Buzzards out the back door

They’re back.
The sky over our back yard is full of turkey vultures.
They soar silently on huge black wings, seeking out rising warm air and flapping in to a landing in the tops of a line of tall trees that separate a broad expanse of lawn from an abandoned railroad right-of-way.
This is our sixth spring here, but we noticed them for the first time last year. It seems unlikely that we would have missed a roost of 50-or-so turkey vultures for four consecutive springs, so I can only conclude that they relocated to our neighborhood after something forced them to move.
I’ve long enjoyed watching them fly. I used to see them when my ex and I took our sons camping at Turkey Run State Park a few miles southwest of here back in the 1970s. That’s when I first looked them up in Roger Tory Petersen’s "Field Guide to the Birds of North America" and learned they are the second-largest birds in North America - eclipsed only by the nearly extinct California Condor, itself a form of vulture.
I admit I was mildly concerned about all those vultures peering down at my 4-month-old Australian shepherd puppy Pete.
So I went online to learn more.
Turns out, there’s no need to worry. Turkey vultures don’t kill anything. They won’t touch anything that isn’t dead. Besides that, they will pass on dead carnivores like dogs, cats and coyotes, preferring to dine on dead herbivores like sheep, goats and cattle.
The Cherokees called the turkey vulture the “peace eagle” because it soars like the predatory bird, but does not kill.
They are about 25 inches from end to end with a six-foot wingspan. The average adult turkey vulture weighs in at 6 pounds.
The turkey vultures around here are migratory, wintering in the U.S. south or perhaps as far south as Central America.
I remember seeing a humorous piece on the old Disneyland TV show back in the ‘50s about the festivities surrounding the return of the turkey vultures each spring to Hinkley, Ohio, much the same way the swallows come back to San Juan Capistrano on the same day each year.
I didn’t make note of the first sighting here this year, but I think it was around March 8. I’m marking my calendar to start looking for them in early March next year, just to see if and when they show up.
I also discovered turkey vultures even have their own fan club - The Turkey Vulture Society (vulturesociety.homestead.com).
Bill Kohlmoos, president of the Turkey Vulture Society, has written a fascinating piece about the birds in which he points out they have a rich social life, like to play aerial tag, and will invite other roosts to join them if they find a particularly large meal.
In California, he said, they’ve even been known to tell condors about major feasts and guide them to the scene.
Among his anecdotes:
“…it was reported by a person who had studied turkey vultures for many years that one would wait every morning for his son, a young school boy, to come out of his house. The vulture would follow the boy several blocks to the school bus stop and then wait on top of a telephone pole until the boy got on the bus. In the afternoon the bird would be back on the pole waiting for the boy's return, and then follow him home.”
And:
“One lady wrote us that she has built a small wooden tower-like feeder in her back yard and puts out food for her friends each day. One day she noticed that after eating their breakfast, the vultures had gone down to the lawn in her yard and six of them were in a circle around a soccer-size ball left on the lawn by her grandchildren. The vultures were hitting the ball back and forth to each other by butting it with their head and beak. Each day thereafter they played this game. And although there were four balls of different colors, they always picked the orange one.”
And:
“Turkey Vultures are affectionate and often make good pets. When a bird is injured and taken into rehab he will become emotionally attached to his handler and follow him around and watch him, much like a pet dog. They love to bring an object to a person and then play tug-of-war.”
And:
“A lady in Southern California wrote that she and her husband would drive their car five miles from town and take a daily walk in the country with their dog. A turkey vulture would join them, soaring above and watching them. And then one day at home she broke a leg and the walks were not possible for a while. One day she was in her back yard on crutches and there was her turkey vulture sitting on the fence, waiting to say hello. He had found her in a town of 12,000 people!”
Turkey vultures are covered by an international migratory bird treaty that makes it a federal crime to kill or injured them or to possess one without the appropriate permit as a wildlife rehabilitator.

Stuff

Don't you hate listening to people who end sentences with "but..." or "so..." without completing the thought.
It's on a par with "as far as" without "concerned," like, "as far as the weather is concerned."
I'm sitting in the Starbucks at the Lafayette, IN Barnes & Noble, blogging and drinking a vente mocha frappacino and having to listen to a girl having a cell phone conversation in which she is repeatedly committing all three of these linguistic offenses.
Oh, yeah. I'm fucking sick to death with hearing "awesome."
I just came from a soon-to-be-closed Office Max where I scored an
$80 remanufactured toner cartridge for my HP LaserJet IIP for about $40.
And, of course, the sign by the door apologetically informs shoppers that this Office Max store "will be closing." How about "will close" or "is closing?"
Maybe the sign-maker is getting paid by the letter.

--
Sent from my Treo

Unclaimed Funds

Got a letter yesterday from Joel Maul, who calls himself a “Relationship Manager” with EquiSearch, a White Plains, N.Y. outfit that helps people recover unclaimed funds.
Mr. Maul wrote to me about a year ago on the same matter - some unclaimed stock owned by my late mother.
EquiSearch is cagey in that they don’t tell you what and where the funds are - only a general hint about the amount, like “the current value of this account exceeds $X.”
After reading the fine print and discovering that EquiSearch takes 35% of the funds they recover, I decided to handle the matter myself.
EquiSearch apparently counts on people being too lazy or too stupid to do the recovery work themselves, but being a retired journalist with the skill and inclination to find out pretty much anything I want to know, I wasn’t about to give them a piece of the action.
It really isn’t all that hard to track down stuff like this. The Indiana Attorney General’s office has a website dedicated to helping people recover misplaced funds. Every state has such a mechanism and it doesn’t take much Googling to find the right sites.
So I recovered the funds and, in the process, found a bunch of unclaimed money belonging to friends and, incidentally, my ex wife. There’s about $405 worth of stock from her dad’s estate waiting for her to claim it and, as the executrix of her parents’ estate, it should be she and not one of her two sisters, who goes after it. I e-mailed her about it last year when I turned it up but a check of the Attorney General’s site last night shows she still hasn’t retrieved it. I suppose I’ll e-mail her again, mainly because I hate loose ends.
So I was surprised when I got Mr. Maul’s letter yesterday, considering that the funds he’s offering to recover are no longer out there. I think I’ll use his postage-paid business reply mail envelope to thank him for the heads-up.

Why can't we just get along?

Here's why:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan man facing a possible death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.

Abdul Rahman, 41, has been charged with rejecting Islam, a crime under this country’s Islamic laws. His trial started last week and he confessed to becoming a Christian 16 years ago. If convicted, he could be executed.

But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.

Can't Touch This

I discovered the other day that MC Hammer has a blog here on Blogger.com. I always liked the guy and enjoyed his music and videos. He struck me as more wholesome and less menacing than the "gangsta" types and I liked it that a lot of his stuff had a very positive spiritual vibe.
Does that make him a less authentic voice for the African-American community? I really don't care. I think he's an authentic expression of the American experience.
His blog isn't a load of showbiz hype and glitter. Rather, it's full of day-to-day experiences and stuff about his little boy's upcoming baseball season. He has a Sidekick and loves mobile blogging with text and pictures.
You can check him out at mchammer.blogspot.com.

More on the PGR

Good Morning America did a piece on the Patriot Guard Riders and their work to shield the families of U.S. military personnel from wacko protests at their funerals.
Sign-ups surged today as a result of itand the membership is up to more than 19,100.
Click here to see the ABC News report.

Router Wars

It has often occurred to me that we misunderstand the supposed master/servant relationship we have with computers and that it is we who serve the computers and not the other way around.
When I went to check my e-mail Saturday morning, I discovered my DSL internet connection had gone wonky. This happens from time to time and sometimes it’s my equipment and sometimes it’s the ISP’s fault.
Living in a small (population 1,500) rural community, I suppose we’re lucky to have highspeed internet at all. It’s provided by the local Frontier Telephone Co. and is called Frontiernet. Turns out, Frontiernet is in various places all over the U.S. and Canada.
So, after rebooting the computer and cycling the modem and wireless router, I called Frontiernet’s tech service. It didn’t surprise me that the techie who took my call had a Canadian (“oot” and “aboot”) accent.
We checked my connections, did a lot of DOS prompt PINGing, turned the Norton security software off and on, took the router out of the loop and fiddled around for about 45 minutes before he came to the conclusion that my D-Link wireless router is hosed.
Since our photo and writing enterprises depend heavily upon having a reliable internet connection, buying and installing a new wireless router went to the top of the day’s To Do list.
Maria and I bade farewell to our dogs and drove the 35 miles to the Best Buy store in Carmel, Ind. I had also decided to look for a replacement for my 5-year-old Speedstream DSL modem on the assumption that there must be faster modems out there. The Best Buy sales guy directed me to a combination modem/wireless router that had the SBC-Yahoo logo on the box. He assured me that it wasn’t a proprietary unit and would work with any DSL connection.
Wrong.
When I ran the software installation CD, I found it gave me no choice but to create an SBC-Yahoo account. Since my town isn’t served by SBC, that made the unit useless to me, so we drove 35 miles back to the store and swapped it for a D-Link wireless router.
By the time we got home, having driven 140 miles on our quest for a reliable internet connection, it was past time for dinner and I was in no mood to mess with installing the new router.
I was reading the specs on the router box over my breakfast the next morning when I started wondering if maybe I needed a faster router than the one I’d just bought.
I had a non-networked internet connection for my desktop computer only, so I did a little research and concluded that it was probably plenty fast, since my DSL data transfer rate is only 1.1Mb/sec down and 750Kb/sec up. Just for the hell of it, I reconnected my old, supposedly hosed, D-Link wireless router and - wonder of wonders - it worked fine. I came down to the kitchen and fired up the laptop to see if the Wi-Fi was working and, sure enough, it was cranking at 5 bars.
So, it seems, the problem wasn’t on my end after all.
Maria and I were driving up to Lafayette to do a bit of grocery shopping, so we included the Lafayette Best Buy in our route and returned the unneeded new router.
I went online later and found an ISP discussion forum with a thread devoted to the experiences of Frontiernet customers. I was not at all surprised to find complaint after complaint about spotty service, disrupted service, and tech service people who will never ever concede that the problem might be on their end.
At least I didn’t get stuck with a wireless router I don’t need.

************************************************************

Tuesday, March 21
I went to the D-Link website today and downloaded the newest version of firmware for my router, which includes such enhancements as Super G Turbo speed and extended range.
I installed it configured the router for passsword security and it's working better than ever. So much for Frontiernet's diagnosis.

The Ring, Part 2

The day after Maria’s wedding ring turned up in the bathroom jewelry box - a place she says she never puts it - we were having breakfast in the kitchen when she noticed she wasn’t wearing her ring.
That was especially startling, considering the anxiety we’d just gone through leading up to its discovery.
She dashed upstairs to search, only to discover the ring was back in the jewelry box in the same drawer, in the same spot in the drawer.
Again, she swore she had absolutely no recollection of having taken the ring off or of putting it into the box.
This, of course, left us with a couple of possibilities:
1. The painkilling drugs she’d taken a week earlier in the wake of her hysterectomy were still kicking around in her nervous system and making her do things she normally wouldn’t do and couldn’t remember, or
2. There was some supernatural explanation.
I’m not ruling out either scenario.
She hadn’t had any of the pain meds for at least a week and wasn’t having any other noticeable lapses in memory of judgment.
At the same time, she and her daughter claim to have sensed the presence of my late mother in the house at various times and the central stone in Maria’s wedding ring did come from my mother’s engagement ring.
Her daughter Morgan said she’d “seen” my mother a couple of times when she was sick - once when she was recuperating from oral surgery. Mom was a Registered Nurse and I suppose it would be natural for her to show up when someone in the house needed nursing. And, of course, Maria was recuperating from a hysterectomy.
I’ve always been blissfully oblivious to these “presences” and apparitions, although I sometimes think Mom takes possession of our dog Ruthie when I catch Ruthie giving me that reproachful look that Mom used to shoot me whenever she disapproved of something I’d done or said.
Maria says she’s seen and experienced ghosts and spirits numerous times since her childhood and I don’t disbelieve her. I just don’t see them.
Maria’s mother also claims to have been “visited” by the spirit of her mother. Over one period of time, she said, she found a succession of face-up pennies on or around her desk and recalled that her mother considered it good luck to find a face-up penny. After that, she said, she began finding diabetes blood test strips around the desk and between the pages of books. She took it as an indication that her mother was visiting and saying hello.
Whenever Maria has found the presence of spirits bothersome, she tells them in a loud, firm voice to leave and apparently they do.
In this most recent case, she said she had a chat with my mother and told her it was okay to hang around, just stop messing with her wedding ring.
Now, five days later, the ring is still on Maria’s finger and we’ve had no more problems.
I’m withholding judgment. I learned a long time ago to believe nothing and believe everything.

O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Two days of tension and anxiety ended yesterday afternoon.
Maria's wedding ring went missing on Sunday. She normally puts it into a large makeup box by the bathroom sink when she's applying hand cream or doing anything else that she wants to protect the ring from.
Aside from being a substantial investment - it was custom made by one of the top jewelry designers in Indiana - the ring incorporates the main stone from my mother's engagement ring, so it has a lot of emotional weight as well.
She did a search of the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and every other place she thought she could have put it and eventually we came to the conclusion that Pete the pup might be involved in the disappearance.
While scouring the bedroom and bathroom floor for the ring, we also considered that me might have swallowed it. After all, he chews and gnaws on everything he can get his paws on.
Maria called the vet's office and determined an X-ray would cost $75-100. Failing that, she was advised to keep an eye on his poop for the next day or two.
So we put the ongoing housebreaking training on hold and made sure he pooped in the house for the last few days, Maria taking on the task of gathering it up in a plastic wastebasket liner and suppressing her gag reflex while kneading it and feeling for the missing ring.
We had outgoing mail that didn't get picked up yesterday, so we decided to run it down to the postoffice in the county seat and also get bite to eat. Freshening up before leaving the house, Maria opened the top drawer of the jewelry case she keeps in the bathroom to pick out a pair of earrings. And there, where it had been all along, was her wedding ring.
Pete, for all his mischief and destruction, was off the hook for what could have been a deal-breaker for the little guy.
So we celebrated with dinner at White Castle and a bad movie from Blockbuster (Kicking and Screaming - formulaic and predictable and not all that funny).
I'm chalking it up to the effects of Maria's post-surgery painkillers that have left her slightly off-balance for the past week. She's pretty much back to normal, but still has the occasional lapse.

Jimi!!!!!

Got an e-mail over the weekend from the stock photo agency where we list our pictures, saying the Jimi Hendrix people want to license one of my shots from his May, 1968, concert in Indianapolis.
Seems they're working on a book and I'm the only shooter they could find who was at that particular concert. Actually, I know of at least one other - he was with me - but I'm not telling him about it until I have the check in my hands.
Not that it's all that much money - $132 (my 60% of the $200 licensing fee) - but I don't want to blow an opportunity.
This is the first sale we've see after more than two years with this outfit and I was beginning to think we'd wasted our time sending them more than 1,000 high-res images.
You never know what's gonna sell, but my insistence on never throwing away anything that could conceivably have value continues to serve me.

Who was Tom Fox?

Terror Meets Delusion: The Murder of Tom Fox
March 11th, 2006



An American peace activist is slaughtered by Islamists

Yesterday, peace activist Tom Fox was found murdered in Iraq.

Fox, along with fellow activists Harmeet Singh Sooden, Norman Kember, and James Loney was kidnapped in Baghdad on November 26, 2005.

All belonged to the leftwing Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which provided “human shields” in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, works side by side with the anti-Israel, quasi-terrorist International Solidarity Movement and takes the standard leftwing position that America, as the world’s biggest terrorist, got its comeuppance on 9/11/2001. CPT’s official motto is “Getting in the Way,” and it ran a program called “Adopt a Detainee,” which was sympathetic to suspected terrorists being detained by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq.

So, the late Mr. Fox belonged to a group that essentially saw the “good guys” as being equal to, if not worse than, the bad guys. He believed he was doing a righteous thing by essentially throwing stones in the path of the U.S., Iraqi and Coalition soldiers, the same men and women who are trying to round up the Islamist terror-mongers washing the streets of Baghdad in blood and misery, terror-mongers like those who murdered him.

Everything I’ve read about Mr. Fox indicates that, though misguided in his worldview, he was in many ways a decent man. Fox played in the United States Marine Band for twenty years. A Quaker, he served as a youth leader at Langley Hill Friends Meeting. His daughter, Katherine, says that while he was in the military, he refused military discounts on principle.

But Fox also harbored hatred for his culture and an overall disdain for America, as indicated by statements he made on his blog. He also suffered from a terrible naiveté:

I think it would be fair to say that a survey of opinion taken from news sources in various parts of the world would find people using the words ‘fear and hatred’ much more often than they would use the words ‘respect and love’ when it comes to describing the United States. Not only in the Middle East but in Europe and in much of Asia and other areas as well. We are seen more as an empire rather than a beacon of hope to the oppressed and downtrodden. We are seen more as a militaristic superpower, bent on imposing our will on others, rather than the keeper of the flame of the hope and promise of democracy,

said Thomas William Fox, ignoring, among other things, the fact that people fear America so much, that they flock to its shores in droves, seeking freedom and peace and economic opportunity.

After reading most of his blog entries, it seems to me that Fox’s tragic flaw, the one that ultimately got him killed, was that he did not really believe that some men are more evil than others.

Crippled by this moral confusion, Fox habitually ignored the greater of two evils. His blog entry on Fallujah hints at as much. Though in his writings he essentially described the liberation of Fallujah as a senseless act, he failed to mention that after U.S. forces chased out and killed the Islamists who had held the town hostage, they made the gruesome discovery of nearly two dozen torture chambers, awash in blood, some with bloated bodies and hacked off body parts dumped near them. Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, a Marine said,

The face of Satan was here in Fallujah, and I’m absolutely convinced that that was true.

Ultimately, Tom Fox saw that face up close and personal. It is the face of those who commit shocking evil while promising Heaven on Earth. I wonder if, in the end, he finally recognized it for what it was—and is.

The Utopian fanatics who killed Tom Fox couldn't have cared less whether or not he was sympathetic towards them, or if he hated them or whether he believed in God, or not. They couldn't have cared less if he had a family or friends who loved him. They did not care for his compassion. They did not care that, on some levels, he even empathized with them: they, who held him captive. They did not care that, in his way, he was trying to help alleviate the suffering of their brothers and sisters.

All Tom Fox was to his captors and murderers was filth—a piece of garbage; a weak, vile, subhuman infidel of the Western variety; a creature to be spit on and reviled and, when no longer useful, slaughtered like an animal and then discarded. They treated Mr. Fox like they would treat us all, as stones to be kicked aside while building the road to Paradise. They treated Mr. Fox, and if given the chance they’d treat us all, like the Nazis treated the Jews.

If there are lessons to be learned from the murder of Tom Fox, they are primarily for the Left: Like a person, it is never too late for it to abandon its suicidal march until the moment the executioner strikes.

Thomas William Fox (1951-2006) R.I.P.

Rocco DiPippo, a freelance political writer, publishes The Autonomist website.




Rocco DiPippo

A public relations boon

It occurred to me this week that the Rev. Fred Phelps could be the best friend the sport of motorcycling has had in years.
Phelps, you may recall, is the looney tune Baptist pastor from Topeka, Kans., who calls upon his followers to picket the funerals of U.S. casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan because the U.S. tolerates gays too much for his sensibilities.
Those of us who ride motorcycles have been concerned about the unsavory image our sport has had ever since the 1950s when Marlon Brando appeared in "The Wild One" and the Hell's Angels captured the media spotlight in the '60s.
Most of us cringe whenever the media stereotypes all of us as biker lifestyle types with tattoos, greasy hair, drug and alcohol problems and loud Harley-Davidsons.
But thanks to Fred Phelps, we're enjoying a new resurgence of respectability. You see, his stupidity gave rise to the Patriot Guard Riders - an organization of motorcyclists who have banded together to attend those same funerals, at the request of the bereaved families, to shield the families from the obscene protests.
The PGR include vets, hawks and doves and motorcyclists of all ages and brand persuasions who are united in their belief that the grieving families of U.S. military personnel deserve respect and honor.
The organization is growing like crazy. Membership stood at 8,000 when I joined a couple of weeks ago. It will pass the 16,000 mark this weekend and there's no end in sight.
The media loves us, the cops love us, the military loves us and the families love us. About the only people who don't love us are the followers of the Rev. Phelps and we're supremely indifferent to their opinions.
So, thanks, Fred. You're bringing out the best in everyone except the folks who agree with you.

--
Sent from my Treo

Are you insecure?

I have a wireless router as part of my home computer network.
I use the hard-wired side of it to link my desktop computer with Maria's, since our desks face each other in close proximity in our home office.
I used the wireless, or Wi-Fi, side of it to access the internet from my laptop. I'm doing that now as I write this.
When Maria's daughter Morgan is home from college, she uses the Wi-Fi to connect her desktop to the network from her room.
When my friend Tim helped me install our first wireless router - we're on our third now - he did a cursory test of its range by keeping his laptop connected as he backed out of our driveway. He reported he lost the signal about the time he reached the street.
My router is supposed to have a range of 150-200 feet, so it's not inconceivable that someone could park in front of the house and piggyback onto the signal.
I was aware of that possibility but didn't give it much thought - after all, this is a sleepy little country town of 1,500 and besides, our side of the street is posted for no parking.
But when we got the laptop last spring and started connecting to the router whenever we powered up, I noticed that my next-door neighbor in the big yellow house to the north of us also has a wireless router. Occasionally on power-up, our laptop would lock onto his signal at a quite usable strength of 2 bars out of 5.
I immediately realized that if I could see his network signal, he could see ours.
I didn't really think he was any kind of a hacking or snooping threat, but I wasn't eager to be proven wrong. So I decided to explore the encryption instructions that came with my D-Link router. It was a bit of a challenge because the geeks who wrote the instructions assumed that the reader had a working knowledge of the vocabulary of Wi-Fi, which I did not. I went to Barnes & Noble, got a vente mocha and browsed through a copy of "Wi-Fi for Fucking Morons," made some notes and went home to give it a try. I finally sorted it out and now have a secure network with its own name (Pearlsend, since we live at the south end of Pearl Street), accessible with a password.
My neighbor's network appears in my laptop's list of available networks as "linksys," the name of the router manufacturer, and "unsecured wireless network." I discovered last June, as we drove west on our photo safari, that the air in most cities is filled with unsecured wireless networks named "linksys" and "dlink."
That's because most people just plug the things in, make sure they can get a signal, and never bother to use the encryption features.
With so many open networks, piggybacking in an urban environment it a pretty easy thing, especially in apartment buildings where there are lots of tightly clustered living spaces. Other than marginally slowing the host's broadband connection with added traffic, I figured it was mostly a harmless thing.
But then I read a piece by Glenn Fleischman at wifinews.com.
He references a recent New York Times story about piggybacking that's a pretty comprehensive look at the subject.
But here is what Fleischman said that really got my attention:
Worse, however, is that a local network is usually given less scrutiny by firewalls and thus a user who piggybacks onto your network and whose machine is infected with viruses and worms could unintentionally compromise your systems. That’s a bigger risk, in my view. Now I feel even better about having a security-enabled wireless network. I might even mention it to my neighbor.

Mission Accomplished

The morons from the Westboro Baptist Church were a no-show today at the funeral of Sgt. Rickey Jones in Kokomo, Ind.
But the Patriot Guard Riders were there and they did a splendid job of showing the Jones family their son's service to his country mattered and was valued.
The funeral came four days after Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a bill making disorderly conduct within 500 feet of a funeral a felony in Indiana. Mitch said he's reasonably sure the law will stand up to judicial challenge.
A dense fog lay upon the land around central Indiana this morning and visibility was less than 500 feet from the vantage point of the church where the funeral was conducted, so Fred Phelps and his gang of malignant imbeciles wouldn't have been visible even if they had shown up. It would seem that God Himself wanted the Jones family protected from their hideous insults.
***********************
This morning's Indianapolis Star story quotes Shirley Phelps-Roper, a Westboro spokeswoman, who said protesters stayed home mainly because of the law.
"We're not going to go some place where your government is busy setting a trap for us," she said. "We're not stupid."
Sure. If believing God is kills soldiers because the U.S. tolerates gays isn't stupid, I don't know what the hell is.
Stupid, Shirley. Stoooooooooooooopid.

Hey, it's Bike Week in Daytona Beach

The calendar on my Treo smartphone reminded me Sunday morning that this is Daytona Beach Bike Week.
Since I was gazing out my window at snowflakes the size of cornflakes, it's obvious that I didn't go this year. Again.
I went for a couple of years - 1993 and 1994, I think it was. And, of course, I rode all the way both times.
(That's kind of a standing joke for touring BMW riders. After awhile, we get used to people looking at our license plates and asking, "Did you ride all the way from (insert home state here - in my case, Indiana)?"
Yes, of course we did.
I take pride in the fact that I've never trailered my bike anywhere.
We BMW folks like to call it Trailer Week instead of Bike Week because most of the bikes (i.e., Harley-Davidsons) arrive on trailers or in the back of pickup trucks.
The first year I rode to Bike Week, I lacked a proper cold weather riding suit so I went to a farm supply store and bought a $100 set of Carhart coveralls - the big tan thing you see farmers wearing in winter. I bought an XXXL size so it would fit over my leathers and other gear. There was 6 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature was in the 20s the day I left for Daytona and I looked like an overstuffed couch perched on my '91 K100RS. But I was reasonably warm. Of course, I could only turn my head about 60 degrees and couldn't see my boots. I'd left in the afternoon after work and made it to Elizabethtown, Ky., before darkness and spitting snow persuaded me to bag it at a Third World motel.
I was able to shed the suit somewhere south of Chattanooga, Tenn., the next day and never wore it again. Instead, I bought a proper Motoport cold-weather riding suit from a vendor at the Daytona International Speedway complex.
In those days, the BMW enclave was at Bulow Campground - a former KOA operation north of Daytona and a few miles inland from Flagler Beach. The Space Coast BMW Riders ran the operation and we had about a third of the sprawling campground that used to be some kind of plantation.
The rest of the camping area was given over to other brands and, since Daytona is mostly a H-D affair, that meant Harley folks. I discovered that some of them regarded us with a kind of uncomprehending awe since it was generally understood that we routinely ride great distances with little or no regard for weather. It's a consequence of choosing riding gear for its functionality rather than because we want to look like cowboys or Indians.
I was walking to the showers early one morning, plodding along past a sea of H-D rider tents and watching the sun rise over the palm trees when someone back in the BMW compound popped a cassette of Wagnerian opera into the stereo system on his bike. How nice, I thought, humming along.
Then I noticed the biker lifestyle types emerging from their tents and staring with bewildered looks in the direction of the music, heads tilted in puzzlement like dogs. One of them mumbled something about "church music."
It was as if they had just discovered their neighbors were from another planet.
That first trip to Daytona Bike Week was entertaining. Some of my Indianapolis BMW Club friends showed me around. We went to the Jap Bike Bash at Gilley's in New Smyrna Beach where they beat a Japanese motorcycle to death. We went to the Cabbage Patch and watched Reubenesque biker chicks wrestling in coleslaw. We rode up and down the beach and cruised the freakshow that is Main Street.
I rode back down the next year, but it was a bore. After the second day, I was sick of the mass stupidity and the noise. The only thing I liked about it was being able to ride in warm sunshine in early March. And when I rode home that second year, I knew I wouldn't do another Bike Week for a long long time.
When I mentioned Bike Week yesterday, Maria asked if I wanted to go. I didn't have to give it much thought.
The only reason I'd care to go back would be as a photographer rather than as a motorcycling participant.

Blogging from the library

Did I ever mention how much I love Wi-Fi?
I'm at the local public library where I fled this morning to thrash out a magazine piece that is a bit overdue.
I find it very difficult to work at home because Pete the pup requires semi-constant supervision and I can only focus on projects during the brief periods when he consents to nap in his kennel.
Maria kindly agreed to keep an eye on Pete while I adjourned to the library's reading room to sort out my notes and lash the final piece together. Now that I've done as much as I can here at the library, I'm taking a moment to catch up on my blogging.
Maria continues to improve after her surgery Monday, but is still on the heavy-duty painkillers. She recognizes there is a lot of very serious pain just waiting to grab her if she slacks off on the drugs too soon.
She got flowers this week from my son Sean and his wife Ruth, from a young woman whose case she championed in the paper last week and from her coworkers at the paper. Her spirits were also buoyed by a call from son Steve the other night who let us listen to our granddaughter Lisa count to 10 and beyond with remarkable clarity. Lisa, who will be 2 on Memorial Day weekend, started going to preschool shortly after Christmas. She sounds like she's doing splendidly and I'm feeling guilty for not paying a visit to her and her parents since the holidays.
Things are shaping up for a very large turnout Monday for the funeral of Sgt. Rickey Jones, a 101st Airborne trooper killed in Iraq. The loonies from Westboro Baptist Church have promised to bring their obnoxious sideshow to Kokomo for the occasion and they will be counterbalanced by at least 100 members of the Patriot Guard Riders, myself included. The posts to the PGR website - www.patriotguard.org - indicate there will be members there from throughout the Midwest, despite what promises to be really crappy late winter weather.
Maria's mother has agreed to come over and fill in for me as nurse and cook while I'm off doing my patriotic duty.

Operation successful

Maria's hysterectomy went fine and she was out of surgery much sooner than expected.
Her parents and I saw her in the recovery room and she's in great spirits, mainly because of the pain meds and the relief that it's over.
Said she wants to doze and cut me loose to find some breakfast, which I did up the road at McDonald's. Turns out this McD has free Wi-Fi, so I could have brought the laptop.
Now the big challenge will be to make sure she doesn't lift anything heavier than 10 pounds for the next six weeks. That seems an incredibly stringent restriction, considering all of the 10-pound-plus stuff we routinely pick up in the course of an ordinary day.
Fortunately, her camera weighs less than 5 pounds.
We got a call on Saturday from a girl whose senior portrait we shot last fall asking if we could photograph her wedding this coming Saturday night. Yeah, one week's notice. But then she was pregnant when we shot her senior portrait, so you can see that timing is not her strong suit.
Maria, obviously, won't be in any shape to shoot a wedding that soon and the girl has a very limited budget, so I'm going to do her a cheapie abbreviated shoot of the ceremony and reception for $200.
Gotta get out of here now. There's a family with a brutally stupid and noisy grandfather two tables away and I can feel my psychic energy draining away...

--
Sent from my Treo

Counting down

Maria's hysterectomy is set for 8 a.m. Monday and we're getting all of our waterfowl aligned for the surgery and the recovery.
I took a fistful of prescriptions to the drugstore this afternoon and walked out $171 poorer. Could have been worse - the poor bastards without insurance would have paid $427 for the same drugs.
She's been floating on Valium since Wednesday and all of her coworkers have been amazed at how much calmer and unflappable she's been.
I mentioned this morning that I got an e-mail from the state captain of the Patriot Guard Riders about early reports of the death of a soldier from Kokomo in Iraq. The PGR guys, being mostly veterans, call these gigs "missions." So when I told Maria I had a possible mission with the Patriot Guard Riders next week, she dissolved into hysterical laughter. I admit, it does sound like some kids' club - "Mom, Billy and I are going on a mission for Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron..."
Anyhow, at some point she realized she was laughing way out of proportion to the admitted goofiness of the situation and declared herself unfit to drive herself the 19 twisty country miles to work. So I chauffeured her and now I'm sitting in her newspaper office waiting for her to wrap things up and ride home with me.
All of this also serves to remind me that I courted disaster several years ago when my first wife was in a hysterical rage by observing that the word "hysterical" has the same feminine origins as the word "hysterectomy," thereby suggesting that she was being irrationally hormonal.
Needless to say, we are no longer married.
So Maria is preparing to be off work for two, maybe three weeks and I am preparing to cook and feed and fetch and otherwise do for her during her convalescence. She expects to watch a lot of movies on DVD and we're going to sign up with Netflix over the weekend with that in mind.
We dumped cable for DISH satellite TV last summer, but still find we have lots of channels and very little we care to watch. Most evenings, we watch several episodes of Cops - there's something deliciously fun about watching stupid people fucking up - until South Park comes on, and then off to bed.

--
Sent from my Treo

Not a joiner, but...

I’m not much of a joiner, but I enlisted in a potentially controversial organization yesterday. I did it because I felt compelled to do something to offset the pain being inflicted by members of the Westboro Baptist Church upon the families of U.S. military personnel killed in the line of duty.
The Topeka, Kans., church sends it members and sympathizers to the funerals of soldiers to protest and to proclaim that U.S. casualties are God’s punishment for America’s tolerant attitude toward gays. If you want to get a good dose of their craziness, visit their website: www.godhatesfags.com
Their hateful actions have created a huge backlash with legislatures in several states considering laws banning protests at funerals – a measure that doesn’t sit well with anyone who values our First Amendment rights to free speech.
I covered a funeral recently where a handful of WBC loonies showed up. Their presence was more than counterbalanced by a contingent of 60 or so members of the Patriot Guard Riders – a motorcycle organization whose membership is mostly veterans and Harley-Davidson riders.
I visited the Patriot Guard Riders’ website – www.patriotguard.org – yesterday and satisfied myself that I could be comfortable with their mission statement. They attend the funerals of service personnel to show support for the families and to shield the families from the disturbing presence of protesters. They attend only at the invitation of the families and with the knowledge and approval of local law enforcement. Their intent is to show respect and not to visit violence – however richly deserved – upon the WBC folks.
Even though I’m a BMW rider and not a fan of the black leather biker lifestyle look, I share their desire to show respect for those who gave their lives for our security, so I filled out the online form and signed up.
Looks like a lot of others are joining as well. Their membership counter indicates more than 400 people joined yesterday and another 988 have signed up today and it’s not even noon yet. Their total membership at the moment stands at 8,634, but at this rate they’ll top 10,000 by the weekend.

Oh, yeah. It's not Monday.

I feel like I'm running in sand today - flailing away and not getting anywhere.
I have another aviation piece to write and, of course, I'm deep into procrastination. This one is a no-brainer - a 1,000-word interview with one of the execs of a major aircraft manufacturer. I did the telephone interview last month and haven't even looked at my notes. Just letting the thing marinade in my consciousness until I'm ready to bash it out.
(As I write this, Pete the pup is playing with a golf ball we found on the baseball diamond across the street. He's fascinated with tossing it around the kitchen and watching it roll and bounce on the vinyl floor. Lots of running around and making noise.)
So it was almost a relief to have a good excuse not to write today.
First thing on the agenda was a 9:40 a.m. pre-op meeting with Maria's gynecologist who will perform a long-hoped-for hysterectomy on her next Monday morning. After several years of frustrating non-progress at the hands of her longtime family GP who tried to solve her problems by putting her on the pill and taking her off and putting her back on, Maria went to a real OB/GYN doc and got what we consider the definitive solution.
So we got the prescriptions for the various pain meds and the pre-op briefing this morning. Maria is looking forward with great eagerness to being rid of this semi-constant discomfort and hassle and only has flashes of anxiety about the surgery. It'll be an outpatient affair and they expect to cut her loose to float home on her pain meds by 5 p.m. Her parents are coming along, so I'll have plenty of help.
My job is to keep her comfortable, make sure she takes her meds on time and keep her from returning to activity too soon. I'll also be in charge of meal preparation, which is no big deal for me. I was a bachelor, off and on, for six or seven years and managed not to starve, so I think I can handle a couple of weeks of kitchen duty.
My other big achievement today was to rip Quadrophenia (by The Who, of course) to MP3 format and load it into the SD card in my Treo 600 smartphone. It's a 256 megabyte card and the album only took up 75MB. I'm on the last track of the album at the moment and am pleased to discover the whole thing only took my battery from 100% to 90%. Got me thinking about a 1 gigabyte SD card and all the possibilities.
Yeah, I realize it's nothing compared with my son Steve's 60GB iPod, but it's still pretty good for a cell phone.
It kills me that everyone asks if it's a Blackberry when I whip it out. No, it's a Treo 600 and it does pretty much everything a Blackberry does, only better, plus being a kick-ass Palm PDA. Sorta like riding a BMW and having people call it a Harley.
Now it's time to go see why Pete and his golf ball are so quiet...

Breakfast thoughts on a Friday morning

Scanning the MSNBC website over breakfast this morning, I came upon an interview with Robert Redford and a couple of his remarks stood out and reminded me that nobody is right all of the time and nobody is wrong all of the time.

In the "right" category is this observation about the Sundance Film Festival he founded 25 years ago in which he uses a pointles celebrity to make a point:
It was too intense for me. To the outside world, it's a big fat market where you have people like Paris Hilton going to parties. Now, she doesn't have anything to do with anything. I think the festival is close to being out of control.

In the "wrong" category is his Michael Mooresque observation about the current political scene:
Now you pick up the paper and there's a Watergate every day. I don't think anyone's connecting the dots and saying to the public, "Wake up, folks, because you could end up in a totalitarian nightmare, wondering what happened to your country."

Redford, an avid environmentalist, has never made a secret of his disdain for President Bush. So one would suppose that he believes the totalitarian threat is coming from the Republican side of the aisle. I think the party that wants to take away private citizens' guns in the interest of "a safer society" is the one that bears watching and that's not the NRA-endorsed GOP.
But maybe Redford actually meant the Heil Hillary crowd. I'd like to think so.

Oh Roy, oh Roy, is that your hat?

It all started last August when I was hanging out with some of my closest BMW motorcycle friends at the home of Tim and Linda in Alma, Colo.
It was the Indianapolis BMW Club's annual Colorado Chalet Week and we were comfortably ensconced at Tim and Linda's place some 10,600 feet above sea level in the heart of the Rockies.
We were watching a DVD copy of Kevin Costner's classic Western, Open Range, and I opined that Costner's character in the movie had the coolest cowboy hat I'd ever seen.
So a few days later, friends Linda and Webb and Cindy coaxed me into the Colorado Mountain Hat Co. on historic Front Street in Fairplay.
Sherry, who is a consummate hat-seller, dragged out a century-old phrenology device - a relic from the pseudo science of determining one's personality on the basis of the contours of their head. In this case, it was used to make a record of head measurements for a precise hat fit.
These are not cheap hats. They're custom made and come in three grades - felt, felt/beaver blend and pure beaver. Beaver sheds water better and is more appropriate for real cowboys who ride the range in all kinds of foul weather.
They had a considerable variety of hats on display, including a splendidly goofy looking replica of Hopalong Cassidy's tall black hat. They also said they could duplicate the Costner Open Range hat in any color and blend I wanted. I couldn't justify a pricey cowboy hat, so I stuck the punch-card set of my measurements into my motorcycle tank bag and dismissed it.
But Maria got wind of the encounter and decided I'd look smashing in an Open Range chapeau. So she ferreted out the measurements and ordered me a felt/beaver blend charcoal hat with a custom braided leather band for Christmas for $350.
Unfortunately, the folks in Fairplay were seriously backlogged on their orders and my Christmas hat arrived today on Valentine's Day.
I wore it to dinner at the local restaurant this evening and only felt a little self-conscious. After all, this is a rural county and there are lots of horse farms about.
Now I can't wait to get back to Colorado where a hat like this makes a little better fashion sense.

Just shoot me

The press is acting like such a pack of Bush-hating jackals, I'm ashamed to admit I ever called myself a journalist.
Also, their lack of knowledge of firearms is appalling. Shotguns don't fire "bullets" and the terms "birdshot" and "buckshot" are hardly interchangeable, unless you think a bird is the same thing as a buck. And these morons think they're qualified to interpret the happenings of the day for us?

Old dog, new trick

Our older dog, Ruthie, loves lasers.
In fact, she probably owes her life to laser technology.
When I went to the animal shelter with Maria and her kids seven years ago to pick out a dog, I took my laser pointer along to test adoption candidates for alertness and responsiveness.
Most of the dogs paid little attention to the appearance of a bright red dot skittering across the floor of their kennel enclosure. But Ruthie went crazy over it.
Besides that, she smiled at us with a look that said, "Here I am. What took you so long? Take me home."
So we did.
And the laser - in this case one that resembles a pen with pocket clip and runs on a pair of AAA batteries - remains her favorite toy.
I can stand on the back porch at night and run her all over the yard with the red dot. I can run her up and down the stairs until she is near collapse and her face registers deep disappointment when I stop to let her rest.
Pete the Australian sheperd pup who came to live with us just before Christmas also has an interest in the laser, but he doesn't get much of a chance to play because Ruthie knocks him out of the way in her frenzy to get a paw on the elusive crimson dot.
There was little positive interaction between the two dogs at first, but as the weeks have passed, Pete and Ruthie are learning to play together. They engage in games of tug-of-war with a rubber mallard and other dog toys and Pete loves to pester Ruthie. He nips at her flanks, then darts out of the way when she wheels around to get him. Being a herding dog and much younger, he can run circles around Ruthie and make her crazy. This can lead to Ruthie barking hysterically,which only makes Pete more aggressive with his playful soprano growls.
This usually happens in the evenings while Maria is sitting in the bedroom crocheting and watching TV and I'm in the adjacent upstairs office trying to edit photos or write. I gave up yelling at Ruthie to shut up and decided, instead, to break her concentration by flashing the laser onto the carpet near her.
This, of course, worked wonderfully and she was immediately drawn into a game of chase-the-laser, which Pete seemed to enjoy as well.
But over the last few nights, I began to notice Ruthie barking wildly at Pete, sometimes picking a fight with him, and then looking expectantly in my direction.
I finally caught on that she was deliberately making a fuss so I would bring out the laser.
The old dog was teaching me a new trick and I didn't even realize it.

Sunday observations

"Have a nice day!" said the cashier at Wendy's, fixing me with a maniacal grin.
According to her nametag, her name was "Autum," and I found myself wondering what happened to the "n."
Is that really her name? Did her parents really not know how to spell the third season or were they trying to be cute or clever? Or did her store manager make the mistake when he wrote her name down on the nametag order? Or was the nametag order placed verbally and the person stamping out the tags the weak link?
All I know is that sitting here three days later, drinking a vente cafe mocha at Barnes & Noble, I'm still wondering about it.
We're in Lafayette, IN where Maria is doing the weekly grocery shopping at Meijer and I'm taking a moment to blog after running an errand to Best Buy to pick up some printable blank CDs for the Indianapolis BMW Club's annual slideshow.
It's a little project I've taken on for the last few years - collecting motorcycle and club-related photos to add to a rapidly growing gallery of several thousand images that comprise a computer slideshow.
We play it on a laptop connected with a digital projector as background entertainment for the club's annual Valentine's Day weekend awards banquet.. I make extra copies and sell them to club members for $10 a pop to cover production expense. I also include an archive of all of the club's monthly newsletters from the time I took over in December, 1993 until now, so the new folks can get up to speed on who's who and a bit of the club's history.
Most years, I'm the biggest contributor of images, but 2005 was a low-mileage year for me and I hardly took any photos. I didn't even take a camera along when I rode out to Colorado for the club's annual Colorado Chalet Week. That was mainly because I didn't want to expose one of our Nikon D100 digital cameras to the dust and vibration of a motorcycle adventure and I didn't feel like dragging around my massive Nikon F5 film camera. Besides, I've been digital so long that the idea of buying film, then paying to have it processed and then having to scan it to digital is abhorrent to me. And after carrying around a camera that can shoot more than 300 high-res images without reloading makes a 36-exposure roll of film seem downright primitive. Which it is.
Why it's even dumber than "Autum."

--
Sent from my Treo

Saturday night shopping

Maria being amused by my Treo camera at Jo-Ann Fabrics.

Here's your shopping list

Food:
Arla milk, cheese etc.
Danish crown (meat)
Lurmaerket Butter
Danish Bacon
Thor Fish
Danisco Food

Candy:
Toms (chocolate)
Lagermann
Galle & Jessen

Beverages:
Tuborg Beer
Carlsberg Beer
Aalborg Aquavit

Medicine:
Novo

Clothing:
H2O
Hummel
Per Reumert

Shoes:
Ecco
Jaco

Danish Design:
Royal Copenhagen
Georg Jensen
Stelton
PH-lamps
Lego (toys)
Brio (toys)
Raadvad (knives etc.)
Trip Trap
HTH- kitchen
Morsoe (Fireplaces)
Royal Danish Porcelain
B & G Porcelain
Vesta (Windmills)
B & O radios/televisions etc.

Other:
Watco Danish Furniture Oil

Emotional retards

I imagine the handful of folks who check in here on a regular or semi-regular basis find my political and religious observations a bit tedious, so I'll keep this one mercifully brief.
While there are doubtless millions of Muslims who are horrified by the current frenzy over a few cartoons published in newspapers, the impression being given to the rest of the world is that Islam is a form of mental illness and its adherents are emotionally retarded.
A friend who was in Tehran for a few months around the time of the fall of the Shah observed that the masses in the streets who supported Khomeini had the political sophistication of children.
Sadly, nothing seems to have changed.

Worth repeating

Sensitivity' can have brutal consequences February 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I long ago lost count of the number of times I've switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ''Death to the Great Satan!'' Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ''Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!'' But I never thought I'd switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.
Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that's easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven't a clue how I'd get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.
Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, the Danes are a little bewildered to find that this time it's plucky little Denmark who's caught the eye of the nutters. Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.
Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.
Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.
That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the "sensitivity" of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ''Shouf Shouf Habibi!'' on the grounds that "I don't want a knife in my chest" -- which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ''right to dissent'' all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they're just being "sensitive,'' too.
And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the "sensitivity" of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.
One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."
© Mark Steyn, 2006 Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006 Copyright © The Sun-Times Company.

Great Danes

As a career newspaperman, I share my colleagues' outrage over the behavior of much of the Islamic world in response to a few cartoons published in Danish newspapers depicting the Prophed Mohammed.
The reaction has included recalling ambassadors from Denmark, boycotts of Danish products, burning Danish flags, threats against Danish journalists and Danes in general, and on and on.
Yet nobody would raise an eyebrow if Western newspapers published irreverent cartroons depicting the Pope or Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
I came across this piece on one of my favorite sites this afternoon and think it's worth repeating here:

So it’s OK for ayatollahs to offend Western values by routinely issuing fatwas requiring devout Muslims to kill those whom they dislike (a la Salman Rushdie)!

It’s OK to preach hatred of Jews and Christians every day in Koranic schools and mosques the world over! It’s OK for Muslim newspapers to publish cartoons that portray Jews as pigs and apes, and exhort Muslims to “to slaughter them and murder them, according to the words of Allah”!

It’s OK to blast planes and buildings in the name of Allah and celebrate the mass murderers, called the “Magnificent 19” in the Islamic press, by organizing conferences in their honor!

It’s OK to praise martyrdom against the West, and encourage it by agitating the lure of 71 virgins and making hefty payments to the families of those who blast themselves!

It’s OK for Islamic leaders to demand the physical elimination of the Jews and of their state in holocaust fashion!

It’s OK for Arabs living in the West to deny their daughters education in violation of Western laws! It’s OK to rape those who dare dress with Western fashion! It’s OK to practice polygamy! It’s OK to defend women abuse and battery from the pulpit!

It’s OK for conservative Arab countries to ban Western women from driving and force them to wear chadors in public. It’s OK for their courts to order mutilation and death-by-stoning for minor offenses.

It’s OK to turn a blind eye to female genital mutilation.

It’s OK to randomly seize hostages and murder them like pigs, while praising Allah!

Let’s stop this nonsense! The West has values too that are non-negotiable. They include freedom of the press, freedom of expression, equality, and democracy among others. If Arabs want to live in our midst, they must uphold them. No exception! If they do not care to, they are welcome to return to the sand dunes that are more hospitable to their sensitivities.

And, let us never make the mistake to apologize for our values or tolerate compromises and exceptions. And shame to the weak-hearted and feeble-minded politicians and editors who offered regrets and apologies for what is nothing but an assertion of Western most cherished values. They have once again failed their people and dishonored their offices.

Taking stock

Maria and I have been submitting our photos to a stock photo agency called PAI Networks for the past couple of years. Nothing much has come of it, but we remain hopeful that some publishers will go to www.painetworks.com, do a keyword search for some particular subject and fall wildly in love with our work.
So far we have 1,319 images posted there. If you're terminally bored and want to see what we do, click here.

Space cowboy

Poking around in the attic this afternoon, I discovered an album containing long-forgotten photos of my childhood.
I was particularly struck by this one. I'm wearing some kind of Buck Rogers space hat, complete with goggles, and using my tricycle to pull my dog, Spot, in a wagon.
This would be around 1951 or so and the setting is the alley behind our house.
I was very space-minded and couldn't get enough science fiction stuff. This was at a time when Tom Corbett - Space Cadet and Space Patrol were on TV and I never missed an episode.

Sunrise at Punxsutawney

The goofballs in top hats say this lardass rodent saw his shadow this morning, signifying there will six more weeks of winter and no early spring. Pretty scientific, eh?
So far, we've hardly had any winter at all here in central Indiana, so another six weeks of daily highs above freezing is no big deal.
Bring it on, Fat Boy Phil.
(Hey, isn't that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on the right?)

I got a Nikon camera...

One of my wife's coworkers gave us a couple of old film cameras the other day - something he'd had knocking around for decades.
One was a Mamiya C3 double-lens reflex, 2¼x2¼ camera.
The other was this - a Nikon F with the Ftn light meter finder and a 50mm f/1.45 lens.
This was once the camera of my dreams. When I got into the newspaper business back in the mid-1960s, this was the absolute ultimate supreme 35mm single lens reflex camera. All of the top shooters, especially guys covering Vietnam like Eddie Adams and David Douglas Duncan, wouldn't walk out the front door without at least two of these hanging from neck and shoulders - one with a wide-angle lens, the other with a telephoto.
These things were clunky and heavy but they earned the reputation of being able to take a terrible beating and keep on going. One shooter of the period called the Nikon F a "hockey puck" for its indestructibility and the name stuck.
For whatever reason, I didn't think I could afford a Nikon, so when I was ready to step up from a Mamiya HiMatic 7 rangefinder 35mm to an SLR, I bought a Pentax Spotmatic and ended up investing in several Pentax screw-mount lenses. They were a nightmare to change under pressure because it was tricky to get the threads lined up.
Nikon, of course, pioneered the bayonet mount - insert the lens into the camera body, give it a twist and it locks into place.
I eventually got seduced by autofocus point-and-shoots and it wasn't until I started hanging out with Maria that I sold all of my Pentax junk and started investing in Nikon gear - first an N90S, then an F5 before we transitioned to our digital D100s.
My friend Bob Basler, who went on to the Albany, N.Y. Knickerbocker News and then to Reuters, married the daughter of the president of the Associated Press. Consequently, he came to know Eddie Adams and ended up with one of Eddie's Nikon Fs.
The F, introduced in 1959, was the first successful 35mm SLR and helped change "Made in Japan" from pejorative expression to a mark of quality and precision.
By today's standards, it's as ancient and obsolete as a typewriter. Other than the light meter, there's nothing electronic about it. Everything is mechanical.
No autofocus, no program modes, no automatic film advance. You focus manually with a (to my eyes, anyway) hard to use viewfinder screen and you set the shutter speed and aperture manually. You also advance the film with a thumb lever.
The light meter, which replaced the stock prism eyepiece housing, was a through-the-lens affair, so it saw what the film would see in terms of light. You achieved a proper exposure by adjustinaperturere and shutter speed to balance a light meter needle that appeared at the top of the viewing field. Along with the needle, there was also a read-out for the shutter speed.
The meter used two 1.35 volt mercury batteries, which are no longer available because of environmental concerns about mercury. The mercury cells were ideal because they continued to deliver a consistent 1.35 volts throughout their life until they finally crapped out. Currently available 1.35 volt cells deliver less and less power as they age, which means less and less accurate meter readings. The other choice is 1.5 volt cells which deliver a consistently wrong reading by an f-stop or two.
Other than dead meter batteries, the Nikon F given to us appears to be usable. The optics are reasonably clear and the shutter seems ok. I expect I'll run a roll of film though it soon and see how it does, not that I expect to use it for anything important.
All of our serious work is digital and on the rare occasion that I do need to shoot film, I have the F's direct descendant - the Nikon F5. But the F5 has been obsoleted too, by the F6 - what many believe will be Nikon's last professional 35mm SLR.
But whether I ever use the F or not, it's fun to finally own one and to have a piece of photojournalistic history on my office bookcase shelf.

TreoAlarm: Killer app

This is TreoAlarm, a truly killer application and something I've been looking for since I got my Treo 600 last fall.
It wakes you up and gives you the current weather all in one shot.
One of the main reasons I bought a smartphone was because I wanted as many of the features of a notebook computer as possible in a small package that I could carry with me on motorcycle trips.
The Treo 600 lets me journal, check e-mail and blog from the road, but until now I never had a reliable alarm and it was a bit of a hassle to check the weather - something a touring motorcyclist routinely wants to know about as soon as he wakes up every morning. Now I have an application that will get me on the road on time and brief me instantly on the current weather conditions and the forecast for what's waiting out in front of me.
If you're a Treo user, check it out at www.treoalarm.com

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Frantz

This flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation and the United States Army as a token of appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service.


Marilyn and James Frantz, Lafayette, Ind., accept the flag from the casket of their son, Spc. Matthew Frantz, 23, killed in action Jan. 20 at Hawijah, Iraq.

A half-dozen of the loonies from Topeka did show up outside the church, but so did about 60 bikers - mostly members of ABATE of Indiana and Vietnam and Gulf War vets - who would have stomped the wackos if the cops hadn't kept them separated. The wackos left about 5 minutes before I got there and, while I would have enjoyed photographing the scene, it did mean that they will get no publicity in my wife's paper. And, after all, this was about Spc. Frantz, not a bunch of evil morons who are an insult to Christianity.

Funeral duty today

I'm being a photojournalist today.
I'm driving up to Lafayette (Ind.) to photograph the funeral of a 23-year-old soldier in the 101st Airborne Division who was killed last week in Iraq.
The funeral will be in the Lafayette Christian Reformed Church. My first wife and her family were members there and that's where we were married, so I know the place well. The last time I was there was for my mother-in-law's funeral in 1991.
I don't plan to go inside for the funeral services because I don't want to be intrusive. So I'll stay outside and shoot the casket coming out and keep an eye out for those malignant imbeciles from the moronic Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kans., who think casualties in Iraq are America's payback for not putting gay people in concentration camps. They would have been right at home in the Third Reich.
Then I'll beat it over to the cemetery and shoot that scene.
It's overcast and it will be around 40 degrees by then. The last two funerals I shot were for police officers killed in the line of duty and they were on considerably colder days. Just once, I'd like to cover one of these things in nice weather, assuming I have to cover one at all.

Taxing times at Wal-Mart

Tax time at Wal-Mart I listened in on a bit of this interview and there's no way I'd let the guy she was talking to figure my taxes.

Job app

The kid on the right is filling out a job application at Wal-Mart. Good luck, kid.

Funky Llama

Hot damn! Funky Llama Argentine wine on sale!
Funky Llama is a pretty good brand of table wines made in Argentina. It's a killer bargain because of the extremely favorable exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the U.S. dollar.
We discovered it a few months ago in the wine section of Meijer stores, gave it a try and were favorably impressed. We checked out a few online reviews, just to be sure our taste buds weren't completely out of synch with everyone else and have been regular consumers of Funky Llama ever since.
Ordinarily, it runs $5-6 a bottle, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it on sale at Meijer for $4.50 a bottle.

Read this

I discovered Colby Buzzell's milblog from Iraq several months ago - http://cbftw.blogspot.com/ - titled My War: Fear and Loathing in Iraq.
He wrote the most compelling first-person accounts of combat I've read from that conflict and had a huge following. He was even read on a regular basis at the White House and the Pentagon.
Unfortunately, he made people in his chain of command nervous and they put so much pressure on him that he decided to pack it in.
But the good news is that his blog entries ended up forming the core of his book titled My War: Killing Time in Iraq (clever double-entendre, eh?).
I put it on my Amazon.com wish list and my stepdaughter was kind enough to buy it for me for Christmas.
I took my time, savoring it, and finally finished reading it this week.
It's not great literature, but it's as honest an account of a U.S. soldier's experience in Iraq as you're likely to see and it makes me proud of this most professional army we've ever fielded.
If Buzzell, for all of his faults and frailties, is typical of America's armed forces, our enemies have little to hope for and much to fear.

Low-speed banking

My view for what seemed like forever this afternoon at the bank. Today, everyone is a moron.

Dog Wars

Ruthie telling Pete to get out of her space.


Pete the Pup is feeling feisty this morning.
He's growling his little high-pitched growl and shaking the bejeezus out of the seemingly indestructible rubber mallard we gave Ruthie for Christmas a couple of years ago.
Now he's dashing wildly back and forth across the bedroom floor, looking for something to attack.
A few minutes ago, he and Ruthie were engaged in a spirited argument - facing off and barking and snapping at each other. I think it's just play, but sometimes it's worrisome.
Ruthie jumped up onto the couch with Maria and me last night while we watched TV and Pete, who apparently has come to regard the couch as his exclusive domain, went crazy and started growling and snapping at Ruthie. This was mildly comical, since he's still too small to jump up onto the couch from the floor. His usual route onto the couch is up the stairs behind it and through the bannister rungs onto the back of the counch.
Pete seems generally unimpressed with Ruthie's size and recognizes that he has the edge with his Aussie speed and agility. He backs off only when he senses she's ready to do him some serious harm.
But he's always pushing and probing and intruding into her comfort zone.
Maria had hoped they could be buddies and we see occasional indications that things may turn out that way. At least they're not mortal enemies.
When we turn them out into the back yard, Pete bounds out the back door right behind Ruthie and shadows her around the yard. When she sits and stares at the treeline behind our property, Pete sits next to her and gazes in the same direction, probably wondering all the while what it is that they're looking for.
He's looking to her for instruction on how to be a member of our pack, but he's also asserting himself whenever possible.
He wasn't the Alpha dog in his litter. That position was occupied by a white-faced female pup who shouldered her siblings aside at feeding time and grew conspicuously faster than the others.
But now we wonder if Pete wasn't second in the pecking order.
Ruthie will be eight years old this year, which makes her 56 in dog years. It's clear that Pete's energetic pestering wears her out. She's turned to me several times lately, after a fierce barking exchange with Pete, with a pleading look as if to say, "Would you please get this kid away from me?" Sometimes she even whines about it.
We can only hope that she can endure until Pete outgrows his impulse to tweak her up, since she seems to be losing her ability to put him in his place.

A moment of truce.

Life's little surprises

Wise man hide leaf in tree - ancient Chinese proverb


See this rug?
We have one just like it in our dining room and a similar, darker version in the living room. They fit nicely in our century-old Queen Anne Victorian house.
But they have an unexpected down-side, especially the one in the living room.
They are a near-perfect camouflage background for dogshit.
We don't use the living room much, so Ruthie's rather rare indiscretions sometimes went a week or more before they were discovered - long enough to dry and nearly petrify.
Now that we have Pete the Pup, this is especially troubling because Pete hasn't quite gotten the idea that his bathroom facilities are outdoors.
Even with daylight streaming in through the windows or with all of the lamps blazing, Pete poop is fiendishly hard to see. Maria made that discovery last night with her sock feet. We did a careful survey and got all of it, but just to be sure I swept the area with my laser pointer at a height of about a half-inch and found nothing more.
Pete gets regular visits to the back yard but he seems to think it's because we want him to chase Ruthie around, gnaw on a stick or poke his nose into interesting places under the deck.
Pete has no idea how lucky he is that I am completely captivated by his cuteness and that he has caught me at a point in my life when I had the patience to deal with his chaos.

Burns me up

Aside from the usual two or three credit card solicitations, today's junk mail included promotional material for the Cremation Center of Indiana.
I'd like to think everyone in my Zip code got the mailing. It would be disturbing to think I was singled out as a particularly promising recipient because I just happen to be 60.
The letter from someone named Barb Milton, which addressed me familiarly on a first-name basis, informs me the Cremation Center of Indiana at 635 E. Market Street in Indianapolis "is a one-of-a-kind facility that includes a spectacular meeting room. It is the perfect place to hold a memorial gathering, reception and other special events and there is nothing like it anywhere in the country."
Barb goes on to invite me to come for a visit, dangling as bait a cheesy looking "Howard Miller clock with mahogany finish, quartz movement. A $25 value!"
Wow. A clock with a wholesale value of $12.50.
The envelope also includes a Q&A sheet with photos of 60-ish men and women who are presumably getting their questions answered. Like, "How long does it take to cremate a body?" (Between 2 and 2½ hours.) and "Is embalming necessary for cremation?" (No.)
Well, Barb, you caught me in a particularly unreceptive mood today and I'm throwing your stuff in the trash.
I'm not ready to go up in flames just yet.

Seeing things in a bad light

I'm working on reducing our energy consumption around the house.
I've been walking around turning off lights and unneeded appliances and I've got programmable theromostats delivering heat to only the parts of the house where there are people. The fact that we're having a remarkably warm January makes me hopeful that we'll save enough on natural gas consumption to offset the post-Katrina price hikes.
And slowly but surely I'm replacing the most heavily used lightbulbs with the spring-shaped fluourescent bulbs that deliver lots of illumination for much less electricity.
Maria discovered from her quilting sources that there's a color-correct daylight version of these high efficiency bulbs. We bought one for her quilting table lamp and another for a lamp in the parlor where she quilts while watching TV. She loves them and swears she can see better and with greater color accuracy.
So when I was at the Home Depot yesterday afternoon looking to pick up a few more replacement bulbs, I snarfed up a three-pack of Commercial Electric Daylight Lamps, rated at 90 watts of illumination, but only drawing 23 watts of power.
I decided the three-light ceiling fan fixture over the kitchen table was probably getting the most use of any conventionally bulbed light in the house, so I replaced its three 60 watt bulbs with the new Daylight Lamps.
I hadn't anticipated there would be such a difference from a combined 180 watts of illumination to 270 watts. The color quality was quite unexpected at this intensity as well.
This end of the kitchen now looks like it's being lit by one of those mercury vapor outdoor security lights. It certainly doesn't feel like daylight - too much blue/purple. And it makes the can-mounted floods on the other end of the kitchen look positively yellow.
I also noticed a warm-up period for these bulbs. They come on a little dim and build to their full intensity over a period of about 30 seconds or so.
Rather than evoking the warmth of natural sunlight, the quality of the light strikes me as stark and cold. In fact, it's making me feel a little queasy. Daylight? On what planet?
Maybe the non-daylight 60 watt version of the energy saving bulb would be a better fit for the kitchen table. I can install the 90s in seldom-used living room lamps and derive my advertised $201 in energy savings that way.

Scary stuff

So I'm editing stories at Maria's newspaper this afternoon and we hear someone screaming "Mayday!" on a fire department frequency.
All other activity in the newsroom stops as we gather around the scanner radio and listen to a conversation between a firefighter who is apparently trapped inside a burning building and the guys outside.
Maria had one of the reporters call the photographeer on his cell phone and then checked with the fire department dispatcher.
We're all having visions of the movie "Ladder 49" and think we're listening to a firefighter about to die.
But no, it turns out it's a training exercise.
Maria got on the phone to the fire dispatcher and implored them to let us know ahead of time when they're going to train, explaining everyone over here was freaking out.

--
Sent from my Treo

I'm Super Cool. How about you?

Am I cool or uncool? [CLICK] You are Super-Cool! Whoa! Step back - the future's so bright for you it's blinding me! You are the coolest of the cool. Everyone looks up to you as the benchmark for being coooool. The Fonz was your grandfather. Any cooler and you'd freeze! WOO it's chilly in here. Cool quizzes at Go-Quiz.com

Purging Pete's parasites

Pete the pup has had a rough morning.
He's dozing in his kennel, worn out from a traumatic trip to the veterinarian's office.
We took him to the vet four weeks ago, where he got medicated for roundworms - a parasite common to puppies. The doc gave us a syringe with a second dose of the liquid to squirt down Pete's throat on Jan. 6 and we followed his instructions.
But scrutiny of Pete's poop showed he was still blowing out worms as late as this morning.
Turns out they were tapeworm segments, something outside the reach of the wormer meds we'd given him.
So, in addition to his distemper shot this morning, Pete had to swallow a couple of tapeworm pills. The doc put them deep into Pete's throat and the pup managed to swallow one, but spit out the other.
He clearly wanted nothing more to do with pills, so the doc had to straightjacket him with a towel wrap and recruit an assistant to hold the pup down while he used a pill-poker to jam the tabled down his throat.
Pete, of course, was sure he was being killed and screamed and choked accordingly.
He stuck close by my side while I paid the bill and lay quietly in his basket on the ride home.
He went directly to his kennel for a nap and I haven't heard a peep out of him since.

On the road again...

On the road again: a January jaunt to the Greencastle exit on I-70.

Riding again. Amazing!

Anytime the temperature gets above 55 in January in Indiana, it's riding weather.
So here I am, putting some unexpected miles on the K1200GT.
At the moment, I'm taking a break at the Greencastle exit on I-70, having ridden down to see the World War II German V-1 buzz bomb on the Putnam County Courthouse square. Unfortunately for me, its V-shaped concrete pedestal is empty because the thing is being restored after 50-some years of Hoosier weather and acid rain. I guess it's a testimony to German craftsmanship that the thing has survived as long as it has. After all, the designers never envisioned 50 years of weather exposure. They figured it would be fired and blown to bits somewhere in England within a few weeks of its manufacture.
Anyhow, it's a very incongruous sight, since most military courthouse lawn decorations are artillery pieces, tanks or gutted aircraft.
The ride down here kinda sucked because I got stuck behind a long slug of slow-moving traffic on a twisty two-lane highway with few passing opportunities and lots of oncoming traffic.
So I just backed off, put it on cruise control and got into XM radio's 5002 greatest hits of rock on the Deep Tracks channel.
I spent a few hours yesterday briefing some touring novice friends on road choices in Arizona, Utah and Colorado and couldn't possibly pass up a chance to ride in today's fine weather.

--
Sent from my Treo

The Kennedy Curse

After watching Sen. Ted Kennedy badgering Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, I find myself wondering, "Where is the Kennedy curse when we really need it?"
Does it just work on Kennedys who I like? Despite my present political perspective, at various points in my life I've had favorable thoughts about some of the Kennedys.
I liked John Kennedy, being in my teens during his brief presidency. I liked him so much that I went to Washington, D.C. in November, 1963 for his funeral.
I liked Bobby Kennedy because he represented what I thought was the best alternative to Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
I liked John Kennedy Jr. because he didn't go into politics and trade on his family name and because he was stylish without being politically menacing.
But when it comes to Ted Kennedy, I can't remember him saying anything I could agree with since about in the last 35 years.

A Picture Share!

Pete in the back seat.

Bust the hoax

A friend forwarded an e-mail to me today - a chain-letter kind of thing that purported to be an account of testimony given by Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987 in which Col. North warned senators - including Al Gore - about Osama bin Laden. It also included a story about how the Israelis had 9/11 WTC pilot Mohamed Atta in prison and were pressured to release him by Bill Clinton and then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
I've seen enough of these things to be reflexively skeptical and I also know some of my friends will forward some crazy stuff without checking it.
So I went to the two best authorities on online tomfoolery - Hoaxbusters and Snopes.
And, of course, both sites said the stories are bogus. Snopes, in fact, had a letter from Col. North refuting the bin Laden story and asserting that he was speaking of the terrorist Abu Nidal.
Now, I detest Bill Clinton and Al Gore as much as any right-thinking Republican, but I prefer to deal in facts.
So the next time you get an e-mail with a shocking story, regardless of the political spin, please check it out before you forward it to everyone in your address book. If you don't, it's about the same as if you let a virus replicate via your e-mail access. It also makes you look like a gullible dope when your friends try to confirm the story.

Semper Fi

I had the amazing honor today to speak with Raymond Jacobs, a member of the Marine recon patrol that raised the first American flag on Iwo Jima.
Everyone has seen Associated Press photographer's iconic photo of the second flag-raising on Iwo. It's possibly the greatest photograph to come out of World War II and was the basis for the sculpture that is the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The first flag-raising involved a smaller flag. Moments after the Marines erected the makeshift flagpole that was actually a water pipe the Japanese defenders had used to supply their fighting positions on the summit of Mt. Suribachi, the Japanese came out of their holes in the volcanic crater and attacked the Marines. They beat the attack back, but Staff Sgt. Lou Lowrey, who photgraphed the first flag-raising, tumbled down the slope and smashed his camera. Fortunately, the film was saved and we have this photo of the guys, including radioman Jacobs on the far right of this picture.
Jacobs is one of two surviving men from this photo. The other is Charles Lindberg.
Jacobs has an account of the action on another website and I was struck by this passage from it:

Just moments after the flag was raised we heard a roar from down below on the island.
Marines on the ground, still engaged in combat, raised a spontaneous yell when they saw the flag. Screaming and cheering so loud and prolonged that we could hear it quite clearly on top of Suribachi.
The boats on the beach and the ships at sea joined in blowing horns and whistles.
The celebration went on for many minutes. It was a highly emotional, strongly patriotic moment for all of us.

Jan. 2 and I'm riding!

Greetings from the westbound rest area on I-74, 25 miles east of the Illinois state line.

Out for a ride

The temperature is crowding 60 and it's partly sunny, so I've gone for a motorcycle ride.
I checked the Weather Channel radar before I left home and determined there was a storm front about 50 miles west of the Indiana-Illinois state line, so I took Maria's advice and rode west on I-74 to meet it and race it home.
I got as far as the Covington exit - about 8 miles from the state line and çoncluded the rain was one, maybe two exits away.
So I turned around and headed back east, stopping at the first Crawfordsville exit for a McDonald's lunch and to blog.
Being able to go for a 100+ mile ride today is like a gift. I didn't expect to fire the engine again until late February.
I needed a ride to clear my head - Morgan had Ruthie and Pete playing tug-of-war with Ruthie's rubber mallard last night when Ruthie suddenly went on the attack and Pete ended up with a bloody gum and a front tooth nearly ripped out - it was standing straight out and when Maria tried to push it back into place, she concluded the underlying soft bone may have been broken.
I'd read Maria (and I thought Morgan) a passage from a dog training book my son Steve gave me for Christmas that advised against forcing a new dog and an established dog to play together. Rather, you're supposed to let them define their relationship themselves. I had misgivings when they playing started last night, but didn't want to seem a jerk by stopping it. Obviously, I should have interceded.
Fortunately, Pete seemed to be mending nicely this morning and the tooth looked like it was moving back into its original position, so we cancelled the appointment we'd made with the vet.
Nevertheless, I found the attack very disturbing and felt terrible that I'd allowed the puppy to be hurt. I'll not make that mistake again.
--
Sent from my Treo