Finding Hillary

I should have known better than this, but I didn't. I saw a notice in today's newspaper that Hillary Clinton was having a rally in Oakland this afternoon, at 14th and Clay. Gee, I thought, she'll be here, I could go down and take a look at her, and see what I think. The rally was at 4:30, and I could spend a couple of hours at the College Avenue Stroll (the annual street fair), and then hop on BART and go downtown.

There are reasons I don't normally attend political rallies, and today I was forcibly reminded what they are.

I got there about 4:20, or 10 minutes before the rally was advertised to begin. I found my way out of Oakland City Center (which is under construction) on to 14th Street, to see a line of people stretching in both directions. (It was actually two lines, but more on that later.) I asked, and found that yes, this was the line for the Clinton rally; so I started looking for the end. Half a block away, the line turned right at the corner of Broadway and kept going ... and going ... and going, all the way to the corner of 12th Street, at which point it actually ended. So I stood in it. By now it was pretty close to 4:30, but it was obvious that they weren't going to start on time with all these people out in the street. It took 45 minutes for me to work my way up to the rally entrance, with the line lengthening behind me all the time. I politely ignored at least 5 sellers of political buttons and 3 T-shirt vendors, not counting the Obama crowd on the corner. In the last 20 minutes or so we listened to a children's chorus singing "America," not very well.

The line didn't make much sense to me. It began at the rally entrance, of course, and backed up on the north side of 14th Street to Broadway, one long block; then it turned left and crossed 14th (blocked off), and snaked back down 14th halfway to the entrance again, where it made a U-turn and went back up toward Broadway, where it turned south and went another 2 blocks to 12th Street before turning again, west on 12th. I never did figure out a good reason for that U-turn on the south side of 14th.

I eventually collected the little half sheet of paper that everyone had to fill out in order to get in. We were told it was "for security reasons", but I can't think of a single security reason why they would need my name, address, email, and cell phone and home phone numbers. This is a marketing ploy to fill out the mailing list, but since I'm already on that mailing list, I played along. I will say the campaign had it organized - they had stringers going up and down the line making sure everyone had their "ticket" filled out.

Once we all got into the rally, and past the bleachers where people who actually paid money for this were sitting, we all crowded up around the stage. I never actually saw the stage, or any of the people on it. I could hear clearly enough, their sound system was more than adequate; but I was at least half a block back in the crowd, and I'm only 5 foot 5, and at least half of the crowd was taller than I am. So, for another half hour, I counted the checks in the plaid shirt in front of me, and listened to speeches from unnamed people (must have been introduced before I got there). The only speaker whose name I actually caught was Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. I never did get the name of the man with the "black" accent who was acting as emcee (looking at the photos on SFGate, it may have been Rev. Cecil Williams), or the woman with the slight eastern clip in her voice (I actually thought, foolish me, that this might be Hillary, until she referred to Hillary as "she".) who followed the first local musician.

As the evening drew in and my feet began to hurt, the announcer introduced a second local musician who began a set of songs intended to inspire the faithful; and I looked at my watch and saw that it was 5:30, and I still couldn't see the stage, and Hillary Clinton was still nowhere in evidence, and the people running things appeared to be vamping. "I came here to hear Hillary Clinton, not these people," I said to a woman standing next to me; and she replied, "Oh, that's how these rallies are; I understand she's due around 6 o'clock." (The article on sfgate.com doesn't say when she actually arrived.) Well, I was probably foolish, but I decided my desire to see the elephant (sorry, I suppose I should say "donkey") was not strong enough to stand around until 6 o'clock, or whenever Madam Candidate chose to make her entrance. So I said the hell with it and began to make my way out of the crowd toward the BART station.

I've had trouble with crowds ever since the Free Speech Movement and People's Park Riots of the '60s; large groups of people make me nervous, especially if they're all there about a Cause. For some reason I didn't have that reaction today. In fact, I didn't really feel that I was in a cohesive "crowd" at all. I was standing in a large group of people paying polite but not passionate attention to the speakers, who continually urged them to show their enthusiasm more loudly. Maybe if I'd stayed to see Hillary, the spark would have happened and the agglomeration of humans would have coalesced into an organism. Then again, maybe not; I've never heard that charisma is Mrs. Clinton's thing.

She seems to be the front runner, she has the machine behind her, she's probably unstoppable, and I do think it would be a good thing symbolically for the U.S. to have a woman president, especially now; but something in the back of my mind says that Barack Obama would make a better president.

Women Bloggers

I can't recall where I saw this first, but I recently noticed that there are web sites, and web rings, for women bloggers. I visited a couple of them; let's use as an example BlogHer, which exists in two forms, Blogher.com and www.blogher.org. If I'd spent more time on either of them I might have figured out what the difference is (maybe they're the same site with two URLs); they both had the same lead post, which, since it had to do with schools and school children, was of marginal interest to me. I was actually considering signing up for it, since I am a woman and a blogger; but the more I looked, the less I felt I fit in there.

First, there's this focus on "women's stuff." Some of their links are: Art and Design; Astrology and Horoscopes (of interest to me only for debunking purposes); Business, Career and Personal Finance (I'm retired); Feminism and Gender; Health and Wellness (that's what I have a doctor for); and so on. You can go read the list yourself; for that matter, you can read the posts yourself.

I'm just not very interested in "women's sites". I've tried it over the years; and they all get back to fashion (the way I'm built? surely you jest), and child care (no kids here), and weight control (yeah, I know I'm too fat; that's not a blog post, it's just a fact); and I never remember to go back. I don't understand why I should be treated differently from any other blogger, just because I'm a woman. Either I have something interesting to say or I don't. In honesty they do have some sections on Policy and News, Media and Journalism, Technology and Web, which I might actually like to read; but still.

It also bothers me that they have these Categories. My blog doesn't have a category; its purpose is to allow me to rant on whatever subject is currently exercising or interesting me. I have this feeling that if I signed up I'd end up classified as "Other", the organizational kiss of death. I've checked up on 3 or 4 other women bloggers that I've come across, and they also tend to rant on whatever's going on at the time, and not to focus on a Category.

I suppose their real point is that women bloggers are a small minority - which they are - and therefore need to be coddled and supported lest they vanish in the endless sea of male bloggers. I don't know - most of the women bloggers I've read sounded pretty confident and competent to me. Some of them astounded me. If you want to realize that all the annoying things in your life which are bothering you are really not that bad after all, go read the Babblings of Whimsicalbrainpan. Now, that woman is a survivor.

I guess I'm just not much of a joiner; I never seem to fit into formal groups. I have things I want to say in my blog, and I say them; and a few people listen, and sometimes they argue. God knows, this isn't the DailyKos! But a few people read and comment, and I enjoy the exchanges. Should I join a women's blogging group? I don't know. Maybe I'd get more readers; then again, maybe I'd end up classified as "Other" and never get a visitor from there at all. I'm still thinking about it. But as a good child of the Sixties, I've spent the last 40 years trying to persuade myself that people should be judged on their individual merits (intelligence, competence, honesty, kindness, etc.), and not by their race, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, or whatever; and that's why "women blogger" sites bother me.

Alcohol Dependency, and Recovery

On Tuesday October 2 it will be exactly 6 months since my husband had his last drink of alcohol.

I have his permission to blog about his alcohol dependency and his recovery; he's been very open about it with everyone; but the fact remains that, six months ago, I suddenly had to deal with the fact that the man I've been married to for twenty-one years is an alcoholic.

How could I not realize something like that (you ask)? Well, that's a good question. I'm not stupid; I knew he always drank wine with dinner (I only drink with dinner occasionally); I knew there were days when he drank too much, and woke up the next morning hung over. (He's very hard to deal with when hung over.) But we don't spend our entire lives watching what other people do; I was working full-time, in a high-stress job that took a lot of my energy and attention, and - frankly - I'm not always that observant, and I didn't realize how far it had really gone. Also, even though I wished he wouldn't do it, I realized that there was nothing I could do about it. I knew couldn't make him stop drinking; all I could do was nag at him about it, which would make both of us miserable, because I dislike confrontation. So, I chose not to do that. Also, frankly, I didn't want to think about it too much. It's just social drinking, I thought - but it wasn't.

What's really bizarre about the situation is that his alcohol dependency, which is a Bad Thing, has led to his alcohol recovery - and that is a really Good Thing. I didn't realize until he started talking about his recovery that he had almost completely stopped talking to me - or anyone else - at all. I didn't realize until he started going to nightly (now, weekly) recovery group meetings, that except for work, and his solitary hiking trips, it had been months since he left the house at all, and years since he attended any kind of social gathering.

So what happened? He says he finally realized that his alcoholism was affecting his ability to hike and take pleasure in nature, which is probably his major passion; and therefore it had to stop. Also, at my suggestion (I cheerfully admit), he talked to the Employee Assistance Program at his job - and the lady there read him the riot act about the characteristics of an alcohol dependent personality, and he had every one of 'em. So she enrolled him in the Kaiser Chemical Dependency Recovery Program, and he enrolled himself in a secular chemical dependency support group called LifeRing, and he hasn't had a drink since. In fact, we no longer have any wine or beer in the house, and I'm negotiating to get rid of some old bottles of spirits that date from before we got married. But they're not critical because on his worst day he never drank spirits.

I feel like I've gotten back the man I married. He's chatty, he's cheerful, he's lost a lot of weight (many empty calories in booze), he makes awful puns again, he can go to parties and talk to people - a few years ago, we went to a New Year's Eve party at a friend's house, and he walked out after half an hour, leaving me to explain that he just didn't like crowds. I didn't realize then that the drinking was already a problem.

So where did this come from? When we married he was a social drinker, nothing more. Well, several personal things - we think it's been going on for about 6 years - and a genetic predisposition. His mother died of Alzheimer's disease in 2003, just before Christmas, after a ten-year "long goodbye." It hit him really hard. He was the caregiver, and he was very fond of his mother, and he had to watch her turn into a vegetable. That's one; the party he walked out on was right after that. Just about the time she died, his job became very very stressful. That's two. And finally, I knew that he had a history of weight problems in his youth, and he lost a lot of weight in graduate school; but I learned during the recovery discussions that he was bulimic at that time; he thinks the two behaviors are related (alcoholism and earlier bulimia), apparently there is some clinical evidence for it.

As for the genetic predisposition: I'll refer you to a book called Under the Influence, by Milam and Ketcham. Amazon has it; Barnes and Noble, or your local public library, probably has it. It's been around for a while, it came out in 1981. If you think that alcoholism is caused by moral decay or lack of will power or some variant of the "Demon Rum", you need to read this book. There is a small part of the population, I think around 10 percent, that simply metabolizes alcohol differently than everyone else. If people with this chemistry get into the habit of drinking regularly, for whatever reason, they find that they have to continue drinking in order to feel well enough to function; and the more they drink, the more they have to drink. They can recover if they stop drinking altogether; but after a certain point, they can't stop drinking without outside help. It's a startling and eye-opening book.

My husband, very fortunately, made the decision to stop before he reached the point where he had to go into detox - he just stopped drinking, assisted materially by the Kaiser CDRP, which provided him with different things to do instead of drinking. As people trying to quit smoking know, the habit patterns are as hard to break as the chemical dependency. He'd been coming home from work and drinking; now he came home from work and went to a meeting, and talked about it. In fact, some nights he went to two meetings: Kaiser's, and LifeRing's. He's now down to 2-3 meetings a week; he really enjoys the discussions.

I won't go too much into LifeRing here - I've linked their web site, you can read it for yourself - but he prefers them to AA because AA is just too Christian-tinged religious for him. He's a very religious person, but he doesn't consider himself a Christian (as I don't). In case you didn't think AA was a Christian organization, I'll refer you to the LifeRing leader's blog post on a recent court case, where a Buddhist convict objected to being forced to attend AA as a condition of parole. I've added the New Recovery blog to my links.

I've been mulling this post over for 6 months. I don't know if I'll post on the subject again; but I wanted to put this out on the table for discussion.

Nature Bats Last

Isn't that a great line? I saw that on a bumper sticker. And I've been continually reminded of it by all flap surrounding the climate change meetings in New York.

First of all, it is appallingly rude but unfortunately typical of the Bush administration to ignore the U.N.'s attempts to Do Something about impending climate changes and schedule his own parallel meeting at pretty much the same time, inviting all the other major polluters, who ought to be at the U.N. meeting with the rest of the world.

Second, I'm amazed at the blether coming out of the White House - and yes, Condi, that includes you, the President's mouthpiece. We can't possibly slow anybody's growth, or impact anybody's economy (including ours). And we certainly can't impose binding targets, even if we choose them ourselves - why, what if we change our minds??

“Every country will make its own decisions,” she said, “reflecting its own needs and interests.”

How is that different from what we've been doing all along, which is what's gotten us here, facing the entire loss of the Arctic ice pack in our lifetimes?? When the permafrost melts, what will happen to our wonderful Alaska pipeline (it's grounded on permafrost, you know)? For that matter, when the pipeline ruptures because the ground has collapsed into a swamp under it, how will the citizens of Alaska get along without all the money they get from the oil fund??

President Bush is now capable of saying the words, "human induced climate change", but he still doesn't get it. He doesn't understand what a 1.5 degree Celsius (that's 3 degrees Fahrenheit, Georgie) average increase in the global temperature will mean for the weather extremes: the winters will be warmer; the summers will be hotter (will you even be able to live in Texas in the summer?); the storms will be stronger; the rain patterns will change, which will disrupt agriculture.

It wouldn't take much of a change in the snow and rainfall pattern to make California incapable of supporting the number of people who live there now - not counting the ones who will move here next week or next year. We've just had one of the driest years on record - is that a coincidence, or the start of a trend? What price the most expensive housing market on the planet if you have Draconian water rationing??

Places near the equator, which are now uncomfortably hot and dry, will become entirely uninhabitable, and the people who live there will have to find somewhere else to live. Are we going to take them in? They're mostly poor and brown, which doesn't augur well; we have this thing about poor brown people.

The climate change has already started; and no matter what we do, it will have some effect. Immediate and strenuous efforts to reduce the fossil fuels we burn may allow us to continue to live here, in varying degrees of discomfort; but remember that the Earth will go on happily whether we can live on it or not.

Muse on the News

There's plenty of weirdness in the news this morning.

President Bush announces that he's shocked - SHOCKED! - at what's going on in Myanmar (which I notice the BBC is starting to call "Burma" again). Actually he said "outraged" but the echo of Casablanca is irresistable. A military dictatorship, who knew? Mr. Bush, who woke you up? This has been going on for I think 19 years, and for the previous 6 years of your term you've taken essentially zero notice. I hate to say this, but I think the Burmese junta is just coiling to strike, and nebulous "support" from the U.N. is going to do nada to shield the monks when the shooting starts.

Then there's the flap over Mahmoud Ahmedinajad's speech at Columbia University. This was a good thing, and kudos to Columbia for inviting him and carrying through. Kudos also to President Bollinger, who called Ahmedinajad as he saw him in his introduction. The Iranians are complaining, but I thought it was a good give and take. Barack Obama is right: we should be talking to our enemies.

I gather Pres. Ahmedinajad, in response to a question about Iran's death penalty for homosexuality, claims that there are no homosexuals in Iran. I suppose he's sure they got them all.

In this invitation, Columbia compares very favorably to my alma mater, the University of California, which just disgracefully raised a stink when Dr. Lawrence Summers was invited to speak to the Board of Regents at Davis. It looks to me as if "free speech" at U.C. is limited to people the University community agrees with. I don't agree with Dr. Summers' opinion on the different abilities of men and women in science and math; but refusing to allow to him say anything (in a formal speech to the Board of Regents) is not the appropriate response, and reinforces a popular conception of U.C. as a narrow-minded cabal of repressive left-wing ideocrats. I'm sorry, but it's true.

And finally in domestic political news, Pres. Bush's Secretary of Transportation (with White House approval) seems to have been using her office and her staff to lobby state governors and members of Congress, particularly from Michigan, to push the EPA to oppose California's request for a waiver on regulating greenhouse gases from cars and trucks. Congressman Henry Waxman thinks this is a violation of the Anti-Lobbying Act; and thank you, Mr. Waxman, for ferreting this out.

Civil Liberties and the GWOT

I read The Economist every week, because I like their journalism; besides, they occasionally use words that even I don't know, so I learn something. One of their leader essays this week (Sept. 15 issue) ended with a statement about civil liberties and the "global war on terror" that cuts so close to the bone that I'm just going to quote the whole thing here:

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

Take torture, arguably the hardest case (and the subject of the first article in our series). A famous thought experiment asks what you would do with a terrorist who knew the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. Logic says you would torture one man to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so you would. But this a fictional dilemma. In the real world, policemen are seldom sure whether the many (not one) suspects they want to torture know of any plot, or how many lives might be at stake. All that is certain is that the logic of the ticking bomb leads down a slippery slope where the state is licensed in the name of the greater good to trample on the hard-won rights of any one and therefore all of its citizens.

Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Hang Up And Drive

The California Governator has just signed a law prohibiting 16 and 17 year olds from using cell phones, PDAs, laptops (they're using LAPTOPS??) and pagers while driving, effective July 1, 2008. They won't be able to text message their friends from behind the wheel any more. Tooooo bad. I only have two questions.

1. Why are we waiting until July 1? (OK, this is probably just the way the legal system works) and,

2. Why only 16 and 17 year olds??

Once these kids turn 18, assuming they don't kill themselves and everyone else in the car before then, they will be able to text message their friends while driving, and it'll be perfectly legal. Also, most of the idiots I pass, driving one-handed at 70 MPH with the other hand gluing a cellphone to their ear, are well over the age of 18. I've seen more than one study indicating that driving while talking on the phone is as dangerous as driving drunk - maybe even more so. Just Google "cell phone driving" and look at the evidence for yourself. This is stupid, people.

OK, I'll back off and do the disclaimers: yes, yes, most teenagers don't drive and text. But in this case "most" amounts to two out of three, according to a recent study done by AAA and Seventeen magazine. That means one out of three teenagers is driving and texting, or at least driving and yakking. That's a very high percentage. If they kill themselves while doing this, that may be just Darwinian selection at work; but the odds are quite high that, through inattention, they will kill someone else too, who has done nothing more dangerous than try to drive to work. (Actually, driving to work is dangerous; much more so than the great Terrorist Threat; but that's another post...)

This article lists all the countries, and the U.S. states, that have passed some kind of ban on using cell phones while driving - in some cases just requiring hands-free equipment, but in some cases (New Delhi, India) banning even that. You can potentially go to jail for driving and chatting in Bahrain. There is a reason all these countries have banned driving and phoning: it's dangerous. It kills people. Let's keep your attention on the road, folks.

Oh, yeah, and what about eating while driving, and putting on makeup while driving?? (For that matter, what about the guy I saw wailing down the Number One lane, doing at least 80, with a 3 ring binder spread out on his steering wheel??) Well, they aren't illegal, and not even I am suggesting that they should be (OK, maybe putting on eye makeup should be); but they're just as dangerous as talking on the cell phone. Let's face it, folks: when you're driving a car, your entire attention should be on the road. This is not the time to demonstrate how well you can multi-task. As the old song goes, "Keep your mind on your drivin' and your hands on the wheel..."

Too Smart For Their Own Good

Warning: if financial shenanigans make your head ache, go right down to the last post and read about Osama Bin Laden, because this is going to be pretty specialized.

The sub prime mortgage mess has now expanded to restrict the whole credit market, not just credit to people with poor FICO scores. You can't get a jumbo loan even with good credit, which effectively means you can't buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've actually been waiting for something like this to happen. For the last dunnamany years, the investment banking community has been trading a class of financial instruments they call "credit derivatives" - whose purpose was to "manage risk", by spreading it around among multiple parties so no single party was exposed to all the risk of any one transaction.

The mortgage backed securities, which are collapsing like card houses as subprime mortgage holders default, are only one example. The general class is an investment where a group of normal, understandable transactions - A borrows money from B - is munged up into a big pot, which is then given a name, divided up into pieces and resold, with the pieces priced based on the amount of risk associated with them. In other words, instead of B just booking the fact that A owes him a million dollars, B creates derivative instruments which he sells to C and D, based on their appetite for risk. If C buys the highly rated piece of the pie (or "tranche"), then C gets a relatively low percentage of the interest, but doesn't expect to have to pay out much if the underlying loan (or loans) goes Tango Uniform; D, however, buys the bottom or junk "tranche", which carries the highest risk of default, so D gets the highest percentage of the interest. B passes on some of the income from the loans to C and D in exchange for also passing on some of the risk. This process is called securitization.

I am simplifying wildly here.

The point I'm getting to, though, is that these arrangements are enormously complicated. Further, under current accounting rules, firms that have bought these things have to "mark them to market" daily - that is, their value on the company books has to be what the holder thinks it can sell them for. (I say "it" because human beings don't own these things; financial institutions own them.) And there's where the shoe pinches, because when all the irrational sub prime mortgages started to reset their interest rates to the "real" amount, and the owners suddenly realized they couldn't pay, refinance or even sell because the housing market had slumped, the holders of these investments found themselves getting margin calls (not only do they buy this crap, they buy it on credit - they call it "gearing" or "leveraging") on investments they thought were rated AAA.

What everyone forgot was that if you have securitized a bunch of mortgage loans, and sold the pieces, they are only worth something if the mortgage holders are still paying on the underlying loans. If the mortgage holders default, the securities become worthless.

So while the mortgage firms that made the original loans were going bankrupt, the financial firms that bought the mortgage-backed securities realized suddenly that the assets they held weren't worth what they thought they were. Worse, they realized that they didn't actually know what the assets they held were worth. And worst of all, they realized that they had loaned money out to other firms, and they now couldn't judge whether those other firms were capable of repaying them or not, because the other firms didn't know what their assets were worth, either. This is called counterparty risk - the risk that the counterparty you trusted will fail you. If you have been reading in the newspaper that banks are afraid to borrow from each other, this is why.

The problem isn't that these firms are going bankrupt; it's that they don't know whether they're going bankrupt or not. And this is all happening because some very bright people invented these credit derivatives, and sold them to the financial community as a clever way to "manage risk", when in fact only about 8 people anywhere actually understand them. It all worked fine as long as there was another fool standing in line ready to buy the next one. But the fool has stepped out of line and put his money under the mattress.

Peter Lynch of 1980s investing fame used to say that you shouldn't invest in anything you couldn't explain to your mother. He was talking about buying stocks, but it applies here too.

So are they going to take the whole economy down with them?? I don't know, but I doubt it; I'm afraid I think they'll get bailed out. They've already had a kind of bail-out, when the Fed lowered its "discount rate" (what it charges banks to borrow short term to true up cash for the day) back in August. I hate to see them get off scot-free from this stupidity, but they'd take too many other people down with them.

Doppelganger

I don't think it's him. Osama Bin Laden, I mean. Bin Laden is actually a fairly handsome man, based on validated photos; this guy is ugly. He seems to have changed his turban. The face doesn't narrow as much toward the chin as in earlier photos, the nose seems broader at the base, and why would he suddenly trim the beard? Isn't he Mr. Islamic Fundamentalist, who never trims his beard? Not to mention, why would he suddenly dye his beard? The beard in that photo is dead black, and earlier Osama photos have shown everything from streaks of white to full gray. I think they have a younger body double for the photos, operating on the theory that one Arab man with a full beard looks much like another, and the quality of the videos is crappy. I'm not sure about the voice; but they could have a voice double too. Chris Regan, on Fanatical Apathy the other day, linked to a video he did in which he imitated FDR, and it was brilliant; I've heard FDR recorded, and I couldn't tell the difference. If Chris Regan can do FDR that well, Al Quaeda could train a mimic to talk like Osama.

Personally, I think Osama Bin Laden has been dead for at least a couple of years. Remember, this man's kidneys were bad: he was on dialysis. And he couldn't just drop into the local hospital for treatments: he had to carry the dialysis machine, and power for same, around with him from hideout to hideout. He has/had the money to do all this, no doubt; but it seems like a situation where it wouldn't take too many things going wrong all at once to be fatal over a relatively short period. I don't think he made it out of Tora Bora. But his mystique is so strong there's a powerful incentive for the remaining inner circle of Al Quaeda to keep releasing videos of him (with the background carefully blurred), to convince the world that he's still there and still a threat. Nobody else has that kind of mana.

The final reason I don't think it's him? This absurd suggestion that Americans should convert to Islam if we want to end the war in Iraq. That's just stupid, and while I dislike Bin Laden, he's not (or was not, if I'm right) stupid, and I don't think he would waste valuable broadcast time on a suggestion that is about as rational as the Pope suggesting that all Muslims should convert to Catholicism. That statement came from a not very bright ideologue, whose religious impulses overrode his brain; and nobody ever said that about Bin Laden.

Furthermore, if we all did convert to Islam, it wouldn't do a thing about the war in Iraq; and Osama Bin Laden knows that (assuming he's still alive). That's a local civil war among internal groups, most of whom hate Osama Bin Ladin and Saudi Wahhabism as much as they hate Americans. Shias versus Sunnis; Shias versus Shias (check out Basra and environs); everybody versus the Kurds; and the vast majority of the combatants are Iraqis. No matter what the neocons say about "Al Quaeda in Iraq". Sure, there probably are some foreign jihadis running around hoping to achieve martyrdom while taking a whack at the Great Satan; but they're a minority. How many times do we have to say "civil war"??

Popcorn

An article recently published by the Associated Press notes that doctors in Denver have a patient who may have developed a condition called "popcorn lung", which until now has only been known to affect workers in factories that manufacture microwave popcorn. The potentially fatal disease seems to be caused by inhaling diacetyl, a chemical used in "buttery flavored" microwave popcorn.

Is this making you just a little nervous about buttery-flavored microwave popcorn?

According to the article, the unnamed patient microwaved popcorn "several times a day for years," and developed coughing, shortness of breath, and inability to exhale (to exhale??), which improved after he quit microwaving the popcorn. Airborne levels of diacetyl in the patient's home resembled those which have caused workplace safety lawsuits.

I have to ask this: how much microwave popcorn did this guy EAT, anyway?? Was he feeding it to birds?? To the dog? Using it to pack shipments he sold on eBay (in which case, why buttered?)?

OK, one swallow does not a summer make, and one patient with a problem based on a really unusual level of consumption probably isn't a sign of a major public health issue. It's probably not damaging to your health to eat an occasional package of butter-flavored microwave popcorn. (I do wonder about the air in the office kitchen where I used to work; the fire safety people always wanted that door kept closed, and people regularly made microwave popcorn in there...)

But you know: it isn't that hard to pop your own popcorn, from the stuff you buy in a jar. If you don't want to do it on the stove in a pan, the old way (which is free), you can get a popcorn popper for somewhere around $20; and if you put butter on the popcorn, it's just butter, not diacetyl.

Don't Tap Your Foot In The John

I couldn't have made this up if I'd tried. A U.S. senator from Idaho was arrested in June in the Minneapolis airport for "lewd conduct" in the men's room; he pled guilty in court but now says he was misunderstood and shouldn't have entered the plea. If he wasn't guilty, then I agree, he shouldn't have pled guilty; he says he was "trying to handle the matter myself".

The incredible part, however, is the account of the arrest:

Roll Call, citing the report, said Sgt. Dave Karsnia made the arrest after an encounter in which he was seated in a stall next to a stall occupied by Craig. Karsnia described Craig tapping his foot, which Karsnia said he "recognized as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct."

The message here is clear: under no circumstances should a gentleman, sitting in a bathroom stall in Minneapolis, tap his foot. You will be misinterpreted. You may be arrested.

No doubt some of my erudite readers will respond to this post saying that I'm wrong, and Sgt. Karsnia was right, and men tapping their feet in the bathroom are soliciting all sorts of lewd and indecent conduct. But I still think the whole thing is ridiculous. Is it now illegal to have a nervous tic that causes one to tap one's foot while sitting for a short period?? Give me a break.

Centenary

If he'd lived this long, this Friday, August 31, would have been my father's 100th birthday. In fact, he died in 1994, at the age of 86; but the 100th anniversary of his birth has me thinking about him and his life.

He was the youngest of 5 in a hardscrabble Missouri farming family; he was the only sibling to finish high school. It took him until he was 21, because he had to work to support his mother. Issues I won't discuss here caused my grandmother to leave my grandfather when Dad was around 3 - they got back together, and then separated again, off and on for most of his childhood, which was not easy; as I said, he worked through high school. In fact, he worked most of his life; by the time he was old, he defined himself by the work he could do, which got to be a problem when he began to fail physically. He was never good at relaxing.

As the youngest son, and the last child to marry, he was the one who helped support his mother through the Depression - and half the time, the rest of his family and their children as well, since only one of his sisters married a man who would reliably support her, and his oldest brother was in and out of work. My grandmother was, in fact, quite capable herself - family legend says that she once ran a sawmill, and we know she worked in a cafeteria for the telephone company in Wichita, Kansas, because while doing that she injured her back and couldn't work any more. And none of the jobs they had ever paid what we'd call good money. So my dad worked - in an ice cream factory, in a shoe store, in whatever job would pay him. The ice cream factory was across town; he had half an hour for lunch, and it was a 10 minute trolley ride each way, so he rode the trolley home, ate lunch in 10 minutes, and rode back. He could clean a plate faster than anyone else at the table. He tried working in the fields in Texas but couldn't take the heat - he always had trouble with dehydration - so, back to Wichita and the shoe store.

The mantra today is that we must have a job that we like, a job that fulfills us - we're told to follow our passion. Dad's passion was to have any job he could get. This was before the safety net: no welfare, no SSI, no Social Security. If you didn't have a job, you could starve on the street, unless a private charity helped you. Hence all the people lined up for the soup kitchens, in the photos from the 30's, all in overcoats and hats because that was what you wore in public then.

His life wasn't all work and no play; in fact, he had quite a reputation. They called him "Wild Bill" (but his first name wasn't "William"!). He loved to dance, and he'd go to the dance on Saturday night with a half pint of whiskey in his pocket, and take a drink out behind the hall. He was a ladies' man, a real charmer, and a very sharp dresser; he liked to play cards, canasta and penuchle. He got into the occasional fight; in fact, my sister says he once told her he got into his last bar fight at the age of 55. Apparently, he knocked the guy down, dusted off his hands, and came home, and never said a thing. I remember him as a very calm and peaceful man; but that was at home. I know that at one point in the Twenties, the most obnoxious of my uncles came to the house where Dad and Grandma lived, and where my aunt was staying with her children (to get away from the uncle); and Dad pulled a gun on him, and told him he would see his wife only if she agreed to it. Dad also told me of the prank he played on a friend who had a Stutz-Bearcat car: the car was garaged in a shed, and Dad and some friends went one night, picked the car up, and put it down sideways in the shed, with only about an inch clearance front and back. Then they watched the guy try to get it out of the shed.

At the end of the Thirties, war was looming in Europe; and while a strong current of opinion in this country said it was none of America's business, nonetheless, the military shipyards on the coasts were booming. Like many other people in the Thirties, my dad came out to California, sometime in 1940, to work in the Navy shipyard at Mare Island, in Vallejo, California. He stayed at Mare Island for 31 years, doing everything from chipping paint, to driving a forklift, to moving officers in and out of quarters, to supervising a team of men in the stockroom. In 1957, the Navy gave him an award for 10 years of supervision without a lost-time accident; he was a very careful man, and he trained his men to be careful. To the end of his life, he could get more stuff in a U-Haul trailer than anyone else I ever saw.

Because he wasn't a veteran (too young for the first war, too old for the second), every time they had a cut in funding, he got knocked back to laborer, so the better-paid jobs could go to veterans. He complained, but not much; he had a job, and by then he had a family too. (He actually had an earlier wife, but I never knew much about her. I don't think his mother liked her.) He met my mother through Mare Island - she was the bookkeeper at the Vallejo USO, and he met her through a sailor they both knew at the Navy Yard. They weren't sure at first they would marry - their mothers were both horrified. He was a Baptist, and a divorcee; my mother was a Catholic, and a Canadian emigrant. But eventually he told her that he had gas money to get to Reno, and asked if she would go - and she said yes. The "gas money to Reno" actually got them to Sacramento, and they caught the train over the Sierras the rest of the way. That was in 1944, and it was typical of Dad that he had gas coupons; he was always doing favors for the sailors and they'd pay him in gas coupons. (Both mothers ended up living with them. At the same time.)

In 1950 he bought a house in Napa, 15 miles away from the shipyard, and set up a carpool to save gas money driving to work. He always drove; his riders paid him. He paid $6,000 for that house and lived in it for 43 years, until he died. He rebuilt the inside of it himself, in his spare time. He floored it with 1 by 4 oak planks that he bought when the Navy tore down the married servicemen's wartime housing in Benicia - all the units had had solid oak floors, covered with linoleum! He paid $150 for a truck load of the boards and floored the whole house, upstairs and down, except for the kitchen, back hall, and bathroom; he had enough left over to build a fence around the back yard. He laid the floor boards himself - it took him 3 days to position the first one. Then he hired a man to finish the floor in one room, watched him do it, and did the rest himself, with rented equipment. I remember crawling on that floor on my hands and knees, with a can of paste wax and a steel wool pad, polishing the wood.

When he finally retired from Mare Island, he didn't stop working - he had a civil service pension but no Social Security, so he got a job as a roustabout in an auto body shop, washing cars and sweeping up, to work his minimum Social Security quarters. It would have been wasteful to pass it up. When he finally retired from there, they begged him to stay - they said he did more work in an hour than most of the "boys" did in a day. After that job he just stayed home, doing repairs on the old house (built in 1907), doing favors for neighbors who needed them, and worrying about his daughters, since at that point neither of us was married.

Getting old is hard on a man who defines himself by the physical work he can do. I remember him complaining to my husband, shortly after we married, that he was past it - he couldn't haul a 100 pound sack of cement out of the car trunk any more. I believe he was 80 at the time. He began to get little strokes; his whole family had a problem with atherosclerosis; and eventually one killed him. The real trouble was his quality of life; he wouldn't fix himself up. He had cataracts, and was almost blind when he died. When the doctor diagnosed the cataracts, Dad asked if he needed to have them fixed; if the doctor had said yes, he would have done it. The doctor said that Dad would decide when to get them fixed; and Dad never said the word, because he was an "old man", and "worthless." I could have killed that doctor. I predicted what would happen, and I was right; but I couldn't get through to Dad. He would have been so much more comfortable if he had been able to see. He was also pretty deaf (one of his jobs at the shipyard had been chipping paint, and without ear protection; but, of course, the Navy said it wasn't related); but he felt it was "a waste" to pay good money for hearing aids and of course he couldn't see to manipulate them. How do you teach a man to value himself?? He'd never have let a car get into such a state for lack of maintenance. He was never really the same after his best friend died; they only saw each other every couple of years, but they'd known each other since they were 11, and when Walt died, a piece of Dad died too.

Well, he's gone now; but he lives in my memory, and in my sister's, and the rest of the family. He was a good man; an honest man; a kind man; and he paid cash for everything. (He may have bought one car on credit once, I'm not sure.) If you needed a shirt, he'd give you his; if your car needed fixing, he'd fix it. He paid special attention to the car repair needs of "widow women." People I didn't even recognize turned up at his funeral. The Mexican family that rented the house across the street came to the funeral and said he was the only one in the neighborhood who came to talk to them; he called them "neighbor".

Rest in peace, Neighbor.

Chester and York

We hadn't originally planned to visit Chester; but at least 3 different people we met, hearing that we planned to drive from north Wales to York, told us that we must visit Chester. Chester, they all said, had a magnificent Elizabethan downtown shopping district, with beautifully preserved black-and-whites still in use. So we stopped at the Chester park-and-ride and rode the bus in for a quick tour and lunch, despite the fact that it was raining cats and dogs when we got there.

Chester really does have a magnificent Elizabethan downtown; it's more interesting because it isn't exclusively Elizabethan. It's been updated in all periods, including Victorian and modern, and somehow it all fits together. But the black-and-whites: they're fabulous. Some of them are four stories high, each story projecting out a little farther than the one below, in meticulous repair. The shopping district has a long section of adjacent black-and-whites where the first two stories are in use as stores and restaurants, and you can get to the second story from the city wall, which is also still in use (as a walkway, not a defensive perimeter). It stopped raining after we'd been there about 10 minutes and we walked around, had lunch on the second floor of a black-and-white (in a regrettably modern sandwich shop, but the 1638 Boot Inn a couple of doors down looked like a little more than we had time for). We thought we'd found a restored Roman garden by the city wall (Chester was a Roman camp), but it turned out to be someone's idea of what a Roman garden would have looked like if the Romans had used the masonry fragments that the gardeners had to hand.

We also toured the Chester Cathedral. This isn't one of the major cathedrals like York or Canterbury, but it's impressive in a brooding way: it's all made of a dark red stone, which looks even darker when it's wet. We walked around it on the city wall, and came back out to the shopping district through the cathedral close, which is still in use for offices and so on (and strictly Georgian in architecture, except for the medieval gateway). We went in and took the audio tour; the first religious foundation on the site was a Saxon church, founded in 907 to hold the relics of St. Werburgh. After the Norman conquest, the church was turned into a Benedictine abbey beginning in the late 11th century. The abbey church was turned into a cathedral by Henry VIII after he dissolved the monastery. Chester Cathedral contains a room that was used as a consistory court (trying cases of ecclesiastical law) into the early 20th century and could still be so used today if the Chancellor of the diocese chose.

However, we had to get not only to but past York by evening, which meant passing both Manchester and Leeds in the late afternoon. We met some very heavy traffic but had no serious delays. It was a little disconcerting to come off a ramp from a major motorway to a lesser road, and find ourselves staring straight ahead at about 5 huge cooling towers for a nuclear power station, but then, the British do that.

We didn't stay in York proper; we stayed in a one-pub village called Stockton-on-the-Forest, about 10 miles from York on the Scarborough road, and rode the inevitable park-and-ride bus into the city. York has been inhabited since the Romans (who called it Eboracum and used it as a major administrative center); in our touring we saw an excavated Roman bathhouse, the Jorvik exhibit of the town in the Viking period, and, of course, York Minster. We had lunch in a building that dated to the early 14th century; we were on the 3rd floor (I think; I lost count of the stairs we climbed), and the floor tilted out toward the windows so sharply that when my husband tried to get up from the table, he almost fell over. York has a street called The Pavement; I found this extremely confusing until someone explained that it was the first area of the town that ever was paved, and was used in the middle ages for public announcements.

The word that comes to my mind for York Minster is "light". The stone is light, the building is even more full of light than most cathedrals. I noticed that everything in the Minster looked fresh, as if it had just been restored; in Canterbury, many statues and tomb carvings had bits knocked off, but everything in York Minster looked beautifully kept. Of course, some of it was almost new; they had a ghastly fire in the early 1970s which took out the entire South Transept, and they had to rebuild that section almost from scratch. But they did it to match the rest of the building.

I found what I thought was an absolute jewel in a side chapel: one wall panel was painted in almost perfect 14th century trompe l'oeil style, with a man walking down a street next to a building, and inside the building a man in bed, and everything just so to show the perspective, because they were just learning to draw that way. The guide book, which I read later, was a major let-down: the panel was painted in 1930 in memory of the 1st Marquess of Zetland, and based on the background of Crivelli's Annunciation. Drat. But it's still gorgeous.

I chose to explore the crypt, which was laid out to show the Roman and Viking and Norman foundations, the history of the site, and the church treasury. I passed on climbing the tower, which was the equivalent of 19 stories high. My husband climbed it.

God help the York householder who wants to expand his basement! The Roman bathhouse was discovered when a pub owner wanted to do just that, and the pub now runs an archaeological museum downstairs. Seeing the Roman bathhouse reminded me that the Romans really lived very like us: they had centrally heated houses with hot and cold running water, they bathed in public baths with hot, tepid, and cold plunges, and they had indoor bathrooms with running water (and sponges taking the place of toilet paper) which flushed into a central sewer. (Of course, the sewer dumped into the local river, but you can't have everything.) And three hundred years after Rome fell, people lived either in wattle-and-daub huts or stone castles; the heat in both dwellings was a firepit in the middle of the floor, venting through the roof; people bathed once a year, maybe; and I don't even want to think about what they did when they "had to go". The Jorvik exhibit (which was aimed at getting 11 year old boys excited about archaeology) had a replica Viking toilet (with animatronic user) which was pretty crude. And all of this happened because of Christianity; the Christians assumed that if the godless Romans were cleanly, then there must be something ungodly about cleanliness. I wonder what daily life will be like 300 years from now; and if it does decline as life did after Rome, then what will cause it.

We spent one day touring York, and we probably could have spent more time. But by this time we'd been traveling for two and a half weeks, and we were starting to run down. Three weeks is about my limit for an extended vacation, and after that I want to go home and put my feet up. Have you ever noticed that vacation lodgings are short on places to put your feet up? I always end up sitting on the bed with pillows piled at my back. So after spending one day in York, we spent one more day touring the neighborhood.

We spent that last touring day on two sites: Castle Howard and Rievaulx Abbey. I'm not sure whether my husband planned it this way, but they represent the extreme developments of the religious and the secular ways of life in England.

Castle Howard was begun in the early 18th century by Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, a major figure in the English government (First Lord of the Treasury), largely because he owned the land and he could. It actually took most of a century (and 3 Earls) to "complete". My main reaction to Castle Howard was stunned disbelief at the size and opulence. I can't find anywhere a simple statement of how many rooms the place has; I have to wonder whether they know. I've lived in apartments that were smaller than the Atlas Fountain. And the most stunning thing about the place is that part of the Howard family (but not, any longer, the Earl) still lives there, including two small children. Imagine raising children in a place filled with genuine Roman statuary (collected by the 4th Earl) and fine art (collected by the 5th Earl); for that matter, imagine trying to find small children on a thousand-acre estate. To give them their due, the Howards run the place as a non-profit trust, dedicated to preserving the art, buildings, and gardens; and the docents I talked to on the tour all seemed to adore the Howards personally. But as I look at pictures of the place, I still can't imagine brushing my teeth there.

If Castle Howard represents the epitome of the English aristocratic (secular) way of life, then Rievaulx Abbey represents the height of the medieval monastic movement. Rievaulx was founded in 1132 by Bernard of Clairvaux as the first, and eventually largest, Cistercian foundation in England. The Cistercians, at least in the 12th century, felt that the Benedictines were too rich, and corrupted by their proximity to towns, commerce, politics, etc.; so the Cistercians built their monasteries as far from all that as they could. Rievaulx was built on the Yorkshire moors; it's still a long way from anything, although there's a small town right near the site. All the Cistercians wanted was lots of land to raise sheep on (and other necessities of life; the abbeys were intended to be self-sufficient). Since they continued to expand their land and sheepholdings, and to sell the surplus wool, they too eventually became rich and corrupt; but that's another story. Rievaulx at its height had around 800 monks, a bigger population than many villages; and all that money from the surplus wool sales built a soaring abbey church, plus a large refectory, living quarters, etc. As with most monasteries, only the walls survive (and not all of those); the roofs tended to be made of lead, which was salvaged and reused by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries. The windows were destroyed to salvage the leading, or simply broke; and the ruins were quarried for stone to build other structures. The site today is extremely peaceful and beautiful. It can also be viewed from a garden up the hill, Rievaulx Terrace, which was built by a local landowner in the 18th century, to give himself a convenient place to stroll and observe his "ruin," since the 18th century considered it very fashionable to have a ruin on the property. Some people went so far as to build fake ruins, but the owner of the property above Rievaulx, of course, didn't need to do that.

Rievaulx Abbey was the end of our touring. We had a final pub lunch in a nearby small town, and a last helping of banoffee pie; and the next day we set out for Staines, Heathrow, and home, an epic journey which I ranted about back in July. I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I've enjoyed writing it, which is unlikely. But thanks for staying with me, if you did; and check back from time to time, as I'm working on a photo gallery for my web site, and will note here when it's ready.

Term Limits, California Style

Once again, the California Legislature has failed to pass a budget on time. As nearly as I can tell this time (and I admit to some bias here), the Assembly Democrats passed a budget which actually reduced the deficit, sort of, and at the last minute the Republicans in the Senate held out for even more spending cuts and put the whole business on hold.

Frankly, at this point I don't care if those details are right or not. This happens every year, and I'm fed up with it. Every year, thousands of poor, ill, elderly people, and the businesses who serve same, have to sit and wonder when they'll get their payments, and if they'll be able to make it through until the Lege acts, because state payments to them are frozen while the legislators posture. People are even expecting this:

The state keeps humming along, however, largely because thousands of people, from hospital administrators to school officials in all parts of the state, have learned to prepare for California's chronically late budget deals. They know either to have cash on hand or which banks to turn to for short-term loans when budget negotiations bog down.

This idiocy is also why California has the second-worst state credit rating in the country; only Louisiana is worse.

These people are incompetent. An employee of a business with a bottom line, who repeatedly behaved like this, would be fired. And on top of this they have the brass-bound balls to ask us to extend term limits so they can spend more time in office. Well, I have another suggestion, and I'll bet it would pass if we could get it on the ballot:

No member of a legislature which failed to pass a budget on time would be eligible to run for state office again. Any state office, ever. This is what it'll take, folks; we've already tried suspending their pay while they argue about the budget, and it doesn't help, because it's "only a few weeks", and they all have the resources to ride it out, unlike the poor people dependent on state aid whom they routinely nail to the wall, every year, for political points.

Snowdonia Looks Like Northern California

Yes, it really does. Specifically, it looks like the north coastal California mountains in winter (it was really green; but then, everyone was complaining that it'd been raining for 5 weeks), only without so much obscuring vegetation and maybe with more exposed rocks. The hills are about the right height and about the right slope, and have the frequent rock outcroppings that will be familiar to any resident of Napa or Sonoma Counties. The rock, however, is slate. As a national park, Snowdonia is astoundingly beautiful; it's also cold, barren, and remote. It has a few small towns dedicated to the tourist trade, specifically the ski trade; this is one of the places Great Britain goes to ski. It's also where Great Britain goes to climb rocks, but that's a smaller population. Apart from the tourist trade, the only other means of making a living that we saw were sheep farming, and quarrying slate (and what a mess that made!). Snowdonia can also make you feel very small and isolated, stopped at a road pull-out with (as far as I could tell) nothing for about 5 miles in any direction. The day we drove around, it didn't rain too much, but it was overcast all day with a steady, biting wind; visibility good, only the very tops of the mountains were in the clouds. I considered it the authentic Welsh experience (except there was no fog).

It's called Snowdonia because of Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales (and the highest in Britain south of Scotland), 3,560 feet. (Shut up, you Sierra hikers; I can hear you sniggering.) You can take a train up Snowdon, if you don't feel up to the hike, but the day we were there, it was only going about 3/4 of the way up (probably due to cloud cover) and would take almost 2 hours, so we passed. During the stop, however, I got what I think was my first lungful of coal smoke. When we went to New Zealand, we rode a coal-burning steamboat up Lake Wakatipu, by Queensland; but the motion of the boat meant the smoke was behind us. Coal smoke is brown and extremely smelly; I can't imaging how people could have used it for heating and cooking.

During this drive around, we stopped at two places that really could not be more different: Portmeirion, and Harlech Castle. I'll take Portmeirion first, because it's the oddest. (If any of you are fans of The Prisoner, you may already know this, because it was largely filmed there.)

Portmeirion is a largely Italianate village, an eclectic collection of generally Mediterranean styles with an equally eclectic collection of decorations (I don't think of Buddha as Italianate, but there's a Buddha statue), set down on a Welsh hillside overlooking an estuary off Tremadog Bay, on the Irish Sea. Portmeirion was built, over 50 years or so, by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who wanted to "demonstrate how a naturally beautiful site could be developed without spoiling it." I presume he didn't like stone buildings. He was over 90 when it was finally done. The buildings are set among elegant formal gardens, with classical statuary and a reflecting pool; there is also a band shell. The day we were there, the band was playing in the shell, while the rain came down outside; two people were sitting next to the pool listening, under a large umbrella. The buildings are all stuccoed, and painted various shades of pastel - yellow, turquoise blue, peach. The contrast with the rest of rural Wales, where I never saw a house that was any color other than stone, or whitewashed stucco, is staggering. (The "smallest house in Great Britain" was, in fact, painted red; but that's (a) in a town, and (b) a tourist stunt.) Portmeirion might come across as a charming Mediterranean village on a warm, sunny summer day; but we were there on a cold, overcast, windy summer day, and the whole place, as I heard another visitor say, was "surreal". God knows what it's like in winter. Since there isn't much to do there unless you want to worship at The Prisoner shrine, we walked around, had lunch, and went on to Harlech Castle.

Harlech Castle is the absolute antithesis of Portmeirion, although it's only about 5 miles away. Like Conwy Castle, Harlech was built by Edward I in the late 13th century, as part of his "iron ring" around Snowdonia, to contain the Welsh. The coastline has moved, but it was originally perched on a crag dropping straight into the sea; it was essentially impregnable from the land side, while it could be supplied by sea during a siege. Unlike Conwy Castle, Harlech has no remaining interior walls of any significance. There are excellent photographs at this site, but the day we were there, we didn't see the beautiful blue sky; it's actually more impressive on an overcast day. The visible walls are the original inner walls; the outer ring of fortifications didn't survive the next 400 years of warfare. A siege during the Wars of the Roses is said to have given rise to the song, Men of Harlech. The castle last saw action in the 17th century; it was the final Royalist stronghold to fall in the English Civil War. Harlech is an absolute classic of medieval military architecture and beautiful in a stern way.

Castles and Walled Towns

After the Eisteddfod, we headed north again, grateful to see the weather clearing; our first stop was another Bronze Age ruin, a spot called Capel Garmon, with a handsome chambered tomb. This site actually was marked off with a fence, and a sign; but then, it was in the middle of someone's farm. In fact, it was in the middle of a pasture full of sheep; the fence was undoubtedly to keep the sheep from falling into the tomb, which was 3-4 feet deep. I felt a little odd driving down what was evidently someone's driveway (complete with sign reminding us to close the gate); but that's where it was. It was a lovely, peaceful spot. If you want more information on Capel Garmon and feel like exercising your Welsh, there is a Wicipedia [sic!] site on it, entirely in that language.

Having taken the requisite number of photographs (I'm working on the photo gallery, there are 16 rolls of film!), we moved on to Bodnant Garden, where we spent several hours in our usual fashion, Jim cruising the garden, looking for interesting combinations of plants, while I simply wandered around. My initial wandering was driven by the fact that I needed a loo, and had failed to use the one in the parking lot; the only other one was at the extreme bottom of the garden, down by the Old Mill. Having found the facility, I had a lovely wander back along the stream (massed blue hydrangeas) and up to The Poem (the local name for a mausoleum perched on a rocky hill; don't ask me why they called it that). The Poem, unfortunately, is under renovation until (as I recall) 2009 or so, and was entirely wrapped in what looked like tarpaper; but I still had a nice walk. Bodnant also had several gorgeous reflecting pools with the usual water lilies.

After Bodnant we moved on to our next B&B, in Conwy, at the mouth of the Conwy River, on the Welsh coast facing the Irish Sea. Conwy, like much of northern Wales, is quite hilly; and I assumed when I saw the medieval stonework (with round towers) climbing a hill some distance from the inn, that I was looking at Conwy Castle. I was wrong: it was Conwy's town wall, which is still intact; you can walk around the town on it, at least from one side of the Castle to the other. As a standard medieval defensive tactic, one can't get into the Castle from the town wall. One can't get into the town without going through the wall, even in a car; and the arch that allows car traffic is one car wide, and one way. Watching buses negotiate the arch is amusing; I'm sure there's a limit on the size of bus they can use. Since our B&B was within walking distance of a gate in the wall, we left the car there when we went into town.

Conwy Castle is very well preserved, with a number of interior walls intact and even some of the decorations; it's possible to climb to the top of all 4 corner towers. In its day, it was a spectacular fortification, beautifully (and strategically) located at the river mouth overlooking the estuary. Edward I built it at the end of the 13th century, as part of his campaign to control the Welsh, and the town, of course, grew up around the castle.

Conwy is a town, by the way, and not a city; we made a remark about the "city wall" to a local person and were sternly corrected. One must have a cathedral in order to be called a city; Conwy only has parish churches. I don't think there was much there before the castle, despite the location on a river, because of the Church of St. Mary's and All Saints, in Conwy. The nice parish lady explained to me that the church was founded in 1172 as the Cistercian Abbey of Aberconwy. When Edward I built his castle, a hundred years or so later, he negotiated with the Cistercians (read: bribed with more land) to move the abbey to another site, and the abbey church became a parish church - much larger than the population then probably warranted, since the Cistercians were notorious for putting their abbeys as far away from other settlements as possible. St. Mary's and All Saints, and its graveyard are in the "back yard" between two city blocks; all the neighboring houses back onto it. There's one actual road going to it, but I found it by looking down an alley.

Aberconwy House, now run by the National Trust, is a 14th century merchant's house which survived into the 20th century as an occupied dwelling (occupied during the late Victorian period by a Temperance Hotel). It's been restored, so that one room looks as it would have in the 15th century, and one as it would have in the 18th or 19th, and a couple as they were in the Temperance Hotel. It's very rare for a merchant's house to survive this long with the structure essentially intact. Conwy also has an Elizabethan house, but it wasn't open for touring. At the other end of the scale of importance and interest, Conwy contains the Smallest House in Great Britain, which I toured out of sheer curiosity - the whole house (2 stories) is less than 6 feet wide and just under 10 feet high.

Pity the Poor Immigrant (with thanks to Bob Dylan)

It was in the paper today that St. Michael of Homeland Security is going to Get Tough with those awful illegal immigrants. Specifically, he's going to start chasing down and fining U.S. employers who don't clear up those "no match" letters - the ones that say, your employee's Social Security number isn't in the file. He's going after the employers because, of course, his department's ongoing attempts to find all these illegals and deport them have had about as much effect as spitting into the wind. I have one question for St. Michael:

You and what army?

The standard estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is around 12 million. There are more illegal immigrants in the U.S., on that measure, than there are people in any of almost 150 countries (courtesy of the population list in Wikipedia).

In 2004 (the latest numbers on the official web site), Homeland Security had 183,000 employees. Of course that has changed; say it's doubled, to 366,000. Unlikely, given how cheap the Bush administration is for everything except the Iraq war; but assume it. That means that each Homeland Security employee, everybody down to the janitors and the guy in the mail room, has to go, and find, and process out, 33 illegal immigrants, in order to clean this up. And that assumes they do nothing else, including guarding the border and issuing the passports that everybody now has to have to go to Canada and Mexico and anywhere else.

So - this isn't possible, they're just blowing smoke to make the Republicans look good for the presidential campaign. Or, as one nurseryman I heard on the radio complained, they plan to turn local businessmen into their enforcement officers, and without any pay or benefits for doing the job, either. In fact, for some businesses, complying with this initiative will put them out of business, because as far as I can tell (from a couple of completely unscientific chats with people in the field), these really are jobs that many Americans will not do. It isn't just picking fruit, either - the jobs include a lot of stuff that used to be standard blue collar work: Hanging drywall. Painting. Doing garden maintenance. Making beds in hotels. Looking at the five guys roofing a house down the street from us, I have to wonder about them: do they have papers? Valid papers?

Which raises the question: even if it were possible to deport all these people, is this a good idea?? As far as I'm concerned, and even leaving aside the effect on agriculture, the service industries, and the construction trade, the answer is no. This is a country of immigrants. Everybody here, if you go back far enough, descends from an immigrant - even the Indians. They just got here first; but they came (it's pretty clear) from Asia. This country was built on immigration (see the verse on the Statue of Liberty); and it's been a good thing, too. The "greatest generation", the people who fought in World War II? Immigrants, or children of same, most of them.

I discussed this whole issue before, back in May 2006 (see The Immigrant Uprising), where I, and the commenters, covered many more aspects of this than I plan to go into here. If you're interested in the subject, I recommend you go read that thread. What got me posting today was the sheer chutzpah of the whole announcement, with no resources to enforce it any better than what we're doing now, except to put the whole thing on the business community, with threats of fines for non-compliance.

And, oh - if the immigrant has stolen an actual, valid Social Security number and is using that? No problema, amigo, the system won't catch it - and what an incentive to identity theft that is!

And given that Congress has already failed to produce a workable immigration bill, and has further covered itself with disrepute by handing the Attorney General the keys to the telephone system before scuttling home for a vacation which I hope they do not enjoy - I guess we're stuck with these yokels until the election.

And Now, Wales

After our stay on Dartmoor, we left Cockington (once more fighting our way through the morning traffic in Kingskerswell) and got on the motorway for Cardiff, in Wales. You know immediately when you've entered Wales: suddenly all the road signs are in two languages. (Of course, the bridge over the Bristol Channel is another helpful guide.) This wouldn't be much of a problem if the languages were consistently in the same order, but they vary - some signs are English then Welsh, and some are Welsh then English. I wasn't driving but even I found this distracting, as you glance at the sign and then have to figure out whether you read the top part or the bottom.

I found the Welsh language signs interesting; languages have always been a hobby of mine. Some of the words in Welsh are obviously copped from English, along the lines of the "le hot dog" in French: "tolls" on the bridge is tollau, and "cameras" (there are security cameras everywhere) is camerau; also, "toilets" is toiletdau. From this I infer that "au" is a plural ending in Welsh, at least for borrowed English words. It isn't for all of them, since I also saw a shop (siop) advertising byrgyrs (and yes, in Welsh that's pronounced "burgers" as far as I can tell). The only words I remember (because they were on signs everywhere) that clearly have no relation to English were araf for "stop", heol for "street", and heddlu (pronounced, I think, HETH-lee, with the th as in those) for "police." We had dinner in Cardiff at a pub called Y Mochen Du (trans: the black pig; so du in Welsh is maybe related to dhu in Scots Gaelic, which also means black? Sorry, I got sidetracked), and none of those words seem to have any English taint. Many of the Welsh consonants can only be pronounced properly by people who learned them before the age of 5; I get very frustrated by trying to read words I can't pronounce, but I never did really get Welsh pronunciation.

Our trip into Cardiff seemed uneventful - we had a good map - until we tried to find our B&B. The web site said it was a "handsome Victorian", and we assumed (beware of that word) that meant it would stand out. It was in about the fourth or fifth block of identical handsome Victorian townhouses; none of them had visible street numbers, and every third one of them had a B&B sign in the yard. At least they had yards; the Welsh don't seem to build their townhouses right out to the sidewalks as the English do. Also the parking was down the alley in back of the place, not intuitive at all. However, once we got in it was very nice, and we walked around to Cardiff Castle and caught one of the last tours of the day.

Cardiff Castle is schizophrenic. In the middle of the courtyard is the original Cardiff Castle, which was built by the Normans at the end of the 11th century and is an absolutely classic motte-and-bailey fortress in stone. Surrounding it is the rest of the castle that has grown up in the subsequent thousand years or so; but the only part of the history you actually see on the tour is the work of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (yes, that is a Scottish title) in the late 19th century. The web site says that the 3rd Marquess was "destined to become one of the greatest private patrons of architecture this country has seen"; what he actually did at Cardiff was to transform a whole side of the castle wall into a series of chambers that represented what a well-educated late Victorian thought the middle ages ought to have looked like. (While he had a remnant of the real middle ages out on the motte...) Money was no object; our docent suggested that Lord Bute was the 19th century equivalent of Bill Gates. The staggering thing about all this architectural fantasy is that he did it in a residence where he only spent about 6 weeks out of the year - I suppose if they're always working on the place, you wouldn't want to spend much time there. I won't really try to describe Cardiff Castle, it has to be seen, especially the pre-Raphaelite style cartoons on all the walls representing various historical legends and events; but if you ever find yourself in Cardiff, go take the tour. The web site (under the link Present) has a pretty good photo gallery, but you have to see the 3 story coved (and gilt) ceiling of the Arab room to appreciate it - the photograph does NOT do it justice.

We only spent one night in Cardiff, but I learned one other thing that has cleared up something that has bugged me for years; or at least I thought it did until I found the nursery rhyme site. There's an old nursery rhyme that begins, "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief." I never could understand why "Taffy" should be an insulting term for a Welshman, until I learned that the river that runs through Cardiff is the River Taff. That made sense to me until I found the nursery rhyme site linked above - which says that "Taffy" is derived from "Amaethon", the name of the Welsh God of Agriculture. If you can see how "Amaethon" could translate into "Taffy", you know more about Welsh than I do; my guess still makes more sense to me!

Our first destination in Wales was actually Llangollen, which I will NOT try to put into accurate phonetics; the "ll" is one of those consonants you have to learn in the cradle. A reasonable fake for an English speaker is "clan-GOCH-len" where the "ch" in the second syllable is roughly equivalent to the one in the German "ach". LLangollen hosts the annual International Eisteddfod, a music and dance competition that lasts most of a week; we were there for one day, staying two nights in Corwen, a nearby village. As a musician, this was a high point for me; the groups that compete in this festival are really good, and we spent most of the day listening to the choral competitions (mixed chorus, chamber chorus, folk song chorus), and a couple of the Celtic music competitions. The singing was superb and I was pleased to see American choirs (de Paul A Capella, Voices of the Academy from Chicago, Mount San Antonio College Choir from L.A., University of Maryland Chamber Singers) take firsts and seconds in several of the competitions. I'd like to go back another time and take in some of the dance competitions, and the smaller groups.

The music was the plus; the weather was the minus, this was one of the days it rained all day, and in fact waited until we were trying to get back to the car (walking most of a mile) to come down in roaring buckets. Oh, well, we hung everything in the bathroom and dried out overnight. The festival grounds were sort of paved, in some places (our B&B landlady says they've actually improved it a lot, it used to be much worse), but a great deal of it was a complete swamp. I wore light colored trousers and they were muddy to the knee, and I didn't even fall. The countryside was gorgeous: Llangollen sits in a river valley (the River Dee, no relation to the one in Scotland), and with all the rain everything was very green, and dotted with the inevitable sheep.

Glancing back at Brighton

I've realized that I forgot to include something we saw in Brighton that was really fun - in a street blocked off as a pedestrian mall, they had a street fair. In the course of one block, I counted:

Two lightning caricaturists;
One portrait artist (chalk);
One palmist;
Two Tarot readers; and
One elderly Oriental man doing chair massage.

This was in addition to the usual collection of people selling bead jewelry off quilts on the sidewalk. It was a lively and very urban scene; I can't recall the last time I saw street artists (as opposed to graffiti taggers).

Dartmoor

Since my wish to see the Dartmoor was at least partly based on years of reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, I was tempted to title this with some cheesy remark about "... the footprints of a gigantic hound!" However, the really interesting book about the Dartmoor is not the Conan Doyle classic, but the Laurie King sequel called The Moor, in the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series (all of which is very strongly recommended). Also, there's a series of medieval detective stories by Michael Jecks, set near the Dartmoor in the early 14th century, in which the tin miners on Dartmoor occasionally show up - we'd call them "wildcat" miners today, they usually worked alone on the moor. The moor itself is always in everyone's mind, in all these books. I wanted to see a place that impresses people to the extent that they include it as a character in their books; so after avoiding the Tour de France mess, we rolled westward on the motorways to the suburbs of Torquay. We never actually got all the way into Torquay, since we stayed in a suburb called Cockington (which may actually be no more than a neighborhood, but a charming one). We also realized, fighting our way through the local traffic in Kingskerswell for the 3rd or 4th time, that we might have found one of the smaller towns farther north (Newton Abbott or Bovey Tracey) a better base for exploring the Dartmoor; but so it goes.

We spent 2 days driving around the Dartmoor, looking at sheep (lots of sheep), a few cattle, very occasional wild ponies, and staggeringly beautiful landscape. The Dartmoor is a raised granite lump (I believe I've read somewhere that it is a pluton, but if it is, Wikipedia doesn't mention it), rising sharply some 1200 feet above the surrounding Devon countryside. It's covered with peat where the rocks aren't exposed, and can become very boggy; it was very green (especially given that it had been raining for the past month). We didn't personally encounter any bogs but we found lots of mud. The granite outcrops at the top of hills are known as tors, and climbing up to them can provide a superb panorama of the surrounding countryside. If it isn't raining. We climbed, of course, up to Hound's Tor, which doesn't look anything like a hound (it's supposed to resemble a hound's teeth; didn't look like it to me). The wind was quite stiff, but the view was wonderful; the rocks themselves were occupied by two separate sets of technical rock climbers, a group of adults on one stack and a larger group of middle or high school children, with teachers, on another.

We were fortunate that, for most of the 2 days we spent poking around, it was merely overcast and windy, and the sun even came out once or twice. Since the Dartmoor is now a national park, it's about as developed as it's going to get; but it's been developed for hundreds of years. No, actually, thousands of years - we went to 2 different bronze age ruins, one near Merivale, and one at Grimspound.

Looking at prehistoric ruins in the U.K. is entirely different from looking at them in the U.S. In the U.S. we'd have parking lots, and graded trails, and educational signs, and railings to keep people off the ruins, and maybe even a ranger to answer questions. In the U.K., and especially on Dartmoor, there is nothing. There are no parking lots; there are no signs or railings, and certainly no rangers. There is a general description of the sort of thing you can expect to find, and a dot on the map that suggests where it might be, but you'd better know what a line of standing stones or a hut circle might look like because you are on your own. There are no trails; you hike up the hill (everything here is up hill) until you see something that looks right. I found refreshing the complete absence of any attempt to keep you from breaking your neck on anything; Americans have become too damn litigious. If you want to sit on the rocks, or try to flake off a piece (we didn't), no one will stop you: no one is there, at least during the week (we were there on Monday and Tuesday). We found Merivale very frustrating because of this, the remains there are quite scanty; so the next day we went to Grimspound, which is much better marked (but still invisible from where we parked, up an unmarked hillside from a secondary road).

Grimspound was obviously a largeish fortified settlement: most of the stone perimeter circle is still there, with one obvious entrance gate (and a second opening that may just have fallen over); and it contains a number of hut circles, one or two of which look as though they might have belonged to someone of importance (standing stones marking a possible entrance). The site was below the brow of a hill, which I wondered about, as it would have been vulnerable to attack from above by invaders coming over the crest of the hill; but I believe the site was chosen because of the water: there was a stream flowing inside the stone ring. I couldn't find an origin spring, but I didn't look very hard; of course they would want access to water inside the perimeter. We shared the site with a large flock of sheep, wandering around, grazing and lying in the ruins. In fact much of the Dartmoor is unfenced range for sheep, and some cattle; on a couple of occasions we had to wait until they got off the road. They even had a road sign: Warning - sheep laying in road. It was quite accurate.

We also visited some of the towns on the Dartmoor. None of these towns is large. All of them have been there for a very long time; the houses are one or at most two stories, huddled down in folds of the land against the wind. Houses on the Dartmoor are stone or stucco; I didn't see any obviously wooden houses, no clapboard sidings here. Houses here are also not colored; they're either made of unpainted stone, or they're whitewashed. It gives the place a very grim look. A surprising number of them have thatched roofs.

The first town we visited was Widecombe-on-the-Moor. That's the full name; it isn't just "Widecombe", which happens to be located on the moor. It's a tiny town with a beautiful 16th century church and an inn, appropriately called the Old Inn, which served us two very good meals. I found the Old Inn fascinating; for one thing, it's built into a hill and is, the entrance is up a flight of about 8 stairs from the main floor, and the high windows in that part of the inn are actually at ground level outside. There were no notes on how old it was; it's obviously been recently spruced up, with some very modern clever sayings painted on the walls (including the classic Groucho Marx quote, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."). It's built of stone and stucco and looks like it's been there forever. Widecombe is in a deep little valley; when you come to it using the route we took, you can see it from the breast of the hill before you start down the really precipitous road. It looks tiny; it is surrounded by very green fields, empty except for sheep; it looks very lonely. In fact, all the towns we saw on the Dartmoor looked as if they were there on sufferance.

Widecombe is, however, a real town, with real town things going on. The day we were there, the local school was having a children's art exhibit in the stone building that was once the old sexton's cottage. I attended it (and put 50p in the donation bowl) after having been accosted by an earnest 8 year old girl (clearly anxious that I was going to refuse). It is not possible to say "No, I don't want to see your art exhibit" to a worried 8 year old.

Widecombe-on-the-Moor has a fair, first held in 1850, which is the subject of an English folk song called Widdicombe Fair (yes, the song is spelled differently from the town). The song has its own web page explaining the legend behind the song (and being very snide about variant versions from Wessex!); I was delighted to find out about this because it explained a line that Lord Peter Wimsey used in one of Dorothy Sayers' novels: "and Uncle Tom Cobley and all" (intended to mean, "the whole bunch of them"). This line actually comes from the chorus of "Widdicombe Fair". The dates are a little odd - the song's web page says that the song is "thought to have been heard in the early 1800s", which seems unlikely if the Fair only started in 1850 - but then, it's always hard to pin down folksongs.

We also visited North Bovey, largely because of its reputation for a beautiful, unspoilt town green. It is very beautiful: most of the houses are whitewashed stucco, and I'd say the majority of them have thatched roofs; one house had obviously just had the thatching over the doors redone, the straw was still straw colored. A thatched roof that's been there for awhile turns a very dark brown with weathering. I guess in this area, "Thatcher" can be more than just a last name. When we were there (a Tuesday around midday) there was absolutely no one else visible except, down one of the four streets, a man mending one of the area's ubiquitous stone walls; the sense of silence and peace was very deep. These stone walls are 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzles; they aren't drystone, they are mortared, but they are made of whatever stone pieces happen to be around, and yet they always have a relatively flat top over a collection of wildly different shaped stones, fitted closely together. North Bovey's town green is charming for a local habit: when some significant Event happens, they plant a new tree, and put a memorial stone by the sapling. We saw the trees they planted for Queen Victoria's Jubilee, and for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and for the millennium. You can look past the former town pump (the handle is now padlocked), in the middle of the green, and see the sapling, with its stone reading "AD 2000".

In fact, if you want absolute peace, silence (except for the wind, and the occasional low-flying fighter jet - sorry, the Royal Navy uses part of the Dartmoor as a bombing range), and remoteness (except for the bombing range), with pretty much unlimited hiking, you could do worse than to visit the Dartmoor. I sound like a Chamber of Commerce brochure, but it's true.

The only other "town" we visited was Postbridge, notable for its beautifully preserved clapper bridge over the East Dart River (these bridges seem to exist only in the Dartmoor area for some reason). Postbridge is also pretty much the exact center of the Dartmoor national park, so a lot of people use it as a base for exploring. This may explain why, when we were there, there were actually more people than buildings (total buildings, about 6, one of which had a "For Sale" sign up, but maybe 15 or 20 people). Like everywhere else we visited on the Dartmoor, it is stunningly beautiful. We stopped at a place called Dartmeet, where the East and West forks of the Dart river converge, to see the remains of a ruined clapper bridge; this is listed on the map as a "town" but all I saw was a bridge, a public loo, a park information center, and a van selling ice cream. By Dartmoor standards, maybe that is a town.