution through Ingram.

Alice developed a cancerous node on her lung around 2013 and was not able to put much work into the business after that. With the agreement of her family, none of whom were interested in maintaining the Teeny Publishing Bidness, I bought her out: business, client list, contacts, files and all. Many of the remaining clients were touchingly grateful that someone was there to carry on with the firm. It has since developed that many of our older books, especially the ones dealing with local history are in demand … and command quite high prices on the rare book market. They were originally printed in limited quantities – perhaps a couple of thousand in one go – and while we kept a copy or two for record purposes, the rest of the print runs were turned over to the client for private distribution. I wish that we kept at least half a dozen copies of some books, as they presently command at least three-figure prices on the rare book market, if they can be found at all.

I field an occasional call from researchers and historians searching for a copy of one of our limited-run books. Our original authors (many of whom have, like Alice, passed away) did a lot of basic grunt work in researching local history, a mildly famous ancestor or an event, The late Fred McKenzie, who exhaustively researched local histories around Avinger and Hickory Hill, Cass County, Texas – at least has his books available on Amazon through second-hand dealers. I’ve fielded quite a few calls looking for copies from people researching their families, the place they live in, or a business that their family used to own in that part of Texas. I had no luck when a woman called, looking for a copy of this book for sale at any price. Best I could do was to find a nearby library which had a copy, and tell her to ask for it by interlibrary loan.

In the case of this biography, of a woman who was one of the dozen nurses evacuated by submarine from Corregidor before it surrendered to the Japanese in 1942, more copies are in existence; a naval commemorative group did several editions, which were widely distributed. Army nurse Lucy Wilson was barely a hundred pounds dripping wet at the start of the war; she lost twenty-five pounds in the few months of the American retreat. The chief nurse responsible for selecting the handful of women to be evacuated chose those who she feared would not survive captivity for very long, because of their physical or mental condition. Lucy Wilson likely was one of the first on her list. She later qualified as a flight nurse and returned to serve in the South Pacific before the war ended. I used it myself as a reference for my own WWII novel, My Dear Cousin. But no one can locate the current whereabouts of any of Lucy Wilson Jopling’s descendants, who hold the original rights – so no further editions.

Some of our authors wrote a memoir of events which later turned out to be of interest to higher-level researchers and historians. As participants or witnesses to events, they provide sources which are pure, original, unsullied gold to an academic researcher. In his youth during WWII, the author of this memoir was a transport pilot who flew transport aircraft over the hazardous “Hump”. Decades later, he wrote up a rollicking account of his adventures in that theater, and had six copies typed out by his secretary, one for each of his children. His youngest daughter came to us another decade and a half later with her copy and some other relics of his service, including his ration card for a month in late 1943, documenting that he had maxed out his beer allotment, but only used a single bar of soap. The daughter had us do a limited publication, for friends and family for Christmas gifts. Much, much later, a historian called me, looking for a copy of it – I have no idea how he even found the title, as the only place that even lists it is our website, and the Bowker, Inc. data base. Sometimes I can help by sending them in the direction of the author or client, who holds the rights to the book as well as any remaining copies. In this case, I could provide him with the name and last known address of the daughter.

This only applies for a handful of our older and rarer books, though. With the inprint to do publish on demand books, for those authors who have chosen to get their books available for distribution and available, say on Amazon, there is no such thing now as a limited quantity available, and a hard search to find them. Anyone who wants one of those later books can find it readily and easily, without going to the trouble of turning every used book store and rare book website upside down.

And that is my break and yours, from matters political this week. Comment as you wish, on rare books that you wish you had, or kept copies of, knowing now how much they might be worth.

The Fire Next Time

15. January 2025 · Comments Off on The Fire Next Time · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Politics, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.

So we lived in the hills as soon as Mom and Dad could afford a mortgage rather than rent, kept the brush around the various houses trimmed, the garden well-watered, had a mental list of the precious and irreplaceable items to be grabbed and taken with us in case of a sudden fire evacuation. (In the end, in spite of all care and precautions taken, Mom and Dad’s retirement house in northern San Diego County burned in the 2003 fires, destroying any number of inherited family relics.)I have never forgotten the peculiar odor of smoke from a big burn hanging in the air, the odd beige-orange color of the sky, how the smoke from a distant brushfire piles up in sullen beige clouds, and the peculiar deep roaring sound of a fire well under way. One night in the week of Thanksgiving 1975, we watched the Mill fire burning downhill towards Sunland, Tujunga and La Crescenta. Through Dad’s binoculars, we saw a fire tornado sucking flying debris into itself, while a line of advancing flames stretched as far to the east and west as we could see. Fire engine sirens wailed almost constantly, near and far that night, along the streets below us.

The LAFD were able to beat out that massive fire in the Angeles National Forest within three days or so. But that was then … this is now, and half a century later. Managerial competence in governance and administration appears to have departed California, right along with that portion of a middle and working class who despair of ever getting ahead of the game. So many essential blocks have been pulled out of the jenga tower that was California, through political expediency and mismanagement. The infrastructure of lines and hydrants neglected. Reservoirs and dams were not filled with a particularly generous snow-melt and routed where it would be needed when the fires came; instead, precious water was allowed to pour unhindered into the ocean. Fire breaks and roads were not maintained, preventive burns not done, because environmental activists within and outside the state government have made it nearly impossible. Insurance companies, upon seeing the writing on the wall and knowing that catastrophic fires were inevitable, flatly declined to provide coverage to homeowners. The LAFD fired essential personnel for refusing the Covid shot, deferred equipment maintenance, appeared to prioritize celebrating gay and transgender rather than focusing on fire prevention. In the final insult, the LA FD had their budget cut by the mayor’s office. The mayor herself seems to be one of those who revels in the rewards of the office and those ceremonial honors attached but has little appetite or ability for attending to essentials of civic management.

So all those jenga blocks had been pulled out, when the fires started burning after the Santa Ana winds began to blow. It matters very little if those fires were started by any deliberate or random accident, as they always will in California. Anything and everything will spark off a fire: a discarded cigarette butt, a short in a power line or a string of Christmas lights, a steel bulldozer striking a flint rock, sunlight focusing through a piece of broken glass, a campfire not entirely extinguished, a hot catalytic converter on a car parking in long dry grass … accident or arson.
The hills will burn.
This time, they have burned out the wealthy and well-situated. (Again – like the 1961 Bel-Air fire did.) To a large degree, those in Malibu, along the coast, and in the Pacific Palisades generally appear to be people who were perfectly OK with the initial extraction of the jenga blocks which permitted their secure and privileged lives. Until the fires came over the hillside. (The Eaton fire simultaneously burned out whole neighborhoods in Altadena. This didn’t seem to get half the breathless coverage in the mainstream establish media, mostly because it’s a middle-class to working class neighborhood, with many residents who have lived there for generations, and whose small urban single-family cottages will not be as readily replaced.)

Some commenters speculate that the fires this time will lead to a conservative reawakening in California. A nice thought, but I rather doubt it. Even with the various mismanagement of things in California … it’s still very pleasant for those who have a comfortable income, have lived there all their lives and distain the thought of living anywhere else. The climate is mild year-round, compared to most other places, the range of scenery is glorious, and there still are some cultural advantages. A handful of counties back of the coastal zone and outside of the big cities are still well-managed and sane.
I think it more likely that what will happen as a result of the fires will be a west-coast Curley effect. The electorate will be shaped as the long-time mayor of Boston did, driving out those most inclined to vote against progressive policies. Those who can see the writing on the wall are leaving and will leave with all speed, and perhaps the speed will increase after this disaster. The Californians left behind probably won’t vote for Karen “The Commie” Bass, Governor Brylcreem or their ilk. It’s even more likely that they’ll pull the lever for another even worse Dem next time around and probably one even more incompetent. Whoever the next generation of California politicians and managers will be – it’s a guarantee that their progressive credentials and their chosen pronouns will be perfect. Comment as you wish.

Resolutions

27. December 2024 · Comments Off on Resolutions · Categories: Domestic

Ah, yes – that time of year, again: time to assess what has been done, and what has been left undone, and to consider plans for the coming year.

Ah, the items left undone – wrapping up the Luna City series, with book 12. Alas, it’s about half completed, and the creative dry spell late this year appears to have lifted. It will be an e-book only, but available in print as part of Luna City Compendium #4.

I may yet continue with Luna City stories as a YA series, with the adventures of Stephen, Douglas, Letty and their friends as children in the 1920s and 1930s. I am very fond of Luna City as a setting – the most perfect small town in South Texas. I am increasingly convinced that YA  teen and tween readers need  books which are not studies in grey goo dysfunction and misery. I did manage to complete and launch the pioneer trail YA adventure, West Towards the Sunet, start to finish, including review by beta readers in slightly less than a year. I also have been struck by enough ideas about how to go about continuing it as a series, so there may be a second volume of the Kettering family saga in time for next Christmas.

As for the household – I did manage to purchase the pet door insert for the slider door into the back porch, but the two male cats are still prone to pee on stuff – so I might as well not have bothered. As for chickens again – when Wee Jamie is a little older. Maybe this spring, we’ll try again with them. The back fence has been replaced totally, so  any chickens kept there  ought to be safe enough during the day, as long as they are locked up after dark.

As of the end of April, 2025, the mortgage on my personal little patch of Paradise will be paid off, and I will have gotten through another year of paying for that replaced siding and exterior paint, new windows and the HVAC system, all installed late in 2020 or early 2021. As noted previously, the siding and the specialty hot-climate paint with which it was covered have worn beautifully well – it still looks as if it had just been done. I am bound and determined to replace the refrigerator freezer the very instant the mortgage is paid in full, though. The one we have now has been a massive disappointment to us both – all the various plastic bins and drawers have been cracking and breaking off bits, beginning when it was barely a couple of years old. It wasn’t a cheap model, but it wasn’t rock-bottom cheap, either. The ice maker and dispenser stopped working entirely and repairing it all isn’t worth the trouble and the parts.

Not having a monthly mortgage payment will free up a not inconsiderable sum of money; I plan to frivolously spend it paying down the existing accounts for siding, windows and HVAC, thereby bringing the day when I am free to begin on paying for a completely fresh round of necessary fixes for the house – like new flooring throughout and a renovated kitchen. This may be made easier when my daughter, the real estate agent still working towards a point were a couple of thousand here and a couple of thousand there is just small change rattling around in the bottom of her expensive handbag, will have her own house. I will finally have that empty nest, with all of her stuff moved out of the garage.

And that’s what I’m looking forward to in the next year! In any case, the writing and story-telling will continue.

For Christmas – A Christmas in the Barracks, 1978

25. December 2024 · Comments Off on For Christmas – A Christmas in the Barracks, 1978 · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

In November, it only seemed logical to plan our own Thanksgiving dinner. We took up a fund for groceries, did a headcount of who wasn’t going to their supervisors’ houses and immediately hit a snag:

“Who’s going to do the turkey?” was the main question, followed by “Well, who helped enough at home to stuff and bake a 20lb turkey without giving anyone food poisoning?” AFRTS spots at that time of year always spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on this unpleasant possibility.
I had helped Mom and Granny Jessie with the holiday turkeys and was unwary enough to admit it. Before I could come up with a plausible way to wiggle out, I was rushing to the commissary with a pocket full of crumpled notes and change on the Wednesday afternoon, with just fifteen minutes before I had to be up the hill and on-shift at the TV station.

Turkey, 20+ pounds, frozen solid: OK, I would leave it to defrost outside in my car during the shift; Northern Japan in November was slightly chillier than the inside of most refrigerators anyway. Onionscelerysagesausage…bread. Mom always bought a loaf of bakery wheat bread, tore each slice into clunks and dried them on a sheet-cake pan in the closet where the hot water heater lived. I zigged down the bakery aisle, threw a loaf into the basket and headed for the quick-checkout register, making it to work with about a half-minute to spare.

Didn’t even notice until I got back to the barracks that night, and took out the bread so that it could dry overnight, that I had a loaf of rye. There was no way to get a loaf of wheat bread, no way at all. It was nearly midnight, and even there was such a thing at the Japanese grocery store the next morning, it would be too late. The turkey had to be in the oven first thing.

“Oh, go ahead and use it anyway,” Marsh consoled me. “Who’s going to notice a couple of caraway seeds with all the other stuff and gravy on top!”

No one did, and it made fantastic stuffing. We all lay about afterwards burping gently and nibbling on just one more bit of pumpkin or pecan pie. I can’t remember who launched the trial balloon for our Christmas— either Marsh, or Thea ventured.

“You know, we could do a really nice bash for Christmas….”

The room perked up, interest had been piqued.
“A way bigger turkey…”
“Maybe not, the oven can’t handle it.”
“Steamed pudding… a ham, too.”
“They’ve got a fake Christmas tree in storage, and a box of decorations, too…”
“Our doors…. We could decorate our doors… and… and…. Have someone in to judge a contest on Christmas Eve.”
“Santa! They have a couple of Santa Suits at MWR!”
“He could bring gifts… we can draw each others names, and get a gift… and Santa can deliver them…”
“OK, who all is going to be here… make a list.”

The room bubbled with enthusiastic plans: the dinner would be bigger, more lavish than Thanksgiving… Santa would deliver the gifts on Christmas Eve, after the judging of the doors. Thea and I exchanged slightly smug looks: yes, this would be a vast improvement on the year before. Our cunning plan came together, as those who would have been otherwise inclined to stay in their room and gloom through the holiday were seized by the spirit of competition in decorating their doors with wrapping paper, and lights, to buy small plastic fir trees downtown and put them in their rooms. I began making ball ornaments from Styrofoam, covered with velvet and laces and gold braid, and baking tray after tray of cookies, telling everyone they were for the guys at work.

The regular dinners in December became planning sessions: we drew names, arranged for renting the Santa suit, inveigled the Catholic chaplain – the most approachable of the base chaplains – into judging the door contest, set up the somewhat bedraggled fake spruce that the dorm manager pulled out of storage. Kenny, one of the five male residents, volunteered to be Santa, although he was young and skinny, and looked more like an adolescent Donald Sutherland than Santa Claus. Some of the girls put up lights in their windows, which reflected pastel colors onto the snow outside. The upstairs and downstairs corridors became a mini-Christmas Tree lane, with tinsel and paper and ribbons applied to the doors or doorframes. Thea made a small door out of cardboard covered with paper like her own room door, and attached it to the wall just above the baseboard, several feet from her room, and parked a pair of felt dolls, 28 inches tall and tricked out like Christmas caroling mice in front of it.

On Christmas Eve, I was taking one last tray of cookies out of the oven, while the Chaplain was going around, reviewing the doors.

“Come and see how Kenny looks,” Thea said, “He’s got the costume on, but we need another couple of laundry bags for the presents.”

Even a couple of pillows stuffed down the front couldn’t transform a lanky and somewhat drunken 19 year old into a convincing Santa, but this one would arrive bearing gifts. Thea and I hastily rounded up two more GI green laundry bags, and began filling them with gift-wrapped packages, making sure that no one had been left off, there was a present for everyone. Almost everyone else was already in the dayroom, listening to the Chaplain award first prize in the door-decorating contest – to Thea’s Christmas mouse door! We cheered heartily, and the Chaplain took himself off, and Kenny lurched into the dayroom, with a lumpy laundry bag over his shoulder and dragging two more.

“Merry Christmas, ho ho ho… and have you all been good little girls and boys this year?” He leered at the room, and was answered with a raucous chorus of “Yes, Santa” and “Hell no, Santa!” He reached into the first bag, and squinting blearily, read off the name. Everyone watched as the gifts were opened, slowly and individually, while Kenny kept up a stream of drunken, slightly obscene but very funny patter, and the piles of torn paper and ribbons mounded up at our feet.

Thea and I swapped a satisfied glance: the room was filled with laughter and lights and good fellowship. Tomorrow we would dish up a lavish Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Like last year, everyone in the barracks would still be thousands of miles from family, in a foreign country, but we would not be alone, and we would have Christmas joyfully.

I had one more little thing to do. A lavishly large box of cookies had already been left in the break-room at FEN, but all the rest—brownies and sugar cookies and macaroons, and peppermint sandwiches- were divided amongst thirty little bags, tied with ribbon and a little tag “A Present from Sandy Claws”. Just before midnight, when light showed under the doors of only the night owls or insomniacs, I went around and quietly hung a bag of cookies on each door.

Everyone deserves that unexpected surprise gift at Christmas.

The Lie at the Heart

19. December 2024 · Comments Off on The Lie at the Heart · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, Good God, Health and Wellness

There was a time when most of us neither knew or cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and that new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.

There was certainly no rush on the part of activists and the popular media urging anyone else to follow along the trans-brick road and screaming at us to extensively tolerate and enable them. Indeed, for a good few decades there were men who put on women’s cloth for a lark, a laugh, and entertainment; to escape the mob (Some Like It Hot), get out of the Army (M*A*S*H), rent an apartment (Bosum Buddies), or just have good comic romp (Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Late in the 19th century, and early 20th it was a convention for local groups to stage ‘womanless weddings”, elaborately lampooning formal marriage ceremonies as a good, rowdy fundraising event. (One of my Tiny Bidness Publishing clients wrote an insightful monograph about this once-widely-spread custom, which is how I first heard about it.)

But that was then, and this is now, and it’s ‘trans’ and demands for toleration, acceptance and something called ‘allyship’ everywhere you look, as well as any number of fading celebrities wearing their trans children as a kind of trendy accessory. The rage of trans activists against women who object to having private female spaces – bathrooms, spas, locker rooms – invaded by intact men claiming to be trans is as disconcerting as it is frightening. (I wonder now if the establishment feminists wouldn’t have firmer ground to stand on presently, insisting on female-only spaces, if they hadn’t been so bloody-mindedly insistent on invading men-only spaces back in the day.) There have been just too many incidents of male sex offenders with intact male genitals claiming to be female in order to be admitted to places where they can continue harassing females. (No, I was not surprised in the least when I read that the Wii spa tranny turned out to be a registered sex offender who invaded the no-clothing area of the spa for jollies and gratification.) The frantic enthusiasm among trans activists and allies to rush children and vulnerable teens into chemically and surgically mutilating their genitalia is even more horrifying to contemplate, let alone to wonder why they are so determined to do it, or see it done. One might very well conclude that the sexually misfit/deeply confused want to ensure a continuing supply of younger sexually-misfit/confused into their ranks on the grounds that sexual misery loves company, and that medical professions pushing trans treatment for teenagers and children are merely ensuring a nice income stream for themselves.

It’s also concerning that male athletes claiming to be female for competition purposes are steamrollering over from-birth females, and in some cases, causing life-affecting injuries. This is so prodigiously unfair. The last time that I was able physically to hold my own in rough housing with my brother’s friends, I was twelve or thirteen. There is no arguing around the fact that a male who has gone through puberty will be physically stronger than a female of the same size, age bracket and general state of fitness. I don’t care if he has been mainlining female hormones, growing out his hair, sprouting breasts and calling himself Loretta – he will still be faster, stronger, and able to lift more than original-issue XX females. Allowing manufactured XY-females to physically go up against original-issue XX women in most sports competition is not just unfair, it also carries the risk of permanent injuries to a smaller and comparatively weaker party. Refusal to play may be about the only option at this point. And that is likewise unfair to women who have honed their talent in a sport, only to see the prize, awards and scholarships go to a pseudo-woman.

I hope that this progressive enthusiasm for transexuals will just turn out to be a transient and overhyped concern/fad, to diminish as swiftly as did ‘daycare satanic abuse!’ and ‘recovered memory’ once the madness of crowds has sobered up a little. I do take mild comfort in knowing that the trans-fad isn’t nearly as pervasive among the normal as the media would have us believe. My daughter and I have spotted only one very obvious hulking-guy-inna-dress in the course of our lives, although I will accept that there may have been others who were a wee bit more successful in presenting as a delicate flower of fair femineity. How much longer will this particular mania last? Discuss as you wish.

The Ephemeral World

28. November 2024 · Comments Off on The Ephemeral World · Categories: Ain't That America?

There was a YA novel that my mother had a cherished copy of – likely a first edition, because I vividly remember the dust jacket painting in the 1930s commercial style – a pair of teenagers on horseback, in a landscape that was very clearly California’s back country. There was a gnarled live oak tree behind them, some ranges of green trees that looked like a citrus orchard, and a range of purple mountains on the horizon. Mom had her own bookplate pasted into the inside cover of that copy – a black and white picture of a cowboy on a horse, swinging a lariat. That book gravitated from Granny Jessie’s house through three or four houses where we all lived, until it finally was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain fire, which burned Mom and Dad’s retirement home to the ground, along with just about all the inherited memorabilia and books from both sides of the family. I had a go at replacing some of the books which had been lost, but I was stymied for years at remembering the name and author. And things happened: Dad passed away in 2010, and Mom fell catastrophically some years after that. She has been paralyzed from the shoulders down ever since. She had to go to a nursing home, and then to my sister’s home. The retirement house had to be sold, all the furniture and fittings dispersed among the family, sold at an estate sale or given away … which is irrelevant to this essay, but for the fact that that book was the one which I never got around to replacing.

I couldn’t remember the title of that book, or the author, although I could remember such things as the name of the protagonist, his friends, the general plot, and the fact that there was a map of the relevant area in the book. His name was Billy, his cousin from the big city was Penny, his horse was named Querida, and the family name was Deane – they lived on a ranch in the back country of Northern San Diego County, as it was then. He had a good friend in a boy from the local Indian reservation, and the plot involved dangerous smuggling from over the border, and an earth tremor which had somehow rerouted the natural springs which watered the Deane ranch. Such is my erratic memory – one which Mom once compared to an untidy filing cabinet, full of curious odds, ends and strange but true facts, but all jumbled together in no particular organized order. Now and again, I tried out a search using these bare factoids, but nothing ever turned up, until I threw out the question to the regulars at the Sunday morning book thread at Ace of Spades HQ – and yay – a miracle!

A regular reader there applied those various sketchy details out to a better search engine and came up with the title and author name! Hurrah! The book was titled The Singing Cave, by one Margaret Leighton Carver, who apparently had a good long run as a writer of young adult historical fiction and biographies for about twenty years. The Singing Cave, originally released in 1945 was one of her first popular novels. She lived in California, which accounted for the local west-coast color. I found a reasonably-priced copy at Abe Books and ordered it at once. Not only was there a certain sentimental value for me – but that in many ways the plot and setting was in a California long-gone, and even fading in memory as those who recall it as children and teenagers in the 1930s and 40ies pass from this mortal coil. There once was a California of ranches and small farms,  orchards of citrus trees surrounded by windbreaks of eucalyptus, olive trees and grapes for raisins and wine, dairy farms, plantations of olive trees, almonds and other specialty crops, interspersed with small towns of comfortable early 20th century houses, modest suburbs and the occasional grand estate in Pasadena, Santa Barbera, or San Marino, established by a scattering of old wealth who loved the mild climate. I was around to see the last few bits of pre-WWII California, which my parents remembered from their own growing up, before it was all swamped in miles and miles of development sprawl and strangled by new freeways. The California that my parents knew and loved, and that I remember most fondly is all but gone – the world described in The Singing Cave is saved from the wreck like a bit of flotsam, a window into a previous time, and a reflection of the way that things used to be.

The Time of the Season

27. November 2024 · Comments Off on The Time of the Season · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry

Yes, the time of the season has arrived again, although seeing all the pumpkin spice scented and flavored seasonal stuff on the shelves of various retail outlets should have provided what is popularly known as “a clue.” (Along with all the autumn leaf and scarecrow and harvest décor things…)
Yes, Thanksgiving, followed closely by Christmas, featuring a centerpiece dish of what I used to call Eternal Turkey, Strong to Save. Thanksgiving when I was living at a home with my parents and sibs, meant a ginormous turkey on both holidays, followed by my mother’s schedule of dishes incorporating the leftovers thereof: plain old warmed up leftovers initially, followed by hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey a la king, turkey croquettes, turkey and noodle casserole … and when the carcass was stripped to bones, into the pot for broth and another two weeks of turkey stew/soup.

Yes, these days, I’ll do a turkey for Thanksgiving, a couple of evening meals of leftovers in various guises, and then practically anything else for Christmas. For the last couple of years, it’s been Beef Wellington for our Christmas supper main dish.

Getting back to turkey and Thanksgiving, though – although I do like roast turkey, and a modest (no more than a week’s worth) schedule of meals incorporating the leftovers – I do not like most of those so-called traditional Thanksgiving side dishes. While mashed potatoes and giblet gravy (made from pan drippings and the extra bits normally contained in a small bag in the turkey’s interior) are acceptable, bread stuffing is OK when fresh-baked, but rapidly turns disgusting, baked yams are heavy and indigestible, especially when emptied from a can and adorned with (yuck) marshmallows, I simply cannot hate that baked canned green bean casserole enough, and then adding rolls and cornbread on the side… it’s all too heavy and indigestible. We generally bag everything but mashed potatoes, and a smidge of stuffing. Our favorite side is oven-roasted brussels sprouts with red onion, slim slices of kielbasa all sprinkled with olive oil and salt, and sometimes a corn pudding casserole. Some years I’d also fix a corn and bell pepper relish, or a confit of pears stewed with currents and sweetened with honey, along with the cranberry relish.
Pepper Corn Relish
This is a recipe for a pepper and corn relish which I copied out of a Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet Magazine, lo these many years ago.
Combine and simmer for half an hour: 5 ½ cup fresh or frozen corn kernels, 1 finely chopped red bell pepper, 1 finely chopped green bell pepper, one medium onion, 2 carrots, also finely chopped, 1 ½ cup sugar, 1 teasp dry mustard, ½ teasp celery, ¼ teasp turmeric and 1 ½ cup vinegar. This relish can be eaten fresh, or processed in the canning kettle for fifteen minutes. It makes about 5 pint jars.
Honey Pear Conserve (also from the same issue)
Combine in a large saucepan: 4 lbs Anjou pears, peeled, cored and cut unto chunks, ¾ cup lemon juice, 1 cup honey, ½ tsp cloves, 2 tsp cinnamon and ½ cup dried currents. Simmer until thickened and pears are cooked through.
Cranberry Chutney
Combine in a large saucepan: ½ cup cider vinegar, 2 ¼ cup brown sugar, ¾ tsp curry powder, ½ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cloves, ¼ tsp allspice, ¼ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cinnamon, and 1 ½ cups water.
Bring to a boil, then while stirring simmering mixture, add: 2 lemons, rind grated finely, pith discarded and lemon sectioned and chopped, 2 oranges, (ditto), 1 apple finely chopped, 3 cups cranberries, ½ cup golden raisins, and ½ cup chopped dried apricots. Simmer gently for 40 minutes, until mixture is thickened.
Add: 2 additional cups cranberries and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add: 1 cup cranberries and ½ cup chopped walnuts, stirring until the last cup of cranberries are just cooked. The variously cooked cranberries give it a lot of cranberry texture, and a very fresh flavor.
Bon appetite – and the happiest of Thanksgiving to all of our readers, since we have an extra special reason to be thankful this year.

Schadenfreudelicious

22. November 2024 · Comments Off on Schadenfreudelicious · Categories: Ain't That America?

Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Aso movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.

You’d think that anyone paying attention might have realized this some months, or even years ago, but apparently our managerial class of the liberal persuasion need to be smacked with the obvious – along the lines of a mushroom cloud over a Japanese city, a dinosaur-killing asteroid, an earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone, (which made the Mississippi River briefly flow backwards) or the Trump landslide. If, as Andrew Breitbart observed once, that politics is downstream from culture – are we seeing that current reversed, and culture is flowing downstream from MAGA?

More than two weeks have gone by, and Trump’s success is still all too much for some of them to take. A good few are reacting in an embarrassingly theatrical manner. Abandoning Twitter/X and flouncing off to the echo chamber of Bluesky. Rob Reiner is signing himself into some kind of rehab center, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are flouncing off and going to Britian to live … well, at least one celebrity couple are making good to leave the US on account of Trump’s election. My only question is – can’t they take Oprah Winfrey with them? I’ve never paid any heed to celeb endorsements, by the way – and the gruesome crew who came out for Harris-Walz is enough to put one off going to going to their movies ever again. (Good thing that Harrison Ford is pretty much aged out of anything but character parts. He’s now in my ‘not unless dragged by wild horses’ category, right alongside Jane Fonda and every single one of those participants in that horrifyingly embarrassing ‘zoom call-avengers assemble!’ video promotion.)

The more sensible corporations and companies – or those who have been paying attention to the bottom line, and who desire their companies to continue making a handsome (or even a moderately attractive) profit seem to have made a rational decision. Indeed, the owner of the L.A. Times (which once used to be substantial and respected newspaper) and the international book publisher Hachette apparently do want to rein in the hysterical progressives among their respective employees and appeal to that niche market of the majority of American consumers. Even if their employees are having screaming meltdowns. Yes, there’s a large audience out there – probably more for books, than for newspaper subscriptions. How many other companies have decided, in the wake of Trump’s election that they had rather make a fat bottom line, and never mind the howling from their in-house woke element? Discuss as you wish.

Stick a Fork In…

11. November 2024 · Comments Off on Stick a Fork In… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.

The mainstream, big-money, corporate national news media was so far down into the tank for Harris and Walz that they probably needed a surface crew in a boat pumping down oxygen to them, or so I gather from the election post-mortem analyses. And this time, it didn’t do the least particle of good in moving masses of voters to vote for them. Not the last-minute OMG-Trump said bad things about service members story! OMG, he’s a convicted rapist-bully-thug-crook who hates women, Jews and people of color! It didn’t work … and Kamala’s campaign team apparently couldn’t even begin to figure out why, according to some of the post-mortem laments. Spending money like it was water gushing from a fire hydrant didn’t work, all those celebrity endorsements (Which apparently were bought and paid for) didn’t work. Reporting on poll results putting her in the lead didn’t work. All the old tried and true methods which always worked before … didn’t work.

It wasn’t just that credibility of mainstream corporate news media has sunk lower than the Titanic. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – especially Harris – came off as horribly inauthentic, fake, manufactured personalities. In none of their brief, scripted and staged appearances did they seem natural, engaging, likeable. And there was not a single thing that their campaign staffers could do to counter that plastic impression to everyone outside of committed true believers. Kamala seemed like a kind of life-sized Chatty-Kammy doll; pull the string in her back and out came a kind of scripted focus-grouped garble that almost seemed like relevant speech. Off-the-cuff, spontaneous, non-scripted? With a less-than-worshipful interviewer? Oh, heck no! In contrast, Trump and Vance came across as relatable, authentic, humorous – they could do hours of unscripted interviews with someone like Joe Rogan, Indeed, I’m halfway convinced that the Rogan podcast interviews with Trump and Vance that pushed undecided voters towards supporting them. They talked about what the audience truly wanted to know … not the same, tired, over-focused party line.

Discuss as you wish – what else do you think also pushed the voters towards Trump and Vance?

Literary Life

04. November 2024 · Comments Off on Literary Life · Categories: Ain't That America?, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts

(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)

I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)

Anyway, in full Marxist throat, Ms Rooney has gone all out in a typical Marxist-manifesto mode, flogging her scribbling fraternity pals on to greater endeavors; a mass boycott of Israeli publishers, book events and festivals, lecture tours. It is her right to do so, I will concede – to pick and choose her publisher when it comes to translating her books and to pick a side and to put at least some of her money and influence on the side where her sympathies lie. It is a great convenience to me and to other pro-Israeli sympathizers, in providing a list of authors, celebs and intellectuals who have chosen to ally with her in this boycott, as I now know who to avoid patronizing with my eyeballs and my pocketbook. I have never made a political decision based on a celebrity endorsement, but I most certainly have avoided movies and music because of public declarations made by performers over the years.

I did have another thought, though – regarding the influence of authors and books on events; that is, there have been books which deeply influenced readers towards backing a particular cause or sympathy. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was instrumental in firing a wide-range of anti-slavery sentiment in the years before the American Civil War, after being read by people who hadn’t thought very much about the issue. But the novel made it real to readers, aroused sympathy for the plight of the enslaved, and in the end … as Abraham Lincoln jestingly commented to the author, she was the lady who wrote the book that started the whole war. Sally Rooney herself, and so many others of her successful and well-placed friends in the scribbling trade are madly pro-Palestinian, I wonder why she has not considered writing some kind of best-selling, popular, heart-rending novel to bring overwhelming sympathy for their plight, instead of just hectoring us with public statements and boycotts. Comment as you wish, and if you care.

A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect

28. October 2024 · Comments Off on A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not

You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

The Atlantic, along with Harpers’, Horizon and American Heritage were publications that my mother had subscriptions to, from the earliest days of my own childhood – even when she and Dad were raising two children (later three, and subsequently four) on a graduate student’s GI Bill stipend. Although Harpers’ and Atlantic were similar in content and quality, and Mom could have saved a bit more of that tiny income by giving up one or the other – she never could decide which, and so kept both. They arrived regularly at the family home, and when I departed that home, I kept up subscriptions of my own, all during the long two decades of military service, most of it overseas. They provided between them a bit of a connection to an intellectual and literary world which – to be frank – didn’t come my way very often. I had many regular magazine subscriptions then; about twenty or so, if memory service. Between them and the catalogs that I was on a mailing list for, the post office clerks swore up and down that on some days they had to use a crowbar in order to wedge all of my mail into my military post office box. I recall most particularly reading a Bernard Lewis article, sometime during the build-up to the first Gulf War – an article on the reasons for Moslem rage against the modern western world, generally. I remember going around to other people in the unit with that issue in my hand saying, “See?! This is why they’re so pissed at us! It’s not anything that we did – we just succeeded at modern stuff, and they didn’t!” Yes, it all made sense to me then. Still does.

Anyway – I regularly devoured issues of the Atlantic, even after I retired from the military and set up a home in Texas … and then over the years since 9-11, and finding other connections and sources through the internet, all those subscriptions fell off. A good few of them, like Brill’s Content ceased publication. Others, like Entertainment Weekly and Premiere … I just lost interest. Newsweek – a weekly digest of news just got dated and increasingly pointless, as the internet sped up. I dumped Harpers after getting annoyed at the pretentions of prosy old prune, Lewis Lapham, in the wake of 9-11. I think that I gave upon the Atlantic about the same time that I gave up listening to Prairie Home Companion, and for much the same reason – a combination of poisonous hatred for GW Bush and the slobbering worship of Obama which just got too much to endure.

I suppose that I shouldn’t really care so much what degradation Atlantic has sunk to, of late – but for so many decades it provided a very real intellectual pleasure to my life, and to that of my family, but this latest turn of fortune for it is just sad and infuriating – sort of like seeing your once respectable and beloved third-grade teacher becoming a homeless crack whore turning tricks at the nearest truck plaza. Comment as you wish.

With Dread and Foreboding

23. October 2024 · Comments Off on With Dread and Foreboding · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, Politics, Texas

So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.
If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Diety knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.

That’s uncharted waters, in modern American politics – although not unknown in South America, or Europe of the early 20th century. Americans did not routinely do things that way, and since 1865, we had rather prided ourselves on that record of relatively peaceful turnover between parties. Not that assassination of various notable American politicians hasn’t happened – but most usually at the hands of the freelance nutters. In this present overheated political atmosphere, we can be assured that an assassin would be made a hero/heroine (overtly or covertly) by the media, academic and intellectual elite. Anyone with eyes to see must know this and also acknowledge that Trump fans and voters generally would be made … very unhappy by such a turn of events. How unhappy? That’s one of those things that I dread finding out. Even if a political assassination is not in the cards – the Harris/Walz partisans and the party supporting them will take every opportunity to be obstructive, and even more vicious and nasty than ever before. Witness the current slime vented by the Atlantic Magazine, which used to be a respected publication.

The Harris/Walz combo achieving a win on November 4th, possibly through an overwhelming flood of ballot farming and fakery in various districts particularly vulnerable to such … bald, undisguised fraud, giving the win to Kamala and Elmer Fudd; this will absolutely inflame Trump voters, for all that we can do about in the immediate aftermath. We learned a hard lesson of January 6th; likely those of a mind to criticize the outcome won’t be so eager to go to Washington to protest openly and run the chance of experiencing debilitating lawfare and interminable imprisonment in a Washington DC gulag, pending trail by a biased jury and a corrupted justice system. But Trump voters will be infuriated. Deeply angry – and the cohort which engineered a victory for Kamala-walla-bang-bang and Tim the Tampon Man will not rest easy in that victory. They will be insecure, suspicious and ready to lash out at any perceived threat or defiance of Federal government authority, likely with disproportionate violence. Those states which succeeded in maintaining a sane and competent governance in accordance with the votes and desires of the majority of their residents may manage to stand against rounds of Fed-gov madness.
It will all be very interesting reading in history books, assuming that any detached and relatively non-partisan accounts will be written in future.

Two more weeks. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, I guess. Comment as you wish – how does it all look from where you are standing?

Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever

20. October 2024 · Comments Off on Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Veteran's Affairs

In the time before the internet became a thing, when I was mostly stationed at bases overseas, I could rejoice when the base post office put up the mail … we had numbered post boxes, the kind that one sees in the post offices now, with the little locking doors with a small glass window. mine was nearly always packed tightly with mail. On really, really good days, there was a pink cardboard slip which meant a package – take the slip to the window and collect your package. Depressing it might be to see a package slip, and the parcel window had already closed on a Saturday afternoon  which meant  waiting until  Monday to get the package. (In Greenland, though, whenever an airplane came in with mail, the post office clerks would call the radio station, and the duty announcer would read out that so many pounds of mail had been received, and the post box numbers who had gotten packages on the air. The post office window would be open for exactly half an hour then, no matter what the day, or hours – and on hearing your box number read out, everyone would beat feet for the post office. This was Greenland – everyone knew to the minute when an aircraft came in, and if it were coming from Stateside, there would be mail on it.)

I subscribed then to a number of magazines – magazines of news and cultural interest, mostly, with some hobby publications among them … and catalogues. Oh, I got catalogs – so many that the post office clerks swore that sometimes they had to wedge my mail into my post box with the aid of a crowbar. There were just so many things that weren’t available to  us through the exchange, or on the local economy. Clothing, books, household goods, hobby materials and supplies, small furniture kits, movies … even certain food items – anything the least bit non-standard had to come by catalog mail order. (In the case of Greenland, there was no local economy, only the souvenir booth on the Danish side of the runway, and the little trading post store, which was about  the size of a corner minimart.)

Of course I was the recipient of catalogs galore, for all the things that couldn’t be obtained locally and for which I had a taste or an interest. One of my very favorite clothing catalogs was the original Banana Republic line, when it was truly a vendor of quirky yet practical travel clothing and accessories. A fair number of their early items were military surplus of all sorts of other militaries, much of which came in color palettes which explored the vibrant spectrum of olive-drab green, tan, brown, gray and dull blue, but which had the benefit of being durable, practical and well-made. The original Banana Republic’s clothing tended to be pricy – rather like LL Bean items of the same era – but ever so worth it in the long run; comfortable, practical fabrics, flattering cuts, and modest – suitable for wear on countries where excessive displays of flesh were not advised – and infinitely variable. The ideal for their kind of traveler, I gathered from their content, was the one who could do a world tour with a single small piece of luggage, and still be comfortably, practically, and tastefully turned out for every possible occasion, from morning trek to see a ruined temple in the jungle to a tea party at an embassy that afternoon. I liked that kind of practicality – liked it very much, although I could only afford a couple of pieces from them. A mid-length khaki drill skirt was one of them, and another was a pair of flat-heeled ballet pumps that I wore all over Europe; the soles were ribbed rubber. Perfect for hiking through places and streets floored with slick stone and cobbles, which – wet or dry – were a hazard. The Banana Republic catalogues were literate, even just fun to read. They stood out among my collection of catalogs for that very reason. I understand that the handful of Banana Republic brick-and-mortar locations were just as spectacular, in décor and design. Alas, I never got to visit one in person. Eventually, the couple who had built the brand sold it to the company which already owned a big nationwide chain and a couple of other brands, and Banana Republic stopped being the quirky, original source for high-quality travel clothing and exotic military surplus. It became just another generic brand of mall-marketed clothes, just like all the other generic, cheaply-manufactured generic mall clothing brands.

I wish that I had kept some of the catalogs, though. Just for sentimental value. Maybe I have – and they are buried out in a box in the garage.

 

They Have Their Exits

10. October 2024 · Comments Off on They Have Their Exits · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Home Front

I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other Federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dogs’ breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.

At any rate, FEMA, like so many other government organizations, corporations, and universities seem of late to have slavishly follow the dictates of Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE as we call it in conservative/libertarian circles). FEMA, after taking care of illegal immigrant, would prefer focusing on service to the D-I-E client base instead of those who are … you know, impacted by the disaster regardless of race, sexual orientation, religion or income. In any case, FEMA as an organization seems to be of less and less use, compared to local volunteers, churches, organizations like the Redneck Air Force, the Cajun Navy and those states, like Florida, whose disaster-recovery offices are so well-practiced at coping with hurricane activity and the aftermath that they can actually locate their posteriors without the aid of a large-scale map, PowerPoint flip charts and GPS.

In any case, I speculate that the various devotees of DIE in various orgs and corporations are writing their own corporate/activity death sentence, sooner or later. (Probably later, in the case of government bodies, as civil service hires tend to dig into the body politic like ticks and not easily dislodged.) In any case, competence at the core activity is bread and butter, when it comes to that bottom line. “Do or not do”, as the weird greenish Jedi master admonished Luke Skywalker. Base the hiring and promotion decisions on the race, sex, or orientation of the hired/promoted, and putting actual competence at the job at a distant second? “Not do” appears to be the assured result.
I will admit that perhaps the DIE checkboxers might on random occasion turn up a previously unconsidered racial or sexual minority capable of performing at a high level required for optimal performance results. And I may score a hot date with the Pride and Prejudice era Colin Firth or have a Hollywood producer option one of my books for a blockbuster movie. I believe the odds are about the same.

It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to government services. But when individuals are hired or recruited for an organization/activity based on superficial aspects such as their color or sexual orientation and NOT their core competencies … the organization/activity can skate along for a while, based on the labor that the remaining competent staff provide. Eventually those able and dedicated will burn out, retire and depart, leaving the activity in the situation as the human appendix – useless, purposeless and inclined to nasty inflammation. At some point when “do” is not delivered in a commercial setting, the purchasers of a service walk away, taking their eyeballs and discretionary dollars elsewhere. Look at what’s been happening with movies and TV miniseries in the woke era; the competent and experienced writers, producers, directors who can work up and tell a good story translated to the big or smaller screen that will pack them in are basically sidelined in favor of the wokerati, with results that give the Critical Drinker hours of materiel.

Discuss as you will. Be as amusing as anything on Netflix or at the multiplex of late.

Don’t Fear the Beeper

26. September 2024 · Comments Off on Don’t Fear the Beeper · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Military, Smells Like Cedar, War

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

A commenter at Bayou Renaissance Man’s post about Operation Grim Beeper huffed and puffed indignantly – War crime! Horrible! Unprecedented! What about the Children! and calling the rest of us all kinds of unflattering names as we are markedly unsympathetic to the plight of the Hezball-less command echelon and those few innocent unfortunates caught in the immediate vicinity. The commenter went by the nic of Anonymous for the purpose of that comment thread, and likely for good reasons – cowardly reasons, but there you go. So brave to stand up thus anonymously on a conservative blog-thread! So … whatever. Sabotaging pagers, cellphones and walkie-talkies specifically ordered for the use of and put into the hands of a terror org’s operatives is a heck of a lot more targeted and focused than say … dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and Japan in WWII, firing rockets at random into Northern Israel or sending hijacked airliners into a couple of tall office buildings in New York.

Frankly, I applaud the specificity of Operation Grim Beeper – it delivered in a very satisfactory way to people who had richly deserved such retribution and had deserved it for decades. I have not forgotten the Hezbollah truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, or the hideous torture and murder of kidnapped Americans in Lebanon at around the same time. The Israelis took out the trash in a way that it seemed that our own administrations since then were unable and then unwilling to do. Thanks, Mossad; you might not get anything but backbiting and quiet sabotage from the Biden administration and our State Department generally, but you have my personal gratitude as a military veteran.

Besides defanging Hezbollah/Hezball-less, in decapitating their chain of command by killing or incapacitating everyone sufficiently high-ranking enough to be issued a pager, Grim Beeper has some other interesting side effects; first, in lumbering the organization for immediate and ongoing medical care of their wounded. The dead burden an organization to a certain degree, but care of the wounded and permanently crippled ties up considerably more in resources. And secondly – having essential bits of male anatomy atomized by an exploding beeper – that’s just cruelly comic. Heartless – but funny. Becoming a laughingstock across the Middle East just has to sting. I’ve also seen speculation that Hezbollah/Hezball-less might also have lost whatever remains of toleration for their activities within Lebanon itself, although there may not be enough normal folk left there to return Beirut to being the Paris of the eastern Med again. As for notable Hamas-Hezbollah fan Rashida Talib getting all indignant and bent out of shape over a cartoon … well, she IS a fan of both … and pointing it out humorously by referencing an exploding pager on her desk is something we still can do. Honestly, you’d think that someone elected to a seat in our national legislature would have developed a thicker skin.
Your thoughts and insights?

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