Facebook and Identity Theft

Here's one more little rif on a recurring theme of mine. Recurring because some things need reiterating in order to keep folks (read: some of my very plugged-in, younger online friends in particular) on their toes. Hey, every frippin' year I have to accomplish the same half dozen computer-based training (CBT) modules on "Information Assurance" or the "Protection of Classified Information" or some such, so surely someone did a study that showed it was necessary. Surely they aren't making me repeat it because they think I might just hit the "Next Page" button as fast as the current page will load. Not me.

Anyway, long before I started seeing warnings pop up on the internet associating the risk of identity theft with the propensity of today's young to share everything about themselves on social networking sites, I was busy trying to convince some acquaintances that answering all hundred or more questions in three or four online surveys several times a week might be a fun way to explore the projection of one's various personae, but it was not a safe thing to do in terms of protecting one's future bank accounts. I've even sounded a few of those warnings here, as in my Independence Day post, for example.

Today, as I was catching up on some technology news, I came across an interesting article posted on CNet, titled, Facebook users open to cyberattacks, ID theft? Here's an excerpt that pretty much reiterates the message I've been trying to pass on, including a frightening example of exactly what I've been saying was possible:

However, Olson and Rick Howard, director of intelligence at VeriSign's iDefense Labs, said a longer-term problem is users' openness with personal information on public forums.

"They seem to have no sense of privacy," Howard said. "We think it could go two ways. In the future, they're either going to decide they're embarrassed by all the information they've put out there, or they may decide it's just the way it is and (that) it's OK to put information out there."

In a "thought experiment" the two conducted in the United States before visiting Australia, Howard said they managed to acquire enough information on one young user to steal her identity.

"We pulled down one person's name--in this instance, a female--and everything she put out there," Howard said.

"In 15 minutes of doing Google searches, we were able to collect enough information to steal her identity."

What makes the young particularly vunerable, as I've noted before, is that they have no idea, yet, which questions among the hundred or more in each survey reveal potentially compromising personal information. "Where were you born? What was your first car? What is your pet's name?" These sound like safe things to tell people who really want to know more about you. Problem is, they also function as security questions for online identification.

If you're the sort of person who reads blogs, you're probably not the sort of person who needs this warning. But how about your kids? Do you visit their MySpace and FaceBook profiles? Peruse the bulletins where so much about them is out there for all to see? It's worth your time. Educate them now and you may save them some pain later.

Umm . . . Like, check this out

As an English professor, you cannot help but love this:

The just announced “Umm Like All-Star” list includes Britney Spears, who was caught uttering 73 “likes” and “ya knows” in a five-minute video interview on YouTube.

Read the whole article here, to find out which celebs like, you know, um, can't string, like, five, you know, words, like, together in, like, you know, a row.

Or check out the whole Umm . . . Like website.

More Conroy

I'm two thirds of the way through The Lords of Discipline, and just needed to share the following quote, which is like much in McCarthy, and expressive of a concept around which Kevin McColley fashioned an entire novel, called Praying to a Laughing God. From Conroy:

"I have read too much history, Mr. McLean," he said, moving past Vanderhorst Row. "And it has depressed me about my fellow man."

"Why has it depressed you, sir?" I asked.

"Because the single theme of human existence is atrocity, sir. Even the most casual perusal of the subject would tell you that. Anything that man can do that will irreparably harm his fellow man, he will certainly do. I can close my eyes, Mr. McLean, close them this instant on this very pleasant walk, and my brain will come alive with horrendous, unspeakable images of heinous crimes men have performed against other men. Nothing surprisese me anymore. Nothing shocks me. I have reached the point in my life when I am seized with an utter hopelessness about the human race. And you, sir," he said, fixing his gaze on me, "how do you feel about the race that violates this lovely planet?"

"I like human beings all right, Colonel," I said, "better than wart hogs or sting rays, anyway."

"I assure you, cad, that you would receive far more justice and mercy from a wart hog than from one of the monstrous chimps who wears a black robe and sits in judgment against his fellow man. The God that created man in his own image, Mr. McLean, must be a vile, unconscionable being. Or he must be highly amused by depravity." --p. 395

Mother Teresa: Doubts of a Saint

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? --Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

I first came to Blood Meridian, at a time when the doubts in my own soul were at their darkest. Actually, I misspoke. I came to that book at a time when doubt had yielded to darker certainty. That, as much as anything, drew me to McCarthy. By the time I got to The Crossing, and the heretic of Caborca, it was as though I was reading about myself.

It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him. --The Crossing p. 149

It has been a long slow recovery from certainty to the more optimistic condition of mere doubt.

So it was with some sense of kinship (make no mistake--I'm well aware that I am no saint) that I read today's news about the darkness which haunted Mother Teresa.

It began, she said, soon after she set up her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the late 1940s to succor India’s poor. And it lasted, with only a joyous five-week respite in 1959 when she refound God, until her death at age 87, a decade ago.

“There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work,’” she wrote in 1953.

What is one to do, then, laboring under such a burden? Where find some solace? If we are to judge from the life of Mother Teresa, there is something to be said for doing what one can for others. I understand that drive too. In 1982, smarting from the disintegration of a marriage, the brevity of which set a standard that Britney Spears only barely surpassed, I decided that the best way to move my focus from my own pathetic self-pity was to volunteer for a community crisis hotline in the small town where I bought my first house. It worked. I heard things, and talked people through things, that pretty quickly reminded me that my life was pretty damned good, all-in-all.

Which brings me to my questions for today: how does one one-up a mere hotline? How resist the urge to call down the lightning as does Ahab, haunted by equally dark certainties? How strike through the mask, and at what? Where does one find answers to the questions Suttree asks? That McCarthy asks through Suttree?

It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me? --Suttree, p. 366

Where seek the confidence to answer in the affirmative the boy's question in The Road, "Are we still the good guys?" Where?

And in the meantime, while we seek?

Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones. --Suttree, p. 29

What Kind of Sandwich Are You?

You Are a Ham Sandwich

You are quiet, understated, and a great comfort to all of your friends. Over time, you have proven yourself as loyal and steadfast. And you are by no means boring. You do well in any situation - from fancy to laid back. Your best friend: The Turkey Sandwich Your mortal enemy: The Grilled Cheese Sandwich

What Kind of Sandwich Are You?

Hat tip: Barry, a Tuna Fish Sandwich.

Southern Women

I've said before and I'll say again, more than for any other reason, we love authors according to their ability to put into words far better than our own, the philosophies we believe we hold, or the observations we believe we've made, but could never have captured so perfectly. To wit, as I began The Lords of Discipline, my first Pat Conroy novel (an admission that shames me), I was no further than 4 pages into the prologue before I knew I will likely have read the entire Conroy canon by this time next year:

My mother is a different case. As lovely a woman as I have ever seen, bread and nurtured like a gardenia, she has always seemed somehow odorless and sexless to me, yet viscerally seductive in the manner of Southern women, that taloned species who speak with restrained and self-effacing drawls, fill a room with elegance and vulnerability, move with the grace of wind-tilted cane, and rule their families with a secret pact of steel. The sweetness of Southern women often conceals the secret deadliness of snakes. It has helped them survive the impervious tyranny of Southern men more comfortable with a myth than a flesh-and-blood woman.

Crossroads

Here's a tip for couples: please talk to one another--often, always, and honestly. And be open to hearing what the other has to say. Unconditional love doesn't mean that we view someone as perfect. It means that we love them, imperfections and all. If either of you complains to the other of some quirk or mannerism or habit that is less than endearing, then thank one another for the honesty, consider whether it is ammendable without any argument over whether it should be ammended. If it can, it should be. If it can't, then the other will have to decide what they can live with and still love. True unconditional love seldom exists, except in a parent for a child.

Be careful, always though, not to confuse the recognition of imperfections with failing to love. It is a far dearer thing, and harder to find, to be loved for what we really are, and to find a mate whose vision of us includes and helps us attain the best that we can be in this lifetime. Nathaniel Branden pointed out years ago that we tend to fall in love with people for the way they see us. Inevitably sad for us if that vision is an illusion, then so will its love be. Infinitely happy for us if that vision is real, both of what is and what can be, for then, the love also is real, unchanging, empowering, sustaining, encompassing, ever-growing. It would be lucky for us if we were designed so as only to fall in love with someone whose love and vision were of the former variety, rather than the latter. But we are so designed that the most attractive thing of all is the illusion of our own perfection when we see it in someone else's eyes

I think it's a rare person who even gets a shot at that more honest, open-eyed love. That's the sort of love that will help us up a notch on the circle. That is a soul mate. And it's a lucky person who gets that shot at an age or a stage when they can recognize the difference, and recognizing it, seize the right ring. God's sense of humor in that regard is closely linked to the fun he has with our sex drives.

_____________
A closing quote from Cormac:

Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all. (Cities of the Plain, 285)

Are you a Feminist?

I don't think I'll say where I waffled. I'll just say that it was the one question that really had nothing to do with feminism, because the answer is really gender independent. The underlying assumption behind every question is that the desired condition is already true for men, and in one particular case, it's not even close. It's simply not an "injustice" or inequality that's gender motivated or determined.

You Are 93% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

(Hat tip: Enrevanche)

Like Minds?

I am so not a believer in coincidence.

All the way back across the country, I looked forward to penning a post about the superb new humidor I received during our visit to Wilmington, NC. In the last six months or more, I can think of not a single blog post, among the few I read with regularity, with cigars as a topic. Yet on my return, I find with some delight that the Mountain Philosopher is awake again, and among his recent posts, one about cigars. Coincidence?

I might have been willing to think so, but then . . . Two days ago, I finished Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein, having listened to it, from the Colorado/Kansas border to Tennessee before setting it aside to listen to The Road from Nashville to Wilmington (more on this in a later post), and then picking up Einstein again from Calabash through New Orleans and Dallas all the way back to Colorado. I highly recommend it, btw.

Because I'll be returning to Wilmington in less than two weeks, I decided to finish off my summer reading with a Southern author I've been way too long in coming to. Thus it was that, yesterday, I began The Lords of Discipline. Why is that remarkable? Because today's post on The Archer Pelican is about none other than, you guessed it, Pat Conroy. Coincidence? Give me a break.

Input/Output and Minority Report

Remember that awesome input/output interface in Minority Report? (If you don't, or didn't see the movie, then see the trailer at the bottom of this post.) It's not as far into the future as you may think.



And searching for the right clip from Minority Report, I came across this further demo of the technology that either led to or sprung from what Microsoft is showing off above:



Finally, here's the trailer, the search for which thoroughly demonstrated to me that I'm far from the first to connect the movie and this technology. That said though, what should be more amazing is that a greater number of futuristic films haven't showcased it. I see the stuff above and I think it'll be pretty amazing if my grandchildren are using keyboards and mice. Hammers and chisels seem more likely than that.

Your memory or your life?

An interesting article appeared in the news last week. One which got my attention more than most.

Elderly black people who are chronic users of acid-inhibiting drugs in the family that includes Zantac, Pepcid and Tagamet have 2½ times the normal risk of developing dementia, Indiana researchers reported Friday.

The drugs block production of stomach acid by inhibiting histamine-2 receptors; the stomach releases hydrochloric acid when stimulated by histamines. But they also inhibit the brain’s cholinergic system, which is involved in memory and cognition. Low levels of cholinergic activity have been linked to dementia.

Now I am neither elderly nor black, but I hope to be one someday, and I'm pretty sure that the biochemistry we're talking about here isn't race-related. The study subjects were black, driving the wording above.

Why did this get my attention? Because, like many married men my age who, forced to take pleasure where they can find it, long ago installed a mirror over the kitchen table, I was also long ago diagnosed with a hiatal hernia and GERD. Of more concern, a recent EGD (The fog of anesthesia of which I emerged from alternating a recitation of the "Prologue" of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and my favorite line of "jive" from Airplane. That the portions of my brain governing memory and language awakened well before those responsible for discretion did not amuse my spouse . . . but that's another story.) brought with it the news that the bottom five centimeters of my esophagus is being assimilated by my Borg-like stomach. The technical name for this is Barrett's Esophagus. It is a precursor condition to cancer, which, doesn't so much run in my family as sprint. But, Picard escaped the Borg, so resistance is never wholly futile.

While opinions seem to differ on whether esophageal tissue that has become stomach tissue can ever really become esophagus again, there is at least agreement that treating the GERD (with both lifestyle changes and drugs) can at least stop the damage.

My drug is Aciphex. Which, I am happy to report, is not in the class listed above, but is instead, a proton pump inhibitor. That's good news:

The study did not look at Caucasians and there was not enough data to suggest a risk from a different family of drugs called “proton pump inhibitors,” which includes Prilosec, Nexium and Prevacid.

It would be a wicked irony indeed that asked a person to choose between risking an early end to life by leaving one condition unchecked and prolonging life, but not being able to remember why you wanted to in the first place. Which is why, in the end, lifestyle changes, when possible, are always a superior, if more difficult, option than drugs.

Blog Roll Catch Up

One of the things I like about IE7 is the ability to open a slew of websites with a single click from the favorites menu. Accordingly, I have a "Blog Maintenance" folder, and a "Blog Reads" folder. Part of catching up since vacation has been to peruse some of the posts on the Blogroll since I left. A few are worth recommending.

This from Indexed made me laugh out loud.

This shifting map of the Middle East on Acute Politics is worth watching.

Bad time to pick up a new vice?

Ten years ago, I couldn't explain what a single-malt Scotch was, let alone name a favorite. But I can now.

Cigars, though, I'm still learning about. I've added a cigar blog to my list of occasional reads, and for father's day this year, my daughters gave me a beautiful Don Salvatore Cuban Wheel humidor that I'm working on stocking with some good smokes as I discover them. That is, if I can afford to. A recent post over at Mountain Philosopher has me a little concerned:

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) Bill, co-sponsored by Senators Hatch and Kennedy, and which passed the Senate last week by a veto-proof majority but which has yet to pass the House, would extend health insurance to millions of uninsured American children. The bulk of the program's costs would be financed by an additional 61 cent tax on a pack of cigarettes. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

The bill also calls for HUGE increases on premium cigars which yours truly does relish upon occasion. How much of an increase? The current stoogie federal tax is a 5 cents. The House version of the bill calls for about a one dollar tax. Again, I can live with that 2000% increase.

But the Senate version goes crazy, setting up to a TEN DOLLAR TAX per stick! The formula calls for an approximately 53% tax on the wholesale cost. I typically smoke four to seven dollar cigars. A seven dollar cigar runs about $3.50 wholesale, making it $5.25 before markup, and about ten bucks to me if the retailer is going to maintain his margin and stay in business. The fifteen dollar sticks, and believe me, these are more popular than you might think, will start to go for 24 bucks.

I now understand why the humidor came with a little flyer urging me to visit the Legislative Action Center of the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America and get involved.

Seafood Capital of the World

First, a hearty thanks to Barry over at Enrevanche for the occasional post to They Rode On while I was busy enjoying a Saturday night stock car race, NC beaches, barbeque, and too much deep-fried seafood and hand-dipped Mayfield ice cream in "the seafood capital of the world."

Since this blog purports to claim food as an occasional topic, let me offer a few suggestions to anyone lucky enough to visit Calabash, NC, in the near future. After years of spending a week at Sunset Beach, about five miles up the coast from Calabash, I've tried most of the restaurants in town at least once. Every regular visitor to Calabash has a personal favorite. Dad's is The Seafood Hut, on the left after you make the turn at the light and head toward the dock. They have great seafood there, but last time I went (admittedly a few years ago), they only took cash, and I don't tend to travel with a lot of that, so we opt for Dockside instead.

Everyone has his or her own standard to judge a seafood house by, so here's what my family likes about Dockside, and you can judge from there. First, great service. (As our waitress came by the table the first time, carrying a tray of food to another table, she smilingly said, "I'll be right with ya'll." I could write a paragraph about why that mattered, but if you need the paragraph, you won't get it anyway.) Awesome, hot, plentiful hushpuppies. One family member's favorite is the deviled crab and another's is the shrimp and fish and clam chowder. My wife and I split the deluxe platter because we love all of the above and oysters and scallops, and we still have more food than we can eat. All hot, all fresh, all great.

Need a break from seafood, or allergic to it? Then try Tony's Pizza, on the right, just past The Seafood Hut, but before you get to Dockside. If we're down for the week, we'll hit Tony's at least once.

After dinner, there's only one place in Calabash that people in the know go for ice cream: The Back Porch. Once upon a time, it was in a tiny little building that really was more porch than building. But a few years ago, it moved to a location just across Beach Drive from Callahan's. For at least the decade that we've been visiting, Vivian has been hand-dipping Mayfield ice cream (my new personal favorite is Extreme Moose Tracks), and making true southern sundaes complete with wet nuts. If you don't know what wet nuts are, you are not a NC native. (Hint: to make some for yourself, take a mason jar, fill it with walnuts, then pour in Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup to the top, put a lid on, let it sit for a week, then try that as a topping for your favorite ice cream.) A few years ago, a rival "creamery" moved in within spitting distance of the old porch. I can't comment on that other place except second-hand, and none of that has been good, bless their hearts. Go to the Back Porch.

Before you do though, you'll need to let that hefty helping of artery-hardening, deep-fried seafood settle, so if you're like our family, you'll need to spend an hour or so wandering around in Callahan's, across the street. Buy a t-shirt, pick up some new beach jewelry. If you leave with less than a pound of fudge, you're not trying. But, for heaven's sake, do not buy a hermit crab, unless your plan is to name it Willy and take it back to the ocean and set it free the very next day. You get lots of Karma points for that.

...and the women aren't all that attractive, either

From the "This would be funny, only it's happening to me" department:

A private e-mail address, linked to a pseudonym that I use for occasional print and Web articles, has been helpfully subscribed to an "online dating" site.

The word "dating," in this case, seems to have the same euphemistic meaning that the transsexual hookers in New York City's Meatpacking District always understood: "...honey, want a date?" (a line not infrequently delivered in a disconcerting basso profundo.)

Even better: Having logged in with the credentials provided by the semi-literate prankster who set this up (since he or she used my e-mail address, I got all the notifications of account creation, as well as the many "special offers" that begin pouring into my inbox this morning)... there is no way to delete the account from the site via the web interface.

Okay. Scratch one e-mail account, set up another, add some random characters into the name.

Good thing they're disposable these days.

(crossposted from enrevanche)

Sack up

I've gone hiking in bear country before, and a standard practice there is to hang your food (and the clothes you wore while cooking!) up in a tree, some distance from your camp, so that you don't invite bears into your tent.

(The reason that you hang the clothes you've cooked in, and don't sleep in them, is that if a bear wanders into your camp at night, you, smelling of food, in your sleeping bag, will appear to be something that was packaged by Kraft.)

Anyway... meet Ursack.


(crossposted from enrevanche)

"The cat's here; call in the family"

When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.

In his two years living in Steere's end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence.

He wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"It's not that the cat is consistently there first," Dr. Joan Teno, a professor of community health at Brown University, who sees patients in the unit. "But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours."

Nursing home cat can sense death, ease passing (Reuters via Yahoo News)

The staff don't believe that anything supernatural is going on; rather, they posit that Oscar is sensitive to some kind of biochemical change that is taking place in the unit's patients as death approaches.

However, definitely check out Oscar's picture in the Yahoo News article cited above. He appears to be a very wise cat, with a great deal of Buddha-nature. You can just tell that the little guy has quite a bedside manner.

Related: Dosa, David M. A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat N Engl J Med 2007 357: 328-329

(crossposted from enrevanche)

How Find Good Barbeque

"One place is sort of expensive."
"Tell me how to get to the other one. Good barbeque is never expensive."

That's how I knew which one of three barbeque restaurants was the real thing in Cookeville, Tennessee. The other clue was, "Well, that place only does pork."

You have to understand, though, I was getting these directions from my innkeepers, both of whom were from Michigan. They had all the right information; they just didn't know it.

The real reason I logged on here tonight was so that I could print the blog from a couple days ago, and the Gazette article it links to. That should help them make some sense of all my babbling about "real" barbeque.

And this is likely to be my last post for a while. I'm glad to see Barry's keeping the keyboard warm though. Thanks cuz. Hope to see you in NC soon.

Spot of trouble on the commute

(Hi. Barry here. While Doc is on travel, I will be posting here occasionally. I'm kin to him, but please don't hold that against me.)

As I'm sure anyone within reach of the Intertubes already knows, there was a teensy spot of trouble near Grand Central Station last night... a massive steam pipe exploded, sending a geyser of live steam, "mud" (more on that in a second), rocks and miscellaneous debris twenty stories into the air and blasting a huge hole in Lexington Avenue.

I can't hope to add anything to the voluminous coverage of this incident, except to relate another incident that took place in my office last night. The explosion occurred just before 6PM, at the height of the evening rush hour, and shortly thereafter a number of us gathered in the Network Operations Center, where a local news channel was tuned in and patched through to the overhead projector.

The initial images were really startling - the steam-geyser was achieving some incredible heights, and it was evident that the steam pipes had taken out quite a bit of additional infrastructure with them when they blew, as there was an enormous amount of debris in the mix.

"Damn," one of our senior engineers observed. "Looks like it took out a sewer line, too."

One of the new guys objected.

"The news says that's mud."

The senior guy said, "Dude, I've worked in IT for over 20 years now. Don't you think I can recognize a fountain of shit when I see one?"

NC BBQ in Colorado

Damn. Damn. Damn. I picked a helluva weekend to actually be in NC. Probably the one weekend there'll be something resembling a real NC pig pickin' (the last of which I attended was thrown by our Association of Graduate Students in the English Department at UNC-CH, back in 1989) here at the base of the Rockies.

“My wife thinks I’m slightly obsessed about barbecue,” says Smith, who lives in Monument. “I love to smoke meat and make it like I grew up eating in North Carolina.”

That’s why he often throws parties for friends, especially for a gathering of hard-core North Carolina transplants — most with ties to the University of North Carolina — who are nuts about his barbecue.

13 Ways of Looking at a BlackBerry: Number 4, BlackBerry Smoothie

Over at Enrevanche, (okay, so you can tell what blogs I visit regularly), Barry posted a link you have to see to believe (unless you know about this site).

So, after visiting, I made a suggestion:

We'll see what comes of it. Either way, I think this will stand as #4.

13 Ways of Looking at a BlackBerry: Number Three: "Outmoded"

Also from Barry, at Enrevanche:

Here's my entry.

I call this piece “Outmoded.”

Pictured, left to right: Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry Curve, generously provided by my employer, adjacent to Apple’s new iPhone, generously provided by me, both displaying a favorite blog.

And again, if you haven't been there already, here's the photo that started this.

13 Ways of Looking at a BlackBerry, Number Two

First up with a contribution to the series was Barry, over at Enrevanche, with a comment that, while not a photo, I'm going to count nonetheless. Certainly, "through poetry" is a valid way of looking, given where I pilfered the title of the series. So, moving from the comment box, where it was prefaced by, "I'll see your Wallace Stevens and raise you a William Carlos Williams," to front page, here's number 2:

so much depends

upon

a blackberry

buzzing

vibrating in its

holster

like a way-too-expensive

marital aid

Touche! Frankly, I think that's going to be hard to beat.

He also posted a photo, but I'm off to a picnic, so I'll post that when I return, or you can pay it a visit over at his place in the meantime.

And if you haven't been there already, check out the photo that started this.

BlackBerry Coaster

Confession: When I was younger, I never really knew how to enjoy the company of other men. Perhaps it was insecurity, and a sense of every situation being a competition of sorts. But I'm inclined to think that wasn't it, given that in many respects, that's an aspect of male relationships that never wholly goes away. Or perhaps it was a surplus of testosterone that drove me always to be looking for a person of the opposite gender with whom to spend time. God knows that's less of a problem as we age. Or maybe the problem was that I used to care, overmuch, what others thought. Heaven knows I still care, but sooooo much less.

Whatever the reason, in the last five years or so, I've finally begun to enjoy the company of my fellow alpha males. I say alpha males, because, for the most part, they are. You'd think we'd clash. But for whatever reason, age, nothing-left-to-prove confidence, manageable hormone levels, whatever, we get along. We all have wives or significant others. We enjoy their company, most of us. But we also enjoy one another's, and take pains to find time for it. Breakfast, runs, bike rides, horseshoes, skydiving, lunch, or, to use last night as an example: a couple glasses of St Remy in snifters, a couple of great cigars, a pair of Adirondack chairs on top of a hill overlooking the city with the sun setting behind Pike's Peak, and stories of snakebites, almost snakebites, switchbacks, and the trout that got away, until sunset and the rapid Colorado chill sent us in. Now that is the kind of evening that will get you through the week. If you spend part of it planning a weekend guy getaway to a cabin on a trout stream with cigars and reserve whiskey for sustenance, it's the kind of evening that will get you through the month.

Don't get me wrong. I love my wife. I love my daughters. I love my two big female dogs (Husky and Newfoundland). I even love our one completely uncatlike female cat. But I love not having to explain myself. Guys understand guys things, guy likes, guy angst and guy anger. With guys, you can simply describe a situation--note, that's describe, not explain--then wrap up the matter in three short sentences (okay, one sentence, one phrase, and one word):

"Dude, that's f___ed up."
"Damn straight."
"S__t."

That's it. No need for explaining, hugs, tears, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. It's taken nearly half a century, but I'm finally able to really appreciate that.

All that said, this blog opens with a guy photo from a guy friend taken on his guy vacation. With apologies to Wallace Stevens, I'm going to issue an invitation to my readers to contribute to a series, with this as entry number one. We'll call the series, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a BlackBerry." E-mail me your photographic entries and I'll post them here with appropriate credits. Entry number one comes courtesy of Robert. The e-mail that brought it to me came with the following note: "Please see my recent vacation photos for detailed proper usage of a Blackberry and Corona." We'll call it "BlackBerry Coaster."

Yeah baby . . .

We all know this sounds just like something I would do . . .

BEND, Ore. — Last weekend, Bend gas station owner Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some drinks and snacks — and a parachute.

Attached to the lawn chair were 105 balloons of various colors, each 4 feet around. Bundled together, the balloons rise three stories high.

Couch carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.

Destination: Idaho.

My favorite line:

Even at two miles high, Couch said, he could hear cattle lowing and children talking. He heard gunshots, which worried him.

Who knew you needed to prep the route with a SEAD mission? :-)

Source: Yesterday's Seattle Times.

The Survey Generation

Things survive on the internet. Nothing really ever goes away. Sometimes, it gets harder to find, but your best bet is to assume that, once there, it'll stay there. Forever.

Surveys are a good example. They can be fun. They can be revealing. They can be dangerous. They can be dangerously revealing.

Got kids? No, this is not a survey question. Well, actually, it is, but not in this instance. In this instance, it's rhetorical. In a survey, it would likely be followed by "How many?" "What are their names?" "Birthdays?" Now, next to each other those questions look pretty suspicious. But a survey will get you to drop your guard by interspersing innocuous questions like, "Do they ever eat macaroni?" "What was their last injury that required a bandaid?" "Are they walking yet?" etc.

In this instance, it's prelude to saying, Get online and watch what they're posting on their personal sites, like MySpace and FaceBook, and the like. They may not have bank accounts yet, but one day they will. And when the bank asks security questions like "What's your mother's maiden name?" "What town were you born in?" "What was your first pet's name?" "What was your first car?" "What's your favorite color?" (all of which I've seen as security questions at one time or another), do you think they'll remember that they've answered all of those questions for the world to see (or at least all of their "friends"--who for most kids, number well into the hundreds) on MySpace or FaceBook.

I took the title of this post from one of the hits I got when I typed "myspace surveys security" on Google. Ethan Kaplan, had an interesting blog post about the same tendency, but less from a security perspective than a psychological one. It's worth reading though.

Meanwhile, our children are likely to be challenged, when the time comes for them to set up security questions for online financial accounts; that is, if they're web-savvy enough to remember that the purpose of those questions is to ask them things that only they would know the answers to, and then to remember that, oh yeah, several hundred of my "friends" and by means of "extended networks" their "friends" and so on, know those answers too. Because, as I said at the beginning, nothing on the web ever dies, and just because you can't find it anymore, doesn't mean that even a poorly skilled hacker can't.

So, think twice about answering all those survey questions, or try to get your kids to, or at least try to school them in which ones are best answered, "None of your beeswax." And then, after you've schooled them, plan to remind them, and remind them, and remind them. Nothing on the web dies, but good advice has a half-life shorter than most man-made elements. Good luck.

Move over Stanley Kubrick

Even Eyes Wide Shut was only rated R.

This is not an adult blog, by any means. But an online rating site seems to think differently. This is pretty funny.


Mingle² - Online Dating

Here's why:

Engaged vs Disengaged

I had the good fortune to sit in on a briefing this morning from a representative of The Gallup Organization. Central question: Can character be measured? Answer from the speaker: Yes.

It is, of course, more complicated than that. But that's it in a nutshell. Most importantly, I came away convinced.

More importantly still, I came away wanting to work for the company that said they could do it. I came away convinced that they get it. That, for all their inexperience with military culture, they can translate. I came away thinking that the most cogent quote of the day might have been, from John C. Maxwell, translated and paraphrased, "There's no such thing as military ethics. There's just ethics." In other words, for the most part, there's no need for translation.

I also came away a little saddened, and clearer than ever in my mind that, for my good, and for the good of an organization I've loved for a long time, and given 26 years of my life, it's time for me to leave. I am anything but disengaged, but I share too many characteristics at the moment with the disengaged. At some point, when I have time to pull from the web the characteristics I mean, I will explain them one by one. Disturbed, I asked whether possession of the characteristics was what classified a person as disengaged, or if some other test determined that, and then the disengaged could simply be expected to exhibit those characteristics? I was told that the measuring of engagement was independent of these factors.

Let me offer a few examples. The engaged and the disengaged tend to have opposite answers to questions like, "Would you recommend this company to a friend?" or "Do you want to still be working here in a year?" Engaged workers are happier and more productive. I'll buy all of that, but there is still that chicken/egg question: disengaged, therefore unhappy; or, unhappy, therefore disengaged. More importantly, can you still be engaged, yet share answers with the disengaged. These are questions I'm pondering, but questions I'm sure Gallup has the answer to.

Probing my own situation, I found some consolation in one more point. The quote went something like this: "People join organizations; they leave individuals." You can love your job, love your organization, and reach a point where you can no longer watch it driven into the ground by one or many in positions of authority. The longer you watch that occur, the more you may find yourself in the "disengaged" camp in answering certain questions. The more you love your work, your mission, your teammates, the more devastating the impact of poor leadership on your morale. Does that make you disengaged or too engaged? This is more than semantics. There is something very basic at stake here.

There is a book answer, I'm sure. But I'd love to hear any comments. Bookish or otherwise.

Don't complexify things

My prolific record of posts since my return from spring break should speak volumes regarding my failure to heed the title's advice. And yet, though I've written little here, my fingers have been no stranger to the keyboard.

I'm attempting to draw one long career to a close and set out on another. Just which other is yet to be determined. But the exploration of possible others has kept me rather busy lately.

The other thing that's kept me busy has been reconnecting with some old friends. Back in May, I stood beneath the center of the new Air Force Memorial, staring up at the stars, with only even an occasional passing car as a distraction. I recommend visiting that monument--in fact, I recommend visiting all of them--well after midnight in the middle of the week. I don't like crowds. But I do like individuals. And those I call friends, I tend to like intensely, and for a lifetime. One of those friends gave me that midnight tour of DC. The monuments were nice, the government buildings were nice, the empty streets were like something from The Twilight Zone, but the best thing of all was reconnecting with a friend I'd not seen in a quarter of a century.

Today, I reconnected with another, after nearly a decade. Over an hour on the phone wasn't really long enough. Our kids were in grade school the last time we talked. This fall, we'll each drop one off at different colleges on the east coast. The last time we connected was his birthday, a decade ago, and he was about halfway through a year-long deployment to Korea. For his birthday, I sent him a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and one of two Costa Rican cigars from a little shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, picked up on a visit to a battlefield there as part of a graduate course on the literature of the Civil War (good luck untangling those modifiers). Then, through e-mail, we coordinated so that, at the same time, half a world apart, he smoked his cigar on a morning walk in Korea, and I smoked mine, on an evening walk, in gently falling snow, near Charlottesville, Virginia. The walk itself, a long-range version of something we did rarely, but with intense consciousness of each precious moment, sporting cigars on the starlit terrazzo of our shared alma mater, not quite two decades earlier still. A world apart, a shared, smoke-haloed perambulation--and then, the long drift. I hadn't the heart to tell him today that I'd driven by his house once, or, at least a house that was once his, some four years ago. On a road trip from North Carolina to a conference in Florida, I'd detoured through Alabama with an associate to look at a house he was arranging to live in with his family for a year of school there. At my request, we detoured by another as well. There wasn't time to stop for a real visit anyway, we had somewhere we had to be, "miles to go." But even more than that, there was, has been for years, for me, an unexplainable conflict between yearning and foreboding, more like than unlike that of Frost's most famous traveler. Still, I wanted to see the house, to have an idea in what surroundings to picture the closest friend I made in the four-year crucible we called a college, should one or the other of us bridge that drift again.

So, today, I did. Only I could really. I've moved three times since that December walk; he only once that I know of.

Funny thing about both those reconnections, the one spanning a quarter century and the other a decade: both are doctors. Well, technically, I suppose we all three are, but they're the kind who can cure you; whereas, I . . . well as I've told more than one jumper who's approached me for medical care, "I can describe that injury in colorful iambic pentameter and analyze the subtext within the plot turns of your life leading inevitably to it, but I'm not going to be much help to you, medically--not that sort of 'Doc' . . . sorry."

And both are artists, of one sort or another, so naturally, I'm coming to believe that all surgeons have this alter ego as a feature of their personalities. One gardens and cooks on a level well above my head, and the other draws and paints. Both have a gift for words as well, and it is to today's reconnection that I owe the lovely coinage that titles this post. As we both laughed at our growing collection of reading glasses (I find I'm not the only person with a pair in every room, pocket, vehicle, and end-table) and lamented the utter complexity of our lives, I mentioned a yearning "to simplify" my life. He responded, rightly I think, that we were probably past that point, the better strategy would have been "not to complexify them in the first place."

So, this post is a tribute to simpler times and to one of the simplest and most fundamental of life's pleasures: friendship. Quite honestly, I probably don't deserve the caliber of friends I have, and my gratitude that God has seen fit to bless me so abundantly nonetheless is probably all the explanation I ever need seek for my affinity for expressions of friendship in art. Some people saw Serendipity as a chick flick; I saw it as a buddy movie. I've never seen a better scripted or acted portrayal of that mysterious way in which male friendships materialize than the first few episodes of Deadwood, from Bullock's and Hickok's first meeting to the latter's murder. And you already know that I think Reign Over Me the finest movie to come out thus far this year, in any category. But I digress.

To my friends, thank you for putting up with me. You're really the only readers I have anyway. And to any of the latter who haven't been or aren't yet the former, I hope for you that you are or will be at least half so blessed as I in that arena, for were I only even half so blessed, I would still consider myself a very, very lucky man.

Now I've seen everything

The author of the words taken for title of this blog appeared on Oprah today. My phone and e-mail have been hopping ever since. More to follow.

Two movies

My beautiful eldest daugther and her mother and her mother's mother took off for a week in Hawaii following my daughter's high school graduation last week. For me, it was a rare opportunity to spend some time with my younger daughter. We shopped, we cooked, we saw a couple of movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End--Good movie to see with your daughter. Good movie to see, period. Entertaining. Great special effects. Minimum of stupidity. Good story. The critics--what do they know.

We also saw Knocked Up--For God's sake don't go see this with your 15-yr-old. Great reviews: "poignant," "hilarious," etc. Reality: mildly funny. Poignant, in a "this is the sort of real life I go to movies to escape from" sort of way.

Lastly, there is Spiderman III--SAVE YOUR MONEY. When I saw Mission Impossible II with my wife, she took all the fun out of it by laughing out loud at some of John Woo's more over-the-top directorial moments. At Spiderman, we both laughed. To begin with, Tobey Maguire is no great shakes as an actor. But really, when said 15-yr-old comes home and says it's the worst movie she's seen in a while (and this from someone who thinks Will Farrell can act), you know you're probably going to want that three hours of your life back.

Want to know what you shouldn't miss? Reign Over Me. So far, for 2007, the best movie I've seen, and I saw most of the Academy Award Winners. First, Adam Sandler can act. If you didn't know that after Spanglish, you weren't paying attention. Second, there is not an emotion that Reign Over Me leaves untapped: anger, love, humor, happiness, passion, friendship, grief, and every other corner of your heart that I've not named. If there is a don't miss movie for this year, this is it. Critics gave it a C+. They gave Spiderman a B; same grade they gave Talladega Nights. See a pattern yet?

Yin and Yang

A brief three days back in Colorado and then off to jump into the Preakness in Baltimore this Friday and Saturday. Stealing just a second to mention a pair of books that really should be read as a pair.

A few months ago, a friend recommended Thomas L. Friedman's, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Beyond being dated by having been right about much, the effect of which is that the late-coming reader is constantly thinking, "Well, duh," the book is a good study of globalization. To condense the point (a lot), globalization is inevitable, and largely good.

About the same time, an equally respected friend was touting the work of Michael Pollan, coincidentally at the same time that Pollan was scheduled to speak at a private college near my home. [The power of blogging is that you can link to all these things--books, other blogs, people, the college; the power of having a job is that I don't have time to add links tonight. Sorry. Maybe later.] I went to hear Pollan speak. I bought his book and am now about three-quarters through it. To condense the point (again, a lot), globalization/industrialization of the food chain into a monoculture based largely on a single plant, corn, is not inevitable, but is happening, and is bad. Bad on so many levels that all I can say is READ THE BOOK. Friedman, not so much.

Here's why I say read one, read it, read it, read it, but just read the other if you have some time to kill. Friedman will explain some things about the world today and how it came to be as it is. Cool to know, but it won't really drive you to change anything about your life. Pollan will tell you things you'll never learn otherwise, and that will change the way you see many things, and probably, the way you live and, most particularly, shop for and eat food.

And that is all I have time for today. Peace. Out.

What Next?

I am finally far enough behind on the posting to no longer feel obligated to catch up, and instead feel empowered to start anew. So . . .

Greetings from our nation's capital. Tomorrow, maybe a review of tonight's restaurant, but today, a quick recommendation on touring the capital: consider doing it after midnight. Unconventional, I'll admit, but standing directly beneath the apex and staring up through the center of the new Air Force Memorial at about 0130 the other night was waaay cool. And driving by the other memorials and viewing them in pristine unpopulated isolation, even from the car, was something impossible to experience during the day. And the absence of traffic was a blessed contrast to what I've experienced since. So, consider it. If you can combine it with an evening of catching up with an old friend you've not seen in 25 years, even better!

Gotta run. Doc.

America is not at war

I really should be in bed, but . . . some random thoughts first.

I attended a Holocaust remembrance today after work. Two really outstanding features of that. The first was the narrative presented by the speaker, one of the first four Americans to breach the wire at Buchenwald. I suppose he's in his 80's now. His gentleness was striking. His memories heartbreaking. His outrage at what he found there still fresh. His bride of 60 years was there with him--that says enough. Very small group of us there to hear him. And I'm glad I went. Second treat of that event was the trio that played before, in the middle, and after. Violin, accordion, bass. Worth going to hear either one.

And seeing the 3-star there reminded me of something he said the other day that I could write about for a long time, but won't tonight. "America is not at war. America's military is." And is, and is, and is. In more places than any of my civilian friends even know. And against some of the same evils that today's speaker fought. The great failure of the current campaign is not so much that it exists, but that people have forgotten why it exists, and that forgetting has enabled or necessitated, depending on how you look at it, its half-hearted prosecution. So it goes.

Lastly, I was having lunch with my daughter the other day. I picked her up at school and we made a quick trip to Panera Bread. Because I came from work and had to return to work, I was dressed for work. As we were leaving, an older gentleman and his wife said simply, "Thanks for your service." It's my honor to serve, but it still touches my heart every time I hear that. How is it that we're getting that right this time around? Whatever a civilian's position on the Global War on Terror, the troops are still embraced. An all volunteer force this time, yet we get thanked for prosecuting a less and less "popular" (an odd word to apply to that which follows, no matter how you cut it) war; whereas, a largely draftee and reluctant force was spat upon when they returned from an endeavor they had little choice in. Don't misunderstand--I am always grateful and touched by the acknowledgement. But it always makes me want to find one of those guys with the Vietnam campaign ribbon on a jacket, or in a car window, or on a license tag and hand that acknowledgement over to him with interest. Those men and women are overdue.

Vonnegut

If I'd had time to really write anything today, it would have been something about the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, complete with links to an obit, bio, etc. But life's been busy, and it would be hard to improve on the recollections over at Enrevanche.

In Vonnegut's case, "passing" may be a rather ironic euphemism.

As a college student, I had to read Slaughterhouse Five. As a college professor, I taught that and Cat's Cradle.

As a blogger, I'm going to shut up now and just say, pay Barry a visit, and you can press on from there.

So long Kurt.

Possibilities

I forget, from time to time, just how much I love live entertainment over something digitized and mass re-produced. Then I attend a play, a comedy bar, a symphony, a benefit concert, a reading, or, as tonight, a chamber series, and I vow anew to do a better job of scanning the campus newspaper and the entertainment section to find those live settings that allow a human connection impossible when the artist is a two-dimensional re-presentation. But I never do, do that better job. It's almost always accidental, but always a good thing. Tonight, it was on purpose.

I won't bother to review the concert. I'll say it was outstanding and leave it at that. The purpose of this entry is to pass on a recommendation. Whenever I've had the good fortune to interview authors, one question I always ask is, "Whom are you reading now?" Should I ever interview a musician whose work I like, I should ask, "To whom are you listening these days?" Tonight, I didn't have to ask. In the course of introducing a piece, one of the musicians put in a plug for a collection he'd lately found inspirational.

In the realm of books, I've never had a bum steer from an author I respected; so, I stopped on the way home and bought the album. I think we've started something. (I should probably have picked up a little Amy Winehouse while I was there, based on another recent recommendation, but I'm still smarting from Idiocracy.) At any rate, the recommendation was for Herbie Hancock's, Possibilities, an album which includes work with Sting, Santana, Annie Lennox, John Mayer, Paul Simon, Damien Rice & Lisa Hannigan to name a few. I am always fascinated and seldom disappointed by the result when musical artists make appearances in one anothers' works. (Ponder for a moment, what that might look like if artists in the written word were to try it.)

So far, the whole thing goes really, really well with Woodford Reserve on the rocks.

Children of Men

Back in January, my inspiration for this exercise in self-indulgence (who writes a blog others actually read) posted an entry on the movie Idiocracy. It inspired me to rent the movie--an act I regretted ten minutes into it and that my wife and daughters are likely to ensure I regret through the ages. Nonetheless, it popped to mind tonight.

Children of Men is nothing like Idiocracy. It doesn't bother to poke fun at what we're likely to do to ourselves as we press obliviously forward. I found the movie an interesting diversion, bleak, and not too thought provoking, and certainly not capable of sustaining any really deep analysis. The special features (that is, the extra stuff on the DVD; not the FX) though, are a different story. In fact, I recommend renting the DVD, skipping the movie (which you know you won't do) and going straight to the featurette titled, "The Possibility of Hope" (or something like that). Lots of futurists with lots to say. Some a bit of a stretch, but all far more thought provoking than the movie itself. And all very relevant to Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree (a riff on globalization interesting enough in its own right), which I finally finished this very afternoon.

But most particularly, for you fans of Idiocracy, if you watch that vignette to the end, you'll be rewarded with a closing line that, had it come first, might well have served as the kernel that germinated into the more farcical film on mankind's ultimate fate. Same messages, more or less--open to debate about which is better suited for the audience that might be able to effect change. If you really want to give your brain a cramp, see them both and then ponder that question for a while.

"That Old Guy Tried to Fight Me"

I mentioned in yesterday’s entry that I had “facilitated” in another DWI arrest once upon a time. Here’s that story.

Hard to believe that it was over two decades ago now. After over two years of living across the street from one another as the two most notably confirmed bachelor aviators in our squadron, my best friend of over 25 years now and I had finally managed to be assigned to the same crew. No longer being on opposing alert and flying schedules made all kinds of things possible. Like our St Patrick’s Day trip to Savannah, and our spring break in Ft Lauderdale. Two single captains on flying status. Need I say more?

Toward the end of our final summer in eastern North Carolina, we were making a trip from Goldsboro over to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point to pick up my buddy’s car, which he had loaned to a friend who needed to catch a hop out of Cherry Point. We’re cruising along eastbound on four-lane NC Hwy 70 with barely another car on the road in the middle of flat, down-east North Carolina. At some point, it becomes clear that we’re gaining pretty fast on a small pickup truck about a quarter-mile ahead. No sweat. I change to the left lane. The pickup moves to the left lane. I move back to the right. The pick up moves back to the right. All of this as we’re closing that quarter mile or more, rather quickly. Off the accelerator, I coast into a position behind this pickup. At least, occasionally behind it. I stayed in the right lane. The pickup swerved, while creeping along at about 20 mph, from the right shoulder to the left, and back again. Through the back window (remember, this was in the day before window tint was the norm), we could see a white-haired male, swaying with the swerves. Also in that back window, and giving an irony to the moment that persists to this day, was a sticker for the Retired Sheriff’s Association.

I looked over at my friend. “I believe he’s drunk.” I said. “What was your first clue? The way he’s driving or the way he nearly falls over every time he swerves to the left?” “Do you suppose he’s sober enough to be able to tell the difference between an unmarked Mustang (car of choice for the NC Highway Patrol in that era) and a charcoal grey Camaro?” I asked. “I doubt it.” “Let’s find out.”

So, tucked in behind him, I turned on my emergency flashers and my headlights and flashed them from bright to dim. The driver pulled well off the road and onto the shoulder and stopped. “Now what?” Remember this was also in the day before cell phones—even those the size of a shoe box—had been invented. “We need to be very careful.”

So, I got out the driver’s side, and my friend got out on the passenger’s side, and we walked slowly toward the pickup. As I did, the driver’s side door opened. We stopped. Out came a pair of legs in jeans. The driver leaned out, made one attempt to stand up, and then fell over backwards into the driver’s seat. I’m thinking the truck must have been a Toyota or a Chevy Luv, or something like that, because he was able to sit there on the seat, facing out the door, with his feet on the ground and his hands on his knees as I approached. He seemed pretty harmless. Your average southern good ole boy. Ball cap, white hair, an empty bottle of Crown Royal laying atop its velvet sack on the passenger’s seat beside him.

“How you doin?” I asked?

“Whaaaa?” he looked up, bleary-eyed.

“Had a little to drink?” I asked.

“Whaaaa?” he said again.

“Tell you what. If you’ll give me a name and phone number to call, we’ll have somebody come out here and drive you home, buddy. You’re in no shape to be driving.”

“Whaaaa?” he said a third time.

“Never mind.” And with that, I reached past him and pulled the keys from the ignition. No resistance, no awareness, just a continuing effort to balance himself in an upright sitting position, hands on knees, feet on the ground, facing out the driver’s side door. “You just sit tight pal. Somebody will be along to get you.” I looked across the bed of the truck at my friend on the other side. “Let’s go.”

We got in the Camaro, pulled out, and headed down the highway, leaving him in the same position he’d been in since his first attempt to stand up out of the truck. “You took his keys?” my buddy said. “Yep.” “Now what?” “We go to the next exit and call the Highway Patrol.”

And so we did. From a pay phone at gas station on a crossroad a few miles down the road, I had the operator connect me to the nearest Highway Patrol office. I remember having to explain a couple of times exactly what was going on. Eventually, we gave the dispatcher a description of our own vehicle and arranged to have a trooper meet us on the overpass of the road we were on, and then we went back to the bridge where the road crossed Hwy 70, parked, got out and waited. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we watched as a NC State Highway Patrol cruiser exited Hwy 70 from the east, came to the top of the off ramp, drove past us and then did a U turn to pull in behind.

The officer got out, walked up, and asked, “You the guys that called?”

We spent the next five minutes basically telling the story above and then handing him the keys from the other vehicle. “Now let me get this straight . . . you just leaned in and took the keys?”

“Yep.”

“And he didn’t try to stop you?”

“Officer, he couldn’t have told you what country he was in, let alone notice that I was taking his keys.”

“Well, I’ll be danged. I been doin’ this for quite a while, but this is a first. Where’d you leave him?”

We estimated the distance west of us where he would find at least the vehicle if not the driver, gave him our names, addresses, and phone numbers in case he needed any more information. He said thanks, still not sure whether that was the right thing to be saying or not, and then he took off, heading down the on ramp west with a little more urgency than he’d arrived from the east, and my buddy and I hit the road eastbound again toward Cherry Point.

We’d not been driving for ten minutes before we saw, across the median, two more State Troopers hauling the mail westbound with lights and sirens. We made it to Cherry Point, picked up his Saab, and then drove back to Goldsboro, arriving late in the afternoon. The first thing we did was to call the State Highway Patrol and ask to be connected to the dispatcher for the area east of Kinston. After explaining who we were, the arresting officer eventually came on the line.

“We saw a couple of cruisers headed your way in a hurry after we got back on the road,” I said. “I hope everything was okay.”

“I’ll tell you what,” came the reply. “By the time I got there, that son of a gun had sobered up enough to figure out what you’d done to him and I’m gonna tell you, he was hoppin’ mad. That old guy tried to fight me! I had to call for backup! You probably don’t need to worry about going to court for the drunken driving charge. Public drunkenness, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer ought to be enough. You probably saved somebody’s life by getting him off the road. Probably not the safest thing to have done, but thanks for doing it. We’ll call you if we need you.”

We never heard another thing about it, but to this day, we still laugh at the mental images that come to mind of an old man, too drunk to even stand, trying to take on a State Trooper because he’s figured out he’s stranded by the highway, without his keys, and nothing left in his bottle of Crown Royal but the backwash.

The Closest I Came to Dying . . .

. . . during two weeks away from home, at a spring training deployment where I made 85 skydives and logged over an hour and seventeen minutes of freefall time, was on I-25 in New Mexico on the way back home.

This narrative is overdue, in part because I promised to write it and have it properly certified as an affidavit and then mail it to the New Mexico State Police, whose praises I can’t sing loudly enough.

One brief piece of back-story first: The trip home from a remote airfield in Arizona took a couple hours longer than originally planned because just after crossing the Arizona/New Mexico border on I-40, I apparently shredded 5th gear. I drive a Jeep Wrangler with a soft top (a remnant of my southern California days when I could put down the top in April and leave it down until October because some songs are true, at least part of the year). I wear earplugs on long trips because the road noise rivals the twin turbines of my favorite jump platform. Even through the earplugs I noticed a strange overtone developing for about five minutes before the RPMs suddenly redlined and the power dropped to nothing just as I was passing a camper. I signaled and coasted to the shoulder in the middle of nowhere, thinking, as I was still about two hours west of Albuquerque, that I probably wasn’t going to be seeing the family until the first part of the next week. A quick trip around and under the vehicle didn’t reveal anything missing, so I got back in, put it in first gear and everything seemed okay. Second was okay. Third and fourth seemed fine. Then I tried fifth—one big gaping quadrant newly assigned to neutral. It being Saturday, I expected that if I stopped in Grants or Albuquerque I would be there for a couple of days at best, so I decided to try getting home at a somewhat lesser speed and higher RPM and expected some really lousy gas mileage.

So, one more unnecessary but surprising detail of back-story, then back to my closest call: as it turns out, aerodynamics (or the lack thereof) are a greater factor than RPMs in gas mileage with Jeep Wranglers. As a skydiver, I understand very well the concept of terminal velocity. If you rolled a Wrangler out the back end of a C-130 (Skydive Arizona may have tried this by now) I’m convinced gravity would meet its match at around 80 miles per hour. It turns out that my gas mileage went from around 13-14 mpg at 75 mph in 5th gear, to 19-20 mpg at 60-65 mph in 4th gear. That’s about the same rpm range. I suspect that on a graph of wind resistance versus mph, the line transitions from sloped to near vertical as you pass 70 mph. Interesting. At least if you own a 4-cylinder Wrangler.

I tell you all of that in order to tell you this. Being an aviator, I’m pretty cognizant of what’s at my six most of the time anyway, but for the second half of this trip, now firmly ensconced in the slower 50% of traffic on the interstate rather than the faster 50%, I was hyper-aware of traffic approaching from the rear. This fact, together with the long sight distances on the plateau south of Raton, New Mexico, explains why I had plenty of time to wonder whether I was about to die or, at a minimum, take another of the E-ticket rides that seem to be a hallmark of my life.

I was something like 10 miles south of the Shell station at Highway 58 and I-25, near Springer, NM, when I noticed a small, silver car gaining fast from behind. The overtake though, which had to be at least 30 mph (meaning this guy was doing every bit of 95 and probably better than 100 mph) wasn’t nearly as riveting as his position in the road, or rather, partly in the road and partly on the shoulder. That is, he was straddling the white line on the right side, actually more off than on the road—so much so, even, that I actually thought he was going to pass me on the shoulder. That would have been a little odd, as there were no other cars even in sight besides the two of us. There was a nice smooth passing lane wide open to my left, and I was pretty sure that I had the pre-eminent claim to the lane I was in, having been there first, and being, at that point, most decidedly, “slower traffic,” even at a good solid 65 mph. With less than a hundred feet to go, and with the driver now visible and leaned into the center of the car (in that attitude that some drivers with attitude assume), I pondered moving to the left lane to clear a path, but detecting a slight veer in that direction from the vehicle at my six, instead, I just braced for impact.

If impact had come, a good 30+ mph tap on the left rear bumper ring, I don’t think all the counter-steering in the world would have prevented a fully operational test of the roll bar on the Wrangler. If I had swerved an inch, or even let off the gas, I think I’d be telling a different story. But impact didn’t come. The silver bullet came zinging by my left side, swerving so hard himself that the trajectory carried him all the way to the center median shoulder on the left side before he corrected to the right, all the way back across both lanes to his position centering the solid white line on the right shoulder as he disappeared into the distance, again half on the highway and half on the shoulder, receding now as rapidly as he approached.

Now, in my day, I’ve called in at least four obviously drunk drivers to 911 in various states and cities. Only once has it resulted in an arrest, and that story I’ll tell in another entry. Skeptical as I was of its efficacy, my civic duty here seemed pretty clear. If I called, at least when the next call about the inevitable crash came into the system, the operator wouldn’t be surprised. Cell reception was poor where I was, but I got a 911 operator on the line, gave her my location, and let her know that a silver missile with a malfunctioning guidance system was headed for Raton. And that was about all I could do. I’m sure the log contains my position in terms of mile markers, but as for a make of vehicle or license tag, the best I could do was, “Some kind of small car like a Kia or Neon or something like that, silver, as much off the road as on, and traveling at around 100 mph or better, northbound on I-25. He barely missed me.”

As 911 calls go, that’s the sketchiest information I’ve ever given them. In at least two previous instances I’ve given them everything but the suspect’s social security number and fingerprints and even given them a running location for five or ten minutes, all to no avail, so I didn't expect much to come of this. Less than ten minutes after I made the call, I coasted into my fuel stop, just hoping the vehicle would be there. The few of you who read this blog know me well enough to know that I’d have made an impromptu breath analysis on the spot, and if my suspicions were confirmed, taken his keys and locked him in his own trunk until the cavalry could arrive. (I promise to tell the story of the other DWI arrest I “facilitated” in another blog entry some other day.) No such luck.

Ten minutes later, I was on the road again. It was dusk as I rolled by Raton, NM, and started up the pass. As I’d come into town, I received a voice mail on the cell from the New Mexico State Police. The message was that they hadn’t found the silver missile yet, and they wondered if I still had the driver in sight. I called back with the intention of telling them that I didn’t have him in sight for more than a minute—he was moving that fast. When I called back, I identified myself and the young woman who answered asked if I could hold. “Sure.” And I was on hold as I left Raton in the rear view and began the climb up the mountain. I had only rounded a curve or two when I saw the thing that made my day. A New Mexico cruiser was parked on the right shoulder, lights flashing. In front of the cruiser was the silver missile. On the roof of the silver missile, for the world to see, was what looked like a fifth of Smirnoff or something like it. SWEET!!

Still on hold, I lost the cell signal as I entered the pass, but as I came into Trinidad on the Colorado side, I called again. “You got him!” “Yes sir! He’s under arrest for DWI. Thank you so very much for calling.”

In the 85 jumps during the previous two weeks, I was never closer than 10 seconds from impact (about 1800 ft) before getting a canopy over my head. And I jump with an Automated Activation Device (AAD) that would have fired my reserve canopy if I had ever failed to deploy the main before half the remaining distance had closed. I tell my friends and family that they are nearly always at more risk driving to the grocery store than I am jumping out of airplanes. The distance by which this guy missed me was inches, and fewer than 12 of them I’m sure. Change the timing by tenths of a second—the start of his swerve, a twitch or release of the throttle on my part—and someone would have been in a world of hurt or dead. It wasn’t my day to go, nor his.

The arresting officer called the next day to thank me for making the call and to let me know that they might need to subpoena me if the driver challenged their probable cause for stopping him. I promised them I’d get with our JAG and draw up an affidavit just in case, but I also let them know I’d be happy to make the trip to Raton if necessary. I’ve spent four years in two different volunteer fire departments responding to crashes where uninjured drunks watched from the back seat of a police cruiser while we used the jaws of life to cut their victims from what was left of the other car. I’m glad it wasn’t me this time. I pray it’s never anyone I know.

Bottom line: if you see a drunk driver, make the call. Sometimes it works. The road up until the point they stopped this guy was as straight as it gets—not so his ground track. I have a hard time imagining him making it through the pass in one piece. A single-car crash is about the best he could have hoped for. That trooper probably saved the driver’s life, and maybe someone else’s.

And, hey, that whole thing with setting the bottle on top of the car is way cool. The officer (whose name I’m leaving out on purpose) said it was so that the video cameras in their cruisers could record it as evidence. But it has another benefit as well: every car that passed them by the side of the road had no doubt what that was all about. If every DWI arrest included that as procedure, maybe one or two more drivers would think twice about getting behind the wheel with a bottle as a copilot. Just a thought.

Don’t drink and drive. If you need a rush, go skydiving. It’s far safer, and there’s no hangover the next day.

Blue skies, Doc.

Back in the world

Spring Training Deployment complete: 85 jumps; 1 hr, 17 min, 49 seconds of freefall. This is the one time during the year when I truly feel proficient at everything I do in the realm of parachuting, from video, to instruction, to relative work, big ways, and demos. Best demo moment from this trip: 2 seconds out the door for a demo to Earth Day at the Phoenix International Raceway (which turned out to be to the parking lot across the highway for a crowd of about 10,000, give or take 9,980 or so) I broke 10 hours of total freefall time and finished the jump by dead centering the T. Accuracy inversely proportional to the size of the crowd. :-)

Over a hundred e-mails to sort through at home. Probably three or four times that many at work. Tomorrow will largely be dedicated to sorting through that mess. And to finding someone to repair the transmission in the Jeep, which lost fifth gear and reverse as I crossed the New Mexico border yesterday. Drove the rest of the way home in 4th gear. Took two extra hours at the lower speed, but increased my gas mileage by 25%. Turns out the wind resistance was a bigger factor than RPMs in fuel efficiency for what has to be one of the most un-aerodynamic vehicles on the road.

And last but not least, added a bottle icon to the door frame below the driver's side window as I logged my second confirmed assist in a DWI arrest. More on that in a separate post to follow. Meanwhile, glad to be home.