Our Congress - Lost in Space: weekly column 30 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Our Congress – Lost in Space

 

Our United States Congress, apparently having little to do, has been holding hearings (or hearing holdings) on UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena), which used to be known as UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). Although they’re not the same thing they are they same thing [What Is a UAP? Explaining the UFO Hearings in Congress. (businessinsider.com)].

 

Former Air Force major David Grusch is now a whistleblower (with a real Sergeant Preston of the Yukon whistle?) who has whistleblown to Congress that the U. S. government has for decades been collecting and reverse-engineering data from crashed spacecraft but covering it all up. He also alleges that the Vatican in collusion with Mussolini and the United States government has been hiding evidence of spaceships and the body parts of spacemen for some ninety years [Ex-Intel Officer Who Says US Has Proof of Aliens Made Wild Claims Before (businessinsider.com)].

 

The major has no proof of any of this, but he says he has talked with people who have seen the “non-human biologics” (dead spacemen) and parts salvaged from spaceships.

 

The galloping major did not mention any Lizard People.

 

Possibly Congress will next form a committee to investigate the rumor that if you read Little House on the Prairie backward you will hear a satanic message from The Mamas and the Papas. And then there’s the pizza parlor in D.C. that receives secret shortwave messages from the Mole People in their tunnels beneath Oak Island. The pepperoni are then positioned in a code that only the Illuminaughty can understand. I’m risking my life in telling you this, but watch the pepperoni. The fate of Western Civilization depends upon it! Watch the pepperoni!

 

This nation boasts both The United States Space Command [the united states space command - Search (bing.com)] and The United States Space Force [the united states space force - Search (bing.com)], both with uniforms and marching songs and anthems and badges, but probably the spaciest of all are some of the far, far out honorable ladies and honorable gentlemen of Congress.

 

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Two Sovereign Remedies for Depression - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Two Sovereign Remedies for Depression

 

Reading a few pages of Wodehouse at bedtime

Is like walking behind a dachshund at any time

 

Happiness

In Nature We are Only a Menu Item - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

In Nature We are Only a Menu Item

 

Purporting to love nature is a commonplace

This does not mean that nature loves us back

We often look for nature’s smiling face

But nature looks for us as a tasty snack

 

The alligator is defended for being here first

The gentle boar is a creature of God

Anopheles wants only to quench its thirst

The innocent shark hungers only for cod

 

Communing with nature cannot be beaten –

Up until the moment when you are eaten!

 

A Japanese Army Cap - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

A Japanese Army Cap

 "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East"

-Kipling

Long, long ago in a land far away

I met some children playing on a river bank

One little boy wore a Japanese Army cap

Faded and old – I wondered who wore it first?

 

I tried to buy it from him - an MPC dollar?

No.

Five dollars?

No.

Ten dollars?

Laughter and another no.

Twenty good American MPC dollars?

No.

 

We continued our patrol up to Cambodia

And back again

I did not leave my bones in Viet-Nam

Nor even my cap  

                              (I was a fool all the same)

Jane Birkin's Smile - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Jane Birkin’s Smile

 

Her eyes were everything when she looked at us

Teasingly, from beneath a wide-brimmed hat

In that long-ago summer world when we

Assumed for ourselves eternal youth

 

Her lips were everything when she smiled at us

Mischievously, from among the surprised decades

Of this cold winter world that crept upon us

Her insouciance defying the pains of age

 

If we misplaced our youth, our hopes, our dreams

That was all right

We found them again in her saucy grin

Goofus and Gallant Revisited - doggerel 10 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

Goofus and Gallant Revisited

 

Thanks to The Atlantic Monthly

 

I never paid attention to Goofus and Gallant

Because I sensed that I was being preached at

Only later in life do I appreciate their talent

Much better than the cat who sat on a mat

A Japanese Army Cap - weekly column 9 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Japanese Army Cap

 

“A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

 

-Kipling

 

Long, long ago in a land far, far away I met a little boy who was wearing a Japanese army cap. Our boats were upriver along the Cambodian border on routine patrol and to land Sgt. Thuey and me in a little village for an hour or two of propaganda and medical care.

 

Among the children I saw that little boy proudly wearing an old army cap left from the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China. It was a practical cap made of cotton, with a neck flap as further protection from the sun and mosquitoes.

 

I offered the kid an American dollar for that little bit of history, but he grinned and shook his head.

 

I offered him five dollars, but again he grinned and shook his head.

 

Finally I offered him twenty dollars for the cap, and it was still no deal. The cap was important to the little fellow, and I imagine there was a family story about it worth more than money from yet another transient foreign power.

 

Numerous small states were absorbed into the French empire in the 19^th century and ruled as French Indo-China until 1954 [What Was French Indochina? (thoughtco.com)]. Japan occupied the area during the Second World War II and, like France, exploited the land and its people for its natural resources, food production, and manufacturing capacity.

 

The situation during the war was always complicated, and grew worse at the end, with some Japanese soldiers joining the Viet-Minh and others working with the British Army (mostly Indian) in Saigon, numerous nationalist groups, Free French, Vichy French, die-hard imperial Japanese, Chinese, Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and some Americans, most everyone fighting everyone else. On one occasion American planes shot down three British bombers, claiming to have mistaken them for Japanese. Every power group made bad decisions, and thousands, mostly Vietnamese civilians, died in the fighting, from massacres and mass executions by Japanese, French, and Communist authorities, and from starvation.

 

Communist China invaded Viet-Nam in 1979 and was quickly defeated with great loss of men and weapons. I imagine that somewhere around Cao Bang in the north a little kid is wearing a Chinese army cap and telling stories about how his grandfather took it from a dead or captured soldier.

 

Which leads us back to the kid wearing a Japanese army cap in 1970, and the question of whatever happened to the young Japanese soldier, probably little more than a kid himself, who was issued that cap as part of his tropical service kit for duty in Indo-China. Was he killed in the war, or did he finally get home to his mom and dad?

 

I don’t think I lost a cap, but maybe I did, and some little kid even now is wearing it while playing with the other kids, telling them how his grandfather snatched it from a running dog imperialist lackey.

 

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Keyboard Combatants - poem, 7 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Keyboard Combatants

 

“H*** hath no fury like a non-combatant”

 

-anonymous; dates as early as the American Civil War

 

Pitching war metaphors toward a people

Who don’t understand metaphors or war

Does not promote prudent self-government

Or peace

                 Only bullhorns and misspelt signs

Leaving the Party - poem 4 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Leaving the Party

“You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting

With much admired disorder.”

 

-Lady Macbeth in III.iv.109-110

 

The party we leave is not the party that was,

Beginning in optimism and good will

In rooms well-lit with generosity and thought -

Ideas thoughtfully spoken and thoughtfully heard

 

We have all left a party for fresh air

To escape from hollow laughter and cliches

From shouted arguments and whispered schemes

Half-empty glasses and sour cigarette smoke

 

Screamed taunts that sting, a hive-like waspish buzz -

The party we leave is not the party that was

 

Physics Always Follows the Rules - weekly column 25 June 2023

 

 

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

 

Physics Always Follows the Rules

 

RMS Titanic has fascinated people for well over a century now, its construction, technology, launch, passengers, and sinking the subject of thousands of books, movies, and television specials churning up the same old factoids over and over. The reality is that there is probably nothing about Titanic that we don’t know despite tabloid-ish advertisements promoting solved and unsolved mysteries, purported riddles, discoveries that aren’t really discoveries, and even ghosts and curses.

 

As a tee-shirt said during all the giddiness about the Jack and Rose film, “The Ship Sank; Get Over It.”

 

But the continuing fascination is understandable. In a time when most people did not have electricity or running water the Titanic might have seemed as high-tech to them as the science-fiction Enterprise does now. The famous and wealthy passengers, the jewels, servants, and strictly observed class divisions are the sorts of things we decry while watching Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and Sanditon. In this manifestation of the “ship of fools” theme Titanic features the best and worst of technology, human nature, and Edwardian décor.

 

There is no evidence that Captain Smith or anyone else said, “Madam, God Himself couldn’t sink this ship,” but as demonstrated in the tabloids, television, and now the InterGossip humans seldom allow reality to interfere with fantasy.

 

The nature of hubris and the minutiae of ignored lifeboat drills and careless seamanship have been discussed to the point of obsessiveness, but the disaster occurred because of one inexplicable error in judgement: the captain was driving too fast at night without headlights.

 

Recently, forced comparisons between Titanic and the recent loss of what appears to be an imaginatively but maybe inadequately designed submersible occupied our Orwellian telescreens for a week, and I confess that I followed events closely.

 

I was aware that those whose pockets are loaded with the green stuff could take tourist visits to the wreckage of Titanic but paid little attention to it. Like most people I generally assumed that planes, trains, ferryboats, ships, underground railways, trolleys, busses, and other forms of public transportation are regulated by the appropriate government agencies and thus safe for the general public.

 

However, in following the frequent and almost breathless bulletins we learned that the Titan (clever name, eh?) appears not to have been inspected by or registered with any responsible board or agency. 

 

“I think it was General MacArthur who said you’re remembered for the rules…And I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”

 

Stockton Rush: What we know about the Titan submersible's pilot | CNN Business

 

The many reported flaw designs of Titan have been discussed at length, but ultimately there is this: except for the 19-year-old, the four other crew / passengers / “mission specialists” / tourists were middle-aged men of great accomplishments in science and business, and thus brilliant in solving problems. Why did they not see a problem in crowding themselves and a teenager into a large pipe, bolted and sealed from the outside, from which there was no possible escape?

 

In most of the possible failure scenarios escape was a null concept anyway – you can’t escape a vessel at however-many-thousands of feet down. But even if the Titan had remained intact and surfaced the only way out was for the technicians on the mother ship to locate the submersible, board it or retrieve it, and then free the many bolts. But what if the mother ship weren’t there? What if it caught fire and sank? What if a Gilligan dropped into the ocean the one specialty wrench needed?

 

Physics is an absolute judge, and will not accept any special pleadings from those who don’t follow its rules.

 

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What's the Name of my Bank this Week? weekly column 18 June 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

 

What’s the Name of my Bank this Week?

 

The elected board of trustees of Big City School District is considering re-naming (for a price – cha-ching!) their football stadium. It’s for the children.

 

Names of businesses, streets, schools, statues, and other private and public entities change often according to political fashions and financial influences. One generation’s heroes are the next generation’s ratfinks, which keeps artists, sculptors, and crane operators busy shifting statues around and making new ones to replace the old ones.

 

As for banks, a friend once suggested they might as well put up their signs with Velcro® since they buy and sell and trade and devour each other almost with the changes of seasons.

 

Two or three name changes ago I stopped in the drive-through to cash a small check and the televised teller asked me if I had an account with their famously family friendly bank. I looked at the new sign and replied, “I’m not sure. I had an account with a different bank that used to be in this building.” Yeah, I had to show lots of I.D. for that smart remark.

 

The selling of naming right for sports venues has become so common that the practice might be extended to other areas of human endeavor.

 

Your street might be renamed Acme Computers Avenue on a yearly lease.

 

You could sell naming rights applied to your children: Mme. Sniffly Perfume Collection Tiffany, Smith Lumber Company Kyle, and Gigantic Consolidated Industries Juan.

 

Your hunting dogs could be Mega Electrics Pete, Ponsonby Shopping Mall Molly, and Slick Tire Company Red.

 

As for the elected board of Big City ISD, one wonders if they have ever considered naming their stadium after those who paid more for its construction and still more for its upkeep more than any sody water company or car dealership, maybe something like The Hardworking Taxpayer Stadium.

 

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The Desperadoes of Silicon Gulch - weekly column 11 June 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Desperadoes of Silicon Gulch

 

One of the many advantages of reading a physical book is that when you open it to continue the narrative the typeface and layout have not been upgraded (snort) against your will into near illegibility, with the table of contents all messed up and the chapter headings hidden in a corner.

 

When in Chapter 3 you’re following noble Sheriff Rocky Manly as he sneaks up on the hideout of Butch Jawbone and his gang of unshaven desperadoes the action is not suddenly interrupted by an advertisement blocking the page.

 

When reading a book-on-dead-tree the story is not paused with three dots and a note to the effect that if you want to continue you’ll have to upgrade (that dirty word again) to “paid.”

 

On weekends and holidays the conflict between Sheriff Manly and treacherous outlaw Jawbone doesn’t freeze in place – it’s a book; it doesn’t require a signal from the expensive but fragile InterGossip service provider.

 

But the techno-tyrants don’t see it that way. The other day I opened my Antarctica  Off-Line mail server to find a blur of unfamiliar and less legible type shoved onto the Orwellian Telescreen as a jumble. It’s as if the knee-pants at corporate felt the need to justify their existence by taking a familiar, practical, and comfortable layout and messing it all up. This is what they call an “upgrade.”

 

The concept of “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” does not obtain in Silicon Gulch.

 

There’s a space for comments on the purported upgrade, and you can write a (polite) suggestion and request a return to the previous dashboard, but you will be a voice crying in an electronic wilderness.

 

Not only will you never learn if Nellie from the Long Branch Sushi Saloon finally chose between Sheriff Manly and outlaw Jawbone, you might be a long time finding your electrical mail on the upgraded program.

 

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Is Peter Rabbit a Democrat or a Republican? weekly column 4 June 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Is Peter Rabbit a Democrat or a Republican?

 

“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

 

-Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

 

Davis School District in Utah has pulled the Bible from its elementary and middle schools due to a parental complaint [https://tucson.com/news/utah-district-bans-bible-in-elementary-and-middle-schools-due-to-vulgarity-or-violence/article_38d3a71b-1c97-5f79-8651-f2fa895d2a3a.html].

 

This is part of the latest spasm of book banning in this country. Once upon a time people regarded public and school libraries as repositories of thousands of years of civilization, open to all, with John Milton shelved uneasily close to Geoffrey Chaucer and with Phyllis Wheatley a few aisles away from Margaret Mitchell.  An old saying is that if a library doesn’t contain books with which you vehemently disagree, it’s not a good library.

 

Book banning was an expression of Nazism and Communism and other tyrannies. Molly Guptill Manning makes an excellent study of books and freedom during the Second World War in her excellent When Books Went to War.

 

Unhappily, in the last decade or so banning and censoring books has become quite a fashion in the United States, with citizens all along the political spectrum demanding control of what others and others’ children may or may not read.

 

The irony is that this nation is one of the poorest in the world in reading [Can You Guess Where in the World People Read the Most? (mic.com)]. One does not imagine a father fussing at his son with, “Junior, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you to put down Macbeth and go watch television or play video games!”, or perhaps a mother advising her daughter that, “The Brothers Karamazov is okay, I guess, but I wish you’d spend more time at the nail salon or on Thick-Tok.”

 

When Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was first released, audiences, mostly young people, enjoyed chasing down the references to Shakespeare, including the title. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is enriched and informed by references to Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and Shakespeare’s King Lear (there is something of Lear in both Kirk and Khan). The eponymous villain quotes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, misusing this Christian epic about the Fall as an instruction manual rather than as a cautionary tale. Khan also quotes several times from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, using some of Captain Ahab’s lines for his own dramatic self-destruction: "From hell's heart, I stab at thee!"

 

The producers don’t simply take bits of Shakespeare and others for isolated quotes, they mine The Great Tradition of literature to explore the transcendental themes of the good, the true, and the beautiful in new ways through the cinema.

 

Those who made the first cycles of Star Trek television shows and films understood that the teenagers and young professionals of the 80s and 90s, the maligned millennials, appreciated The Great Tradition and appreciated being approached with respect instead of the patronizing self-referential cartoonery that infects popular culture just now.

 

In sum, in a nation where a family home might have more screens than books, citizens angrily wave their little made-in-Communist China Orwellian telescreens while banning the books that no one ever reads anyway.

 

Oh, and the bit about Shakespeare in the original Klingon is a joke. The Klingons know very well that Shakespeare was a human. The reference is to the Cold War, when Soviets claimed to have invented everything from baseball to antibiotics, and blamed the West for appropriating their work. In the original series Ensign Chekhov, a Russian, often claims proudly that a certain book or song or bit of technology was invented in Russia.  Further, the original Chekhov was a popular Russian writer from the Czarist times who is considered the master of the short story.

 

Everything connects.

 

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In Search of Lost Timepieces - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Hellopoetry.com

 

In Search of Lost Timepieces

 

(as Marcel Proust did not say)

 

When clocks were electric and mechanical

They almost never agreed with each other

The glowing G.E. beside the bed read 2:00

While Mother’s kitchen pastel hummed 2:03

 

Dad’s Hamilton ticked 1358

(And you never argued with him about it)

Grandfather Clock chimed whenever he wanted, by cracky

And the Timex took a licking at 2:04

 

But now all clocks obey an electronic command –

As the old joke goes, “We have ways of making you tock.”

You Meet the Nicest People in Hospitals - weekly column 2 July 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

You Meet the Nicest People in Hospitals

 

I have spent much of this year so far in and out of the hospital for surgeries, E.R. visits, therapy, and recovery, and repeats of all of the above, which have been not merely individual lessons but a densely structured curriculum in humility and gratitude.

 

Among the nicest people one meets in hospitals are those professionals who don’t have the good roles in the medical movies or television shows: the cleaners, food service workers, the young men and women who wheel you out to the car after your adventures, and other folks who are essential to the ministry of healing.

 

I don’t think I met a one who wasn’t in school or putting someone else through school.

 

One wheelchair pusher was a young man putting himself through university for a degree in engineering.

 

Another young man was putting in all the hours he could so his wife could attend nursing school. The plan was that after she passed her state boards he would then attend nursing school himself.

 

Yet another young man was burning that metaphorical candle at both ends at the hospital and in school to be a pipefitter.

 

One nice lady was retired, her children grown and gone, and though she didn’t need the job she enjoyed visiting with people. She was also thinking of applying for an LVN program.

 

One of the young food-service workers delivered trays with unfailing good cheer and merry banter. I asked him if he had considered studying to be a dietitian but he wasn’t sure if that was his calling. He certainly shares the gift of happiness, though, which might be a vocation in itself along long corridors where happiness can be in short supply.

 

By the way, if you ask nicely you might score another Jell-O.

 

During an otherwise grim visit to the E.R. I watched a young orderly or attendant who, along with his many other duties, entertained little children and carried in his pockets a Santa Claus-ish trove of little Barbies and race cars and other toys to share with them.

 

Just think – he might be a pediatric nurse or physician someday.

 

Yes, you meet the nicest people in hospitals.

 

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