Still More Beans

My previous post (Beans and More Beans) elicited a comment from a friend, who remarked, “I didn’t know you shelled butter beans.” I had not anticipated that response. So let me extend my comments.

You don’t want to eat the shells, so you extract the beans first and cook them. But you don’t have to do those two things in that order. Butter beans in the shell can be fried in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, then eaten. To eat them, put the fried shell with beans into your mouth, then pull the shell out of your mouth while using your teeth to extract the beans from the shell. I have not eaten beans that way but to each his own.

It’s not just beans. English peas, black eyed peas, and chickpeas (garbanzo beans) must be shelled, too. You’ve heard the expression, two peas in a pod. The pod is the shell. Inside the pod, the peas are identical and sit so close together that they touch. Hence, the phrase two peas in a pod is used to describe two people who are very much alike. As with beans, you split open the peapod and rake the peas out with your finger or thumb, then cook the peas. (You will probably want to soak black eyed peas and chickpeas before cooking them.)

As one would expect, there are shelling machines to do this for commercial farms. For home gardeners and those who occasionally buy unshelled beans and peas because they prefer the flavor and nutrition of fresh produce, a shelling machine can save a lot of time. But a shelling machine may not be worth its cost if its for occasional use. It may be better (and a lot more fun) to gather family members on your front porch and shell beans together while you gossip about the goings-on in the neighborhood. Make sure one of your helpers is a child who can one day pass on the shelling tradition. If the kid turns out to be an engineer, he or she may invent a transporter that “beams” the beans or peas out of the shell and into a bowl. Admittedly, that process loses much of the magic of shelling beans together.

It would not surprise me to hear someone ask me, “Would you like me to print you some beans?” We live in strange and wondrous times.

Note: In my previous post I said it was my experience growing up in the South that butter beans were small and green and lima beans were larger and cream-colored. In parts of the US, small green butter beans may be called baby lima beans and lima beans may be called butter beans. In the UK, the term butter bean is used almost exclusively to refer to a lima bean. Regardless, butter beans and lima beans are the same bean. (Unless I’m wrong. But what are the odds of that?)

Beans And More Beans

The clock says 8PM. I’m pondering eating some supper. I have beans. I can eat great northern beans for supper. I like pinto beans and kidney beans and black beans, but I have none of those in my kitchen. I have Beanie Weenies: original, baked, and hickory smoked flavors. I call that last flavor “hickory smoked,” but the label on the can says “smoked hickory.” Hmm. I’ll need a veggie to go with them, and I have a choice of turnip greens or collard greens. Or a salad, but I ate a salad for lunch, along with half a baloney sandwich. Beans and greens: that sounds decent, does it not?

What I would really like is butter beans. If you’re not from the South, you might know them as lima beans. But for me, lima beans are cream-colored whereas butter beans are green. I’d call them green beans but that name is taken: string beans and snap beans and green beans are different names for the same bean. And why even call a green bean a bean? It’s not bean-shaped. Plus, three names for the same thing seems redundant. And confusing.

When I was a kid, I would sit on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, with a paper bag full of snap beans and a bowl in my lap, and I would “snap” the beans. First I would string the bean (de-string it to be precise) and then I would snap it. I think the bean farmers have bred that stringy part out of the bean. Other times I would sit and shell butter beans. (I was removing the shell so you’d think “de-shell” or “un-shell” would be the term.) Years later, I bought butter beans from a man who had a butter bean shelling machine. It had paddles that turned inside a wire drum that turned the opposite way. Basically, shelling butter beans (lima beans) involves whacking the hell out of the beans. The wire drum allowed the beans to fall out of the drum into a tray while the shells stayed inside the drum. The whole shebang was run by a small electric motor. It was ingenious.

This is too complicated. Times a-wastin’. I’ll skip supper tonight. In a few hours I’ll wake up hungry and eat a couple of chili dogs. I realize now that on my last trip to the store, I didn’t buy enough wieners and buns. Hot dogs are my fallback meal choice. Sometimes I envy my married friends—they don’t have to make these decisions. Their better half tells them what they will eat for supper and they simply reply, “Yes, Dear.” Life is simpler for them. I also think there are entirely too many kinds of beans in the world. Do we really need more than two or three kinds of beans?

It’s 9:30PM. Time flies when you’re multi-tasking, and I’ve been chatting on WhatsApp with a friend while writing this blog post. I probably haven’t done a good job at either task. No matter, I’m hitting the Publish button now. G’night all.

Spam

Midnight: My day begins. I went to bed at nine. Now, three hours later, I’m up. The temperature is 36°F. It’s supposed to be 70° later today and 81° tomorrow. I’ll have the windows open.

5:10AM: I just ate breakfast: two hot dogs with chili and onion. Chili dogs are good any time of the day. I would have eaten Spam and eggs if I had eggs. And some Spam.

I haven’t eaten Spam in a long time. An Irish lass named Diane Jennings posted a YouTube video of herself tasting Spam for the first time. She said she had never heard of it, and consequently never knew that “spam email” is named after the canned meat product. Anyway, someone sent her a package of Spam—one of those single slice packets—and she pondered whether she should she cook it, and decided to fry it. Spam is already cooked, but most people don’t eat it fresh out of the package. You fry it, heat it up, and brown it on both sides. Many people eat a slice of Spam with their morning eggs.

So Diane put a small piece of the fried Spam into her mouth and chewed for a few seconds, and her reaction was priceless. As we know, the first time you taste Spam, every cell in your body sits up and says, “What is that? We want more!”

8:00AM: The chili dogs put me to sleep for a couple more hours. I’m up again and still thinking about how a Spam and fried egg sandwich would hit the spot right now. But I have no Spam nor any eggs. I do have salad fixings. I have chopped lettuce and a tablespoon of dressing. Let me ponder that. Hmmm... Nope. That sounds far too healthy for this early in the day.

Trains 2

It’s 3:42 AM and I hear a train whistle. The train is passing through my small city. I really enjoy hearing train whistles, and even hearing the steel wheels cruising the rails. I grew up traveling on trains. My mother told me this story: When I was a baby, she went to the bathroom on the train, and she laid me on the toilet adjacent to her toilet stall, and of course the next thing that happened was I rolled off the toilet seat onto the train car’s floor. BAM!

A few years after that, I was at the nearby train station waiting for the Silver Meteor to arrive. It roared into Union Station and came to a stop. The conductors lowered the metal boarding steps and I climbed onto the train car. The first thing I saw was a drinking fountain. I call it a fountain for lack of a better name, but it was one of those things where you hold a paper cup under a spout and you push a button to get water.

I rode the Silver Meteor to and from Florida many times. Half of my family lived in Florida (my dad’s half). I was born there. So we visited by train, because driving there was a two day trip. (This was before the Interstates were built.) The last time I drove to Florida from my home in Virginia took about 12 hours each way on the Interstate, and I drove at 85 mph. Everyone was driving at that speed. I was just keeping up with the traffic.

I can recall walking between the train cars. There was a metal plate that covered the coupling mechanism. Cold air blasted through the space between train cars. I could smell diesel fumes from the engine. It was wonderful. Maybe not for a grown-up, but for a kid, yeah, it was wonderful.

One time when we were making the trip back to Virginia, the train broke in half. A coupling between two cars had failed. I was in the train half with the engine. We stopped and began to go into reverse. We had to back up quite a way in order to reach the rear half of the train. It took a while but we linked up and continued our journey.

I remember well the steam locomotives. I recall standing in my front yard and watching a train pulled by a steam locomotive passing over a trestle above my street. It was night and all the wheels of the train were outlined in bright circles of fire. The train had its brakes on. It was a freight train, and it takes a while to stop a long freight train. You might ask, if the brakes produce so much fiery sparks, isn’t that dangerous? Couldn’t it start a fire? Yes, it could. When my mother was a child, she and her parents lived in a rented farmhouse. One day a train came past and started a grass fire that ended up burning down her home. Her family lost everything they owned. Did it cost the railroad company money? No way. There was a time when the railroad was king. My mother’s family found another place to live and started over. Such is life.

But diesel-electrics have their own charm. Not like in the days of yore, when trains had a dining car and a club car (a.k.a. lounge car) where you could purchase liquor. The last train I rode had a dome car. A dome car is a train car with a glass dome where passengers can sit above the train and see in all directions. It was nice.

People who have never ridden a passenger train have missed an experience that is impossible to fully describe and will never return. I know kids will say, “Poor geezer, he’ll never know the fun of using TikTok.” And they’re right.

Mechatronics

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, have developed a ventilator for Covid-19 patients. (A ventilator helps the patient breathe by pumping air into and out of the patient’s lungs.) I watched this video about the project. The device is now awaiting emergency approval by the FDA before going into production.

The ventilator appears to work well, but there are whispers of one problem. If the patient farts while the ventilator is running, he or she is likely to shoot through an open window like they’re, well, jet-propelled. But there is already a solution: the ventilators will ship with tie-down straps to secure the patient to the bed. I mean, it’s what I hear, so take it with a grain of salt.

There was an interview with a young lady in the video named Michelle Easter. She’s a “mechatronics engineer” at JPL. I was an electronics engineer for many years. I had not heard the term mechatronics engineer used previously, but it is a real thing and it sounds pretty cool. According to Google:

Mechatronics, which is also called mechatronic engineering, is a multidisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the engineering of both electrical and mechanical systems, and also includes a combination of robotics, electronics, computer, telecommunications, systems, control, and product engineering.

It sounds a little bit like that expression, “Jack-of-all-trades, Master of none.” But we need people like that. When I was an electrical engineer, I often had to take into consideration the mechanical aspects of a project. Maybe the job titles are just catching up with real-world engineering. Maybe I was a mechatronics engineer all along, and I didn’t know it.

The term mechatronics reminds me of the Transformers film franchise, perhaps because of the similarity between mechatronic and Megatron. Megatron was the leader of the Decepticons, who were sentient robotic lifeforms from the planet Cybertron. When the original Transformers TV series came out, my engineering job was designing electronics for a robot—an environment-aware, self-navigating mobile robot. As it navigated the aisles of our building at night in complete darkness, it seemed almost sentient. The company I worked for was called Cybermotion. The Transformers movie was released in 1986. I went to work for Cybermotion in 1986.

Some say there are no coincidences. Cue the woo-woo music.

And So To Bed

After publishing my previous blog post titled “The Recent Pandemic,” I wanted to return to bed. But I’m wide awake. So, what to do?

Here’s a scientific fact: Protein contains the sleep-inducing amino acid tryptophan, and eating carbohydrates along with the protein makes it easier for the tryptophan to enter the brain. So I opened up a tin of sardines and ate them.

I didn’t notice, when I bought the sardines, that they were packed in hot, spicy tomato sauce and sliced hot peppers. Or so it said on the tin’s label. That was fine with me. I love spicy food.

The spicy tomato sauce was plentiful in the tin. There was only one very thin slice of hot pepper. No matter; I was after the protein in the sardines. To get the aforementioned carbs, I followed the sardines with a piece of bread smeared with peanut butter and honey.

At 4AM, I sit at the ‘puter with the TV on, watching a replay of last night’s national news, which I had not viewed when it aired. I’ve been typing this little blog post as I watch the news. Most of the news is about—surprise, surprise—Covid-19. I wonder if I can get to sleep now?

At 4:30AM, the local news is on. They say Virginia has had 10,998 confirmed cases of Covid-19 along with 372 deaths. My small city is considered a Covid-19 hotspot in this part of Virginia. Surrounding communities are jealous. They want to be number 1. Sorry, surrounding communities, but you’re going to have to work harder to get there. It’s good to be number one at something, and we’re going to hang onto it. I wonder if we’ll get a plaque? Even a framed certificate would be nice.

I’m babbling now, so I know it’s time to return to bed. Don’t forget to read the previous post, “The Recent Pandemic.”

The Recent Pandemic

My friend and fellow blogger CD is a “prepper.” I call his hobby prepper-lite. He hasn’t rented or built an underground bunker stocked with 12 months of provisions and medicines (that I am aware of). He probably doesn’t even own a bug-out bag. But he’s prepared to be cut off from the world for weeks or months. I don’t know the details of prepper life, but I can still recall my Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.

CD has stocked up on items he will need in the event of a “zombie apocalypse” (or ZA, as he calls it). The word “zombie” is his catchall for any doomsday event that can knock out a portion of the country or planet: a meteor strike, alien invasion, nuclear war … the list of possible apocalypses is a long one. We may be in the beginning of one now. How would we know?

But it turns out that you don’t need any of those apocalyptic events to have a ZA. All you need are human beings. Humans can create their own ZA out of nothing more than fear. Real shortages may come, but at this point we have only fear-induced buying sprees that are creating shortages.

The CDC estimates that the recent flu season in the US (October 1, 2019, through April 4, 2020) resulted in 39 to 56 million flu cases and 24 to 62 thousand flu deaths. But people are comfortable with those numbers. A vaccine for flu is available each fall, yet less than half of adult Americans get a flu shot. The US has had 870 thousand confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 50 thousand deaths thus far.

The numbers explain why so many people want to ignore medical advice and go back to work. But the numbers, in most countries, are still going up, and no one knows when the numbers will level off. We can only wait and see.

Chart: Confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US through April 23, 2020.

Testing God

In March 2020, Bishop Gerald Glenn, pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Virginia, dismissed CDC warnings to avoid mass gatherings and said in a sermon, “God is larger than” Covid-19. Less than one month later, Bishop Gerald Glenn died of Covid-19, and four members of his family are infected.

If one is going to rely on God to keep them safe, then they should consider a verse from the Bible’s book of Mathew.

Then the devil took him [Jesus] to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.“If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

‘He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’

Jesus answered him, “The Scriptures also say, ‘You must not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

There’s another, non-religious way to state this wisdom, and that is with the idiom “Don’t press your luck.”

When someone ignores scientific advice and medical wisdom and tempts fate, are they putting God to the test? Are they pressing their luck? Yes and yes. That is precisely what they’re doing.

I saw a man in the street protesting the quarantine. He was in a crowd of similar protesters. He said he needed to go back to work and he said, “I’m not afraid to die.” He might feel a little differently when he’s in a hospital bed with a plastic tube shoved down his throat and a machine pumping air into and out of his lungs because he can’t breathe. He might feel differently if he were able to see his doctor tell his wife that her husband is dead, or see his wife tell their kids that their dad will not be coming home again, ever. And even if that man doesn’t care about his own life, what about the lives of those people he may infect? How about the young mother with children, or the young father who is the sole support of his family? Does the man who wants so badly to get out of quarantine not care about their lives?

Enough preaching. Everyone must do what they believe is the right thing. I am simply asking people, before you demand your “rights” to go anywhere and do anything you please, to remember why the rules are there. They’re not there to inconvenience us. They’re there because our government is trying as best it can to keep us—and the people who cross our paths—alive.

Shopping at the Lion

I drove to Food Lion this afternoon. Right off the bat, I ran into a guy with a pistol on his belt. He was ogling some toilet paper. Just about then, another guy, also with a sidearm, ran up shouting, “I saw it first!” They both grabbed at the TP and began fighting, and the next thing you know, a shot rang out. Then another shot. The two guys took cover; one ran behind the potato chips, and the other took refuge behind the corn chips. They continued shooting. Like other customers, I hit the floor. I was lying beside a guy wearing a Food Lion stocker costume, and I thought it proper to introduce myself.

“Hi, I’m VirtualWayne.”

“Hello, I’m Jason.”

“Hi Jason. You can call me VW.”

“Nice to meet you, VW.” And we shook hands, breaking several Covid-19 regulations the governor has declared.

“Nice to meet you, Jason. Can I call you J-man?”

“Please don’t.”

Great story, huh? But it didn’t happen. I’m making it up, as you well know.

“But,” you protest, “how were we supposed to know you were making up this story?”

Simple. Your first clue should have been when I said there was toilet paper at Food Lion. Because, there is no toilet paper at Food Lion. Or nose blow paper. Or paper towels. (But there really was a shopper wearing a pistol.)

Is there a shortage of these things? No. The reason why the shelves are bare is because when the store opens at 7AM a small crowd rushes in, and by 7:15 the store is sold out of paper goods. It’s a really sad commentary on humanity. For the rest of the day, no one can buy toilet paper because ten people have filled their garages to the rafters with it. If something were to start a fire in one of those garages, it would go up in flames like Jim Beam’s warehouse.

Thankfully, the store had the things I myself consider essential: potato chips, corn chips, trail mix, and Oreo cookies. Plus, regular food that any American male would eat for any meal of the day: all-beef hot dogs and buns. And hot dog chili. And onion for dicing and adding to the dog.

I also bought a jar of peanut butter, because peanut butter is all-purpose. You can eat peanut butter out of the jar, by itself. You can eat bread with peanut butter and honey, or with peanut butter and jelly. You can make chocolate and peanut butter pie. You can make peanut butter and baloney sandwiches. You can spackle a bullet hole in your wall with peanut butter. Uh, maybe that last one isn’t a plus. But you can.

Escape Velocity

I went to bed early, around midnight. But I awoke at 1:30AM and knew my sleep was over for the night. Anyway, I was thinking about mathematics.

Suppose you could write a number like so, 0.999… (the dots denote an infinite number of 9s). Mathematicians also write this as 0.9. Note the bar above the 9; it’s called a macron. It’s surprising how difficult it is to make a computer do something so simple. But it’s actually easy if you use CSS… Cascading Style Sheets. (At this point I know I’m talking to myself, so I’ll get on.)

Now imagine this number: 1.0. My question is this: “Is the number 0.999… with 9s to infinity exactly the same as the number 1.0?”

It is obvious that each succeeding 9 in the series 0.999… gets you a tad closer to 1.0, but none of them will get you exactly to 1. There is never a 9 where you can say, “That’s it, we’re at 1.0 now.” Nope, there’s always going to be an infinite number of nines remaining. You can get closer and closer and ever so closer to the number 1, but you can never quite get there. So the two numbers are not the same. Right?

Wrong. The number 1.0 and the number 0.999… with it’s infinite string of 9s are equivalent ways to write the same quantity. They are equal.

You might ask, “Who cares about infinity? It doesn’t exist, it’s just a math trick.” It’s true that infinity is a math concept, but it’s a very useful one that is often used in “the real world” by scientists and engineers, as well as mathematicians.

In a university physics class many years ago, I was asked to compute Earth’s escape velocity. Some of you might ask, “What is escape velocity?”

If you throw a ball into the air, straight up, it will fall back down. If you throw it harder, it will go higher but still fall back down. But suppose you had a cannon that could shoot that ball straight up as fast as you wanted. How fast would the ball have to be going up for it to never fall back to Earth? The ball would have to keep going forever. It would go slower and slower, of course, but because Earth’s gravity gets weaker with distance from Earth, the ball’s deceleration would decrease as distance from our planet increased, so that the ball will never stop. Mathematically, we can say the ball will stop at infinity, after traveling an infinite distance on a journey that required infinite time. The key insight is that if we reverse that impossible journey, so that the ball starts at zero speed at infinity and falls to Earth, the speed of the ball when it hits Earth will be Earth’s escape velocity. The two journeys are mirror images.

To calculate the speed the ball is going when it hits Earth requires using a branch of mathematics called calculus. If you make a career of engineering, it will probably be the first math you’re taught. I spent a year learning integral calculus. I spent another year learning differential calculus. Then—I got to the hard stuff. But just because you have to learn it doesn’t mean you’ll ever need to use it. Maybe you won’t. But if you’re a science-type person, you might find it so intriguing that you keep going.

We have sent probes into space traveling faster than escape velocity. Those probes will never return to Earth. They’ll travel through space and time for as long as our Universe exists, barring an encounter with a planet or a star or a black hole. Or—aliens.

Now it’s after 6AM and it’s still dark. Maybe I’ll fix myself some breakfast. It’s a tossup between raisin bran cereal and sausage biscuits. So many decisions.

Easter, Relatively Speaking

Arrgh! A wasted day!

First, I slept late and therefore got a late start to my day. Then, because today is Easter Sunday, I decided I would write about Easter. You probably know that Christians didn’t invent Easter. The holiday was invented by Anglo-Saxons long before Christianity was a thing. They had a spring celebration most likely named after their goddess Ēostre, goddess of fertility. The festivity celebrated the rebirth of life with the coming of spring. Rabbits and eggs were symbols of fertility. The date of Easter is still calculated based on the position of the Moon. Then early Christians came along and said, “Here’s a nice holiday, let’s make it ours.” And so they did.

But I’m wandering. I decided a proper article about Easter would be too long for a blog post. So I thought, “What else can I write about?” It happened that I also watched an interesting video on YouTube called “Why E=mc² Is Wrong.” It was created by someone at Fermilab.

As long as I’m this far off topic, I might as well go a little further. (Mental note: If farther means more far, why doesn’t further mean more fur?)

So E=mc² got me thinking about Relativity and how I could make some non-technical observations about it, but then I got bogged down in a search for an Alt Code for a particular letter. I needed to type the symbol for the Lorentz transformation, but now that I think about it, I probably would have lost some readers at that point. But anyway, I thought I needed an Alt Code for the Greek letter gamma ( Γ ), but after much wasted time I realized I needed the Alt Code for a Latin gamma, preferably upper case ( Ɣ ). I won’t say how much time I wasted trying to find the Alt Code I needed, but I can be stubborn that way. I even found an error on an Alt Code website and sent an email alerting them to it. I now know way more about alphabets than I knew this morning—or ever wanted to know. I never found the Alt Code I needed. So how did I type this Latin gamma Ɣ without an Alt Code? I didn’t. And yet I have used it twice in this blog post, because while I can be stubborn, I can also be clever. I mean, I have my moments. Unfortunately, my moments don’t make any money for me, they’re just stupid moments like how to type a Latin gamma.

If you have ever studied written Spanish, you know a sentence that asks a question not only ends with a question mark, it begins with an inverted question mark. The same rule applies to an exclamation mark. Furthermore, you can type those symbols because they have Alt Codes.

Are you a student?
¿Eres un estudiante?

I am a student!
¡Soy un estudiante!

In a table of Alt Codes, you can find every stupid symbol you can think of: smiley faces, negative smiley faces, diamonds-hearts-spades-clubs, and so on, but not the Latin gamma. I guess I won’t be able to write a blog post about Relativity. And if you can’t type a Latin gamma, then what good are computers anyway? I mean, except for watching porn. There’s always that. They probably watch it even at Fermilab—when no one is looking. “Man, look at those electrons and positrons gettin’ it on! You dirty little particle!”

Wow, this blog post has gone all to hell.

It’s A Catch-22

I don’t understand the thinking behind the refusal of some people to wear a mask over their face during this time of pandemic. I don’t wear a mask, but I have a good reason: I don’t own a mask. In order to buy a mask I have to go to a store, but I can’t go to a store because I don’t have a mask. It’s a classic Catch-22.

Catch-22 is the title of an excellent novel written by Joseph Heller. It was published in 1961 and released as a film in 1970. Guess what famous singer was in the movie? Art Garfunkel—of Simon and Garfunkel. If Garfunkel had known he would become famous, he might have changed his name. Maybe to Schuster. Simon and Schuster has a nice ring to it. A little bookish, perhaps.

In Catch-22, Garfunkel’s character was named Nately. He was a lieutenant for part of the story and, later, a captain. The story takes place during WWII in Italy. In fact, Joseph Heller was a bombardier with the 12th Air Force in the Mediterranean in World War II. The novel is about a bombardier named John Yossarian. Nately is a supporting character. If you’re a storyteller, you write best what you know best.

The following bit of dialog is copied from IMDb, which copied it from the film, which is based on the novel.

Old man in whorehouse : You see, Italy is a very poor, weak country and that is what makes us so strong, strong enough to survive this war and still be in existence, long after your country has been destroyed.
Capt. Nately : What are you talking about? America is not going to be destroyed.
Old man in whorehouse : Never?
Capt. Nately : Well...
Old man in whorehouse : Rome was destroyed. Greece was destroyed. Persia was destroyed. Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you think your country will last? Forever?
Capt. Nately : Well, forever is a long time.
Old man in whorehouse : Very long.

Capt. Nately : Don't you have any principles?
Old man in whorehouse : Of course not!
Capt. Nately : No morality?
Old man in whorehouse : I'm a very moral man, and Italy is a very moral country. That's why we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.
Capt. Nately : You talk like a madman.
Old man in whorehouse : But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top. Now that he has been deposed, I am anti-fascist. When the Germans were here, I was fanatically pro-German. Now I'm fanatically pro-American. You'll find no more loyal partisan in all of Italy than myself.
Capt. Nately : You're a shameful opportunist! What you don't understand is that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
Old man in whorehouse : You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. I know.
Capt. Nately : How do you know?
Old man in whorehouse : Because I am 107-years-old. How old are you?
Capt. Nately : I'll be 20 in January.
Old man in whorehouse : If you live.

I have no doubt that war is indescribable hell. If you could describe it (which you can’t), the only way would be through absurdity. Approach it from an angle. Sidle up to the story. Tear off a little piece of life and show how war makes sane people crazy. That is what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., did when he wrote Slaughterhouse Five. The protagonist of Vonnegut’s novel was a prisoner-of-war who survived the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut himself was a prisoner-of-war who survived the firebombing of Dresden. As a little known blogger once said, “If you’re a storyteller, you write best what you know best.”

Even if I go to a store to buy a mask, I’ve heard that all the masks are gone. Sold out. It’s the Human Pandemic Hoarding Reflex on display. Psychologists call it the HPHR. It’s pronounced like it’s spelled. Some people have it, some people don’t. I’m right on the line. I don’t mind putting on a mask if it makes the governor happy. I completely understand the thinking of the people who have decided to wear masks during this time of pandemic. But… (this blog post is circular, you must go to the top to finish reading it. Quickly, go now! Oh, you missed your chance. Now you’ll never find your way out of this blog. It’s a Catch-22. Don’t believe me? Read the title of this post.)

What Shall We Become

The train rolled through my small city. I heard the whistle and the steel wheels. I turned in bed and looked at the bedside clock. It displayed 3:00 AM. I watched until it changed to 3:01. I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight.

For some reason, J Robert Oppenheimer was on my mind this past evening. Specifically, I reflected upon his thoughts upon witnessing the death of his creation (and the birth of a new terror) in the New Mexico desert. (I credit Oppenheimer, although he led a team of physicists.) His creation’s code name was Trinity; Oppenheimer gave it that name. Oppenheimer later recalled his thoughts: 

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

But as for that, the end has not arrived. The world may yet end; we have the tools to make it happen. Those tools await the touch of foolish humans. Vishnu, in the form of almost 8 billion of us, may still become the destroyer of our world.

Crossroads

My home life as a child was very stressful. Not just parental arguments (which were daily), but shouting and threats and occasionally the cops showing up, things getting broken, holes punched in doors, that kind of thing. It was a daily occurrence (the constant fighting, not the out-of-control violence). I think it affected me in ways I probably don't understand. My father was an alcoholic and sometimes I had to be the adult in the house. I remember on more than one occasion thinking, "If I don't go crazy I must have the strongest brain in the world." And then I had to go to school and be around kids and pretend everything was fine in my life. Some kids had it worse than I did. Life is a lottery.

One day my school teacher, Mrs. Peck (I was probably about 10 or 11 years old) gave us a paper to have signed by our parents and returned the next day. As usual, Dad was drunk and he and Mom were fighting like cats and dogs. The next morning Dad had left for work and Mom was rushing around trying to get ready to catch the bus to work, no time to sign school papers. Mrs. Peck called me up to the front of the class and berated me for not getting that paper signed by my parents. I felt totally humiliated, but couldn't explain to her the insanity going on in my house. I remember that incident vividly to this day.

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I read the above paragraphs to my friend CyberDave. He's an insightful guy and I wanted his opinion on whether my young life would make good blogging fodder. With his astute insights and penetrating wit, CD could be a blogger. Oh wait, he is a blogger. His blog is on one of those o-t-h-e-r blogging platforms whose name shall not pass my lips because it is a direct competitor to my blogging platform. But there is nothing in the Bloggers’ Code that says I can’t type the URL and embed it into a hyperlink. Like so: CD’s blog. What follows is CD’s comment on my blog post.

CD: That was a crossroads for you ... a watershed moment.

Me: Why do you say that?

CD: Because you made a choice. You could have signed your mother's name, how would the teacher know? You chose honesty.

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And yet, I really didn't choose honesty. I was taught honesty. In fact, forging my mother's name on a school paper was something that would never have occurred to me. Honesty wasn't a choice; it was my default position on (almost) everything. Let me tell you a story about an exception.

When I was a child I loved sci-fi novels, especially the ACE double novels. It was pulp fiction (the double novels) but I was a kid so naturally I loved it.  Paperback novels cost about 35 or 40 cents. One day I ran across a book that cost 60 cents. It was non-fiction, a book about the Universe. What to do, what to do? I did a dishonest thing. I took the book to the checkout, and when the cashier saw it she asked, "How much?" And I replied, "Thirty-five cents." The cashier didn't blink. She rang up 35 cent paperbacks all the time. So she rang up the phony price.

That minor dishonesty, a mere 25 cents, has bothered me to this day. I don't think about it on a daily basis, but the memory hasn't faded. The memory returns when something triggers it. Maybe the tongue-lashing I received from Mrs. Peck was payback for that minor theft. But was the theft in the past or in the future of my encounter with Mrs. Peck? Can you receive payback now for something that you will do tomorrow or next week? I don't know. It's karma, and there are things I don't know about karma. People who have been to the “other side” and returned to tell the tale say that time doesn’t exist there. Maybe. Sometimes I feel I’ve been given far more payback than the number of bad deeds I’ve committed.

And what about CD? Did he ever sign his mother’s name on a school paper? In fact, he did. Once. And he got caught. Parents’ signatures were on file at that school—allegedly. That’s what the teacher told CD. I find it difficult to believe a schoolteacher will run 30 or 40 kids’ signatures against a “paper database” of signatures to find a kid who forged his mother’s signature. She probably looked at it and thought “that’s a child’s handwriting, but he’ll deny it unless I make him believe I have his mother’s signature on file.” I think the teacher pulled a bluff, and CD should have called her bluff and said, “It’s her signature, so let’s have a look at your file.” I think of all the angles.

Today, and for as long as I’ve known him, CD is honest as the day is long. But maybe that single instance of cheating and getting caught was his crossroads. Sometimes a seemingly insignificant thing has unforgettable consequences. It becomes a watershed moment. We do something we know is wrong. It’s not the size of the deed or the size of the theft that matters. What matters is: we know we are doing something wrong and we do it anyway. That must go ten-fold for youngsters in their formative years.

The first crime is trivial, but the path diverges. The next time you are tempted, you can choose honesty. But if you take the wrong turn, each succeeding transgression becomes easier. I like to think God, or the Universe, or the Next World was sending me a signal. “Go ahead, kid, lie about the price of that book. It’s a trivial matter, but you will find out what it feels like to be a thief.” If that is what happened, the lesson was well learned.

The poet Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem titled “The Road Not Taken.” It is one of my two favorite Robert Frost poems (the other poem being “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). “The Road Not Taken” is,  according to people who should know (Google) the most popular poem in America. The poem’s copyright has expired, so I can include it here.

There are only 4 stanzas of 20 verses. But it is the first and final stanzas that speak to me and are relevant to this blog post. Robert Frost wrote this poem as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas frequently hiked the countryside together and whenever they came to a diverging path, Thomas had great indecision about which path to take and frequently regretted whatever path the pair took. That became frustrating for Frost. Hence, the poem came to be. Frost was gently mocking his friend’s indecision. The poem has multiple levels of meaning, depending on the reader.

When Frost gave his first public reading of the poem, he was quite disappointed when the audience took his poem seriously. If this is a sample of Robert Frost’s humor, he should have written more humor. However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” So who knows?

      The Road Not Taken

          by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We’ve all traveled different paths to get where we are, and we’ve all made mistakes. None of us are perfect. Alexander Pope, in his "Essay on Criticism", said “to err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Mistakes don’t make us bad people; they make us human. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes. If we don’t learn, we are destined to repeat them, again and again. That cannot end well.

Random Stuff at Midnight

The clock is ticking past midnight. For no particular reason, I considered my meals today.

Breakfast: Mostly chopped cabbage with pomegranate dressing.

Lunch: Deviled ham on toast.

Dinner: Raisin Bran cereal. I didn’t put milk on it because I don’t drink milk. Usually I put almond milk on cereal, which is modestly better than plain water, but I didn’t have any almond milk. So I put the cereal in a bowl and ate it dry. I have to say, it was pretty good. (I’m not particular when it comes to food, as you might have guessed.) For dessert, I ate a 4 ounce snack cup of chocolate pudding.

Bedtime snack: a banana and a couple tablespoons of peanut butter.

All in all, I feel I ate a well-balanced diet today. If I had alcohol in the house, I would drink a few too many drinks and go to bed. But I have no alcohol. Thank you, Dry January.

I was thinking about the Navy Captain who was “relieved of command” (fired) because he asked for help with an outbreak of Covid-19 on his ship. SecNav said the Captain copied his request for help to too many people. I imagine the Captain tried using the chain of command first, and when that didn’t work he grew frustrated and went around the chain of command. SecNav said the Captain used poor judgment. I think he used great judgment and he accomplished what needed to be done to protect his crew. He was fired because he embarrassed some higher-up, and that person wanted payback. I don’t know who was embarrassed but my money is on SecNav himself.

If the Captain had done the “right” thing and waited for the slow-moving Navy brass to act on his request, and if, as a result, some of his sailors had died, then the Captain would be blamed for that. He was in a no-win situation. When you’re in a lose-lose situation, you take the path that does the least harm, and that’s what the Captain did. Kudos to Captain Crozier.

Almost 1 AM now. Goodnight all.

Another Day in the Pandemic

Lying in bed in my dark bedroom, I heard the train whistle. I heard the rumble of the wheels. The rumble went on and on. I knew it was a freight train; passenger trains aren’t that long. I rolled over in bed and looked at the clock. It read 3:53 AM. I had not yet gone to sleep. I knew sleep would not come and I might as well get up.

Coronavirus: almost a million cases confirmed and 47,273 deaths worldwide. In the US, almost 217,000 cases confirmed and 5,137 deaths. It will soon be higher, the experts say. Much higher.

I canceled a doctor appointment yesterday. It was a routine annual visit, so it wasn’t important. Why chance it? The last person to enter the clinic might have coughed into his hand before opening the door. Then I come along and grab the same door handle, and now I have his germs on my hand. Later I’m sitting in the waiting room and my nose itches. Without thinking, I scratch my nose with my germy fingers. Next thing I know, I’m in the hospital. That’s one way the pandemic can get you.

I ponder going to the grocery store. I’m out of chocolate chip cookies. Is it worth risking death for chocolate chip cookies? It might be. I can’t decide.

People ask me how I’m handling the isolation. They don’t understand that isolation has been my lifestyle for years. And as for “stocking up” on supplies, I’ve never done that. If the store is out of one thing, it will have another. You “make do.” Maybe you can’t make the meal you’d like to make, but you can still eat. You open cans or boxes and throw odds and ends together and make something entirely new. You “get by.”

You can live without eating meat. You can live without eating vegetables. In fact, you can live without eating anything at all for longer than you might think. After three days, you quit being hungry. I’ve done it. But you must drink plenty of water. If you don’t, you will get dehydrated, and then bad things can happen and you can end up at the ER. I’ve done that, too.

It’s 4:40 AM now. Time to hit the Publish button. To all my readers, have a nice day and be careful out there.