I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'll think of something

 

Here's a story from the old, weird America that once was, where there were isolated rural enclaves where the old ways still lingered, where a 16-year-old girl was of marriageable age, where teenage girls were not bobby-soxers in pedal-pushers and saddle shoes swooning over Guy Mitchell songs but broom-wielding barefoot witches whom you had better not upset or, brother, look out! 

I've wondered why the belief that adolescent girls have mischievous powers, cause poltergeist activity and that sort of thing, has been common for such a long time.  Adolescent boys are not ascribed such powers.  Because the conviction that, as it is usually described, an angry or unhappy pubescent girl can cause havoc, make things and animals fly through the air, break crockery, even teleport herself, persists, it would seem like there must be something to it.  

I don't know.  When I was a teen, I had my share of anger and unhappiness, but I could never cause things to shatter or fly through the air.  I certainly could not teleport myself.  

Darn it.

"You with your kindness and your handsome face and your city manners," Abbie said. "How could you do it? You made me fall in love with you. It wasn't hard, was it? All you had to do was hold a little hill girl's hand in the moonlight an' kiss her once, an' she was ready to jump in bed with you. But you didn't want anything as natural as that. All the time you was laughing and scheming. Poor little hill girl!"

 Wherever You May Be, first broadcast on June 26, 1956, by NBC radio as an episode of the series X Minus One. It was based on a novella by James A. Gunn published in the May, 1953, edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.

 An episode of the 1989 Soviet science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, "Psychodynamics of Witchcraft," was based on this story.

James Gunn was also an example of the old America, his grandfather appearing in Ripley's Believe It or Not because he could name every county of every state in the union. A high-ranking mason, Gunn studied Japanese to learn the secrets of the Orient. As a result, when he was drafted in World War II he was sent to the Pacific to interrogate Japanese prisoners and learn their secrets.  After the war, he became a professor of English at the University of Kansas, teaching science fiction.  He wrote The Listeners, which Carl Sagan called, "one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written."

Gunn's novella was adopted for radio by Ernest Kinoy.  Kinoy fought in World War II with the 106th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, his regiment was surrounded by the Germans and forced to surrender. The Americans were interned at Stalag IX until they were transferred to the concentration camp at Berga, the slogan of which was Vernichtung durch Arbeit -- extermination through labor. One day the commandant of the the stalag lined all the regiment up and ordered those who were Jewish to step forward.  The senior NCO replied that they were all Jewish. So they were sent to Berga where Kinoy and his fellow soldiers dug tunnels and space for an ammunition plant 150 feet underground under conditions so harrowing that 47 men died.  When the US Army neared the camp, the prisoners were force-marched to another camp.  Thirty-six died along the way. Kinoy survived all this, graduated from Columbia University and became a script writer for NBC during the Golden Age of Television, writing for Studio One and Playhouse 90 as well as such television series as The Defenders, Dr. Kildare and Route 66, in addition to writing for radio. He, too, is an example of the America that was.

Patsy O'Shea, the actress who plays Abigail Jenkins, was also part of the America that was and lived to see what it has become. Born at the height of the Depression in 1931, she became a wildly popular child star beginning at the age of three, appearing in hundreds of radio plays. She became a regular on the soap operas Guiding Light and As the World Turns, among others. A 1942 article described her as “Orson Welles in miniature,” adding, “She is so much in demand that if you tune in on any daytime radio serial and hear a little girl’s voice the chances are that it’s Miss O’Shea.”  She switched to television when it came along, continuing her roles in the soap operas as well as appearing in such early TV series as Boston Blackie, The Line-Up and City Detective. She died alone in a nursing home in 2020 at the height of the Covid lock-down madness, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and 90-year-old husband of almost 70 years forbidden to visit her.

Ants and the Borg

See that line across the road just about in the middle of the photo to the left?  That's an ant trail.  It was there when I was a little girl visiting my grandparents.  It was there when my mother was a little girl and my grandmother told me it was there when she was a little girl and her mother told her it was there when she was a little girl.  So that ant trail has been in the same spot for more than a century and a quarter, and very probably a lot longer than that. 

 How much longer? Who can say, but probably a lot longer than that road has existed, centuries maybe, maybe thousands of years.  Maybe it was there before the Indians came.  If I learned that it had been there since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised. And if, somehow, I was to learn that that ant trail would still be there when the glaciers come grinding down from the north again, as by and by they surely will, whether that's a hundred years from now or 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised, either. What is time to an ant colony anyway? We humans are like mayflies compared to colonial creatures, whether ants and termites or coral polyps.

Then there are plants.  Some years ago I came across a study of the flora of the Mojave Desert.  It mentioned that the author had found a creosote bush that was 12,000 years old.  The plant grows by spreading out in an ever-widening circle.  Underground the roots spread from the central, original plant, the above-surface parts of which may die, but beneath the surface, it lives on, essentially indefinitely.  Even a fire, which may burn off the above-ground parts of it, won't kill it because the root structure is untouched.  It can, of course, be killed.  In this case, the bush was bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a housing development.  Alive since the beginning of the Holocene, a grassland ape destroyed it to create another one of its ever-proliferating nest heaps.

Do plants think, are they sentient?  Define sentience. Is there only one type?  Is your definition valid for any life form other than hominids? How do you know?  

How about fungi? I once listened to a very -- very --  smart guy proposing and defending convincingly the hypothesis that all fungi on the planet are really just one globe-spanning life form that has been continuously alive since the first fungi evolved.  What about the oceans separating continents, and continents moving around via plate tectonics? What about islands far out in the ocean? Wouldn't that have broken apart the Ur fungi?  He had an answer to that, but I forget what it was.  

Fungi and vascular plants interact intimately with each other.  Fungi act as a communications pathway between trees, conveying information about their health, telling a tree that it is time to die -- yes! that's true -- among many other things including, no doubt, things we, as animals, could never understand, or even be aware of.

Are fungi sentient?  How about the combined creature that is a forest/fungi symbiote?    

And what about Gaia, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' updating of Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere as the interconnected biomass of the earth through time and distance that maintains itself through feedback loops. Is it sentient?  What experiment could we devise to prove or disprove it? What if we are just a part of Gaia's "brain," rather like our brain is made up of various parts that separately are nothing but combined are us? Or maybe we are like one of the cells in our body that, alone, is nothing but combined with millions of other cells is us and we continue to be us even as the individual cells die and others replace them, rather like bees in a hive.  The hive continues on year after year though the various bee units come into being, function for a while, then perish, each bee, aware of its impending death, leaving the hive to die alone so as not to pollute the hive with its decaying corpse.  How does the bee know it's going to die?  Or does it?  Perhaps it just begins to feel tired and so, on one of its excursions, stops to rest on a flower petal and goes to sleep, forever.  Will we ever understand these things?  Or just imagine that we do?

I recall reading, maybe in The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, speculation about social insects having a group mind, rather like that of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched that with my dad when I was a kid and remember him saying, "Borg, Borg, okay Borg.  But where's Warner, that's what I want to know.  What did Borg do with Warner?"  I had no idea what he was talking about but my brothers laughed.

I digress.  Where was I?  Hmm.  I forget.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
―Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 
I would take a splendid sapling in my hands, pull it back, let it fly, as it did with a will, into position again—its uprightness. One day I stopped in the exercise, the thought striking me: This is great amusement to me; I wonder if not as great to the sapling? Maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass.  

In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.

I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as it pass’d me, murmuring out of its myriad leaves, “We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.”

I fling out my fancies toward them,
Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.

~ from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

I thought about you today

I was thinking about this old guy I knew when I was in college, just some guy I met while sitting on a park bench. We got to talking and became friends, although, as has been not unknown to happen, he believed my cordiality implied romantic interest, which it did not. That put the kibosh on our friendship.  The fact that he was three times my age did not suggest to  him that...well, you know. I liked him, but not that way. And it had never occurred to me that he would like me that way.

Oh, really?

Anyway, for some reason after heaven knows how long not thinking about him suddenly I did, remembering that he had spent decades writing a book, a novel based around the character of his girlfriend, who had died during the summer of love, 1967, the year he quit high school and joined the hippies in Haight-Ashbury.

He couldn't get over her death, and what I came to realize was that he was keeping her alive in his novel. That's why he worked on writing it every day of his life, writing, re-writing, editing, "polishing"  it, as he said. I wondered why he didn't submit it to a literary agent, who would advise him on shaping it for publication.  He said he had and that the agent said it was a very promising first novel but that, at 700 pages, it was too long for a publisher to accept as a first novel by an unknown.  He suggested cutting it down to 300 pages.  That my friend would not do. After that he didn't bother with agents or publishers. He just kept writing and re-writing, reliving the magical year  of 1967, the pinnacle of his life, when he was in love as only a teenager can be. 

Some time after I had lost contact with him, while browsing Amazon I ran across an author by his name and I wondered if it could be the same person and checked out his author's page and, yes, it was him and he had finally published his book, self-published it. 

Well, today I tried to find his book on Amazon.  I decided I should read it, wanted to read it.  But I could not find it.  I'd forgotten the title, and, honestly, even his name.  I had to think hard to recall it.  His first name, of course, I remembered, but not his last name.  Finally it came to me and I searched Amazon for him.  I found authors with the same name, but not him. I didn't understand that. I thought an Amazon listing was forever.  

I tried to find e-mails from him, but I only found some that didn't mention the title of his book.  Maybe we only talked about it. But I did find his obituary. It was in an e-mail from a someone I didn't know that I had never opened, presumably a friend of his who sent the obituary to those who had known him. Probably at the time I didn't want to be reminded of him, the end of our friendship still fresh in my mind, so I ignored it, the heading not mentioning the content, merely "About ---."

Died after a long illness.  Cancer, I suppose.  I wonder if, when he knew his life was over, he decided to publish his novel, letting "her" go to live on in the life he gave her in his mind so that she would live in the minds of others who might read his novel.

I don't know.  But I would like to think so. Rest in peace, Robbie, and long may your Lily live.

 

Escape

 

With everything in so much turmoil these days and nothing we below can do anything about, I think it best to just focus on our own lives and those we live with, love and need.  

It does seem true that we are living at the end of a civilizational era, on the brink of catastrophic war followed by an interregnum that could last for centuries before another civilization arises, if one does.  It's odd to me that most people don't see this. They focus on trivial, ephemeral political issues -- hostility to a personality or political perspective.  They are as if the crew of the Lusitania were brawling in the wheelhouse, oblivious to the periscope of the U-20 foaming a path through the sea to starboard.  

Maybe their behavior is natural and to be expected; after all, does not the water still flow from the tap, is not the refrigerator crowded with food from every part of the world, do not the lights come on at night?  All is as it was and ever shall be.  Why would it change?

 So if the coffee in your cup inexplicably trembles ever so slightly  as it sits on the side table while you scroll your tablet, it cannot mean that a Tyrannosaur has smelled you out and is coming. Ridiculous.  And that low rumbling you hear is merely distant thunder, not the sound of a rolling artillery barrage headed your way.  How could it be otherwise? 

I'm with you.  I don't want to know.  All these grim conversations I've had lately with those in the know, men who see clearly how things are, have spotted the avalanche roaring down the mountain toward us, the tsunami rising out of the sea and racing toward our shore -- what can I do about it?  My own politics comprise the single sentence: Can't we all just get along? That gets a horse laugh from all sides -- the joy of life comes from smiting your enemies, and if you don't have any, you make them.  Fight with a neighbor, fight with a nation, whatever and whoever.  Just fight.

Well, I don't want to fight.  Go away, all of you. Leave me alone, can't you? Let me dream of a long ago summer of love that was once real and will surely come again.  

It was real.  Wasn't it?

 

Yippy ki yay

 We had an onslaught of coyotes harassing one of our herds and we didn't have enough hands to deal with the situation so I volunteered to night herd and then flank ride when we decided to move the cattle to a different range. I rode a gouch-eared mare they told me had good cow sense although she didn't look like much.

Since my main task was to keep the coyotes away from the calves I was armed with a saddle rifle, my old short-barreled Winchester .30-30.  When I was night herding I heard a lot of coyotes yipping and yowling  but only saw coyotes twice. Once I spotted one loping towards the herd and I reined in, drew the Winchester from its scabbard and carefully led the beast.  I could see it clearly in the strong moonlight.  I fired and missed but I must have got close because without slowing down he veered away from the herd, zig-zagging as he ran.  He must have been shot at before.  I counted him as a "mission kill."

The other one I saw was very close in to the herd, crouching getting ready to spring.  I was afraid to shoot at him because he was between me and the cattle and I sure didn't want to go down as having shot a cow if I missed him.  So I charged him. I thought about yelling and whooping but I didn't want to startle the cattle.  When he spotted me coming he took off.  Once I was between him and the herd I chanced a shot at him. He was pretty far away by then, but I reined in my horse, took careful aim, gently squeezed the trigger while holding my breath and ... missed him clean. I swear he turned his head to look at me, though.  I imagined him saying, "Nya, nya, ya missed me!"

I levered another round into the chamber and lined up on him again, but didn't fire.  If I didn't hit him the first time I sure wasn't going to now that he was farther away and getting hard to make out. 

Once in a while, I heard a shot fired by one of the cowpokes and wondered it they had any better luck than me.

Other than those two incidents nothing happened other than I got really cold. The sky was mostly clear so the temperature plunged down into the single digits. Before the moon rose the night sky was stunning.  So many stars. The Milky Way a wonder of creation. To fight the cold, sometimes I leaned forward on my mount, hugging her neck to absorb some of her warmth.  Several times I dismounted to swing my arms and stamp my feet to get the circulation going.  I walked some, too, did jumping jacks and squats and so forth, then remounted.  I had to keep up with the herd and keep an eye out for those darn coyotes. I remembered the words a worn out old man had once spoken to me, that the best job was one with no heavy lifting, indoors in winter and all the water you could drink.  I thought it was a joke then, but now I understood.

 After sunrise we brought dogs out, mostly border collies but also a couple of blue heelers, a type of dog I don't like but they were very good at encouraging the stragglers to keep up.  We didn't have dogs out at night because they might have been mistaken for coyotes and shot, but during the day they were very aggressive toward any coyote that showed up. I saw one border collie actually overtake a running coyote and bite one of his rear legs, causing him to tumble. He got up and lunged at the border collie.  The collie didn't engage but darted away.  I took the opportunity to risk a shot at the coyote. Missed again, but I saw dirt and snow scatter just behind him.  I should have led him a little more and maybe aimed a bit higher but he took off like a scalded cat so I counted it another mission kill.  At the shot, the collie, who was charging in again on the coyote, veered off and ran back to the herd.

 Once the herd was at the new pasture the coyotes became less of a problem.  Maybe they stuck to their home range. I don't know.  We did lose a few calves despite all our efforts so maybe they had eaten their fill and didn't feel the need to risk getting shot.

The sun was warm and the days were quite pleasant.  We all took turns sleeping in the camper mounted in the bed of a 4x4 pickup and chowing down at another that had been converted to a modern-day chuckwagon. Some boys drove up with hay bales that we broke open and scattered over the snow for the cattle to feed on.

After a few days of this, a relief crew took over. I was glad to head out, bone weary and sore. We rode our horses to the old bunkhouse and stable where the hands were staying and after taking care of our mounts and having a supper of pinto beans cooked with dried chili peppers,  fried eggs, ham, bacon and fresh-baked corn bread sopped in bacon grease, a salad of tomatoes, lettuce, onions, carrots, green peppers and black olives with a dressing made of vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice, and a desert of bread pudding with raisins, washed down with percolator coffee, all rustled up by yours truly, the guys washed up and crawled into their bunks. I cleaned the dishes, noting there were no left overs, not even one piece of corn bread. One of the guys got out of his rack and dried and put away the dishes for me. Afterwards, I sat down in a chair by the old coal-burning pot-bellied stove. Oh, it was so toasty warm there. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I woke up about 45 minutes later everybody was sleeping. I packed up my gear, left a note saying good-bye and God bless and went home. 

The cowpokes weren't so lucky. They are still out there, earning their pay.  

Later, I thought about the conversation I had with the 'poke who dried the dishes for me.  I mentioned my chagrin at firing at and missing three coyotes and he said, "You didn't really want to kill those coyotes, did you?"  As soon as he said that, I realized it was true, although it had never entered my conscious mind before. I stopped washing, pot in hand, as I thought about that.  He looked at me appraisingly.  Then he said, "You know we lost calves to coyotes.  Maybe to those you didn't shoot.  Think about the horror of those calves being attacked and ripped apart by the 'yotes, their moms trying to fend them off and failing, how they feel because you felt sympathy for their killers.  Something always has to die, Wanda.  Something always does.  Us or them."

 

Winter contentment

 

It's funny, but I'm regretting the passing of winter. For me, it's become a very comfortable season.  It compels confinement. In the past, that would have been frustrating for me, I'd want to be up and doing, out and about.  But recently I relish the relief of having an excuse to not do anything.  Oh, there are chores and things that have to be done around the house and with family, but they are things I enjoy doing or at least don't mind, and just about everything can be put off if the weather is inclement.

So life slows down and the long evenings of welcome quiet are something I look forward to. After the little that needs to be done is done, I sit in my favorite chair in front of the fireplace and read or knit -- my Lord, yes, I've taken up knitting and crocheting; I never would have imagined! 

This is a family that reads.  I've seen to that, or, rather, my parents did, making reading part of us kids' daily life, as their parents did for them, and as I now do for my children.  El jefe also came from a family of readers, so we dovetail in that as in so many other things. El jefe also enjoys reading aloud so he's the designated bedtime story reader. 

He's like my dad that way, but unlike the popster, who would read us books and short stories he always intended to read but somehow never got around to -- Moby Dick, Arundel, Northwest Passage, The Sea Wolf (I had nightmares about that one), Blue Hotel, The Lottery, The Tell-Tale Heart, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge....sweet dreams and nighty-night, kids; actually, my brothers loved the scary stuff, me not so much, 'though I did like Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales -- 

Anyway, el jefe reads them children's stories: Thumbelena and other stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Hansel and Gretel and the Brothers Grimm tales and also more grown-up tales such as Jack London's The Hobo and the Fairy, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Stephen Vincent Benét's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgkin Burnett's The Secret Garden, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of Third Floor Back, Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, Booth Tarkington's The Terrible Shyness of Orvie Stone, Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Also such novels as Peter Pan, The Virginian, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, Treasure Island, Riders of the Purple Sage, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Childhood's End, The Light in the Forest, The Hundred Dresses, Idylls of the King (okay that's poetry), Under Two Flags, The Maltese Falcon, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Four Feathers, Tom Sawyer, The Light That Failed, Wild Animals I Have Known (semi-factual), The Lonesome Gods, Huckleberry Finn, Pasó Por Aquí, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Screwtape Letters, The Hobbit.... They never know what he will read them on any given night.  His practice is to read them a poem before beginning his book reading, usually a classic from the 19th century -- The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead.....  Oh, dear.

He doesn't just read, he acts out the characters, giving them different voices, from squeaky to gruff, depending.  He rushes excitedly through the sentences or pauses dramatically, as the story unfolds, sometimes looking up from the page and turning his gaze from one child to the other and they look back with awe, expectancy or impatience -- yes, well, what happens? -- as the story line dictates. Sometimes his readings are so good and the novel so engaging that as I happen to pass by I stop to listen, too, slipping quietly into the room so as not to disturb. Sometimes my mother slips in to listen, as well.

What's that? TV? Cell phones? The internet?  None of that in my house! (Except internet for school work and other research under supervision.)

Otherwise, while el jefe is terrifying  entertaining the children, I sit watching the fire in the fireplace, thinking nothing much at all.  Sometimes I go over to a window and stand looking out at the winter landscape, watch the early sunset, see a late crow fly across the western glow, or maybe an early owl. One by one, the stars and planets appear and a chill draft curls up around the window, making me shiver, so I retreat to the fireplace and stand in front of it warming up, then make a cup of tea, settle into my chair, pick up my knitting and begin clacking the needles or go back to my book and open it to where I left off, the cat climbs into my lap, the fire hisses, and all's right with the world.

 

 

 

 

Atomic bombs now and then

Original art from the story.

If you wanted to change the horrible present and were somehow transported back 30 years into the past into your own childhood with full knowledge of all that had happened in the intervening years, what would you do? How would you convince your parents that you had returned from your adult future to you own childhood?  If you did convince them, what would they do?

 Time and Again, based on a story by H. Beam Piper, first broadcast over NBC radio as an episode in the series Dimension X on July 12, 1951. The story originally appeared in the April, 1947, issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  This was Piper's first published story.

This story interests me not just for its thought experiment aspect but because it evokes the last days of the Pacific War as it was for people at home in the states, how they thought about the war, and in particular what it was like the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, and more broadly how the future was expected to play out in another generation -- not well. Not well at all.

 

 

 

 

 

The Men That Don't Fit In

 

 I was thinking about poetry and wondering why it's basically vanished from the world.  Nobody writes it, nobody reads it, nobody cares about it.  Oh, sure, stuff called poetry is still published and maybe the poet's family says they read it and it was just swell, but the truth is there is no audience for poetry anymore.  And even someone like me who actually does read poetry reads essentially nothing published after 1960.

I think one reason why poetry is dead -- and there are many reasons -- is that there is no longer poetry addressed to the reality of life, distilled observation and common sense. Certainly there is no robust, masculine poetry anymore -- the kind that speaks directly to you without literary allusions, metaphors, obscure references, the kind of poetry you  have to take a class to understand. There used to be lots of that sort published in mass-circulation magazines, then collected in books that became popular best sellers.  There was also a lot of humorous poetry, poetry for children, religious poetry.  All gone now.  

It seems to me there is a demand still for such poetry but in its absence people quote, recite, song lyrics.  That's the closest thing there is to popular poetry anymore, and sometimes the lyrics are pretty good.  But too often they are painfully poorly written, the writer unskilled with the written word, unable to express well what he wants to say.  Not all, of course.  Some song lyrics are very good and stay with you, creating images in your mind that linger.

Anyway, here's a poem that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.  A plain poem telling us something about the world and a type of person in it that we can recognize. Maybe it's us and a warning.  It has a certain masculine flavor to it that seems gone from the world.  It was written by Robert W. Service in 1911.

There's a race of men that don't fit in,

    A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

    And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

    And they climb the mountain's crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;

    They are strong and brave and true;

But they're always tired of the things that are,

    And they want the strange and new.

They say: "Could I find my proper groove,

    What a deep mark I would make!"

So they chop and change, and each fresh move

    Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs

    With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones

    Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,

    Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,

    In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;

    He has just done things by half.

Life's been a jolly good joke on him,

    And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;

    He was never meant to win;

He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;

    He's a man who won't fit in.

And here's a song, Gentle on My Mind, that I think has lyrics to rival the old verses of the popular poets of days gone by.  It was written by the great John Hartford in 1968 and is here sung by Glen Cambell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whoof!

 

Stay away from politics. 

If you get involved with it, the world looks terrible and it's clear that we're all doomed if something isn't done right now to stop the evil other side and their wicked ways.  

But if you avoid that toxic cesspool, you notice the sun is shining in a bright blue sky decorated with drifting fair weather clouds that cast dappled shadows, a gentle breeze from the south is rustling the leaves of the trees, flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the cattle are lowing and the kids and the dog want to hike down to the pond and have a picnic. 

Let's go!

And hubby says, "Hey! Wait for me!"

 

Why?

**

"Anything you want to do, you can do… anything… and believe it. You can do it. Don’t let people tell you you can’t. Don’t let people tell you you aren’t good enough.
Be good enough."
Gayle Snell, WASP
 

With the two recent air crashes in the news involving female pilots that have generated vast hostility to female pilots, not only by men, but women, too, including one prominent female columnist who referred to the Delta Airlines pilot as "baby cakes," I've wondered why such hatred? 
If the two pilots were men, in particular white men, there would have been no such reaction, just as when not long ago a New Zealand Navy  ship captained by a female ran aground there was an eruption of misogyny but when a US Navy aircraft carrier captained by a man collided with a merchant ship and the captain was relieved of command, there was no reaction, as there was not when a male captain got his ship sideways in the Suez Canal and blocked it or another male captain rammed his ship into a bridge in Baltimore.  Nor was there when a Bering Air Cessna crashed killing all aboard or when a Jet Rescue Learjet crashed, also killing all aboard. The pilots were male.

Retiring Rear Adm. Wendi Carpenter,Commander,
Navy Warfare Development Command,
surrounded by female Naval aviators & air crewman in 2011.
Carpenter was designated a Naval Aviator in
1979, graduating at the top of her class.

 About the same time as the Delta crash, when a general aviation pilot -- a male -- cut in front of another plane in the landing pattern, causing a mid-air collision, and the male pilot crashed, killing himself and his passenger while the female pilot in the other plane landed her damaged aircraft safely, there was no outrage about incompetent male pilots -- nor praise for the female pilot. But had the situation been reversed there would still be furious ranting about incapable female pilots.

Carpenter was assigned
to the Second Fleet
as an expert in air
warfare command
and control.

I don't understand why this is happening now.  Female pilots are old news.  Notice in the photo to the upper left that Rear Admiral Wendi Carpenter is retiring after a full career as a naval aviator -- in 2011! Fourteen years ago. Fourteen! She began her aviation career almost half a century ago! Notice, if you will, that she is surrounded by female aviators in a photo taken years ago. And back during World War II women were flying those old death trap planes designed and flown before there were even V numbers -- planes with nicknames like one a day in Tampa Bay and the widow maker.  I've written a little bit about this in Girl Fliers.  So what's the big deal in 2025 about women flying airplanes?  

Incidentally, V numbers were developed by Hazel Hasleden around 1950.  The "V" stands for "vitesse," meaning "speed" in French. They were introduced after an October 26, 1952 deHavilland Comet crash in  Rome that involved what today we would say was Vmu (Slowest speed at which an aircraft can become airborne) / Vr (rotation speed), pitch control, power and the difference between being stall-limited and geometry-limited on takeoff. The official conclusion of the British Bureau of Aircraft Accidents for the crash was that "The accident was due to an error of judgment by the Captain [a man!] in not appreciating the excessive nose-up attitude of the aircraft during the take-off." 

If you want to know more about Vmu, read this: MINIMUM UNSTICK SPEED CALCULATION FOR HIGH-SPEED JET TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT . How's your math by the way?  You'll need it. If you can understand this monograph, tell me does anything in it relate to the  Delta CRJ accident? If so, what and how?  If you have no idea, stand down.

A dozen years ago a thorough study of female Army aviation pilots was made, WOMEN IN COMBAT ARMS: A STUDY OF THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, that stated, "there is a population of female soldiers that have contributed as front line 'trigger pullers' throughout the course of the past 12 years of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These women are Army aviators who have served in attack aviation roles, without restriction, since the beginning of major combat operations in the Global War on Terror. This research shows that over a decade of females serving on the front lines alongside their male counterparts, there is no significant stigma or other prohibitive factors that would degrade the effectiveness or lethality of combat arms units in war.

"Performance in combat is the central issue that must guide the debate of women in combat arms. However, as the research indicates, the performance of women in combat is not a problem. Both historically and more recently during the war on terror, anecdotal and statistical input conclude that women can and will continue to perform admirably in combat across a wide variety of jobs.
"A look at the data on aircraft accidents is useful to make an assessment of performance of female pilots. As the data highlights, women are involved in fewer aircraft accidents than all-male crews -- comprising only 3% of incidents. As women comprise roughly 10% of all aviators, the evidence suggests that women may operate aircraft more safely than men. As it pertains to just AH-64 aircraft, 100% of all accidents, both in garrison and in theater, involve all-male crews, at least suggesting that female attack pilots may be even more safe in the performance of flight duties." 

In the Navy, where women have been aviators since 1974, 12 percent of pilots are women and they have a comparable safety record to Army female pilots.

Harriet Quimby in her plane.

 I truly do not get this hostility to women pilots.  All this vicious hysteria, this intense hatred of female pilots makes no sense to me.  I could maybe understand it back a hundred years ago when Amelia Earhart set a world altitude record less than a decade after a female duo riding motorcycles from New York to Los Angeles were arrested for wearing pants -- I kid you not.  But times have changed.  Or I thought they had.  For heaven's sake, the second person to fly across the English channel was a woman, Harriet Quimby, back in 1912. She was celebrated as a heroine, men wrote songs about her and women rushed to dress the same way she did when she flew the channel. So what's the big deal now, 113 years later?

When I read some opinion columnist, who knows nothing about the subject, asserting that women are pushed into aviation as DEI hires, that women are incapable of flying airplanes, and gets spittle-spraying fanboys shouting their agreement, I wonder what the motive is.  What is the objective these people hope to achieve? What is their end goal?  Do they want women banned from aviation? Why?  How is the world made better if this is achieved?

Another thing I wonder is why are these neurotic creeps spazzing out like this when they have to know that women are not going to be banned from piloting airplanes, civilian or military. Nothing will result from their hysteria. The accidents will be properly investigated by knowledgeable, responsible people, causes discovered, and actions taken to prevent such causes in the future.  Okay, one thing will be achieved by their antics: they will drive a lot of women away from conservatism who were sympathetic to it.  Maybe that's the goal, why all this is happening.  That this will cause the right to lose elections doesn't matter to them.  All that matters is that they drive away women.
(By the way, I mentioned that 12 percent of naval aviators are female.  Guess how many naval aviators are black -- 0.013 percent. Look at that group photo above of female aviators.  Almost entirely white women. So shouldn't  right-wing white men be cheering for them?  Yay! Mighty whitey rules the skies!  Fat chance.  Rightest white men hate white women.  Elliot Rodgers is their hero.  I don't know where they think white men come from. Maybe they buy into the leftist assertion that men can become pregnant, too. Spare me the details.)

 I was taught to fly by men -- my father and grandfather among them -- who certainly did not think women should not be pilots. To me it was not a big deal.  It was just part of growing up.  They taught me how to ride a bicycle, a horse, a motorbike, how to drive a car, how to fly an airplane. It was all part of a continuum.  Among these, why would only flying an airplane be considered something a female could not do? Every male instructor I ever had only wanted to make me the best pilot I could be and never expressed any doubt that I could fly as well as anyone, and gender had nothing to do with it. And, believe you me, none were afraid to kick my ass till I was.  And when I finally was, it was a high five and now go fly!

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Female WASP pilots were safer pilots than men. ATC (ACT is a typo) is
Air Transport Command. WAFS is Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron.

 Thousands of pilot trainees were killed learning to fly during World War II.  WASP pilot trainees died, too.

 

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This guy didn't have any problem with women pilots in 1944, so why now in 2025?

Odean "Deanie" Parish, engineering test pilot, and her P-47.
She passed away in 2022, one day shy of her 100th birthday.

Jackie Cochran, winner of  five Harmon Trophies.

Female air traffic controller, Floyd Bennett Field, 1943.

 

A male pilot remembering and thanking a female pilot for helping him overcome his fear.

 

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 **WASP: Women's Airforce Service Pilot

      

An emergency very well handled -- by a girl!