JamulBlog: Nov 30, 2013

Iran deal update... I'm not entirely sure it's another debacle, so for now I'll keep calling it a “deal” – which, come to think of it, it is. But for whom? That's the interesting question...

Surrender in Geneva. The inimitable Mark Steyn:

In Geneva, the participants came to the talks with different goals: The Americans and Europeans wanted an agreement; the Iranians wanted nukes. Each party got what it came for.

Comparisons with Munich are rampant. I saw the photoshop at right and was just stunned – somehow the photo is much more powerful than all the words about the Iran deal I've read.

I'm afraid, though, that this photo won't mean much to all too many Americans, as they don't know enough history to recognize this as a photoshop of the famous photo of Neville Chamberlain (original at left) giving his infamous “Peace for our time” speech after making a disastrous deal with Hitler. Shortly afterwards, World War II erupted, and the deal was recognized as being the enabling moment that allowed Hitler's evil to roll over Europe.

Is That One's deal with Iran the equivalent? Certainly not the direct equivalent; there are too many relevant and significant differences between Hitler and his Germany, and the mad mullahs and their Iran. But there are enough similarities to be concerning. The very idea of the mad mullahs having a collection of nuclear weapons at their disposal is one that I find frightening – and I live half a world away. Just imagine how the countries in their neighborhood feel about that!

Some cartoons from the week:

Pater: A little imagination and play... At right, my dad on my last visit with him: August 25, 2013. He's tucking into a plate of scrapple (a favorite breakfast for both he and I). He hated cornmeal mush – a staple in his family during the depression – but somehow he never caught onto the fact that scrapple is basically slightly dolled-up cornmeal mush :) Also in front of him: a slice of my mom's world-class homemade apple pie and a bag of “Liz’s cookies” (recipe originally from Mrs. Philbrook on Matinicus Island). My mom is clutching his hand...

A little imagination and play...

This morning as I walked our dogs in the pre-dawn dark, I was treated to a beautiful crescent moon. The dark part was brightly lit with earthshine, a phenomenon I always enjoyed seeing. These days there are many things that remind me of my dad, and this was yet another – he's the first person who ever explained why the dark part of the moon was sometimes lit up. But he didn't explain it the way Wikipedia does...

To make sense of this, you'll need a little context. My family, of course, knows all this very well – but if you never had the opportunity to meet my dad, you might be a bit surprised by it...

My dad would frequently say that he was “still a kid”, and in some important ways he was right. He never really completely grew up. In particular, he had a child's sense of imagination – most especially, a child's willingness to suspend disbelief and reality. His imagination manifested in many ways, but the one I remember most vividly was his story-telling. When we kids were young, he delighted in spinning the most amazing extemporaneous yarns that could keep us enthralled for hours. Sometimes these stories began and ended on one evening's tale; sometimes they were “serialized” and went on for weeks. The characters in the stories could be people, talking frogs, trees that could walk around (Ents!), anything at all. The stories always had a coherent (though often meandering) plot, and occasionally had a lesson or two, but mostly they were purely for fun. He loved to delight us with a plot twist (“the momma frog hopped into her pond, and accidentally stepped on a snapping turtle!”). I loved those stories...

So how does earthshine on the moon come into it? Well, when I was perhaps 5 or 6, long before I understood what the moon actually was, my dad, my brother Scott, and I were camping in the hills of West Virginia. It was a fine, clear night, so we just threw our sleeping bags on a tarp and sacked out under the moon and stars. On that night, there was a crescent moon, and there was bright earthshine. I asked my dad about it, and he unhesitatingly spun a story that went like this:

“It's the light bulbs. You probably think that light bulbs are made in a factory, but actually they are grown on farms, on the moon. What you see now is most of the moon covered with baby light bulbs that can only glow dimly. When they grow up, they get really bright - and that’s the bright part of the moon. When the crop is ready for harvest, the whole moon will be bright!”

Now, looking back, I have no idea if my dad actually knew what earthshine was, so I don't know if he could have given me the correct explanation. But he did give me an explanation I could understand – and believe! – and I did believe it, for several years.

That explanatory story was nothing unusual – my dad was full of them, and many have become family legends. He was clearly having fun with them, always pushing the envelope of what our kid selves would believe. He had an iron-clad rule that we could invoke anytime we wanted to: if we asked him “Is that true?”, he would answer honestly. But very often it never occurred to us to ask...

One such explanatory story that has become family legend has to do with cows. The story started out as an explanation for where chocolate milk came from (brown cows, of course!). Then the story grew to include an explanation for buttermilk (cows that hopped instead of walking!), and milkshakes (cows that ran in tight circles around the tops of frozen Swiss mountains!). Somewhere along the line, we learned about the special Swiss cows that were bred to have shorter legs on one side, so they could stand straight up on the steep alpine meadows (these came in left-handed and right-handed varieties). The entire edifice of cow explanations came tumbling down when he tried the milkshake explanation on us – one of the kids asked “Is that true?” and he admitted that it was not. That led us to question some things we had previously been convinced were true, like chocolate milk coming from brown cows :)

This sort of story-telling was absolutely routine with my dad. He always did it extemporaneously, seamlessly, and so full of detail that we found it utterly plausible. It was surprisingly rare for us to catch him at first; generally we only tumbled to his story when he tried to push it too far...

His verbal imagination extended to word play, too. He was notorious for his awful puns, which he could carry on with ad nauseum. When he got together with a friend who similarly enjoyed horrible puns, it could be unbearable for us to be around them :) But it wasn't just puns, thankfully. He came up with some very creative spoonerisms that are now baked into the family's vocabulary: “mocalate chilk”, “chirds burping”, and “flutterby” are some favorites. He invented whimsical terms, some of which I still use today: “cackleberries” (for eggs), “moo juice” (for milk), and “sparrow grass” (for asparagus).

It wasn't just word play that my dad enjoyed, either. He liked to play in many ways. We played lots of games as a kid. He taught me how to play chess at quite a young age, and was always a ruthless competitor – there was no mollycoddling from him! My whole family played lots of card games and board games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Boggle, and Krypto were all favorites. Many of these, though not all, had an educational component to them – I don't know whether that was a deliberate strategy to interest us in learning, or if my parents just thought those games were fun. Both are equally plausible.

And my dad liked physical play with little kids, too – which delighted us, as he was the only adult we knew who did so. He loved to engage in rough-and-tumble play, down on the ground at our level. He'd let us climb all over him, ride him like a pony, wrestle with him, and so on. He'd tickle us (he loved to see us laugh), and tease us. Often in the middle of that play, he'd give us a big hug and hold us tight for a moment.

Many years afterward, when I was on a long, long cruise on a Navy ship, I had a conversation about fathers with three of my crewmates. We were all playing a game of spades, trying to make the boring hours at sea at least a little more engaging. Somehow we got into a conversation about our fathers. This sort of conversation didn't happen often amongst groups of sailors, as the general habit there was to make ruthless use of every nugget of discovered fact to mercilessly tease and ridicule someone. This tended to inhibit personal revelations :) But on that day, with those four people, something made them open up a bit; a sort of mutual trust, I think. The first guy to talk about his father described an alcoholic dad who routinely beat up his wife and smacked the kids around. His mom ran away, taking the kids with her to live with her mother – whose husband had also been a drunk. The second guy to talk described his dad in wistful tones, as someone he really didn't know. His dad was always working or out with his friends, and he'd never really spent much time with him. The third guy, who came from the projects in Chicago, had no idea who his father was – and his mother didn't, either. Then it was my turn. I talked about the traveling, camping, and hiking we kids did with my mom and dad. The others wanted to hear more. There was a sort of hungry look on their faces that I'll never forget. Our card game was forgotten. I ended up talking about my parents and childhood for hours that day, something I had never done before (though I have many times since then!). But here's the point of this whole paragraph: the thing those guys wanted to hear about the most was my dad's stories and the way he played with us. They leaned over our little card table, completely focused on what they were hearing, smiling at the very idea of a dad like mine...

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Even in California...

Some interesting Martian terrain...

Iran deal update...

ObamaCare debacle update...

Unfortunately, this is all too believable...

Pater: A little imagination and play...