Paul's Thing

. . . or did you also see kicking and punching during some of the plays in last night’s Super Bowl game, and wonder why the fights weren’t given the instant replay treatment, or why there was no commentary on it, or why no penalty flags were thrown?  If this had been a regular season game, I expect the fighting would have gotten a lot more attention.

At the start of the 3rd quarter, we in Tucson endured a three-minute block of apparently unscheduled advertising, presumably while everyone else in the country was watching the game.  I knew something was wrong because there was no sound, the ads were low-res and pixelated, and they were the kind of crap ads that air late in the evening, not the multimillion-dollar extravaganzas you associate with the Super Bowl.  Was this just a local Comcast screwup, or did it happen elsewhere?  And more importantly, what didn’t we see during those three minutes?  When stuff like this happens, I think censorship.  What were they hiding?  I can’t help thinking it was another fight, since the network was trying so hard to avoid highlighting the earlier ones.

One last question.  Am I the only one thinking the game was great but the ads sucked?

A rainy morning in Tucson.  The mountains are hidden in clouds and all is gray.  A good day to nurse a cold.

Thursday and Friday I felt a chest cold coming on but felt well enough to go for a bicycle ride Saturday.  I’m sure the ride had nothing to do with it, but I came home with laryngitis, and now I’m working my way through the medicine cabinet pharmacopeia.  Poor Donna’s just coming out from under a cold so we had a lot of non-prescription stuff in the first place; our friend Mary Ann brought over a bunch more.  Zicam, Sudafed, Robitussin . . . bring it on!

I keep hearing they’re (who’re?  DEA?  ATF?  FBI?) going to make all the strong stuff . . . the good stuff they keep behind the pharmacy counter because you can make meth out of it . . . prescription only.  Damn that Obama!

Well, at least we’re close enough to Mexico to make drug runs into Nogales.  I go down once a year anyway to freshen our supply of amoxicillin; if they make it so I can’t get Sudafed here without a prescription I can always buy it south of the border.

Speaking of Mexican drugs, the cat bit me a couple of months ago (I was trying out one of those furminator(?) brushes on her, and she didn’t want anything to do with it).  She gave me a deep puncture wound on the ball of my thumb and it immediately became infected.  I started taking amoxicillin and it cleared right up.  Amoxicillin and 800 mg Ibuprofen tablets . . . great things to have on hand!

Whatever, life can’t stop for colds.  Donna tells me there’s some sort of football game on TV later today, and I’ve been enlisted to deep fry a few dozen chicken wings for all the company she’s invited over.  I do love me some wings; I only hope I’ll be able to taste them.  And I’d better remember not to kiss our guests . . . or cough on them, or sneeze.

If you’re back East under two feet of snow, I hope you have plenty of food and drink on hand, and that you won’t have to drive anywhere until the roads are clear.  Hunker down and wait it out, which is pretty much what I’m doing today.

I could fill this entry with hyperlinks to news articles about Obama’s push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the predictable conservative opposition, but if you’re that out of touch with current events you probably don’t read blogs either.

DADT, summed up, says that being openly gay is grounds for discharge.  Therefore any gay who comes out while in uniform has clearly broken the rule and must be discharged.

Some arguments against DADT:

• The ban on acknowledging one’s own homosexuality is morally wrong, forcing gays who want to serve their country to lie.  This is closely related to the Nuremburg precedent stating that following morally-wrong orders is no defense against war crimes.
• When it comes to past marijuana use, nearly everyone who joined the military from the mid-1960s to the present day lied too.
• Many of the gays who have been prosecuted and discharged since the imposition of DADT were actually doing their best to comply with DADT.  They weren’t telling . . . they were outed by others, often anonymously.

DADT (which never put much of a dent in gay witch-hunting) has been a travesty.  It’s clearly wrong and should be repealed.  We’ve wasted far too much time investigating and prosecuting people for things that have no impact on mission accomplishment.

We veterans like to brag on the military for leading the way in racial integration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, forgetting that President Truman had to order us to desegregate, that the firestorms of protest were far greater than those we’re seeing today over repealing DADT, and that even after Truman integrated the military we fought it for years, kicking and screaming all the way.  But we did it, it worked, we’re better for it . . . and it was the right thing to do.

I realize this part of my argument has no validity, but hypocrisy infuriates me, and when it comes to homosexuality the military spells Hypocrisy with a capital H.  When I attended Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk I had a lesbian army officer as a seminar mate.  She never declared, of course, but it was obvious enough, and if anyone had any doubts they were dispelled when she brought her girlfriend to graduation.  She was a good officer, she loved the military, she did her job well, and no one objected . . . not her seminar mates, nor any AFSC officials, nor her army superiors.  In spite of a few high-visibility prosecutions of lesbian military members over the years, in general the military tolerates their presence.  Male homosexuals, on the other hand, have almost always been, and continue to be, vigorously sought out and discharged.

The opposition argument de jour is that there’s a war on and this is not the time to impose social experimentation on the military.  There’s always a war on, and even when there isn’t, the opposition will still say this is not the time.  That’s what they said when Truman desegregated the military.  What they meant, and what they mean now, is that it will never be the time.

Sometimes you simply have to overrule objections and do what is right.  Now is the time to do what is right.

Update (11:02 pm): reader Gwen posted a link in the comment below that contradicts what I said about the military being more tolerant of female than male homosexuality.  It appears my experience was the exception, not the rule.  I do think, however, that DADT set up a system whereby anyone could accuse anyone else of homosexuality (with impunity and no threat of having to face the accused), automatically setting the process of investigation, prosecution, and discharge in motion . . . and that perhaps DADT has made things worse for gays in the military than they were before DADT.

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.” J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

	Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, by Gore Vidal Gore Vidal always was a name-dropper. A talented, even brilliant writer, with wicked and incisive views on most any subject . . . but he can’t stop trying to impress readers by reciting the names of famous and infamous people he’s known. To me, it’s more than a regrettable foible . . . it’s a massive turnoff. Partway through the first chapter I began to wonder how long he’d be able to go before mentioning Jackie Kennedy. He dropped her name on the very next page. I sighed, closed the book, and took it back to the library.
	Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, by John Krakauer Jon Krakauer details the circumstances surrounding Army Specialist Pat Tillman’s “friendly fire” death in Afghanistan. Along the way he writes a fascinating biography of Tillman, an inspiring and rare man who stood by his principles and acted on them, sacrificing all for his country and his ideas of what is right. It’s impossible to write about Tillman’s death without also exploring the ensuing attempts to cover it up, a shameful business that involved Tillman’s fellow soldiers; his superior officers and commanders; the four-star leaders of the US Army, the JCS, CENTCOM, JSOC, and USSOC; the SecDef; even the President. And you can’t write about the cover-up without also exploring how the military, the DoD, and the nation’s political leaders manipulated news from Iraq and Afghanistan to cover up other incidents of fratricide, to fictionalize events in order to turn them into pro-war propaganda, and to make heroes of soldiers like Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch to drum up public support for unpopular wars. I’ve read other reader reviews of Where Men Win Glory, and many say they wish Krakauer would have been more “even-handed” in his criticisms of military and civilian leaders and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What they mean is that they wish he hadn’t written this book at all, because the truth isn’t “even-handed” and they don’t want to hear it. I was a USAF officer for 24 years — a fighter pilot and a joint staff officer at US Special Operations Command — and have witnessed first-hand similar attempts to hide or bury embarrassing accidents and deaths, and to scapegoat lower-ranking personnel when cover-ups fail. Krakauer is dead on. Jon Krakauer is fearlessly honest. With Into Thin Air, he was roundly criticized for detailing the hubris and poor decision-making of the leaders of the disastrous 1996 Everest expeditions. With Under the Banner of Heaven, he angered Mormons everywhere by exploring the excesses of the church and many of its members. Krakauer reported honestly on the life and death of Christopher McCandless, the young man at the center of Into the Wild, refusing to make a romantic hero of this misguided young man. Krakauer is also a damn fine writer who can explain the most minute and technical details of esoteric activities like mountain climbing and complex military operations to lay readers. You can’t get much better reportage, and if you’re not afraid of seeing where the chips really fall you should read Where Men Win Glory.
	The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood I do love me some Margaret Atwood, and I do love me some science fiction! Atwood writes of a possible near future, one in which middle-class employed people are a small minority, all working for a few giant corporations and living in guarded, isolated compounds run by the corps. Everyone else makes do in the pleebs, living hand to mouth in a world of drug-ridden violence and crumbling infrastructure. There is no government; services that used to be functions of the military and law enforcement are now provided by uniformed personnel of CorpSEcorps (question: is that pronounced “corpse-core” or “corp-see-core”?), a Blackwater-like pan-corporate private paramilitary. All the things we have nightmares about today — irreversible climate change, widespread drought and massive human migration, rampant privatization of governmental functions, the complete breakdown of social safety nets, genetic engineering with fearsome unintended consequences — are at play in The Year of the Flood and its precursor, Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. As with Oryx and Crake, we inhabit this nightmare world through two engaging, sympathetic, believable characters, Toby and Ren (women this time, unlike Oryx and Crake), members of a secretive religious cult opposed to mans’ destruction of nature. I loved this novel and hated to see it end. But reading it makes me want to re-read Oryx and Crake, so perhaps it hasn’t ended after all. Brilliant, frightening and yet hopeful, The Year of the Flood is Margaret Atwood at her best.
	Soul Patch: a Moe Prager Mystery, by Reed Farrel Coleman This was my second Moe Prager novel. I thought I was re-reading the first one, because Coleman’s character Moe Prager was still wrapped around the axle about his wife’s missing brother and her evil politician father. I thought all that stuff was settled in the other novel I’d read, but now I think Coleman is one of those writers who milks a theme to death. By the time I got to Coleman’s description of a high-rise apartment complex as a “pile of puss” (no shit), I’d already made up my mind to move on to the next book on my shelf. I probably won’t be reading any more Moe Prager mysteries.
	Lowboy, by John Wray I’ve discovered that, for me at least, there’s a difference between novels about mental disease written by mentally-diseased authors, and novels about mental disease written by sane authors. I couldn’t finish David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest because the author’s own mental illness intruded so deeply into the story. I was constantly aware of the fact that Wallace’s depression finally got the better of him and led him to commit suicide. It freaked me out, frankly, and I was too upset to go on. Lowboy, a novel about paranoid schizophrenics, was written by John Wray, an apparently normal though exceptionally gifted author. Even though Wray’s descriptions of people in the throes of schizophrenia differ little from Wallace’s, I had no trouble reading Wray’s novel. I loved it, in fact. Lowboy is a well-written thriller. A mentally ill boy escapes from an institution in order to accomplish a delusional mission (in which he succeeds, by the way, thus saving the world), eluding his pursuers on a day-long chase through New York City subways. His pursuers, a policeman specializing in “special” missing person cases and the boy’s mother (who herself suffers from schizophrenia, though to a lesser degree than her son), know that the boy is capable of doing, and probably likely to do, harm to strangers. The tension is built in, and the gritty detail of subway cars, tunnels, hidden underground chambers, and the strange denizens who inhabit those dark places, is brilliantly described. A gripping, satisfying read. I will now go in search of more John Wray.
	Makers, by Cory Doctorow If you follow the popular Boing Boing web site, you’ll be familiar with the themes expressed in Makers, Cory Doctorow’s “Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come.” If you’ve read Ayn Rand, you’ll be familiar with Cory’s writing style and pacing. If you’ve ever made a list of two hundred techno-geek words and thought about using them in a book, you’ll be familiar with Cory Doctorow’s method. Really, the themes of this novel are the perennial themes of Boing Boing.  I told myself I’d plod on until Cory started to indulge his Disney fetish. When he did, I decided to read on until he mentioned Hello Kitty. That was a mistake, because Hello Kitty never came up, but I had to read the entire book to make sure. Had I set my goal on “teh” (as in teh awesome) I could have knocked off about halfway through. Oh well. Apparently the whirlwind changes to come involve free-wheeling intellectual property theft, inexplicably odd spellings of “mafia,” a miracle cure for obesity, and a whole lot of Randian dialog in lieu of plot and action. Oh, and a sex scene lifted right out of a Penthouse Forum letter. William Gibson covers some of the same ground. Difference is, Gibson can write.

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“May the Force be with you.” — Harrison Ford (as Han Solo), Star Wars (1977)

	The Class (Entre les Murs) (2008) I don’t like teenagers and I’m not cut out to be a teacher, so I was prepared to dislike this movie. Curiously enough, I liked and disliked it at the same time . . . it confirmed my curmudgeonly prejudices but also made me think, and it will stay with me. The Class is a micro-story focused on single term in a Paris middle school, following a class of 13- and 14-year old kids and their French language teacher, filmed in a documentary style that reminds you of Fredrick Wiseman. The Class presents the mind-numbing minutia of of the teacher’s professional life: the meetings, the counseling sessions, the politics. But the real story happens in the classroom, and the film presents it from both the teacher’s and students’ perspectives. It is disturbing and unsettling, yet somehow hopeful. Kids suck. Teachers are heroes. Even in France.
	Frozen River (2008) A hard but compelling watch. Frozen River immerses you in the bleakness of poverty, with disaster always at arm’s length and often closer, a slice of life most of us cannot comprehend. Two single mothers enter into an unlikely business partnership that grows into an even unlikelier friendship, offering a small ray of hope, but my overall reaction was sadness. Well plotted & directed, with strong acting . . . but sad, sad, sad. You’ll need a solid week of Disney movies to restore the spring in your step.
	Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) This movie transports viewers into the mind of a dislikable 13-year-old boy with sex on the brain and misinformed notions about adult heterosexual relationships. Sure, slobby single nerds and drop-dead gorgeous women live together and share sex toys and talk about fucking and oral sex all the time! Matter of fact, that’s pretty much all they do . . . yeah, that’s the ticket! I can’t wait until I’m a grownup too! I don’t think of myself as a prude, but when I’m around immature young men who cannot control their slack-jawed prurience I move away, and I couldn’t move away from this movie fast enough . . . it made my skin crawl. Perhaps it got better after the first fifteen minutes . . . a team of horses couldn’t drag me back to find out.
	Wag the Dog (1997) I didn’t catch Wag the Dog during the Clinton years, when it came out, and somehow missed it during the intervening years. Until now, that is. With news of the Bush/Cheney administration’s manipulation of terror warning levels during the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, Wag the Dog suddenly seemed relevant. Not a great film; more of a star turn for Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, but still, it’s cynically persuasive . . . you know they do it; you know they’ve always done it; you know they always will do it. Wag the Dog will induce a few chuckles and wry smiles, but if you want to see a truly funny and brutally honest movie about politics and war, rent the 2008 British film In the Loop (review coming).
	The Soloist (2008) I read about Steve Lopez and Nathanial Ayers in The New Yorker, so I knew the broad outlines of the story. What I wasn’t prepared for is the powerful way director Joe Wright casts the story. I literally couldn’t tear myself away from the movie long enough to get a glass of water. The cinematography — especially the overhead shots of Los Angeles — blew me away, and the gritty depiction of homeless street life (using homeless extras in downtown LA) was gut-wrenching. Joe Wright and Jamie Foxx were able to give me a hint of what schizophrenia might be like, and Robert Downey’s self-deprecating Steve Lopez character was totally engaging. My one objection? Every time Nathanial Ayers begins to play the cello, an invisible string orchestra plays along, making the music all pretty & sweet. It dumbs the movie down; it’s as inappropriate as canned laughter. Objection aside, The Soloist is moving, different, and strong.
	The Great Buck Howard (2008) A sweet, engaging, often funny movie, a tribute to late night TV talk show guest magicians like The Amazing Kreskin and the hundreds of other entertainers who brush up against, but never quite make, the big time. I quite liked it, but it’s not about anything important, and a week from now — I’m being honest here — I’ll have forgotten all about it.
	Race to Witch Mountain (2008) Sometimes you just want a Big Mac. Sometimes you just want a Disney flick. Good clean fun all around, for kids and adults.
	Doubt (2008) I didn’t want to watch this because I hate the way the church has spoiled life for generations of people, telling them their normal urges and desires are sinful and wrong. Immature of me, I know — it’s humanity itself that’s the problem, not the church — but everything I hate about the way we deny our own nature is embodied in priests and nuns, and this is a movie about priests and nuns. But I did watch it, and I was stunned by how good it is. Good as in powerful, thought-provoking, and disturbing, not good as in happy. This is not a happy movie. You know Meryl Streep is a master of her craft when you love her character in one movie (Julie & Julia) and hate & fear her character in another (Doubt). Her Sister Aloysius is Nurse Ratched, but with depth. The three principles — Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams — are fantastic throughout. But Meryl is killer good. She may well be the best actress of our time, and Doubt is worth watching for Meryl alone.
	Bottle Shock (2008) It’s a feel-good movie with some sappy parts, but it brought back the California I knew during the 1960s and 70s and made me ache for that wonderful place & time. Surprisingly suspenseful, given that we know how the blind taste test came out, and probably a better wine movie than Sideways. Also, it has Alan Rickman in it, always a plus. Great fun, and you should probably drink a little Napa Valley wine while you’re watching it.
	State of Play (2009) A surprisingly good film; taut, tense, fast-paced, well-plotted, and above all, interesting. I’m a huge fan of the middle-aged Russell Crowe. He gets better and better, but I’m not saying he carries the movie all by himself — the rest of the cast is terrific as well. I was reminded of Three Days of the Condor, a 1970s fast-paced political thriller that weighed in on many of the issues of the day. State of Play gives good weight too.

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Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pool!

Men at work

The crack

Next step: cut out the crack, fix it with new concrete & rebar, resurface the pool, put in new tile and decking, refill.  There goes the new kitchen!

This time they’re after Anne Frank’s Diary (again).

Going through old junk today, Donna found this memo from 1984, when I was the wing commander’s exec at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska.  I don’t remember who Captain Bupp was, but I do remember his calls being persistent and annoying.  Colonel Paxton was my boss, and Joanne was our secretary.