bloggin' along

I don't have this blog business down yet by a long shot. I'm not sure if this is like a personal diary that the entire world can read, an unsent e-mail that sits here waiting to be seen by who knows who, or an outlet for a bush-league creative writing talent stunted by a career of writing legal stuff. My high school Latin helps with the legal writing, but doesn't help at all with the creative part. Legal writing has limited objectives: (1) Persuade judges that justice is on your client's side, (2) memorialize an agreement with specificity, or (3) state what you cannot do where, when, and with whom, as in a city ordinance. Even the description of legal writing is boring. I'm learning not to react to what I read on other blogs, which adds to my confusion. Check back the end of August. Maybe the muse will have struck in the meantime.

The Democrats convene

Tonight was opening night for the Democratic convention, and you had to be impressed with the speeches. Well, maybe not had to. If you are a Republican or a Nader groupie you wouldn't have been impressed, of course, and if you think you've heard it all before from other political figures in the past you won't have been terribly impressed either. But, after discounting for the jadedness that comes from seeing too many politicians stand but fail to deliver, tonight's speeches were still pretty good.

Americans pay little attention to speeches any more and that's a shame. In an earlier century you weren't considered much of a politician if you couldn't keep a speech going for at least two hours. The Gettysburg Address was belittled because Lincoln delivered it in something like three minutes. By modern standards (that is, by modern television entertainment-disguised-as-news standards), that would have been two minutes and 45 seconds too long. Too short for a real speech, too long for a sound bite. Abe Lincoln would have difficulty getting elected in 2004 (assuming we could resurrect him and not have him look his age).

I once heard Fuller Warren, Florida's governor in the early 1950's, warming up a crowd for a Miami man running for governor. Warren was from Blountstown, a sawmill town in the Panhandle, and the last of the old-style orators. The Miami man needed all the help he could get in the Panhandle and Warren did his best. I can still see him on the outdoor platform they'd set up for the event, a short pugnacious man with flowing silver hair, pounding his fists in the air while saying all manner of insulting things about Republicans. It was great entertainment. The poor Miami man didn't look or sound so interesting by the time his turn came to speak.

Now we have every speech followed by talking heads, analyzing this and that while the newsguys back in the studio are boiling it down to the 15-second sound bite. It's no wonder we ignore them. Bring me back the old-time orators, and send the talking heads out for pizza.

Blazing Saddles

We went to see Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" this afternoon.  This 1974 movie was iconclastic, dealing with taboo subjects like racism, sexism, etc., with a peculiar brand of humor that allowed Brooks to get away with it because you knew the entire film was a parody.  Nominated for three Academy Awards, it won none.  Thirty years later, we struggle to remember how this film played at the time it came out.  It was offensive then and now.  The humor ranges from slapstick to just plain stupid, and is politically incorrect to the nth degree.  This kind of humor will get you fired in today's workplace, and "it was only a joke" is not a defense.  The movie's saving grace may be that the black sheriff prevailed in the end and the white townsfolk sadly bid him farewell.  He needed the assistance of a white, drunken, ex-gunslinger to prevail, but he also needed the assistance of the railroad construction gang where he worked at the film's beginning.  Maybe it says something about the movie that the scene I remembered best after all these years is the flatulence-around-the-campfire scene.  The scene was shorter than I remembered it. 
 
I think the kids of the 20-something generation have a better handle on race relations than your parents do now, certainly better than we did then.   
 

We all love sunsets

Let's lighten up a little, here.  You've seen sunsets over the Gulf.  This was taken from Uncle Mike's sailboat 'way out in the Gulf the weekend of the Fourth.  At sunset, most of our hot fishing was behind us but we didn't know it yet.  The full moon was about to rise in the East and we expected to haul in more grouper and mackerel, but the fishies were tucking themselves into bed.   They might have gotten hungry when the full moon was overhead but, by then, we'd tucked ourselves into bed too, or to be more accurate, stretched out on the benches in the cockpit area and nodded off.  The moonlight over the water around 4:00 a.m. was spectacular - visualize a billion diamonds on a dark carpet spread out to the horizon in all directions.  My camera was forward and my legs were too heavy to let me get up and go find it, but a photo wouldn't have done that scene justice.  So, this is all you get for scenics that night:   

                                  
    Sunset over the Gulf, 20 miles west of Naples, July 3, 2004 

Terrorists and air travel

The 9/11 Commission Report has been released today, and you can pull up a copy by clicking here: click here for report   It is 585 pages long. 
 
About the only good news I found after a quick scan for a few key words like "Graham" (as in Senator Bob, who would make an excellent vice president), "Florida," and a few cities in Florida, is this:
 
"The terrorists who hijacked three other commercial flights on 9/11 operated in five-man teams. They initiated their cockpit takeover within 30 minutes of takeoff. On Flight 93, however, the takeover took place 46 minutes after takeoff and there were only four hijackers. The operative likely intended to round out the team for this flight, Mohamed al Kahtani, had been refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida’s Orlando International Airport in August."   (Page 28)
 
It would be comforting, somewhat, to know that airport security was actually doing its job somewhere, but note that the agent on the ball that day was an immigration inspector, not your routine airport security guy.  Airport security had no clue that such a thing would happen.  It is easy to criticize, but hindsight is always 20-15. 
 
We have flown many times since 9-11-01 and I haven't flown with an abnormal fear of disaster.  I have no great confidence in airport security, but there are much easier targets in the U.S. than commercial airplanes today.   I'm not going to live my life in fear that the "next one," whatever that may be, will get me.  The drive to and from the airport is still the most dangerous part of the trip.
 
I've been doing a little reading of Irish and Scottish history lately.  It amazes me how much blood has been shed over the centuries by soldiers and innocent civilians, always in the name of power, greed, and religious zealotry.   Our ancestry includes Scottish, Irish, and German blood, and before that, a mixture of Scots, Picts, Saxons, Normans, and Vikings too.  That mixture occurred as a result of military conquests.  We - that is, all of humanity - are a violent species.
 

Al's Attic

What's a guy like me doing this for?  This looks like a way to spill your psychological profile out on the road for people to gawk at and drive over.  So, I'll keep the psycho stuff down to a minimum.  This will mainly be a substitute for e-mails (and old-fashioned letters) to my kids, who are spread out from East Coast to West Coast and who probably get enough e-mail as it is.  I'll probably add something once a week after the novelty wears off.  You can check it once a week, or once a month.  Or, once a year.  

I'll promise to keep the subjects varied.  Like a real attic, this "Attic" will have a lotta miscellaneous stuff in it, some useful, some crap that ought to be discarded.  My intended audience knows what I'm talking about - they've seen our garage.  Florida houses don't usually have attics.  

The immediate impetus is that I'm at home, on a Wednesday, recovering from minor surgery.  There's no such thing as minor surgery when somebody is cutting on you.  The bleeding has mostly stopped and the anesthetic and Darvocet have worn off.  I ought to be in my garage sorting out and discarding crap but the doctor told me no hard exercise for two weeks and it's too danged hot and humid out there.  I'm not going to spend the day watching TV.  Lance is going to win whether I watch or not.  The Devil Rays are a different story; who knows which players will show up today.  I may check the office e-mail a couple of times, and I have a couple of library books on the history of Ireland ready to read. 

The name "AWSCOM," by the way, comes from the Army unit I was stationed with in Germany.  The "AW" meant "advanced weapons," and your imagination can take it from there.  It has a techie ring to it, like truncating awesome.com, which would not be the right name for this.  I don't plan to be awesome.

This introductory paragraph turned into five.  Time to knock it off.