In reading about Tom Cotton, the unhinged Senator who authored the truly wacko letter to Iran inferring that the Obama Administration couldn’t negotiate a permanent deal, I realized that what most disturbed me was that he had been an officer in the Army.
I was in the Army and know, first hand, that the Army is chock full of idiots, so being bothered about Lieutenant Tom Cotton surprised me. I was was disturbed that a person so lacking in common sense, would be charged with leading troops into the meat grinder but I hadn’t been disturbed that he was a Senator. That’s what surprised me, my low standards for a Senator, my lack of surprise that a person of such low common sense would be a Senator.
I went to watch granddaughter Charlotte play basketball over the weekend. When the game first started, Charlotte played a pretty good defensive game but she seemed to be playing offense at a much lower pitch.
To back up. Charlotte is what we used to call a jock (your mother will explain that to you when you get older, Charlotte). She just likes sports: so much that she is playing basketball in the local Catholic Youth League.
That did not come from my side of the family. My parents were not jocks – the rumor was that my father had been a boxer at Cal but he went to Cal from about sixteen to almost nineteen and I never saw the killer instinct he would have needed to beat up on students who were older and, presumably, bigger – so I am going to stay with no jock. I am not a jock; I liked to to ski and hike and even some lightweight mountaineering but those were ways to get outside into the wild (or semi-wild). When I was young, in grammar school and then, later, highschool I played the required football and ran track and never particularly enjoyed it. My daughter, Samantha, ran the Bay to Breakers, a couple times – in informal costumes – but quit playing soccer way sooner than I would have liked. None of us had the intensity that Charlotte seems to channel.
Maybe it comes from Charlotte’s father. I don’t know.
Well, that’s not quite true, I don’t know, but I do have a theory and a hint lies in the word channel. I think the world is evolving, maybe not the whole world, but the elite West Coast world and probably the entire Western world (and elite Eastern world). Leisure is increasingly becoming busting your ass at sports just like it was in 750 BC Greece. When I was a kid, there were jocks and nerds, but now the nerds are the jocks.
Today’s mechanistic theory of life is that everything is physical. We are little, self contained machines, influenced only by our DNA strands. Even our minds are in our brains. There is alot of evidence that the mechanical theory is not true – or not complete – but it is the accepted dogma and most scientists, especially older scientists, are dedicated to guarding us against any heresy. Still, I don’t think that Charlotte’s athleticism and competitiveness only comes from her DNA, I think she is tuned into a new, different, world.
Watching Charlotte playing basketball, she seemed different from the Charlotte who was the star of the game the last time I watched her play Soccer. Here she was more hesitant, more willing to let someone else shoot. Watching, I began to think that this was a gift, she experienced being the star at Soccer and here she was able to experience being a supporting player. I don’t think her coach must have felt the same way because she pulled Charlotte out for a good part of the first half. When Charlotte came back, however, she started channeling her Reshanda Gray.
She started to charge and shoot and make baskets. Her team won 18 to 12 – these are little girls shooting at ten foot high baskets, 18-12 is a pretty high score – and she was the biggest scorer (at one time, I think Charlotte had scored as much as the entire other team). Standing there, in a Catholic Boy’s School gym, the noise so loud it was hard to talk, I kept thinking, Now where did that come from.
Michael Graves died a couple of days ago and I feel a loss from it that is bigger than I expected (that is if I had thought about it at all). I think that I have only been in one building designed by Graves, the Capistrano Library. It was one of the most interesting interiors I have ever been in. As good as a Frank Lloyd Wright house and, unexpectedly, almost as completely designed, right down to the table lamps. Even more unexpected was that the library was packed on a mid-week late afternoon.
It was a soft thrill, for lack of a better way to describe the hour or so, walking through and around the building. Good architecture – which, for purposes here, I’ll define good as original, thoughtful, and appropriate to its location – influences us in a positive way. Most architecture is neutral, but Graves was anything but neutral. He designed the stuffing out of everything. I once talked to a City Planner who had worked in the Portland City Hall, one of Graves’ signature buildings, and he said that it was an almost impossible place to work and I believe him. I just not sure that I care how well it works as a machine but how well it works at enriching Portland.
Architecture, good architecture, great architecture – which isn’t always good, certainly Frank Lloyd Wright’s great building weren’t always good – has nurtured my life as long as I can remember. It is a gene, or interest, that I think I got from my Daddy, maybe when he took me to see Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of the few things we did together and that has emphasized its importance. I don’t particularly care what style the architecture is, I love buildings from Baroque to Mid-century Modern, from the San Francisco City Hall complex to the Oakland Museum. The Capistrano Library is one of my favorite buildings, just walking around it has enriched my life, and I bet that it still enriches the community of Capistrano. That is a nice legacy.
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. Eric Hoffe
Sometime last Saturday, my blog was hacked by ISIS. I found out when I got an email from Malcolm Pearson saying Did you know you’ve been hacked by Islamic State? I am happy to say that Michele was able to unhack it in less than an hour. That is more than pretty good; according to Eldora Speedway, whose website was also hacked by ISIS, it took the Darke County Sheriff, FBI & GoDaddy working together atleast an hour to unlock their website.
Which brings up the question, Why me? Michele says it is probably an automatic hack because I mentioned ISIS in a headline, but why would they hack Eldora Speedway in Darke County, Ohio. And why the Isle of the Wight County, Virginia, website? or the Sequoia Park Zoo Website? It seems so random and strange and creepy. I feel both, sort of honored in the I don’t care what they say about me just spell my name right way, and creeped out in the Holy shit, these wackos actually kill people way. It drives home that ISIS is basically incomprehensible to me.
Anything I say about ISIS or any group, for that matter, is just my projection. I can’t, really, put myself in the shoes of someone that so believes their answer is god’s command. I can only guess as to why my website was hacked, and all those guesses are only what I would do. Or what I think I would do, or fantasize I would do, but never have. Anger? I can relate to that. All I have to do is read about the murder of Ahmed Al-Jumaili last Thursday to make me angry. Not angry enough, long enough, to hack a website and chopping somebody’s head off is a huge stretch – obviously, I hope – but I can understand it.
Hate, sure. I’ve felt the corrosive burning of hate. Boredom, absolutely. I volunteered to go to Vietnam in 1965 because I was bored. I would have gone, too, if the Battalion Recruitment Officer hadn’t talked me out of it, telling me that the only job in Vietnam I was qualified for, would be as a door gunner on a Huey, often a short lived assignment. But he did talk me out of it. If he had pushed me, instead, with tales of my saving civilization as we know it, I might have ended up there, killing people (or trying to).
But a voice from heaven? that’s hard for me to relate to. I guess it would be nice to be noticed by god, but I would rather be given a winning Lotto number. Hell, there is also the very real possibility that the the hack might not even be from ISIS (although it did say ISIS is everywhere in a, sort of, homage to Anonymous.
What ever the reason, however it happened, Michele was able to get me unhacked and update my website in the process, so I would like to say No harm, no foul, but it did screw up Michele’s day. She unhacked me in an hour but the rest of the day was consumed with making upgrades and changes.
symbiosis: a relationship between two people or groups that work with and depend on each other Merriam-Webster
parasite: a person or thing that takes something from someone or something else and does not do anything to earn it or deserve it Merriam-Webster
Last Sunday morning I went to our local shopping center – if you can call a parking lot with a market, a nursery/gift shop, an art/framing store, several banks, three restaurants, and a coffee shop; a shopping center – to see a, sort-of Car Show. Car Show may be way too grand, what this was, were some cars parked in a parking lot. What makes it different from an average Walmart parking lot is that the cars were, by and large, unusual.
Circa 1967 Alfa Romeo DuettoRolls Royce (I’m going to guess early 30’s)McLaren 650S
When I was in High School, I went to my first car show, the first Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance. Two of my friends actually had their cars in the Concours, one was a 1950 Ford Hotrod and one was a Morris Minor Coupe. Last year, the winner of the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance was an immaculately restored 1938 Talbot Lago T150C Figoni et Falaschi; my friends cars obviously would not have made the grade. But even today, they would be interesting cars, cherished by their owners. Up until recently, they would have had no place to show them off, but that is starting to change.
I first heard about what is now known as Cars and Coffee – or Cars & Croissants in its more pretentious form – about ten years ago when Malcolm Pearson’s cousin-in-law mentioned going to one in Orange County. Now they seem to be popping up everywhere. The idea is that the owners – with their cars – meet on a Saturday or Sunday morning, in a parking lot that has a coffeehouse, and anybody who is interested can drop by to ogle and talk cars.
Maserati Khamsin, Audi RS4, Deuce RoadsterHonda N600, Honda Z600, Honda Z600 (I’m not sure if this is accurate and I even had one)Circa 1966 Ford GT40 replica, 1955 Chevrolet BelAirPorsche type 550 Spyder – Beck replica
Some of the cars are outstanding but not prepared enough for a official concours, like the Maserati Khamsin above. Some are outstanding but not concours material, like the Audi RS4, a somewhere around 500 horsepower factory hotrod that looks like a regular A4 to the casual observer. Some are not particularly good cars but are still interesting to anybody who is interested, like the Hondas above. And some are replicas of cars that would be in a concours if they were real.
The replicas look like the real thing and are often just as interesting in their own way. After a typical Porsche 550 Spyder was no longer competitive as a racecar – in, say, 1960 – it was not worth very much. They were much simpler cars than a contemporary street Porsche and not very practical as transportation, still they would be great fun to occasionally take out on a crisp fall morning and play in the leaves, as I once read in a book on driving race cars on the street. But, now they sell for north of $3.5 million and that just seems ludicrous. Beck came along and made replicas with newer Volkswagen engines that were faster and more reliable, sold for somewhere around twenty grand, and were just as enjoyable, if not more so. But nobody is going to let one in the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance – yet – so here it is. The Ford GT40 is roughly the same situation, only on a more expensive scale.
When I started this post, I wanted to make the Beck/Porsche relationship symbiotic but, in telling Richard Taylor about the cars, he pointed out that the Beck/Porsche relationship isn’t really symbiotic because, while the Beck replica depends on the Porsche 550 Spyder price becoming astronomical, the Porsche doesn’t depend on the Beck. Then I thought maybe it could be considered a parasitical relationship but, while the Beck does feed off of the Porsche to a certain extent, parasitical doesn’t quite describe it. Still, I like The Good, The Bad, and The Symbiotic as a headline and want to keep it, so I looked around for another example to allow me to keep the headline.
A relationship that does fit is between the circumstances that led to the gourmet food truck. In the collapse of 2008, construction – especially residential construction – was one of the biggest losers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Construction employment fell by 1.5 million during the December 2007–June 2009 recession. By 2007, most guys working in the field were buying their lunch from food trucks – affectionately known as roach coaches – and, as the construction industry collapsed, the roach coach biz collapsed with it. That resulted in lots of food trucks being taken back by lenders. At the same time, restaurants were laying off scores of very qualified cooks.
In November 2008, Roy Choi, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Mark Manguera bought a well used roach coach and converted it to Kogi BBQ, an Asian Mexican fusion restaurant on wheels. They say they were peddling $2.00 Korean barbecue tacos on the streets of L.A., but, really they were selling cheap gourmet food from a food truck. This would not have happened without the happy – for us – availability of used food trucks and out of work gourmet cooks.
As I was thinking about symbiotic and parricidal relationships, I couldn’t help but think of Walmart and the U. S. Government. Walmart doesn’t pay enough for their employees to live on. As an aside, when I say employees, I don’t mean the top executives, C. Douglas McMillon, the President and CEO, had a total compensation of $25.6 million last year and that is enough for anyone to live on. End aside. The average sales associate, however, got $8.86 per hour, or a salary of $17,841, according to Walmart. That is not enough to support a family, but it is low enough to qualify for Food Stamps in most cases. It seems that Walmart is only able to get people to work at that low pay because those same people can get government assistance (now including government subsidized health insurance). According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart employees get about $6.2 billion annually in mostly federal taxpayer subsidies. If you are still looking for Reagan’s, Cadillac driving welfare queen, look no further, it is the parricide, Walmart.
