Just Asking

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

War or battle?

I realized that we conservatives seem to be losing a war of words.

We agree that the U.S. is fighting a War against Terrorists around the world. But I think this war has numerous battles going on: the Battle in Afghanistan, the Battle in Iraq, the new media battle for public support, the financial battle to stop the flow of money to the terrorists, the battle to stop terrorists from entering the U.S., the battle to track down terrorists living in the U.S., and many more.

Congress is voting on withdrawing from the "Iraq War" today. But Iraq is not a "War" but a "Battle". Withdrawing from the Iraqi Battle will not end the war, but it does guarantee that we will lose that battle, which would be a major setback in the War against Terrorists.

Patriotism

My liberal friends are openly anti-war, opposed to nationalism, and loath the U.S. military, but they claim to be patriotic. There is even a lefty bumper sticker that says "Peace is patriotic." Since there is nothing illegal about publicly stating, "I am not patriotic," why pretend? Why don't they just admit they are not patriotic? Many liberal youth have the courage to refuse to say the pledge of allegiance, but everyone wants to be patriotic. I don't get it.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Igloo Outing

It was very wet. The forecast was for rain turning to snow around noon. We went anyway. Well, not Soto, he was smart enough to stay home. We built two igloos in steady rain, with the temperature around 45 F. It was miserable and several of the scouts were cold and wet, so we crashed in the igloos and went home. The photo shows the igloo that I constructed. My friend is standing in the entryway, blocking your view of the opening. The top of the doorway is lower than the floor of the igloo to trap warm air inside. The floorspace inside is larger than it looks and over a foot below the surrounding snow; this igloo will sleep two adults.

P.S. It rained 1.34 inches at my house on Saturday, when we were building igloos.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Author Unknown

Thought for the Day:

"The American Indians found out what happens when you don't control immigration."

Saturday, March 17, 2007

My Mother

My mother passed away quietly in her sleep early Saturday morning. She has been getting weaker and weaker for about a year, so this is not a big surprise, but it is still a shock. She was a good Christian woman who spent most of her life living and working on a farm in eastern Washington with her husband of 63 years. We will miss her; may she rest in peace.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Beat that!

I backpacked 6.25 miles today with 56 pounds on my back, up and down 1250 feet, in 123 minutes. Beat that!

Except Soto. I have no doubt he could beat that.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Newt

I like Newt Gingrich. I like what he has to say, and I like his courage for saying it, and I have for over 10 years, but I do not think he is presidential material. Like Hillary, Newt has baggage. His conservative base will not forgive him for his adulterous affairs, just as they have never forgiven Bill. And like Hillary, the other party (and not just the radicals) have really strong negative feelings about Newt. His speeches do not bring the nation together, but they divide the nation. Our next president needs to appeal to ordinary citizens, to bring us together to face a multitude of huge domestic and international problems, to bring assurance, and not to antagonize.

Michael Gartner car story

By Michael Gartner, editor of various newspapers and president of NBC News. This car story reminds me in some ways of my dad, as well as my granddad (who shifted from 1st gear to high gear faster than anyone else I know, almost as soon as he got the car off gravel and onto pavement).
_______________

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together. My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none.

"No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first. But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car. Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, and a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea.

"Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work. Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio.

In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"

"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again.

"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked.

"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. " If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.

"Because you're 102 years old," I said.

"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words. "I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Early March flowers blooming

A few early spring flowers are starting to bloom here in the Seattle area:
azalea (just barely), camellia, cherry trees, crocuses, daffodils, forsythia, heather, Oemleria cerasiformis (a native shrub called "Indian Plum"), pansies, pieris japonica, primroses, quince, star magnolia, and vinca ("periwinkle").

Monday, March 12, 2007

Computer Science History Question

How many bytes of information were stored on a computer card?
I mean the ones that were fed into computers in the 1960's and 1970's.

For comparison, a modern camera memory card holds 2,000,000,000 bytes (more or less).

Friday, March 09, 2007

Little Miss Sunshine

I watched Little Miss Sunshine this evening. I liked it! :)
It was funny in a lot of places, but mostly because of all the weird things that happen, and not because they were trying to be funny.
I found it very entertaining because it was an unusual movie, but in a nice family sort of way. And the family was amusingly unusual family.
My only complaint is pretty standard for me and Hollywood:
Why did they have to use the F-word so much?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Catching up

Sorry I have not posted; I’ve been busy. Here are a few pet peeves:

It is just too soon to discuss the 2008 presidential primaries, isn’t it?

I was saddened this morning to hear that Scooter Libby was convicted on four charges.

The Mayor of Seattle wants the state to spend around a billion dollars on a tunnel along the Seattle docks to improve the view from downtown.

The Seattle Supersonics and NASCAR want the state to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium and a race track, respectively.

The Democrats in Olympia have increased the state budget by around 20% per year since taking control of the legislature, but the Department of Corrections is releasing felons and sexual predators due to lack of funds for jail space??

What is wrong with their priorities?