O shiri no itami

 Actually, no; the pain is in the leg, not in the ass.

This was this morning; left calf - technically it's the "gastrocnemius", the big muscle of the calf - wrapped up and laid over a cold pack, watching poor Everton take a Manchester United hiding.

To get here...well, this winter I went back to the beginner kendo class run through the Parks & Recreation district out in Beaverton by the westside kendo club, Obukan.

I played kendo at Obukan thirty years ago, back when I lived out there (married to a different woman, but that's a whoooooole 'nother story...). I never progressed beyond Rokkyu - the lowest rank - but enjoyed the hell out of it.

(I enjoyed the hell out of the marriage, too, mind, but that's really a whole 'nother story...)

Then I got divorced, moved away, started playing soccer, wrecked my hips, got them replaced and then my knees started to go, got them replaced (in the process somewhere changing women, which is a whole 'nother 'nother story), and then retired. 

With more time on my hands I started thinking about kendo again.

I fenced European style in college - just foil, and just for my own entertainment - and studied karate in the Shorin-ryu style after I got out of the active service, but something in kendo scratches me in all the right places more or less.

My only real question was whether I could return to being a good kendoka after thirty years and with legs full of replacement parts.

Well...so far so good, until last night, when I managed to strain something in my leg, probably pushing my dead ass forward, since the left left is the "pushing" leg in kendo. 

Ouch.

What was kind of odd is that when I played goalkeeper I was always banging myself up. Broken fingers, bruised shoulders, damaged knees...I was the king of pain, and all of the dings were just a thing. 

I'd put my knee braces on - I had two huge rubber-and-metal ones that pretty much took all the weight off the knee - and ice them down, wrap up the shoulder, get the fingers set, and go off to work.

It's been a decade since I've had a sports injury, and I'd forgotten how irking they are. And I'm ten years older, too, so instead of walking it off I've been sort of hobbling around and that as little as possible...

Anyway, just an idle sort of Saturday, and a kind of transition piece away from the politics. I'll be back later in the week with something more hopeful.

Oh, and the title? It's supposed to be "pain in the ass" in Japanese, tho after poking around a bit it sounds like there isn't an exact equivalent for the meaning of the term; the closes seems to be うざい ("Uzai"), which is a contraction of "urusei", "rude" or "noisy", and to bark "uzai" at someone is apparently a way of letting them know they're being a pain in your ass.

Or leg.

Which is what I need to limp off and ice down. No, thanks, I can see myself out. I'm good

Vous pouvez me demander ce que vous voulez, sauf le temps

Every year at this time I get to read through a round of e-mails and/or Facebook posts about the change from Standard to Daylight time.

DST is, admittedly, a sort an oddity. My understanding is that it was one of those wartime expedients first cooked up in 1918 and repeated in the Forties to reduce the use of things like coal and electricity. The mystery to me is how it generated a constituency to be continued after 1945.

I admit to liking the long sunny evenings under DST while not minding the dark mornings. But there seems to be enough bitching and moaning every year on this weekend that I can't imagine that mere preference was enough. And it seems that the U.S. largely went off DST in the late Forties and returned in the mid-Sixties...why? The Wiki entry on "Daylight saving time" says that:

"(i)n the mid-1980s, Clorox (parent of Kingsford Charcoal) and 7-Eleven provided the primary funding for the Daylight Saving Time Coalition behind the 1987 extension to US DST, and both Idaho senators voted for it based on the premise that during DST fast-food restaurants sell more French fries, which are made from Idaho potatoes."

Clorox? French fries? WTF? Clorox and Idaho solons managed to push DST through the national legislature? Seriously?

My thought would be that if everybody who wants DST to be a thing wanted more people to want DST to be a thing they'd push to make it happen they'd push for it to happen Friday afternoon at 4pm instead of in the pre-dawn of a Sunday morning. Push beer-thirty up one hour? Where do I sign up for that..?

From The Past Is Never Really Past...a short history of Trump Steaks^TM. Best quote from the link?

"Martha Stewart, however, had perhaps the most unique response to Trump Steaks. In an interview with Joan Rivers, the lifestyle mogul and former Apprentice contestant replied “Too bad!” when Rivers said that the steaks weren’t actually from a slaughtered Donald Trump."

Sorry, but there's not enough Trump Vodka to wash that down...

Speaking of nasty water-like things, here's an interesting version of DST; again from the Wiki entry:

"Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes."

There are other applications I'd be okay with time working that way, too. Hmmm...

The hip seems to be rehabbing decently. I've been trying to get up and walk on it per the orthopod's direction, and it moves fairly well with relatively minimal discomfort. It's still a little unsteady but I've ditched the walker for a cane. If I work it too hard as I did yesterday it's achy enough that falling asleep is difficult without 5mg of hillbilly heroin.

The photos that I've included with this post are from the day out that Mojo, Missy and I enjoyed yesterday. A couple of rounds at Trackers Portland indoor archery range let our Inner Mongol out for a stroll, followed by a trip south to Aurora, where the Colony museum and the local handspinners were having a field day that included everything crafy, from dropspinning and weaving through adorable furry bunnies. We all enjoyed the hell out of it, especially crafty little Miss who acquired her own backloom and has been weaving away on her doorknob ever since...

Right now I'm killing time waiting for friends to come over for the Timbers match this afternoon. Mojo and Missy are out at Crystal Springs feeding the ducks, and The Boy and his pal Michael are playing some sort of hack-n-slash videogame.

Just another Daylight Sunday.

Friday night at the Ramada

Appears to be some sort of party night; the hallways are pounding with running feet and shouting kids. I have no idea what the hell of going on but it sure as dammit is noisy.

Meanwhile I've finished my daily work writeup and have an off day tomorrow - rain is forecast for tonight and the excavator doesn't want to slop around in the muck - so I need to find some time to kill, and blogging is as good a time-suck as any.

I don't recall where I found this; researching the Philippine Sea, I suspect.

It must have been a hell of a hot day over Rabaul, and the flak must have been light. Either that or our man was bolder than I would have been. I'd have strapped a steel pot over my crotch, at the very least. War's all very manly, but let's not let it incapacitate you for the manliest sport of all...

The other funny thing that this skyclad air gunner makes me think of is that it seems like an unbreakable rule of military service that the more chickenshit the conflict the more, well, chickenshit there is. I'm not sure whether that term has survived the twenty years since I first heard it, but "chickenshit", in Army terms, meant petty harassment over uniforms and appearance.

Look at the photos of GIs in Iraq or Afghanistan or, well, pretty much anywhere the U.S. Army has deployed in the past fifteen years. Everybody STRACed down tight; chinstraps fastened, Oakleys on, flak vests strapped up.

Then go back and look at the pictures from damn near any Army or Marine unit anywhere in in the world between about 1943 and 1945. Half the time those guys look like hobos who have hit the Army-Navy Store on jumble sale day; blouses un-bloused, helmets or those weird knitted "jeep caps" or just bare-headed, every variation of "uniform" you can think of and some you probably couldn't if you sat down all day with both hands.

I'm not sure how much of this was just the effects of having a gajillion guys in uniform and the near-impossibility of trying to make them all look the same (tho God knows Georgie Patton tried) or whether it had more to do with having more important things to worry about - like getting their asses whipped by truly dangerous enemies - than looking pretty.

I think I found this on one of my friends' Facebook feeds while I was dorking around on the Internet - an occupational hazard of being far from home with nothing else to do. No ulterior motive other than pure enjoyment.

One of the fun things about having older kids other than not having to wipe asses is that they start interacting with you as people rather than just as a sort of parasitical life form that relies on your for food, shelter, and emotional nurture.

My daughter, for example, has developed a truly adorable talent for drawing - which is NOT my doing, by the way; she started sketching well before seeing any of my stuff - and now surprises me with her little cards and cartoons when I go away. She tucks them into my bag, usually early in the morning when she gets up. Here's one from her latest going-away card:

In case the word-balloons are a little difficult to read, the gist is that our two cats are arguing - not an unusual situation - about who is fuzzier...at which point some sort of TV moderator-cat shows up and announces that they are in a cuteness contest, which both Drachma and Nitty ignore. I'm not sure which is better, her cat-characters themselves or the whole comic set-up. Either way, she's a clever little Missy, that little Missy.

Saw my first Carson bumper sticker today which just served to remind me of 1) what a remarkable liar that man is, and 2) what an amazingly stupid creature the average American voter is. I mean, c'mon! If you haven't scraped off that damn sticker after the mad doctor has denied evolution, claimed the pyramids were grain silos, stated that he was offered a "scholarship" to West Point (hint; there ain't no such thing), and shown that his understanding of the U.S. fiscal system is about on the level as a milk-cow's understanding of the Nicene Creed you're a goddamn moron and should be trusted with a vote like a Capuchin monkey should be trusted with a live grenade.

Speaking of odd things...

...I have NO idea what this is or why it is. Some sort of 1950's weightlessness test with a cat for a subject? Wing-wiper humor? I got nothin'...but it's a great image.

Another great, if odd, image:

June Haver - born June Stovenour of Rock Island, Illinois - the "Pocket Grable" some time in the Forties. I'm not sure what the hoops for the hoopskirt are all about, but presumably a publicity snap for some sort of costume picture. Very pretty woman, but her story is more interesting than her looks. She seems to have had a very pallid interest in filmmaking, and she when she married Fred MacMurray (yeah, the "My Three Sons" dad guy...) she dropped out altogether.

The MacMurray-Haver menage sounds fascinating. MacMurray was a real red-meat Republican of the Taft variety and both financially brilliant and a guy who sounds kind of neurotic neat-freak and skinflint; June says that "When I married Fred, he was terribly set in his ways. He was a fuss-budget. He hadn't quite progressed to being a lint picker, but he was already an ash-tray emptier, and that's just about as set in his ways as a man can get." Supposedly one of the keys to his wealth was that he never spent anything he didn't have to. The cast and crew of his pictures commented that not only did he typically brown-bag his lunches but that in the spring they would typically contain a colored Easter egg weeks or months after the holiday rather than waste the technicolor henfruit.

Mind you, June's other career option was to become a nun - she was a devout Roman Catholic and had her share of romantic tragedies - and tho she did take vows she left after a couple of months, so maybe MacMurray was easier to get along with than her Heavenly Bridegroom. Maybe. She is said to have made the comment that she had asked her adopted daughters not to write a Mommy Dearest about her, but that “I told them if they wanted to write about their dad, that was OK.”

I'm still going to have to figure out how to kill the day tomorrow between sleeping-in and the Timbers semifinal match tonight. Which reminds me...

There's another Timbers fan - a fella by the name of Diskin - who domes some wonderfully creative things with standard or stock images or old posters to make, well, Timbers Propaganda. Here's an example:

I have no idea where the heck the guy finds the time or the creativity to do this, and it covers everything from workups of old magazine ads, Soviet propaganda posters, commercial images, original work...Diskin's work is a never-failing entertainment for a Timbers fan. I'm linked to his FB page, so I come across whatever his latest effort is when he posts it.

So it was today that I came across this:

The "shake the gates of hell" thing is a Timbers Army song, and Shakes the Skunk there is, well, shaking the gates of hell. This is with the playoff match coming up tonight so, well, because.

But that's not what the entertaining thing was. To me, anyway.

Nope, the fun bit was the original image that Diskin used to adapt this, which is the Distinguishing Unit Insignia (and, yes, it's called a "DUI") for the Oregon State Army Guard Headquarters; HQ STARC.

The original has a beaver (no, duh?) instead of the skunk and the Army reds and golds rather than Timbers greens:

Which, in turn, reminded me of my time assigned to STARC, my last Guard unit and the one I retired out of.

Not that I was actually assigned to STARC proper, that is, the head shed under the flagpole. I was one of the satellite detachments, of which there were a shit-ton. STARC in my time was ginormous, probably something between 300 and 500 bodies altogether, easily larger than any one of the infantry battalions (that were chronically understrength, and moreso after several extended deployments to the Middle East). Apparently this is a common ARNG thing; state headquarters tend to be a repository of warm bodies and not just any warm bodies, either; they are usually pretty senior people in both the officer and noncommissioned officer ranks. The maneuver units might go hungry for bodies, but STARC never starves.

I'm not sure what the situation is now...except that I know that the umbrella Oregon maneuver unit, the 41st Infantry Brigade, is no longer a true brigade; it has been reduced to two infantry battalions and has lost one of the artillery batteries - my old Charlie Battery - from the FA battalion. Whether this is a top-down sort of reorganization, or a recognition that most of the old "traditional" one-weekend-a-month Guardsmen have been driven out by deployments and that there is no way to fully man a three-battalion brigade, I have no idea.

And speaking of the FA battalion, here is the unit crest for that outfit:

I still have the DUIs from that outfit, but I was never able to look at the crest without observing that even though I know that the critter on the top is supposed to be a beaver (the sunset and the beaver are from the old 41st Division/41st Brigade crest) it always looks like a goddamn prairie dog or a gopher to me.

I mean, look at it! No beaver was ever that lanky, they don't stand up like that, either, and that's the saddest little skinny beaver tail I've ever seen. It's a damn gopher, and we're not the damn "Gopher State". Puh-leeze.


So. I'm off to find some other source of entertainment...but you might end up hearing from me sooner than you'd think. It's pretty dull down here in Medford.

Friday randomness.

Just some musings on a slow Friday at work.

Yes, I know it's old and has been floating all over the Internet forever.

And, yes, that's pretty much how I feel, despite the good work the present Pontiff has been doing shaming the shit out of the plutocrats. If you want a God to hug because it makes you a happier, gentler, kinder, more humane person? Good on you. You are part of a lovely, inconsequential majority. The relatively small minority of Bible- (or Koran-, or what-the-hell-ever-Buddhists-bash) bashing, snake-handling, sectarian-hating religious nutjobs out there are doing a terrific job of making you all look like credulous tools.

What the fuck, over?

We risked our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor...for this?

And yet the fuckin' Teatards are all pissed off about the wages paid to public schoolteachers.

[Facepalm]

................

One of the many things I love about living in the Northwest is our weather. Yes, the Black Months are gruesome (try spending weeks in the gray drizzling rain with temperatures that rise from a low of 44 Fahrenheit to a high of 46 and back and see how you like it...) but the rest of the year we enjoy some moments of aching beauty.

Winter mornings are often among them.

The combination of cold ground and cool are produces dense fog. The mist enfolds the land, softening the hard surfaces of civilization and returning us to those pre-Conquest dawns when the only noises were the slow dripping of the dark fir-boughs and the calling of the wild geese rising from the morning waters.

I love to emerge from the house to see my little street dim and cool with whorls of miniscule gray beads of vapor, hot coffee steaming in my hand and all the sounds of the city around me dampened and far away.

Makes for some lovely sunrises, too.

(To give credit where it's due, both the above images are from a wonderful little photoessay by Thomas Boyd from the World's Worst Newspaper. Even the deepest dungheap produces the occasional gem.)

I am so fucking totally going to name my next garage band "Chinese Donkey Meat".

(And I should add that the whole question of "Who put the fox in the can of delicious donkey meat?" does sort of highlight how foolish the notion that usually goes under the general heading of "small government".

China - and the U.S., and Brazil, and Australia, and about every other goddamn polity outside Andorra - is an immense, complex, insanely complex and interconnected industrial state. This isn't the fucking colonies circa 1789. We are, daily, constantly, confronted with things we don't control, made by people we cannot see and cannot influence, in places we do not know or understand, that can, if they are badly made, or poorly designed, or simply capable of being shipped, or stored, or used, in certain ways that will injure, maim, or kill us.

And, frankly, those that make them may not understand the actual dangers. Or, worse, may know and not care, counting on the distance from source to destination, the weakness of the intervening polity, or their own desperation and/or greed to shield them from the punishment appropriate for their negligence.

There is no other organization other than ourselves acting in concert (that is, as some sort of public corporation - which is more-or-less the same thing as an arm of government) that has the power to prevent this malfeasance or the power to punish it if it occurs.

It's really just that simple.)

The silly season for soccer here has been more-than-usually-silly. Especially with our women's soccer club, Thorns FC. After winning the league in 2013...

First we parted ways with our manager, Cindy Parlow Cone, who guided the team to championship in it's very first year of existence.

Then we added another U.S. Women's National Team player, Amber Brooks.

Now we're looking down the barrel of the first expansion draft gun next Friday; the new team in Houston gets to pluck a yet-unknown number of players from our team. And right now we, the supporters, have no idea how many players we can protect.

And speaking of footy, did I tell you I scored the awesome Cat Scarf?

Nitty Kitty seems unimpressed, having never had any balls to begin with. But I love this, perhaps the silliest soccer scarf I've ever come across.

And with that I really have to go clean out the equipment storage room. Back with some Friday jukebox in a bit.

Timber!

So after our busy Saturday we had a fairly busy Sunday. I took the Boy and his pal to Lasertag and then out to Beaverton to give a basic rifle marksmanship lesson to our pals the Ravas. And came back to another friends' open house for the neighborhood.

Nothing momentious, just a pleasant rainy day full of small pleasures.

But between returning from lasering and going to Beaverton BRM-training this fell from the sky on top of me:

This branch fell probably 20 to 25 feet from the street tree just outside our city strip. The tree itself is a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), "...a deciduous tree in the genus Liquidambar native to warm temperate areas of eastern North America and tropical montane regions of Mexico and Central America." Apparently this species has some value as a medicinal and food source: "Slashed to the cambium, sap will leak out and harden. The resulting gum can be chewed. Unripe fruit can be crushed and soaked in alcohol to make a medicinal tincture. The bark can be used to make a medicinal tea."

Not mentioned in the literature, however, is that the sonofabitch is structurally unsound and tends to shed branches in anything stronger than a gentle zephyr. We've already had a sizeable piece of the tophamper drop on the Subaru and any sort of strong wind leaves branch litter around the base.

And don't get me started on the seedpods/fruits/nutcases:

These fucking things drop all...year..round, wind or no, and function as very effective caltrops when you have forgotten to take the trash out to the curb and have to rush out in the predawn dark barefoot.

The strange thing is that yesterday afternoon there wasn't a breath of wind. I was walking out to the car, Mojo and the Boy were on the sidewalk nearby when I felt a hard blow, like a heavy punch, on the shoulder. I staggered sideways a bit and look around to see who had hit me and there this branch was; I'd gotten the thick end instead of the fluffy, leafy end and had it been two inches west or a half a second sooner I'd have taken it square atop the skull.

No noise, either; no cracking, no sound of leaves rustling, just...BANG, and a big ol' branch in the street beside me.

Which just, again, reminds me how freakish and random Life is. We amble through life taking every day, every night, each breath, every sunrise and birdsong and hug and kiss, each breathless moment at the height of lovemaking, every rich explosion of flavor on the tongue...every single warm cuddle from little bodies fitted to our chests, every syllable of happy babble, every tear, the good pull and stretch of strong muscle worked hard, each and every lingering glance of greeting and farewell with the casual acceptance that we give a yawn or a passing car or a flickering light. We expect life to rise to greet us every day, every heart to just continue beating, every tire to track smoothly, every breath to begin as the last one ends.

The fuzzy-huggy-bunny-wuffy-ladybuggery adoption folks have this thing about the "red thread" that connects you to your magical baby that God (and it is usually God) has picked out for you and how that means that everything will work out for the best; you will always be tied to your love by this mystic invisible red thread.

But if there's anything I've learned in this journey towards the grave, it's that life itself is a tenuous thread, a spindly, blood-red thread that may break or fail at any time. One minute you'll be fine, the next one of you will be gone.

On the one hand, this is terrifying. The body that feels so sturdy, the life that seems so complete...a flu germ, a layoff, an affair, a little too much anesthaesia, and it is gone as thoroughly as the dream of a dream. Nothing is certain. Nothing can be counted on. All is vanity and striving after nothingness.

And yet...tilt your glance and it isn't.

Everything we humans build and are; every house, every love, every layer of fat, bone and muscle, is ephemeral. We are all doomed from the moment we are born. And yet in those moments between darkness and darkness, what towers we can raise! What loves we can lift, what momuments to strength and caring and honor and passion!!

If we choose.

So every day a little death...and yet, every day, every day, is a gift of life. Each time we hold our children, each day we tell our lovers we love them, each day we work and laugh and cry and love and hate...each day is a goddam miracle, and we live and move through them like gods, like heroes.

Or we can. We should.

So today, take a moment to savor your life. LIVE it. Listen to the rain. Meditate. Do a kata until it's as perfect as you can make it. Make a great cup of coffee and a buttered croissant.

Hug your daughter extra tight.

The night is dark and long. That branch may fall this way to tragedy instead of that way to trivia. But we can fear the dark and the fall, or we can bask in and savor the brilliant daylight that is all the brighter for coming between the sunrise and the sunset.

And I hope tomorrow you wake to a sunny day full of love and happiness, work hard, play foolishly, and go to sleep tired and content.

Every day you live you are a gift of love.

There and Back Again, Random Maundering Edition

My son recently discovered a game called Minecraft.

It's actually a pretty cool game. You have to run around this bizarre-sort-of-8-bit-looking cubic world assembling resources and building stuff. You are - depending on the level you play - menaced by creatures like "creepers" and "spiders" and confronted with the need to find food, build shelter, and sleep.

He finds this terrifically fascinating. I thought that it was a pleasant alternative to his usual digital enthusiasm, which is shooting the hell out of stuff.

Mind you; nature finds a way to defeat nurture. Tonight he was bludgeoning digital swine to death with objects ranging from a fishing rod through raw meat to a rose.

While his sister bounced on the couch chanting "Kill the pig! Kill the pig!"

Sigh. That's not the fictional place I really want them to go...

Anyway.

Nothing in particular on my mind tonight, so let's see if the spirit bloweth where it listeth.

Turns out that Richard Plantagent died about as hard as a man can.

That's his brain housing group up there. Note the big hole in the lower right rear; forensics people in the UK seem to think that was made with a damn big blade; a halberd, war axe, something of that sort. The other view is a depressed fracture of the skull, and he had about a total of six other facial wounds, including a swordcut straight-on into the face. Apparently there's some evidence that he was Gaddafied, too; some joker shoved a dagger up his backside, hopefully after the poor SOB was dead.

Hard death aside, years ago I had the occasion to read two books in the same year: Bill Shakespeare's Richard III and Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. They're both fairly straight-up partisan tracts, one agin, the other for, the last Plantagenet ruler of England. Not sure which teacher assigned them, and whether they came as a set, or whether it was coincidence, or what. They're both good reads, though you'd never know they were talking about the same guy.

The one thing, though, that Tey brings up in her story that does make sense to me is the whole business of The Princes in the Tower.

You know that one, right? Poor little fellows, done to death by their wicked uncle Richard? Classic sort of bwa-ha-ha over-the-top mustache-twirling Bad Guy stuff that gives ol' Richard his eeeeeeevil rep.

Thing is, Dick (not being British and at this remove I think I can get away with calling the subject by his nickname) got to be king through an Act of Parliament titled Titulus Regius. You can read the whole thing at the link, but the nitty is that his brother's kids (and heirs) were legally decreed bastards. Not in the "You little bastard!" sense; no, actual bastards, illegitimate kids, because his marriage to their mother Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous.

So Dick takes over as the Plantagenet heir, stashes the kids in one of the royal castles, and goes on to get kacked in a pretty gory fashion at Bosworth.

His successor, Henry Tudor, has the Act repealed. And destroyed; every extant copy burned: "...said Bill, Act and Record, be anulled and utterly destroyed, and that it be ordained by the same Authority, that the same Act and Record be taken out of the Roll of Parliament, and be cancelled and brent, and be put in perpetual oblivion." One of the first acts of the new Tudor Administration was a "destroy without reading" for ol' Titulus Regius.

But...here's the thing; if you repeal that Act, then Edward Plantagenet - Edward V, the delegitimized nephew of now-dead-Dick - becomes king.

Kind of a good reason for Henry Tudor to make sure that young Ed never turned up...alive. No?

So while it appears that Dick WAS a hunchback and may well have been other things he might not have been the original Wicked Uncle.

...and then says "You know, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me." and knees his balls up through his diaphragm.

You can learn from adversity.

But it doesn't make it any less painful.

Speaking of learning from adversity, my friend Talyssa over at the Hidden Thimble asked me about books recently. I have a very catholic taste and my reading tends to vary quite a lot, but I've been enjoying several of my gift-books lately, and they're

John Scalzi's Redshirts: If you haven't found Scalzi's blog Whatever you're missing a good thing. He blogs as well as he writes, and that's very well indeed. His latest story is a fascinating combination of science fiction, metafiction, the television business, actors and acting and screenwriting...and also a thoughtful look at love and loss, fate...what the author of Proverbs might well have summed up as "...the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid."

Anyway, Redshirts is one hell of a good tale.

In something of a weirder and darker note is The Last Light of the Sun by a Canadian author by the name of Guy Gavriel Kay. It's set in a thinly disguised early medieval Wessex with scenes set in Wales, and in the norse lands to the east, probably Norway...but one where the legends of the spirits of earth and air are, well, not. It's not a particularly original tale, but one well-told and with a good eye and ear for the period.

And I've got Summers' On Strategy on the nightstand, again. I've been slagging off on him over at MilPub and need to re-read him to see if he is as louche' as I recalled. Ah, the things I do for blogging...

Hmmm...

Let's see if there's anything else rattling around in here.

Did I mention that we have a new team in Portland?

The Portland Thorns F.C. is our entry into the new women's pro league. The army is already sold on our Thorns, and with old favorite Chris Sinclair returning to Portland, exciting young players like Allie Long and Tina Ellertson, USWNT stalwart Alex Morgan and CWNT keeper Karina leBlanc we're looking forward to a hell of an exciting first season for the Rose City women. PTFC!

In "News of the Weird", Fourth Grader Edition, my Little Guy's best pal is leaving his classroom for our local Catholic elementary school this coming Monday.

Now I had a bit of exposure to parochial school as a kid and, generally, I have no real issues with the way the local diocesan schools work. There's a bit more religion but I never encountered the "jesus-on-a-dinosaur" sort of bone-stupid back-to-the-13th-Century sorts of instruction that the local fundie "schools" deal in.

But...my understanding is that the main reason is because my son and his pal both have one of the old-school teachers this year. Mister (Name Redacted) is a sort of crusty old guy who seems mostly concerned with keeping the kids sat down and working and, frankly, I think he's kind of burned-out. He's not a fun, bouncy, peppy, imaginative sort of guy which is what the boys have been lucky enough to have up until now.

But...the thing is...what I remember from parochial school were lots of that kind of guy. Not burned-out necessarily, but strict and all about the rules.

We're not talking Miss Dove here.

So...I really wonder what the hell is going on. Unless there's some sort of problem with Peep's Pal needing more structure...

I don't see how he's going to get more out of Our Lady of Pain Elementary.

And, sadly, the Boy is heartsick at losing his best pal. He knows what's going to happen, and though his mother and Pal's family have sworn great swears that Pal and the Boy will get lots of time together and can continue to be Best Pals, well...

He knows better, and so do I.

There's a special place in social Hell where friendships go to die, and I think my little man can smell the whiff of brimstone. I wish I could make him feel more optimistic, or at least more sanguine, but I can't. I moved too many times when I was little. Friends move, or go away, and never come back, and there's a special sadness there that can never be undone or made better.

Poor little guy.

Almost out of gas here. But, pictures! I got pictures. From deviantart, a "harajuku cat".

Well, okay, then!

And I love this one, from Amy Mebberson, all of the Doctor's "companions". I'm embarrassed to admit I only know Sarah Jane Smith and Leela, from the old Tom Baker version of the show...

Okay. I'm done. Gotta go home and see if my in-laws have been buried under immense snowdrifts.

American Anthem

Hey! It's a chilly rainy Saturday in Portland and who's up for some Montenegro?

Is that a great song, or what?

I needed something to be cheerful about after watching my beloved Norwich City make FA Cup history by getting shot dead square in the ass by Luton Town. Don't get me wrong; I loves me some FA Cup, but, damn, when a season goes to hell sometimes it really goes to hell.

Anyway, from there I wandered over to Gin and Tacos where this discussion of national anthems led me to this discussion of National Anthems.

The Grantland article (the second link in the paragraph above) is funny but there's some genuine truth to it.

When you get past the essential silliness of the whole concept of a "national anthem" you eventually get around to the historical use of singing as a way of bringing people together and firing them up emotionally. As I talked about the other day; some emotions just lend themselves to song. They just do. "Patriotism"? Yep.

But part of that really does involve the actual song.

And I happen to agree with conventional wisdom and agree that The Star Spangled Banner - as a song - isn't all that as a "man the barricades sort of thing. It IS hard to sing, and it does lack a certain...je ne sais pas...something that the boys from Montenegro, and the Gosudarstvenny Gimn Rossiyskoy Federatsii, and La Marseillaise have in abundance;

Let's face it; if you're going to have a song about your country, singing it should really make you excited about your country. Patriotism is, of course, a ridiculous tribal atavism that has fueled some of the most dangerous and destructive idiocy ever perpetrated by the human race. But.

But...

It's hard to deny that there is something very satisfying to the human soul to be part of that crowd uplifted by that singing, feeling that shiver that comes with the sensation of being armored and armed with participation in something that makes you feel bigger and stronger than your own small self. As Phillips says over at Grantland:

"A good anthem has to do a lot of things. It has to inspire. It has to instill loyalty to the nation-state. It has to be singable. Most important, it has to capture a mysterious and complex feeling of being simultaneously (a) in church, (b) about to charge the enemy trenches, and (c) at a really great New Year's party."

Those aren't very nice feelings, really, when you think about it. They have made and will make us do awful things in the name of "patriotism".

But, then, they have made us do some genuinely noble and heroic things, as well.

So I suppose what it comes down to is that even a bombastic poem set to an old pub drinking song can do that trick, when you sing in a certain way. I remember how I felt when I sang it then:

Ten feet tall and bristling with spines.

So, are we bad? Maybe so. For all our song doesn't make the Top Ten.

But maybe not quite as badass as the folks from Montenegro...

The seething hot magma at the core of the world —
Bring us our tankards, we want to drink some for breakfast!
We wean our babies on lava, and they can't get enough.
By the time they're 6, they could beat an oak tree at wrestling.
Everyone! Do you understand that we are ferocious?
We have ventured down among the bones of the mountains,
Where we killed like 50 or 60 dragons,
We didn't even keep track, that's how easy it was.
My beard is the moss that binds the stone of God's fury.
Drink with us! Drink with all of us! Be welcome!
We will wipe the floor with you and leave you for dead.
I'm in a good mood! I may dismember a bear.

Feel like humming along?

Cool.

Random Runnings

I have a friend whose son is some sort of nuclear-powered attack submarine of a child.

Seriously; this kid has an internal engine that just doesn't quit. His little family - it's just him and his mom and dad - came out to Portland to visit for an insanely brief time. Mom and Dad had concert tickets and flew in just for the show and then back home. We volunteered to sit for their son, let's call him Atomo the Atomic Boy, and quickly found out about the whole Atomo-incredible-drive-motor.

We went to a hockey game, played videogames, built LEGOS, told stories, played tag...and the little guy was still going. He was like an adorable tiny unstoppable force. Even in his sleep he was still going; he self-soothed, singing and rocking and thumping his arms.

I was amazed that the little family got any sleep at all.

Dunno why I wanted to tell you that; maybe just because it points up how individual people can be and the degree to which they are particular. You really have no idea until you slam headfirst into one of these outliers. And only then you know.

What it tells you? I have no idea.

But the point is that Atomo and his mom used to go out to their favorite natural places for walks. Which always seemed to evolve into Atomo racing away at top speed with mom in dogged pursuit. He wasn't trying to hide, or running away from his mom; he just had so much damn energy that he had to just run.

She called this "random runnings".

That's what I'm doing today.

I've just got the urge to babble, and nothing in particular to babble about, so my mind is randomly running about and I don't pretend to know where it's going to go.

But it starts with this couple.

First, I have to confess; I am a very boring "romantic". Or, ummm..."sexantic". Or whatever you call the part of your life that involves getting intimate with other people in a personal way. Loving them, or making love to them. Whatever, my personal history is deeply, intensely boring, whether you're measuring in an emotional or the physical scale, to any- and everyone outside me (and, I suppose, the other halves of the relationships).

I had the usual sorts of fumbling relationships in high school and college. Platonic, sorta-platonic, hoped-for-carnal, sexual-but-kinda-pathetic. I had several lovers/girlfriends during my time in the service. I got married nearly as soon as I got out and stayed married more than a decade. I got divorced, dated a bit, then found the woman I love, married her and we've been together a touch more than ten years now.

But I have to say; I was fairly stunned at the amount of drama in Laura and Sam's story. Breakups, makeups, cheating, makeups, accidents, incidents, lost parents, lost ears...

It's a hell of a tale and then they get married.

I'm a romantic and so I hope that they've got things figured out, I hope that they are terrific for each other and both grow frail together and compete to see who makes mournful jokes over the other's grave.

But...damn. Just reading about all that drama makes me tired.

Is it just that these two gals are really emo? Or am I just really plodding?

Either way; for all that it sounds like their joys were really joyous I'm sorta glad that I never had a lover put me (or I put a lover) through that.

Speaking of things about me, my employer's HR person sent around a questionairre for our in-house newsletter, and a couple of the questions seemed to provide a certain opportunity for my prose style. For example, here's the one about some particular thing or things that we'd done that we considered "surprising":

What is something you’ve done that would surprise others?

Dunno; (I replied) depends on how easily surprised they are.

I helped another 10,000 people or so “liberate” the Spice Island of Grenada in 1983. I met Sandy Duncan in person and almost asked her which one of her eyes is real. I am one of three people who are credited by the Oregon Birds Record Committee with the first recorded state sighting of a Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla) in Oregon; the other two are my wife and my ex-wife.

And there was another about sense of humor: Do you remember what were you doing the last time you had a really good laugh?

Describing to my wife my daughter’s reaction to the moment that our housecat suddenly became incontinent all over the dining room table this past Saturday evening. We both lost all composure. Mind you, to say that I have a sideways sense of humor is not an exaggeration.

I should add that dinner was not on the table when this occurred, which is why the Little Cat is still with us. I feel wretched about her continuing mortal illness, but not wretched enough to be willing to continue to host a pet that cannot be counted on not to defecate on our food.

Here was a real stunner for anyone incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time: the woman who made her bones forcing her teachers and administrators to compete for their jobs and pay by teaching others to take tests turns out to have pretty much not bothered to check and see whether those employees were doing the sane thing and ensuring that the duds, gimps, and wheezers were getting pencil-whipped through the goddamn tests.

Gee. I'm shocked. Shocked.

I've said this before; if you test my teaching with nothing more than a test then I will teach to the test. AND I will do my best to ensure that my gomers (and I know I'll have some gomers who are thick as a brick; every class has them) are shoved out of the way or their scores improved if I can possibly manage it.

You can try and blame me for not making a stone into a flower. But don't expect me to buy your interpretation. The gomers' inability to learn has nothing to do with my ability to teach.

Oh. I've got another post up at Slide Rule Pass that talks about one of my recent diversions; the off-season moves by the front office of my Portland Timbers.

I laid my thoughts out thoroughly over there so I won't rehash them here. But the short version is that after two years of treating team-building like a greedy toddler my club seems to have actually developed some discernment.

This would be a good thing, and I'm hopeful for better things in the coming season. Onward, Rose City!

Speaking of Rose City soccer; only a few months separate us from the debut of our newest PTFC; the Portland Thorns of women's pro soccer!

I'm already fired up, looking forward to sharing my passion - soccer - with my passion - Mojolicious - at the friendly confines of Jeld-Wen Field this spring. We'll be comin' down the road!

Mind you, there are those of us already pretty far DOWN the road, and here was one of them, one of our North Portland maniacs who...

Wait, I have to tell the story as it happened.

So a bit more than a week before this past Christmas our Portland firefighters show up at a house on North Hodge Avenue. Said house is on fire; the smoke-eaters are there to put the fire out.

Problem; resident loony grampa is on the front porch doing his Braveheart thing swinging a sword at the fire crew.

Firefighters say; grandpa, your fucking house is on fire. Your starting to smoulder, dummy. Put the damn sword down.

Grandpa says: Freedom! You want it? Come and have a go if you're hard enough, then!

Firefighters say eff that, back off, and wait for Portland PD.

Portland PD arrives. Tasers loony grandpa off porch. Firefighters put out fire. Loony grandpa goes to loony room at hospital to be cooled down. House is a wreck. Firefighters and cops have another great loony story to tell.

North Portland; even our loonies are a trifle naff.

Speaking of loonies.

I want a trillion dollar platinum coin.

But, more than this; I want the fucking government to quit fucking around with the goddamn debt limit. It's idiotic, and it makes us look less competent than goddamn Kazakstan, where at least the critters can do graft and corruption efficiently.

I expect the GOoPers to try and use the damn thing to arm-wrestle my country into whatever Gilded Age plutocracy they're erect about this week. That's what they do; it'd be like complaining about a park flasher showing his dingus.

But the damn Democrats need to get a pair. It's time they accepted that they can't reason with these loonies and start just hoofing them one and moving on. This crap is just getting old.

Not that I think for a moment they'll do it, mind you. Just a thought.

And one last thought, one that occurred to me as the kiddos watched the movie Tangled for the second (well, the third for Missy, but she says she doesn't remember when we went to see it in the theater) time this past Sunday; one of the fun things about any good piece of work is that it stands up well over time and provides a fertile soil for the inspirations of others.

So whether you're working from Bocaccio or the Bible, Les Miserables or the fairy tale of Rapunzel tarted up for modern times it can be tremendously intriguing to see the latest version of, or someone else's riff on, the original.

Like the little cartoon above, from "Katikut" growing out of the remarkably fertile soil of deviantart

What does an artistic princess do when she fulfills her dream of adventure and romance? Shimmies into a pair of skinny jeans and its off with flip-flops, art supplies, and loyal boyfriend to "art school" to put all those years of painting the walls to some use? Why NOT?

What kind of new dream is it if it doesn't include the help of your inamorata to carry your hair around, anyway?

Cute.

Hope you're getting that sort of love and support these days.

As for me...I think my motor's finally run down. Let me know if I've left anywhere unscrambled, okay?

Back soon.