Web Log   June 26th through July 9th

Saturday, July 9th, 2005

Here's Proof...that it takes all kinds! 

AUGUSTA, Maine Jul 8, 2005 — A man's arrest two weeks ago after being pulled from an outhouse toilet in New Hampshire has landed him in hot water in Maine. Assistant District Attorney Brad Grant noted that Moody was on probation for a sixth OUI and that probationers in Maine must have written permission from a probation officer before leaving the state. "He left the state of Maine without permission, and the crimes he is alleged to have committed in New Hampshire are extremely disturbing," the prosecutor said.
Gary Moody, 45, a convenience store owner, has been free on $250 bail from Carroll County, N.H., where he faces two counts of disorderly conduct and one count of criminal trespass after being found June 26 in the waste tank of a pit toilet on U.S. Forest Service property in Albany, N.H. Authorities arrived at the scene after a 14-year-old girl heard a noise in the toilet and saw a face looking up at her. Moody was removed by police and was hosed down by firefighters before being arrested.

Last night was well-spent, musically, but I didn't get around to recording any music. The 'process' (of recording music) requires set-up time. I mean, it takes at least a half hour (that's if I only do it half-assed) to choose, arrange and place microphones (before setting levels...and affixing any sound equalization or effects). That's just to start! If I am 'successful' in recording something worth listening to, then there's the often-much-longer-and-never-quite-over process of mixing the tracks.
So, being near out of physical energy (been joggin' these last two days), I decided to revert to my 12 year-old thespian (Shakespeare-loving) self...and record some Sonnets. (Almost no set up time is needed for one spoken voice.) 
Self-indulgent of me, I know, and these early results are uneven. And now that I've listened to them in the proverbial cold, gray light of morning, I hear that I can do better...especially with some compression, judiciously applied. But give 'em a listen. Each is only about a minute long. It was lotsa fun and I learned something.

Now...from the Maybe You Already Knew This department: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, husband and wife, have the same birthday (September 25th) 25 years apart!

Friday, July 8th, 2005

Before the news of yesterday's bombings in London, I had been rehashing the convoluted tale which has just led to the jailing of NYT reporter Judith Miller. Maggie asked me to explain and (invertebrate (sic) news junkie that I am) I could so I did but...in doing so, I 'noticed' even so much more that this is an outrage! Of the three journalists contacted by the Special Prosecutor over the possible crime of revealing the name of a covert CIA operative, Judith Miller is the only one who didn't actually write anything about Valerie Plame...and now she's the only one in jail! A story, quoted by William Safire, and probably apocryphal, is that, when Henry David Thoreau went to jail to protest an unjust law, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked, ''Henry, what are you doing in here?'' Thoreau replied, ''Ralph, what are you doing out there?" 
If you read nothing else today, please read the NYT editorial on this subject from yesterday, July 7th. It is the longest editorial I can remember from the Times but it is well worth the five or six minutes that it might take you to read it. 

Thursday, July 7th, 2005      OMG! It's Seven-Seven!

Transiting my brain these last few days has been the phrase "...and not be attached to outcomes." It's a cool phrase. It's a nice sound! It strikes a reverential tone, kinda like "...and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."
I first noticed it only about three weeks ago when my baby sister uttered it compactly. Then, wondering if someone had assumed credit for it, I typed it into AltaVista and, depending on how you shorten it or (do or do not) use quotation marks, you get nearly a million 'hits', many of them for essays belaboring various interpretations of the phrase.
Honestly? I'm not sure what it means. Maybe that's why it's such a powerful phrase apart from its nice sound. It's enigmatic. It requires that the listener pause long enough to consider what it means to be attached to outcomes. [What's an outcome?]
Now, I can think of situations in which it's gotta be all about the outcome! How 'bout, say, if you're, like, starving to death? How circumspect do you expect to be? I mean, you better be attached to an outcome else y'aint gonna be attached at all!

Iraq signs military pact with Iran. The horror of this morning's attacks in London will surely cause this story to be overlooked (for a while) by many. But (and none of us should take any comfort here) it appears to mark the 'coming true' of the most pessimistic predictions about where the overthrow of Saddam will take the region. In the 1980's, the US government's policy was to keep Iran and Iraq at war with each other. Yes, the thinking was that the very worst thing that could happen would be for these two countries to work together. Iraq's leadership (under Saddam) was secular. Iran's leadership was religious. Alfred's own father, in fact (as VP under Reagan and, later, as President himself) supported (and, to a degree, authored) our policy of supporting Saddam...even after it was no longer possible to dismiss widespread reports of Saddam's ruthlessness. The outcome of recent elections in Iran was viewed with disfavor (a mild word) by our bellicose leaders. And, in case you agree that it's not a good thing to have anti-Americans at the helm in Iran...then please stick around for the results of 'free and fair' elections in Iraq.

What happens now? I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie:
Now that Britain has been attacked, the proponents of the Iraq war will no longer argue, "See? The war is making us safe at home! We're fighting 'em there so we don't hafta fight 'em here!"
They'll switch over to, "See? Look what cruel, callous, cowardly and barbarous people we're up against! Look at how much they hate us! THAT's why we're in Iraq! We can't pull our troops out now 'cuz that'd be like rewarding these thugs!"

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005       It happened 59 years ago.         Nancy Reagan was born eighty-four years ago.

A fascinating factoid, I've always thought: Thomas Jefferson (age 83) and John Adams (age 90) died on the same day (July 4, 1826), precisely fifty years after each had signed the Declaration of Independence.

Tuesday, July 5th, 2005

To the timeless uestion: "What's it all about?"

An nswer: "It's all about paying attention! Both God and the Devil are in the details! details!"

Monday, July 4th, 2005   Happy Birthday, America!

Living alone...being alone becomes a habit. After one has lived alone for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult to accommodate the (sustained) presence of  another adult.  Now, I italicize the last noun in that last sentence because, for many people, the condition of living alone makes them surely more accommodative (even desirous) of other company: starting with kids and working down through dogs, rabbits, cats, parakeets, fish, turtles, wild birds and (crossing, now, from fauna to flora) plants. See...kids et al. don't even try to occupy the same 'space' as an adult person and, so, do not intrude on one's 'alone-ness'. [Well, of course, it is (or it can be) the same 'space'...but it's not, either (if you know what I mean).]

Living alone...for young people (i.e., those of 'legal' age...just over eighteen) is hardly ever a lifestyle choice. A kid's first away-from-home experience is most often in a college dormitory, a military barrack or an early marriage. Rare is the young person who, at the first opportunity, actually chooses (and is financially able) to live alone. For people who have never lived alone, then not living alone becomes a habit. For people who have never found someone with whom to cohabit, then living alone...being alone becomes a habit. 

As the years go by, whatever one has been doing becomes 'normal'. [I don't offer this as if it's some great insight. ;-)]
But life has a way of confronting our 'normalities'...our habits. The (aforementioned rare) young person who chooses to live alone may become financially (or physically) unable to any longer do so. The nineteen year-old bride may soon find herself disillusioned, betrayed...or widowed. The fifty year-old spouse in a thirty year-old marriage may suddenly find himself disillusioned, betrayed...or 'widower-ed'. Then what? It is at such painful moments that life is at its most 'interesting'.

Hey! Bit off-topic but yesterday, after I posted (below here to the left) the picture of Heather Armstrong (who is very pretty, I will add), I noticed her striking resemblance to my tomcat (this site's mascot)! Look at Heather. Then look at KC! I mean...has anyone ever seen them together?

Sunday, July 3, 2005

It seems there are many variations and gradations of this oughties phenomenon of Blogging. ABC News currently has a feature on the subject which highlights the very slick Blog of one Heather Armstrong. Ms. Armstrong is a skilled Web designer (her trade before motherhood). Her English is all-the-way-to perfect! Now...ex-Mormons are, I think, even more anti-religious than us (we?) ex-Catholics. Heather waxes wild in her (fwoabw) 'frankness'. Along with copious references to all matters scatological (detailed and personal), she discusses her friends and relatives with an abandon which must surely make them all nervous, especially now that her four-year-old Blog (meticulously archived and searchable) has received attention from the 'mainstream'. 

I marvel at how much work some people put into their Web sites. The other day, while reading posts from one of the Yahoo! Groups of which I am a member, I perused the colorful site of one Håkon Søreide, a (former) Norwegian sailor-turned-poet, musician and graphic artist. And he's only 31 years old! 

Saturday, July 2, 2005      Happy Birthday, Ruth!

It is always better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're stupid
than to open it and remove all doubt.

Posted a new take of Maggie singing LYT. Mix emphasis is on the vocal. Compression has been used both at the time the vocals were recorded and in the mix. The effect is to keep the vocal 'front & center' throughout. I can do a better job mixing the rest of the track. Tonight. 

Friday, July 1, 2005

"I am glad of all details, whether they seem to you to be relevant or not." Sherlock Holmes 

This is sad... very sad.

Don't Ya Gotta Love It? It's the War of the Words and it's one very well-written piece! Perhaps someone will read it to you-know-who! 

Nursery Rhymes For Our Times. Courtesy of RJ.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

"Our country is in a state of conceptual confusion about Iraq because of its inability to recognize that the war has already been lost. Whether we leave in six months or six years, we will leave ignominiously and in defeat - and with Iraq in shambles - not only because the war has been badly fought but also because it was a hopelessly flawed venture from the beginning. Imagine how many lives would have been spared in Vietnam if this same simple truth had been acknowledged years earlier." Victor A. Altshul,  June 29, 2005

Group members: here's the music-minus-one-vocal-track that I posted last night for Maggie. Gonna try to get her to record the vocal tonight.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005       Happy Birthday, Carol!

"Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe?", says a newly self-appointed expert on post-partum depression, psychiatric pharmacopoeia ("There's no such thing as a chemical imbalance in the brain. Scientology has demonstrated repeatedly that mood disorders can be monitored with mood rings and cured with vitamins, exercise, and regular high colonics.")
and now...on the unfolding of the Cosmos itself! But I choose to be kind. For had I been surrounded for the last twenty years by people telling me how smart & wonderful I am, then by now I'm sure I'd have come to believe it!!
And Brooke, surely grateful for Tom's wise counsel...and clearly supportive of his engagement to a much-younger woman, has said, "If he wants to see Chicago, I've left him two tickets--one adult, one child."

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005    My father was born ninety years ago today. My stepfather was born one hundred-sixteen years ago today.

"Our mission in Iraq is harder because the administration ignored the advice of others, went in largely alone, underestimated the likelihood and power of the insurgency, sent in too few troops to secure the country, destroyed the Iraqi army through de-Baathification, failed to secure ammunition dumps, refused to recognize the urgency of training Iraqi security forces and did no postwar planning." 
But but but...John! You voted to authorize this disaster! Remember? The war was a bad  idea then and it's a worse idea now! It's being fought disproportionately by kids from poor families;  young men and women of  the 'Volunteer Army', most of whom signed up for the educational and economic opportunities...not for the dangerous job of saving the political face of a rich man's son! When will people like John Kerry dare to tell it like it is? The only right thing to do now is to leave Iraq! Any government we 'install' will be unpopular! We're invaders and occupiers and there IS no 'mission'!

Where have you gone, J. William Fulbright?
Where are you now, Wayne Morse?
Now, only Barbara Lee speaks for me!

Monday, June 27th, 2005

"Last throes"?  But but but..."The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years." Perhaps it's time that Dick and Don did lunch!

"That was the first place to look. You can look through the windows and check inside. That is simple. Maybe they should have looked in the trunk." But then, that surely begs the question: why didn't he look in the trunk? "...the family assumed that police looked in the trunk of the car that was parked just steps from where the boys were last seen playing." They did what? They 'assumed'?

Sunday, June 26th, 2005

"Why didn't anyone check the trunk?" is a fair question. I lived my first nineteen years in New Jersey (though on the other side of the State from Camden). It's hot there by the third week of June and rain is not infrequent. People usually roll up the windows of any car which they plan not to drive for a few hours (or days). I understand that this 1992 Camry had one of those tensioned lift supports (a 'strut') for the trunk lid and that the support had worn out (as it will after so many years). So if you opened the trunk and let go, the lid closed. Evidently, that's what happened in this instance.
But to return to the question: why didn't anyone think of it? Well, in the 50's and 60's it seemed that stories of kids getting trapped (not so much in car trunks but) in out-of-use refrigerators and freezers were all-too-common. Might have to look this up but I believe that, by the 70's, manufacturing standards (if not Federal mandates) were in place to make such entrapments less likely. My current refrigerator doesn't even have a latch. The main door is spring-loaded and designed to close by itself on one-inch-wide insulating strips...and it is helped to stay closed only by the pressure difference between cold-inner and hot-outer air. It could easily be opened by anyone 'trapped' inside.
Back to the car trunk. I woulda thought it'd occur to any one of the older people (over, say, 55) involved in the search that such an accident was possible...maybe even likely, given the circumstances at hand, which included: who's gonna kidnap-for-ransom three little kids from not-wealthy families? And what skulking child molester would risk snatching three obstreperous little boys? Did they drown in the Delaware River? All three of 'em? And no bodies?
I'll betcha most of the young searchers had never even heard of  that old refrigerator/freezer safety issue. And, to take it even more off the table, most new cars (from the last five years or so) are equipped with an inside-the-trunk release mechanism in the event that someone is trapped (or forced) inside. Us old guys grew up with cars whose trunks not only did not close by themselves (they were spring-loaded to stay open) but, unlike on this Camry, could not be opened except with a key...NOT by any now-common and convenient little right-by-the-driver lever. And so, for rather opposite reasons, neither the young nor the old had heard much about kids getting trapped in a car trunk!
And...to take it even more out-of-mind: in New Jersey, by the time a car is ten years old (about the working lifetime of a trunk lid strut) it has often rusted out (from harsh winters on roads salted for ice removal) and been sent to a wrecking yard...where little kids are forbidden to play.
 
What we do not look for, we do not find.

Too bad...not only for the kids' parents, but also for the police and firefighters who must surely feel embarrassed and shamed.
Perhaps such feelings of failing can be mitigated by considering the results we get from a 'seat of the pants' volumetric analysis of this heartbreaker:

Let's do a very crude calculation of how long it would have taken for the oxygen in that trunk to be used up. Standard estimates for adult respiratory volume (so-called 'tidal volume') are on the order of 500 ml. But let's pretend that kids only draw a fifth of that volume per breath and let's pick a ridiculously low number of breaths per minute: how about five? Now...for the volume of a Camry trunk? Well, how many gallon jugs of water could you store in that trunk? Let's pick a number that we can be sure is higher than the real number. Let's pick 250! Does anyone think he could stuff more than 250 gallon water jugs in an otherwise empty Camry trunk?  OK. Now we're ready to perform a deliriously best-case estimate for how long those kids could have survived in that confined space. Our assumptions are that the car windows were rolled up and that the trunk was well-insulated: 

Each kid draws 100 ml of air per breath times five breaths per minute equals 500ml of air per minute times three kids equals 1500 ml (1.5 liter) of air per minute. Let's call a gallon four liters and so the total air in the trunk is 250 gallons times four liters equals one thousand liters of air divided by 1.5 liters per minute equals about 665 minutes divided by sixty minutes per hour equals about eleven hours. The real figure is likely to be a good deal less, of course; perhaps even an order of magnitude less. So quite likely, within only one hour, the air was depleted enough to bring on lethargy and the kids could no longer cry out or bang for help. The likely biggest source of error in our calculation lies in the estimate of air volume in the trunk. A gallon of water weighs a little more than eight pounds. If each kid only weighed fifty pounds then we'll say that each displaced about six gallons times four liters times three kids equals 72 liters. That's already the better part of an hour's worth of air under our unrealistically best-case reckoning. By no calculation, it seems, was time on the rescuers' side. Unless they were dispatched promptly (and they were not...for three hours) and someone made a lucky guess, the situation was hopeless very early on. By all figuring, when the sun came up the next morning (the kids disappeared early evening), there was no longer any rescuing to be done. 

Refinement: The listed trunk volume of a Toyota Camry is about 17 cu. ft. which converts to a little less than 500 liters. So our estimate, using gallon water jugs, was high (by a factor of two). My reasoning also ignored two other variables...both real but each difficult to quantify: 1) the trunk was not perfectly airtight and 2) exhalations would have raised the CO₂ content of the breathing air. While the first factor would increase survival time, the second would decrease it.