It's Better To Be Clean

Sometimes, things happen that make me realize that I've a lot for which I should be grateful. I am grateful for my parents, who have provided unfailing and unflinching support for me in recent years, especially when times were hard. I am grateful for my friends here in Palmdale, who found a way to share a portion of their prosperity and hard work with me. And most of all, I am grateful to the wonderful woman who agreed to spend her life with me. She's cleaned up my act in a big way.

The impetus for this gratitude was a trip to da LBC (that's Long Beach, for those of you who aren't street like me) to pick up some things from my brother-in-law's apartment. When The Wife and I started dating, her brother moved out here to California and took over her apartment as she and I moved in together. He's decided to move back to Wisconsin and we went down there to get some of her things back. We borrowed a co-worker's pickup truck (for which I am also grateful) and fought traffic for three hours to get there.

The brother-in-law has a somewhat different attitude about moving out of a place than either The Wife or I would have -- he's not going to move most of the things he doesn't want out of there and would rather forfeit his security deposit than clean the place up. I also know his primary hobby is smoking, so mentally I was prepared for the effects of three years of tobacco use. But a non-smoker surrounded by other non-smokers most of the time is never fully prepared for close contact with heavy smoking.

So I knew the place would not be in not very good condition, and indeed it wasn't. No physical damage but the place is filled with crap. Trash bags everywhere, sinks and other fixtures innocent of cleaning products for a three-year period, and the acrid odor and film of cigarettes permeating everything. I'd given him a blond wood table which now looked more like oak, but not in a good way. But worst of all was the bathroom. He knew it was bad, because he warned The Wife not to use the bathroom; however, I'd had a few diet Cokes before and simply could not wait.

How is it that certain specimens of the breed homus bachelaris can tolerate astonishingly high levels of grime and buildup of, um... things... in the bathroom? It looked like a three-dimensional watercolor painting in there, using only rust, black, and soap-scum colored paints that had oozed everywhere in sight. While my brother-in-law has grown a beard and claimed to have not shaved his face for three weeks, there was a cone-shaped pile of whisker shavings from an electric razor occupying a corner of the sink.

Yuck!

Anyway, after emerging from this chamber of horrors, I realize that while The Wife gets on my case for cleanliness from time to time, it's for the good that she does. As we air out the bedframe and other recovered artifacts in the garage (they too smell of her brother's cigarettes) I am grateful indeed that The Wife has impressed upon me the importance of keeping a clean house and not living in filth.

Slow News Day

For a news junkie, a slow news day is kind of a drag. Today to find something worthwhile to read in the New York Times, I found an article about how normally conservatively-dressed women like to wear sexy, revealing costumes on Halloween. Really. Trust the Gray Lady to be on the cutting edge like that.

So instead, I've been enjoying checking in on the adventures of these two dudes, who are trying to hitchhike from Times Square to every state capitol in 50 days. The genius of their website is a tie-in to Google Maps and a GPS indicator that they carry with them everywhere. It seems to be a lot of college students helping them out. I don't know if they've figured out how to do Juneau and Honolulu just yet; obviously they can't go by land.

I also contemplated a fantasy football trade, Charlie Frye for Shaun Alexander. My team hasn't used Frye at all and the team that has Alexander needs a QB. We have some other RB's, so we can wait out Frye's injury but the other team needs to build up its points right now and has been weak in that area. Frye's done better than expected, so maybe they'll go for it. The trade makes sense on both ends, as I see it.

It's just as well, I've been busy at work. As I discussed with The Wife tonight, a day of constant interruptions is not a good way to complete any tasks at all. I need to learn how to filter out communications to me during the day better than I have been doing.

They Have Begun To Eat Their Own

If there's one thing politicians are really good at, it's explaining why every problem and difficulty is caused by someone else. If there's one thing that Republicans like doing more than fighting Democrats, it's fighting each other. And if there's one thing that inevitably happens in parties that lose power is that internal leadership will shift; obviously the old leaders couldn't keep the house in order. So seeing this sort of thing happen now, three weeks before the election, is a really good indication that now, Republicans are really expecting to lose Congress. Maybe even all of it.

And it seems I'm far from the only one who thinks of himself as right-of-center but nevertheless has come to the conclusion that this imminent sea change is a rich alloy of a well-deserved result of a blend of incompetence and arrogance. While the Democrats promise nothng better, the Republicans have done so badly that a change is necessary simply to indicate that what we've been getting is simply intolerable.

Spam, Spam, Spam (and Eggs)

People get different kinds of spam. Some people (amusingly a lot of women) seem to get penis-enlargement or performance-enhancing herbal supplement advertisements. There was also the enticements to buy straight-up porn. Time was, I could count on having to devote time every day to deleting unsolicited e-mails cluttering up my inbox promising release for my darkest fantasies and hot teen college girls doing naughty things I was promised that I just wouldn't believe.

But I don't get spam like that anymore. Now all I get are stock prods ("we've got a runner, get in now before it's too late!") and the occasional offer to refinance my house at low-low-low rates. This shift seemed to happen all of a sudden, and let's face it, compared to the thrill of spycam photos revealing forbidden lesbian lust, stock tips are pretty lame.

In a way, it makes me sad. It strongly suggests that spammers use the same kind of demographic filtering techniques that more legitimate advertisers do. Is there some database out there that says that now that I'm out of the 18-35 demographic, I'm apparently assumed to no longer be interested in enhanced manhood and skanky girls, and now all I care about is the promise of an engorged portfolio? Maybe it's the same folks who decided I was ready to dispose of my mortal remains and join the AARP that decided I wasn't buying enough internet pornography and needed to shift the advertising focus.

It'll be ads for fiber supplements and denture cream next!

300,000,000 New Cars

According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population exceeded 300,000,000 people at about 5:00 this morning (Pacific Time). You can see a current estimated population count here.

To make our national debt go away, each and every one of these people would need to pay in to the Treasury the equivalent of the MSRP of a 2007 Pontiac Grand Prix, about $28,500 each. Nice car. Too bad you don't get to drive it.

Some national debt is probably useful as a control on the cost of money and inflation. Some borrowing is necessary to keep the government afloat. But we've taken it way too far. The debt is only increasing, and soon we'll all have to buy Mercedes instead of Pontiacs.

An Loyal Old Soldier Speaks The Truth

Dick Armey has not held elective office for a few years. He was the House Majority Leader (second-in-command of the House of Representatives) from the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 to his retirement in 2003. Some say he, and not Newt Gingrich, was the author of the "Contract With America" that was singularly responsible for putting the Republicans in power in the first place. From the comfort of a think-tank where he was the successor to Jack Kemp, he's still writing about public affairs, still active in Republican politics, and he's been dead-on in the past few weeks.

On September 23, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that fiscally-minded conservative voters are up for grabs in this election cycle, and if the Democrats are clever or the Republicans are foolish, those voters who care about the economy and the budget may well be wooed to vote for los burros instead of los elephantes.

More recently, he wrote an eloquent piece about why religiously-motivated voters should support libertarian agendas instead of attempting to legislate their version of morality. Bear in mind, the man is himself a devout Christian and describes himself as a "values voter." Still, this is sweet music to sing indeed. Whether it will sound so sweet to the target of his attacks -- James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- is rather unlikely. But then again, Armey isn't trying to make friends with Dobson. He's trying to re-create the Reagan Coalition of the 1980's: fiscal conservatives, social libertarians, pro-military advocates, and evangelical Christians.

Armey best distilled his campaign, his clarion call for the Republicans to return to their roots, in the New York Times last week. The critical portion of his short op-ed in the Gray Lady reads:

Let's be frank. America is facing a catastrophic fiscal meltdown that has the power to cripple our society. Americans are waiting for a serious, adult debate on retirement security and the appropriate size and scope of government.

Republicans need to return to the ideas that inspire their voters -- lower taxes, less government, more freedom. That vision brought us into the majority in the first place. Reining in federal spending, reforming a broken tax code, passing realistic immigration reform and creating an ownership society through entitlement reform are all big ideas that resonate with voters.

The dude is dead on. We're spending ourselves into oblivion and no one in power seems to care. We've become blinded by trivialities which, on acute analysis, are actually quite offensive. Republicans need to get off the big-government train and start espousing conservative principles about the role of the government in society, and getting the heavy burdens of taxes and public debt off of the backs of the American taxpayers and American businesses. The GOP has been doing a damn poor job of these things in recent years.

This is heresy to some of the people who have been calling the shots while wearing elephant pins. But as far as I'm concerned, he's just about the most loyal of Republicans out there. Armey is saying that the party's imminent loss of Congress is a symptom, not the disease, and the way to hang on to power is to cure the disease. To hold on to power, the Republicans need to get back to doing what they're supposed to be doing -- reducing the size, power, and cost of government.

He's saying what he's saying because he wants to see Republicans stay in power and he wants to see them use that power wisely and for the public benefit. We need people like him around; it's a shame we don't still have him in office still, although perhaps it is his very freedom from the need to run for re-election every two years that enables him to speak these truths.

One wonders what reception these unpleasant truths will earn him.

Strange Junk Mail

I got some junk mail today from the Neptune Society, trying to sell a "pre-need" package. It's left me feeling weird.

Now, I fully accept that I will die one day and something will need to be done with my corpse. And I do not want to have to burden The Wife with that issue during a time of grief, and it seems like the right thing to do would be to make sure that things are paid for.

My general thoughts are that any useful organs should be harvested and used to help the living who need them. My eyes are astygmatic and myopic, but they are better than no eyes at all to a blind person. My kidneys, liver, spleen, heart, and pancreas all work fine (so far). After anything useful has been taken out and been transplanted to people who can use the organs, I guess burning up the rest is as good a way of disposing of the remains as anything else. The body is just going to be a hunk of dead meat, after all -- I won't be using it again.

Well, I wonder if the expenses can be addressed by way of an assignment of a portion of life insurance proceeds rather than being prepaid with cash. That would make the financial side of things easier to address and provide the cremation vendor with a guaranteed source of payment. And if the company goes away, then that give us some time to make adjustments.

Still, mature contemplation about life insurance and disposal methods aside, it is odd to be confronted with mail like this. I'm not exactly ready to kick it yet, and being confronted with a question about what to do with my corpse is a bit unnerving. Being confronted with the issue by way of unsolicited junk mail is even more off-putting.

Oh, and I also got a solicitation to join AARP. It's about 14 years early. But I suppose I should take it as another harbinger of my apparenty imminent doom.

Neck and Neck at the Sixth Post

If the New York Times is to be believed, the race for control of Congress is coming down to the wire and is too close to call.

According to the Times' survey, with three weeks to go, control of the Senate is going to come down to fights in Missouri, New Jersey, and Tennessee, with Democrats needing to sweep these three to take a clear majority and if two of the three go Democrat, the Senate being evenly tied at 50 votes each (resulting in effective Republican control as the Vice-President casts tiebreakers).

The House is very much in play also, according to the Times. It is projecting 210 seats for the Democrats and 209 for the Republicans, with the remaining 16 races too close to call. An even split of those 16 races -- 8 for Hezbollah and 8 for los burros sin pistas -- results in Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Where is the Times getting its data? From the most recently published polls for each area. For this reason, the data is both suspect and limited. It does not let us in on the knowledge of the polls for the house seats in question for the House seats, so it's particualrly hard to know if these projections are accurate at that level. There pretty much is no ready data on the House seats. And the Times was, not very long ago, projecting a moderate Democrat win in the California gubernatorial race -- although this has since been reversed and the Times is now projecting a Schwarzenegger victory which anyone on the ground in California could have told you two months ago would have taken a Mark Foley-like disaster to have derailed.

These last three weeks of the campaign season are the most intense and the most interesting. The last act of the season opened with the Mark Foley issue hitting the fan. How it will close is a good question. I'm still thinking that the Republicans are going to hang on to the House; the Senate seems to be much more in play as in the three key states, the Democrats are all leading. A lot is going to happen in the next 23 days.

Stay tuned, and vote!

A Surprise From The Fish Wrapper

From the Antelope Valley Press I would expect this, and even from a slightly more middle-of-the-road paper like the San Jose Mercury-News or the San Diego Union-Tribune. But to see an endorsement to re-elect Governor Schwarzenegger in the Los Angeles Fish Wrapper is something of a surprise.

It's not often I agree with the Los Angeles Fish Wrapper. Take any political or social proposition, "A." If the editorial board of that newspaper thinks that "A" is a good idea, chances are it's actually a horrendously misguided notion that deserves round criticism. So now I may have to think twice about voting for the Governator.

Good News from the NFL

Today, the Green Bay Packers did not lose. Of course, that's because they didn't play.

Now, if you follow sports news, you've heard all the rumors and speculation and prognostication about #4. But I don't buy in to all the talk of why it would be a good thing to trade Brett Favre. Good on paper, bad in practice. Sure, the Packers could get some value for him, and sure, it might be nice to see Favre play for a team with enough talent to have a credible shot at winning the Super Bowl again. But there's also value to the fact of his continued identification with the team. He's come to define the franchise. And a new system would be as much of a struggle for him as anyone else; it seems unlikely that he would really be able to single-handedly turn a team around. More likely, his interception percentage would go up with a new receiving corps unused to him and a set of defenses that have studied his every move for the past twelve years.

Bestides, it was not nearly as much fun to see Joe Montana wear a Kansas City Chiefs uniform and perform only moderately well in a new system for his last two years; it would be just as not much fun to see Favre wearing a Cleveland or Oakland or Miami (or Kansas City) uniform. Everybody wants to remember Favre as a Green Bay Packer, and that's how it ought to be. So ride it all the way home to Mississippi, Brett, and tell Aaron Rodgers everything you know about how to do it with the joy and style that you've brought to the game.

Wanderlust

I've been thinking a little bit about travel and getaways. We've got a friend who would likely watch our dogs for us over the weekend if The Wife and I wanted to get away again, so that's handy. I've been thinking a lot about seeing the Sierras, where I've not been for several years, but that's not a very Wife-friendly sort of trip. So instead I've been wondering about how I could make good on my promise to take The Wife up to San Francisco. She's never been and I've always told her I'd take her.

I'm not actually a huge fan of San Francisco but it is certainly has some good points from a tourism perspective. It's as picturesque a city as you could ask for. It has some fantastic restaurants and good shopping. I'd rather go a few hours north and enjoy the wines in Sonoma and Napa, but there's no reason we couldn't do both the city and the wines if we had a few days up there.

Mainly what I want is a few days away from the Antelope Valley. Aside from three nights in Wisconsin, I've slept every night here in the Rented Mansion In The Desert -- a very nice, big, and empty house on the far west side of Palmdale that has a view of the Tehachipi and San Gabriel Mountains, with a vast expanse of a well-developed desert plain in between that lately has begun to seem more than a little bit dreary. The same landscape I remember as a teenager. It's making me a little stir crazy -- my world seems so small all of a sudden!

But, sensibly, I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. We've the holidays coming up soon and gifts to buy for then; after that we need to save up our money to buy a house when the lease on this gigantic, empty house expires in June. Spending several hundred dollars on gas, lodging, and food for a trip to San Francisco, while pleasant-sounding, is not the best use of our money.

Hawaiian Earthquake

We mainlanders don't often think of Hawaii as an earthquake zone; perhaps we think of the spectacular but generally benign eruptions of the volcanos on the Big Island, with red-hot flows of lava tumbling into the sea. But where there are volcanos, there are earthquakes, and one happened this morning. Google Maps has an indicator to show where it happened. I'm sure you'll join me in sending best wishes go out to the people of the Kona Coast, who took the brunt of the temblor.

I still want to go to the Big Island most of any of the Hawaiian Islands, earthquakes or no. One day.

Dinner With The Monk

Saturday night was supposed to be the big dinner party -- our friend the Buddhist monk and one of Becky's friends, the Area Governor for Toastmasters. The Toastmaster friend fell ill and could not join us, so we wound up with (guess what) a surplus of food. Dinner, in classic Italian style, consisted of antipasta, primi, secondi, and dolce.

Antipasta was asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto with a little lemon juice and olive oil, garnished with fresh avocado. Blanch and lightly steam the asparagus first; wrap the asparagus in the prosciutto first and while the asparagus is still warm, or else it will never stick without a binder like mayonnaise. Serve chilled.

Primi was mostaccoli carbonara. To make carbonara sauce, fry up some bacon and grind it into small pieces. Sop up most, but not all, of the grease, and then sweat a finely-chopped onion in it. Reserve. Meanwhile, mix four eggs, a pint of cream, black pepper, garlic powder, and generous amounts of chopped parsley until a pale yellow liquid (with the parsley floating on top) is formed. Boil a pound of pasta until al dente. In a warm pan (like a heated crock pot) melt 1/4 cup of butter. Then mix all the ingredients in the pot, stirring until the sauce thickens around the pasta. This is not health food.

Secondi was my famous steak (marinade for at least four hours in teryiaki sauce, red wine, and green onions), cooked rare over a grill with steamed broccoli seasoned with dill. I've described this before, so I need not go in to elaborate detail for it.

Dolce was tasche delle rum mele, which translates into "pockets of rum apples." An invention born of necessity -- the absence of a muffin or pie tin -- they turned out wonderfully. Slice 3 small apples very thin using a mandolin. Mix in sugar, vanilla, cinammon, ground ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. Cut pie crusts in half. Wrap the half pie crust around a quantity (4-5 tbsp) of apple mixture, and fold over until the apples are wrapped in the crust. This is a basic apple turnover, so far. Now for the rum sauce: make a simple syrup (boiling water and sugar). Reduce the heat, and add spiced rum. Bring to a low boil. In a separate container, thoroughly mix some flour in to very cold water. Add to the rum syrup, and stir constantly until the sauce boils, reduces, and thickens; leave over lowest heat until the sugar begins to carmelize. A generous dollop or two on top of each turnover, with some whipped cream, turns a normal apple turnover into a decadent treat.

Writing Gives Under Stress

An interruption in the blogosophere took place last week, as TL was up to his eyebrows in life. Two classes online, a faculty meeting for a live class, heavy workload at the office, and a busy home life with many house guests and evening activities. So, something's got to give under all this stress, and this week it was blogging. Thus, no posts for six days.

Hey, you survived.

One Way To Find A Job Right Out Of Law School

Great. Twelve years of practice and I'm resigned to the fact that my own political views and lack of religious belief have condemned me to never take a seat on the bench. A price I'm willing to pay to be true to myself, but still, I'd like being a judge if I could be one. So I think I can be forgiven for being just a bit bitter and envious to run across an article about a guy who is exactly my age who gets a black robe despite being out of law school for less than a year.

I mean, yes, congratulations to Judge Miller and I'm sure he'll do a fine job.

And yes, I know that this little puff piece from his law school isn't telling us the whole story. Maybe the guy is hard-wired into his Governor's machinery and spent his pre-law career raising money for Governor Blunt. It doesn't escape my notice that he got appointed after winning the Republican primary -- he hasn't yet won election outright but it's a good bet that the GOP nomination is effectively the election, particularly in a rural district. So he's connected in ways I'm not and likely will never be, and so he gets the kind of work I'd like very much to do but never will.

That may well make him immensely more qualified for the job than I would be. Like I say, I know what the real qualifications for a job like that are, and I don't have them. I haven't made friends in Governor Schwarzenegger's office and I suppose I might have had a chance to have done that back in 2003. Leaving for two years to another state does not exactly demonstrate my commitment to California and its Republican leadership, either. Then there's all the things I've said critical of party leaders. (I've said plenty of things critical of Democrats, too.) No, I know I'm too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a wild card, and I don't have "Deputy District Attorney" on my resume. So I'll never get that job.

Local Wisdom

One of our weekly dinner companions is the editor of the local paper. I see his fingerprints all over this one. And you've got to admit -- the guy has a point.

Updated Blog

I've migrated my blog to the "beta" model of Blogger. The best new feature is the ability to have keyword search. I've updated about fifty past posts for keywords. You can search the blog for entries by subject; the keyword list appears on the bottom. I don't have much energy for going back much further than that, but future posts should all have keywords. I'll need to re-post the national debt counter, but that shouldn't be a big deal. In the meantime, the extra functionality is nice.

If You Don't Think This Is A Worst-Case Scenario, You Haven't Been Paying Attention

A friend asked "How is it that North Korea has adopted such an 'us-against-the-world' mentality?" At the risk (read: certainty) of sounding shrill, I have to protest that this is nothing new and nothing that we in the West have created. It is, however, something we in the West will need to deal with.

North Korea has hardly been "alone against the world" since the end of the Korean War and the U.S. was not the only architect of the division of the country. Korea was divided between the Soviets and the U.S. before the end of World War II when it became apparent that the Japanese protectorate that the area had been living under since the early 20th century was going to dissolve in the face of Japan's imminent defeat.

Kim Il-Sung (Big Kim) was a tool of the Soviets, armed, funded, and paid for by the then-cooperating USSR and PRC, who were hoping to evangelize their vision of expanding socialist polities.

Since the truce that ended the conflict (technically, the war is still going on) Big Kim Il-Sung's government promoted a policy of "self-reliance," which initially made it one of the most industrialized nations in Asia; but that title to his policies was pretty much a joke, as North Korean "self-reliance" depended on rich subsidies from ideological allies China and the Soviet Union.

For most of the sixties, North Korea was a pawn in a struggle for ideological supremacy between the PRC and the USSR, which Big Kim thoroughly mishandled by first siding with the Chinese on most geopolitical issues, and after learning to his dismay that the PRC had less to give by way of foreign support, he then began to roundly criticize Mao's internal politics. Having alienated both of his major-power sponsors, Big Kim got to watch his formerly (relatively) advanced country stagnate and slide into poverty. His solution was to clamp down harder on his control of the military, and to borrow money from Western sources. He defaulted on those loans in the late 80's, and thus made himself a pariah to the West. Big Kim died in 1994 (but the office of President of the DPRK is still held open for him) and his excerable son, Kim Jong-Il (hereinafter "Lil' Kim") took over.

Lil' Kim has done nothing in the past 12 years to reform the North Korean economy, restructure his government to permit more individual freedoms, or engage in any kind of meaningful dialogue with the rest of the world. Quite the opposite. There is only one answer to the "guns-or-butter" question for Lil' Kim, and his cholesterol level is not in any danger.

He still begs for money from China, which cntinues to dish out the dough even though Lil' Kim is not a particularly obedient or reliable client. Much of the rest of North Korean's extant industrial capabilities is the result of his periodic rounds of extortion based on the apparently massive military of the DPRK; some of the funds used to develop the current military came from U.S. and European coffers in exchange for Lil' Kim's promises to not a) build up his infantry, then b) not develop mid-range tactical missile technology, then c) not develop breeder reactors, then d) not use the plutonium generated by his breeder reactors to generate warheads, then e) not develop long-range tactical missile technology, and now f) not sell any of his military technology to rich terrorists (like al-Qaeda) for desperately-needed hard cash. The oppressed, uneducated, and terrified millions of people living under his rule starve and the only means of any kind of personal advancement in that country is either to be in the military or to serve its industrial needs; the few observers to travel to the area report a culture best described as a realization of Orwell's worst fever dreams.

However, despite periodic scoldings and generous payments to Lil' Kim's junta by varying segments of the global community, under Lil' Kim's leadership the DPRK has a) built the second-largest infantry in Asia and aimed all of them at targets south of the DMZ; b) successfully built and tested missiles capable of striking Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo; c) created breeder reactors for "peaceful" generation of electricity; d) tested a two-stage ballistic missile with sufficient range to reach Los Angeles; and yesterday e) performed a successful test of a nuclear warhead. However, we are asked to trust him when he says that he hasn't sold any weapons systems to terrorist groups, despite the fact that North Korea's only export of any kind is fear of the lunatic called "Dear Leader" by his subjects.

I am far from encouraged that the response to North Korea's nuclear test is going to be a "measured response" of more scoldings and toothless economic sanctions which will last until he decides to hold the world hostage again. Starving this guy out of power has clearly not worked, in part because he hasn't really been starved and in part because his military isn't starving, just his civilian population. Whether the massive army he has created can do more than sing patriotic songs and goose-step across parade grounds is a good question; however, we should bear in mind the horrific casualty figures from the active war in the 1950's as well as the fact that the young men carrying those guns across those parade grounds are now third-generation creatures of the most oppressive mind-control techniques the world has yet seen. I'm not saying that Lil' Kim isn't the right guy to do business with. That should be obvious. I'm saying he's flat-out evil and can't be trusted with anything as dangerous as a pointy stick.

The reason we aren't taking him on in the only way that could meaningfully alter his course of behavior is that our misadventures from the Tigris to the Khyber Pass have overextended our ability to conduct military operations in any other theater of operations. Having rendered ourselves effectively impotent against this malicious dwarf whose ideological resemblence to Stalin is ultimately defeated by his lack of Stalin's good qualities (that is, a snappy fashion sense and the theoretical desire to feed his own people), I suppose all that we realistically can to is cluck disapprovingly and loudly at his use of nuclear devices and hope that none of our so-called "partners for peace" give in to another round of his fundraising cycle of extort-lie-and-repeat.

Pompeii

Tonight, The Wife and I watched a History Channel program about Pompeii. It brought the story to life in a way I hadn't seen before. You know the story -- on August 24, in the year 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, and within two days, three cities nearby were destroyed and preserved under the volcanic debris. The result is quite possibly the richest, most extensive archeaological site in the world, a snapshot of a city.

Recall that the city of Pompeii was the luxury destination for the Roman elite and many members of the luxury class lived there almost full-time. All of the people needed to support their luxurious lifestyle also lived there, in more humble surroundings -- artists, chefs, grocers, bakers, potters, musicians, olive oil pressers, construction workers, bath-tenders, and so on. Tens of thousands of people lived there, a reasonably large city for the ancient world. Then there would have been more lower-class people, too; farm workers, fishermen, household slaves. All of these people (many of the slaves included) lived there with their families. As for the culture of the city, think Las Vegas or Monaco mixed with South Beach or Palm Springs.

The TV show toured the Phlegraean Fields, a few miles west of Vesuvius, which looked exactly like the ancient images of the gates of Hell. Ash-white rock with outcrops of bright yellow sulfur, fumaroles belching out hot, poisonous smoke. There was also a look at Stromboli, an active volcano in the ocean, which erupts several times a day, suggesting that had Vesuvius been producing relatively harmless plumes of smoke and sometimes spectacular showers of glowing magma bombs. The host suggested that this may have been an object of amusement rather than of terror to the Romans who vacationed or lived there.

But I can't be awed by the extent of the city's remains, and the astonishing amount of information we have about Roman life in the first century. At least, not without remembering that this city is also a mass grave. Twenty-five thousand people or more died; buried under what was a twenty-mile high tower of pumice pebbles that fell for twelve hours, and killed in an instant by a hundred-mile-an-hour surge of pyroplastic flow -- a superheated mixture of poisonous gas, lava foam, and rocks. As archeaologists began to uncover the city a century ago, they found that there were cavities in the rock, left over from the victims.

Whole families, terrified at nature run amok around them, suddenly and instantly killed. Mothers and fathers trying against all odds to protect their children from the overwhelming force of the volcano. And their poses, and in some cases faces, are preserved for us now, are preserved and speak to the horror and terror they felt as they died. For whatever reason, it real struck home for me that these were people just like my wife and I, our families, our friends. These were people who lived their lives as best they could; they had people who loved them and grieved over them when they died. In part it was the pets and service animals -- dogs and mules -- and in part it was the plentiful incidents of everyday life, like the plaster image of a child clutching a beloved toy as she died.

It's a reminder that as fascinating, informative, pleasurable, and useful a study of history is, it is also a study of real people, who lived real lives. People like you and me. People who did not know their own futures, people who made decisions and had families. Pompeii and Herculaneum and Stabiae were towns like Palmdale and Knoxville and Watertown. They were victims of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina last year or the tsunami in southeast Asia the year before or an earthquake or anything else. And the people who died deserve the same respect and grief from us as the victims of these more recent tragedies do.

By the way, Vesuvius last erupted in March of 1944, just after the Allies had invaded Italy. This was a different kind of explosion, one that produced more lava than airborne debris. Lava engulfed San Sebastiano, a small village near the volcano. The deaths in that village -- which had been mostly evacuated -- were caused not by flowing lava (which encased the village in up to twenty feet of the stuff) but by collapsing roofs, overburdened by falling ash. And today, three million people live in and around Naples. It is only a matter of time until there is another gigantic explosion, and now there are almost a hundred times as many people in the area as there were in Roman times. Let us hope that should the worst happen again, the preparations made by the Neapolitan government to evacuate the area spares more lives than were lost nineteen hundred years ago.

The Show Returns

I couldn't be more pleased with the return of Battlestar Galactica. The 2-hour season premiere was everything I could have hoped for -- narratively rich, complex, obviously within a large and well-thought out story arc, emotionally compelling, morally ambiguous, and intellectually challenging. What to make of things when the (supposed) good guys use suicide bombers and terrorist tactics? Have we been too harsh in judging Marshal Petain and the Vichys?