Wayward Landlubber

     CAPTAINS LOG:  Janus day 6, 3005 BCE. 1st dogwatch "Hey God, is it Log or logue?" "Who knows, write something, I'm not a damned editor, and English has not yet been invented.". "But you are all-knowing" "Noah, you do know I could arrange for you to be lost at sea?"      Captain's LOG Wednesday 3005, BCE: "This BCE thing, Before Common Era, what does that mean exactly? You are in this era, I'm in this era, everybody alive today, and soon to be drowned by your flood, is in this era, and there is no other era I can think of, so why are we using this?" " Don't push your luck Noah, I could just as easily make Avram Lichtenstein captain of this ship".  "Well God, he will be just as unprepared as I am. How many boat captains do you know capable of guiding a boat too tall for three decks of oars, no square sails, and not even a proper rudder? And filled with two of every kind of animal from predator to prey, ...

     On March 10, 2007 my youngest son, Aidan and I drove to the village of Celilo to commemorate the 50th anniversary since the US Corps of Engineers drowned that famous village under the somewhat more placid waters of the the Columbia River. The Dalles dam was the newest addition to the Columbia hydro-electric compact. At the time, and for most of us, it was a great engineering achievement. Houses were being built that advertised their all-electric features. Some of them with the logo of Reddy Kilowatt, an advertising scheme concocted by Pacific Power and Light Company. That half-century had brought the states of Oregon and Washington rapid economic growth and greatly reduced our use of fossil fuels to create energy, a goal that had not yet become a goal. It had also opened the upper Columbia River to barge traffic for the grain farmers and timber producers upriver, making Portland a major trading hub to Asia. But there was a cost. Columbia River Salmon runs that once w...

     Gary Richardson was reaching the climax of his guitar solo. The fingers of his left hand moved rapidly over the frets; a piece of chromed steel on his little finger to make those special harmonic notes. His right hand strummed across the 12 strings of his Gibson guitar, a bead of sweat ran down his nose. It was a performance I had seen dozens of times since we rented the main floor of an old house with 4 bedrooms on 16th and Flanders street in Portland, right across from Radio Cab. It was 1979. In a few more years we would be able to fill up our gas tanks at Radio Cab during the gas embargo brought on by the OPEC countries during the Arab-Israeli War.       Gary's face was showing the strain as his strumming approached those final notes. I had seen this as many times as I had heard his playing. This time was different. I was wondering who I was and whether my return from this particular chemical high would see me coming back as the same person i h...

     Recently I was given a task by Professor Wen at Willamette University . She is conducting a study on generations with her class. Since I am of an older generation,  i represent my demographic. My task was to make a presentation of my writing to a small group of students from the class she is teaching. I knew immediately what I would present to her Generations group.      Some years ago in my mid 20's I hitch-hiked to Southern California. On a typical sunny California day I found myself sitting in the well-heeled comfort of Marina Del Rey.  An old man struck up a conversation with me. He was then, around my age now.     He was clearly Jewish, that distinctive nose and the Eastern European accent. He told me a story of escaping Holland in a sailboat regatta of these odd little sabot sailboats. I said little except to draw him out when the story began to lag. He used a phrase when referring to how people dealt with the insult of b...

     If you Google it, the oldest recorded joke was told in 1900 BCE. It was written on a Sumerian tablet. We will have to trust the experts on this because I wasn't there to download it. And you know how unreliable those Sumerian tablets can be. The subject of the joke was a woman sitting in her husband's lap--- and farting. Let us pause here for a moment to consider how you tell a joke by scratching glyphs onto a clay tablet. About farting, fachrissakes. We also might consider how those glyphs were translated from a language spoken nearly 4000 years ago. I wonder if the grandpa joke about "pull my finger" had been common in those days. And how was it recorded?      Using that same time frame, let us try another joke that may have been told in that time but was too long to scratch onto a tablet. A sumerian charioteer returns from a long campaign against Persia, or some other warring nation. In the time he had been away, his hut had developed a crack in the...

     Historians have this annoying thing. They look at historical events from the point of view of the conquering peoples. Twisting themselves into pretzels to find a positive.The Mongols did a lot of bad stuff but they United the plains of Eastern Europe. Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world around the Meditterranean sea and Indian Ocean. Persia brought stability to the Middle East. No one looks at it from the point of view of the conquered nations. Perhaps they were a loose collection of warring tribes before they were conquered. Perhaps their engineering skills, their language sophistication, their social organization were not as great as the cultures that conquered and enslaved their people, but they were free-or perhaps freer- than they were as conquered people.       Maybe, as in the case of the Roman Republic, they were presented with the popular vote, used by Athens before the Peloponnesian war. But it was still only available ...

     May 26, 1993, Jose Conseco made baseball history doing something no outfielder wants to see on film. He was chasing a high fly ball in the rightfield and lost it in the sun. The ball bounced off the top of his head and went into the stands for a home run. It went down in baseball lore as "the doink". Consecco had some pretty good stats until his career was ruined by steroids. Perhaps his one defensive weakness was in fielding, which is why he played right field, the one position which required the least defensive talent.       The first thing you learn in Pee-wee baseball, someone has claimed, is to put the least capable player in right field. In politics the same claim can be made. Rightwingers are the fat kid with the big mouth and the weinie-arm. They do have an offensive talent but in being offensive, not for being enlightened. Republicans are the fat kid in rightfield watching all the other kids fielding hits. Even worse, Republican politics ...