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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Just Sayin'...PacNW Sports Pride Edition 


Oregon State University Beavers: 33
U. of Southern California Trojans: 31

It is a much brighter day in the Beaver State, especially in the capital of Beaver Nation, Corvallis, than folks in these parts have ever allowed themselves to expect that they could ever see. In one fell swoop, the Oregon State football team brought some pride to a program sorely lacking in success more often than not over the last hundred years, stirred up the race for the Pac-10 championship, and rolled a live tear-gas grenade down the staid quiet halls of whatever high-rise big city office building holds the offices of the mysterious beings who make the big decisions about the Bowl Championship Series. All in all, a good day...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:00 PM 0 comments

Where the Hell Have THESE Reporters Been? 

...NOW, all of a sudden, for reasons that not even the most capable of fortune tellers could tease out of some particular arrangement of tea leaves or sheep guts, the big guys - the national media - have discovered, much to their chagrin, shock, and dismay, that George W. Bush isn't making public appearances in all of these taxpayer-funded campaign events that we keep seeing so much of on our televisions. Knock me down with a feather, but the ol' boy is doing all of his campaign appearin' at ticketed or invitation-only events as this election season winds down...

...where the HELL have these people been? More to the point, if these hot-rod national journalists are making a whole boatload full of money more than I do, how the hell do I get in on this gig? Gee Dub and Big Dick "Waterboard" Cheney have staged only...well...staged events for at least the last two years, and probably longer if a person wanted to spend the time to review all the facts. Both of the Bobsey twins have visited Central Oregon over the last few years, and anyone whose name was not found written in the Book Of (Republican) Life could pretty much assume that wailing and gnashing of teeth of the lost was the best that they could hope for, because they sure as heck weren't going to get into the building through any argument or technique short of ramming their way in with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and you just can't get your hands on one of those when the chips are down. This boils down to being the least stunning, least meaningful "news" that professional journalists have stumbled across in the last six years. What has been a joke to most of us who know the truth about threats and false arrests and expulsions for things like t-shirt slogans and bumper stickers over the last few years has somehow only now become a story worthy of treatment in Newsweek. Now, that's embarrassing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Mourning in The Family 

...it's just what you do when you work for a land management agency. You answer the phone, at work or at home, at 10 a.m. or 2:30 in the afternoon or 8 in the evening or 3 in the morning, receive your instructions, grab your red bag and your line gear, and you go. You end up somewhere on your district or forest or - frequently - in country you've never seen before and some you never want to see again, working 12 to 16 hour days or nights, getting hot and tired and dirty like you haven't been dirty since you were 5, for 3 or 4 or 8 or 14 or 21 days in a row, sleeping (and sometimes eating) poorly, doing your part to suppress a wildfire. Opportunities to be killed or injured by falling trees or rolling rocks or burnover or just the evil nature of the land are sometimes almost laughably numerous, especially during initial attack in the early stages of a fire, but every bit of training and experience is geared toward avoiding becoming a casualty. This isn't like being a Marine in Fallujah or somewhere outside of Kabul; the thought that a guy could get killed doing this might flit through your mind (especially after a close call), but it's not supposed to be that way. You're not supposed to die fighting a wildfire...

But it is dangerous work and sometimes things go wrong, especially in the wild dynamics of low-humidity winds like the Santa Ana's of Southern California. When you first hear the news that some of yours have been killed on a fire, you can lock up for a moment, because it's a shock every time it happens. The facts this time have the same grim brutal simplicity that they did last time: a crew trapped and burned over by wind pushed flames with dead and injured. Even if I don't know their names, I still know them because they're just like the suppression folks that have worked down various halls from me over the last thirty years: fit, energetic, mostly young men and women not yet bent down by the middle-aged burdens of job, family, and home and who are willing to endure the daily drudgery of non-firefighting duties in order to enjoy that powerful jolt of adrenaline that comes from going face to face against one of the most formidable forces of nature. And it's painful when you've been there, caught out with no better option than to fling your gear in the truck and drive through the flames toward the Only Way Out, because - at least a little bit - you understand...

I pray for the families and friends of those who have been lost and injured today, that they may find strength in this difficult time, and I pray for the injured that they may acheive a full recovery. It is a difficult time for all members of the Forest Service family because they've done or still do this work, understand the risks of this line of work, and like to pride themselves on successfully managing those risks, and because - to riff a bit on John Donne - the death of each of these coworkers diminishes us all...

UPDATE:
...so now it's arson and that makes it murder. Some sick bastard started a fire at a time and under circumstances that virutally guaranteed disaster, placing a fire crew in a situation where their efforts to protect property and lives led to their deaths because of the unpredictable and unforgiving microclimate conditons that a Santa Ana wind episode creates. There are a lot of people tonight desperately hoping this arsonist is found and wishing they could have a few minutes with the perp before the authorities take him/her away...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:11 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Just Another Day in My Little Universe 

...Amanda didn’t want to take Victor home, despite all of her friends insisting that it would be - could be - a really good time. Victor just wasn’t her type, and she really didn’t want to get involved that way anyway, but - peer pressure being what it is - she relented, and brought Victor to her place on Friday night. It didn’t help that her younger brother, James, was hosting a swirling, hormonally overcharged gang for his fourteenth birthday party, which was the sort of setting that a small, wild, emotionally unstable guinea pig like Victor wouldn’t adapt to well, but somebody had to take care of Victor, the unofficial mascot of the high school science class who had been the target of an ad hoc animal rescue by one of the students from a life of brutal, meaningless abuse, for the weekend, and for reasons that she will never understand the short straw was her’s...

Dire threats involving detailed descriptions of the exact nature of bodily injury if the guinea pig was messed with were relayed to James and his young guests and, in the way that sibling threats, admonitions, and orders usually are, they were ignored. Amanda awoke to discover an empty cage, a younger brother long on guilt but short on answers, a set of parents somewhat concerned about the potential ramifications of this disappearance, and a once innocent home that now seemed to loom as the repository of a thousand - maybe even a million - hiding places for a small crazed rodent. After hours of fruitless searching and the growing realization that her friend Leslie, Victor’s savior and nominal “owner”, was going to be pissed at Victor’s disappearance, Amanda called another friend, Lisa, and they roared off to the small local rural feed store where you can buy hay and horse chow and saddlery tack and salt blocks, along with birds, rabbits, mice, and (who knows why) guinea pigs. They were able to purchase one roughly the size, shape, and color of Victor and retired to Amanda’s home in a moderately celebratory mood as a result of their little conspiracy, confident that they would be able to pass off the imposter as the real deal.

The first indication that Amanda received that this day was going to truly suck the big one was when she put Victor II in his cage. The original model, probably as a result of the abusive behavior that he had received by previous owners, was an emotional wreck in a guinea pig sort of way. Darting and jumpy, constantly moving in a frenzy, he had a...well, a look in his eye that spoke of the sorts of deep pyschic wounds that only another guinea pig could understand. The ersatz Victor, on the other hand, put the “pig” in guinea pig, viewing walking as a necessary evil to be endured solely in order to make the occasional journey to the water dispenser or the food bowl...

...but it gets better...

The one and true Victor was an absolute banana fanatic; if pressed, he would in all likelihood attempt to chew his way through rebar to get at chunks of banana. The charlatan Victor, while not exactly disdaining bananas, viewed them as little more than other objects in his world needing to be surmounted or bypassed in those infrequent sojourns to the water dispenser or the food bowl; Victor II was no more likely to even nibble, much less display any enthusiasm for, a fresh chunk of banana that he would the bedding in his cage...

...but it gets better...

The real Victor was a guy; high-strung, perhaps, and certainly high maintenance, but a guy nonetheless. The imposter, on closer inspection, wasn’t a he at all...

There is a happy ending. Younger brother James, understanding in that feral way that young teens do that he may not see 15, much less 14 and a couple of days, if the guinea pig he was specifically forbidden to mess with were to expire and decay in some unreachable part of his parent’s living room, spent most of his birthday exploring the furthermost crevices and cracks of the house, finally finding the original Victor cowering in a heretofore undiscovered hidden spot behind the wood stove. The imposter was returned to the feed store for a refund, best friend Lisa was placed under the Central Oregon version of the code of omerta (punishment for violation includes things the Mafia could never even dream of and of which we simply can’t speak here; this is, after all, a family blog), and nobody was the wiser come Monday, although Amanda did dissolve into hysterical laughter at the mere question of “how did the weekend go”...

...and you city people think you live the high life...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:14 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 23, 2006

Raining On My Conspiracy Parade 

...you know, I just hate this. Here I am, aflame with intense partisan certainty that Nov. 7 will bring an end to our not-so-terribly-long national nightmare of crooked, deceitful, self-serving Republican rule with a tsunami of Democratic victories in the House and Senate, and here comes Jonathan Alter to pour water on that flame with one of those stark political realities that I full well understand but have been able to beat back into the lower recesses of my brain. Even uses the same oceanographic concept...

Polls can be the enemy of reality, and that threat is particularly strong this year. National and race-specific polls seem to be whispering the sweet siren song that the only way Democrats can't regain the House majority is through dirty Republican dealings and electronic voting machine trickery. It looks from the polls, two weeks out, that anything less than a 15-seat Democratic gain in the House will be prima facie grounds for heading down to the sporting goods store and emptying the place of .223 ammo and clips for the Ruger Mini 14, because a back-door coup has occurred and it's time to cowboy up, for the revolution is surely coming. Unfortunately, as Alter points out, that siren song may mutate into the grating screeches of harpies for no better reason than the other guys have a better get-out-the-vote program than our team in races that the common voter doesn't pay very much attention to in any case. Indeed, it is very likely that there are voters in this great land of ours who will cast a vote for Congress without actually knowing the name of their incumbent, much less the challenger. In fact, having observed my coworkers on many election days through the years before Oregon switched to vote-by-mail, I'd be willing to lay money on that proposition...and I'm not a bettin' man. For all the analysing and parsing and applying of differential equations to poll numbers, the decision will go to the party that can best motivate voters to travel to a specific location and physically place a mark on a piece of paper or push a spot on a touchscreen. That's not the same as being a "likely voter", and while I deplore the idea of having to dwell on the prospects of diminished expectations at a time when the climate seems so ripe for putting Democrats in Congress in large numbers (although that in itself should be a motivational factor), the wiser course for our own mental health is to at least consider the possibility that things won't pan out for reasons having nothing to do with purged voter rolls or black boxes. Still, though, I hate having people rain on my conspiracy parade...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:11 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 22, 2006

The Moderates Are Coming! The Moderates Are Coming! 

...I've commented so frequently on this subject, both here and and the old Ruminate This and other places, that I am just about worn out about the whole thing. The "whole thing", of course, is the long-standing tension between the progressive "true believers" of the Democratic party and those Democrats who don't pass the various litmus tests that various subsets of the "True Believers" are always trying to administer. I've always believed, using myself as one humble example, that people as a rule are more complex than some might realize and that progressives - in particular, progressives with a strong affinity for a particular issue - did themselves and the party's prospects harm by rejecting candidates on a limited list of narrowly defined issues. Thus we were rewarded with the grim vision of Ralph Nadar, with his self-avowed desire to force Al Gore to move more to the left on a specific set of issues. More recently, we saw a near insurrection by progressives in Pennsylvania over the Democratic Senatorial candidate's views on abortion...

We are playing the game on an entirely different field this election cycle, though, and if Democratic candidates can keep their wits about them and deflect the oncoming onslaught of negative ads while cranking up some sort of reasonable get-out-the-vote program we are looking at the possiblity of capturing both the House and the Senate. This year, however, as this article highlights, the Democrats storming the gates - particularly in Senate races - are not the sorts of folks that most progressives would draw willingly to their breasts. Harold Ford in Tennessee, John Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania; these are not progressives, in the current sense of the term. Neither are a good number of the Democrats threatening to take over the majority in the House of Representatives. What they are is a group who are willing to strap a "D" on their chests and crawl into the trenches in territory that Republicans have owned - owned for years, in some cases - and take on that establishment as part of the 50-states strategy that Howard Dean has been carrying on about for a couple of years. You're not going to find much in Democratic campaign platforms in some of these battles that is likely to positively stir the passions of someone teetering on the edge of fleeing to the Green Party, but the hell with that, eh?

How Democrats will hold their own "big tent" majority together if they are successful in a couple of weeks will be interesting to watch, but one issue is being made clear in this election cycle: Democrats will need to rely on moderate and even nominally conservative candidtates if they want to make it to the big dance...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:00 PM 0 comments

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