Fractured Headline 1

Headline in 3/24/07 Palo Alto Daily News: "Professor wins wastewater award"

Will he keep it on his mantle?

A Little Paunch Goes A Long Way

This man, Ralph Wenzel, featured in yesterday's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle is a rather amazing athlete. In 3 months time he swam 356 miles, logging nearly four hours a day in the very cold SF Bay. Perhaps he will become a pin-up for countless middle aged, slightly paunchy guys like myself. We are trend setters moving away from the chiseled look of male athletes and movie stars who are probably hiding a steroid or eating disorder.

I remember working shirtless in my back yard garden one afternoon while one of my sons and his girlfriend were in the kitchen. They were about 15 at the time. As I walked by the kitchen window, I overhead Alex explain to Charlotte, "All middle aged men have pot bellies." I could only guess what Charlotte had said to prompt Alex's reply. I skipped my before-bed "Ben and Jerry's" that night.

Sobering Statistic 1

Translators in Iraq are targeted infidels.
According to the Titan Company that hires private contractors in Iraq, so far 250 translators have been killed since the occupation began.

(source: This American Life radio show)

"Animal Farm"

Back in the early 60's in Peoria, Illinois, I was a clueless 5th and 6th grader, but I still knew who were the popular kids and who were the kids with "cooties." Everybody knew that stuff. Sharon Sturm was the prettiest girl and she had four other pretty girls who went wherever she did. Back then madras prints from India were the coolest shirts and the five of them would frequently come to school wearing the exact same print. Back then, dressing alike was cool, at least in Peoria. The popular guys would ride bikes in a pack by each of the girls' houses as a sort of daily ritual. They called it "making the rounds."

Sharon's group pretty much decided which girls in the class had cooties. The girls with cooties included a couple of kids from foreign countries along with some ugly girls who were either fat or had braces or wore clothes that were obviously picked out by their mothers or their minister. You'd know if somebody had been added to that group if their house would get TP'd during the night. TP stands for toilet paper. Many of us knew when it was coming because there was an abandoned shed near Sharon's house and they'd start stockpiling rolls of TP there for days before it would happen. But nobody ever told on the popular girls.

There was another girl, Debbie Jeffords, who didn't have the looks, but definitely had the smarts. Every year the teacher would choose her to direct the class play and she even got to help write it. Her mother drove an Oldsmobile and often picked her up for some kind of after school activity. That stood out in a neighborhood where most kids' dads worked at the Caterpillar assembly plant. Not unlike Sharon, she had some girlfriends who followed her around too.

Everything changed when we got back for school after summer vacation following sixth grade. The girls had boobs. And all the boys - even the clueless ones - noticed. The girls wore bras and some of the daring boys would snap them as a way to flirt. Believe it or not, one of the only girls in the class who didn't get any boobs was Sharon Sturm. The boys noticed and some jokes were made at her expense. Sharon's deficit was not lost on Debbie Jeffords and she wrote a mean, but clever song that you could hear her friends singing over by the basketball court.

One fall day all of Sharon's girlfriends showed up at school with matching lime green windbreakers that were given to them by Debbie Jeffords who was holding court right in the center of all the popular girls. That's how it went for the next few months and the boys altered their route when they made the rounds to reflect the new pecking order.

One day in March when the trees were still bare, Sharon noticed a bunch of toilet paper rolls in the shed by her house as she walked home alone. The next day she confronted two of her former cronies on the field before school and demanded an explanation. She may have lost her popularity, but she could still fluster all those other girls when she yelled in their faces. They assured her that the TP was destined for the house of a new foreign kid, the first Japanese person most of us had ever seen outside of TV and war movies. Her family came in January and her mother walked her to school every morning, holding an umbrella on sunny days. That sparked a bunch of "retread" jokes. Sharon didn't believe them. She'd had a lot of time to stew about Debbie Jeffords and think how hateful she was. She'd been thinking that Debbie would try something really evil against her.

Sharon passed notes to several of the cootie-kids inviting them to her house after school. Three of them showed up, looking pretty sheepish and uncomfortable. Sharon told them they could end cootie-bashing and teach a lesson to those who acted superior. She told them Debbie Jeffords and her gang were planning a TP attack against her and she wanted them to help her thwart it. Sharon had them enlist older brothers and cousins to show up at an ambush site she'd specify. Sharon was no slouch when it came to planning combat. Her plan worked to perfection except for the consequences. By keeping tabs on the TP stockpile she figured out the night the prank would happen. The older boys, armed with rocks, were in perfect position as the girls emerged with their bags of TP, and showered them with an attack they wouldn't soon forget.

Unfortunately, one girl got hit squarely in the eye and an ambulance had to be called. She lost her vision in that eye. Police came to our school and subsequently to the high school where a couple of the boys attended. Three kids ended up going to juvenile hall which we hadn't even heard of before. There were parent meetings and it was a big mess. Sharon Sturm ended up leaving our school and going to a Catholic one. About a year later I heard she had developed pretty big boobs.....

(This story is the blogger's feeble attempt to create an Orwellian "Animal Farm" parable that speaks to the previous post about the Cold War.)

Cold War Back By Popular Demand

Somewhat buried on Page 13 of the SF Chronicle, February 20th, was an article about an escalating war of words that could lead to a return of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia - complete with freaky arms race and spiraling mistrust amidst growing piles of WMD.

Apparently, the U.S. has convinced Poland and the Czech Republic to let it install 10 "defensive" missiles and a radar site, ostensibly to protect against an attack from a "middle eastern" country. Russia sees it as another step in arming its old satellite countries against it and that it represents just a foot in the door for the U.S. with more offensive missiles to follow. They have threatened to respond by producing intermediate range nuclear missiles to aim back at Poland and the Czech Republic even though they were banned by the Gorbachev / Reagan agreements in 1987. One observer quoted in the article, says that Russia perceives this as payback for selling missiles to Iran and Syria. In what appears to be a reassurance to Russians, the Polish Prime Minister made the unsettling statement that "the missile defense is not directed against any normal state."

I find it totally unsettling that the Dr. Strangelovian-missile-advocates have some operative definition of which states fail the "normalcy" test. It's equally unsettling that any government sees itself as an arms merchant to other countries. Has the current messy tragedy in Iraq made all the players nostalgic for the Cold War?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Talks

Pentagon sources have confirmed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to 28 different terrorist plots, many of which never happened. He has also confessed to orchestrating much of the tagging that has defaced New York City subways, the rapid decimation of amphibians worldwide, and the theft of Barbara Bush's pocketbook at a Denny's restaurant in 1968. Additionally, there are strong indications that he is the mastermind of the Crips Gang and Gitmo interrogators continue to ply him with glazed donuts (his weakness) and foot massages to extract his remaining dark secrets.

Profits and Loss.... Earthstory

Did Nero actually fiddle while Rome burned? Could people actually continue to stoke our "modern" economies and lifestyles until all the glaciers and forests and coral reefs are gone? Until cities disappear under water and societies wither from famine? There's an episode (12/5/03 - "Middle of Nowhere") from This American Life, my favorite radio show, that left a huge impression on me. It's about a South Pacific island, Nauru, whose 12,000 or so people were surrounded by trees, many that bore fruit. In the late 1800's an Australian man brought back a piece of what looked like petrified wood from the island and used it as a doorstop. Another man at his work discovered that it was actually a rich phosphate and Nauru became very conspicuous on the world map. One colonizing country after another came to mine the phosphate during the 20th century. When colonialism went out of style and gave way to globalization the citizens of an independent Nahru continued to sell off their valuable phosphate rich parcels until the tiny island was almost completely denuded of topsoil and trees. For awhile, in the late 80's, the "Nauruinians" were the richest people per capita on the entire planet. By the late 90's, except for some trees on the perimeter, the entire surface of the Manhattan-sized island is all dusty gray-white coral. All food and even drinking water must be flown in.

(The story gets into the crazy and barely legal ways Nauru has schemed to raise money without any natural resources to sell.)

To me, this little island is a total metaphor for the larger group of us inhabiting Planet Earth, which is just a bigger, more spherical island. Have we reached the equivalent of the late 80's in Nauru?

That's my son!

I went to Flickr.com, a site where people post their photos. I searched for "New Orleans + tornado" and found some photos from three different photographers. I noticed that one had two shots of a house where two walls were blown out. When I enlarged the second one, I saw it was my son Zac standing in front of it. That's the house he'd told me about that I mentioned in my previous blog entry. Yet another example of the internet shrink-wrapping our world.

My own photos on Flickr can be found at: here.

Tornado in New Orleans 2/13/07

My son Zac just called to tell me his New Orleans neighborhood was hit by a tornado at 3:30 AM last night. The whole house was shaking, a couple of windows shattered, transformers were exploding outside, and the porch railing was blasted apart by some flying debris. Apparently, his house fared much better than those of many neighbors. At first light, he and his roommate went out as did many others to find the streets covered with broken phone poles that had snapped in half and a swarm of electrical, phone, and cable wiring weaving through the streets like a high-tech spider web. In five hours, all the neighbors had cleared the streets. Zac helped various people board up their shattered windows. He helped one man remove valuable doors and windows from the two walls that had been blown entirely off his house. Others are missing their roofs, while nobody has electricity or landlines for phones. Zac used his cell phone to tell his employers at Habitat for Humanity that he would not be coming to work today. Speaking only partly as his dad, I think Habitat should have all their workers out in that neighborhood (a portion of Uptown) for the next day or so and count it toward their work hours. Apparently some of the Habitat volunteers who heard what Zac (their supervisor) and his roommate were up to, came out and lent a hand today as well. New Orleans seems like a magnet for natural disasters. I'm so proud that Zac knew instinctively what he needed to be doing today.

Wikipedia: Got Truth?

A few of us were talking about the amazing phenomenon of Wikipedia, the comprehensive, peoples' encyclopedia, that anybody can help to write. One voiced his concern that since participants can change entries to reflect their own opinionated positions on any controversial topic, eventually few sites would be credible. I said that school textbooks also reflect prejudices and world views of the people in power and the popular perspective of their time and place. My friend said that ideally you'd like people who are actually from a specific community to write the entries about their reality. I pointed out that physical communities are frequently the greatest practitioners of self deception particularly when they feel threatened by the community "on the other side." So where you gonna go for "truth?"

Meditation Novice

I went to my first meditation class and sitting. It was peaceful sitting and breathing and noticing that. It wasn't long before I was thinking that I hadn't finished my Starbucks coffeecake earlier at home, and where the heck had I put it down? Then I noticed my digression and refocused on my breathing. Minutes later I was mentally reviewing scenes from a famous fight between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard that had been playing on a sports channel as I'd eaten dinner that evening. I sharpened the focus on my breathing again, but not before noting that thoughts are often a lot like TV shows for me, a source of endless amusement and distraction.

Jeff Frost Memorial

I just returned from a memorial service for Jeff Frost who was my dentist and died of a sudden heart attack at age 50. I suspect there were a number of other patients there who only saw Jeff a few minutes per year, but were touched by his calm, smiling energy. I knew he had a couple of young daughters, loved music and travel. Today I heard from some of his longtime friends - all guys - that he was a Deadhead, a musician, and as a youngster he was a consummate inventor, philosopher, and fantasy player - building a perpetual motion machine and developing a shared cosmology with his buddies about an imaginary planet. It sounded like he'd gone to school at UC Santa Barbara. Indeed, we probably crossed paths at the Dead concert in 1974 when he would have been a freshman and me a senior. Would that someone could have introduced us that day as future dentist and patient, I think we'd have both gotten even higher. He was never worried about the gum recession over my two eye teeth, though he monitored it every year and once sent me for a graft. He said it would take many years before I'd have to worry about the loss of those teeth. It's hard to accept that his whole life is gone before those two teeth.

"Live in Peace" March and Rally in East Palo Alto

Today I went to the "Live in Peace" March and Rally in East Palo Alto. Since late December there have been 20 shootings including several murders of teenagers in the community of 30,000 Latinos, African-Americans,
Tongans, and Caucasians. Two young Tongan girls are among the dead. The relatively new police chief Davis has emphasized communications and community policing and the crime rate had gone down dramatically last year. But the violence - most of it youth violence - just erupted with a momentum of its own. Perhaps a couple of thousand from the community - all ethnic groups were represented - and perhaps a hundred or so from neighboring, affluent Palo Alto, participated in the march and rally. The poetry and raps from the young people who took the stage were most inspiring of all. Some of them were close to someone who's been shot or killed. The march, noisy with conversations, a Tongan marching band, and spontaneous whoops of joy, made a clear statement about the community's intention to reclaim the streets and Jack Farrell Park. Today the dangerous park was filled with balloons and hot dogs and people of all ages and backgrounds. There were even some normally intimidating, weathered, motorcycle guys wearing their decal-laden leather jackets. Everybody saying "stop d'a violence." Faye McNair Knox, the Executive Director of One EPA, was introduced as the "Mother of East Palo Alto." I wondered how she felt about that because, not that long ago, it was the generation before her - Ms. Mouton and Ms. Wilkes who would get introduced like that, but immediately she shouted out, "I'm a Grandmother now!" She said that there's talk that some of the shooters have "put down their beef" and put away their guns. Even they are affected by a community outpouring for peace and safety. Perhaps they want to be part of it, if indeed, everybody perceives a vibrant community in EPA.

"Rose" and my "Bubbie"

Last night we saw a one woman performance called "Rose", from the Traveling Jewish Theatre. Rose recounts her 80 years beginning with her life in a "schtetl" (Jewish village) in Poland, moving to the big, culturally vibrant Warsaw as a young woman, falling in love with someone she meets at a party, having a baby - only to crash into "realpolitik" as the Nazis invade Poland and create a crowded ghetto for the Jews in Warsaw. Her husband and child are killed. She manages to escape and after time in a refugee camp, ends up on the famous ship "Exodus" that is refused entry to Palestine. She outlives two more husbands in America. She has another child who ends up moving to a kibbutz in Israel. She is living alone in an apartment on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach when she has a poignant, angry, telephone exchange with her Israeli son.

It's amazing how little he knows of his mother's life.....all the pain she carries and the yearning for her first love, Yossel, and their child, her life in Warsaw or the refugee camps etc. It is reflected in his remarks about how Israelis resurrected the Hebrew language and discarded Yiddish as a relic of a rootless, victimized past. "Israelis look to the future" he says, and between that dynamic and the fact that she never shares her past with her new husband(s) and child, there is an internal life that gets erased from the books even before she's passed away.

It is a familiar story, repeated many times over. My own "Bubbie" (grandmother) somehow escaped the Nazis and made her way to Chicago, America where she and her daughter met my "Zadie", a widower with two daughters, who worked in the stockyards as a "shochet", slaughtering cows by the kosher method of a sharp knife across the throat. I know nothing of where she came from or how she got to America. They spoke Yiddish to each other and lived in a religious Jewish neighborhood called Albany Park (long after all the younger families moved north to West Rogers Park). Bubbie and Zadie obviously took pleasure from our visits at holidays, lavishing us with food, but there was little conversation, at least with us grandkids. It was like going to another planet, though the food was great. They had a red wagon that we played on for hours, but not much else in the way of toys. We played games with nuts since they had many of those.

She outlived my Zadie who died one year after retiring from the stockyards and continued her work as a kindergarden teacher in an Orthodox school. She eventually married another Orthodox man who had a job as a "mashgiach" at a Miami Beach hotel (a mashgiach certifies that all the food at the hotel is strictly kosher). She outlived him and ended up in an apartment by herself on Collins Avenue, just like Rose. I barely ever kept in touch after my stint in Chicago at the Yeshiva and my own Exodus from orthodox Judaism. Deborah and I can vaguely remember introducing her to our baby twins and the pleasure she beamed, though we can't remember where that occurred. I know nothing of her personal story. I don't know how her first husband died and what weights she carried in her heart.

Some time after she died, I received a call from her daughter in Brooklyn. She told me how much Bubbie loved all her grandchildren and that she was able to leave each one a hefty check for $15,000.

Comfort Voices

We all know what "comfort food" is. Most of us probably have "comfort voices" too. As soon as you hear the sound of certain singers, their voice just reaches down to that same comfort zone that feels so much like your favorite room at the Art Museum, or your favorite walking trail. It's not necessarily the voices that fill you with awe like Joni Mitchell or Aaron Neville. For me the voices that always resonate with my internal "feel-right" frequency, include Mark Knoffler, Bonnie Raitt, Eva Cassidy, and Mississippi John Hurt.

Chasidic Wedding

I went to Israel to attend my niece's Chasidic wedding. What a surprise to see many of her friends looking like they'd just come from the Rainbow Festival. The young women wore long beautiful headscarves and a number were drumming. The young men had long hair, accented by "payis" (earlocks) and danced in that arm-waving, swaying, bouncing way that we do at Grateful Dead concerts. The Chasidic band included an outstanding fiddler and the music was mixed with strains of "Chieftains-style" Irish rock. I'm going to have to do some research on the "Breslov Rebbe" and the "Bayla Rebbe" who are at the center of the ideology. I believe the Breslov Rebbe lived in the 1800's. My 20 year old niece and her 22 year old soulmate-husband were lost in each other's eyes for minutes on end, when he lifted her veil.

Shiite vs. Sunni Question

The question I have about Iraq is never addressed in the newspapers. Who has researched it? Is all the sectarian violence perpetrated by "religious" Sunnis and Shiites, or are all Sunnis and Shiites (even secular ones) mistrustful, angry, and either participating in or supporting the violence? If it's the former, then what per cent of Iraqis are secular people who just want to coexist and raise families and get on with their lives? Also, if one is a "religious" Sunni or Shiite, then what's the likelihood that he or she supports the violence?

(I put quotes around "religious" because many fundamentalists and orthodox of every stripe are so adept at preaching love and sacrality, yet fomenting intolerance and violence "with God on their side.")

Blog for the Pentagon

I answered an add on Craigslist for a writing job. It was vague and I couldn't find a web site connected to email address - two strikes, but what the hell. I got a reply within a couple of hours asking if I had a problem writing about government agencies. I replied not if the story is true.

Next day I got an email asking if I could come in for an interview anytime that day. No web site as I'd asked for. We then spoke by phone. Call me naive, but I never knew this "word of mouth" marketing existed on such a grand scale as what he told me about.

He's doing a startup after working for a "Word of Mouth" company called Newgate that was purchased by iCrossing. His first big customer is the Pentagon. They want stories about all the great things the army is accomplishing in Iraq. It sounded like these stories would appear on clearly identified government sites. But it sounded like we writers would not be identified as Pentagon subcontractors.

His previous work included customers like Motorola, Microsoft, and Oracle. He said they will have people saying positive things about his commercial clients' products, posting the comments in public forums and onto blogs. He said when even two people talk up a product on a forum, it starts to influence others. He said the writers do not identify themselves. He said there is some subterfuge involved but nothing illegal. However, he mentioned that the FTC is trying to force publicly traded companies to disclose their contracts with "word of mouth" marketers.

According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Assciation, the code of ethics is very clear about identifying yourself when posting this kind of praise-for-hire. I wonder how many do. Guess I won't be putting too much stock into the reviews I see on public forums anymore.
I took a pass on the job.

Robert Scheer, journalist with a history

Palo Alto's Peace and Justice Center sponsored a talk by journalist Robert Scheer. Many are familiar with the famous Jimmy Carter line admitting to "lust in his heart" from an interview with Scheer. I last heard him thirty two years ago when I would attend his weekly talks in Berkeley with my then-housemate Charlie. The other night, he was still wearing jeans and a "workshirt" but as though someone had hit the fast forward button, he is now a hard-to-believe 70 years old.

Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts Magazine and longtime columnist for the LA Times, is as mesmorizing, entertaining, and information-laden as ever. He runs an online newspaper-blog with his sons, called Truthdig. He spoke about Presidents since his last book is about the five he has interviewed and studied as well as Bush II who he hasn't interviewed. He recounted presidential lies in every administration, but also found some good to report in nearly every case. He reminds us that Nixon was "pink" relative to the current batch of Republicans, what with the wage and price controls he implemented and his trip to China, opening diplomatic relations. (Cheney and Rumsfeld were around then and opposed the visit to China.) Thanks to Gorbachev's proposal, it was Reagan who destroyed a chunk of our nuclear weapons after their summit in Reykovik, Iceland. Carter's experience as Governor of Georgia, with a legislature that only met 60 days a year, wasn't much preparation for president and it really showed. Instead, he became a great ex-president. There just wasn't anything good to say about George II.

Scheer wrote a column in May, 2001 (five months before 9/11) blasting the administration for sending $43 million to the tyrannical, rabidly anti-American Taliban government in Afghanistan. Apparently, because they had outlawed farming opium, they deserved to be propped up with our dollars.

There was some Q & A, but I held my tongue since mostly I wanted to know how he stayed so trim and could retain so many historical facts in his memory.

Pekin "Chinks"

I was pleased and surprised that the "Not In Our Town" conference (community responses to hate crimes) was held in Bloomington, Illinois. I grew up 40 miles away in Peoria, Illinois. I don't think of that area as a leader in the realm of diversity awareness. The town next to Peoria is Pekin, named originally after Peking, China. The high school moniker was the "Pekin Chinks!" I remember one year in the late 60's when Pekin High went all the way to the state basketball finals. I imagine newspapers all over the state carried a headline about the "Chinks Victory" without thinking anything about it. At least as a kid, I never thought about it. There was also an ice skating rink in Pekin. You guessed it..... "Chink Rink." They had a local TV commercial that portrayed a simple line drawing of an old Chinese man on ice skates, mixed with their voiceover and maybe some music. "Institutional racism" is the boring term for when racism is so pervasive it is invisible or like wallpaper. I'm sure it wasn't like wallpaper to any Chinese folks who lived around there, but I didn't know any.

I went to Wikipedia and found that there was an attempt to change the high school moniker around 1974, but it didn't actually get changed until 1980. (My family moved around 1969.) Now they are called the Pekin Dragons.

Link to a blog with more detail.