Like the Dew

Important to me as is the subject of hearing loss, I try to not let it dominate this blog. There are others better at specializing. I applaud their work and depend on it. Nonetheless, I have detailed my hearing loss and cochlear implant in an article entitled "One Leg at a Time," which appears in the the on-line journal of southern culture and politics, Like the Dew.

http://likethedew.com/2012/03/12/one-leg-at-a-time/

I was recently in touch with writer Bill Hedgepeth for the first time in many years. We attended Henry W. Grady High School together, and for a while, he had a desk in front of mine in the city room of The Atlanta Journal. Bill went on to become the youngest Senior Editor at Look Magazine, where he wrote the first national story about San Francisco hippies in the 1960’s. I was in the U.S. Army at the time, and another soldier handed me the magazine article and said, “I think you will be interested in reading this.” The first thing that caught my eye was the By-Line. After reading Bills article about hippies, I knew for certain that I would become one when I got out of the army.

My recent reconnection with Bill Hedgepeth came from an article he had written in Like the Dew, which includes among its writers several former co-workers of mine from Atlanta Journal-Constitution days at 10 Forsyth St. Bill suggested I write something for The Dew. “It doesn't pay anything (but then neither does Huffington Post,” he said. “The story about your hearing loss would be a good start.”

Another AJC alumnus Jim Bentley wrote to me, “Well, Billy, I’m glad to see that you followed Bill Hedgepeth’s advice.” Bentley is a former city editor of The Atlanta Constitution. Fifty years ago, he was Religion Editor of The Constitution at the same time I carried that title with The Journal. Competition between the two newspapers was friendly to familial. My current article "One Leg at a Time" in Like the Dew, according to Bentley, “Told people with similar devastating tragedies that guts and perseverance (maybe bone-headed stubbornness) can make a bad situation better... and offers more hope – to people suffering similar mule-kicks to the head.” Several comments on my article are from just such readers.

Frequently Asked Questions at Like the Dew include:

SO IT IS ABOUT OLD AND RETIRED JOURNALISTS?
No. LikeTheDew.com is a community of people writing, sharing, reading and commenting on the South. The not-so-old and retired journalists do regularly submit great stories and will always be a huge part of LikeTheDew.com, but they also mentor the quality of young (and old) and aspiring web-based journalists.

IS JUST ANYONE ALLOWED TO SUBMIT A STORY?
Yes. You are required to register and log in on this site with a valid email address (we are not going to sell or give your email to anyone). Login is found at the top right of every page and the bottom-left of our home page. Once you login, you will be offered links to submit a story. If you are not registered, you may request registration by emailingwebmaster@LikeTheDew.com – please include your name and some way for us to tell that you are real. We will send you a password via email to the address you provide. You might also need to add “webmaster@likethedew.com” to your address book. If you have problems or other questions, please contact webmaster@likethedew.com.

http://likethedew.com/q_and_a_plus_discussion/how-to-submit-a-story-to-the-dew/

Just Say, Over My Dead Body

Flashing lights, square red ambulance, blue uniforms, shiny metal stretcher on wheels, practiced faces set to stare down, past, through the ugly truth.

In the swanky hotel room, the brick house on the suburban cul-de-sac, townhouse on concrete , trailer on blocks in patch of red clay, bottles including Xanax, Lorazepam, Valium, ibuprofen, Midol, and more, cough syrup, steroids, animal tranquilizers, Ambien, Oxycontin.

Police know the addresses by hard heart from histories of disturbances and outbursts, domestic violence, child neglect, truancy.

The investigators do not look too hard for the conspicuous jewelry, ammo, fishing tackle, sewing box with baggies, syringe, spoon, flick lighter, rubber tie, because if the family gets a chance first, the only problem is just exactly how to accomplish disposal without drawing attention or leaving a trail.

The toxicology report takes a matter of weeks.  No reason to be in a hurry to make worse cold facts already chiseled in stone.

Back during the Vietnam war, I remember believing how the war would end when every block in every neighborhood had lost someone.  The Vietnam Memorial contains 58,195 names, including those unaccounted for.  Not named: the 15 percent of Vietnam veterans who came home addicted to heroin: 2,709,918 Vietnam vets X  .15 = 406,487 back home, still MIA.  Maybe they have all been accounted for to everyone's satisfaction by now.

Imagine there's a Drug War Memorial; it would cover the entire Washington Mall from the Capitol lawn to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with names on its wall: diva darling daughter son mother father sister brother.

Dread Tamales

My friend Pascal and I were in the fifth grade together, back when there were no computers, no e-mails, no music videos.  Imagine.  Or remember.  Whichever.  These days Pascal and I attach music videos to e-mails we exchange on the internet.  Before Christmas, he sent me a YouTube from Gounod’s opera Faust.  Pascal and I have been planning to attend the encore showing at the North I-85 Regal Hollywood 24 of the Met Live in HD production.  I e-mailed Pascal a link to Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard singing Pancho and Lefty. 

"All the Federales say

They could have had him any day."

Did they say, “dread tamales?”   Sometimes, due to my hearing loss and subsequent cochlear implant, everything sounds to me like Alvin and the Chipmunks announcing the subway stops at the Atlanta airport.  I wished I could have heard Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard even that well, but it made me happy just to watch these two old geezers, both great artists, and remember their beautiful voices.

On Christmas day, my wife Annette and I visited daughter Heidi and her husband Buke and children Ava and Evan in Camp Hill, Ala., near Auburn.  We were invited to Christmas brunch with Heidi’s in-laws.  Deafness is as much a social problem for me as it is a disability.  I try to head off at the pass the usual discomfort and embarrassment by describing why I do not hear or understand a word anybody says in group conversations.  I mention Alvin and the Chipmunks and describe the hardware and electronics of my cochlear implant to exceed anybody’s interest.  I say that my cochlear implant is a medical miracle but technologically inferior to any $40 cell phone at Wal-Mart.  For good measure, I explain my difficulty in distinguishing the difference between social conversation and rumbling from the dishwasher. Heidi’s father-in-law Chester, a retired professor of electrical engineering, is listed on the internet as a certified founding father of computer electronics, holder of patents, and plaintiff in lawsuits against giant corporate infringers.   Heidi’s father-in-law volunteers, “You need a noise filter.”

That is what I’ve been trying to tell the cochlear implant professionals for five years.  They know more about the practice of medicine and collection of insurance payments than I do, but I have seen no evidence they know as much about audio electronics as an AT&T telephone technician or anybody sitting behind a mixing board at a Nashville recording studio.  I told Chester I had worked in telecommunications for three decades, because the army made me a radio teletype operator.  He said, “I want to show you something.”  He left the room for a few minutes and returned with his graduation certificate from the U.S. Army Southeastern Signal Corps School, Camp Gordon, Ga., named Ft. Gordon by the time I also became an alumnus.  Later that afternoon, as I sat snoring in an easy chair back at Heidi's house, Chester came by with a pair of earmuff headphones for listening to things on the computer.  He suggested that I cup them over my cochlear implant earpiece for their strong noise filtering capability.  My first try at this was encouraging, so I bought a $24.95 GE computer headset with adjustable volume control, telephone adapters included.

Pancho and Lefty has never been a song that meant much to me, although Emmy Lou Harris sang it like an angel, and the Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard duet turned it into a number one hit.  The song was written by Townes Van Zandt with minor chords and haunting rhymes and reasons, as happens when you just can’t help it and the fever takes hold.  I rang in the New Year 2012 listening to Faust through my new headset, and I enjoyed it so much I gave the Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard YouTube another try.  I heard Merle Haggard clearly enough dedicate Pancho and Lefty  “to all the folks out there who make their livings on the road like we do.  All the drivers.  All the musicians….”  I played the Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard music video so many times I forgot to count.  Again and again, the old geezer trio, sang:

“Living on the road, my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean.

Now you wear your skin like iron, breath as hard as kerosene...."

An Instrument to Measure New Years With

     While I was paying attention to something else, the people who provide the internet application for my blog were collecting statistics on my readers.  I maintain a mailing list of a few dozen friends and relatives, as well as some loyalists I have never even met.  The shelf-life of a new blog posting of mine is usually about three days for those of that number who are interested.  Then readership falls into single digits, including zero.  Of course, anyone surfing the internet can enter key words for a subject of interest at any time, and if I happen to have written a blog about it, internet magic will connect us. 
     According to the Wizard of Google, readers of my blog since 2007 used Windows (89%) and Macintosh (7%), with leftovers picked over by other computer operating systems.  Don't ask me how Google knows.  They have their ways.  They are like the C.I.A.  The rest of us are better off, the less we know.
     English speaking countries account for 71.5% of my blog readers, if you include Canada, which is bi-lingual.  The surprising thing about the geographic demographics of my blog readers is that 11% are in countries of Eastern Europe.  Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Slovenia.  At first, I pictured 1950's ads for Radio Free Europe, courageous liberty lovers behind the Iron Curtain gathered around an illicit computer screen to read my blog.  What else could explain these statistics?
     I posed this question to a veteran telecommunications specialist, retired from a government agency that will not even admit knowing how to spell C.I.A.  He explained my blog readers in Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Slovenia this way: hackers and spammers.
     For encouragement, Google lists the ten most popular blogs I have written.  Three of the ten blogs that have had the most pageviews share the same magic words in their title: "Flannery O'Connor."  Internet searches for Flannery O'Connor or Mary Flannery O'Connor certainly account for this coincidence.
     The blog posting of mine that has attracted the second highest number of readers is aided by a link from the website of Charleston, S.C., Gullah Tours, which is detailed favorably in my blog.  But the number one blog I have written, far and away the most popular, immortalizes my favorite plumbing fact, about an essential part of every modern flush toilet, the Crapper Flapper, named after its English inventor, knighted by the Queen a century ago for his contribution to Western Civilization and known thenceforth as Sir Thomas Crapper.
     I wish the happiest of New Years to all readers of refinement and appreciation of history.
     Google All Time Statistics
     (Pageviews since 8/18/07)
     Crapper Flapper Flap (498)

     It Ain't Necessarily So (488) 
     Bluebird on My Shoulder (318)

     Flannery O'Connor's Savannah (219) 

     Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville (186)               
     Dangerous, Uncontrolled and Unconrollable (117)

     Georgia Blog Carnival #32 (111)

     Cochlear Bone Connected to the Cell Phone (94)

     Flannery O'Connor, Amen (85) 

     Rain Man, Forrest Gump, and Khan (60) 

The Right Side of History

James Monroe, fifth President of the United States, articulated in his 1823 State of the Union address that the door was closed for European colonization of the Americas, both North and South, and interference in American affairs would be considered an act of war. Subsequent US Presidents have taken The Monroe Doctrine very seriously, none more so than John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The generally acknowledged author of the Monroe Doctrine was Monroe’s Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who grew up in the household of the U.S. Ambassador to The Netherlands and then England, his father John Adams, whose best friend was the Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson. Young John Quincy traveled widely, including to Russia as secretary to a diplomatic delegation, even before he entered Harvard.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, proclaiming : All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights….that rights are not conferred by government; they are the birthright of all people. It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them. At the anniversary celebration in Geneva last week, the current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a policy update on behalf of the United States that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”

According to Secretary of State Clinton, “This morning, back in Washington, President Obama put into place the first U.S. Government strategy dedicated to combating human rights abuses against LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) persons abroad…, the President has directed all U.S. Government agencies engaged overseas to combat the criminalization of LGBT status and conduct, to enhance efforts to protect vulnerable LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, to ensure that our foreign assistance promotes the protection of LGBT rights, to enlist international organizations in the fight against discrimination, and to respond swiftly to abuses against LGBT persons.”

“Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences…. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.”

“Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. This recognition did not occur all at once. It evolved over time. And as it did, we understood that we were honoring rights that people always had, rather than creating new or special rights for them. It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished.”

LGBT “are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors….Finally, progress comes from being willing to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. We need to ask ourselves, "How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love? How would it feel to be discriminated against for something about myself that I cannot change?"

This may or may not become known as the Obama Doctrine, whatever role his Secretary of State played. I’ll bet that Hillary Rodham Clinton is as familiar with the accomplishments of John Quincy Adams as I am and knows that Secretary of State was not the end of his political career.

November 22

Chris Matthews, formerly of The San Francisco Examiner and currently host of MSNBC's Hardball, may be the closest thing remaining to the sort of old fashioned journalist I grew up wanting to be. As he has mentioned several times on his television show, he has written a new book about John F. Kennedy. He avoids using the term "Camelot," but his memory of President Kennedy is certainly admiring. Matthews, in his youth, joined Kennedy's Peace Corps, as did others of my and Matthews' generation, many males of whom changed their hair styles to resemble that of Kennedy. Include Chris Matthews himself. Also Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Me, too. Sales of "greasy kid stuff" went the way of the buggy whip.

Matthews argues that Kennedy should be remembered for things other than his assassination on November 22, 1963. However, there are those of us who can never forget, because our world never looked the same to us again after Kennedy in Dallas, with Oswald and Ruby.

Chris Matthews nominates remembering Kennedy on his birthday or the anniversary of his civil rights speech in 1963. I could propose some other special dates: that of the Cuban Missle Crisis or the brutal murder of the South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem 20 days before Nov. 22, 1963.

You can see in the photo of JFK and his wife Jacqueline arriving in Ft. Worth on their way to Dallas. He wore a handsome smile. She wore a spotless pink suit.

Of All The Gaul

The U.S. Army stationed me in France when I was only a few months no longer a teenager, making me among the last in a line not easily kept down on the farm after they'd seen Paree. For two years, I lived and worked near the small French village of Saran, which is just outside the city of Orleans, 111 kilometers (66 miles) south of Paris. That was enough for me to become a life-long Francophile.

Now, I am trying to arrange a visit again to France. Possibly my last. We tried to rent a village house (550 euros --less than $800) a month in Marseillan, not to be confused with Marseilles, which is also on the Mediterranean but about 130 miles and many dollars converted to euros further east. Marseillan is the oyster capital of France and more like the Mississippi Gulf Coast for lower rent sunshine, sand, and seawater.



Alas, the village house in Marseillan reqired a minimum occupancy of six months. The standard tourist visa provided with a U.S. passport limits the stay in France to 90 days. A long-stay visa for France is pretty much out of the question, although the French consulate will not tell you that. In fact, they will not tell you much of anything; they just will not issue the visa.

So, now we have found a village house in Olonzac, in the south France region Languedoc-Roussillon. Olonzac is 20 miles from the Mediterranean, even closer to the Canal du Midi, and near historic sites of Carcassonne and Beziers, where Papal Crusaders masacred 20,000 in order to make memorable example of the Cathars, an early Christian sect that advocated heresies such as birth control. When the leader of the Crusade asked how he could identify the Cathars from the Catholics, he was instructed, "Kill them all. God will know his own."






Olonzac is two and a half hours from Barcelona. Some of the countryside looks like this.





If the bank that is too big to fail does not cancel my credit card before I can max it out , I will buy some postcards.

a.k.a. "A Rose"

The writer widely known as William Shakespeare, possibly a pen-name, put these words in the sweet mouth of his character Juliet:

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

I entered Paw Paw Bill in my browser. Some results directed me to postings about opera at the movies in HD, others to personal accounts of hearing loss and cochlear implants, satire from the second U.S. President, whose wit is burried safely in the vaults history, memories of my first week in Cairo brought to mind by this year’s uprisings in Egypt.

I could invite the Paw Paw Bill on Facebook to be my friend, because the user of that name I recognize from his picture is not myself. Might he be interested in John Adams, Placido Domingo, and/or Hosni Mubarak?

A touching testimonial from a grandchild says “My Paw Paw Bill is one of the most incredible men I’ve ever known. He is everything you would imagine a grandfather to be.” This is not from anybody related to me.

The Alabama House of Representatives passed legislation 99-0 standing up for the rights of grandparents, whatever sort of mess the parents of grandchildren can create. The bill protects grandparents' visitation rights with their grandchildren. Democratic Rep. Yusuf Salaam of Selma said the issue was important because often grandparents are the "stabilizing force" in the lives of their grandchildren. Salaam called the legislation the "Paw-Paw bill."

I must have had grand-parents. My daddy was an only child, raised by his step-mother. His father walked with a limp from unknown sources, sometimes a stagger from an origin known all too well. My daddy never touched a drop of alcohol. "That's like your grand-daddy Cotter" was the worse accusation anybody in my family knew.

My mother did not get along with her mother. Grandma Varner visited us once. Her bottom lip was puffed out with Tube Rose Snuff, and I had been warned to be careful and not tip over her dip cup. She cooked chicken and dumplins and an apple pie, the best I can ever remember. I saw a photo of my grand-daddy Varner, when I was about 17. He was about 50 in the photo. Seeing the photo was like looking in a mirror and seeing the future. DNA is more amazing than time-travel.

I think the name Cotter Pen suggests a persona more worldly than Paw Paw Bill. Maybe after I get used to my new blog name, I will do some traveling in real time. It is a big, wide world.

I know the stork brings babies, but I do not know where decisions come from. You just wake up one morning and see something different from the day before.

Thimblerigger

The shell game dates back to the ancient world, Egypt, Rome, Greece. It is depicted in European paintings from the Middle Ages.

The game requires a pea and three shells, walnuts will do, but thimbles, cups, whatever is handy and covers the pea. This worldwide street swindle is usually played on a mat lying on the ground, sometimes a cardboard box.

The person handling the shells and pea is called the thimblerigger. He begins the game by placing the pea under one of the shells, then quickly shuffles the shells around. The Thimblerigger takes bets on the location of the pea. Maybe double your money back. The Thimblerigger's trick is practiced sleight of hand, removing a pea from under a shell and placing it under any other shell undetected by the mark.

Some of the excited gamblers may be part of the trick, working for the Thimblerigger. Such insiders are called shills. They also may serve as lookouts for the police and serve as muscle to intimidate marks who become unruly. One shill may pretend to disclose a winning strategy to the mark, needless to say, just a ruse to get the mark to place a large bet.

Any player who is suspected of understanding the trick, or does not place a bet and just wants to watch, will be quickly edged away from the table by the shills or the muscle, according to wikipedia.



"The Conjurer," painted by Hieronymus Bosch, shows a cups and balls routine, a variation of the shell game. A pickpocket, working for the conjurer, is robbing the spectator who is bent over.

The shell game can still be encountered on the streets of modern New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Cairo, and Washington, D.C. Politicians and governments from the largest to the smallest continue to practice versions and variations of this ancient swindle.

Cochlear Implant Studies

Two studies of Cochlear Implant experiences have invited me to participate, and I have been delighted to do so. Why not? When I lost 100 percent of my hearing in both ears five years ago, there was not anywhere near enough Cochlear Implant information available to keep me from feeling like I was jumping off a cliff blindfolded. Now, a Cochlear Implant, an electronic device provides me bionic hearing, a miracle but far from perfect.

The University of Iowa is conducting a research and training program concentrating on music perception for those of us with Cochlear Implants. Personally, this is a very important issue for me, because listening to music has always contributed so much to the quality of my life. After first receiving my Cochlear Implant, music was particularly frustrating, just a jumble of noise. Now I am able to distinguish enough of the various aspects of music to experience something I can honestly call enjoyment again.

For further information clink on this link:

http://www.cimusicresearch.com/

or e-mail

virginia-driscoll@uiowa.edu

The other study I have participated in is a Cochlear Implant and BAHA Online Survey from Juniper Consulting Group,a medical market research company. Their current project is trying to identify areas for improvement of cochlear implants or bone
anchored hearing implants.

This online survey take approximately 30-40 minutes to complete. It asks for your level of satisfaction about Cochlear Implant and BAHA issues, including medical support, training, and hardware. Compensation of $100 is offered. The only requirements to start the survey are you must be a recipient of a cochlear implant or a BAHA and be over the age of 18.

> Email: cbess@junicon.net for a link to the survey.

Encore! Encore!

Performances from the award-winning series The Met: Live in HD encore this summer Wednesday evenings at 6:30 p.m. in shopping mall movie theatres. Click here for the location nearest you. Ticket prices are less than the American Idols Concert Tour, more than a bleacher seat at the Braves. Popcorn and soft drinks available at the concession stand.

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly June 15. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes.
Patricia Racette sings the title role. Marcello Giordani is American Navy Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. Dwayne Croft and Maria Zifchak co-star. Patrick Summers conducts.

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale June 22. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes.
Anna Netrebko reprises her turn in this bel canto comedy , opposite Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecien, and John Del Carlo in the title role. James Levine conducts.

Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra June 29. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Four decades into a legendary Met career, tenor Placido Domingo makes history singing the title role, written for a baritone. Adrianne Pieczonka, Marcello Giordani, and James Morris co-star in this gripping political thriller and moving story of a father and his lost daughter. James Levine conducts

Donizetti’s La Fille de Regiment July 13. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Natalie Dessay as the tomboy Marie, who has been brought up as the “daughter of the regiment,” and Juan Diego Florez as the young man in love with her. Legendary actress Marian Seldes makes a special appearance as he Duchess of Krakenthorp. Marco Armiliato conducts.

Puccini’s Tosca July 20. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. Karita Mattila stars in the title role and Marcelo Alvarez as her lover, the painter Cavaradossi. George Gagnidze plays Scarpia, the sadistic chief of police, who wants Tosca for himself. Joseph Colaneri conducts.

Verdi’s Don Carlo July 27. Running time: 3 hours 36 minutes. Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts. Singers: Roberto Alagna in the title role, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Marina Poplavskaya, Anna Smirnova, and Simon Keenlyside.

Rain Man, Forrest Gump, and Khan

My Name is Khan is a Bollywood film about stereotypes. Bollywood is not a real place but is the nickname for the film industry niche in India famous for stylized song and dance fantasy confection. Bollywood is headquartered in Mumbai, known in a previous incarnation as Bombay.

Khan, a Muslin immigrant to California from Mumbai, has Aspergers Syndrome autism, which is characterized by symptoms that include avoiding to make eye-contact but verbal skill often marked by unedited bluntness and literalism easily misunderstood, as when Khan sets off all the alarms at the airport when he says to the Homeland Security Officers he is going to Washington, D.C., to tell the President, “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.”

Khan falls in love with the most beautiful, intelligent, and charming Hindu girl in California, a single mom as a result of an arranged marriage that did not work out. A successful entrepreneur beauty shop operator, she agrees to marry Khan. About this time, you begin to figure out this film is a fairy tale and fable.

This movie caught my attention as I browsed the rental shelves of the Blockbuster store in Atlanta on Ponce de Leon Ave. and Barnett St., the only Blockbuster within a 45 minute drive that is not in the process of closing and liquidating its stock. Since then, I found it listed by Redbox, which has a half dozen vending machine locations less than 10 minutes from my house. Redbox rentals are $1 per night. I guess that's why Blockbuster is The Incredible Shrinking Video Store.

My Name Is Khan, directed by Karan Johar, stars Shahrukh Khan and Kajol, Bollywood royalty who reunite for the first time in nine years. Khan’s portrayal of the film’s autistic main character will inevitably bring to mind Dustin Hoffman as Rain Man and Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, in whose respected company the Bollywood iternational superstar holds his own. Life for Khan’s Khan is not, however, a box of chocolates.

"Khan is one of a handful of Hindi films about Indians living in a paranoid, post-9/11 America, and there’s something fascinating about looking at this country through a Bollywood lens,” according to The New York Times. The Hollywood Reporter stated My Name Is Khan is, "a film that delves compellingly into Americans' anti-Muslim hysteria" as it tackles "a subject American movies have mostly avoided -- that of racial profiling and the plight of Muslim-Americans.”

After 9/11, Khan’s family is crushed. His beautiful bride’s son dies in an incident of teenage racial bullying. Khan embarks on a coast-to-coast, border-to-border pilgrimage through the United States, as if in desperate search for America. He carries a sign hand written with the message, “I can fix almost anything.” He finds an anti-American group in a mosque he visits. He confronts them as going against the teachings of Islam, and he turns them in. Additionally, he throws stones at them and calls them “The Devil,” a scene alluding to a ritual throwing stones at the devil as part of the Hajj, one of five Pillars of Islam, the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca for all Muslims who are physically and financially able. Among other things, the Hajj commemorates the Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismael, as commanded by Allah. Because of Ibrahim’s obedience, Allah accepted sacrifice of a lamb in the place of Ismael.

排便 Happens

Help wanted--Immediate Opening: Nuclear Heroes.

Maintenance and repair workers needed for nuclear power plant at seaside location in beautiful Pacific archipelago. Record earthquake and Tusnami have created need for emergency workers to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Preference given older workers, who will probably die of something else before the cancer risks from radiation exposure.

Japan consists of 6,852 islands located in a volcanic zone of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes pulled Japan away from the mainland of Asia about 15 million years ago.

The word Tsunami is Japanese for “harbor wave“ or “wave train.” Japan has experienced 195 Tsunami in its recorded history. Before Westerners learned about Tsunami, the same event was called a Tidal Wave. Television taught us the word Tsunami when one killed a quarter of a million people in Asia just a few years ago. During WWII, New Zealand attempted and failed to create with explosives a Tsunami for use as a weapon.

In addition to earthquakes and Tsunami, Japan has a vivid nuclear history and involuntary experience with radiation poisoning from Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So why did Japan build a nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone with an ocean view? Somebody forgot the famous maxim from the Shinto shrine: "排便 Happens." It does indeed. Serious 排便.

One good thing to result from the current disaster in Japan is the sudden appearance on television of people who actually know their isotopes from a hole in the ground, intelligent gray haired people who went to math and science classes in their youth.

Here’s a lesson from one of those classes:

About 70,000 years ago, a volcano erupted at Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, one of the earth’s largest known eruptions. It deposited a layer of ash throughout Asia. The climate effects of the Toba eruption triggered a global ecological disaster, including worldwide vegetation destruction, and severe drought. Famine and a 6-to-10-year volcanic winter reduced the world's human population to 10,000 survivors or perhaps a mere 1,000 breeding pairs.

The Lake Toba super volcano eruption was two orders of magnitude greater than the largest volcanic eruption in recorded historic times, at Mount Tambora, Indonesia, which caused 1816 to be the "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere

Shores of Tripoli

Before the military coup in 1969 that established Muammar al-Gaddafi as leader of Libya, he had risen the rank of Colonel in the army, not generalisimo or field marshall or even commander of the elephants. Now he shoots his own citizens, who have watched their neighbors in Tunis and Egypt successfully overthow tyrants. Gaddafi is not the first thug in Tripoli.

In the early days of the United States, as the country sought commerce with Europe and elsewhere, the Barbary states of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco ruled the Mediterranean. Their pirates captured U.S. shipping, crews, and cargo, held for ransom.

It fell to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Ambassadors to Great Britain and France, respectively, to attempt diplomacy between the United States and the Barbary States.

Ambassador Adams wrote to Ambassador Jefferson Feb. 17, 1786:

I was sometime in doubt, whether any notice should be taken of the Tripoline Ambassador (Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja); but receiving information that he made enquiries about me, and expressed a surprise that when the other foreign ministers had visited him, the American had not, and finding that he was a universal and perpetual ambassador, it was thought best to call upon him. Last evening, in making a tour of other visits, I stopped at his door, intending only to leave a card, but the ambassador was announced at home and ready to receive me. I was in a state.

Two great chairs before the fire, one of which was destined for me, the other for His Excellency. Two secretaries of legation, men of no small consequence, standing upright in the middle of the room, without daring to sit, during the whole time I was there, and whether they are not yet upright upon their legs I know not.

“We make tobacco in Tripoli,” said His Excellency, “but it is too strong. Your American tobacco is better.” By this time, one of his secretaries or “upper servants” brought two pipes ready filled and lighted. The longest was offered to me; the other to His Excellency. It is long since I took a pipe but as it would be unpardonable to be wanting in politeness in so ceremonious an interview, I took the pipe with great complacency, placed the bowl upon the carpet, for the stem was fit for a walking cane, and I believe more than two yards in length, and smoked in awful pomp, reciprocating whiff for whiff, with His Excellency, until coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a cup, after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco, and I wished he would take a pinch in turn from his snuff box for variety; and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that the two secretaries appeared in raptures and the superior of them who speaks a few words of French cried out in ecstasy, “Monsieur, vous etes un Turk.”

The necessary civilities being thus completed, His Excellency began upon business; asked many questions about America: The soil climate heat cold, etc., and said it was a very great country. But “Tripoli is at war with it.” I was “Sorry to hear that." “Had not heard of any war with Tripoli.” “America had done no injury to Tripoli, committed no hostility; nor had Tripoli done America any injury or committed any hostility against her, that I had heard of.” True said His Excellency “but there must be a treaty of peace. There could be no peace without a treaty. The Turks and Africans were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean, and there could be no navigation there nor peace without treaties of peace.”

The King (of England) told one of the foreign ministers... that the Tripoline ambassador refused to treat with his ministers and insisted upon an audience. But that all he had to say was that Tripoli was at peace with England and desired to continue so. The King added all he wants is a present, and his expenses born to Vienna or Denmark.

The relation of my visit is to be sure inconsistent with the dignity of your character and mine, but the ridicule of it was real and the drollery inevitable. How can we preserve our dignity in negotiating with such nations? And who but a petit maitre would think of gravity upon such an occasion?

Jefferson was not long amused. Adams succeeded George Washington as President of the United States. President Adams championed creation of the U.S. Navy. Jefferson succeeded Adams. President Jefferson dispatched the U.S. Navy , along with U.S. Marines, to the shores of Tripoli, as sung proudly still in the Marine Corps Hymn.

Streets of Cairo

I arrived at the American Embassy in Cairo the same month Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President of the United States. I got off on the wrong foot with Cairo and never found a better one. “Tomorrow is Friday, but you’ll have jet-lag,” my new boss said. “I’ll send a duty driver for you on Monday.” However, stomach cramps, diarrhea, and fever hallucinations, Pharaoh’s revenge, immediately overtook the jet-lag, and I was unable to report for work until another week later. Then came the Baladi Bread and Butagas Riots.

Egypt borrowed money from the World Bank, where heckuva job Bob McNamara, of Vietnam fame, was president, and the brightest and best there recommended Egypt abolish price controls on baladi bread, flour, rice, cooking oil, and butagas. From Alexandria to Aswan, rioters took to the streets, hundreds killed, more injured. Along the main road from Cairo to the Pyramids, Islamists attacked the gaudy nightclub venues of alcohol drinking, casino gambling, and belly dancing. President Sadat declared martial law. Rioters shouted, “Where is our breakfast?" and "Nasser, Nasser." After the riots, the Egyptian government took it all back and reinstated the price controls.

On the first morning of the protests, I had gone to the Embassy without noticing any difference from every other day of chaos on the streets of Cairo. By 10 a.m., my boss dragged an army green footlocker from the secured vault into the office and unpacked its contents in front of his four-man staff of teletype operators. He spread across a desk an olive-drab webbed-belt, a leather holster embossed “U.S.,” and a .45 caliber semi-automatic M1911A sidearm. He hooked the holster to the belt and sheathed the pistol. A metal ammo box contained incendiary grenades, in case of emergency destruction of classified documents. The boss opened the main filing cabinet. “Pull the pin, toss it in, and run like hell.” To me, he said, “You’re riding with me.”

My boss drove a 1973 Plymouth Fury, still in its prime as a huge hunk of steel and V-8 horsepower. We rode out the front gate of the Embassy, past the Shepheards Hotel, and down the Corniche El Nil. At the first bridge, a crowd gathered. My boss stopped the car in the middle of the street a block away and shifted the transmission into Neutral. “Roll up your window and lock the doors,” he told me. The crowd advanced towards the Plymouth. Some carried rocks in their hands and lengths of iron pipes. “Hold on to your ass,” my boss said. Angry faces began to come into focus. My boss stomped on the accelerator with the engine still in Neutral. When the RPM needle pointed to 12 O’Clock High, he dropped the gear shift into Drive, screeching tires and raising a trail of blue smoke and the smell of rubber. He aimed the Plymouth Fury steel and horsepower at the middle of the mob. The accelerator pedal was still flat on the floor at 60 MPH, when the crowd parted like the Red Sea. At my front door, the boss said, “You just stay home until I send for you.” There was no telephone service. The next time the duty driver came for me, I had been in Cairo three weeks and had worked one full day and part of another.

Sadat’s government survived the bread riots, with a lot of help from his friends, until the assassins got him in 1981. Mubarak was his vice president. Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 30 years without a vice president but now has decided he needs one and has chosen his not-so-secret police chief, a trusted torturer. Meanwhile, Mohamed ElBaradei a United Nations bureaucrat living in Europe, got a sudden urge to participate in Cairo street riots, and American television immediately elected him “the opposition leader.” Remember Benazir Bhutto, educated in Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, England, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and twice run out of Islamabad on a rail, suddenly homesick for Pakistan again when it looked like regime change was in bloom? There must be some special travel agency offering special packages at special rates for special expatriate patriots.

Cochlear Bone Connected to the Cell Phone

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Anniversary after anniversary since my miraculous Cochlear Implant surgery, I’ve been trying to find a way to connect my CI personal audio cable to my cell phone. When I try to listen to a CD or tape via my direct connect audio cable, what I hear is my best experience with sound, because the signal is clean, unpolluted electronics, without any airborne sound waves bouncing around or mixing in background noise. I considered cutting and splicing cables but was afraid I might make a mistake and ruin my CI personal audio cable, which listed for $130 in the catalog that came with my implant four years ago, back when I had a job, insurance coverage, and lawyers at Let them Hear Foundation barking and biting on my behalf, because the insurance company excluded anything that would fix hearing loss.

My old cell phone provides a 2.5mm headset jack; the connector of my CI personal audio cable jack is 3.5mm, standard for portable audio products like CD and tape players, as well as radios. I bought a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter plug at Radio Shack. Great fit. No sound. I got in touch with a guy at T-Mobile, where I used to work, and discussed this with him. He explained that an adapter was a waste of time and money, because the mismatch is more than just the matter of size. Anyway, he says the problem has pretty much gone out of date, as of the last year or so. He said the 3.5mm connector used by audio products like portable cd players and other popular demand electronics is now commonly provided as the output jack for the newer cell phones.

"Put your old cell phone in your closet, behind the polyester leisure-suits," he said.

We immediately tested my 3.5mm direct connect personal audio cable for my Cochlear Implant hearing device with his new cell phone, a Nokia 5230 Nuron. Double thumbs up. It worked like a champ. T-Mobile sells the Nokia 5230 Nuron for $149, not including service plan. A contract plan will always get you a discount on any new phone. I talked to the Nokia factory, and according to them, the following Nokia models also use 3.5mm connector jacks: N8, N97 Mini, X6, E72, 5730, E5, and 5530. Then I checked with AT&T, and the same was true with many of their newer phones from various manufacturers. The AT&T list: HTC Surround, LG Encore, LG Incite CT810, LG Neon II, LG Prime GS390, LP Quantum, Motorola Backflip, Motorola Bravo, Motorola EM330/EM28, Motorola Flipout, Motorola Flipside, Motorola Karma QA1.

I hunted for a bargain and found an AT&T Go Phone packet at Walmart for $79, a Nokia C3 smartphone with QWERTY keyboard and $30 credit balance to open the account. I picked the pre-paid plan that charges $2 per day of use, only on the days you actually use it, and includes unlimited calls and texts. So if I use it only one day a month, it costs me only $2, even if I talk for hours, five days during the month, $10. Read the fine print, of course. The Nokia C3 is a Smartphone, smarter than me. As I explored the touch screen icons, I unintentionally nickel and dimed my free start-up balance of $30 down to $27.47. Internet whistles and bells all cost extra. Nonetheless, I made basic cell phone voice calls and texting tests the rest of the afternoon with no further charges.

Check out the specifications on the C3 at http://www.nokiausa.com/find-products/phones/nokia-c3/specifications . This is the critical information: 3.5 mm stereo headphone plug. Even the vendors get confused about 2.5mm plugs, 3.5mm plugs, headphones, headsets, hearing aid compatible, and often can not tell one from the other.

Here is a very useful website where you can search by vendor, type of phone, 3.5mm jack, etc. It is called Phonescoop at http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/finder_results.php?car=0&avr=r&av_2=y&f73r=r

Phonescoop listed these cellphones with 3.5mm jacks:

Alltel/Sprint -- Apple iPhone 3GS, Apple iPhone 4.
AT&T – HP Ipaq Glisten, HP Palm Pixi / Pixi PLUS (CDMA), HP Palm Pixi Plus (GSM), HP Palm Pre Plus (GSM), HP Palm Treo Pro (CDMA), HCT Aria.
Sprint – HTC Desire (CDMA).
Sprint/Verizon -- HTC Droid Incredible.
T-Mobile – HTC EVO 4G, HTC G2, HTC HD2, HTC HD7, HTC Hero (CDMA), HTC Imagio.
U.S. Cellular – HTC myTouch 3G/Magic.
Verizon – HTC myTouch 3G Slide, HTC myTouch 4G.

George Ann Bohling

9/27/30 - 9/27/10

Dear Curt,

It was great to see you at your mother’s memorial service. I believe the last time I saw you was at John’s memorial service. We really need to stop meeting like this.

I wanted to say a few words about your mother, but the stairs at the service made me fearful of falling. As you may know, I was hospitalized four years ago with meningitis. After three weeks in a coma, I woke up with 100 percent hearing loss and 100 percent loss of balance function in both ears.

George Ann was already Annette’s friend when Annette and I met 35 or so years ago. On two separate occasions George Ann was my landlady. Annette rented the house on Michael Street from Ethel Lilley Realty through George Ann, and then several years later we rented the house George Ann owned on Princeton Way. Then George Ann sold me my first home. I paid $41,000 in about 1983 or 1984 for a house down the street from Agnes Scott College in Decatur. Two bedrooms, dining room, den, finished attic. I sold that house three years later for $65,000, the first money I ever made in real estate but not the last. Over the years I bought and sold a half dozen or more properties, both primary residences and rental properties. Each sale was profitable, plus the rental income produced.

I am sure that some poet has said something about a dear friend being treasured more than gold. Anybody can be that kind of friend. But George Ann also showed me the way to make a little cash on the side, something everyone needs, maybe for a retirement fund, or something for the grandchildren when they go off to college.

The Met at the Movies

The Met: Live in HD opens its fifth season at a Shopping Mall Movie Theatre Near You. Ticket prices vary: Adult, Senior, Child -- more than the latest Brad Pitt charmer, less than the Atlanta Zoo.

Click Here For Details and Tickets

Wagner’s Das Rheingold

Live Sat. Oct. 9 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Oct. 27 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Conductor: James Levine. Bryn Terfel sings the leading role of Wotan for the first time with the company, heading an extraordinary cast. Director Robert Lepage brings cutting-edge technology and his own visionary imagination to a great theatrical journey.

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov

Live Sat. Oct. 23 at 12 Noon. Encore Wed. Nov. 10 at 6:30 PM.
5 hours.
Singers: René Pape, Aleksandrs Antonenko, Vladimir Ognovenko, and Ekaterina Semenchuk. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. Valery Gergiev conducts.

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale

Live Sat. Nov. 13 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Dec. 1 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Anna Netrebko, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecien, and John Del Carlo. James Levine conducts. Production by Otto Schenk.

Verdi’s Don Carlo

Live Sat. Dec. 11 at 12:30 PM. Encore Wed. Jan. 5 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Roberto Alagna, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Marina Poplavskaya, Anna Smirnova, and Simon Keenlyside. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. Director Nicholas Hytner makes his Met debut with this new production

Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West

Live Sat. Jan. 8 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. Jan. 26 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours, 30 minutes.
Puccini’s wild-west opera had its world premiere in 1910 at the Met. Now, on the occasion of its centennial, all-American diva Deborah Voigt sings the title role, starring opposite Marcello Giordani. Nicola Luisotti conducts.

Adams’s Nixon in China

Live Sat. Feb. 12 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. March 2 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours
Baritone James Maddalena stars in the title role. Director and longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars makes his Met debut with this groundbreaking 1987 work.

Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride

Live Sat. Feb. 26 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. March 16 at 6:30 PM.
2 hours, 30 minutes.
Singers: Susan Graham, Plácido Domingo, and Paul Groves. Production by Stephen Wadsworth. Patrick Summers conducts.

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor

Live Sat. March 19 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. April 6 at 6:30 PM.
4 hours.
Singers: Natalie Dessay and Joseph Calleja. Production by Mary Zimmerman.

Rossini’s Le Comte Ory

Live Sat. April 9 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. April 27 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato, and Diana Damrau. Production by Bartlett Sher.

Strauss’s Capriccio

Live Sat. April 23 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. May 11 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Renée Fleming ,Joseph Kaiser and Sarah Connolly. Andrew Davis conducts.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore

Live Sat. April 30 at 1 PM. Encore Wed. May 18 at 6:30 PM.
3 hours.
Singers: Sondra Radvanovsky, Dolora Zajick, Marcelo Álvarez, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Production by David McVicar. James Lavine conducts.

Wagner’s Die Walküre

Live Sat. May 14 at 12 Noon. Encore Wed. June 1 at 6:30 PM.
5 hours, 15 minutes.
A stellar cast comes together for this second installment of Robert Lepage’s new production of the Ring cycle: Bryn Terfel, Deborah Voigt, Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Stephanie Blythe. James Levine conducts.

The Metropolitan Opera of New York’s Emmy and Peabody award-winning series of live, high-definition performance transmissions has been a box office smash hit. According to Time magazine, the Met sold 2.2 million tickets last season for its nine live high-definition telecasts, 400,000 more than the previous year.

Perhaps this reflects an era of plus change. Opera singers were once judged by their ability to be heard in the last row of the balcony but now must consider wide-screen close-ups. Opera News on-line discusses opera blogs and connects to several.

Over 30 principal cast members and chorus of the Opera Company of Philadelphia production of La Traviata last spring infiltrated the crowd at the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival and launched four-minutes of Brindisi as guerrilla theatre, winning a thunderous ovation that included both laughter and tears. Click here to watch.

Take A Bow

Two carnies are walking down a country road in the pouring rain. The carnival has folded, and they are walking to the next town. They’re cold, wet, and bedraggled. They pass a house and look in the picture window. A father is sitting by the fire reading to his children. His wife sits by his side, smiling at him and the children. One carnie says to the other, ‘Look at that poor bastard. I’ll bet he wishes he was in show business like us.’

In her book LIFE UPON THE WICKED STAGE, Jacqueline Boles quotes this anecdote from her interviews and correspondence with Sally Rand, the legendary fan dancer. Dr. Boles, sociology professor emeritus at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has studied the lives of entertainers ranging from singers, dancers, comics, and others, celebrities and small timers. She spices her social science methodology with personal experiences and wit.

Dr. Boles, a longtime favorite both with students at Georgia State University and an appreciative audience of devoted friends, herself once performed as the lovely young female assistant in the stage and sideshow act of Rex Dane, magician and mind reader, otherwise known as Don Boles, beloved husband and father. She knows first hand the persistence required of entertainers, reporting how she and Don solicited 25 venues to obtain three bookings, a good result but typical in show business.

Studied in Life Upon the Wicked Stage are entertainers from tribal societies through modern Hollywood, shamans who employed the skills of ventriloquism and magic, dancing girls who doubled as prostitutes, court jesters and television stand-up comics. At the core of her research, Dr. Boles has sampled information in 117 biographies and autobiographies of entertainers, and she asks two central questions about the occupation: “why do people choose entertainment and why do they persist?”

You will recognize many of your favorites. Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, the Marx Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, Sammy Davis, Jr., Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Gunther-Gebel Williams. 117 Stars 117. Plus some whose names you may not recognize but are nonetheless fascinating. Dr. Boles points out common traits, backgrounds, experiences, dreams. What’s best, she does so with great insight and humor.

A guy walks into a bar. He is dirty and smells terrible. Another guy at the bar says to him, “I know it’s none of my business, but, buddy, you smell really bad. Isn’t there anything you can do about that?” The first guy says, “I know I stink. I can’t help it. It’s my job.” The second man says, “What kind of a job do you have?” The first man says, “I clean out elephant poop in the circus.” The second man says, “Well, why don’t you get another job?” The first guy replies, “What, and quit show business?”

Still, there are serious drawbacks that make working in show business no laughing matter: persistent periods of unemployment, because there are never enough jobs to go around, the tragic deaths of talented people like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Lenny Bruce, Hank Williams.

Life Upon the Wicked Stage by Jacqueline Boles can be ordered on-line at Amazon.com.

It Ain’t Necessarily So

My wife Annette wanted to go to Charleston for her birthday. Since I knew where the party was being held, I enjoyed some of the cake. You can ask Annette how many candles, if you want. Charleston is a little like Savannah or New Orleans, only more New World American than Old World European. The old stuff is what people want to see. They could stay home and visit suburban shopping malls. Maybe the most famous thing about Charleston is Fort Sumter, out in the harbor, guarding against threats from without. South Carolina secessionists fired the first shots of the Civil War against United States military forces at Fort Sumter. You can buy boat tickets for Fort Sumter at the U.S. Park Service at the end of Calhoun Street, named for South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, vice-presidential running mate of Stephen A. Douglas against Abraham Lincoln, ending decades of flawed compromises to preserve both the Union and slavery. The Visitor Education Center recaps the history nicely, including quotes from those who lived it. “The Union cannot survive half-slave and half-free”—used by both sides. An enigmatic editorial from a Southern newspaper of the time: “There is no freedom without slavery.” The ferry ride to Fort Sumter takes 30 minutes. One hour after landing, the return trip departs. We were back on the air-conditioned boat in half that time.

Charleston Plantation Slave Cabins

Back on the land that I lub, we took the Gullah Tour of Charleston. Operated by Alphonso Brown, licensed tour guide, this is where to go for some personality and point of view. After a charming orientation to the Gullah language, the creole patois spoken by coastal South Carolina and Georgia islanders from the time of slavery, Mr. Brown described historical Charleston’s early African Americans, both slave and free, craftsmen, artisans, and intellectuals, and stopped at their businesses and homes, including those of Richard Edward Dereef, himself an owner of 16 slaves, “which was a lot for even a rich white slave owner,” and who was “exempt from paying the freedman’s tax because he claimed Native American descent.”

Master blacksmith Philip Simmons, whose 77 years of ironwork still adorns homes, churches, and gardens throughout Charleston, is a focus of Mr. Brown’s Gullah Tour, with long, lingering stops at the Charleston Visitors Center gate, the Harp of David gate at 65 Alexander St., and The Heart Gate at Saint John’s Church, 93 Anson St. The Gullah Tour visits the Simmons workshop and home, listed on America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

Band director in Simmons ironworks shop

Mr. Brown, a former band director and teacher in the Charleston schools, points out “Catfish Row,” made famous by George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, but known to natives of Charleston as “Cabbage Row.” Also in the category of It ain’t necessiarily so is Porgy himself, “depicted in the opera as a fun-loving, easy-going cripple….who got around in his goat-drawn cart” and based on a Charleston character named Sammy Smalls. According to Mr. Brown, “In real life, Smalls is said to have lived a cruel and murderous life, in which beatings of his common-law wives and girlfriends were part of his daily activities.” Bess, you is my woman now, indeed.

Alphonso Brown’s book A GULLAH GUIDE TO CHARLESTON is available at the Charleston Visitor’s Center and on line.

Our Fathers

I was wrong to wait so long to read Cormac McCarthy’s novel THE ROAD, which has been out a couple of years. I have believed that Cormac McCarthy should be the next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I had concluded since All the Pretty Horses that like Hemingway after For Whom the Bell Tolls, his best writing was behind him. Also, I am not a big fan of post-apocalyptic sensationalism. I respect Dr Strangelove, A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, some others well enough, but they are so few and far between.

Heading south down THE ROAD, a father and his young son, seek relief from the desolate cold of their torched and ruined world. Cormac McCarthy goes out of his way to omit exactly which pointless human vanity befell planet earth. Father and son scavenge abandoned houses for canned food, shoes, blankets. They push a grocery cart from out of the mountains to the sea, evading bands of marauding cannibals. They carry a pistol that contains only one last bullet, which the father saves to prevent his son from further suffering when the time comes. When the father’s time comes,

Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
You said you wouldn’t ever leave me….
If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

There are lots of things fathers cannot do for their sons. Nothing they can provide is more enduring and powerful than their genetics and their own example. Often when I am working, concentrating intensely, perhaps even straining with some physical effort, I suddenly become aware of a way of holding my mouth that I recognize immediately from my Daddy, who looked like John Wayne. As a lanky young man, he could have passed for the handsome star of Stagecoach. In the fullness of his life, he looked like The Quiet Man. He grew old at John Wayne’s pace, all the way to the booze-bellied, one-eyed has-been of True Grit. In my mind, John Wayne and my Daddy might as well have been the same person. My Daddy was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was very much the strong, silent type. Still waters run somewhere nobody ever knows. Although he only graduated from the seventh grade, he took great pride in the fact that he could read and write. He enjoyed working the jumble word puzzle in the newspaper. He loved a good joke. He loved a bad joke. He took me to Atlanta Cracker games at Ponce de Leon Ballpark. On hot days and nights, he would say, “They need to turn on the fans.” My love for baseball made me a reader.

One Saturday, my sister and I sat at his bedside in the hospice with Sisters of Mercy scurrying in the halls, as he lay dying. My Daddy, the anti-Papist and past master of the Grant Park Masonic Lodge, had not spoken for days. My sister and I were remembering the women’s softball games on summer nights in Piedmont Park long before the days of Title IX requirements of equal opportunity for women’s athletics. “What was the name of that team that was so good?” my sister tried to recall. After a long silence of neither she nor I being able to come up with the answer, from my Daddy’s pillow came the last words I ever heard him say: “Dixie Darlings.”

Sixty-Six

My oldest best friend Pascal reminded me this morning that he had seen nothing on the news about D-Day. Here's something I posted last year, on my previous birthday:


The armada of American Allies invaded the coast of France at Normandy 65 anniversaries ago. Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Pointe du Hoc. Paratroopers and gliders floated silently from the sky into French farm fields and towns. Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Bayeux, Carentan. The charming fishing village of Arromanches was turned into an instant deep water port. Sixty-five birthdays ago for me, as I was born the same day. Sixty-five. Retirement age. It is too late for me to think about retiring, since I already left the employment roles three years ago when I was hospitalized, in a coma for three weeks, woke up deaf. Nowadays I stay plenty busy. I just don’t have a job. Lately, I have been remodeling the condo that belonged to my oldest sister, who died the day before Christmas Eve 2007. I am almost finished with that project and look forward to some quality time this summer with my grandchildren, spending some of their inheritance on sunscreen, floppy straw hats, and restaurant meals. I also want to re-read one of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, do some research for an article. Retired is in the eye of the beholder.

Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. My Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. only once before, in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach.

We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35. At sunset, my Daddy and I stood each with one foot resting on the rail of the sea wall, wordlessly smoking American cigarettes and watching the ocean channel. Our hotel was four stories high across the narrow street from the waterfront. During the night, the crashing waves alternately kept me awake and drummed me to sleep.

At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” I always remember this as a substitute for the discussion we never had about French wines, which my Daddy never tasted, and the special quality of light in northern France captured by Impressionist paintings, which never caught my Daddy's eye.

They May Play "Taps"

In my childhood, Memorial Day was observed on May 30, no matter what day of the week. Now, in the interest of a long three-day weekend to begin the summer, it is the last Monday in May. Originally called Decoration Day, it was to remember those who have died in our nation's service. Before the end of the Civil War, groups of women in the South organized and decorated the graves of their fallen. Union Army General John Logan ordered Memorial Day observance on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, a commemoration continued there today with small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 Arlington burial sites. Several southern states still have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead.

Memorial Day 2010, Monday, there will be ceremonies at the final resting places of those who gave what Lincoln called, the "last full measure." Drop by one near you. They may play "Taps." Take a handkerchief, just in case. Other celebrations include picnics, barbecues, family gatherings, and sporting events, such as baseball double-headers, and the Indianapolis 500. Heavy highway vacation driving usually begins on Memorial Day weekend, as do nationwide "Click It or Ticket" campaigns. Watch for rising gasoline prices and alert Highway Patrol vehicles. Some feel that when Congress lumped Memorial Day into a three-day weekend, the special significance of Memorial Day was diluted. “Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day," according to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, a decorated World War II veteran, who lost his arm in combat in Italy, has introduced legislation repeatedly since 1987 to return Memorial Day to its traditional day.

Some people confuse Memorial Day, which remembers those who have died in U.S. military service, with Veterans Day, which honors all those who have served the U.S. in the military. The total number who have died in service to their country is much smaller than the total number of those who have served. This is a significant recruitment tool. Without wishing to side with confusion, I can not help but think of the recent loss of 11 oil riggers at the Deepwater Horizon explosion off the Florida-Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana-Texas Gulf Coast, where BP, at minimum, ignored Murphy's law. Also the 25 coal miners who died from a huge explosion at a Massey Energy mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Who keeps memorial for those who fall as cannon fodder for fossil fuels? You just have to draw the line somewhere.

Encore! Encore!

The Metropolitan Opera of New york is a box office smash hit at a Shopping Mall Movie Theatre Near You. According to Time magazine, the Met has sold 2.2 million tickets during 2009-2010 for its nine live high-definition telecasts, 400,000 more than the previous season. Now the Met will debut a new Summer HD Encore Series, replaying six favorites on Wednesday nights at 6:30 p.m.:

Verdi’s Aida, June 16 . Conductor: Daniele Gatti; Production: Sonja Frisell; Singers: Violeta Urmana, Dolora Zajick, Johan Botha, Carlo Guelfi, Roberto Scandiuzzi, Stefan Kocán

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, June 23. Conductor: Plácido Domingo; Production: Guy Joosten; Singers: Anna Netrebko, Isabel Leonard, Roberto Alagna, Nathan Gunn, Robert Lloyd.

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, July 7. Conductor: Valery Gergiev; Production: Robert Carsen; Singers: Renée Fleming, Ramón Vargas, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Sergei Aleksashkin.

Puccini’s La Bohème, July 14. Conductor: Nicola Luisotti; Production: Franco Zeffirelli; Singers: Angela Gheorghiu, Ainhoa Arteta, Ramón Vargas, Ludovic Tézier, Quinn Kelsey, Oren Gradus, Paul Plishka.

Puccini’s Turandot, July 21. Conductor: Andris Nelsons; Production: Franco Zeffirelli; Singers: Maria Guleghina, Marina Poplavskaya, Marcello Giordani, Samuel Ramey.

Bizet’s Carmen, July 28. Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin; Production: Richard Eyre; Singers: Barbara Frittoli, Elīna Garanča, Roberto Alagna, Mariusz Kwiecien.

Click Here For Details and Tickets

When I entered my zip code, I found my closest movie house broadcast would be at Hollywood 24 @ North I-85, 3265 N.E. EXPRESSWAY Access Road, CHAMBLEE, GA. Summer HD Encore Series tickets are $18. English language captions are provided.

I asked my friend Wayne Gibson, retired chairman of the Music Department at Kennesaw State University, if I had to wear my opera tuxedo or could I dress just like I was going to a Bruce Willis movie. He said, "Totally movie attire is my experience! Everyone has popcorn, hot dogs and giant cokes! The world is certainly changing! I think I like it."

Despite the recession and an audience with a median age of 48, nearly 200,000 enjoyed Rossini's Armida, starring soprano Renee Fleming and tenor Lawrence Brownlee on its May 1 broadcast shown in 1,200 movie theaters in 44 countries worldwide, from Iceland to New Zealand. The encore of showing Armida is scheduled for Wednesday, May 19 at a Shopping Mall Movie Theatre Near You.

Dangerous, Uncontrolled and Uncontrollable

Surreptitiously parents and grandparents inventory every newborn baby. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes. Two ears. Two feet. Two hands. Two legs. Two arms. Erin Ingram of Lithonia had two arms to hug her mother around the neck and wish a Happy Mother’s Day for seven years. Then in March, she was attacked by two dangerous, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable dogs, which dragged her down the street. Neighbors tried to help, but DeKalb County Police Officers had to shoot one of the dogs, before the child could be pulled free. Erin lost most of one arm and the hand and five fingers that came with it. She remains in the hospital, eight weeks after the attack. Other recent Atlanta area dog attacks included a 12-year-old permanently disfigured, a 69 year old woman hospitalized, and a newborn killed--by dangerous, uncontrolled and uncontrollable dogs, pitbulls in each of these cases.

The owner of the two dogs that attacked Erin Ingram has been charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor under current Georgia law, and could face a maximum jail sentence of one year. South Georgia Rep. Gene Maddox, a retired veterinarian, has proposed legislation to require the owners of dogs qualified as vicious or dangerous to pay for victim's medical expenses and for those dog owners to carry insurance policies to help cover those expenses. His bill in the Georgia legislature never made it out of committee this year, but he plans to introduce it again next year. "If you don't restrain your dog the way they're supposed to be restrained, whatever they do, you need to be held accountable for it," Erin Ingram’s father said. The State of Georgia will not allow you to drive a car without insurance, just in case your stupidity or negligence crashes into or runs over somebody else, kills them or ruins them for life. Or their children.

According to the CDC, more than 16,000 people were bitten or attacked by dogs in 1994, “a good 6% of the victims needed one or more forms of reconstructive surgery. In 2001, that number rose to an alarming estimate of about 80,000 people nationwide, and 22% of the those needed extensive hospitalization and reconstructive surgery. And from that 22%, one-third of the victims were always children 7 years and younger. Infants or children who have not yet learned to walk are the most vulnerable, constituting almost all of the cases of the victims who were under 7 years of age.” In 2005, 82% of all the dog attacks in the country involved Pit Bulls, the CDC reports, with Rottweilers ranking as the second most dangerous dog. Other known dog breeds that have a lengthy record of dog bites and attacks are: Akitas, Alaskan Malamutes, Chow Chows, Doberman Pinschers, German Shepherds, Great Danes, Huskies, and Saint Bernards.

People will argue about dogs and dog owners. Who’s to blame? Dangerous dogs or irresponsible dog owners? While you are arguing, think about the victims, born with 10 fingers, two hands, two arms. My wife, who loves dogs, loves children more. She says, “When I go outside, the sky to me looks very blue. Does it look blue to you?”

Why Sarah Palin is a Quitter

Just for the fun of it, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) compiles annual lists of “most corrupt lawmakers,“ and this year has added a new group to its hall of shame: the nation's "Worst Governors." My governor, Sonny Perdue, has been CREWed. Although the list is heavy with governors from the South and Republicans, there are two Democrats and a former bodybuilder movie star.

Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS)
Gov. Donald Carcieri (R-RI)
Gov. Jim Gibbons (R-NV)
Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA)
Gov. David Paterson (D-NY)
Gov. Sonny Perdue (R-GA)
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX)
Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM)
Gov. Mike Rounds (R-SD)
Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA)

With 50 state governors to chose from, what qualifications could possibly distinguish these 11 above the rest, uniting rather than dividing them in ignominy? 1. Misuse of campaign contributions. 2. Rejection of federal stimulus funds. 3. Impeding public access to information about government and blocking transparency. Too bad Sarah Palin quit in mid-term as Governor of Alaska to become whatever it is exactly she has become?

Gov. Sonny Perdue, has a job performance approval rating of 55 percent among Georgia voters, 57 percent of whom disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as President, according to sources as reliable as any who gather and sow such meanings with a straight face, something I never can. Perdue is a two-term Georgia Governor, term-limited by law. He defeated incumbent Governor Roy Barnes, whose accomplishments in office included removing the Confederate Stars and Bars battle emblem from the Georgia flag. Barnes, a Cobb County native, plans to run for Governor again this year. Because of Barnes, Democratic Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, will be muttering like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, “I could have been contender .“ Baker has frequently clashed with Perdue, recently by refusing to add Georgia to the states suing to repeal health care reform enacted by Congress and signed into law by the President.

Republicans wanting to succeed Perdue include Nathan Deal, who resigned from Congress to run for governor, John Oxendine, Insurance Commissioner, Karen Handel, Georgia Secretary of State, and Ray Boyd, Morgan County real estate executive able to launch his campaign by donating $2 million earnest money to himself and promising to reach out to the Tea Party. He said, “Tea party people do not endorse candidates, but if they wanted to endorse somebody, it would be somebody like me."

The Georgia primaries for state offices will be July 20th.

Not a Fiduciary

I guess maybe the watchdogs at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were watching internet porn while Bernard Madoff went unnoticed, his Ponzi scheme defrauding $65-billion from investors, including humanitarian and philanthropic foundations. Now the boys at the SEC apparently have taken a break from internet surfing long enough to file a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment and financial services institution “too big to fail.“ Goldman Sachs withheld “vital information,” according to the SEC, about synthetic investments it created out of thin air, handsome as the emperor’s new clothes, deriving whatever value and reality from the performance of subprime residential mortgages. Some of these investments were then bundled in such a way to doom them to failure, but insurance policies were taken out against that failure, then collected on. Collateralized Debt Obligation. Derivatives. Abacus. What more information would anyone need? Abacus cadabacus hocus pocus dominocus.

The Goldman Sachs CEO explained to a federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in January that Goldman Sachs packaged complex debt, while also betting against the debt, because “clients had the appetite.” He said, "We are not a fiduciary." Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs vice president who created the mortgage derivative product, has been charged with fraud. The Goldman Sachs officers will testify before Congress. I’ll bet $10 or all my remaining shares in my crashed 401-K, whichever is worth more, somebody will “take the Fifth.”

Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, and Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush, came to those important, indeed critical, offices directly from the executive suite of Goldman Sachs, just like there was a wing marked “Democrats” and one marked “Republicans.” The ultimate investment hedge. Goldman Sachs is a primary dealer in the United States Treasury security market.

“We are not a fiduciary.” I looked this up. “Fiduciary: one, such as an agent of a principal or a company director, that stands in a special relation of trust, confidence, or responsibility in certain obligations to others.” Willie Sutton, who was also not a fiduciary, said the reason he robbed banks was that banks were “where the money was.”

I saw popular Republican/Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul on television the other night, saying he believed Social Security should be done away with, in order to teach a lesson to people who had not saved money for their own retirement. Kinky Friedman was also on tv the same night, and he said he thought we should just go ahead and “elect lobbyists to public office and cut out the middle-men.“ Kinky Friedman wears big cowboy hats and smokes big cigars. He is the author of a long list of books such as How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth and is a sometimes country musician and front-man for the band he named Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. He is not a fiduciary, but he knows how telling the truth will usually surprise most people into an involuntary reflex of laughter. Basically, he is a court jester. Ron Paul does not make me laugh.