Verdict on the Summer of 2024

 

Wow, that went fast.

Summer started for me when Little One swept in from Europe back on May 18. Three whirlwind months later we packed her up and dropped her off at school for Junior year, a 45-minute not-too-far but not-too-close drive away. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and already the house seems much more quiet, even though she’s often quiet as a mouse herself.

Though I’m blue at the moment, the summer had its high points. But also, bizarrely, it seemed empty to me, and I feel much like one of those wind-up figurines that parades out of a medieval clock every hour on the hour to circle about doing its thing and then returns inside. A lot of the summer felt rote, by the book, task A to task B to task C wash rinse repeat ad infinitum.

My life here has kinda devolved into pure routine: Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the office doing accounting; Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays hanging in the home office doing accounting. Mow the lawn and trim the hedges every ten days. Water the grass every other day. Put out the trash and recycling every Sunday night. Church. Chipotle on Friday nights.

The highlights were Patch’s confirmation ceremony and the party that followed. Father’s Day was an enjoyable experience for the four of us and not just me. We had a unique Fourth of July where we kinda snuck into an event, watched a brilliant fireworks display, then snuck back out, avoiding all sorts of traffic and the oppressive humidity of the day. I bonded with my dog the two weeks the girls went away to Pennsylvania, followed immediately by another week when they left with the Mrs. to visit her mom in South Carolina.

I continued bonding with my youngest for Thursday movie night (a routine I fully enjoy). We watched some interesting flicks (“psychological thrillers” is the term she uses), ranging from A Beautiful Mind and Awakenings to A Perfect Murder and Psycho II. We still do Saturday errands together, and we did that with her older sister when she wasn’t working her summer job, an activity that I heartily enjoy with my girls and have since they were toddlers.

Me, I look back and feel somewhat empty. Yeah, that fence thing took a full work-week out of my life, spread out over eight summer weeks. But I didn’t really accomplish anything of note. Yeah, I burned my way through five Tom Clancy re-reads from May to August, and that’s all fine and good, but I didn’t do anything creative, other than these scattered blog entries, and that’s a growing thorn in my side.

A couple of days ago I pulled out an old notebook and did some brainstorming – I wanted to list ten projects I could do. No limitations, no prejudgment, no holds barred. Only things that I would like to spend my time on, even if ultimately they came to nothing. After 45 minutes I came up with six ideas. This’ll be a subject of a future post, but I’m hoping these will inject a spark into the daily grind of existence.

Perhaps this is a bit of existential angst that’s come over me. I do have a birthday coming up.  But life is not all meaningless for me; far from it and I don’t want to give that impression. My reading ranges all over the board and is a source of education and entertainment for me. I listen to all sorts of music daily and play my acoustic guitar at least 30 minutes a day (“Ramble On” is my latest obsession). I’ve been working out since the end of July and have the physique of a young Schwarzenegger (when he was about 12, I’d estimate 😊). The Mrs. and I do periodic date nights and we generally enjoy our time together, as much as the average couple married for 23 years. I walk around the ponds by my house, I chat with the people at work, I’m soda and booze free and have a clean bill of health from the docs.

Sigh.

Time’s just going by too fast.

Verdict on the Summer of 2024?

Solid B.

 

The Verdict on the Fence

 

Well, it was a hard-fought project. Took me eight weeks, mostly working a few hours on the weekend in the morning before it got too hot, and I did miss two weekends due to rain. All in all, I tallied 39 hours of work, done mostly while listening to podcasts and slathered up in sun block.

 

Here are the before pics:

 

And the after pics:

 

I learned from my neighbor that he paid two guys $1,500 three years ago to paint his fence. Since my corner lot is a somewhat bigger than his, I guesstimated the current cost to me to have it professionally painted would have been around $2,000. This on top of buying the three drums of stain as well as the rollers, paintbrushes, and trays used.

 

So my 39 hours of labor saved me $2,000. If I was one of those pair of workers mentioned above, I’d have earned $25.64 an hour for the job. Not bad but not great, but better to have paid myself in my imagination than to write a check to some painting company in real life.

 

Verdict: Glad I did it, but I ain’t doing it again. Before we sell the house in a couple of years I’ll touch up the faded areas, but I’ll be doing that in the winter when it actually gets cool around here.

 

N.B. I listened to a lot of true crime podcasts while painting, as well as an hourlong interview with a JFK assassination author, an hour on why history is false (it didn’t convince me) and a whole bunch of movie reviews.

N.B. 2. My favorite “treat” meal after a three-hour painting session was a ham-and-swiss hero with lettuce, tomato, mayo, washed down with an ice tea, bought from a new deli that just opened two miles from my house. Ham-and-Swiss on a roll with lettuce, tomato, and mayo is just about the perfect lunch sandwich ever created.

N.B. 3. My “reward” for the job was an “Atlas of the Civil War” magazine. I may have jumped the gun as I bought it before I finished my work, and now my interest has moved on, so it is now gathering dust on the shelf. Oh well. The maps are pretty.

 

The Verdict on Tom Clancy

 

[minor spoilers]

 

Ten days ago I finished my Tom Clancy project.

It took me five months – March 14 to August 12 – to read through nine of his novels, eight of which I read nearly thirty years ago as a young impressionable lad.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

I’ve written in quite a few places in these here electronic pages how my first encounter with Tom Clancy’s storytelling had opened me up to a whole new world. Up to this time I’d primarily read paperback SF, King and Koontz horror novels, Tolkien and the occasional fantasy work. Plus, I was only getting back into reading having pretty much ended at that point an 8-year “career” playing in several bands to lesser and lesser success.

In the fall of 1994, purely on a whim, I picked up The Sum of All Fears (1991) and was immediately captured. By the summer of 1996 I had put away seven more of his books, the last of which, Executive Orders, I had bought as a first edition paperback while it was still on the bestseller lists.

What is this world of the “military techno-thriller” I just entered? Sure, I watched the movies with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford (that’s probably why I picked up the book in the first place), but I never experienced something along the lines of a Clancy novel.

What do I mean?

Well, the literati and the auteurs scoff at him, and to a certain extent these snobs are correct. When you read a Tom Clancy book, you ain’t getting the prose of a Steinbeck, Faulkner or Hemingway. You’re not reading a potential finalist for the Pulitzer in Drama. What you pick up a Clancy novel for is, well, the pro-American angle, the love of the military, the love of excellence, the ultimate triumph of good over evil. More specifically, the spycraft, the military tech and nomenclature, the intense detail of every major plot device, from a home-made nuclear weapon to a manufactured biological weapon to computerized lasers that melt satellites in orbit to the machinations of the stock market to the ancient historical traditions of England (now sadly threatened) and to the sausage factory that is American political life – the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Press.

It's like an Ian Fleming novel tossed in with the Wall Street Journal and shipped to boot camp at Parris Island.

Each novel I re-read averaged around 650 or 700 pages in hardcover (The Hunt for Red October, his first novel, being the shortest, and Executive Orders, the last of the ones I read, published in 1996, being the longest). At the rate I was reading I was putting one away every three weeks, at about 35 pages a day. Most days the pages flew by. Often I surprised myself by reading over a hundred pages, particularly as I neared the ends of certain novels. Most built to a very satisfying climax that made it hard to put the book down.

It brought out the nostalgia for me. I remembered those care-free days reading these books as a single young guy in his own apartment with no cares and no real responsibilities and no bills. Yet it brought out a deeper nostalgia for me, and a sad one. Sad that the America of these Tom Clancy books (published 1984 to 1996) no longer exists. That America featured brave, competent, courageous men and women fighting evil without distraction or distinction, evil both taking root in American society and flourishing out in the world.

Tom was not afraid to take on Islamic terrorism, Japanese imperialism, political machinations at home, and especially Soviet communism and other examples of Marxism throughout the world. He knew not the words “politically correct.” Perversions were not to be celebrated. Men were men and women were women. I am not sure he could be published today as a first-time novelist.

Each novel seemed to grow longer in page count. Each novel grew more “Bondian” – more and more nefarious schemes were hatched by evildoers of varying stripes. Each novel seemed more grandiose as the series went on. In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan doesn’t even appear in the first 20 percent of the novel, and when he does he’s a junior CIA analyst new at the job who doesn’t quite know if he’s taken seriously. Yet in the last book I read [MAJOR SPOILER!!!] Jack is now the president, picking up the debris of the American government left decapitated after an act of terrorism destroys the House and Senate.

There weren’t too many anachronistic goofs in my re-reading. I did have to chuckle in Patriot Games when Jack is bragging about having a home PC, complete with floppy disks and a modem Clancy describes in excruciating detail. He also writes of a “Korea” as if unified. But overall the books all hold up from a technical point of view, if not a sociological perspective.

Though I recommend any of the following, here is my personal ranking, from A+++ to merely an A:

   The Sum of All Fears

   Executive Orders

   Clear and Present Danger

   The Cardinal of the Kremlin

   Without Remorse

   The Hunt for Red October

   Debt of Honor

   Red Rabbit

   Patriot Games

 

My memory of the plot scenarios was about 80% accurate. Some details I remembered to be major, such as the assassination of a Saddam Hussein character, were only a two or three page mini-chapter at best. At least one unique fate for a character was inadvertently remembered as happening to another. An act of selfless compassion I thought happened in The Sum of All Fears did not in fact happen at all save for a throwaway line suggesting it. Oh well. Memory is fallible, after all. I think someone said that once.

Too many memorable scenes to describe (and this post is getting lengthy), but for those who may have read the books and can agree or disagree, here are some that stayed with me from three decades ago:

 

- Two of the deaths in Without Remorse (one involving a decompression chamber and another the choice between a knife in the ribs or a self-administered drug overdose)

- The sad and horrific death of Sister Jean Baptiste in Executive Orders (almost made me put the book down for good)

- Clancy’s pre-prediction of 9/11 with the denouement of Debt of Honor

- The unique sensory-deprivation torture of Svetlana in The Cardinal of the Kremlin

- The wrong-place wrong-time deaths of Fromm’s wife and the Russian detective in Sum

- The incompetent bravado of sub commander Harry Ricks, also from Sum

 

Yet all is not murder and mayhem. Traitors and villains may throw wrenches and worse at our heroes struggling to save the day and preserve freedom, but they all get their comeuppance, eventually, even 900 pages later. Some “villains” I grew to like, such as Colonel Bondarenko and Marshall Filitov of The Cardinal of the Kremlin, others I despised with a passion, such as Elizabeth Elliot from Sum and Dr. Moudi and the Ayatollah Daryaei from Orders.

Verdict: Very pleased and satisfied I re-read all the books; I enjoyed about 95 percent of the experience (the submarine and aircraft battles can get a little tedious, especially when combatants aren’t given personalities or at least names). A fitting end to a chapter in my life as I probably won’t revisit them again, nor do I have a current desire to read any modern-day ghost-written Clancys or Clancy-imitators. It was fun and nostalgic, and I’d recommend any of them, particularly Sum, Executive Orders, Clear and Present Danger, and Cardinal.

 

Addendum:

Best Film Adaptation – The Hunt for Red October

Worst Film Adaptation – The Sum of All Fears

Do not, under any circumstances, see the Sum of All Fears movie. I beg of you. Just don’t.

Similarly, do not see the Without Remorse movie out on the streaming services.

The John Krasinski Jack Ryan series is okay (at least, the first two seasons), but it’s not Clancy.

Finally, Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan. Not Alec Baldwin, not John Krasinski, and certainly not Ben Affleck.

Alien First Names

 

I know I’ve written extensively about Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien. About how influential it was to me as a young lad. About how into it I was back in those ancient pre-internet times. But I just learned something new about the characters in the movie (and the Alan Dean Foster novelization, I suppose).

 

Their first names.

 

Much like The Lord of the Rings, I feel maligned that now two whole generations of fans (millions of them!) have absorbed this wonderful thing from my youth seemingly known only to me and a small group of pals. So be it; I’ve made my peace with it, and I spend my time actively seeking out and/or revisiting other things that have not found their way into the zeitgeist. But it is always fun and exciting to learn something new about something I thought I knew all about.

 

Alien entered my life when I was 11. I was too young to see it in the movie theaters way back then, I had to make due with Foster’s novelization. Which I read over and over and over again, during this magical time in my life poised midway between childhood and teen adolescence. One of the things that struck me as odd was that none of the characters had first names. In the entirety of the novel the cast of seven were referred to – and called each other by – only their surnames. I was reading a lot of science fiction paperbacks at the time, and I’m sure this happened in other novels, but it was rare enough to stand out.

 

Sure, as the sole survivor of the crew of the Nostromo signing off in the final lines of Alien Ripley mentions her first name – Ellen. And I think there’s a line in the novel where they ask a post-face-hugged-but-still-alive Kane if he knew who he was and he says, “Thomas Kane.” So that’s two first names of our characters.

 

But to my knowledge nothing else. All we knew the crew as was – Captain Dallas, Lambert, Ash, Brett, and Parker.

 

Now I stumbled upon an Alien-universe wiki and within a few minutes I knew all their first names. It was not as I pictured them in my head:

 

  Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) – Arthur

   Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) – Joan (OK, she looks like a “Joan”)

   Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) – Samuel

   Parker (Yaphet Kotto) – Dennis (Dennis?! Really?)

 

Only Ash, the last-minute replacement science officer who harbors a mysterious secret (OK, it’s been 45 years – he’s an android trying to bring back a xenomorph specimen), remains first-name-less, at least to my ten minutes of internet searching, and perhaps this was a wise choice to compliment his shadowy past.

 

I feel satisfied. Another childhood mystery solved, to my partial satisfaction.

 

 … “Dennis” …

Funniest Thing I've Heard in a While

 

The album Catalina Breeze by the Blue Jean Committee:

In the spirit of Spinal Tap and The Folksmen of Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, this “group” and their album spoofs the 70s California easy listenin’ soft rock scene.

The album has seven songs … and is ten minutes long.

Needless to say, I laughed a lot on my first hearing. In fact, I’m laughing now as I write this.

The music and the musicianship is first class. But it’s still parody. And the lyrics, well, there’s everything from sarcasm to witty takes to downright stupidity. It’s funny, and it works, to my ears at least.

My favorite line:

 

Wise man said if you wanna know a man walk a mile in his shoes /

Don’t know ’bout you, but I’m more a barefoot guy

 

Anyway, if you want a chuckle and like this sort of thing, look it up on Apple music or iTunes or YouTube. It’s worth the ten-minute investment.

Gifts from the Girls

 

Saturday afternoon, out of the blue, my two little ones (now aged 19 and 15, but soon to be 20 and 16 next month) gifted me with two “new” Tolkien books:

 

Little One, my globe-trotting, philosophy-studying 19-year-old teacher-to-be, saw the Spark Notes version of The Lord of the Rings and immediately thought of me. “Dad, now you can read the notes after each chapter so you can fully understand the story!”

 

Patch, my 15-year-old high school junior, returned me the paperback Hobbit. Back in 2022, for my birthday, she gave me the “gift” of “giving the Hobbit a go.” Provided I bought her the book. So I did, this one, and she read about a third of it, up to the appearance of Gollum, before storing it in a desk drawer where it remained for nearly two years. Now she returned to me, all smiles, telling me to enjoy it.

 

Thanks, girls! Will do!

 

So, more syzygystic ephemera from the superaether, convincing and convicting me more and more, than I must return to J. R. R. Tolkien. Hmm. Was going to return to Middle-earth last January … now might have to seriously take that journey, re-take it, that is, the sixth journey by my reckoning, on the first day of the next new year.

Fanta

 

Hey, here’s a strange, World War II-ish fact I came across out of the blue a few days ago.

 

Do you know the soft drink Fanta? Though I don’t think I ever had one, I do remember seeing those colorfully musical commercials where a bunch of Latinas dance wildly while chugging the flavored sodas. I guess I must’ve thought that it was some sort of South American product that came up north twenty or twenty-five years ago to wrest some market share from Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, etc. Certainly that seems to be the way it was marketed, at least to my nondiscriminating mind.

 

Anyway, I just found out that Fanta is not South American. It has nothing to do with Latinas, Latinos, or Latin culture.

 

Fanta had its birth in 1942 in Nazi Germany.

 

From what I read (from two apparently reputable sources online, so take that for what its worth), Coca Cola had a fairly sizeable share of the German market up until the American trade embargo of Nazi Germany in 1941. The head of Coke’s division in Germany simply rebranded the beverage as “Fanta” and soon almost three million cases were selling annually in Deutschland.

 

It tasted different from traditional Coca Cola because it could only be made with German-sourced products (the syrup that made Coca Cola Coca Cola was prohibited due to the embargo and the British naval blockade). The name is a take on the German word for imagination, Fantasie.

 

Seems Fanta production ceased in 1949 and was not restarted until 1955, this time in Italy, where orange Fanta was created using actual Italian oranges as an ingredient. It made its way across Europe and overseas to South America while several new flavors were introduced. In 1960 Coca Cola bought the brand, but sales were kept limited in the States until 2001 – when it was pushed to the growing Hispanic community throughout the US.

 

Me, I won’t be trying a Fanta anytime soon. To date I’m 221 days into being soda free in 2024, one of two resolutions I’ve successfully maintained from this past News Year Eve. To be honest I can’t say if I feel better or worse, but no doubt my liver and my teeth thank me and I’ve probably extended my life expectancy at my current age by a few months.

 

Of Lists and the Dismal Science

 

I was walking Charlie Sunday morning around 8 a.m. (before the solar cauldron that is Texas in August overwhelms my poor friend in his fur coat) and I listened to a short video on, of all things, how to make a reading list.

Hey! I’m quite familiar with that.

In 2012 I made a list of Civil War books to read, and during Covid I made a list of WW II books to read. (I chose WW II because it kinda mirrored the scary uncertainty of that first Wu Flu month, but in the end the good guys won.) To date I’ve read 38 Civil War and 40 WW II books, following my reading plans loosely and flexibly.

In 2013 I spent the first five months reading through SF author Philip Jose Farmer’s bibliography, wading my way through fourteen of his works. The next year I read through an H. P. Lovecraft omnibus of 23 lesser and major tales. I’ve done similar excursions with theologian Derek Prince, SF author Robert Silverberg (who I enjoyed much more than Farmer), and eight of thirteen novels from English writer Bernard Cornwell’s Napoleonic saga.

Anyway, I was interested in this YouTuber’s take. He was using “Economics” as an example – how to create a reading list for the beginner in the field of economics.

This got me thinking. To me, economics literally is “the dismal science.” I took Micro and Macro 101 at Rutgers eons ago. I despised the in-the-trenches Micro but only mildly hated the birds-eye-view Macro. Later, at night school, I had to take one or the other again, and I have no memory of the course or my feelings towards it (but I doubt it changed). Back in 2016 when I took a little training course to be a tax preparer for H&R Block, I read a couple of books in the subject, emphasizing taxes, and somewhat sorta enjoyed it. The section on the National Economy of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics was tolerable, but that could be due to Sowell’s skills as a writer and teacher.

In my educated-but-not-specialized mind, economics is statistics mixed with Jeanne Dixon psychic fortune telling. Statistics can be bent, warped, twisted, and extorted to tell anything you want them to tell. Was it Mark Twain who said that thing about lies, damned lies, and statistics? And every economist seems to have his own agenda – an outcome or policy he wants to promote and propound that it’s almost worse than the free-for-all melee that it the history of philosophy. That guy Thomas Friedman, has he ever been right about anything? (Honestly, I don’t know, but I think I read a few things over the years about his less-than-stellar predictions that made me write the previous sentence.)

Hopper’s relationship with economics boils down to a handful of simple but intuitive aphorisms:

   

   * The more you tax something, the less you get. This applies to people’s earnings, too.

   * Trickle down economics work more often than it doesn’t (like, 60% of the time, depending on the state of the economy). Still, the best way to fire up the economy is to cut taxes.

   * The U.S. tax system screws the middle class – and by that I mean it does absolutely nothing to help grow it; it’s almost downright nasty to its millions of members.

   * The Democrats will mug you in broad daylight while the Republicans will only pickpocket you when you feel safest in a crowd.

   * The less government is involved in the economy, the better the economy will hum along.

   * Government programs NEVER go away.

   * The economy is a fragile spider web – one part snapping at the fringe can spell disaster to the entire latticework.

 

   * The government does not create jobs. Rich people with capital do.

 

   * Capitalism is the worst economic system devised by man – except for all the others.

 

   * Firms should only be interested in profit, not social engineering, not discrimination, not DEI, not pandering to (leftist) causes. When the GPS goes off of profit, you wind up in a lake with Michael Scott.

 

   * Stimulus checks have zero economic value.

   * Bubbles burst. When everyone’s talking about one thing, you’re in a bubble. Hear that, A.I.?

 

Sigh. Okay, I see what I just did to myself. Now I’m going to have to ride out the rest of the year working a reading list of books for people who hate economics but now feel the need to study the dismal science.