A Meme of Past Glory II

12) I had another strange surge in popularity at another time in another place, when, at summer camp, I won the talent show for telling Steve Martin jokes. My 13) obsession with Steve Martin jokes had started when another member of our school carpool had told them. I had thought he was the funniest person I knew. So stole his game. I got the “Wild and Crazy Guy” album and memorized it and started telling Steve Martin jokes as well. By the time I was in full swing doing this, the other guy had changed schools and was no longer in our carpool, so he was not around to challenge me.


I told jokes I didn’t even get. One mother who sometimes drove the carpool thought I was hilarious and giggled as she drove.

In my second year at summer camp, the summer before seventh grade, I learned that I could gain prestige among my cabin mates by telling Steve Martin jokes while we were getting ready for bed in the evenings. One evening, our counselor told us that a talent show was coming and suggested I tell Steve Martin jokes for it. I didn’t want to at first, but a cabin mate said I should, that he would help me and coach me. So I wrote all the jokes out that I would tell and rehearsed them alone, and did a trial run in front of him. We figured out a point where I would ask the audience a question and he, as a plant, would yell out the answer.

At the talent show, other boys dressed up as women using soccer balls for boobs; they did the thing where one kid sits behind another and extends his arms and legs forward as if they are the limbs of the kid in front of him, and this “dual person” attempts to eat and brush his hair to the general entertainment of everyone watching. I’m sure, at some point, somebody wore a mop on his head. (This was a five-week, all-male camp. *shudder* 14) I went because there was nothing to do at home in the summertime, and because my mom had loved her summer camp back in her day. She had learned to love horses at her camp. 15) I had spent much of my very early childhood playing around a horse farm where my mother would go to ride, and I always thought that maybe, if someone had asked the horses how they felt about being ridden, they would give an answer the horseback riders did not want to hear. Anyway, by the time I went to camp I had already been put on a horse a few times, and I knew I did not like horseback riding. But I had to do it at camp. Thankfully this was not the focus of camp though. It was a general all-round sports, nature, character building camp for boys, with morning Christian devotions (16) this is where I learned the Lord’s Prayer). To be honest, I did get a lot of my character built in a good way there. But I had a lot of bad feelings, cried a lot, and do not associate the word “fun” with the experience. And really, so many of the kids were lacrosse players from the elite private school St. Christopher’s in Richmond, and had brought their own helmets and sticks and pads to camp, that a lot of the rustic atmosphere was undermined.)

A counselor told me later that, when I walked out on the stage, which was really the floor of the small barn which normally served as our wrestling arena (another sport I hated), he thought I was going to be a flop. It’s likely that most of the other audience members, all sitting on a grassy hill outside the barn looking into its open doors, thought so too. But I knew I had my supporter, my plant, with me in the audience, and, as with the ping-pong tournament, it did not occur to me that I might flop. I knew they would all laugh just as my carpool had, as my cabin mates had. And right from the first joke they started giggling. There were moments when I could hardly keep from laughing myself, probably mostly because I was giddy from all that positive attention, but partly because I was realizing anew that those Steve Martin jokes were pretty damn funny.

Mind you, I was never pretending that these were my jokes. I always said, “These are Steve Martin jokes.”

The next day, at lunch, I was awarded top prize for the talent show, which was a Coke. From the Coke machine. This was the best a camper could hope for in those days, at that camp. If you really did something noteworthy, like crawled under your cabin to get the bubble gum wrappers out (and you weren’t doing that as punishment for something else you had done) or rolled in the mud on a dare from a counselor, then you “got a Coke.”

Okay, that’s my meme in two parts.

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A Meme of Past Glory I

1) In elementary school I was always among the last picked for sports teams at recess. After school, I almost never played pickup sports with other kids. Instead I watched Batman on TV in the afternoons, Bewtiched, the Mickey Mouse club. And I read books. When I would go out, I would ride my bike alone and 2) usually did not really want to run into other kids because, perhaps, I was not socialized very well, and also because other kids were pretty much jerks anyway.


In my mid-elementary school years, 3) my main athletic outlet was playing ping ping-pong with my dad before supper. 4) My mom would be teaching piano lessons in the living room, and Dad would come home from work, come down to the basement, put the news on and play ping ping-pong with me. The ping ping-pong table was next to one of the basement’s white paneled walls, and we declared that banking the ball off this wall was legal, as long as the ball then bounced in the opponent’s court.

I’m trying to remember how this ping-pong playing was dovetailed with my own piano practice when I started lessons in fourth grade. Maybe I played ping-pong with Dad from when he got home after 5pm until Mom finished her last piano student around 6pm. Then she would make supper, and I would take my turn on the piano. We were nothing if not a musical household. Before Mom taught, Dad would be the one on the piano when he got home, playing Ragtime.

Ping-pong was fun, piano was not, but 5) I am known, to this day, to dutifully pursue projects ostensibly to deepen myself, even when I lack honest inspiration. I do this, in fact, sometimes when I should be looking for more work. It’s my tragic flaw, the basic thing that keeps me from truly kicking ass.

Our physical education coach at school was also the new soccer coach at Longwood College of which my elementary school (K-7) was a part as a lab school for training new teachers. We called this phys-ed teacher “Mr. P” because we could not pronounce his eastern European family name. He was from the Northeast and gave us the impression that folks from there all talked kind of tough and preceded every sentence with “’Ey!” as in, “’Ey Joey, quit foolin’ around.” My classmates who lived in Farmville, VA, where all this schooling was taking place, said that they could hear his shouts of “’Ey” wafting up Second Avenue in the afternoons from the soccer practice field.

It seems funny to me that this soccer coach who was hired to whip Longwood’s team into shape (and did so to a significant degree, if I recall correctly) and had a no-nonsense attitude about participation and team building in phys-ed class would start a ping-pong tournament. It was such a sideshow, geeky thing. The matches had to be held at lunchtime or after school, apart from normal phys-ed activities. The ping-pong table would be set up wherever it could be, in the lunchroom or school foyer, whichever was not being used at the time. There was never any ping-pong instruction during P.E.; whatever instruction we had needed to have been already gleaned by our own independent experience in life, which meant that some people were just screwed, and others were uncharacteristically lucky.

The tournament was for fifth, sixth, and seventh graders only. I was in sixth. I think I even was not sure that I wanted to enter the tournament. I was not competitive, I had never played Little League or any other sport, never even been to any of these games as a spectator to watch my classmates play. Some of them were home-run heros who had already perfected their Babe Ruth struts at the age of 11. They were arch-enemys when they faced each other on Friday nights from beneath the brims of their “Rotary,” “Jaycees,” “Moose”hats. They chewed Big League Chew and spat. You know, looking back, 6) I think that the biggest reason I never wanted to do Little League was that I didn’t want to sit on a bench with a bunch of sweaty boys who were spitting. I had never had to do this, and somehow, without ever experiencing it firsthand, I knew to avoid it.

All this athletic engagement was happening to other kids outside my realm of experience, often on Friday nights, when I would be at home watching The Incredible Hulk or whatever. So when I did finally enter my first athletic competition, I was very surprised at the low level of actual competition.

Mr. P was letting folks serve by bouncing the ball first, then tapping it over the net. I could top-spin these suckers back to their court and off to Venus. But I was fairly sensitive for a kid, and in my recollection, I didn’t abuse these opponents too badly.

There was this one serious dickhead “K” in my class who was also in the tournament. He would hit you when the teacher wasn’t looking, and at lunch he would take your yogurt from you. In earlier grades, like first through second grade, he had to wear a cast and brace on a leg that was healing from a nasty break. That took at least a year to heal, but like a dog adapting to loping on three legs, he learned to run with that one leg held rigid in its cast. He would lift it from the hip, heave it forward, slap it rattling to the ground, then sort of jump forward on his good leg. He was about as fast as anyone. He was also known to kick kids with that brace. By sixth grade he had been long healed from that, and he was excellent at all sports, so he was probably really good at ping-pong. I have no memory of playing against him though, so I expect he was beaten in some other bracket by someone else.

The person who beat him was probably severnth grader “T,” whom I played later in a semi-final match one Friday after school. By then the ping-pong tournament had become a big deal. Some players were becoming celebrities in their circles of friends, but I don’t recall much attention being paid to me around the time of that match. In general, 7) I was neither consistently an outsider or insider. For a period of a few days, I could be the object of the cool kids’ teasing; then, other times, I could be on the fringes of the “in” crowd, but then I usually kept my mouth shut, fearing that I would say something that would reveal my quirky outsider interests in sci-fi, books, fantasies.

This match was held in the lunch room after school on a Friday, and maybe 20 or so kids, teachers, a few parents were there to watch. They were mostly, I think, from “T’s” seventh grade class. Some of them even hung or sat in the colorful metal grillwork dividing the lunch room from the hallway bordering it. Normally teachers would immediately yell at anyone doing this, but in my recollection, nobody yelled that afternoon.

I don’t think I realized how good a player “T” was until we had gotten into the match a ways. He was damn good. He was the first opponent to deliberately place the ball certain places to confuse me, and to put spins on it. Early in the match I gave up trying to spin the balls back at him, because his spins combined with my spins were like mixing drugs and alcohol, and nothing good came of it. I ended up just trying to hold on, just return the damn ball, just keep it in play. That was all I could do. Man there were some long volleys too. And it never really occurred to me that I would lose. I mean, he was bigger than me, a seventh grader, probably a better ping-pong player when you get down to it; and he was someone I had heard the girls in my carpool from home to school, “K” and “E,” talking about in the hushed, awestruck tones they were learning about from reading Tiger Beat (remember, I was still watching Batman -- I was certainly not the subject of such conversation). But I had beaten the crap out of everyone that came before me and it just never occurred to me that I could walk away from a match having not won. It’s not that I had to muster all my will, or shut out distractions, or assume the Eye of the Tiger. It was just that I was sweating more, and my ass was against a wall, but that wall was blocking me from losing.

I recall actually running back from the table to catch up to balls going past me. Once I really did dive for a ball and roll on the tile floor, but I certainly lost that point. And in my memory, nobody on the sidelines was saying much -- not much cheering or clapping for either of us. It never occurred to me that they were mostly on “T’s” side, but I think they were. He probably really was expected to win.

My teacher from the previous year, Mrs. “B,” said to my Dad later that “T” just couldn’t get anything past me. I won, and everyone was pretty quiet about it, and our parents drove us home. I think maybe it was while going home that it first occurred to me that, “Jesus, that was a ball buster,” though I hardly had such descriptive language at my disposal at the time.

The final was to to be a few school days later, maybe middle of the next week. I was really uptight about it. The other finalist was “Th,” a fifth grader, a very short guy for his age who had an extremely sunny personality, whom everyone liked, who I don’t think was really teased much at all despite his shortness.

After “T”had been such a hard match, I figured it stood to reason that “Th” would be harder, so I made my Dad practice with me far more than he wanted to. He said, “Okay, but you’ll have to do the same for Sidletz.” 8) “Sidletz” (spelling?) was his word for the male child he presumed I would have someday. (Dad came from middle-income Cleveland, and whenever he needed a name for a generic person, someone I might call “Joe Six-Pack,” his name for such a person came out sounding German or Eastern European, like “Frankie Schnitzelhauser.”) I think that prerequisite to this presumption was another presumption, which was that I would date more as a young adult. Well, all I can say to Dad is, we learn to relate on emotional levels by following our parents’ example.

The final was to be held during the school day, with the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades taking their recess periods at the same time so they could all watch. The day started pretty normally, with us sixth graders coming in to our colorful room, hanging out among our desks before class was to start, taking our seats at the bell. The teacher was trying to start class when “J,” who tended to blut things out without forewarning, said, “Hey, today’s the championship!”

This had been the only thing on my mind that day. 9) Like so many things things that preoccupied me then and now, it was weighing heavily in my chest, and I had kept quiet about it. Bearing that emotional burden, I was suddenly also in the unusual position of having all eyes on me. And they were chanting my three letter, one syllable name like Eastern Bloc sports fans cheering a figure skater. The teacher motioned for them to stop, then quickly gave up and smiled and let it go on for maybe 30 seconds. And then our class finally calmed down, and in the relative quiet, we could hear the fifth graders through the wall chanting “Th’s” name.

The clowns in our class would not be outdone. “Let’s pick him up,” they said, and came at me, and I was sort of in shock, maybe a milder version of how I was 20 years later when 10) I was held up at gunpoint.

My chair was lifted with me in it. I knew this would be awkward, and an instant later, the mob realized this as well and separated me from the chair. I kind of wiggled to get away, and I was probably smiling by now. “W,” a huge guy who had been held back a grade, came up behind me and lifted me, and others joined him to carry me out into the hallway. Fifth graders heard the commotion, saw us, and went back to their room to carry “Th” as well. I was carried maybe only 50 feet or so down the hall, then set down, and we all went back to class and took our seats, flushed, as if coming back from recess.

“What would we do if [Elrond] were up against ‘K,’” one of the athletic boys said. He was referring to the dick who had once had the broken leg. “K” was slouched in his seat though, doing something in his lap, maybe playing one of those pocket video games. He looked up, looked back at the game. He had been out of the tournament for a while and had no interest in it.

I knew what they would have done if it were me against “K” in the finals. The louder, athletic kids would have favored him, and some quieter ones would have supported me. Our class would have been divided. Aware of this sectarian split, there would not have been much pre-game cheering for either of us, but the athletic boys would have slapped Hi-Fives with “K” behind the divider leading to the sink and coat closet area, and I might have come around the corner to find them leaning against the counter there. I would have stopped, sensing I was not welcome, and they would have pushed past me, punching my shoulder as they went by, not punching very hard, but enough to possibly 11) make me cry depending on my emotional makeup of the moment.

From the first volley, I found “Th” to be no match for me. I could not believe he had made it to the finals. As expression of my disbelief, I smashed a few of his lousy serves into the corners of his court, then restrained myself to winning the rest of the points without fanfare.

Afterwards, back in class, “E” the Tiger Beat reader, who happened to have a seat next to me, something I found rather thrilling even that year, was kind of cold toward me for a while. Then she said, “Gah, you didn’t have to kill him. You could have let him get a few points.”

I had some sinister reaction I could not voice, but now, in adulthood, I can. It is, “’K’ got to kick kids with his leg brace and take our yogurt from us. ‘J’ gets to disrupt class whenever he wants. Other ‘J’ gets to come into the room on Monday morning and hold his hands in the air, making peace signs, because of his home runs he hit the previous Friday. ‘T’ gets the girls talking about him in hushed tones. But I don’t get to kick someone’s ass in ping-pong? Well tough shit. I kicked it. But don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll go back to being mostly inconsequential now. I won’t be any more trouble to your sense of justice."

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Dude, Grow Your Own

This Fourth of July, Elrond Hubbard celebrates the proud Americans who look at the sorry state of everything and say, “Fuck it. We’ll grow it ourselves.”

‘Cause let’s face it, folks. The world is going to Hell faster than you can say Larsen B Ice Shelf; to shit faster than you can say National Pork Producers Council.

Elrond Hubbard knows he does his part, driving an SUV. And he knows he consumes a buttload of gas in it, what with all his driving to Raleigh to pick up gear, taking it to Sanford or Rolesville or Chocowinity to shoot a video, and taking it back to Raleigh. And while he’s on the road, he consumes an assload of fast food.

He sits in left-turn lanes in Cary wondering where it all ends. Everyone takes twice as long to get to work now because they have to stop in at Starbucks. This means more people turning left, more assholes gunning back out into traffic, more cars idling in drive-throughs, more windshields out there at once reflecting glare into each other like infinity mirrors facing across the intersections.

Elrond Hubbard looks into that heat at 8:00 AM, when it’s already 90 degrees and hazy, and he thinks that all we are doing in the Middle East is stirring the stew. Call him un-patriotic. Call him un-supportive of our troops. Tell him he doesn’t deserve to watch fireworks on Independence Day because he does not honor the war to which they allude. Though we are continually told we are bringing fundamental change to the region, Elrond Hubbard finds himself agreeing with Fred Kaplan’s warning on Slate that, for all the times Bush repeats it, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.”

George Will sees virtually no realistic alternatives to paying high prices for oil from the Middle East. If we really look like we’re getting in to alternative fuels, he says, the Saudis will just lower oil prices to make potential investing in alternative fuels look less appealing. Anyway, where in our lifestyle are the worst impacts to the environment accrued? Perhaps not so much with carbon dioxide from conventional cars, but in the nitrous oxide and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, emitted in the production and delivery of a hamburger; or the stripping of land by the mining of zinc to make batteries for hybrids, he says.

Elrond Hubbard looks into the smog of hopelessness and thinks that the road to true change is paved not by hardliners with their cries for more war, or by those resigned to the status quo, but industrious folks who don’t waste time preaching about how people ought to live and instead look at what we need and say, “Fuck it. Let's just grow it.”

Friend and utilitarian "G" once lived with Elrond Hubbard. Now he runs a non-profit company New Harvest which plans to someday grow meat as tissue culture, relieving the world and its animals of much of the burden and suffering of factory farming.

Cultured meat isn't natural, but neither is yogurt," says [“G” in an interview with Wired.] And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn't natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?

Meanwhile, PetroSun Inc. has been growing crude oil from carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere, in an industrial algae farm of a sort which does not need to be located on cropland, in Opelika, Alabama, which is not in the Middle East. In August of 2007, the company will hold a three-day demonstration of their facility for invited guests who will need to sign non-disclosure agreements. Guests will be presented with samples of this home-grown crude oil which they can test in their own facilities. PetroSun should invite George Will. The company expects to begin selling crude oil to the biofuel industry in the first quarter of 2008. What could be more patriotic than that?

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How to Talk to a Neoconservative (If You Must)

You are washing dishes at the kitchen sink with your step-mother “J” next to you. From the dining room, you hear the first two anti-terrorism propositions related in the previous post, and you get pissed.

You know that “J” does not like political discussions in the family. Once, in the past, you had a raging argument with your father in her presence, and later she told you it was not good for his blood pressure. But another time, Christmas Eve of 2005 to be exact, you stayed up until 3 AM talking to her about why we went to war in Iraq. She had just read America’s Secret War by George Friedman, and her favorite reason for the war was his assessment, in chapter 11, that the source of al Qaeda’s sentiment and funding was really Saudi Arabia, but that we could not attack that country directly and also could not count on it to police al Qaeda itself. So, we needed to stage a victory against some Arab country to show our strength and persuade Saudi Arabia to come back into strong alliance with us.

It would be interesting to know how she feels about this now. While we may have wanted Saudi Arabia to fear our military might and our “freedom,” what they may actually fear is our ability to iraquidate a country, plunge it into chaos that neither we nor it can control. In Iraq we have been like a little kid playing a board game who sees no better option than to upset the board and scatter the pieces.

Of all your parents (two step-, two biological), you feel closest to “J.” She may harbor basic conservative values about God, family, and country, but you know from the fact that she likes all the short story collections you buy for her for Christmas that she understands irony, can accept ambiguity, does not cling to dogma. And she has been relatively silent about U.S. relations in the Middle East lately. You think that maybe she agrees with you more on some issues now, maybe understands your suspicion from the moment our tanks rolled into Iraq that the U.S. does not know what it is doing. But she will not take your side vocally either, because of your father’s blood pressure and whatnot. So you think, standing next to her at the sink, that she does not want you to get involved in the conversation in the next room. But then you hear from the next room the third ridiculous neocon proposal for fixing the Middle East described in the previous post, and you leave the sink and go in.

Step-sister-in-law “E” is running her rant about how we should give safe haven to the women of Iraq, for surely they want the education we would provide to enable them to take control of their own lives. You interrupt. You tell her this sounds like the past neocon scheme hatched in the late ‘90’s to invade southern Shiite Iraq, protect the Shiites from Saddam, let them start the democracy that neocons were certain they would start. Such an arrangement, according to neocons, would be devastating to Saddam’s regime.

“E” puts her hand on your forearm and gives you, surprisingly, an understanding look. She knows how you disagree with her. Three summers ago you said that our country had been hoodwinked into supporting this war, and she said the WMD issue was “academic,” that an evil dictator had been ousted, that she could not count on Democrats to defend her family. Two summers ago she had said that we had to spread self determinism in the Middle East, that it was the only way to protect ourselves, that we were doing it for them, but really we were doing it for ourselves. One summer ago (when she was reading some collection of writings of St. Thomas Aquinas) she said, out of nowhere, that she would not talk about politics.

This summer she is reading A Christian Manifesto and is apparently willing to talk about politics again.

You tell her all neocon expectations for the Iraq war were based on presumptions. Neocons presumed that Iraqi Shiites were ready to start a democracy. Some presumed that if they open up Iraq as a completely free market, that the country would blossom as an example for the rest of the world. But also, you say, some neocons presumed that Iraqi Shiites would accept the Jordanian monarchy as their rule (not a democracy!) as stated by David Wurmser in an essay called “Clean Break” excerpted here at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Still other neocons wanted to install Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi National Congress as the new government. For information on this, see George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate chapters 3 and 4, or Juan Cole here. Both sources do not give any outright quotes from anyone saying the wanted to install Chalabi and the exiles, but there is strong evidence implying that this is true.

You’ve raised your voice at “E.” Tell her that, with respect to each of the neocon presumptions, the invasion of Iraq has had the opposite of the desired effect. Tell her that concurrently to our military involvement in Iraq, that country has become one of the biggest incubators of terrorism the world has ever known. If she wants to continue espousing neocon ideology, it would behoove her to explain what we can do from here forward to reverse this awful trend of increasing terrorism.

She says that we have to stick with it, that we can’t expect positive results so soon. Ask her if she believed Rumsfeld when he said we would be out in 6 months.

“Did he say that?” she says.

And did she believe Wolfowitz when he said we could do it with 150,000 troops?

She looks away. “I didn’t know that.”

Ask her what planet she has been living on. Tell her that, continuing the parade of neocon presumptions, William Kristol and Robert Kagan are now presuming that the turning against al Qaeda by moderate Sunni tribes is a sign that things are going well. Note that, while these genius writers had once cast their lot with Iraqi Shiites, now it is with Sunnis. Ask her what happened the last time the U.S. supported Sunni tribes against a common enemy.

She doesn’t know.

Tell her those were the precursors of al Qaeda. (Read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.)

Tell her you read at least one article per week in The Weekly Standard and The National Review. Ask her if she reads anything outside the conservative media, and she admits she does not.

She starts on the comparison to the American Revolution. “I believe that every human ultimately wants self determinism,” she says. “I believe that democracy is what all people are striving for.”

Tell her you are not an expert on the American Revolution, but ask her if, before we started that war, our thirteen colonial governments were not pretty much running things for themselves. Ask her if it would have worked for France to invade the American colonies, kick England out, and then continue to occupy us and guide us to forming a democracy.

“No, that would not have worked,” she says.

Tell her that before we invaded Iraq, George Packer wrote a New York Times article called Dreaming of Democracy (free account required) which contained the following paragraph:

The chances of democracy succeeding even in Iraq under American occupation are highly questionable, [Thomas] Carothers [of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] argues. War seldom creates democracy; according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, of the 18 regime changes forced by the United States in the 20th century, only 5 resulted in democracy, and in the case of wars fought unilaterally, the number goes down to one -- Panama. Democracy takes root from within, over a long period of time, in conditions that have never prevailed in Iraq. For democracy to have a chance there would require a lengthy and careful American commitment to nation-building -- which could easily look to Iraqis and other Arabs like colonialism. Nor can we be sure that democracy, in Iraq or elsewhere, will lead to pro-American regimes; it might lead to the opposite. ''The idea that there's a small democracy inside every society waiting to be released just isn't true,'' Carothers says. ''If we're pinning our hopes on the idea that this will lead to a democratic change throughout the region, then we're invading for the wrong reason.'' Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment, adds, '''We've suffered so much that the only alternative is democracy' -- as soon as you say it, you realize there's a mile between the beginning and end of that sentence.''

“E” starts on her World War II analogy: we have to fight, we can’t let totalitarianism remain as a threat to us.

Ask her what WWII had that the Iraq war does not have. Tell her it was post war reconstruction. This was why Germany and Japan did not continue to wage war against their neighbors after WWII. This was what has been sorely lacking in the Iraq war.

“Then that’s the State Department’s fault,” she says, and you cut her off. No. The Pentagon suppressed State Department planning for post-war Iraq because it felt that such planning would delay our invasion. (Read The Assassin’s Gate chapters 3 and 4.)

The beach house has been vacated; all other family members are out on the beach. “E” wants to go out there too, so you both go, and while walking along the boardwalk over the barrier dune, she says “Look, I know Rumsfeld was an arrogant jerk.”

Tell her you are very sorry that the Bush administration has screwed up her dreams for a new Middle East. Remind her that at any time, Rumsfeld could have been fired by a discerning president.

“J” walks past you quickly while you are saying this, does not speak to you. You’ve been wondering if she will ask you to stop, but she does not.

Out on the beach, the kids and adults are waving flashlights around or venturing into the darkness to look for crabs. Tell “E” that you hope our country has learned something from our experience in Iraq: that if we invade a country and oust its government, then that whole country becomes our problem; that we can not predict the outcome of an invasion, particularly if we don’t make a very earnest and well-informed investment in the well-being of the people we intend to liberate; that regardless of how much we love freedom and democracy, we can not control how a population will vote, and it is the pseudo democracies of Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinians that are causing more trouble than the entrenched dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Tell her that next time she wants to “help” the people of a country, she needs to first learn all she can about those people, and not just assume that some “Thomas Jefferson” will arise in their midst and steer them toward becoming like us.

You hope, in light of all this, that she does not want to invade Iran.

“No, I don’t want to invade Iran,” she says. “That would be stupid. But we should bomb Damascus into glass,” she says.

WTF? “I can’t believe you said that,” you say. “That is evil.”

She takes it back. “But Syria is totally useless,” she says.

Tell her that Syria is a big “middle manager” in all this. They are not a source of fundamentalism, nor of oil. Their “president” is secular, a former ophthalmologist working in Paris who was called home by his father to succeed him. (All this comes from George Friedman’s America’s Secret War chapter 11.) Syria has its interest in Lebanon, and it has an interest in making money, and it probably enjoys seeing us bogged down in Iraq. Syria is not to be trusted, but should be talked to, because talking is cheaper than fighting, and anyway, as I said, hasn’t our experience in Iraq taught us something about fighting? And mostly, throughout the whole Middle East, people are just trying to live their lives -- make bread, wash clothes, keep a job, raise food, raise kids. A nuclear attack on some population because of it’s dumbass government would be a despicable act and would surely earn us more enemies than it would kill, would kill far more than just our enemies, and earn us the increased distrust of what allies we have left now. Even William Kristol has described himself (to Stephen Colbert) as a no-nuke-neocon.

“E’s” husband “M” comes over. He is holding her toddler son who, “M” says, has been looking for her. “E” turns her attention to him, and you tell her thanks for talking, tell her to read Informed Comment, which she says she will.

You don’t think she will. She will run across his occasional emotionally charged Bush-bashing, and she will write him off as a crazy liberal.

While this discussion has been going heatedly, the rest of the family has been on the fringes, minding its own business -- finishing the dishes, getting the kids ready to go out to the beach, crabbing. None of their comments from political discussions of past summers entered this one -- not the plea “There have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11” as a justification for the Iraq war; not your father’s mantra, “We have to kill them all. Innocent people will die, but that is the way it has been for thousands of years”; not “We have to fight them at the source,” which everyone knows is not what we are doing.

Back in the beach house later, only your father and "J” are in the living room, working a puzzle. You are in the upstairs loft which overlooks the living room when they ask “E” how the discussion went. She says, “Your son is very engaging and well informed,” and you wonder if she knows you are listening.

The thing about neocons is, they want to keep the discussion in the abstract. That is where ideology lies. So, hit them with specifics that they can’t address. And see if they do address it. Give them a chance and listen, ‘cause you might learn something. But be prepared to blow apart the usual comparisons to WWII and the American Revolution, and remember to identify their presumptions as just that, and remind them of how their past presumptions have turned out to be invalid. If all they know comes from Rupert Murdoch outlets (“The Weekly Standard” and “Fox News”) then you’ve got them right where you want them.

Here’s another pro-war mantra that didn’t come up in this discussion. “We can’t cut and run.” Your repsonse for this is, “We can’t keep pretending a generation four war is a generation three war.” This will likely stymie them if they have not read Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and the Stone, a discussion of why insurgents, from communists in China and Vietnam to the Sandinistas to the Iraqis, have been fought ineffectively by superior military powers. I have not finished it yet, but I look forward to posting on it soon.

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Fresh Ideas from Family Beach Week for the Middle East

Step-brother-in-law “R” retold some story about nuclear war that he had gotten somewhere. Do any of you know where this came from? Some movie or short story?

“R” said that in the story, the president is out speaking in some town in America. News comes in of a nuclear missile launch against us from the Middle East. The president and his entourage order retaliatory strikes against the locations that have attacked us; then they leave the town for the safety of the countryside. They find some country restaurant and make that their base of operations. Americans in the restaurant have already seen news of both missile launches on TV, and they are understandably worried. The president tells them everything will be okay. The missiles launched at us, and ours launched in retaliation, are shown as computer graphics on the TV so everyone can watch. American cities are shown to be blown up in computer graphics. The same goes for locations in the Middle East from which the missiles came. Everyone in the restaurant is dismayed except for the president, who tells them again that everything is okay.

Then live video feeds start coming in from the American cities that had been shown to be destroyed. They are unharmed. The missiles launched at us had been duds. But ours launched at the Middle East were real, and those places that launched duds at us are destroyed.

We had made those duds and pretended to lose them in the Middle East to see who would use them against us.

“R” related this story in complete earnestness.

“Oh yeah,” said step-brother “M.” “Just rig a bunch of explosives to blow up when they are being made into IED’s, and let them fall into terrorists’ hands.”

Step-sister-in-law “E” said, “We need to educate their women.” She said their women are sick and tired of being beaten and held back by their husbands. We need to round them up and put them in a safe place, and teach them how to run their own businesses. That would be the thing to do next to begin transforming the Middle East. “’Islam’ means ‘submission,’” she said, smacking one hand into the other. “We should bomb them and educate their women.”

I swear I’m not making this up.

June 28 addendum: Oh, and I forgot to mention, before all this happened, they had the Chronicles of Narnia showing on DVD for the kids. I watched it too because I had not seen it yet, and I had loved the books as a child. While watching, the daughter of aforementioned "E," who, I must mention, is named "Jordan" after a Middle Eastern country, exclaimed, "Aslan is like Jesus except that Jesus was resurrected after three days, and Aslan was resurrected after one day." Her father, aforementioned "M," said, "That's right Honey."

Speaking of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I give it the same assessment I give David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic Dune. Both have great acting and begin with a rich portrayal of the story. In the case of Dune, much of the richness lies in the production design; in Lion, it is in the wonderful casting and performances of the four kids and all the talking animals, the quick and clear building of the story (because, after all, you have to keep kids' attention), the sinister feel of Narnia in winter, the amazing performance of Tilda Swinton as the evil witch. But both movies lose their richness two-thirds of the way through and degenerate into buildup to war and clash between armies. Important events near the end are subsumed by action sequences, and despite these movies' initial nourishment, the sensitive viewer is left with a feeling of having eaten too much cotton candy.

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We Take Time Out for this Important Service Announcement

I worked on this PSA which is running on TV now.


The producers/directors were really nice folks from DC who normally work at high stress making campaign videos on even-numbered years, and do stuff like this on odd-numbered years. I got the impression that they mostly do Democrats' campaigns 'cause they kept talking about working with Clinton, but I'm not sure how it really works. Maybe, up there, an agency doesn't care whom it's working for; or, on the other hand, maybe agencies have to pledge allegiance to one party or another because suspicions of double-crossing could run high. (Down here, I've seen it both ways -- a company that handles only Democrats, and another company that was known once to have competing candidates in their business at the same time -- one in the conference room, one in the editing room, neither knowing the other was using the same company.) Despite the suspected leaning toward Democrats, I think I overheard one of the DC guys saying that he would probably vote Republican in the next election. But in the next breath he said that he didn't know what to do about Iraq, that probably we would have to buy someone off over there. From recent reports, it looks like we're already buying off moderate Sunni tribes who are fighting al Qaeda. Anyone remember what happened the last time we paid for Sunnis to fight an enemy of ours?

Early that morning, we local crew members arrived in our respective cars well ahead of the out-of-town folks, who ran late. I got out of my car squinting into sunlight spread into a blazing wide, white wall by light fog hanging over the fields. I started putting on sunscreen before saying "Hi" to any of the others standing by their cars, but before I had been there long, the farmer came right up to me in silhouette against the white fog and gave me a warm welcome to his farm. That really started the day off well. He was really patient with me wrapping an ace bandage around his belly under his shirt and clipping the transmitter there. His son, who appears in the video, was a wonderful kid, very cooperative, had pretty much the same forthright way with people that his dad had.

We spent forever on that shot where they are spraying the tractor. The DC folks sent out their assistant to buy various sprinkler heads for the hose, and we stood around waiting for her to return. They never did get the light to catch in the spray as well as they wanted.

All day long, the headphone feed for audio track 1 in the camera was flaking out. I couldn't bear to listen to it. Luckily, we didn't really need two tracks and two mics for just one guy's voice, but I recorded two mics/tracks anyway and only listened to track 2. I'm really glad I didn't have two or more people talking on camera because this would have required both tracks to be monitored. It was a rental camera from DC, and they never check those things out before sending them out again, probably. Especially not the audio parts.

I had the second foray of my life into migrant farmworker housing. That was where the bathroom was. The dwelling was a cinderblock building with a concrete floor, maybe a fraying cable-knit rug in the living room, awful smelly couches losing their stuffing, television playing telenovellas even while noone was home to watch, sagging beds -- cots, really -- with paint chipped on their metal frames, mildew in the corners of the hallway near the bathroom, merely a shower curtain over the bathroom doorway and no curtain over the shower stall itself, scary holes chipped into the corners of the bathroom walls and the shower stall harboring rich black growths of mildew, toilet and sink all dirty with chipped porcelain, no soap, a mildewy pull-string on a bare lightbulb overhead. Maybe there were no screens over the open windows.

At siesta time, the farmworkers came back to this dwelling, riding in the back of a pickup truck. I had expected them to be young scrawny guys, the kind of folks I imagine might be relatively willing to tolerate these accommodations as long as they could head to town on the weekend to let loose a little. But they were middle aged, a bit on the rotund side, all with straw hats and matching blue button-down shirts and blue jeans, all pretty clean looking. In my quick sighting of them, they did not appear to be the types to let loose much at all. I imagined them going out to eat on a Saturday, cheaply, and sitting around with beers watching other people let loose, but not doing much themselves. They would know how to pace themselves. The austerity of life would help with that -- with so little to do, nothing around but the fields you work in, you don't feel a need to rush off to do something else. You take your time, pace yourself so you don't wear out too soon. When you've been doing this work a few years, as I think they have, you get more done while moving slower anyway. At midday, they lie around on whatever bed or couch they find at the house and watch the blinged-out babes on TV. Same for evenings, I guess. I don't know how they get food on the farm. I don't think I saw a kitchen in the house.

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I Will Not Be Silenced

I am Elrond Hubbard and occasionally I speak. Last night I spoke on neoneocon and this morning when I went to see if there were any follow-up comments to my comment, I saw that she had deleted me! The nerve.

Now, if you're smart, you'll stop reading this posting of mine right now, because you know better than to get your knickers in a snit arguing with ideologues. But if you're dumb like me, you'll keep reading 'cause you can't keep from letting the petty comments of others get under your skin.

Neoneocon says she blogs to describe her own transition to neoconservatism and to provide a forum for others. (Note the self-centered perspective. Are blogspot, typepad, wordpress not already the providers of forums for others?) Presuming that I could be one of the "others" on her forum, I responded to one of her postings describing a walk she had taken in Brooklyn. If her blog consisted only of such postings, then she would be a harmless blog of the "I had Cornflakes for breakfast" variety that 'deep trouble pledges not to become. But most of her postings are superficial, voluminous abstractions purposing to give support to what she calls The Long War.

It is pointless to comment on one of her Long Postings, because these draw so many comments that mine would be buried. But I did comment on her walk in Brooklyn posting. Here is what I wrote, as near as I can remember it.

Wait, I get it! Your walk is like The Long War! The heat is the constant attempt by altuslibs to detract from the war effort. The breeze and shade are signs of hope: the rallying against al Qaeda of Sunni tribesmen in Anbar, and the agreement of the cabinet on an oil bill (which is now stymied in parliament).

Your abstract comments really help to simplify a complex situation in the Middle East. It's like you say -- The Long War really is like the Jews wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. If only Muslims could draw the same inspiration from the Bible that we do. Then their arrival at peace and the promised land would be assured! After all, we're doing this for them . . .

There is plenty of mud slinging going on in her comments, so it's hard to believe that my sarcasm was so out of place that she had to delete it.

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iraq·ui·date

i-'rä-kw&-"dAt
transitive verb

1. to dissolve (an organization or entity) because certain threats, which are exacerbated in its absence, are erroneously thought to be associated with it

2. to disband a defeated army and allow its members to become adversaries anew

3. to liberate (people or peoples) to pay the cost of freedom

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Check Out This Dress!

This American tango routine is the fourth dance demonstration my partner and I have done. We did this back in February this year. Thanks to her for getting me into this, for all this dancing we've been doing, for the longest running partnership I've had with any person for any reason. And thanks to the cameraman for taping a rehearsal and traveling with us that cold night to make this video. Your smooth operation brings tremendous improvements to our performance!

As always, we felt really good after we did it, but watching the video revealed lots of things to improve. Then compressed video, the great equalizer, skips enough frames to conceal some of these blemishes, and makes everything look more snappy overall! Watch it here, or on YouTube where it's a little smoother. (And I have to say, if you watch it on YouTube, then check out some of the wonderful tango videos that appear in the "Related Videos" list just to its right. Lots of really awesome performances there.)



We've been learning the Dance Vision (DVIDA) American Silver syllabus for a few years now, and many of the moves in this routine come from that. But while our past mambo and cha-cha routines consisted mostly of syllabus moves with slight variation, we really tried to really cater this routine to the music whole-hog.

And this time, the music has many varied moods. You've heard of Cell Block Tango? Well this is the cell phone tango. I don't know why we chose "La Cumparasita" by Rodriguez, but I do remember the day my partner brought in a CD with 6 different versions of this song by various orchestras for us to choose from. Once we picked that, we had to make up the routine. My partner can make something up in an instant -- you could put on any song, any style, she would not have to have heard it before, and she could dance something to it that looks like a planned routine. So she improvised a lot, and where we could we brought in a portion of a syllabus move. There was also a move she had seen on a TV dancing shows that she wanted to use, and for the softer middle section we wanted to bring in some Argentine tango which I had had a tiny bit of instruction in, and have since taken up again. (This Argentine part could use a lot of improvement, and I'd like to revisit it in the future.)

For my part in it, I kept saying things like, "This is cool, but we gotta do something that reflects that little run in the music there." Or, "We gotta do pivots here, so that means we have to take out 4 measures of something earlier." One day she just told me to go home, work on it, and have it straightened out when we met again. I made an Excel spreadsheet with each column being a beat, eight beats to a measure, one measure per row. In most of the boxes, I wrote a description of what we were doing at that moment. I played the music over and over, moved my measures around, worked it out so it all fit.

We had the routine ready to demonstrate in January, but I got work that day and could not do it. So it was put off to February, and in the extra month, we added more stuff. Then one day we had someone videotape it, and it looked like crap. We had made up this bitch of a routine, and we could hardly do it. That was seriously one of the most depressing things that has happened to me in, say, the past half year. (Which I guess means things were going okay, overall, since this hardly qualifies as real hardship.) At that point we had just two more weeks before the February demonstration. And we never really know how much we'll be able to practice in a given week, because so much of my work comes up at the last minute. But we got it together, had it taped again the next week, and it looked much better.

Right now, there are no more routines on the horizon. We really have to get this syllabus done, get tested, get it out of the way so we can start learning some new stuff.

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"We Got Attacked And Had To Respond"

Some folks say that about the Iraq war. I got into it on someone else's blog, and spent so much effort on a mere comment that I decided to paste it up here.

Yes, I understand that we are actually threatened to some degree by enemies in the Middle East. But in the wake of our invasion of Iraq, that country has become one of the biggest incubators of terrorism the world has known. (Maybe not the very biggest.) Just in the past few days, the Saudi minister of the Interior said that the lax security in Iraq has created a fertile ground for terrorists and a great danger to the region.

Anyone who understood that region before we invaded is not surprised by what has happened. Journalist George Packer published an article in the New York Times Magazine before our invasion called Dreaming of Democracy (free login required) in which several experts on democracy said that the ingredients for democracy do not exist in Iraq, that politics would take the form of vigilantism if we did not establish strong security right away. Also, in his archives from before the invasion, Juan Cole predicted much of what is happening now. Here is the permalink to Cole's essay called "The Risks of Peace, the Costs of War." Read this and try to tell me that no one could have known we would get into this mess in Iraq. Cole said that if we invade Iraq, we are likely to exacerbate the problem of terrorism. He also acknowledged the depravity of Saddam's regime -- he is not coddling our enemies here, as pro-war folks may say about him. He is understanding the complexity of the country and, to give my own summary, saying that we don't know enough about what we are doing to take on this task.

And according to George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, in the meeting with Bush and Cheney where Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya said that we would be greeted as liberators, there were two other Iraqi exiles (Hatem Mukhlis and Rend Rahim) who issued warnings: if we did not garner respect within two months of invading, we would have another Mogadishu on our hands; if we disbanded the army, we would be viewed as occupiers, not liberators; that tribal loyalties were very important to Iraqis; that none of the exiles that the Bush administration was listening to had been in Iraq for decades, so none of them really knew their countrymen that well any more.

But Cheney chose to listen only to Makiya, ironically the most liberal and idealistic of the Iraqi exiles. Cheney repeated Makiya's words to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in the famous greeted as liberators statement.

Meanwhile, the intelligence about the existence of WMD's in Iraq was not conclusive. We could also not confirm their absence. But given this uncertainty, plus the warnings about the dangers of an invasion, I am very surprised that anyone, conservatives especially, thought the risk was worthwhile -- or, at least, that it was worthwhile without sending plenty of troops to make darn sure that we would be able to make the country secure, and without a very comprehensive and thorough plan for post-war reconstruction.

So no, I'm not convinced that our invasion was a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. Honestly, it really does seem to be the pursuit of a neocon dream which had been written about long before 9/11, at the Project for a New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute, to name just two places. Go back and read old William Kristol/Robert Kagan articles for a good laugh about how Shiites would establish a democracy on their own if we liberated them.

By invading Iraq, we took a huge chance. The results of our invasion are commensurate with our government's understanding of Iraq, and its planning for the war.

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Like Hydrocortisone for Handgun and Crackwhoreation

There's this new venue at our town's most dilapidated area, the heart of our decay, the corner of Handgun and Crackwhoreation. I have never dared to stop there. I drive through some mornings, see the folks hanging around, and presume that they convene there because the location offers the same things you can get down the street in jail: tattoos, religion, and lots of iron bars (over the storefronts). I'd see the bright yellow Cadillac parked, and presume where the money for it had come from.

Now, some folks like to talk a little smack about the "Creative Class" rising to possess our city. I may have slung a few stones myself, as it seems, you can stick some mic stands and speakers out anywhere, generate a little feedback, and the hipsters will come and sit on the pavement and clap like it's bible school.

But tonight I went to this venue at this dilapidated corner, and I'm here to tell you, while hipsters may swing in many diverse directions, the ones who opened this venue have some serious balls. They have gone to this place where no one has ever heard of an espresso machine, where there's not a Prius in sight, where one might feel lucky to be treated to a mere homophobic or racist slur rather than a bullet -- and they have actually started a club for local music, bicycle repair, and general love of one's fellow humans. And a contingent of the creative class comes out of their downtown lofts and cafes at ATC to attend. None of the folks I used to see hanging around this street corner were present tonight. Maybe the indie rock scared them off. I've heard classical music can be used to scare teenagers out of parking lots, but this is ridiculous. And what's truly amazing is, tonight, I saw this band Watercolors which has no website that I can find, and they actually sing with melody, harmony, and good intonation, something I hardly expect find on Franklin or Ninth, let alone here.

So keep it rolling and let's see where this venue takes us. If there ever were a locale that needed an influx of the creative class, it's the intersection of Handgun and Crackwhoreation, and what do you know, the class is fluxing in and making a stand.

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Like Hydrocortisone from the DOT

I have often thought that if the cuticle on my right middle finger would grow back, that would be a sign that my eczema has completely subsided. It is from the juncture of nail and skin on this finger that the condition seems to emanate and spread, not traveling down the middle finger and back up the next, but jumping from fingertip to fingertip as a forest fire from treetop to treetop.

For years, in our city, we have suffered an I-85 fractured and chopped, stricken with a rash of orange barrels. Birth pangs of a new freeway some called it, but most just bitched. Many times, while running late for a job, I found my exit ramp had changed like a river in an overnight flood, and myself in the wrong lane and having to backtrack.

It was the Guess Road interchange that was the worst, and had been the worst before the work began. Of all the city streets connected to I-85, Guess was most potted, its lanes the most constraining, causing the most backups for turning left. The renovation process brought even more constriction of lanes, more awful gouges in the pavement, the biggest flareup of orange barrels. This was where, most likely, you would find the very ramp you needed closed, with no alternative provided -- just drive past, turn around, come back, and if you don’t like it, tough toenails, we’ve got a job to do.

About the Washington Street bridge being closed for years, friend “S” said that it was a sign of extreme incompetence. He had never heard of road repairs taking so long. As for me, I live two blocks from that bridge, and I had never crossed it in my life. Now it’s back, wider than before, with an extra cross-hatched no-man’s lane in the middle for safety, and extra shoulder width on the sides for bicycles or maybe just safe walking, plus sidewalks on each side. I now do walk out on that bridge and admire our interstate.

We’ve got handsome brick sound barriers that will glow burnt orange in the summer evenings, echoing the color of the haze in the sky. We’ve got crape myrtles all down the center. Where else on earth do you have crape myrtles all down the center? If they like CO2, heat, and humidity, they’re in for a joyous summer.

Friend “G” always hated the 15-501 northbound to I-85 northbound entrance ramp; now, he says, the ramp itself has as many lanes as the interstate used to have, and the interstate at that portion now has, like, 4 lanes.

From the Washington street bridge, counting the lanes is like counting stripes in a suit. Your eye tends to skip a few, there are so many.

And that Guess Road interchange? Now Guess has two through lanes going each way, plus the left-turn lanes going each way, plus a large median with a brick border and plantings of shrubbery and flowers.

Our disease has been cured at its center, and we can all enjoy a safer, more supple, wrinkle-free, youthful interstate-driving experience. Passers-through may not be inclined to stop in our city, but they will certainly be inclined to pass back and forth before continuing on their way.

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One of Those Days

I was called Sunday about a job Tuesday. I said I could do it, but that I don't have equipment, so I hoped I could get that together on Monday. The job would have two or three people talking on camera and the producer warned that there would be a few wide shots. I said that for those wide shots I would probably rely on wireless mics. To this, the producer replied, "I am not a wireless mic person. Don't you hate the sound of wireless mics?"

There are darn few people who make small videos who like boom better than wireless. I've had reality TV producers tell me to put the boom away. They just want the camera to fly, they want the body mics to get everything, the sound guy to stand back and be neither seen nor heard. It doesn't matter to them that mixing body mics makes them sound phasey, or that one person's coughing ruins another's good sound bite. They just need those quick bites they can grab, like when the daughter goes into the newly remodeled kitchen and exclaims, "Mom, you've got THREE ovens!"

Here was a producer with the opposite leanings. Old school. Like they did it in the day when boom mics ruled the Earth, and wirelesses were mere rodents lurking in the underbrush, running from everything. When I first worked on a movie in audio about 15 years ago, I was a cableperson for a sound guy who hated wirelesses and pretty much trusted all audio to one boom operator, sometimes two, with me filling in as second boom. Sometimes he did use up to 3 wireless mics, but these were mostly on outdoor wide shots. And sometimes he preferred to plant a mic on the set -- in a windowframe or on a column -- than to put it on a person. Constantly frustrated by wireless mics, he would sit at his audio cart and, during down time, fuss with them, trying to figure out ways to put them on people to make them sound decent. I think this is the biggest challenge I face too.

So anyway, here was a producer who wanted me to make the boom work. But we decided we'd still get wirelesses, because we wanted to be sure we had it all covered. Who knew what surprises the lighting guys would make for me, throwing lights everywhere and possibly thinking that I could just stick wirelesses on the actors.

I had to get up at 7:30 am Monday just to get ready to make calls at 8am. At 8 I left several messages about gear. Lights were already coming from one rental company, so it might make sense to rent audio gear from them. But they only had two units of the latest model of fancy-schmancy wireless systems, and I would need three. The cameraman for the job was known to have some wirelesses, but his probably were not this new model, and there is a theoretical problem that can develop when mixing the old and the new, because the new have a 3 millisecond delay in their sound, and as every sound guy knows, 3 milliseconds is just enough. Then there was this other company in Raleigh that I work for a lot that has 4 of these top-model wireless systems all rigged up in a 4-channel mixer bag with ergonomic shoulder harness. I tentatively asked if I could just make my own arrangement with this company, and the producer said sure, go ahead with that.

Luckily, this audio package was available.

But still, the boom mic needed to be a really good one, and the company in Raleigh does not have a really good one -- just the kind that everybody uses. So I arranged to get the really good one from the rental company providing the lights.

So then I had to wolf down breakfast and meet my dance partner at her and her husband's new house. We used to practice at a theater space in town, but she has left that place and plans to build her own studio on her property. Until that is built, she has to teach her students wherever she can, and she and I practice in her bare wood-floored living room. Their new house is a ways out of town, so now it takes 20 minutes for me to meet her.

Knowing what all I had left to do that day, it was hard for me to concentrate on how much turn to make on each step of each move of American Rumba, which is what we have space to work on in her living room. 5/8 turn here, 1/4 turn there. This is what we are memorizing for the American Silver Certification. I only had an hour to spend with her before I had to leave and bust-ass to the next city over to pick up the gear for Tuesday.

I made it there, got the gear, turned around and came back partway along the interstate and stopped to do a half-day afternoon gig at a major networking corporation in their studio. They do live webcasts from there, and these are the most stressful gigs I get these days, because I have to have deep understanding of the audio routing that someone else made up, and I have to react quickly and pot up and down on the fly, and sometimes insert sound effects like applause, and cross-fade to musical selections or "commercials," while sitting right next to about three folks who outrank me give me sometimes conflicting information on how things work, or what to do next. And there are all these voices going at once -- the ones on the studio monitors, the ones on the feed from the central corporate office, the people in the room, and for some reason, somebody down the row from me had a radio going.

Anyway, that went okay. Then I had to get to the rental company in the next town over in the other direction, and get the really nice boom mic.

Then I had to get toilet paper because we were out, and we had two prospective housemate interviews to do that evening.

Then I had to get home and be there for the two interviews. I and the current housemates quickly swept a little, put toilet paper on the rolls in the bathrooms, took out the kitchen trash. I also brought in the audio gear before the first interview and rigged the mic from one place to the boom and mixer from the other place and checked all that out.

The interviews went okay, but what with everyone's uncertain plans, we don't have anything nailed down yet.

Then I had to make dinner, at 10 pm.

All day I had been trying to memorize the actors' lines (5 pages or so) for Tuesday, because I would have to operate boom. I rarely have boom-intensive days, so I really wanted it to go well. But I've been having terrible problems concentrating on anything these days, 'cause my mind is always jumping around and obsessing. Last summer I tried two different kinds of ADD medicine, and they didn't make any difference.

Today, Tuesday, I got up at 5am and studied the lines some more, ate breakfast and showered, and went to the job. I was 10 minutes late because of a confusing thing on Google Maps' directions that I should not have let confuse me.

Setup was easy there. We had to wear our socks because we could not get the white-painted floor for chroma-keying dirty. I paced around and continued to work on the lines.

And I was not my best, not really. It had been so long since I had used this really nice boom mic, and I had forgotten how sensitive it is. Sheesh. I had boomed with it a lot of times in the past, but never had to do so while carrying the mixer and receivers in a bag slung around my shoulders. It was a lot to think about. I kept shaking the boom and jarring the cable inside it, something that causes no trouble on common boom mics, but on this one causes a rattle.

So I was cautious in the first scene. I didn't grab all the off-camera lines on boom like I usually try to do, but I got them the on-camera stuff okay.

The second scene had one actor sneezing loudly and the other comforting him in a softer voice. I had to position the boom to even these levels out some, and I did manage this okay. So I felt better about that.

The third scene had lots of moving in and out for me to cover the actors standing far apart. The rattly boom was extended nearly all its 16 feet, and I was springing back and forth on my toes, in socks, again with the mixer and receivers suspended from my shoulders. By the end of the last scene for the day, I felt like I was kind of in the boom operating groove again. But I had to turn that nice boom mic back in, and I won't be using it for a while. I'm back to the mundane interviews and simple shots for now.

After work, I went to another Argentine tango lesson. Then I was sitting at home eating fruit and yogurt, with the audio gear from the company in Raleigh on the other end of the dining room table. I was looking at it, thinking about how I had picked it all out for this company a year ago, when we were getting very demanding reality TV work and we barely had the gear to cover it, and a deal fell through one time to rent gear for a job, so the company owner told me to tell him what to buy and he would get it. So now there's the gear. If I were to buy my own, I'd get the same stuff. But then, so many folks around here have gear and want me to use theirs, I probably would not be able to pay off my own gear if I had it. And this particular gear from Raleigh doesn't get enough work anyway for itself. So it makes sense that I rent it from them when I do need it.

It's just that I imagine having gear like it. 4 excellent wireless mics and a mixer that you can really put your name on, 'cause it will last probably 8 years in rough conditions. Of course, those mics and that mixer allow you to mix 3 or 4 wireless mics together in one muddy track which sounds mediocre at best, and terrible to a studio recordist. And the wireless systems don't sound as good as a $25.00 hardwire connection, and cost 100 times that. Still, with such mics and that mixer, you can keep up with today's wild and crazy camerapeople and talent, and that's pretty much what you gotta do in audio these days. You get hired if you can keep up. Nobody ever gives feedback on audio quality.

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The Scum is Coming

Readers of this blog well understand the significant role that algae cultivation could play as an alternative energy source. For one thing, it can grow in human-made tubes or ponds or other containers on land that’s not good for much else. In our country, who was relegated to poor land? Native Americans. What can you do on a reservation? You can gamble; and now, you can also cultivate algae. Don’t believe me? read this.

Meanwhile, that same oil drilling company is making arrangements to start algae farms in Australia.

And they’re doing it in Alabama!

That other company mentioned earlier in this blog that is using power plant emissions to grow algae (cutting emissions drastically and producing crude oil and feedstock that the power plant can sell) has built a facility in (these links are to pdf’s) Arizona and is going to build one in Louisiana.

And there’s someone else in on the smokestack emissions to biofuel game.

This editor says that the means to combat global warming will be cheaper in the future than in the present day, so it is economically feasible to wait until the future to take these steps. But I say, how will we know how to make it cheaper in the future if we don't start making our mistakes now? You never know what you're in for until you get started on it. I am very happy that some companies are starting algae farms today, rather than tomorrow. This is what will make tomorrow's algae farms more efficient.

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