This was one guy my Dad and I agreed on. Evel Knievel was the coolest. If anyone else had broken as many bones as he had and I heard he was going to do some insane stunt, I probably wouldn’t pay much attention. Evel Knievel? You HAD to watch him. It didn’t matter if he made the jump or not. The red, white and blue leather jumpsuits. The Jimmy Dean way of looking at who he was talking to from under his brow. And that grin.

To the entire Knievel family, you have my heartfelt condolences. Your Dad gave me and my Dad some amazing Saturday afternoons together. You have no idea how much that means to me.

There was a time when the British Empire would have wiped you off the face of the earth for threatening harm to one of their subjects…it wasn’t that long ago…

…just sayin’.

Sorry to have been a bit chintzy with the free bloggy ice cream over the last couple of days; I was wrestling with the many-limbed monster that is technology – or at least that aspect of it involved in doing a version of “To Truckee’s Trail” for Amazon’s “Kindle” reader. It turned out that the PDF version that I have, which is the final print version was incompatible with what Amazon has established for their system.

Which was a bit of a facer, because it uploaded and converted and looked – if not perfectly OK, at least fairly OK – but some of the other information I had to load – about which I would never in the world goof up (you know, like my SSAN?) were kicked back as invalid. What the hey? Email to Amazon customer service, expressing bafflement and considerable annoyance. Received an email back, with an option for a phone call to a customer service rep, which was totally surprising. I mean – there’s an option for speaking to a real hoo-man at Amazon?

Well, there was, but the first person I talked to sounded like a cousin of Special Ed, who handed me on to a technician who was about as helpful as one of those terrifyingly crusty old senior technicians, back when I was not Sgt. Mom, but merely Baby Airman… with a completely baffling problem.

You remember – the exchange with the crusty old technician with enough stripes on his arm for a zebra farm, which went roughly like this:

Baby Airman: Umm… can you tell me how to perform this insurmountably complicated and obscure task about which I have not the slightest clue?

Crusty Old Senior Technician: It’s in the manual. (Which is, let me add, about the size of the LA phone book, and printed in eeensy weensy type)

Baby Airman: (quavering slightly) Yes, but I…

Crusty Old Senior Technician: (growling contemptuously) Didn’t you read the manual?

B.A.: Yes, but…

C.O.S.T: Well then, what are you asking me for? Go and read it again!

B.A.: (creeping away in silent despair, racking brains in a futile attempt to figure out task)

So the Crusty Old Senior Technician – Amazon version basically told me the file format was all wrong, contemptuously forwarded a page with a lot of links to discussion forums – none of which really addressed my problem, since I wasn’t really sure what it was, exactly, and I wound doing just as what usually happened back then: some slightly more knowledgeable tech whispering “Pssst! Try this!” and handing me a short and well-thumbed little cheat sheet which told me exactly what I had to know to perform that formerly insurmountably complicated and obscure task.

In this case, it was one of the other Independent Authors’ Guild writers who said, “Oh, just convert it from PDF to Word and upload it again.”

So, within another ten hours, assuming something else hasn’t thrown a spanner into the works ( translation: a monkey wrench into the gears) “To Truckee’s Trail” will be available for purchase by those who are keen on the latest hot technological gadget! Enjoy! And thanks to those of you who have purchased paperback copies in the last couple of months!

Is it really that slow of a news day that your lead story at the top of every hour involves dissecting a speech by Bill Clinton? Is it really news that Bill Clinton did one thing in the 90s and then has changed his story today? This surprises…hands…anyone? It’s like slapping your forehead realizing the Donald Rumsfeld may not have been a strategic genius after all.  It’s like thinking, “Hmmm, I think that Fox may not be “fair and balanced.”

Let me tell you about my Senior Drill Instructor.

Throw out your preconceptions; Staff Sergeant King was not R. Lee Ermey, he was not Jack Webb.

What he was was the eptiome of ‘Marine Corps SNCO’. He walked the walk.  He talked the talk. He led by example.

He was the most unusual SDI at MCRD. Platoon 3099 was a herd of non-marching diddy-boppers, going into third phase. This was clearly unacceptable and if we kept it up we’d embarrass ourselves.

How bad were we? At one point SSgt Q. called out a command. First and second squad heard ‘By the Left Flank .. March’.

Third and Fourth squad heard ‘Column Half-Right . . March’

So .. ya. The platoon is rapidly marching away from itself. In front of a brace of Captains and a clutch of Majors and Colonels.  I was in First squad and had a perfect view of SSgt Q’s face. I thought his smokey-the-bear hat was going to pop off from the pressure.

We were pretty bad.

SSgt King brought a metronome in and installed it by the DI Hut, had it on 24×7.  Soon we’re all marching around in time in the barracks. My dreams were in time with a steady ‘click-click-click’.  He borrowed a bass drum from the band and had a pair recruits from the sick, lame and lazy section out beating on it while we drilled.

But they could not carry it around (sick, lame and lazy) so they stood in one place, beating away while we marched around them.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM …. BOOM …. BOOM

“FASTER!”

BOOM.BOOM.BOOM .. BOOM .. BOOM

“SLOWER!”

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM .. BOOM .. BOOM

“JUST LIKE THAT!”

I don’t have a lot of fond memories of boot camp - it’s not summer camp - but that scene is one of them. Thanks, SSgt King.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Okay, it’s that time of year. No matter where you go, be it office or department store, Christmas Music is being forced into our ear canals like creamed green beans through a toddler’s locked jaws. It’s the audio equivalent in my mind.

For today’s fun, what are your favorite Christmas Tunes and what can you simply not listen to one more time?

Favorites:

White Christmas - Bing Crosby

Baby It’s Cold Outside - Almost any version as long as there’s heat between the two singers. This version doesn’t suck one bit, especially for a contemporary duet. I found a new respect for Joan Osbourne after watching this, I didn’t think she had a sense of humor.

Elf’s Lament - Bare Naked Ladies

Silent Night - Celtic Woman (In Gaelic…actually I have an audio crush on Celtic Woman, I love everything they do. Give me my Bose headphones and a collection of their stuff and I’m in bliss.)

Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt (Madonna’s got nuthin’ on this.)

River - Robert Downey Jr.

Almost anything by Trans-Siberian Orchestra

The entire sountrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas (this IS Christmas to me).

Father Christmas - The Kinks

Can NOT listen to again:

Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town - Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band (Used to love this, now it gives me the wiggins. There’s just too much going on here.)

Do They Know It’s Christmas (The Original with various artists…I kind of like Bare Naked Ladies riff on it.)

Happy XMas (War is Over) - John freaking Lennon. I’ve almost caused an accident convulsing to change the channel on my car radio. I like the idea behind the song, but I simply cannot listen to it again.

Okay, let me simplify this. Just about any remake of a Christmas classic by a rock band or singer is going to make my skin crawl. Just quit already. Where is it written that when your career is taking a downturn you should try to put out a Christmas Album? A Very Special Christmas was a nice idea at the time, but it opened the floodgates for a plethora of contemporary artists thinking they could and should do a Christmas album when their careers have run into trouble.

Oh, and I SO stole this idea from Michele’s post.

Not even in the election season yet and I am tired of it already. God give me strength to endure. I think I’ll go hide out in the 19th century and review the build-up to the Civil War for a while, refresh my memory of what bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred, knock-down-and-drag out national politics really was like. Puts it all into proper proportion, I guess.

I’ll come out of my burrow in about eight months. I can always hope that there has been a vicious caning, or a duel on the Capitol lawn, something to break up the monotony of leaks and counter-leaks and he-said-she-said gabfests on the Sunday morning political affairs TV shows, and of political pundits knitting their brows and talking through their hats about who is ahead in the polls and why. Newsflash – they’ve got about as much chance of being right as any fool with a Magic 8-Ball.

Seriously, who the hell talks to people who call out of the clear blue and want to take up fifteen minutes of your life asking stupid-ass questions? I don’t – who the hell doesn’t have caller ID and an answering machine?

I will commit myself to two principles: one, I will try and refrain from using sarcastic names for the various hopeful pols parading their various qualifications or lack of same in the 2008 version of our national political game of “Survivor on the Potomic”. Her Thighness, the Silky Pony, Pretty Boy, or the Hildabeast – such derisive nicks shall not cross my keyboard after today. That is just too junior high, so very Maureen Dowd. I promise to stop it at once. Mom raised me with better manners. When someone made a disgraceful display of themselves in public, Mom said that nice people do their best not to notice – or at the very least least, to be gracious about it.

And two: I will most likely not vote for Hillary Clinton, AKA her Inevitableness. I am qualifying this, because you never know. An unforeseen political tectonic spasm in the next few months may throw to the surface some morally disgusting, totally unacceptable, completely charmless dreg with a murky background and apparently bottomless sources of funding… sorry, Senator Kerry, I wasn’t talking about you. Anyway, someone who makes Her Inevitableness appear to be the lesser of two evils. Hard to picture anything short of Cthulhu performing that feat; but so far one thing about her which disinclines me toward her how the legacy media has sort of crowned her in advance. Oh, and the way that some people blithely assume that just because I am a woman, and a small-f-feminist of many years standing that I will of course vote for here.

Think again. Frankly, I think Rudolph Guiliani might do. At least he looks better in a dress.

If you had to go to the polls today, who would you vote for in the primaries? Both of them. When Nov 08 rolls around, who are the two you want to see running against one another? Why?

I’ll be honest, I haven’t been paying a lot of attention. I know, shame on me. I was tuning it out mostly because it was too damn early and now that the primaries are coming up, I find myself playing catch-up. I don’t think I’m alone.

you should go to Michele’s and view these classic bits of Thanksgiving humor.  Warning, severe screen and keyboard damage.  View with your mouth empty.  You’ve been warned.

The humanity

Found through a comment thread on Lileks; Angie Schultz posted this link and I couldn’t resist.

We’re having roast duck (with pear relish) with fresh green beans, organic fingerling potatoes, and strawberry cheesecake for afters. It’s not that we don’t like turkey and all that traditional stuff - we just don’t like eating the leftovers for a month afterwards!

Intrepid activist Bruce Gagnon bravely writes in from Bushitler’s Amerika to warn us

Each year the Space Command performs a war game set in 2016. In that war game the new military space plane, the Falcon, flies across the planet at six times the speed of sound and delivers 12,000 pound bombs against the “Red” team. Red team means China in Pentagon language.

I do not think that phrase means what you think it does.

In wargaming, the opposing force in a simulated military conflict is known as the Red Team, and is used to reveal weaknesses in current military readiness.

And .. what a new space plane?  How cool. Except, not so much.

The FALCON project includes:

• The X-41 Common Aero Vehicle (CAV) - a common aerial platform for hypersonic ICBMs and cruise missiles, as well as civilian RLVs and ELVs; flew in 2005
• The Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-1 (HTV-1) - a test concept, originally planned to fly in September 2007 now cancelled
• The HTV-2 - to fly in 2008
• The HTV-3 - to fly in 2009
• The HTV-3X - Blackswift
• The Small Launch Vehicle (SLV) - a smaller engine to power CAVs, tests to begin by 2010

Calling FALCON - a program with 6 vehicles (and one cancelled) in test - a new space plane is stretching the truth a bit.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

I found this note on how the RAF used to arm their nuclear weapons to be charmingly English . . .

Newsnight reveals that RAF nuclear bombs were armed by opening a panel held by two captive screws – like a battery cover on a radio – using a thumbnail or a coin.

Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which are turned with an allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or ground burst and other parameters.

The bomb is actually armed by inserting a cylindrical bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees.

There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the bomb, although RAF crews were supposed to always work in pairs if they were near the bomb or had the keys for the bomb.

Opening up the hatch with a coin - then using an allen wrench (for the love of mike) to adjust the darn thing - and then launching with a bicycle key - is a touch worthy of Monty Phython. Mary Poppins would appreciate the thriftiness demonstrated; Yanks would spend billions on a special key system from Boeing. The Brits just ran down to the hardware store one day and called it good.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows… given that the classic “cowboy” functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final years of the frontier per se offered all kinds of interesting potential story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives… but still.

For the generic cowboy was a himself hired hand. Yes, indeed – working for wages as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle – of all the domesticated animals only very slightly brighter than sheep. Your average cow is pretty much a functional retard. If if has had one functioning brain cell to rub against the other, all that would happen would be smoke trickling out of their ears. And, not to put too much of a fine point on it – herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-skill, low-paying labor, most often seasonable, and most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn’t do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, mostly until better employment opportunities came along.

You have to wonder, especially when there were so many other truly heroic epic adventurers available to hang the hero worship on. How did the cowboy even begin to loom so large – especially when the cattle business (and it was a business!) didn’t really begin to thrive until all the excitement was practically over? What about the mountain men, living on their wits in the early days, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? And surely the miners in the various gold and silver booms – they worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves in the earlies and for their employers later on. And what about my own personal favorites among the frontier archetypes, the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were quite a bit more likely to have adventurous encounters with the lawless element, or particularly hostile Indians… although even the stereotype of the Western towns being particularly lawless falls down a bit in contemporary comparison to elements of big cities in the East. Why one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, moves and television shows is enough to make you shrug your shoulders and say “que?!” to the camera, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

So how did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? Damned if I know, although I can take some guesses. The popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. Right time, right place; and it has often been noticed that the typical Western TV show or movie perpetuated ever since is more often set in about the 1865-1885s time frame. Telegraph and the transcontinental railroads are in place, the Indians are reserved (with sporadic exceptions necessary to the plot of the moment, of course) and all the little towns have wooden sidewalks and glass windows, suitable for a reckless cowboy to ride his horse down one and crash through the other. But still – a pretty limited visualization of the frontier west – surely there was more, even in the late 19th century for popular culture to fixate on?

I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn’t based on a melding of one particular and very old archetype and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight – able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in the lively yet strangely scholarly tome “Cracker Culture”, the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock rather favored herding barely domesticated animals (and hunting wild game) rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench – even if it didn’t pay very much at all.

It is fascinating to go back to the roots of the cattle industry – as I am doing for the final volume of Adelsverein ( or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”) – just to discover how very, very different it was from what has always been popularly presented. Owen Wister didn’t get the half of it.

This is a recipe Beautiful Wife has been using for about 10 years. I know the holidays are coming when I start to smell this throughout the house.

Beautiful Wife’s Cranberry Chutney (Adopted from Father Pat’s Recipe and it may be exactly the same, but after 10 years, God only knows.)

4 Cups whole cranberries
1 2/3 Cup Sugar (Splenda works great for anyone cooking for a diabetic)
1 Tsp Fresh Ginger
½ Cup (1 Med) Chopped Onion
½ Cup Thinly Sliced Celery
½ Cup (1 Med) Apple (Peeled, Cored, Chopped)
1 Cup Seedless Raisins
1 Tblspn Ground Cloves
1 Cup Water

Combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, ginger, cloves and water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir frequently. This is a good time to prep/chop the onion, celery and apple. When cranberries start to pop/split, stir in onion, apple and celery. Bring back to a boil, then lower to a simmer for 15 minutes.

If canned in sterilized jars and properly sealed can be stored on pantry shelf for quite a long time. Otherwise, refrigerate. Serve as you would with cranberry sauce, use as jelly, or as a marinade. Good with any meat, not just turkey. Great as a topping for oatmeal or on crackers with cream cheese.

Venomous Kate posted her stuffing recipe too.

Here’s a question…why do southerners think that their stuffing is the “authentic” kind? Didn’t yankees start the whole Thanksgiving thing?

Other recipes welcome.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The head of the Khmer Rouge’s largest and most notorious torture center appeared in court Tuesday in the first public session of the long-delayed U.N.-backed tribunal probing the regime’s reign of terror in the 1970s.

The 4-year regime of the Khmer Rouge resulted in 1.7million deaths. Pol Pot, the dictator responsible for it, died in 1998 without ever being brought to trial.

I have no idea what delayed the trials for 30 years, but I’m glad to see that they’re finally going forward.

Source

When the opening to the Bowie/Queen classic, “Under Pressure” begins…I secretly hope that it’s “Ice-Ice Baby.” I’m not proud of that.

I don’t find the the new vampire-detective drama “Moonlight” half as annoying as I thought I would. I mean, it’s no “Angel” but it doesn’t suck…and yes, I meant to say that.

I’m so not ready for the holidays…seriously…I think we had some silly idea that we’d have more money after I retired and we’d be able to get all new decorations. We might have a tree this year.

I’m really happy we have a fireplace…almost giddy especially on really cold nights.

I hate to admit this because I always have taught my airmen and the folks in the classes I’ve taught, “The first thing you do when troubleshooting anything electrical is to check your power supply.” Our clothes dryer was spinning but not drying…no heat. Did I break down and find my electrical probe to see if it was the outlet or perhaps the fuses? Of course not. I replaced everything in the dryer first. My son-in-law found the “so burnt it disintegrated in his hand” 20 amp fuse that was the real problem. I’m not supposed to beat myself too much over this, but jeez, I feel like a schmuck.

I’ve discovered from hearing recordings of my customer service calls at work, I say, “Ummmmm…” far too often. I haven’t done that in years…decades even.

I’d rather spend a Saturday afternoon cooking for my family and then spend the evening sitting around watching movies on DVD than to go out and DO something else.

Bangladesh has been hit by a cyclone

DHAKA, Bangladesh (CNN) — More than 1,000 people have died in Bangladesh after a devastating tropical cyclone ripped through the western coast of the country, and the toll is expected to rise, a government spokesman tells CNN.

15,000 people hurt, 1,000 missing - it will be worse before it gets better. Villages are flattened, wells poisoned by salt water flooding, crops ruined .. ugh. Puts natural disasters in the West in perspective, hunh?

Oh and the fleet will be ashore soon

U.S. military officials said Friday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was ready to dispatch Navy vessels carrying 3,500 Marines to the region to help in recovery efforts.

It is expected that the USS Kearsarge and USS Wasp would move from the Gulf of Oman. The USS Tarawa recently left Hawaii, and it could go to Bangladesh as well, officials said.

Semper Fi - again. I’m sure the Army barracks we used at the airfield in Dhaka in 1991 are still there, as are the spiffy flush toilets connected to the open sewers.   Watch your step at night, is all I can say - in a country that is pool-table flat the sewage doesn’t flow so much as amble.

Subject line hat tip
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

So Philippa Gregory still has nothing to fear in sales competition from me as the author of “To Truckee’s Trail”, as I have to sell another one million, nine-hundred thousand plus copies before I can even think of buying that tastefully renovated castle in J.K.Rowlings’ neighborhood. I can’t make out from either Amazon’s stats or Booklockers’ how many – if any copies have sold in the last couple of months, because the book distributor Ingram has a four-month lead anyway. And individual POD books like mine are so expensive, relatively speaking, to print when they are done in runs of fifteen or twenty, rather than fifteen or twenty hundred thousand copies at a whack – that bookstores usually can’t get them at a 40% discount… which is a whole nother ball of wax, and the reason that the big-box-bookstores are an un-crackable nut for us independent authors. Thank god for the small local bookstores: I have a book-signing event planned tentatively at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg in December, and another one January 16th at The Twig in Alamo Heights. And my Number One fan, Mom, might be able to twist the arms of her literary friends in Escondido and Valley Center, and schedule something for me over Christmas week. Discouragingly, it still takes months to get reviews, though. Apparently not everyone can read a book as fast as I can.

Still, at least independent authors can get published now – they can get their books out there without having to pass through the gates of the literary industrial complex. There are other options than paying a bomb of money to a printer and stashing crates of copies in their garage. There is another way to find an audience, as independent musicians and independent movie-makers have already discovered. I have gotten together with a handful of other writers to brain storm some marketing strategies; all of us are either small-press or POD and totally exasperated with the current paradigm. There must be a better way for our books to reach interested readers. Without very much more ado, we formed the Independent Authors Guild, put up a website and a discussion group, published a newsletter (which will be a monthly) and began recruiting more members. So far we’re still working out future moves, and putting in sweat equity rather than a lot of cash. Check out the website… my work! (Not the logo, though – someone else did that, and it’s a book, not a pair of panties!)

Oh, and I scored a stack of books for reviews that I have to read and then write about. I promise I will post some more of that good bloggy ice cream here.

And I am four chapters in to the final volume of the “Adelsverein” trilogy - or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”, and need to do some very specific research on 1) how to harness a team of draft horses to a wagon, and what driving them involved -diagrams would help enormously and 2) 19th century prothesis available for a below-elbow arm amputation. Does the BAMC medical museum have a collection, I wonder?

232 Reasons Why the Marine Corps Kicks Ass, from the Marine Corps Times.

Cherry picking, we have …

2. Civilians have to find time to go to the gym. Marines get paid to go.

4. There’s no such thing as an “ex” Marine.

8. “Every Marine Into the Fight.”

18. The lance corporal underground.

22. “No better friend, no worse enemy.”

23. Typhoons approaching Okinawa often spark islandwide beer runs

26. 10 rounds from the 500-yard line.

36. Running cadences that mention napalm. And Eskimos.

55. As if ranks that include the words “master” and “gunnery” aren’t intimidating enough on their own, the Corps uses them both. At once.

60. Marines predicted the WWII campaigns in the Pacific years earlier and prepared for the inevitable. So when a Marine says, “Hey, I’ve been thinking .” perhaps you should take notes.

61. Give a Marine some free time, and he’ll rip down your dictator’s statue.

83. Chuck Norris was in the Air Force. Steve McQueen was a Marine.

90. Arty guys who do civil affairs. They blow it up, then they fix it.  Circle of life.

140. Gunnery sergeants. Don’t know the answer? Ask the gunny. Need something? Ask the gunny. In trouble? Avoid the gunny.

153. Shirt stays. Or garters. Whatever you call them, they’re a triple whammy, keeping your shirt tucked, your socks up and removing all that unwanted leg hair.

199. “8th and I.” Ten bucks says you have no idea where the Army chief of staff lives. Commandants don’t hide.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Via.