NEVER A DREAM

 It just happened.

A VW Bus and California. They went together like nothing else in the world. It was the last vehicle I owned that I could repair with the tools I owned. I commuted between the Bay Area and San Diego for 5 years along the Coast Highway and Big Sur in an orange VW bus with a red door.

FOLLOWING THE NEWS

I got a kick out of this at Book Worm Room.  There is so much truth there it hurts.

STUPID RUNS RAMPANT IN BALTIMORE

Can you imagine teaching in a school system where exactly no students could pass a test? I wonder how indescribably grim and horrible a school must be where whatever it is they do there, it doesn't include studying English or math. Don't get me wrong, I hated to study English and math but I knew that me being there from daybreak until dusk was the price I was going to pay irregardless of whether or not I actually learned anything and I might as well apply myself to learning.

I still can't write but my math is precious to me because it is such a rare and confined little smattering of arithmetic. All the stuff with x's, imaginary numbers and anything in brackets is lost and gone forever and might never have been if you look at my school transcripts. Still. I can do arithmetic and long division and there was never in my life anytime that I needed to work out the square root of anything or calculate the area under the slope of any given line.

As a Fire Control Officer on a missile firing destroyer I had one occasion to use math. I had to calculate the super elevation of the missile launcher and put that number into the missile firing plan that I wrote for our one and only missile shoot after we left Todd Shipyard and the tender mercies of NSWS. Oddly enough, that is pronounced as 'nemesis' and by God they were mine. Anyhow, a little geometry remained and was just enough to calculate the angle for a plan that nobody else ever read and, from the results, nobody who was briefed on it, paid any attention to.

How do I know that? Well, throughout the plan I plagiarized the crap of the Pacific Missile Range's plans for missile firing ships which included multiple and repeated warning about NOT RECOVERING any drones that suffered their expected fate and GOT SHOT DOWN. We no sooner shot down the BQM-34 and the CO was putting the rudder hard over to head to the scene of the splash and start recovering the debris. It took the Range Safety Officer tugging on his cape to keep the CO from salvaging the slivers that remained afloat and hauling them aboard. It was a very weird ship.

But back to Baltimore. Why? Why would ANYBODY spend their life teaching in a place like that where nobody at all, not one, wants to learn? It must be nothing more than a nursery school for older kids who must hate being there even more than the teachers hate it. It's like Hell with a school bus.

I don't think there could ever be a dawn that breaks where students or teachers get up and actually look forward to the 8 hours they're going to spend in confinement with the drug dealers, pushers, rapists, murderers and whatnot because what do you get out of a school system that fails to instruct in civilization? You get anti-civilization and you get it good and hard.

My God, can you imagine employers in and around Baltimore who need to hire workers, counter help, cashiers, stock boys? Where do they get employees and do they dread hiring the way I dread going to the dentist? You know who else can't use people from these schools? Yeah, the employer of last resort (supposedly). The Armed Forces make you take a test before they let you in and if you fail the test, they don't want you. Thank God!

Public schools are mandated by the law. They used to have fairly robust organizations devoted to seeing that everyone attended school, everyone had their shots up to date, everybody could pass a physical exam and read an eye chart and everyone got exposed to math, history and English. Civil society thought they were the basic grounding for leading an exemplary American life. For some time now everyone has been content with the old fake it till you make it school of thought and that is what we are turning out; little toxic blooms of anti-civilization to dwell in the deep city and keep alive a world out of time. They prey on civilization and as long as they last, they insist that they are smarter than you.

In the war we never fought we used to describe incoming soviet missiles hitting 'important' targets because they, like us, were targeting cities. As one looks back to that non-war, one wonders.....How many cities could we trade in the calculus of thermo-nuclear war? We could easily start with Baltimore. If you read the words to the side of this post, you can see how I feel about the old cities.

These schools are literally across the street from me. There's 3 of them. They're all 100 years old. As you can see, the fabric of civilization quickly decays.

Elementary School

Still the elementary school

Middle School

Middle School again.

School across the street cornerstone

I remember driving by a Nashville school with a similar cornerstone. I thought it remarkable that children could still learn in such an old building. In retrospect, nothing remarkable about it. Kids haven't changed, instruction should not have changed and the surroundings are a mere bagatelle.

It's not the fabric of the school or school system that need to change. They have worked for generations. I think perhaps some people have lost the bubble on how to teach and perhaps, have failed to learn that you cannot teach all of the people. For the good of all, some need to go because they ruin it for all. Baltimore leads the pack of diminishing returns.

A NICE PLACE

I am going out of town for a while and mowed our front yard today as needful prep so the town doesn't gig us for too tall grass and weeds. I rested after shoving the mower around the yard.  I did it to well. Several neighbors out walking their dogs asked me if I needed them to dial 911.  I just want to know, where were they back when I was mowing the front 40 as a kid?

Admittedly, I was resting on my back on my front porch and now that I think about it, it probably did look like I had suddenly just expired.

Still, you'd like it here. I do and I've lived everywhere.

ART

"Where is the San Diego Art Museum," she asked.

Damned if I know. I mentioned that I had heard that the art at the Guggenheim or the LA Craft Center with Tar Pits was good but that I had, sadly, never been to either. She thought there must surely be a rival in San Diego to MetroParkCentralis and the Oval but I had to confess that the best we had for almost a decade was an exhibit of Torquemada's Implements of Torture and sadly, it had moved on. Gentle readers, she was not impressed with America's Finest City's Art. It's just not the same.

Art in Metro Park Centralis in yonder building

I mentioned the jet fighter that landed on water skis on display at Balboa but she demurred. Women are fickle.

I lived there for over 30 years. I visited the Louvre countless times, the Smithsonian, the Prado, any number of museums all over the world, every single building in Balboa and the Art? It escaped me. There was Images of Nature long ago next to John's Waffle Shop in La Jolla but it had its counterpart at Stapleton which had the same art but is long gone and she used to fly through Stapleton. I know, just birds, polar bears, penguins and giant mosquitos.

We were forced to confess that San Diego was artless.

NEEDS SHADE

THE ORDERING OF OBJECTIONABLE THINGS

Amazon and BLM. Time to tell the little scamps to settle down and grow up.

UPDATE
Oops, the art got lost. I'll fix it in a bit. Fixed it.

I find that I can live without. I mean it's a struggle. I'm bound to agonize over it.

I might need therapy.

I watched the Black Marble roll by last night and that was after watching the movie I posted about and after a chat with someone who is in Dutch with her mother and school, but then I read this article about Joy Covey on one of those voyages into the Cyber Sea and it struck me, I'm sick to death of hearing about privilege.

I can actually see a mother telling her child that daddy won't be home because he's upstate doing 15-25 for rape, armed robbery and murder. But millions of lives were destroyed by World War II and the worst that can be said of the survivors who suffered torments beyond belief is that they raised a pretty nice generation of kids who, in turn, offered all they had to their kids.

GLUTEN FREE ART

Less filling but remarkable for all that.

rendered gluten free by tasteful artists. I cannot recall where I saw this yesterday but hats off to the inspired creators and artists of the Gluten Free Museum.

TWO THOUSAND YEARS

Roman Campagna - Thomas Cole, 1843

GOOD BOOKS

Somebody had a good time coming up with the spine for this edition.

A CUNNING TRAP

I spotted this last night on the way out of the AMC theater at Courthouse where we watched Spectre. Fortunately, the movie had prepared us and while it was a very clever trap, it just wasn't clever enough.

The ladies enjoyed the movie although they declared that one dress was really ugly and an unfortunate choice. We all had to be convinced after long discussion. That was, apparently, one of the dress's flaws. It was too long. Ah well, we live and learn.

A MOST SINCERE AND PROFOUND APOLOGY

And what a wonderful apology it is. Cribbed from Powerline.

LOCATOR

Defiant has shifted his pennant for a few days. Departed MetroparkCentralis on Monday, return 4 September.

THE POWER OF DRAWING

The art of drawing cities of the imagination by Francois Schuiten

It conveys up

The conviction that if you just get it right, you can fly. It conveys down.

Al Gore raging at the tide at his palace atop a peak in Darien.

LOST IN DIVERSITY AT UNIVERSITY

I quite admire the people that put this gem up all over Youngstown University campus. Good job dudes and dudettes! Roll on Kufra!

The diversity troops took it like an impi taking a British column in the Zulu Wars. Of course, after that was the defense of Roark's Drift. If you've never seen that little book on infantry in defense, it's a gem.

I forget, it might be Red Dwarf or something from Gerald Durrell. "I quite like shouting!"

Most of us would just like you to sit down, shut up or go away. We really don't care. Unless you're a nubile girl and plan to take your clothes off to make your point about some ism in which case, you have my full attention.

To the crew that put up these posters, Bravo Zulu!

RIDING THE RAILS

A few years back my room mate and I used to take the Seoul subway to our offices in Yongsan Main Post. The first couple of times we did it after we arrived we ended up in the damnedest places. We would try to get on pure Korean military installations but never did. What is theirs is theirs. What we share is ours.

I spent a little over two months living in hotels in Seoul that first time and we refused the Army's kind offer of transportation (a bus which appeared at 0530) and decided to test the proof of life by exposing ourselves every single day (we worked @7 days a week) and took the Seoul subways to work.

We had alternate routes. We could amble out, after coffee and breakfast in the Lotte and turn to the left or the right. We mostly went left. I blame that on Reg. He was from Massachusetts and thus a total leftist. We would embark at Seoul Station or City Hall with a transfer or we would sometimes go to the right and take the subway to Itaewon. Either way, we had to walk the last quarter mile or so.

If one got off at Yongsan, the walk took one by Korean Imperial Defense Headquarters (which, soon after, relocated itself out of artillery range of the north Koreans hugging their side of the DMZ with their endless artillery and poison gas shells.) It also let us stroll past the Korean War Museum. If there was ever a museum that had 'one of everything,' it was that museum.

My Coast Guard colleague and I rode the rails underground in a sea of ignorance. The first time, because all the instructions and signs were written only in Korean, we had some trouble but there was an old man to help set us on the proper path. We were wearing our very attractive greenish, black, yellow uniforms of camouflage and he sussed out our desire to go the headquarters of United States Forces in Korea. He got us on the right train despite a very serious language barrier.

I think we took that train for the first month until the young lieutenants convinced us that there was a shorter way to the office. What they hadn't factored was the way that we commuted out of pure ignorance. We had found that if we grabbed a strap on either of the last two undermanned cars of the train that we would not be jammed in like sardines.

Yes, we turned out to be the second worst thing the country team experiences from visitors. We didn't know the last cars on every train are for women only. I know they didn't care at all but maybe it has changed again. We are old reprobates and we would not dream of depriving any lady of a seat on the line. We were just going 4 stops down the line and change. The cars weren't empty but there was absolutely no "inadvertent" brushing, touching, etc. They were mostly empty.

Over the next two decades, the lines got worse. Way. Every train car was packed to maximum capacity. It's a subway. At some point, you cannot add more cars to the train without leaving the rearmost hidden in the tunnel, well away from the platform. The trains took on the aspect of Japanese commuter trains.

It turns out that one can walk for many miles underground in Seoul through the subterranean stores that feature everything from art, belts, sunglasses, bathroom fittings, furniture, clothing... It has to be seen to be believed.

I'll never see it again but it was a really amazing place in the impeccably clean, bright, glistening undergrounds of Seoul. It was like Madrid's in the olden days in terms of clean. Madrid's didn't have any shops and just a handful of buskers.

FASCINATING PICTURES

Many of these pictures are amazing and worth a look.

GOOD OMENS

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's excellent book, Good Omens, is being turned into a radio play by some of the same crew who brought us the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I must have listened to that a thousand times over the years since it served to drown out some of the more objectionable noises I used to hear as I was trying to fall sleep on warships in various oceans and seas around the world. I can't really listen to it anymore because it sends me to sleep but it was a really great radio play.

I have to say that I am looking forward to hearing this.  Good Omens.

The 1990 book tells the story of angel and demon Aziraphale and Crowley who team up to try and save the world from an impending apocalypse. 

Mark Heap and Peter Serafinowicz will star in the leads for the play, set to air on BBC Radio 4 as a "splendid Christmas treat" in December.

The BBC does some really wonderful radio plays. I remember being very ill and listening very late at night on my short wave radio to Heart of a Dog. It was very droll. I haven't read any of the great man's books, but I will. I think someone like Putin is bound to re-suppress Mikhail Bulgakov.

LOSS OF A GOOD MAN IN TIBURON

He just stepped out. He was an amazing presence.

REDUCED SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

This is a lot of fun. Your money back if you don't laugh out loud.