Denny Shines at Santa Cruz

Competitors leap into the surf to begin the 1.5 km swim. Santa Cruz. 2003

Readers may recall my hope, plaintively expressed earlier, that I might at least keep Denny in sight during our Laotian biking in November. My hopes seem now to be squelched with finality.

Denny competed in the Santa Cruz Sentinel Triathlon on September 23, finishing the three part event in a total time of 2 hours, 42 minutes, 1 second. He finished 369th in a total field of 839 participants. He was competing in a much stronger field this time. His finish time would have ranked him 16th in the Kings Trail Triathlon on Maui, where he competed last June. His strongest event was the run, where he ran a 10k in 48:46, after having already completed a 1.5 km swim in the cold Northern California Pacific Ocean, and a 40 km bike ride!

I've exhausted myself, just writing about it. I'm no longer worried about whether I can keep up with Denny in Laos. I now realize what a truly high class worry that was. My concern now is the effect on my morale as I watch Denny ride circles around me, a grin on his face and casually chatting, as I pant slowly up the 35-mile incline!

Congratulations, Den! Great job. We're all proud of you!

Priorities

When George W. Bush took office, one of his first moves was to eliminate the huge Clinton budget surplus by handing out massive tax breaks to people in the highest tax brackets. (The 2001 recession contributed to the deficit, but the tax cuts were the prime factor.)

In 2003, he dragged the country into Iraq. He refused to raise taxes to pay for it. Your kids and your grandkids will still be footing the bill for the disastrous "War Against Weapons of Mass Destruction," long after you've gone on to your reward. The Iraq war is estimated to cost approximately $2 billion per week.

But President Bush has now promised to veto a bill expanding health insurance benefits for low income children. The bill would add $35 billion to the program over a five-year period. (In other words, the cost of 17 weeks of war in Iraq.) The expansion would be financed not by printing money, but by raising the federal cigarette tax by 61 cents per pack.

Good gracious. Where did the Great Decider's sudden concern for balancing the budget come from? Especially since the insurance would be financed by taxes on those persons who chose to worsen their own health and the health of people around them by smoking?

Bush has promised a veto, saying the measure is too costly, unacceptably raises taxes, extends government-covered insurance to children in families who can afford private coverage, and smacks of a move toward completely federalized health care.

Source: AP story, 9-22-07. Ah yes, "federalized health care." It all becomes clear. It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing.

Virtually all Democratic Congressman, and a substantial number of Republicans, support the expansion. Maybe Mr. Bush should get out and talk to doctors and hospital personnel -- and meet some of their young patients -- right there in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the cozy security of the Oval Office. Or even while back in God's country, Houston and Dallas.

Let him take a good look at the desperately ill children of low income families. Let the president look their parents in the eye, and explain to them his lofty theories about how they could have afforded private coverage if they'd really tried. And about how it's ok for the government to bail out banks when they make foolish home loans, but how when parents "fail" to find enough money to obtain health insurance, their kids simply have to live with the results of that "failure."

When forced to get out and meet voters where they shopped, while running for president, George Bush the Elder was amazed to discover that supermarkets had these new-fangled gadgets called check-out scanners. We were amazed that he was amazed. But who knows? Maybe son George W. might encounter some amazing epiphanies of his own -- if he ever emerged from his protective cocoon long enough to look around at the real world.

State of Oregon ex rel. Godzilla v. Bambi

Jim discovered an injured fawn in his driveway, somewhere in rural Oregon. Legally he could have "hunted" the fawn, shot it, and mounted its head over his fireplace. The normal thing for any rural Oregonian to do. Instead, he nursed it back to health, named it "Snowball," and spent thousands of dollars on appropriate food and on modifying the interior of his house so the young deer could live inside. After a year, recovered, Snowball moved into a pen outside.

In the fullness of time, Snowball gave birth to her own child, named Bucky, fathered by a neighbor's tame buck.

Time passes. Suddenly, the State learned to its horror of the meretricious relationship between Jim and his two deer. State officials descended on Jim's property and seized the deer in the name of the sovereign State of Oregon. They charged Jim with raising deer without a permit. The deer probably would be put to death, they added as an afterthought.

In order to save Bambi and child, in other words, it had become necessary to destroy them. For their own good.

The State's action generated a modicum of adverse publicity. In fact, people were outraged. Caught unaware, officials stammered explanations about the dangers of raising deer. Diseases. Property-damaging rampages by marauding deer. Deer turning on their benefactors.

You don't know Bambi like we know Bambi, they explained. Bambi is a crazed beast of prey. This approach was not as successful with public opinion as had been hoped.

The State finds itself in a bind.

The State does issue permits to allow its citizens to rehabilitate wildlife. But it can't give one to Jim. Because it has already issued 16 of the precious pieces of paper, and 16 is the maximum its rules permit. God forbid it should issue 17. Rules is rules, I always say.

With one eye glancing back at their unprotected rear, and the other eye ahead to the next election, state officials now are considering the feasibility of declaring Snowball an "exceptional case," since she would be unable to survive on her own in the wild. As an exceptional case, Snowball would of course be exceptional. Therefore, not subject to the normal wildlife rules. And therefore Snowball not only could be returned to Jim, but law and equity would demand that she be so returned. Problem solved. Q.E.D.

But, alas, not Bucky. We have to draw the line somewhere. The State, when pressed hard enough, can show some compassion, some humanity, even some flexibility -- but the State of Oregon must not be made mock of. Bucky's fate is undecided, but he probably will be released into the wild to fend for himself.

But, hooray, Godzilla's foot does seem to have spared Bambi this time around.

The moral? Damned if I know. I guess if you see Godzilla's foot coming down on you, call your local newspaper posthaste.
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Author's Note: Bambi Meets Godzilla is a 1969 cartoon, rated as the 38th best cartoon of all time. The entire feature lasts only two minutes, most of which is devoted to the opening credits. The conclusion is left to the imagination of the reader, although the scene shown to the right may assist your imagination.

Chalk

Once upon a time, I thought I might become a high school teacher. It's hard to understand how I ever got this remarkable idea, especially when you consider that it occurred to me while I was a high school student myself. Nothing I knew about either my teachers (with a couple of exceptions) or my fellow students should have led me to believe that I would enjoy teaching. I guess I liked history and math, and naively believed that it would therefore be fun to teach those subjects to kids.

Seeing the movie Chalk would have swept away any such illusions. I could have seen myself as Mr. Lowrey, a shy first-year history teacher, standing nervous and tongue-tied before a restless, giggling class.

Lots of movies show high school from the kids' perspectives. Chalk gives us the teachers' side. It follows Mr. Lowrey and three other teachers through a school year at an urban Texas high school. The film, co-written by two former teachers, uses the "mockumentary" format, and does it so realistically that I could easily believe it was a true documentary. The lines and action are spontaneous and unforced. These are not professional actors playing cute high school kids, brimming over with witty one-liners. The girls are usually obese and unattractive; the boys are pimply, in need of shaves, and sullen. Most of all, the students look desperately in need of sleep.

For the teachers, the school year is a wasteland of long days, hostile or indifferent students, conflicts among themselves and with the administration. A broken copier or a "stolen" stapler is enough to push them over the edge.

Nevertheless, each of the four featured teachers makes personal progress during the year, and each develops some rapport with his or her students. We are given to understand that some learning by the kids does occur during the year, although we never see how it happens. This is not a Hollywood movie. None of the teachers even faintly resembles Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

I left the movie with enormous respect for the underpaid and overworked teaching profession. Although the movie gave some reason to question the quality of the education that the teachers themselves had received, it is clear that even the less sympathetic of the teachers cared deeply about the students and about their profession.

My short-lived desire to be a teacher was not without idealism, but it was an idealism on behalf of the academic subjects that I thought I wanted to teach. But for the vast majority of real high school teachers, their devotion is to the kids themselves -- somehow, anyhow, begging, enticing and forcing them to learn the very basic information they will need for life after graduation. As Mr. Lowrey remarks, as his year in hell comes to a close, "teaching is hard work." It is also extremely valuable work that deserves far better compensation, and far more respect than it receives from the rest of us.

One half of all new teachers quit the profession within their first three years. This movie shows us why. It was left up in the air whether Mr. Lowrey would sign the contract offered him for his second year.

An unwelcome visitor

Did you ever sit alone, staring at an absolutely still pond? Most of us have. Most of us have also tossed a pebble into that pond, just to stir things up a bit. We watched the ripples spread out in all directions, on and on, with unforeseen effects on objects in their path. If the pond was wide enough, and the pebble large enough, disasters perhaps occurred to tiny objects, unsuspecting little "people," far from the original impact, long after the pebble was thrown.

Located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is the band of asteroids. About 160 million years ago, an asteroid about 110 miles in diameter was hit by a smaller asteroid, causing it to shatter. Some pieces flew off in all directions, but most remained in the same general area, creating the Baptistina family of asteroids

One piece that went astray is now believed to have created the "Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event," ramming into the earth in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico about 65 million years ago -- nearly 100 million years after the original collision of asteroids. The fragments from the Yucatan impact have the same mineral composition as the Baptistina asteroids. That impact's effects on the planet are believed to have wiped out Earth's population of dinosaurs.

The gigantic Tycho crater near the Moon's south pole is believed to have been created by impact from another Baptistina fragment, 108 million years ago.

Even small asteroidal fragments can cause great damage when hitting a planet at full speed. An extraterrestial object, about 100 to 200 meters in diameter, exploded in the atmosphere over an unpopulated area of Siberia on June 30, 1908. The explosion had a power one thousand times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and knocked down trees over 830 square miles.

Which now brings us to the asteroid Apophis, aptly named after an Egyptian god of destruction, discovered only in 2004. It's about 350 meters -- nearly four football fields -- in diameter. It weighs a lot, as you might guess. On April 13, 2029 -- 22 years from now -- it will pass so close to the Earth as to fly by below the orbits of the communication satellites circling our planet. At present, scientists do not think it will actually strike the Earth, but of course it's hard to be too certain about differences of a few miles in orbit, expected to occur 22 years from now. The results would be devastating if today's scientists are wrong.

Suggestions have been made that we send up a space probe, destined to encounter Apophis in 2014, that would keep an eye on it for about three years. This period of watching would give our best scientific brains about 15 years to figure out what to do, if a reasonable chance should then appear that "little" Apophis would drop in for a visit, via crash landing.

The best way to handle such a problem would be to somehow nudge the asteroid into a slightly different path, one that would cause it to sweep by a decade or so later at a more comfortable distance from your and my homes. Nudging an asteroid out of an existing orbit isn't all that easy, of course. It's never been tried before. It's sort of like using a fishing boat to nudge an oil tanker onto a different course in mid-ocean. But rest assured that the good people at NASA are mulling over the situation, even as we speak.

But aside from the scientific and engineering questions raised by such a threat, think of the psychological implications should we learn in 2014 that Apophis had plans for a terrestial visit in 2029. Democrats couldn't blame the problem on the Republicans. Americans couldn't blame it on the Arabs. The Senate couldn't hold endless hearings on the issue, hoping that it would just go away or people would lose interest in it. We couldn't just turn off our TV sets and think about our golf games. It wouldn't be a communist plot. We couldn't exercise our normal foreign policy solution of bombing the asteroid back to the dark ages -- any attempt to blow it up would cause it to shatter, and Earth would be subjected to a devastating solid rock hailstorm.

Nope, somehow the human race would have to sit down together and work out a plan that would save all of us -- not just our friends and ideological allies -- not just the rich -- not just the Christians -- not just the white race -- from a virtually certain collision that might well send us all off to the same happy hunting ground in which the dinosaurs found themselves 65 million years ago.

Who knows? The experience might cause a spiritual revolution. After experiencing success working together to save ourselves and all our diversity of cultures from common annihilation, we just might all be able to sit down and work together to solve other, lesser problems in the future.

But don't bet the family store on it.

Canada on IMAX would be cheaper

The Canadian Rockies are some of the most beautiful mountains on Earth. The clever Canadians have set huge portions of these mountains aside as national parks. No place in North America can compete when it comes to combining hiking paths leading deep into isolated wilderness with stunning scenery offered as the reward for your labors.

But why get all tired and dirty hiking, why "labor," when all you want is the scenery as your pay-off? And want it now, price no object? This appears to be the question today's tourists now ask. A writer for the New York Times gushes over the joys of a new experience called "heli-hiking." I don't need to explain it to you. The name says it all. You helicopter into an area of great pristine solitude and beauty, spend a few easy hours sucking the marrow out of the experience, and then helicopter your way back to the warmth and luxury of your lodge for drinks, good eats and another night's sleep in a comfy bed.

Even though the actual hiking appears to have been minimal, and the writer soothed himself listening to an iPod while hiking, he still welcomed a massage upon return to "camp."

Massages were available every afternoon, usually after we’d had a drink and some hors d’oeuvres. I guess you could call that part of the day après hike. We would sit around the bar or the couches, pick out our bottle of wine for dinner, and sit and talk with our new hiking friends.

Voilá! Hiking for the rich and lazy! No smoky campfire. No heavy (or light) backpack. No sleeping bag. No cramped tent. It's life at the Ritz, with a little walking during the day to work up an appetite. If any real hikers struggle up the trail, burdened with packs, try to stand aside. They probably are all sweaty and undoubtedly smell bad.

I'm nauseated. I weep for our society. Why not just stay at a very expensive hotel, see the Rockies on a big screen TV in your room, and order up room service?

(The heli-hiking experience is a mere $4,500 for six nights, if you're still interested.)

Bad Day at Grand Junction

GRAND JUNCTION, Colorado (AP) -- It was just another hot, sleepy morning in this little Colorado mining town. Jake Barnes was sweeping the dust off the boardwalk in front of the Grand Vista Hotel, and Bill Boyd, the saloon keeper, was washing glasses inside. Sam Walker, mayor, county assayer, and editor of the Daily Sentinel, all rolled into one rotund, balding, middle-aged businesman, was sitting on a chair outside his newspaper office. He was squinting into the bright sun as he looked down an empty street. Just sitting all peaceful-like, watching and waiting for some news to happen.

And, also as usual, the same bored idlers were lounging around the train station, just loafing and talking and watching for the daily 11:50 from Frisco to come thundering into town. Once in a blue moon, some dandy from the Coast would get off in Grand Junction. That was always good for a chuckle, they thought, something new to talk about over beer later that night.

But today, Mr. Walker really should have gotten off that chair and strolled on over to the station if he was out after news. Today, the usual noisy crowd had grown suddenly silent, not a sound to be heard except for the mournful sound of a harmonica some boy was playing softly in the background. Because this morning, some other men -- not just the customary loafers, talkers and watchers -- had just showed up at the station. Sober men. Men also anxious for the Frisco train.

U.S. Marshals. Tough hombres in dark suits, their stetsons pulled down low over their faces, shielding their eyes.

They were waiting for Norman Hsu, an outlaw wanted out on the Coast for fraud. A bail jumper. A fugitive from justice. "Well, golly jimminy," one bystander muttered, spitting onto the tracks, "guess there ain't no one in America, even here in Grand Junction, that ain't heard of Mr. Hsu by now."

A telegraph had reached the stationmaster ahead of the train -- Hsu was on the train, and Hsu was sick. He'd be getting off in Grand Junction.

The feds were waiting for him.

The 11:50 from Frisco pulled in and shuddered to a stop. One door opened, and a sallow face appeared, eyes blinking in the mid-day heat. Mr. Hsu. Mr. Hsu felt a powerful lot sicker when he saw the U.S. Marshal and his deputies waiting as he stumbled down off the train. As he stepped off, he found himself looking down the barrels of several drawn six-shooters.

The game was up, that was for sure. The dapper little man didn't have any fight left in him. Two deputies grabbed him by each shoulder, and bundled him onto a waiting wagon. They hauled him off, down the dusty county road, to St. Mary's Hospital. He remains in St. Mary's today, in federal custody.

As soon as he gets well, Norman Hsu can enjoy another train ride. Right out of these parts and right back to California. They've got a courtroom waiting out there for Mr. Hsu.

And Sam Walker? The mayor, assayer, editor? Well, he half-way dozed himself right through all the excitement. He never did get the story that made his little town famous, coast to coast. He had to read all about it himself, as it came into his office -- off the AP news wire.

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DISCLAIMER: The foregoing post is fiction. It was intended as humor. The arrest of Norman Hsu was a real event. The event has been presented to readers in the form of a parody, an attempt to imitate in journalistic prose the style of a classic Western film. ["Bad Day at Black Rock" starring Spencer Tracy.] The illustration is a still taken from that movie. (© 1955 MGM) Aside from Mr. Hsu, none of the characters depicted above is real or is based on any actual person. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some place names are real, based on the author's cursory search of the internet. Places so named in no way correspond in reality to the physical descriptions presented in the post. No offense has been intended to the fine people of Grand Junction. The people of Grand Junction speak standard, literate English. They spit no more frequently than citizens of Seattle or San Francisco. Perhaps less than San Francisco. Grand Junction is a modern American city with shopping malls and fast food outlets and excellent high schools. Its streets are paved and do not have boardwalks. The Daily Sentinel is a modern, professionally staffed newspaper. Other apologies will be supplied upon demand. No animals were harmed in the writing of this post. "There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more." --Mark Twain

Enigma Variations

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia," Winston Churchill famously declared in a 1939 radio broadcast. "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." In today's world, the same might be said of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In both instances, too little is known of the sources of power within the country, too little is known of the motivations of the persons exerting that power, and too little is known of the conflicting pressures to which they are responding. In both cases, our ignorance is partly -- but only partly -- our own fault.

These thoughts are prompted by two conflicting articles appearing in today's press. In the New York Times, Michael Slackman writes from Tehran that the economic hardships and international isolation imposed by America's foreign policy is actually helping the hardliners secure their hold over the nation. The hardliners, led by President Ahmadinejad and the religious leadership, are less afraid of a military strike from the West than they are of a "velvet revolution," similar to those that undermined various Communist regimes. They fear that increased prosperity and contact with the international community would gradually weaken Islamic fundamentalism's hold over the people. Therefore, they have consistently worked to undermine the moderating influence of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and to marginalize him as a political influence in the country.

President Ahmadinejad holds power at the sufferance of the religious leadership, and especially that of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's so-called Supreme Leader. As long as Ahmadinejad's aggressive foreign policy and repressive domestic rule further the religious objectives of the ayatollahs, he will remain useful and will stay in power. So far, Slackman writes, the president retains their confidence. As Ayatollah Khamenei commented last week, in reference to the West's attempts to hold back Iran's development of nuclear capabilities: "Iran will defeat these drunken and arrogant powers using its artful and wise ways."

On the other hand, Barbara Slavin writes from Washington, in USA Today, that opponents of President Ahmadinejad took over two powerful governmental positions this week, constituting a major setback for the president. Rafsanjani, rather than being marginalized, has now been elected president of the Assembly of Experts, a religious convocation of Shiite clerics that appoints the Supreme Leader himself. He is expected to make this assembly a more active governing body. And Ayatollah Khamenei replaced the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, the most powerful military force in the country and a military force that Bush reportedly wants to designate as a "terrorist organization." The new commander, Mohammed Ali Jafari, is no liberal domestically, but has favored increased negotiations with the United States on various issues, including the nuclear capability issue.

According to an Iran analyst for the U.S. Navy -- for whatever that opinion is worth -- Khamenei is fed up with President Ahmadinejad's confrontational approach toward the West, and is acting to moderate his approach to foreign policy.

Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.

My instincts tell me that isolation of countries, economically and politically, only tightens a dictator's power by giving him an external threat against which to rally his country. At the same time, all the economic hardships are borne by the very citizens we say we are hoping to help. Cuba is the obvious example of such a foreign policy that has achieved nothing, nothing except securing votes from south Florida for American politicians.

Foreign policy is an art, however, not a science. What works in one instance may be counter-productive in another. Our uncertainty is heightened in situations like Iran -- as in Stalinist Russia -- where we have so little reliable information regarding the conflicting political ideologies, opposing personalities, and economic forces at work.

"May you live in interesting times," goes the ancient Chinese curse. We certainly do. Stability in Iran -- a fascinating and often underrated civilization -- would be a major favorable development for our world. It is unclear, at this time, whether President Bush's policy toward Iran will be his one significant foreign policy success, or whether it will have recklessly unified the Iranian people for years to come behind repressive political and religious rulers.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Admittedly, I'm a fair-weather sports fan. I do usually keep my eye on my college football team, and the team of the U.W., where I went to law school. When those two meet each year, I cheer for the one with the brighter Bowl prospects. This year, they seem destined to fight for 9th and 10th place in the Pac-10, so it's all pretty much academic. (Although the Huskies' decisive win Friday night over Syracuse has caused a bit of a stir in the Seattle area.)

When the Seahawks catch fire, I get enthusiastic. The same with the Mariners. I long ago lost interest in the Sonics, win or lose, and await their imminent departure to a bright red state with equanimity.

I am thus very unlike my friend Pat, who's going to a Mariners' game with me next Monday. Pat follows his teams religiously, through thick and thin, win or lose, triumph or humiliation. If he lived anywhere near Chicago, he would be the archetypical Cubbies fan, a team of losers for which we both actually feel a certain sneaking fondness.

But this brief posting is about the Mariners. About two weeks ago, I mentioned that the Mariners didn't look all that impressive, but, even so, were only two games out of first place in the A.L.West, and were in the lead for the wild card in the play-offs. I also suggested that nothing good would come of anyone's being optimistic about their chances.

Fall down and worship me, for I foresee all, and I tell all.

Last night, the Mariners lost 6-4 to a mediocre Toronto team, concluding a 0-3 sweep. The hapless Seattle team has now lost nine (9) straight games during the crucial last month of the regular season. They have struggled downward to the point that they now are 6 1/2 games behind the Angels in the race for the division pennant. They have fallen 2 full games behind the Yankees in the fight for the wild card position, and would be in even worse shape if the Yankees themselves hadn't been bumbling around recently, losing a series in Tampa Bay.

Push comes to shove. The Mariners will butt heads with the Yankees in a few minutes at Yankee stadium. I won't be watching. I just plain can't bear it.

I'll be out somewhere hiking. I'll read the obituaries tomorrow!

"Quotes I Can't Improve On" Department

My favorite conservative magazine, The Economist of London, comes up with two zingers this week, both contained in the same leader discussing the departure of Alberto Gonzales:

It is hard, though, to think of [an attorney general] quite as supine as Mr. Gonzales. It is unclear whether the Democrats will prove that Mr. Rove bullied Mr. Gonzales into firing the federal prosecutors for political reasons. But the first Latino attorney-general will go down in history as the lawyer who sanctioned the deeply unAmerican side of Mr. Bush's war against terror -- the one where the Geneva Conventions are "quaint," torture is a matter of definition and Guantánamo Bay is just dandy.

And also:

One by one, the president's men are leaving: Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and now Alberto Gonzales, the hapless attorney-general. The Democrats scent more expulsions, more Bushies yearning to spend time with their families. The Republicans talk of witch hunts. The image of George Bush tottering around an empty building -- empty, that is, except for mad old Uncle Dick in the cellar -- is hard to resist.

The Economist (Sept. 1-7, 2007)