Social comment

Roy Benavidez

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In case you don’t know, Veterans’ Day used to be Armistice Day. It was chosen as 11/11 because that’s when the World War I shooting stopped, which is why it is such an important part of Commonwealth life as well, and why it rains poppies (“…in Flanders fields…”) in nearly every Anglophone country.

While many Americans (and citizens/residents of other countries who celebrate their veterans) will take time to thank a lot of people for service, and this is a good thing,  I’d like to pick one veteran and tell you his story. It went far too long with insufficient recognition.

His name was MSG Roy Benavidez, and he entered the U.S. Army from his native Texas.

On 2 May 1968, a Special Forces A-team was doing some recon near Lộc Ninh, Republic of Vietnam. Unfortunately for them, the Vietnam People’s Army (North Vietnamese) had effective control of the area, and the SF team got in serious trouble. Surrounded and under heavy fire, they called for extraction (“get our asses out of here”). Three helicopters couldn’t reach their position due to the intense ground fire. They came back shot up, birds and crews alike.

Benavidez decided that wasn’t the end of it. You couldn’t make this stuff up. He grabbed a bag of medical supplies and a knife, boarded one of the helicopters and rode toward the scene. He had the helicopter land him some distance away from the SF team, then infiltrated past the VPA. They shot him in the face, leg and head in the process. When he reached the A-team, it was trashed: everyone WIA or KIA, but the wounded were still fighting. (SF quits real hard, as many of its adversaries have learned to their great unhappiness.) Benavidez got the wounded into better positions from which to defend, popped smoke and prepared to load the survivors onto a helicopter.

That didn’t work out worth a damn. He managed to drag some of the wounded onto the helicopter; as he went back for the A-team leader’s body, Benavidez’s problems multiplied. Not only did he take small arms fire and grenade fragments to the body–remember, he was already shot up–a VPA rifleman shot the helicopter pilot dead, crashing it. (I presume it was ‘light on the skids,’ so it didn’t fall far enough to kill everyone inside.) Benavidez got the survivors back out, set up another perimeter and gave them aid while directing their defense. They were probably outnumbered about 50-1, give or take.

Next, Benavidez started calling in airstrikes and gunships. He continued directing all the fire, doctoring the wounded and getting further wounded himself. Another helicopter landed to extract the A-team, and Benavidez began hauling them aboard. While doing this, a VPA soldier clubbed him from behind. Benavidez paused to kill him, obtaining some more wounds in the process. A couple of enemy rushed the helicopter, so he killed them too. He made one last trip back to the position for the rest of the wounded, by which time he was pretty near dead himself. He then let the aircrew haul him aboard the helicopter, and everyone booked out of there. It had taken six hours, and Benavidez had thirty-seven separate wounds from shrapnel, bayonets and bullets. That’s a Mansonian level of punishment to absorb.

When the helicopter landed back at whatever base or hospital, Benavidez looked dead enough that Army medics were trying to zip him into a body bag. Without much strength left to move, Benavidez spat in the medic’s face. Seriously. They stopped trying to body-bag him. I would have stopped too. I’d have been very concerned that he would find a way to rip the bag open and strangle me with it.

MSG Benavidez survived those wounds. The Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, our second highest decoration and one they don’t pass out like candy. He retired in 1976. His former comrades, however, would not let the matter rest. If Benavidez’s heroism wasn’t worthy of the Medal of Honor, then what on earth must one do in order to deserve the thing? Based on testimony from the limited number of surviving eyewitnesses, on 24 May 1981–as I was dealing with senioritis and starting to get really excited and scared about college–President Reagan hung the Medal of Honor around MSG Roy Benavidez’s neck. About time.

Benavidez passed away in 1998. He was 63.

Gracias, Sargento Mayor, para su servicio pundonoroso y valiente. No olvidaremos a Ud.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Why no politics

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Those of you who visit here regularly may have noticed that we managed to get through a whole US election season without any partisan politics. I thank you all for not starting any such irritations in the comments; my affection for the readership grew in this time. But it may be useful for me to explain the many reasons behind my studious avoidance, since many of them relate to the views that fuel the writing:

  • I am not aligned with a major party, and am fairly bereft of faith in the process, so my rooting interest is limited to begin with. I feel that elections are something for other people to get worked up about.
  • This is my professional public presence. I make my living with my writing. I don’t check my readers’ political cards, and I find the notion abhorrent. If I share writing, it is for all, and whether we might agree or disagree on any issue is beside the point.
  • The above relates to a view I do hold strongly: one of our great problems today is political incontinence. I define this as the inability to set politics aside and work/play/eat/laugh/boff/live together in amity, caused by the inability to shut the hell up about one’s politics. Politics are like bowel movements: they’re fine in the proper places, even necessary, but the world doesn’t need a report on every last instance, nor does it need a constant flow of other people’s on display. I have determined that this must be a bastion of political continence. I know too many deeply intelligent people all over the spectrum of politics to think less of any person based purely on a political stance. It is important to me that no one walk away from here feeling litmus-tested, and to fulfill that mission requires strict political continence, which must begin with me.
  • If I started the discussion, it would become a fight, because I am a fierce and passionate man. I have seen how many people have behaved over politics in the past year, and many of the types of things people have said would be things they couldn’t take back–it would not be my way to let them. I also might respond with words I couldn’t take back, and being me, I probably would not want to back down. Know thyself, especially thine weaknesses. Whatever gain could be had from allowing that, well, it eludes me. Who could I blame but myself, were I to open that door? It would all be beside the point, which is that I am here to represent my writing to the world, not bicker. There are other places I could bicker, if so minded.
  • People need oases from politics at the best of times. These are not the best of times, and in these, they need oases that much more. People need good places, and I’ve striven to craft one.
  • I have never made a pronouncement/demand that commenters avoid politics, because I didn’t need to. The blog seems to have drawn people of good political continence. If I had to, I suppose I would, though the reflex of just deleting the political comments might be enough to send the message. It is fatuous to come out all bombastic against a problem that does not and likely will not exist. “Okay, thanks for that. What’s next, a proscription outlawing all living velociraptors? No mammoths allowed to post on the blog?”
  • The blog has taught me that social comment is possible without overt political commentary. At the outset, I wondered if this would be the case, and how to handle it.
  • Politics tends to bring on the sin of bloviation. Blogging should not be bloviatory.
  • Confession: I’m not really that knowledgeable about politics, nor do I think most people are. It’s my view that most people who take to political pulpits really don’t and can’t know the facts, because most people would not invest the time. They would take the word of news articles, or their favorite websites, even simply take the headlines and not read the articles. If I find myself having to guard against that, I must assume I’m not the only one. Therefore, my default assumption is that most of what I see is baloney based upon baloney: unsubstantiated conclusions based on unchecked, taken-for-granted suppositions. It is impossible for everyone to check everyone’s references, or even all of one’s own; there simply isn’t enough time. We do have substantial reason to believe one thing: that a lot of what we read and hear and watch is misleading, either by journalistic sloth or by design. I once heard a co-worker, a pretty bright guy, take issue with my questioning of some version of events. His argument: “But it was on the network news! Of course it’s true!” With that statement, it became evident that our world views were parallel. There’s a word that gets misused. What does it mean? Two lines are parallel only if they can never touch. ‘Parallel thinking’ doesn’t mean agreement, despite how people throw it around. His thinking and mine emanated from such different fundamental assumptions that common ground was elusive.

So, from deep inside me, thank you for keeping us free of partisan crap here at the ‘Lancer. Thank you for reading, commenting, liking, visiting, and for motivating me to write. When I begin to conceive a blog post, I am asking myself: “How will this inform, uplift, entertain?” I have aborted quite a few posts because they didn’t supply good answers to that question. Thanks for being the reasons for the question.

Human relations, Social comment

Rote repetitions that simply aren’t true

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One grows very tired of incorrect rote repetitions that have taken on the air of fact in the public mind. Some I remember from childhood, but haven’t heard much since; some I started hearing in adulthood, and some I’ve heard all my damn life from people that I know are smarter than that. So let’s haul them out, starting with one that’s pertinent to the day…

“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Watch me. Whether I vote or not, the exorbitant tax bill I donate to our corporations with the IRS as their collection agency should count for more than whether I marked a piece of paper for the felons and boneheaded initiatives of my choice.

“The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.” In some contexts it can be true, but not universally. I am very often asked by complete strangers “How long have you been growing that beard?” It’s stupid because they aren’t using their brains. One would presume that at some point I had trimmed it, rather than just letting it go; one might judge this by the smooth bottom edge and well-pruned mustache. So, no; in fact, there are a lot of stupid questions that should really never be asked.

“Profanity shows a lack of vocabulary.” Not necessarily. It might show anger, laziness, vulgarity, disrespect or many things, but just because you use the word ‘fuck’ does not mean you have a limited vocabulary. I know people whose brains are stamped Merriam-Webster whose favorite word is ‘shit.’

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” A complete fallacy designed to deter decent people from retaliating against jerks in the only language a jerk understands. If it’s true, we should never have fought back against Japan or helped crush Germany. This one is closely allied to…

“Violence never solves anything.” Oh, yes, it can. It does not cure the underlying problem of the need for violence, but violence will solve a lot of things. The Holocaust did not end because the Allies asked Hitler nicely and patiently to stop the genocide. It ended because the Allies used violence against his country.

“You can’t prove a negative.” Sure I can–at least some negatives. I can prove, for example, that I am not an ostrich. Ostriches have feathers and much longer necks, check a picture of one. This statement has its place, but is used incontinently where it does not apply.

“Everything has shades of grey.” If you really think this, you have no authentic moral compass. If you can’t see absolute evil and absolute good, then you are forever finding good in evil and evil in good, in which case none of your moral judgments mean a thing.

“You have to respect the law.” No, actually, you do not. You can have zero respect for it while still obeying it, either because it makes sense, or because you don’t want the penalties. Compliance under threat is not respect. Some police think they are getting respect, when in reality they are getting fear.

“Everything happens for a reason.” If you mean for a demonstrable scientific reason, probably yes. If you mean because it needed to happen as part of some grand plan, you just said that your Grand Planner needed bubonic plague, the Armenian genocide, 9/11 and Steve Carell movies. Really want to go there?

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Not always. You start writing with a pen. I’ll start slashing with a saber. If that were true, the awesomeness of your pen would defeat me. However, it is true that the pen is powerful. It’s just not all-powerful.

“A vote for a third party is a vote thrown away.” Common form of pressure used by someone about to become a hysterical bitch if you say you aren’t going to vote for the least odious option (which happens to be the one they want to win). A vote thrown away is a ballot not submitted, thus discarded.

“You can’t hit someone for words.” That should usher in a renaissance for the world’s loudmouthed abusers: a guaranteed pass against any actual consequences that might teach them a lesson, such as not to be a verbal abuser. Some words not only deserve a knuckle sandwich–they demand one.

“If you don’t exercise a right, you’ll lose it.” Nah.  Exercising a right has zero impact on whether it gets taken away, unless of course people exercise it very stupidly. If they do that, exercising it is indeed likely to get it revoked.

“It takes one to know one.” I suppose in the case of biochemists, that’s nearly correct. In most cases, it’s not only incorrect, it’s developmentally five years old. I am not a police officer. I can usually tell one when I see him or her. They usually wear khaki, black or blue, carry guns and badges and Batman belts, drive cars that say ‘POLICE’, and so on. It doesn’t take one to know one.

Privacy, Technology

My current privacy array

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I’m fairly sure I’m at the right asymptote of ‘willingness to go through headaches and try new things in order to thwart people’s data gathering just because.’ The tools for this are in a state of constant change, so this might be a time for an update.

My basic browser is Firefox 16.0.2, not because I want to be on that version, but because I was forced by sunsetting to upgrade from a previous version. FF has heavy memory leaks, and has become clunky, but a) it has the most add-ins, b) I hated Safari, c) there is no way I’m going to let Chrome have its way with me, and d) these days, if you use Internet Explorer to do anything but download a real browser, your friends will stage an intervention. “Jonathan, we’ve all come here because we care about you. Your use of IE has affected my life negatively in the following ways…” For all FF’s flaws, it has the most dynamic privacy tool authoring community, and that’s what matters most to me.

It begins with Adblock Plus, which hides just about all the advertising, everywhere. There is a certain irony in all the efforts I exert in order to ruin Facebook’s data mining, when I don’t in fact see their consequent advertising. ABP is low maintenance. It has the added benefit of allowing me spot removal of any image I happen to find offensive and just don’t need to see again.

NoScript is a very helpful package that doesn’t let JavaScripts run unless I say so. It probably also accounts for most of the headaches and tweaks I go through, because it goes by site, and some pages have scripts from fourteen different sources (some of which you only learn of after unblocking this other one). Which one is the one needed in order to do what I came to the page to do? At times I have to turn it off temporarily, but I usually just enable scripts one at a time for the session.

FlashBlock is easier than NoScript because it shows a ‘play’ button on the screen where the Flash content is. Usually it’s a video. Do videos automatically play when you go to a page? Not for me, they don’t, and that’s how I want it.

TACO is wonderful, because it does the best job on cookies. For example, I can accept Facebook cookies on Facebook and on the one game that I play, while blocking them everywhere else. I have to do that one page at a time, but once you do it for the pages you visit most, it’s less necessary every day. That also lets me blow away Google’s ubiquitous cookie-mongering. There is no reason either of those sites needs to set a cookie on my browser just because I visited, say, CNN. That visit, and what I did there, is neither Google’s nor Facebook’s business. While TACO also blocks most web trackers, it doesn’t do it as well as…

Ghostery. In addition to cookies, many sites use beacons/web trackers to keep tabs on what you do. Ghostery blocks nearly all of them by default. If it finds one unblocked, you can choose to add it to the list. Very easy to use, and very satisfying.

GoogleSharing partly convinces Google that I’m somewhere else. Currently, Google News thinks I’m in Austin, TX. Once in a while, I believe when GS resets to a new ‘location,’ my GN shows up in a foreign edition and I have to change it. Although if it’s a language I understand, sometimes I’ll do a bit of reading first. GS says that it anonymizes my search results in some way; sounds good to me.

TrackMeNot spams Google with spurious searches on mundane things. The effect of this is to bury my actual Google searches in a sea of irrelevant crap. Slight downside is that sometimes it gets a little zealous, and Google makes me do Captcha in order to search, announcing that it has detected a lot of traffic from my IP address. This is rare.

WebOfTrust assigns reliability/safety icons to links, especially in Google searches. This mainly keeps one from blundering into sites that attempt to emplace spyware or viruses on your machine. Foolproof it’s not; helpful it is. Part of the problem is that the color of the icon could mean anything from ‘naughty pictures’ to ‘unsafe due to spyware,’ and you have to hover the mouse in order to find out. Part of the problem is that the safety rating of a page comes mainly from user input, so it’s possible that a given page was given adverse ratings simply because a bunch of people wanted to hurt the page’s owner. Use it with some discernment, and it’s helpful.

What are the downsides?

The biggest one is the need to selectively enable JavaScripts until a page works. I admit that sometimes I just punt and use another, unshielded browser. Since I don’t go from place to place with other browsers much, the dossier they compile from them is a tiny fraction of my web surfing. It’s also pretty much impossible to know which script unlocked what I wanted, unless I do it one at a time, which is often more futzing that I desire.

Second biggest is needing to go into TACO each time I go to a new page and block/delete all its cookies. You’d be amazed how many sites stick you with Firefox or Google cookies; WordPress and Yahoo are also frequent offenders.

Third would be the inability to save Google search settings because I won’t take Google cookies on their search page. At times, the non-evil folks at Google break Google search for people who do this–I’m convinced it’s to teach us a lesson.

Fourth would be that you have to use Firefox, which isn’t a very efficient or robust browser compared to others. For games, I use Sleipnir, Opera and/or Maxthon. Sleipnir and Maxthon are very robust. Opera is lousy, but it’s good to have some backup without resorting to IE. Maxthon’s update nags are very annoying; haven’t found out how to get them out of the system tray. At least I can ignore Opera and FF’s update nags.

Anyway, if you want to try browsing my way, there are all the links. Enjoy.

Adventures, Book reviews

William Least Heat-Moon: my unintentional stalker

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I say that with great affection. Let me be perfectly clear that I am sure Mr. Heat-Moon never set out to have his travels continually intersect with my life. He is a very pleasant, benign man as well as one of my favorite travel authors.

And until Roads to Quoz, no matter what he wrote, he did some form of drive-by on me.

I first became aware of Heat-Moon through his American travel biography Blue Highways, in which he drove around the country while avoiding nearly all freeways. In so doing, he spent a little time in the town where I went to high school. There’s a photo in there of people I knew in those days, picturing a scene I remembered well–it was across the highway from a classmate’s family farm, and up the road from my first serious girlfriend’s house. This town has less than 1000 people and is in no way on the beaten path. What a coincidence, eh! Okay, big deal. Then…

One fine day back in the 1990s or so, I received a generous and thoughtful present from my grandparents (maternal). If you read the series from the carriage-room earlier this year, well, that was when these grandparents were still managing the family ranch back home in Chase County, Kansas; my grandfather remodeled that carriage-room gods know how many times. It was a very nice gift: a hardback, signed copy of Heat-Moon’s new travel biography PrairyErth, a study of Chase County. Now, of all the counties in the United States that our esteemed author could choose–there must be at least five thousand–he picks the hardscrabble, low-population-density county from which my family comes? Okay, great. Statistically, I guess it was unlikely but not astronomical. I Got Over It.

At the time, I was living in Seattle. If you are in Seattle and you like Greek food, one of your heavens is Costa’s Opa in Fremont. It’s very close to a cool harp shop where the door chime is a guitar pick fixed to the top of the door, which strums a mounted dulcimer as the door opens or closes. Costa’s is right on the ship canal near the Fremont Bridge, with many quaintnesses and impossible parking. Well, I’d taken my (platonic) friend Barb out to Costa’s, and we had the usual wonderful dinner of Hellenic delights. And then I happened to glance over her shoulder, and guess who’s sitting in the next booth?

Yep. If you’ve ever seen a photo of Heat-Moon, he can’t be mistaken for anyone else. Now, of course, I’m going to say hello, but of course, I’m not going to butt in on his dinner. When he and his companions made ready to go, I approached him and explained my Chase County connection. He was very gracious, interested in what part we were from, quite a polite fellow. One senses he was rather delighted to be recognized two thousand miles away from his Missouri residence, since he was less well known then. I later wrote him a letter, and he sent a friendly postcard back.

Well, it was getting weird, and from then on I came to anticipate Heat-Moonery in my world. Of course, I was a lock to purchase his next book, River-Horse, his adventure travel story of a boat journey from New York City, NY to Astoria, OR. With only seventy miles of portage. By this time I was living in Kennewick, on the eastern side of Washington. I snapped up a copy as soon as it hit print, and sure enough: he’d gone right past us. His boat almost swamped in Lake Wallula, maybe seven miles away, and he hit Clover Island not long after. If I’d known, I could have made a three-mile drive down to the river and brought him home for a restorative dinner.

Then Heat-Moon switched tack on me completely, the clever fellow. His next wasn’t even a travel biography, but an historical study: Columbus in the Americas. I have never once been to any place where Columbus landed, stole, enslaved or let his men fornicate. Surely this would break the chain. Surely there could be no connection.

If you are of an age to remember the 1960s, you remember the Monday Holiday Law. This moved most of our national and bank holidays out of mid-week, preferably to Monday, so people could have three-day weekends. It was a good law and idea. It was also my first introduction in life to the uses of power, and how it would simply brush aside small inconveniences without caring. You see, I happen to have been born on Columbus Day, or what was once Columbus Day. It was kind of fun, my birthday being a holiday. And then one day the government made a law, and my birthday wasn’t a holiday any more. I took guidance from that. Nothing’s safe, ever, not even your birthday.

Except for the lesson it embedded in my developing psyche, I’d forgotten about that until Heat-Moon’s book. While I’m no more an admirer of the old slaver than Heat-Moon is, the day is the day. Of all the topics, of all the days…

When Roads to Quoz (a mosey in search of the unusual) came out, therefore, I more or less assumed that somehow he’d end up someplace important to me, or that had factored in my life, or would have some other connection. At that point, however, the well went dry. Nothing in the book connected to me, and I haven’t run into Heat-Moon anywhere else (though I would like to). With a little luck, he’ll run across this post and say hello.

He can stalk me any time.

Human relations

Self mis-diagnosis

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So, about two weeks back, I came down with a sore throat. Pretty painful one, but it’s not rare for post-nasal stuff to irritate a throat. I assumed that I was coming down with a cold transmitted to us by a child, and groaned as I prepared to fight it off.

As Yoda might say, off it did not fight. Which is bad, because I don’t like going to doctors. At all. There’s a long list of things I despise about the experience, highest on that list being that I don’t really have much natural faith that they’ll do anything to improve my situation–but that they will collect what I think is an exorbitant fee, subject me to an indifferent receptionist, and almost certainly try to push some drugs on me. Around here, that’s mostly what people want–“just give me the pills and I’ll go away.” My own preference is for understanding my condition and what it means, which is not the doctors’ preference. I’m convinced that half the time it’s because they don’t actually know what’s wrong, and the other half, they don’t think it’s a good use of their time to explain it to me.

Pretty soon I couldn’t sleep lying down. Then I couldn’t sleep sitting up. The Tylenol throat stuff, which at first had made it stop hurting, stopped working. Then came pressure on the eardrums. I got to the point where I was ready to surrender and take anything that a reasonably qualified doctor said would make it stop killing me. To give you an idea how bad it was, I even accepted pain medication. I like pain medication even less than I like most other medication.

My self-diagnosis (intense post-nasal drip irritating my throat to the point where I was swallowing too often and perpetuating my problem) was well off base. I started to realize that I’d probably mis-diagnosed myself when I realized I didn’t have any congestion in my nose–just a terrible sore throat accompanied by a horrible dry cough. Turns out it was a fairly heavy duty throat, sinus and ear infection, so the doctor put me on antibiotics about the size of nuclear submarines.

Now we’re to the last gasp phase of it, where the infection rallies its legions and prepares for Bacteria’s Last Stand, but this is one situation where it was fine to just let the doctor tell me it was a mass infection and eat whatever drugs he said to eat. So sick of coughing.

Human relations, Technology

Memories of my days as a computer shaman

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Back before I became a hired pen literary professional, I used to be a computer shaman. My business was moderately successful, and it was good social therapy. I got to thinking about this after watching a video on Cracked, which I suggest you take a gander at as well:

Five Reasons the Guy Fixing Your Computer Hates You

Mostly I didn’t hate my clients. I liked most of them. I liked helping elderly ladies on Social Security get connected so that they could see pictures of their grandbabies, research their osteoporosis and keep in touch with their friend Adna in Wisconsin. I liked being able to reach into the middle of their mess and get rid of the thing they’d installed (very unwisely) that was causing their Windows installation to throw up. Most of them were polite and courteous to me. It was evident that most of them were philosophically pretty different from me, in terms of socio-political-spiritual outlook, and none of them seemed to care.

I went to houses of guys I was pretty sure were retired underworld figures. I went to sheds in east Pasco where huge dogs threw themselves to the ends of heavy chains in forlorn hope of attacking me. I went to mansions. I went to two-bedroom apartments containing three families. I went to farms and I went to garages. I went to the homes of old mercenaries (the real kind), old doctors, and old just about everyone. In the end, the business was a casualty of the $500 PC. It just no longer made sense for anyone to pay me $50/hr to fix a problem that if it took much time, it was easier to upgrade their abacus to something modern.

Here’s the stuff I didn’t like…

Directions.

Everyone adores giving directions, but I couldn’t tell people that I was using map software and would just print myself a map. The minute I asked for the street address, everyone launched into lengthy, arcane directions, full of information I did not need and landmarks that did not matter. I learned to just shut up and let the storm blow past. One way I knew I was about done in the business was when I became candid about it. After five minutes of meaningless directions, someone would ask (because I hadn’t responded), “Are you writing all this down?” I’d answer, “no, because none of it will help me find you. I have your address, the color of the house, whether the numbers are on it, and a printed map. But everyone loves giving directions and there’s nothing I can do to stop them, so I’m not interrupting you. But no, sir, I’m not actually absorbing any of it, to be honest.”

Dogs.

Now, I’m not a fan of dogs. All I want is for them not to come near me. That means they will not put salivas on me, leap on me, startle me by bumping my leg under the desk, or anything else that increases my tension. Chief use of my briefcase? As a shield when dogs would charge at me. And almost without fail, the syrupy, whiny explanation:  “Oh, he just wants to loooooooove you!” Maybe he does, ma’am, but I already have a lover. How I wish you’d just control your animal. Of course, most clients with dogs could not process the concept of someone who could not do his best work with a dog in his face. And it’s the dog’s house, so it’s not like I have any standing to object. I just had to endure.

Great-nephews.

Oh, how often I saw it. I’d come in to a PC with a relatively fresh Windows installation. Mrs. Miller: “Well, my hard drive wasn’t downloading to my e-mail, and I couldn’t get my disk working, and my Windows web browser wouldn’t connect to my Microsoft Works, and my printer wouldn’t print the blue ink anymore. Now, I am a total computer dufus. My great-nephew is a computer god, he works at Hanford, he programs Excel, he knows everything about computers. He told me I needed to just wipe everything off, reformat and start again, so he did some stuff. Now I can’t find my e-mail at all and the Internet is broken. All my book chapters are gone and there is no Works at all. How much do you charge to put it back the way it was?” I was thinking: ma’am, if your great-nephew were here I’d take out the VGA card and cram it into his posterior. Why do these little hotshots do this, and then not help Auntie preserve or reinstall her data? It was hopeless and I could do little to change it.

Political types.

I provided services to two quite prominent local politicians, plus some other folks many people had heard of. Some were great. One political activist was about the biggest jerk I ever did service for. First time at his door: “So, are you a [party name]?” I looked at him with calm, suppressed indignation. “Sir, right now I’m a businessperson, and my priority is to resolve your printer problem.” On another visit, he started the “I’m not sure if you know who I am…”, clearly jonesing for free services–assumption being that I owed him for his political activism. I always believed that business was business and politics was politics, and that I should not introduce mine and they should not introduce theirs. Some simply couldn’t refrain, sitting next to me, dropping hints designed to suss out my political perspective.

The perception that a generalist could easily fix all things.

Hardware, software, connectivity. To them it was all ‘the computer.’ “Can you just fix it or not?” Some people would not grasp that, in order to see on a single visit if their problem was a flaky stick of RAM, I’d have to either carry every kind of RAM with me at all times, or run and get it and swap it in, then wait a few days to see if the problem repeated. How many hours of time was all that? Was I not to charge for that fetchin’ and gettin’? Was I to cart around a van full of stuff (constantly changing with the times) just waiting for this or that to be someone’s problem? If it were that simple, and that easy, sir, I would “just fix it.”

M-CAFee.

Not McAfee, as in MAC a fee, but mc CAFF ee. So many times. “I think I have a virus, my friend says I sent her one, but I don’t see how. This came with McCAFFee.” Did she ever note that it was a three-month trial version? No. Did she ever pay them to keep the virus definitions current at least, even if it was the worst virus protection software out there? She had no idea she needed to. “But I should be safe. I do a full scan every Sunday night!” You scan your computer with an obsolete virus detector. And you don’t understand why something newer than that just sent itself to everyone in your Outhouse Express e-mail directory. It was horrible. All could have been solved with a free one online.

People unwilling to learn.

I was a generous computer shaman, with my time and energy. Most people were doing some very stupid things that caused most of their problems. And when I’d tell them what the problem was, they’d smile that stupid little smile that says, Oh, you’re so cute, with your ideas of good computer use. Do you really think, young man, that I am going to abandon my habit of shutting off my computer by shutting off my surge protector? Well, the answer was frankly no, I didn’t think they would. But I had to try to at least tell them the problems it caused. They never learned. “But I like my WeatherBug!” It was spyware. They didn’t care.

Some of it, I admit, kept me in business. I told myself over and over: Shut up, idiot, and be glad they don’t do it right. That means they have to pay you. Fair enough. But not all the situations were solvable, and if things don’t go right, people tend to think the computer shaman didn’t do a good job. In other words, if they can still break their Internet connection, that must be my fault because I didn’t make it strong enough.

In the end, the frustration became too much, and I was making more money writing and editing. So I just focused on that.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

The blook: today’s publishing trend

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I keep seeing this, so it’s time we gave it a name. From a writer’s vantage, the 2000s have been defined by the crumbling of the NYC stranglehold on the publishing apparatus. The proles can now easily buy the means of production. Self-publishing is the way of the day.

This has led to the blook: the blog that eventually becomes a self-published book. The idea is not new, of course, but an evolution of the colook (collection of columns turned into a book) or the slook (collection of short stories turned into a book). All that’s changed is that now everyone’s a columnist and short story author, me included. Blog consistently enough about a subject, and you can get by with publishing the collection as a blook.

This I don’t like. When I buy a book, I’m expecting that someone meant it to be a book, with previously unpublished insights and a unifying theme. I’m not expecting it to be a bunch of stuff I could have read for free, or seen in the right magazines. I see this as a cheesy way to avoid the long project fatigue of sitting down to author a real book from start to finish. Waspish of me, but: it’s a great way to author by Tao. Ever read the Tao Te Ching? It’s all about doing by not doing. The blook seems exactly like what Lao-Tzu had in mind, applying his concept to authoring.

All the same, the consumer can adjust expectations and willingness to pay. If I think blooks are of less value than books, I can avoid buying blooks I consider not to deliver fair value. However, they sneak up on you, both at the bookstore and at Amazon. In the end, if you aren’t too enamored by blooks, the only answer is to research them yourself before you buy.

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Bank of America: blatant lying about Occupy?

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I had to stop by our local B of A branch today. While B of A is pretty odious, so are most of the realistic options. (It’s not about the local employees. The branch manager is a complete sweetheart and her employees reflect her influence.) Outside was a security guard, playing with his doodad phone.

This was new, so while I waited in line, and the bank employee was trying to handle some of the transactions with people in line, I asked him: why the security? His tone was sanctimonious. “It’s because of Occupy. Two of our tellers were assaulted in Texas by four of them; one woman had a broken leg. This is to assure the safety of our female tellers.” It was in that kind of tone that says ‘You cannot dispute me unless you want it to mean you favor beating up women.’ I expressed skepticism, and that if that had happened, it was probably done by provocateurs–perhaps even police infiltrators. He asserted that they were in jail. I’d never seen this guy here before at the branch, so one suspects that he was sent to ‘message’ this to clients.

This being Bank of America, I knew it was entirely credible that they would simply invent a story. When I got home, I did some research. Two tellers beaten up badly by those ultra-violent Occupy maniacs (who seem to be most famous for being roughed up, pepper-sprayed and assaulted by police, not the other way around) would seem a pretty big deal. No one thinks it’s okay to beat up on bank tellers just doing their work, or coming or going from it. I searched the google string “bank of america tellers assaulted by occupy,” no quotes, to have the greatest possible chance to learn about this breaking story.

Nothing about any such assault. I found some about bank robbers assaulting tellers, but Occupy protestors are not bank robbers. Same terms into a news aggregator; nothing. I found nothing to corroborate this story.

Unless I find something to corroborate it (and if I do, I will update this, of course), I have to assume that the employee was telling patrons a bald-faced lie. Sounds to me like a slick anti-Occupy propaganda trick, depending mainly upon people being too lazy to fact-check. In most cases, that’s probably a safe assumption. If there really was no such attack, it would say a lot about B of A’s opinion of the public. It would also say a lot about the corporate values–not that most observant people would bet heavily on those, at this stage of the game.

Book reviews

Current read: _Carthage Must Be Destroyed_

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It was the phrase that defined the middle to later Roman Republic as much as any other: the statement made at the end of orations by M. Porcius Cato (“the Elder”). Delenda est Carthago. Three wars, one semi-conclusive and two more to the knife. Some of the great figures of an ancient world: Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal Barca, Q. Fabius Maximus (“the great”) Verrocosus (“having a mole/wart”) Cunctator (“the delayer”), P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, and others. Phoenician culture vs. Roman culture. Trade and naval power vs. agrarianism and land power, mercenaries vs. citizen soldiers. War elephants vs. pila and gladii.

I’m not even nearly finished with it, but I’m enjoying Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles. Any attempt to understand Carthage suffers from a problem that is the first thing Miles points out: most of our information comes from non-Carthaginian sources, most of whom had serious biases against this non-Roman, non-Greek nation. We don’t really have extant Carthaginian sources from the ancient world; most were obliterated. We thus are faced with the historian’s challenge of evaluating sources, piecing together information said to be taken from them, examining the archaeological record’s findings, and forming a composite and credible image with as little incorporated bias as we can.

This is why I love ancient history, why I majored in it, why I continue to study it. We are challenged to use our minds to deduce and discover all that we may in spite of evidence that can be minimal, fragmentary, contradictory and elusive. We are further challenged not to conclude too much when we cannot, but to suppose or conjecture based on the most reasonable or probable reality in light of what we do know. Antiquarianism is demanding, never complete, and (like all historical study) benefits from understanding of all disciplines and sciences on some level.

What I like most so far about Miles is the rigorous level of critical thought on display. He doesn’t seem to have come to glorify or vilify Carthage, but to assemble honest understanding. I dislike works that seem to have begun with a conclusion and then focused on the evidence that supported it. Miles seems free of this flaw from what I can discern, as far as I’ve gotten. He could later disappoint me, but I’m not expecting that. I am anticipating a fair, nuanced, common-sense portrait of a poorly understood society that stood as an embodiment of all that many ancient writers scorned. They bequeathed that bias to Western historical tradition, and I relish seeing how Miles will assess the evidence to see where that tradition deserves challenge.

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