Hearts and Minds

Great news, America! The al-Qaida terror group in Iraq appears to be at its weakest state since it gained an initial foothold in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion five years ago. This comes to us from long-time General, first-time caller Martin Dempsey, who assumed interim command of U.S. Central Command on March 28. "Our forces and the Iraqi forces have certainly disrupted al-Qaida, probably to a level that we haven't seen at any time in my experience," said Dempsey, who served in Iraq in the initial stages as a division commander and later as head of the military organization in charge of training Iraqi security forces. "They can regenerate, and do from time to time," he added.
Of course they can regenerate, you silly General. That's what they do. And little dust-ups like the U.S. soldier who was accused of using a copy of the Quran for target practice tend to help that process along. Just about anything about our continued presence in Iraq is fodder for the al-Qaida recruitment process. That's why President Pinhead has apologized to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and promised to prosecute the GI.
The sniper, whose job it is to kill the enemy, has been sent home, and the Iraqi government would also like to see him tried for his grievous crime. The sniper, who probably has at least one friend or acquaintance who has been shot, maimed, or blown up by soldiers who happen to be Muslim. I understand that we're supposed to be the good guys over there, but when the bombs and bullets start flying, just how sensitive can we expect the average eighteen to twenty-four-year-old sniper to be? In one of his rambling monologues in "Apocalypse Now", Colonel Kurtz opines, "We train young men to drop fire on people, but we won't allow them to write 'F*CK' on their airplanes because it's obscene."
Yes, this guy needed to be sent home. Yes, his conduct was unacceptable. Unacceptable from where we're sitting, anyway. I suggest we bring them all home to avoid any further embarrassment.

Looking For Mister Goodbaryonic Matter

I think everyone's mother has, at one time or another, uttered these words: "Well, it didn't just sprout legs and walk out of here, did it?" This would be the admonition one might hear when something has gone missing and you have looked, cross your heart, everywhere for it. At our house, we are fond of the more sarcastic reply: "Oh, I didn't know that it was my week to watch" whatever it is that the other person can find hide nor hair.
It's terrible to lose things. I have ruined entire days looking for this or that when I was sure that I left it right over there. I pride myself on keeping very close tabs on all of my accouterments, and when one or more of them go missing, I take it as a personal failure of galactic proportions. So imagine my glee when I heard that astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space. It had been missing, for our purposes, since time began.
Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. If you have trouble keeping your socks in pairs from one load of laundry to the next, you can relate. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter, the protons and neutrons that make up atoms, but there also is an even larger amount of invisible "dark" matter.
Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE. I'm guessing that it would be much easier to find my wife's glasses if we were allowed to use some of NASA's resources.
What does this mean? Will Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earheart suddenly show up? What about those guys on Oceanic Flight 815? And while we're looking for lost things, how about Marshall, Will and Holly? And my self respect?
Oh well, at least now we know where the backbone of the universe is. Now maybe I'll be able to find my car keys.

Chaos Theory

It started about 2:15 a.m. Sunday when officers responded to a report of an injured bicyclist at Foothill Boulevard and 55th Avenue. When they arrived, they found a twenty-year-old Oakland man lying unconscious on the street. A witness told police that a Pontiac Grand Am had hit the bicyclist and had taken off northbound on 55th Avenue. Paramedics took the victim to Highland Hospital in Oakland, where he was reported to be in critical condition. A short time later, Alameda County sheriff's deputies told police that a Grand Am had arrived at the hospital and that the driver, a twenty-one-year-old Tracy man, had been shot. Police learned that at 2:15 a.m., the Grand Am had been sideswiped by another car on Foothill and that someone in the car had opened fire, hitting the Grand Am driver. The Grand Am continued on Foothill, hit the bicyclist and kept going.
How about that for some tidy coincidence? How about a little more "co-inky-dink": Most of this fun took place within blocks of where I teach. Today my class was as unruly as it has been in recent memory, along with a few others throughout the school. Had it been last week, I would have blamed the hot weather, but the past few days have been very pleasant. Maybe the sudden shift in barometric pressure caused a surge in unpleasant behavior. Maybe the boy who threw a rock at a girl this afternoon has no causal connection whatsoever between what happened early Sunday morning. But riding my bike home I kept an eye out for a Pontiac Grand Am.

Reckoning

"Only the good die young," sang Billy Joel. That was back in 1977. At the time, Billy was twenty-eight years old. I have no idea if, as he rounds the sun on his sixtieth trip, he still preforms this song. I wonder if he has any any qualms about being referred to as "Billy". His good friend Johnny Cougar has been John Mellencamp for the past twenty-five years.
But it got me to thinking: Is he right? If only the good die young, then the older I get, the less good I become. If this is true for all of us, then our choice for president is clear, since the youngest of the bunch has to be the best. Age may bring wisdom, but it would seem that it doesn't include a certificate of goodness.
Then I thought of Mother Theresa, humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, who lived to be eighty-seven. Surely even Billy Joel would have to include her on the "good list", wouldn't he? Maybe it's not a world-view at all. Maybe it's more of a rock 'n' roll thing. Neil Young, who has spent most of his life looking like a crazy old man before actually becoming one, wrote that it was "better to burn out than to fade away." And Roger Daltrey used to sing, "Hope I die before I get old." I'm guessing now that there are only two member of The Who, that sentiment has fallen by the wayside in favor of vitamins and herbal tea.
Or maybe it's hyperbole. It's a reckoning with the inevitability of your own demise, and making peace with the curious imperfections of life. Maybe we should remember Mister Joel still likes to think of himself as "An Angry Young Man", but he also wrote these words:

"So before we end and then begin
We'll drink a toast to how it's been
A few more hours to be complete
A few more nights on satin sheets
A few more times that I can say
I've loved these days"

Me too, Billy.

Work 'n' Stuff

Last night my wife and I were having a discussion about real and made-up jobs. She has a client or two that charge in excess 0f one hundred dollars an hour for their services. I suggested if that was the case, they must have made-up jobs. One was an "Energy Consultant", and you can use your imagination to determine just what that job description looks like. If you're thinking it has something to do with switching to fluorescent light bulbs, think again. One hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour. Go figure.
My attitude may be shaped by the old saw about "Those who can't do teach." I feel this every so often when I come home exhausted from a day in the classroom, and then I remember a day when I used to carry boxes of books around a warehouse for ten hours a day, or when I used to move and repair modular office furniture. Those were jobs. I came home and took a shower. I didn't just sink down into the couch with a low moan. That's why I'm the guy who raises his hand when my assistant principal asks if anybody wants to help putting together bookcases. Molding young minds is important, but it rarely involves a Phillips head screwdriver.
When all was said and done, I decided to return to my high school career goal: I want to be the person who decides when and where the apostrophe-n-apostrophe contraction can and should be used. "Rock 'n' Roll" is pretty much the template, but there are hundreds of other uses, and it is my intent to become the sole arbiter of this little chunk of pop culture. For this service I will not charge by the hour. Instead I will work only on commission. If you have any notions about where you might like to include this appealing and folksy conjunction, have your service call my service. We'll do lunch.

Piano Man

We have a new piece of furniture at our house. It came to live with us a week ago. It makes noise. It's a piano.
For many moons I resisted my wife's insistence that we needed a piano. It seemed a little like "needing" a video game system. I could understand all the intrinsic value of such an acquisition, but I never understood it as a basic need. I suppose if things got very desperate we could prop it on its side and live in the shadow of the soundboard, but it's not much of a shelter and we're not going to eat it or wear it, so why do we need it?
Now that it's here, I understand. My son has been taking piano lessons for the past couple of years and he's been practicing on a Yamaha keyboard. You know the kind, with all the spiffy noises and rhythms. On any given day when he had finished practicing, he would spend a few minutes noodling about with the drum sounds and the other effects. It was a value-added experience for him, but not always for those of us stuck listening to it.
Now he practices on a real piano: eighty-eight keys, no waiting. It's an upright that began its life as a player piano. I grew up with a player piano in our basement, and I was also part of the crew of burly men, though certainly not the burliest, who carried that beast out of my mother's house oh so many years ago. Part of my fear of owning a piano is the certainty of it eventually having to move to another place, and I know just how much gravity has to be overcome in order for this to happen. I can remember when I was in high school I figured out how I could crouch under my mother's baby grand, the upstairs piano, and move it in short slides by arching my back underneath it. A very useful trick, but not one that I would recommend for those who are fans of walking upright.
And so there it sits, behind me on the right, mocking me and my nearly ten years of lessons. "Come on and play me," it taunts, "I'll bet you can't." Well, the truth is, I still can. Not very well, but I can still pound out "Little Drummer Boy" and a few bits of a Beethoven Sonatina that I memorized in my teens. I found some free Scott Joplin sheet music to download on Al Gore's Internet, and I printed out "The Entertainer" just to see how long it would take me to give up in frustration. If this were "Piano Hero", I would be stuck on the first level, clanging away in fits and starts.
In the meantime, my son is preparing for his first recital this Saturday. In previous years he has shied away from that kind of attention, preferring instead to keep his music to himself, but now he feels the time is right. He's been practicing all week long, and I think he'll be ready. I expect he'll be available for a few more impromptu performances right here in the parlor, now that we've got our own analog music machine.

Bucket Brigade

This afternoon I found myself fondly remembering a scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Butch is arguing with his rival Harvey Logan about the rules of their pending knife fight. "Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!" bellows Logan, just before Butch finishes the fight in his own inimitable fashion.
What set me to thinking of this interchange was hearing the neighborhood children chasing one another up and down the street in front of my house with a variety of containers full of water. More to the point, they were briefly full, then suddenly empty on this hottest day of the year so far. One little girl, with Gatorade bottle at the ready was loudly insisting, "Don't wet me! I can't get wet!"
Well, if ever there was an innate challenge to the logic and senses of anyone under five feet tall, this is it. You say you "can't get wet"? I believe there is a very abrupt and gratifying way to test this assertion. Of course you can get wet, you probably shouldn't, and something tells me that standing outside with your bottle of water in attack position isn't the best defense against dampness.
We had a family like that on the street where I grew up. Right about the time the first squirt guns showed up for the season, they were the ones to escalate things. They liked buckets and hoses. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to water fights, I believe firepower is extremely important. But here's the rub: These guys would inevitably show up early, douse some unsuspecting victim, only to run screaming for the relative safety of their own front yard, screaming, "I can't get wet!" This usually had something to do with the fact that they went to Catholic school and were often still wearing their uniforms into the early evening. Not that there was much discussion about whether or not their targets were "allowed" to be soaked. I had my share of Garanimals drenched by these miscreants, and I always imagined a day when I would have my revenge.
Sadly, that day never came. Something about the way justice was meted out in our neighborhood never allowed it. Maybe later in life they ended up on "America's Funniest Home Videos" as the buffoon on the receiving end of an above-the-ground-pool mishap, but I never got to see it. On reflection, I can only say that I am glad that I was always one of those kids who could get wet. It's a real character-builder.