Monday

No Rain

Rain all around the area but not here. Looking at the last 12 months of temps and I find 7 months above normal. Almost one degree above normal. Great that we get warmer and warmer.

 

What I’m Reading

 I’ve been reading Rick Atkinson’s series on WWII. The first is An Army at Dawn, describing in great detail (704 pages) the invasion of North Africa. Read this book and you will gain a real understanding of the complexity, chaos, and tragedy of war. We think of WWII as a noble effort supported by a uniformly positively public. A flawless and well-executed war.

Can’t be farther from the truth. Atkinson describes campaigns designed by planners unfamiliar with the units they were deploying using faulty intelligence. Over time the planners and soldiers learned from their mistakes but before they learned tens of thousands of troops died.  Atkinson’s analysis is clear-cut and fast-moving.

 The second book in the series is The Day of Battle, describing the invasion of Italy.  Once again, in fascinating detail (816 pages) Atkinson faithfully follows the Allies across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily and onto the continent. He is especially good at assessing the decisions made by generals and describing how their personalities affected their confidence or skepticism about battle campaigns. 

The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by General Mark Clark, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. Atkinson tells us how they began the war untested and uncertain but emerged by the Spring of 1944 as battle-hardened and effective commanders.

Atkinson skewers the idealistic view of war that Nemerov mocks in the poem below.

The War In The Air by Howard Nemerov

For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.

Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,

Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.

That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.

                 ——–from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.

 

 

Weekend Over

Weekends, Concept Of

I have to say that while I was just plain retired I began to lose the concept of weekends. Of course, some cultures never really had it. I recently saw this on the Online Bangalore website:

Although not new, the concept of weekend as perceived and practised in Western countries started acquiring popularity and practical force only recently in Bangalore. Weekend here means the whole of Saturday and Sunday for some or half of Saturday and Sunday for some others, but it does clearly mean Sunday for almost everyone. 

I was losing even the concept of Sunday. But now that I have returned to a more regular schedule I once again feel the limits of weekends. I have mixed feelings, I guess, about that. But I like at least the rhythm of work and like that I do it less than full-time.

More later.

Back Again, Again

Gone But Have Returned

Well, I’ve been away for some time but now I’m back. I’ve been working 32 hours each week at my part-time job but it is feeling a little full-timeish recently. For instance, yesterday I worked 13 hours to solve a scheduling problem.  I was scheduled to supervise GED testing in the morning but had inadvertently also been scheduled to work with new immigrants (from Burma, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Syria, and other places) in the evening. No one else qualified to work with the new immigrants was available so I volunteered to work late. This is part-time????

A Job Commonplace

 My original intent in this little job was to offer a service to underserved populations, get back into the work-world a bit, and encounter a slice of life otherwise invisible to those of us living in middle-class suburbs.

Certainly I’ve seen quite a slice of life not experienced before. Every day I talk to immigrants and Americans at the bottom end of the education ladder. In the past I’ve worked and studied with educational elites. If they are the sun of the academic world then I’m now working in the shadows — with dropouts, screw-ups, the vastly underemployed, and, of course, immigrants just taking their first steps in a new world of unfamiliar customs, a strange language, and without the support of nearby family.

 They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are attractive and young like this mother and daughter used by Catholic Charities to raise money. But more often they are people who have lived hard lives full of physical labor yielding little in the way of wealth. 

 

But they want to adopt American values and culture, they want to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, they want to be part of America and everything positive it stands for.  

I don’t recognize in these people the political attacks made by politicians and cable news talking heads. They want to work hard for success, they want to speak English so they can join the American economic mainstream, they want their children to grow up as Americans. Their attitudes are a tonic to feeling bad about American prospects.

The Impact of Underemployment

If only that was all there was to this job.  As a part-time job with no benefits it does not attract workers in the middle of building a life-long career. Rather, it attracts intelligent people who are in between jobs or have reached a dead end of some kind in their work or people like me — occasional workers with no career aspirations. Underemployment – the employment of workers with high skill levels in low-wage jobs that do not require such abilities –  tends to lead to workers feeling undervalued and often bored.  A bad combination. In the case of the college where I work now these feelings led one worker to needle another worker to the point she complained about a hostile work environment.  The man doing the needling thought I had some part in her complaint (I didn’t, actually) and now he glares hostilely at me most days as well as not talking to me.

I can live with this I suppose but the atmosphere is ridiculously tense and leads me to wonder why we all just can’t get along, to reference another person at odds with his work environment.

Maybe I’ll just go back to being retired.

This poem by Bob Hicok has reflects what seems to be the attitude of several people I work with now.

After working sixty hours again for what reason

The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.

        ————— from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok

 

 

Sunday

Anniversary

Last Thursday Marian and I celebrate our 32nd anniversary. We went to one of our favorite restaurants that specializes in a Pan-Asian menu.

A wonderful place where presentation is as important as taste. Not a romantic place, what with its chic, semi-industrial look, but the service is faultless and the food is quite wonderful.

Then we went to see Kathy Griffin, the comedian.

Rapid-fire presentation where she dropped the name of every celebrity we have followed for the past two weeks or so. I couldn’t possibly describe her presentation in any way that begins to truly represent her style. Great fun.

Sunday

Weather Station

Marian gave me a weather station for Christmas.

You can see it next to the bird feeder mounted on the tripod.

The transmitter is connected to the wind and rain sensors and their data transmitted wirelessly to the display inside the house. The only problem with the system is that a PC connection requires a serial connection and my laptop doesn’t have a serial port. I bought a serial-to-USB bridge but it doesn’t appear to be working correctly. I’ll keep tinkering with it. But it is way cool.

The Actual Weather

Looking at my readout it is currently 60.9 degrees (winter in Florida) and we had about half an inch of rain today. But the new year has been largely dry. Already we are more than an inch down. Hopefully the rain today will begin to diminish our long-lasting rain deficit. We continue to remain warmer than normal. 2007 was one of our warmer years and too dry — down 6 inches from our yearly average. Seven mornings below freezing so far (we average 15 mornings below 32 each year) and two days in January so far when highs didn’t get out of the 40’s. But not enough of those to even get us back to average temps.

Movies We’ve Seen

Quite a few, actually, since I last wrote about them.

This weekend we saw The Orphanage. The previews have featured Guillermo Del Toro as a draw but he was a producer rather than the director. The director is unknown in the U.S., directing movies with only European distribution before this. The reviews emphasized the director’s competence but unwillingness to move beyond standard horror movie tropes. Sure enough, the movie is sometimes scary but the director uses conventional ways to scare his viewers: loud noises, narrow perspectives suddenly changed to reveal danger, dark and narrow passages, closeups of Geraldine Chaplin who, apparently, is a mainstay in Spanish movies. She speaks fluent French and Spanish and has had long-term affairs with several Spanish directors. Quite an interesting life.

We thought that National Treasure:Book of Secrets would be a satisfying sequel but we didn’t expect this movie to be as funny and entertaining as it was. Fast-moving, full of laughs and interesting Hollywood plot-twists, good acting and well-shot scenery, the time flew by and we left laughing at remembered scenes. Hardly memorable and never rising above its thoroughly commercial roots, this movie nevertheless is the promise of pure entertainment that Hollywood always promises but only occasionally delivers.

This movie hit all the right notes from the moment Charlie Wilson’s War starts. Mike Nichols is back in his old form we saw in The Birdcage, Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate, and Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf. Tom Hanks seems able to play any role and is absolutely the venal congressman he plays here. Julia Roberts plays an exaggeration of her earlier roles, and Philip Seymour Hoffman just couldn’t have been better. The movie is both funny and serious, and its tone seems utterly realistic. A wonderful movie that talks realistically about serious global issues but finds the humor of human motivation and the ways human failures can move global issues.

We really liked this movie.

You would think this would be an unlikely Christmas Day opener but Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was indeed our Christmas Day movie of choice.  We saw Charlie Wilson’s War on Christmas Day up in the North Carolina mountains. A musical about a serial killer and his girlfriend who made meat pies out of his victims’ remains may seem a bit twisted as holiday fare but Tim Burton pulls it off.  The blood seemed cartoonish enough and the characters were set firmly enough on a musical stage to avoid reminding us of real serial killers or the awful ways he killed his string of victims. But even big names like Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman weren’t enough to draw in huge crowds.  To date the movie has not even pulled in enough to pay its production costs.  Too bad. The score is inventive, the lyrics extremely clever, Depp an able and quite malevolent Todd, and the set design distinctively Tim Burton.

Maybe that is another problem with this movie — Tim Burton. He has made some real financial  blockbusters: Batman, Batman Returns, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes.  All of these have grossed more than $160 million each. And he has grossed more than a billion dollars in his 13 movies, according to Boxofficemojo.com .  But his style is so distinctive that either you are attracted to his expressionist style or you hate it.  We love his style and have seen all his movies, from Peewee’s Big Adventure in 1985 to Sweeney Todd.

Happy New Year

Is it really 2008?? I am now 58 years old, I’ve been retired from my career of over three decades for 13 months, in barely two weeks I’ll celebrate with my wife our 32nd wedding anniversary. You can’t accumulate such longevity in life’s activities without being old, old, old. Social Security actuarial tables suggest I’ll last another 21.5 years if I lasted this long. The same table suggests Marian will live another 29.23 years.

Y2K38 Bug

Should I actually last so long plus 10 years I’ll be entertained by the Y2K38 problem. As opposed to the hyped-up Y2K problem — where I spent New Years Eve 1999/2000 watching Sopranos DVDs with my software engineers at the center waiting for problems as computer clocks ticked over without incident into the year 2000 — this problem in 31 years may turn out to be real.

This problem arises because most C programs use a library of routines called the standard time library . This library establishes a standard 4-byte format for the storage of time values, and also provides a number of functions for converting, displaying and calculating time values.

The standard 4-byte format assumes that the beginning of time is January 1, 1970, at 12:00:00 a.m. This value is 0. Any time/date value is expressed as the number of seconds following that zero value. So the value 919642718 is 919,642,718 seconds past 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1, 1970, which is Sunday, February 21, 1999, at 16:18:38 Pacific time (U.S.). This is a convenient format because if you subtract any two values, what you get is a number of seconds that is the time difference between them. Then you can use other functions in the library to determine how many minutes/hours/days/months/years have passed between the two times.

A signed 4-byte integer has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647, and this is where the Year 2038 problem comes from. The maximum value of time before it rolls over to a negative (and invalid) value is 2,147,483,647, which translates into January 19, 2038. On this date, any C programs that use the standard time library will start to have problems with date calculations.

This problem is somewhat easier to fix than the Y2K problem on mainframes, fortunately. Well-written programs can simply be recompiled with a new version of the library that uses, for example, 8-byte values for the storage format. This is possible because the library encapsulates the whole time activity with its own time types and functions (unlike most mainframe programs, which did not standardize their date formats or calculations). So the Year 2038 problem should not be nearly as hard to fix as the alleged Y2K problem was.

Movie We Saw

Juno. I don’t laugh out loud in many commercial movies but I did here. We went on New Year’s Day to see this movie and just loved it. The trailer is posted below.

It deals with teenage pregnancy but not in any way you would expect. Juno is a very smart 16-year old that finds herself pregnant, going through a momentary impulse to abort the fetus before deciding to allow the baby to be adopted. The movie is chock full of smart, realistic dialogue and real, full-blooded characters. As the movie unfolds the characters reveal more about themselves to the viewer and the truth unfolds to us as it unfolds to Juno. The world is not quite so predictable as she thinks and she is not quite so equipped to interpret complex human interactions as she thinks. Brilliantly done.
The theme sounds like a drag but it is not treated that way. This is a funny, smart, humane, upbeat movie worth the time and money to see.

Naomi Shihab Nye quite adequately invokes the finality of the old year ending and the renewal of the new year — old obligations swept clean — so little is stone.

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

——–Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

JUNO Trailer