Journal Entries
Tiddly Pong!
Posted Feb 15, 2003
Wallace Greenslade died April 21st, 1961, aged 48
He, needless to say, never saw his buddy's subsequent fame...
Poor 'Wall'.
I hope his family got something out of it.
Do Beeb employees get royalties?
Is there any tape or film left of his TV days?
Wonder what his obit said?
Oddly, this is another case of time displacement.
When I first encountered the Goon Shows, I really didn't care enough to see when they were manufactured.
Or to look at the cast bios.
Of course, I didn't have a computer then.
There was such an immediacy to the recordings that I really didn't think of them as history.
They were new to me and my toddler, and thus NEW.
It wasn't until yesterday that I realized that Wallace Greenslade, whose voice I knew like the back of my closet, had been dead almost a year when I was born...
Well, better late than never.
Good-bye, Wall, it was nice knowing you...
Your name is unforgettable and your voice will haunt me forever...
"Winds, light to variable."
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Feb 15, 2003
War and it's little buddies.
Posted Feb 7, 2003
I sit and watch the news and they talk about the deployments and how many troops and sailors and pilots are going over.
I sit and think that it's all much more gradual than one would have thought.
We think of WW1 and WW2 as massive troop movements. We think of Vietnam as a decade and a half of increased and decreased troop numbers, against a relatively constant opponent.
I sit and watch as they talk about all the toys.
The computer-guided smart whatsits and
unmanned drone thingamagigs and
the heat-seaking anti-personnel ring-a-dings...
and I think of the boys on the two sides during the American Civil War who carried what they thought of as modern battle tools toward the early fields of what was supposed to be a short effort.
Some of them carried 'bullet-proof' breastplates and helmets...
others carried short swords and gladiuses.
But, in the end, it's about the death.
Somebody's gonna die. Several somebodies. A lot of somebodies.
And we will be hearing about it for generations to come. Documentaries and books and movies...
all too late...
all too little...
People might be dying in Iraq every day. I dunno.
But I heard there were a lot more dying in southern Africa.
Some might even be grateful for a bullet or a Hellfire missile.
But they haven't peeved us enough to die.
It truly, as I watch the tube and the twinks babbling happily with the file videos unwinding behind them, is not the Iraq War that bothers me. It will happen or it won't.
It is the decade of warfare after that.
Once we are there, we are not gonna just pull out.
We didn't after the Gulf War...which as far as I can tell, isn't even over, yet. This is not a new war. Just the old one, part two.
Like the Hitlerites getting everybody back for the indignity of Versailles. (gee whiz, spelled that right first time!) And the French letting them.... Oh, behave! That's not nice!
No, I think this is just the beginning.
The British and the French left the Middle East to it's own devices after, what, two hundred years, of messing around in there?
Now, the US is going to have to deal with the grandsons of the petty chieftains who went to Sandhurst and St. Etienne to learn how a proper empire was run.
They haven't even begun to govern their nations, haven't given a thought to democracy and equality, beyond it's usefulness to the upper 10%.
I've heard again, this time around, the old canard about Bush and Oil.
Hogwash, then and now.
It's about toys. Then and now. We wanted them, we bought them, now we want to use them and we have to find some place, 'cause we can't use our own backyard. Military toys.
The U.S. will have to learn a lesson that the Romans learned the hard way.
If people don't care, you can't make them.
Afghanistan has turned out to function true to form.
And it reminds me a little of the situation the warlords and the 'civilized nations' were in with China before the Japanese decided to make things more interesting.
We won't get out of Afghanistan any time soon. It'll be tugging at us for a long time.
Meanwhile, this whole 'War on Terrorism' thing has turned into the son of the 'War On Drugs'.
You get enough experts in a room, or an bureaucracy and the old Russian proverb pops into mind:
Two or more nurses and the child is suddenly discovered to have no head!
Discuss this Journal entry [16]
Latest reply: Feb 7, 2003
Risk assessment: flip of the coin or turn of a friendly card?
Posted Feb 2, 2003
Who is qualified to assess risk, before and after something happens?
Those who climb the mountain?
Those who sit at the bottom and tell tales of the brave men who climb mountains until one falls off and they sue the sherpa?
Where is the justice in ignorance?
If I cannot fly, am I qualified to judge those who do?
If I can't build a car, am I qualified to judge those who don't?
If I can't build a computer, am I qualified to judge those who advertise one thing and sell another?
on another tack,
If you just met me, can you judge me?
If you've never met me, can you judge me?
If you've never heard of me and you read about me, can you judge me?
and still another tack,
If you know why some people die, do you know why you still live?
"Hello, I'm an expert witness. This is what I do for a living."
Who decides who is qualified to engage in risk assessment?
And how risky is it to listen to them?
Kinda like letting a championship boxer tell you what he thinks about cookware...
and a championship basketball player tell you where to shop for electrical components...
and a famous actor or musician or fiction writer tell you what they think about politics and the environment...
I'll listen to a stunt man before I'll listen to a star...
for, despite their mundane suits, the Wright Bros were into Xtreme Sports!
Discuss this Journal entry [5]
Latest reply: Feb 2, 2003
let us pray...
Posted Feb 1, 2003
Dear Lord,
I know it's silly to make so much of spaceship,
when there are bus and train and plane accidents almost daily...
But,
I pray for those who die in going to space
and I pray for those who will have to follow them,
hoping that it won't happen to them.
I ask for courage for the families who
have always known this might be possible,
but who probably hoped, as I did,
never to see the image of a shattering
shuttle repeated,
over and over again on the television...
I know that there are many important things
and many lives at risk in the world
right now,
yet, I know that I am not alone
in focusing on this.
Forgive me, please, for joining in
their weakness.
Amen.
Discuss this Journal entry [7]
Latest reply: Feb 1, 2003
Birthday musings: life of the damaged party
Posted Jan 28, 2003
Ah....
41
forty-one!
FORTY-TATTERING-WUN!
What do it mean?
I mean, really, what do it mean?
Another twitch on the odometer?
Another 365 calender squares down the toilet?
Four sticky decades and a year...
Forty years ago, I was still a babe...
and I had a leetle bother just borneded two weeks before...
we're eleven and half munths apart...
We look alike, we talk alike, and we haven't talked or looked at each other in years.
We spent the fifteen years crammmed together. Then I split.
We ended up in Austin together and ended up living together, again.
Urf!
Forty-one years.
Not too old, not too young. Not just right.
I was borneded on the eve of war and here I sit, on the eve again.
Some things never change.
1962 was a long time ago and yet it was yesterday.
I don't remember it, but I've spent a long time looking it up.
Jimi Hendrix was out of the Army and playing weddings.
Buddy Holly was still fresh in memory.
Elvis was in the Army.
The Beatles were still goofing around in Hamburg...for the last time...
Kuwait and Iraq and Yemen and a whole host of former colonies were new countries...
Kennedy was still trying to figure out whether Nixon got the better part of the deal.
Castro was smiling.
My father had a very short haircut and glasses that would make Lisa Loeb proud.
He was driving a ... I think it was a Beetle or a big ugly Chevy... I'll have to ask.
I'm trying to cast back to my earliest memory, now...
and I can't seem to go back further than when I was about three...
my mom went to answer the door and she was ironing...
and I was just tall enough to reach up and place my hand, I can't remember which one, flat on the bottom of the iron...
and screaming...
there was a second time that I burned a hand, when I was a bit older, when I rolled into some live ashes at the bottom of a construction site trash heap... I think that was the left hand...
and then, a couple of years ago, in a factory job, I got some molten aluminium alloy down a glove on my right hand and now I have a scar from that...
ugh...
Forty-one years of bruises, scars, burns, scratchs, splinters...bumps...
then there was when I was fifteen and I discovered...
ooo, there's a lovely thought...
I'll linger on that a bit...
still lingering...
linger, linger, linger....
I think I'll stay here a while....
Oops! Bye!
Discuss this Journal entry [4]
Latest reply: Jan 28, 2003
Tonsil Revenge (PG)
Researcher U186749
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