By Beth Terrell
Last week, my friend Allan Barlow flew into Nashville from his home in Seattle, Washington. We've known each other since junior high school, took drama and band together in high school, and kept in touch through college, where he majored in theater. He worked as an actor for the next 26 years, eventually settling in Seattle with his wife and their two lovely daughters, of whom he is immensely and deservedly proud. We exchanged the occasional email, not nearly enough contact with someone I loved like a brother. But like all the best friendships, it was like no time at all had passed, and we picked up where we had left off, as if we had stepped straight from 1983 and into the present. True friendship is timeless.
On Saturday evening, my husband and I went to see Allan perform a one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It was fascinating to watch him slide effortlessly from one character to another and back to the narrator. I laughed, I cried, I saw the whole story in my mind as clearly as if each of those characters had been standing in front of me. I loved it so much I went back the next afternoon and saw it again. Although he has done dozens, maybe hundreds, of performances of various versions of A Christmas Carol over the years, he says he never gets tired of it. Apparently, neither do we.
Actors as varied as George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine, and Mr. Magoo have played Scrooge. Henry Winkler, the Fonz, did an Americanized version called An American Christmas Carol. Bill Murray put his own stamp on the tale in Scrooged. The muppets did a version in which Kermit played Bob Cratchit; in the Mickey Mouse version, the curmudgeonly Scrooge McDuck played his namesake; and most television series eventually get around to doing at least one episode based on the well-known tale. The equally timeless It's a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart, had its roots in Scrooge's story, as does Adam Sandler's modern fantasy, Click. Like friendship, a good story is timeless.
So what is it about this story that engages us so? Why can we watch it over and over again in all its many permutations and never grow weary of it? What is it about this simple story of forgiveness and redemption that strikes such a deep chord in our hearts? Perhaps it's Jacob Marley's act of grace: he arranges for Scrooge's "reclamation," even though he has no reason to believe he himself will gain anything by it. Perhaps it is the goodness of ordinary men like Bob Cratchit and Scrooge's nephew, Fred, who drink the health of a miserly old man who doesn't deserve it. Perhaps it's because, in Scrooge's transformation, we find hope that we can become better than we are.
Maybe it's just magic.
Whatever the reason, it is clear that in the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, Dickens tapped into something every writer dreams of. He must have hoped his words would live on after him, but he could not have known that this simple holiday tale, written in 1843, would still be being told and retold a hundred-and-sixty-plus years later, or that it would become so much a part of our culture. Could any writer hope for more than to touch as many lives and hearts as Dickens did when he created that "tight-fisted hand at the grindstone," that "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" called Ebeneezer Scrooge?
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Japanese Manners
By Mark W. Danielson
Manners seem to be a thing of the past. It would appear that the crazier our world gets, the less we “mind our manners.” Thankfully, there is a place where politeness is still emphasized, and that’s in the Land of the Rising Sun. Yes, Japan has been passing on its good manners from generation to generation, and while a few bad apples may slip through the cracks, as a whole, you won’t find a more courteous group of people.
Everything about the Japanese is tidy and polite. Their taxi drivers, who polish their cars when they’re not in service, dress in suits, wear white gloves, place white protectors on their seats, greet you, and politely deliver you to your hotel. Your hotel staff politely greets you in colorful, polite uniforms, provide a polite check-in, and en route to your room, frequently receive a polite greeting from one of the housekeeping staff. When entering a Japanese restaurant, you are treated as a guest by a polite waiter who serves you your polite meal. School kids dressed in nicely pressed uniforms smile and carry on polite conversations as they walk the streets. Police officers politely wave at traffic to ensure order. Traffic blends without blaring horns because their drivers are polite. In fact, they are so polite, they stop for pedestrians. Even Japan’s rice fields create a sense of order. So while other countries may also be polite, Japan sets the bar when it comes to manners.
Why is that? Because in this island country, nearly every resident is Japanese, and it’s much easier to be polite when you don’t have contrasting cultures and ethnic groups. But Japan’s politeness also stems from their national pride, and while they got a bit carried away with it sixty seven years ago, they managed to rebuild their country, turning it into a global economic power, and still dominate the world with new inventions. That’s the kind of national pride I’m referring to. Needless to say, Japan has come a long way since exporting cheap plastic products.
My point is that we can all learn something from the Japanese. We can take ourselves a little less seriously. We can replace the garbage our television stations are broadcasting with silly Japanese-style game shows where laughing at ourselves is entertaining. We can be grateful for what we have rather than always expecting more. We can give more love to our family and friends. And finally, we can smile and laugh a lot more. After all, smiles are acceptably contagious.
Manners seem to be a thing of the past. It would appear that the crazier our world gets, the less we “mind our manners.” Thankfully, there is a place where politeness is still emphasized, and that’s in the Land of the Rising Sun. Yes, Japan has been passing on its good manners from generation to generation, and while a few bad apples may slip through the cracks, as a whole, you won’t find a more courteous group of people.
Everything about the Japanese is tidy and polite. Their taxi drivers, who polish their cars when they’re not in service, dress in suits, wear white gloves, place white protectors on their seats, greet you, and politely deliver you to your hotel. Your hotel staff politely greets you in colorful, polite uniforms, provide a polite check-in, and en route to your room, frequently receive a polite greeting from one of the housekeeping staff. When entering a Japanese restaurant, you are treated as a guest by a polite waiter who serves you your polite meal. School kids dressed in nicely pressed uniforms smile and carry on polite conversations as they walk the streets. Police officers politely wave at traffic to ensure order. Traffic blends without blaring horns because their drivers are polite. In fact, they are so polite, they stop for pedestrians. Even Japan’s rice fields create a sense of order. So while other countries may also be polite, Japan sets the bar when it comes to manners.
Why is that? Because in this island country, nearly every resident is Japanese, and it’s much easier to be polite when you don’t have contrasting cultures and ethnic groups. But Japan’s politeness also stems from their national pride, and while they got a bit carried away with it sixty seven years ago, they managed to rebuild their country, turning it into a global economic power, and still dominate the world with new inventions. That’s the kind of national pride I’m referring to. Needless to say, Japan has come a long way since exporting cheap plastic products.
My point is that we can all learn something from the Japanese. We can take ourselves a little less seriously. We can replace the garbage our television stations are broadcasting with silly Japanese-style game shows where laughing at ourselves is entertaining. We can be grateful for what we have rather than always expecting more. We can give more love to our family and friends. And finally, we can smile and laugh a lot more. After all, smiles are acceptably contagious.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
The ABCs of Writing a Book
By Chester Campbell
A few people seem to possess a sort of inherent compass that guides their minds into creating stories that satisfy all the requirements of good writing in one fell swoop of the pen, or a single foray across the keyboard. I'm in awe of the one-draft author. That's because I’m the polar opposite. I constantly edit and revise as I go.
Every writer must find what works best for him or herself. I don’t advocate that anyone follow my style of creating a book, but if you find something here that validates what you do or in some way intrigues you into trying a different approach, I’ll feel I have succeeded in some small manner.
I approach a new a novel with a basic idea for an incident that could lead to lots of complications. In my second Greg McKenzie mystery, for example, I considered what might happen if a penthouse balcony collapsed during a party at a new beachfront high-rise condo, killing two people. That presented the questions: what caused the accident, and who was responsible?
With the major premise in hand, I needed a cast of characters. I’m not a detailed plotter or an outliner, so I depend on my characters to dictate the direction of the story. I decided on a young architect/engineer from the previous book to bear the brunt of blame for the accident. For potential bad guys I picked a developer, a contractor, and an inspector. I later added a female real estate agent.
At that point I needed a little initial research to put me on the right track. Since I knew little if anything about condo construction, I consulted a couple of friends. One was a civil engineer, the other a structural engineer who dealt with concrete, the material of choice for building beachfront condos. That gave me enough information to start writing.
I began with a Prologue that, thanks to later revision, introduced all the suspects and most of the major characters, except for my protagonists, Greg and Jill McKenzie. I set it at the penthouse party and used a third person omniscient viewpoint so I could let the reader know the balcony was in trouble from the opening line. Starting with Chapter 1, the story is told in first person from Greg's point of view.
The architect/engineer is found dead the next morning of what the sheriff calls a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The young man’s parents are the McKenzies’ best friends, and his father doesn’t believe he would commit suicide. He asks Greg, a retired Air Force investigator, to look into it.
After the first few chapters in Nashville, the story moved to Perdido Key, FL. It was time for more intensive on-scene research. My brother had a condo there where my wife and I had stayed a couple of times a year, which is how the plot idea came about. We spent two weeks there checking out various angles. Since the so-called suicide occurred at the Gulf Islands National Seashore, I interviewed the National Park ranger responsible for law enforcement. Following up on what I learned from him, I talked to a sheriff’s investigator, a medical examiner’s tech, and a man in the building inspection office.
I also researched locations and backgrounds on Perdido Key, in Pensacola and around Escambia County.
Although I don’t outline, I did extensive character sketches for the major characters and typed up detailed notes from my research. And early on I plotted out where all the main characters were each hour on the night of the murder.
By this time I knew who the murderer was (or so I thought) and had a pretty good idea of where the story was headed. I sat down to write in earnest. But things happen. About halfway through the book, I changed my mind about the murderer. It required going back to make sure I had left enough clues to make the ending believable. That’s what I love about fiction. You’re free to alter the past anytime you like. Makes you feel like God tinkering with the universe.
As I mentioned at the start, I am a constant rewriter. Each time I sit down to write, I go back at least to the start of the last chapter, read through it and make changes where something doesn’t quite fit. Now and then I’ll start from the beginning and do a quick edit up to the point where I left off. Sometimes I may change a line back to what I had on the first try.
When I get to the end of the book, what might be called a first draft is really anything but. I take this opportunity to go back through the manuscript looking for places I can make the writing more colorful, more dramatic, more scintillating (okay, so I don't scintillate all that much). I also delete those too-cute phrases that I got carried away with in their creation. I try to smooth out the rough spots Chris Roerden cites in her book Don’t Murder Your Mystery.
The book I covered here is titled Designed to Kill and was published in 2004. You can read the Prologue and Chapter 1 by clicking this link to the Designed Opening. If you're interested, go to my home page for a 40 percent discount on purchasing the book.
And if you don't agree with my technique for creating your masterpiece, work out your own. But sit down and write it. That's a requirement.
A few people seem to possess a sort of inherent compass that guides their minds into creating stories that satisfy all the requirements of good writing in one fell swoop of the pen, or a single foray across the keyboard. I'm in awe of the one-draft author. That's because I’m the polar opposite. I constantly edit and revise as I go.
Every writer must find what works best for him or herself. I don’t advocate that anyone follow my style of creating a book, but if you find something here that validates what you do or in some way intrigues you into trying a different approach, I’ll feel I have succeeded in some small manner.
I approach a new a novel with a basic idea for an incident that could lead to lots of complications. In my second Greg McKenzie mystery, for example, I considered what might happen if a penthouse balcony collapsed during a party at a new beachfront high-rise condo, killing two people. That presented the questions: what caused the accident, and who was responsible?
With the major premise in hand, I needed a cast of characters. I’m not a detailed plotter or an outliner, so I depend on my characters to dictate the direction of the story. I decided on a young architect/engineer from the previous book to bear the brunt of blame for the accident. For potential bad guys I picked a developer, a contractor, and an inspector. I later added a female real estate agent.
At that point I needed a little initial research to put me on the right track. Since I knew little if anything about condo construction, I consulted a couple of friends. One was a civil engineer, the other a structural engineer who dealt with concrete, the material of choice for building beachfront condos. That gave me enough information to start writing.
I began with a Prologue that, thanks to later revision, introduced all the suspects and most of the major characters, except for my protagonists, Greg and Jill McKenzie. I set it at the penthouse party and used a third person omniscient viewpoint so I could let the reader know the balcony was in trouble from the opening line. Starting with Chapter 1, the story is told in first person from Greg's point of view.
The architect/engineer is found dead the next morning of what the sheriff calls a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The young man’s parents are the McKenzies’ best friends, and his father doesn’t believe he would commit suicide. He asks Greg, a retired Air Force investigator, to look into it.
After the first few chapters in Nashville, the story moved to Perdido Key, FL. It was time for more intensive on-scene research. My brother had a condo there where my wife and I had stayed a couple of times a year, which is how the plot idea came about. We spent two weeks there checking out various angles. Since the so-called suicide occurred at the Gulf Islands National Seashore, I interviewed the National Park ranger responsible for law enforcement. Following up on what I learned from him, I talked to a sheriff’s investigator, a medical examiner’s tech, and a man in the building inspection office.
I also researched locations and backgrounds on Perdido Key, in Pensacola and around Escambia County.
Although I don’t outline, I did extensive character sketches for the major characters and typed up detailed notes from my research. And early on I plotted out where all the main characters were each hour on the night of the murder.
By this time I knew who the murderer was (or so I thought) and had a pretty good idea of where the story was headed. I sat down to write in earnest. But things happen. About halfway through the book, I changed my mind about the murderer. It required going back to make sure I had left enough clues to make the ending believable. That’s what I love about fiction. You’re free to alter the past anytime you like. Makes you feel like God tinkering with the universe.
As I mentioned at the start, I am a constant rewriter. Each time I sit down to write, I go back at least to the start of the last chapter, read through it and make changes where something doesn’t quite fit. Now and then I’ll start from the beginning and do a quick edit up to the point where I left off. Sometimes I may change a line back to what I had on the first try.
When I get to the end of the book, what might be called a first draft is really anything but. I take this opportunity to go back through the manuscript looking for places I can make the writing more colorful, more dramatic, more scintillating (okay, so I don't scintillate all that much). I also delete those too-cute phrases that I got carried away with in their creation. I try to smooth out the rough spots Chris Roerden cites in her book Don’t Murder Your Mystery.
The book I covered here is titled Designed to Kill and was published in 2004. You can read the Prologue and Chapter 1 by clicking this link to the Designed Opening. If you're interested, go to my home page for a 40 percent discount on purchasing the book.
And if you don't agree with my technique for creating your masterpiece, work out your own. But sit down and write it. That's a requirement.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Gambel And Me
by Ben Small
Contrary to Mark, I don’t enjoy flying. Not at all. And my distaste has nothing to do with fear.
“Harumph,” you say. “Don’t believe a word of it. He’s just chicken and won’t admit it.”
“Nay, nay,” I say. I prefer to think of myself as a Gambel Quail, a bird that can fly but prefers the ground. And heck, I even look like one. Replace a Gambel’s plume with a baseball cap, and you’ve got me.
Yeah, that’s me portrayed above. I’m just wearing black-face and war paint. I wanted to look picture-cool.
Seriously, I know how well airplanes are made. I know about the redundancy of their systems, the sophistication of the computers that fly them on a wire. I know there are usually a series of failures causing a crash. Heck, I worked for an aerospace company that made many of these systems, and I spent the greater part of thirty years flying and defending air crash cases. Airplanes are safe, much safer than a car.
But I’ll take a car any day.
Recently, I was forced to fly from Arizona to Florida and back, a trip that would have required six hard days by car.
Well, I would have preferred the drive.
If I’d driven, I’d have toured the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and watched police-drug lord battles as I passed through El Paso. I’d have sniffed petroleum fumes all over West Texas, and snarfed plates of jambalaya in Louisiana. A book-on-tape would have carried me through Mississippi and Alabama, saving me from preacher-central-radio, and I would have landed in Palm Coast, Florida tired but happy.
Instead, I spent two miserable days each way, and I wanted to kill somebody. My wife wanted to kill me.
Why?
I’m no sausage. I’m six foot six. I don’t fit in a seat built for a midget.
It’s bad enough that I have to stand in line for an hour before I strip down for the TSA cuties who want to wand my private parts. They’re talking smack and chewing on beef jerky strips, occasionally spitting out sinew-bits at me and other unfortunate captives. Then, as I start to tingle in anticipation of actually being next in line, the woman in front of me passes through the detectors. Alarm bells go off. The woman finds a hidden pocket in her moo-moo, and removes something metal from it. The TSA sharpie nods.
The woman steps through again, and the alarms ring once more.
This happens six times. I’m growing old standing behind this woman. And the fat guy behind me has stinky feet. His beat-up Converse All Stars look like they were made in 1956 and have been worn ever since. They’re next to me, just three feet from my nose. I imagine clouds of foot-gas wafting toward me. I turn and look at the man. I see sweat streaming down his swollen cheeks, and his light blue shirt is turning royal blue under the armpits. Deep, dark smiles.
Stinky's barefoot.
I stare at those shoes, and guess they’ve been worn bare most of their service life.
Where is the EPA when you need them?
We finally board the plane, and wonder of wonders, Stinky turns out to be my seatmate. Yup. Squeezed between my wife and me.
My wife falls asleep immediately. Or maybe she fainted.
I’m in the window seat, and my seat belt receiver somehow slid underneath this guy’s butt, so now I gotta play cutsie with him to fish the thing out. He leans toward my wife ― which is when she went out, I think ― and I pull and tug. One final heave, and the bracket flies free. My back untorques, and my block cracks the junction of the interior fuselage and the overhead bin. I think I lost some hair.
Stinky is a chatterbox. Never flown before. He’s nervous. Which means he sweats more, too. The smell of foot becomes more prevalent. I can’t see if Stinky's removed his shoes, because I can’t move. I’m squashed into my seat like a sardine in a can. Irony is, I don’t need a seatbelt; you couldn’t pry me out of that seat.
Stinky says he’s from Tennessee, so I ask if he knows Chester Campbell or Beth Terrell. I don’t understand a word of his response.
I grin and pretend I’m somewhere else.
Stinky talks of his family, of his trip to Tucson, and other stuff I’m not really paying attention to. Besides, I can’t understand much of what Stinky says anyway. Part of my difficulty is his accent, which sounds a bit Clampet-like. But I can't concentrate either...
The stink, you know.
And Stinky's still sweating.
I pop an arm free and adjust the blower above my head, so it’s flowing full force. I debate where to point it, and then turn it his way. My unconscious wife drops deeper into her coma.
Something’s gotta change, so I tell this guy I’m gonna sleep, hoping this will shut him up. He mutters something and then reaches for the Sky Mall magazine. I turn my head to the right, grateful for another inch of distance from my seatmate, grateful even for the stale hair gell odor of the Naugahyde headpiece.
I’m just beginning to relax, when the seatback in front of me comes crashing into my knees.
My reaction is instinctual. I bellow and slam the back of the seat. The guy in front of me unsnaps his belt and turns around.
“Hey!” he says. “Why’d you do that?”
“That’s what you just did to my knees,” I say. “How’d you like it?”
“You can’t do that,” the man says. “I’m entitled to lay my seat back.”
“No, you aren’t,” I say. “Not when doing so causes me physical injury.”
The man tries edging his seat back, and I counter his pressure. I’ve got better leverage, because I can use my arms and knees as pistons. There's nothing for his arms to do, and he can’t use his legs without flipping the guy ahead of him out of his seat.
So he summons a flight attendant, and when she comes, he starts his whine.
You can guess what he's saying: I’m a big meanie; I won’t let him lay his seat back.
The flight attendant looks at my knees pressed up against the seat, and politely tells the guy to go stuff himself.
Stinky wants to chat some more, and my wife is still out cold. So I yawn, feign sleepiness, and turn once more to the window. I don’t move the rest of the flight.
We arrive at Dallas, and the guy in front of me wants to size me up. He changes his mind when I finally unfurl and manage to stand.
We’re in Concourse B, and our next flight, in fifteen minutes, is in Concourse D.
We make it just as the doors are closing. Now we’re huffing and puffing and sweating. We’ll make wonderful seatmates for somebody, albeit with sweeter smelling feet.
The woman in the middle this time is an old lady. She’s got a pleasant smile, but wants to talk about her grandchildren. Fascinating topic: other people’s grandchildren. Especially on a two hour flight. And our seatmate’s soaked herself in old-lady-perfume. You know the stuff. I think it’s sold at the Instead of Bathing counter in Walgreen’s. I think you can also buy it at do-it-yourself pest control stores.
Of course, this torture extends for the entire flight. And when we get to Jacksonville, our baggage is lost. Somehow it ended up in Bangladesh.
And most wonderful of all, we got to do it all over again in just a week.
Oh how fun.
I don’t know what the 19th century naturalist William Gambel did to have this strutting ground-bird named after him, but I know Old Bill didn’t fly.
Maybe next time, I’ll just quail it to Florida.
That or I’ll drive.
Contrary to Mark, I don’t enjoy flying. Not at all. And my distaste has nothing to do with fear.
“Harumph,” you say. “Don’t believe a word of it. He’s just chicken and won’t admit it.”
“Nay, nay,” I say. I prefer to think of myself as a Gambel Quail, a bird that can fly but prefers the ground. And heck, I even look like one. Replace a Gambel’s plume with a baseball cap, and you’ve got me.
Yeah, that’s me portrayed above. I’m just wearing black-face and war paint. I wanted to look picture-cool.
Seriously, I know how well airplanes are made. I know about the redundancy of their systems, the sophistication of the computers that fly them on a wire. I know there are usually a series of failures causing a crash. Heck, I worked for an aerospace company that made many of these systems, and I spent the greater part of thirty years flying and defending air crash cases. Airplanes are safe, much safer than a car.
But I’ll take a car any day.
Recently, I was forced to fly from Arizona to Florida and back, a trip that would have required six hard days by car.
Well, I would have preferred the drive.
If I’d driven, I’d have toured the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and watched police-drug lord battles as I passed through El Paso. I’d have sniffed petroleum fumes all over West Texas, and snarfed plates of jambalaya in Louisiana. A book-on-tape would have carried me through Mississippi and Alabama, saving me from preacher-central-radio, and I would have landed in Palm Coast, Florida tired but happy.
Instead, I spent two miserable days each way, and I wanted to kill somebody. My wife wanted to kill me.
Why?
I’m no sausage. I’m six foot six. I don’t fit in a seat built for a midget.
It’s bad enough that I have to stand in line for an hour before I strip down for the TSA cuties who want to wand my private parts. They’re talking smack and chewing on beef jerky strips, occasionally spitting out sinew-bits at me and other unfortunate captives. Then, as I start to tingle in anticipation of actually being next in line, the woman in front of me passes through the detectors. Alarm bells go off. The woman finds a hidden pocket in her moo-moo, and removes something metal from it. The TSA sharpie nods.
The woman steps through again, and the alarms ring once more.
This happens six times. I’m growing old standing behind this woman. And the fat guy behind me has stinky feet. His beat-up Converse All Stars look like they were made in 1956 and have been worn ever since. They’re next to me, just three feet from my nose. I imagine clouds of foot-gas wafting toward me. I turn and look at the man. I see sweat streaming down his swollen cheeks, and his light blue shirt is turning royal blue under the armpits. Deep, dark smiles.
Stinky's barefoot.
I stare at those shoes, and guess they’ve been worn bare most of their service life.
Where is the EPA when you need them?
We finally board the plane, and wonder of wonders, Stinky turns out to be my seatmate. Yup. Squeezed between my wife and me.
My wife falls asleep immediately. Or maybe she fainted.
I’m in the window seat, and my seat belt receiver somehow slid underneath this guy’s butt, so now I gotta play cutsie with him to fish the thing out. He leans toward my wife ― which is when she went out, I think ― and I pull and tug. One final heave, and the bracket flies free. My back untorques, and my block cracks the junction of the interior fuselage and the overhead bin. I think I lost some hair.
Stinky is a chatterbox. Never flown before. He’s nervous. Which means he sweats more, too. The smell of foot becomes more prevalent. I can’t see if Stinky's removed his shoes, because I can’t move. I’m squashed into my seat like a sardine in a can. Irony is, I don’t need a seatbelt; you couldn’t pry me out of that seat.
Stinky says he’s from Tennessee, so I ask if he knows Chester Campbell or Beth Terrell. I don’t understand a word of his response.
I grin and pretend I’m somewhere else.
Stinky talks of his family, of his trip to Tucson, and other stuff I’m not really paying attention to. Besides, I can’t understand much of what Stinky says anyway. Part of my difficulty is his accent, which sounds a bit Clampet-like. But I can't concentrate either...
The stink, you know.
And Stinky's still sweating.
I pop an arm free and adjust the blower above my head, so it’s flowing full force. I debate where to point it, and then turn it his way. My unconscious wife drops deeper into her coma.
Something’s gotta change, so I tell this guy I’m gonna sleep, hoping this will shut him up. He mutters something and then reaches for the Sky Mall magazine. I turn my head to the right, grateful for another inch of distance from my seatmate, grateful even for the stale hair gell odor of the Naugahyde headpiece.
I’m just beginning to relax, when the seatback in front of me comes crashing into my knees.
My reaction is instinctual. I bellow and slam the back of the seat. The guy in front of me unsnaps his belt and turns around.
“Hey!” he says. “Why’d you do that?”
“That’s what you just did to my knees,” I say. “How’d you like it?”
“You can’t do that,” the man says. “I’m entitled to lay my seat back.”
“No, you aren’t,” I say. “Not when doing so causes me physical injury.”
The man tries edging his seat back, and I counter his pressure. I’ve got better leverage, because I can use my arms and knees as pistons. There's nothing for his arms to do, and he can’t use his legs without flipping the guy ahead of him out of his seat.
So he summons a flight attendant, and when she comes, he starts his whine.
You can guess what he's saying: I’m a big meanie; I won’t let him lay his seat back.
The flight attendant looks at my knees pressed up against the seat, and politely tells the guy to go stuff himself.
Stinky wants to chat some more, and my wife is still out cold. So I yawn, feign sleepiness, and turn once more to the window. I don’t move the rest of the flight.
We arrive at Dallas, and the guy in front of me wants to size me up. He changes his mind when I finally unfurl and manage to stand.
We’re in Concourse B, and our next flight, in fifteen minutes, is in Concourse D.
We make it just as the doors are closing. Now we’re huffing and puffing and sweating. We’ll make wonderful seatmates for somebody, albeit with sweeter smelling feet.
The woman in the middle this time is an old lady. She’s got a pleasant smile, but wants to talk about her grandchildren. Fascinating topic: other people’s grandchildren. Especially on a two hour flight. And our seatmate’s soaked herself in old-lady-perfume. You know the stuff. I think it’s sold at the Instead of Bathing counter in Walgreen’s. I think you can also buy it at do-it-yourself pest control stores.
Of course, this torture extends for the entire flight. And when we get to Jacksonville, our baggage is lost. Somehow it ended up in Bangladesh.
And most wonderful of all, we got to do it all over again in just a week.
Oh how fun.
I don’t know what the 19th century naturalist William Gambel did to have this strutting ground-bird named after him, but I know Old Bill didn’t fly.
Maybe next time, I’ll just quail it to Florida.
That or I’ll drive.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Bombay Then and Now
A commando drops onto the roof of the Jewish center in Bombay. Photo by Siddhartha Babbaji, AP, in the San Francisco Chronicle and other major newspapers.
A statue in one of 30 Buddhist caves of Ajanta, near Aurangabad on the Deccan plateau.
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By Pat Browning
As a lifelong news junkie, I spent my spare time this week roaming the Internet for the latest on the disaster in Bombay. It has been Mumbai only since 1995, which was day before yesterday. It will always be Bombay to me.
A statue in one of 30 Buddhist caves of Ajanta, near Aurangabad on the Deccan plateau.
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By Pat Browning
As a lifelong news junkie, I spent my spare time this week roaming the Internet for the latest on the disaster in Bombay. It has been Mumbai only since 1995, which was day before yesterday. It will always be Bombay to me.
Such a kaleidoscope of memories as I followed the news:
The view from my hotel on the back bay overlooking Marine Drive. Running along the shoreline of the Arabian Sea, Marine Drive glittered with streetlights at night, living up to its nickname of the Queen's Necklace. In the stillness of early morning, solitary men fished from small boats on the bay.
The little-known museum in Mahatma Gandhi’s former home. I was fascinated by glass display cases of miniature figurines in tableaux of scenes from Gandhi’s life. From this house, the Mahatma (Great Soul) launched the civil disobedience movement that led to India’s independence from Great Britain.
The Towers of Silence. Closed to outsiders, they sit on a busy street, hidden by trees. The Parsis, or Zoroastrians, of Bombay, bring their dead to the Towers of Silence and leave them on stone slabs for the buzzards to pick clean. Bones are left to calcify in the sun and eventually swept into a deep well.
Parsis worship earth, fire and water. As it was explained to me, the Towers of Silence don’t pollute the earth with burial; don’t pollute the air by cremation; don’t pollute the water with ashes; and they feed the birds.
A name surfaced during reportage that has been dismissed as fictitious, but it got my attention. A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahadeen supposedly claimed responsibility for the terror in Bombay.
Historically, the Deccan plateau has been ruled by Muslims. The city of Aurangabad, about 100 miles east of Bombay, is the jumping-off place for India’s famous cave temples at Ajanta and Ellora. With Buddhist, Hindu and Jain paintings and sculptures dating as far back as 200 B.C., both sites are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In size, scope and beauty, they are overwhelming.
Gandhi’s influence was pervasive. One of his programs for lifting India’s masses out of poverty was “cottage industry.” On the taxi trip between Aurangabad and the caves, I saw a sandalwood soap factory, a silkworm farm, and many items carved from local woods. I bought a small, round, three-legged rosewood table inlaid with ivory for about $26. The legs were removable for packing into a suitcase. I still have it.
After I got home from India, I read Louis Bromfield’s 1940 novel, NIGHT IN BOMBAY, and marveled at how contemporary it seemed. Bombay apparently had not changed much since Bromfield wrote his book. When I was in Bombay, India’s telephone system didn’t work. Messages were delivered by hand. Even in luxury hotels, reservations were written by hand, on little file cards.
What a difference technology has made. During this week’s nightmare, even the terrorists had cell phones.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Worldwide Wind Power
by Jean Henry Mead
Man has harnessed the power of wind for thousands of years to propel sailing ships as well as windmills to pump water and grind grain. Wind power has been rediscovered and giant windmills or turbines are gradually taking the place of more conventional sources of energy.
Wind power converts energy into electricity with the use of turbines, and although windmills only accounted for one percent of our electrical needs at the beginning of the year, worldwide capacity of wind-powered generators was 94.1 gigawatts of power. Wind power generated nearly 20% of electricity production in Denmark, 9% in Spain and Portugal and 6% in Germany and Israel.
Wind farms are spreading rapidly in California, Wyoming, and other states with traditionally windy areas. In the process they’re causing real concerns for environmentalists who are worried about the disruption of wildlife breeding grounds. Most of the commercial grade wind, according to Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist, is in southeast Wyoming. Wyoming residents, however, won’t benefit from the wind turbines because the electricity is being used by out-of-state consumers, although Wyoming electricity rates have jumped 7% to help pay for the turbines.
Another problem is that Wyoming‘s economy is heavily dependent on its coal mines and petroleum. Now that the price of oil has reached record lows for the year, hundreds of drilling rigs have shut down and coal mines have cut back on production, resulting in massive unemployment.
Two huge wind farms are proposed to be built on private land with a total of a thousand turbines south of the 1-80 corridor by the Power Company of Wyoming, LLC, an affiliate of the Denver-based Anschultz Corporation. Built on cattle grazing land, biologists are concerned that the wind farm will further endanger sage grouse breeding grounds. The birds are already on the verge of extinction.
Farmers and ranchers are in favor of the wind farms because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to earn a living solely on agriculture. So wind farms on private land are becoming a reality. “Having wind energy development that is sensitive to the needs of wildlife is in everyone’s best interests,” Molvar said. But wind farms on remote private land are difficult to regulate.
The first crudely-built windmill was erected in the first century AD and used to power an organ. Six centuries later, a commercial windmill was built in Afghanistan. The vertical axel windmills were made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth. They were used to draw water and grind corn as well as aid in grist milling and sugarcane production. Horizontal axel windmills were used extensively in northern Europe for the grinding of flour from the year 1180, and some still exist in Holland.
It looks as though windmills are here to stay.
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