down the hatch...

Some time ago, I was speaking with a friend who had been a paramedic. And in the course of conversation, she mentioned that usually drunk drivers survive the car accidents they cause. The innocent folk they run into bear the brunt of injury. She had some intriguing ideas about why that might be, but basically, it is in general an accepted fact. So I had this idea...

We should introduce legislation mandating that in order to occupy a motor vehicle, one must be legally drunk.

Think of it. An immediate dramatic decrease in traffic-related deaths. The economy booms as alcoholic beverage sales go through the roof and the auto body industry increases significantly. The American farmer enjoys new demand for the grains from which to make the necessary whiskey and beer to keep America safe. Whole areas of government bureaucracy are eliminated as the ATF becomes merely the TF. And with a shift to pure ethyl alcohol for auto fuel, we could kill two birds with one stone, providing the liquor to lower traffic deaths while saving the environment by eliminating our dependence on foreign oil.

There are a few minor considerations. We will likely need to have some sort of subsidy so that even the economically disadvantaged can afford to get properly intoxicated. Also, the drinking age must be eliminated so that we can provide safety for all vehicular passengers. We must protect America's children.

I think it is clear that to save American lives, we need this legislation. Let's get America swerving in the right direction!

alas...

Glancing, spin me like wool, fine wool.
Weave what is I with your eyes
As the craftsman her glass,
As the potter his clay.

if i told you you had a nice body...

Alright, the order of the day is pickup lines (and I am not talking about the winch on the front of your truck).

My personal favorite is one that I am saving for just that perfect occasion:
"I have the gift of tongues. Want to interpret?"

So... what are your favorites, especially ones that you have actually used or that have been used on you?

may i have some peta for my hamas...

Been watching a bit of Charlie Rose lately. Discovered that you can watch back episodes at www.charlierose.com . Went through most of the interviews Charlie conducted with the several Israeli prime ministers and leaders Olmert, Sharon, Barak & Peres. I wanted to get a clearer picture of the situation over there over from Camp David on... What I keep hearing from the Israelis, both hawks and doves, is essentially that the Palestinian leaders, the Syrians, et. al. talk a lot about peace and what they are willing to do, but that there is never any action. The world puts pressure on Israel to move forward in implementing concessions and they do move forward to a point, but they keep saying that they need something more than words from the Palestinian side to proceed. Several of them characterized Mahmoud Abbas as an honest, well-intentioned statesman who they thought they could work with. But they have yet to see the Palestinians DO one thing to stem the terrorism or to make any progress in their responsibilities.

Enter the past few days' events. What are we supposed to do with a Palestinian state that is so volatile? It highlights one of the great problems for Israel. When all is said and done and there is a contiguous Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, what kind of neighbors can the Israelis expect to have? How can Israel 'give back' strategic areas when doing so creates a salient that can so easily become a staging area for Hamas or even something worse?

I guess the big question is... what can the Palestinians do to finally create a stable government, free of these unstable organizations such as Hamas, that their neighbors can realistically deal with. It seems like the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who seem to want a workable situation where they can just live and work and enjoy the land in peace deserve an answer.

But the thing that chaps my chaps is that when Israel does anything that is perceived to destabilize the peace process, like their response in Lebanon last summer, the world comes down on them pretty hard. But when the Palestinians, or the Syrians, or Hamas, or Hezbollah do things that raise question about even the possibility of ever achieving a workable solution, we seem to pussyfoot around it. I don't get it.

in the year 2000...

if mama has to go through labor...

On the Great Trek eastward last spring, we stopped in Moab and Arches to get some hiking and biking in. Beautiful country, great fun. Well, we were walking up a steepish trail past some cool petroglyphs and toward some of the arches when I experienced one of those great moments of insight. This trail being a popular one in a national park, there were lots of families meandering up it. At least the parents were meandering; the kids were circling like my dad's springer spaniel on the portage trail. I mean, I am in the prime of life, relatively active, and all that, but even so there is no way in communism that could keep pace with those little circling supercharged-batteries-on-two-legs. So a thought came to me...

Why do we take those kids when they love nothing more than pure motion, try to stack them into classrooms and rows of desks and try to get them to listen and read and take in information? Meanwhile, their parents who likely just want a few moments of rest for contemplation have to sit in a cubicle or on an assembly line and move repetitively all day. It just doesn't make sense.

So we desperately need legislation requiring child labor. Think about it. When a kid is weaned and walking, about the age we would shuffle them off to school, we give them a job. They've got boundless energy and nimble little fingers. Then, after 30 or 40 years of solid work experience, they retire at the prime of life, armed with myriad questions to work out in their ensuing education, for which they have already saved up tuition. If necessary, we could give them a couple years of primary school before sending them into the workforce, enough to acquire basic math and elementary reading, or they could learn these on-the-job.

China is already employing this strategy to a limited extent and their economy is growing at something like 10% per annum. Ours is inching along at something like 2%. Think what would happen if we one-upped them and institutionalized their shady little secret weapon of child labor.

On a somewhat less serious note, imagine how greatly we could decrease our dependency on fossil fuels if we simply installed tot-sized hamster wheels instead of chairs in elementary school classrooms. Give each kid a coke and some zingers, and... bam! energy crisis eliminated.

some cheese with your whine...

So I was lamenting the pitiable state of my palate the other day. Actually, was just saying that I enjoy wine very much, but that when the label or the critics say that it carries a hint of blackberry or a touch of truffle, most often I find these flavors and aromas rather elusive. I certainly know what I enjoy and am getting a sense of some of the elements of the enjoyment of the variety of the vine. Well, the other party involved in the conversation summoned up his best aristocratic New England wine critic accent and made some comment about a hint of cow dung and poison oak or some such lowbrow fare.

And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning from out the sky on a clear summer's day, a moment of pure interpretive epiphany! ...the MEANING of the scene in Napoleon Dynamite at the FFA, where Napoleon must tell what has gone wrong with each of the bottles of milk. Brilliant!

agriculture can be fun...

I remember reading about the invention of paintball some time ago. If memory serves, it involved the convergence of a friendly disagreement in a conversation regarding the relative survival skills acquired in urban versus rural upbringings and the opportune discovery of an existing tool used by sheep ranchers for marking their stock. And I remember thinking that nothing leads to great leaps of civilization like disinterested intellectual discourse and Yankee problem-solving. In a Parisian café, for instance, such a disagreement would have remained a mere intellectual argument, possibly eventually resulting in deeply entrenched rival philosophies. Never in America: In America we resolve our disagreements through science and action. We are not satisfied with a web of untested hypotheses and stillborn ideas. Instead, Americans will devise an experiment to test the point in question in a free-market economy of ideas, in this case a few wooded acres of the New England countryside.

So I was visiting some friends the other day. They were recently blessed with the birth of their firstborn, a beautiful and quite a serious little boy. This was the first I had seen them since the birth, so when my friend said that he had to run an errand, I offered to join him, desiring to catch a bit of windshield time and see how he was holding up in the whirlwind of new fatherhood. As it turns out we were going to pick up a breast pump. Now, I have had a few accidental interactions with the electric breast pump, cleaning a nozzle among a sink full of dishes and that sort of thing. But this was my first time ever actually seeing the machine. It is an intriguing thing. The pump had the look of a piece of medical equipment, like something that you would see in a hospital, in the birthing unit, of course, as there were not enough lights or dials or buttons or tubes for it to be for the ICU or emergency room or anything. It is portable, compact, and yet not so small that you wouldn’t notice it sitting on an end table. But the medical nature was masked, mitigated visually by the fact that it had rounded edges, it was made of tough plastic, and it was the sort of color usually reserved for newborns’ toys. And reaching from it, the simplest clear plastic tube sat prepared to bridge the gap between machine and man (or in this case, decidedly woman). What a marvelously engineered device!

Picture a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child. There sits Mary, seated in her glory as a beautiful, new mother. And to her breast she holds… a plastic cup connected to a plastic tube and a brightly colored plastic box with a dial on it, the Child sitting elsewhere in the room. We have actually taken the most beautiful, innocent, intimate connection between a mother and child and MECHANIZED it.

So in my momentary passing glance at this breast pump, being an American and a man I found myself wondering aloud, which was invented first: the breast pump or the automatic cow milking machine, and whether one of the inventions led to the other or whether they were imagined separately. The Lady of the House immediately posited that likely the dairy version came first, as the need for the people version would only have been terribly useful after women began to join the workforce. This made good sense, but I decided to investigate the subject. As it turns out, she appears to have been correct. It seems that the earliest suction milking machines were being patented in the 1850’s. The breast pump, on the other hand, was invented in the 20th century by a chess player, a man named Edward Lasker. Mr. Lasker was a German-born American with degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, and he played chess, contending even for the U.S. championship. Lasker also played go, and even helped found the American Go Association. A go player invented the breast pump! In many ways, chess is a beautiful game, logical, mathematical. Go is graceful. It is organic. It is a dance and it is war, life and death. And a go player invented the breast pump! Why is this significant?

I have seen two faces a great deal lately, both looking out my window and in the mirror. One shines upon nature and upon life, the organic. The other’s eyes brighten at technology, art, the created and the new, industry and organization. The faces look in different directions, and with distance from a point their paths diverge. Essentially the difference between what we call organic and what we call industrial is the agency of man. The fewer times we act upon something, the shallower we go toward the essential elements in our imposition of order, the more we call it natural, organic. But our words betray a friendly disagreement at this point. What is organic is characterized by life. Things alive are composed according to a separation of powers, a division of labor. Looking in ourselves we see different organs with different functions. And as we attempt to recreate the natural orders, mimic them, we act with craft and industry, essentially, we organize. We even create corporations in our own image, magnificent fictitious bodies that act with the power of thousands, imposing their own order on the natural world. And so the other face looks away, toward nature. We attempt to mitigate the agency of man, we place value on the organic. And yet we cannot exorcise the other face. To do so would be to eliminate the agency of man. It would be suicide.

So what does Yankee problem solving do with this friendly disagreement? That remains to be seen. Perhaps there are instruments already existing to resolve the question, a sheep marker or a milking machine, to be exercised on a few wooded acres in New England.

youth and enthusiasm...

A thought occurred to me the other day. Both the race car driver and the fighter pilot use speed and mad maneuvering skills to defeat their opponents. But the race car driver is using those skills to get ahead of the other guy. The fighter pilot is using them to get behind him.

The other day I was driving on the 101 and this sedan blew by me in traffic like something out of Talladega Nights. And, expecting to see a wannabe Ricky Bobby, I turned to catch a glimpse of this skilled but frightening driver. I swear this woman probably played the organ at church maybe thirty or forty years ago. The sweetest looking little old lady, thin with grandmotherly grey hair, and the intense look of a fighter pilot in her blessed old eyes.

Usually my experience with elderly drivers has been the opposite, though. But as much as sometimes I would like to be frustrated with the grey-haired man driving a Buick like it was a mule, I just can't really work up that kind of emotion any more for several reasons.

For one thing, I can't help but think that there is a good chance that this guy was driving a tank across Europe or Korea, or a landing craft in the Pacific while facing enemy fire, say 50 or 60 years ago. So if he drives his car like a tank now, he's probably earned the right. Perhaps he didn't, but I should probably give him the benefit of the doubt.

Another reason is that I think about the changes that have taken place in these peoples' lifetimes. I remember the way my grandfather held the steering wheel when he was driving. I asked my dad one time why he did it that way. I guess on the old tractors (maybe new ones, too) there was a knob for turning it around. And, though he was a great driver, he still drove his Oldsmobile like it was an International Harvester. I remember him talking once about how when he was a kid, you were lucky to see a biplane come to town crop dusting or barnstorming, and when he had grey hair we were putting shuttles in orbit regularly.

But I suppose the biggest reason for me is that I can't help but think about those people who I know and love who are old and full of life, who age has finally come upon, and who have to reconcile themselves to their bodies not working the way they once did and to watching their spouses' worlds grow smaller and smaller as they are able to do less and less.

All that to say, I think it is important to respect our elders, that our days may be long in the land. We'll get there soon enough.

And at the same time, I must say that the 55-year old guy with his captain's hat who intentionally dodges in to cut me off in his shiny Cadillac because he thinks he deserves the road more than I do... that dude is fair game.