Monthly Archives: April 2023

04/27/2023
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Immediate Gratification, Persistence, Space Race

1000 Words: Persistence

A quick shout-out before I get into today’s topic. This is related to my last post about recovering from total hip replacement surgery this month. When I was a kid (meaning any time before a couple of years ago), I thought I knew what love was. I didn’t. I have a better handle on it now.

Every day — sometimes two and three times a day — The Loved One has to put my socks and shoes on for me. I’ll be under doctor’s restrictions against that usually mundane task for the next few weeks, at least.

My conclusion? True love is not gushing romance and bliss and batting eyelashes and pounding heartbeats. No, it’s a spouse or mate or significant other hunkering down, despite having her own back issues, to roll up my socks, gingerly roll them on to my exacting tightness specifications, and then lace up and double-knot my sneakers even, sometimes, when she’s fresh out of bed.

That kind of love is not as exciting or arousing as the kind I desperately sought in my 20s, but it’s indescribably deeper and profoundly more satisfying than any other kind I’ve ever experienced. I can only hope to do the same or something similar for her one day.

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Gagarin

Now then, persistence. Loyal Pencillistas know I’m a space geek. I have been since I was five years old and Alan Shepard became the first American to sit in a space capsule and be launched 101.2 nautical miles above the Earth’s surface. He was the first American in space, even though Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat him to those rarified heights some three and a half weeks previously. Poor Shepard longed to be the first human in space but his Mercury mission had been postponed a half dozen times after its originally scheduled date in 1960. Gagarin’s Vostok 1 mission lifted off on April 12, 1961. He orbited the Earth three times. Shepard’s Freedom 7 spacecraft launched on May 5, 1961. He did not orbit the Earth but flew in a ballistic arc over the Atlantic Ocean.

Another sad turn for Shepard: He climbed into his Freedom 7 capsule at 5:20am that fateful Friday. It was expected liftoff would occur within a couple of hours. Due to miscellaneous delays, Shepard remained strapped in to his capsule for more than four hours. He needed to pee. Eventually, he couldn’t hold it any longer and ground control told him to pee in his spacesuit. In those early space flight days, no provisions had yet been made for crew members to relieve themselves. So Alan Shepard sat in his own urine until he was picked up by rescue helicopter after splashing down at ten minutes to 2:00pm.

Shepard

Another bit of trivia: When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about during his sub-orbital flight, he replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”

Anyway, persistence. The space race was driven, largely, by its two participants’ — the USA and the USSR — common desire to show the world who had the bigger dick. For years, the Soviet’s junk loomed huge over America’s paltry prong. The USA told the world on July 30, 1955 it would send an artificial satellite into space in 1957. The Soviets followed suit four days later. Partially to its credit, the USA would be far more cautious about sending machines and people into space than the Soviets were. That and President Dwight Eisenhower’s un-interest in space exploration allowed the USSR to leapfrog the USA therein. The Soviets would launch Sputnik 1 on October 1, 1957. The USA didn’t send a satellite into space until four months later when it launched Pioneer 1.

Sputnik was a hollow ball containing a simple radio transmitter emitting a continuous string of beeps as it orbited the Earth. Anyone with a rudimentary receiver could hear Sputnik’s beeps as it passed overhead so the American populace suffered a collective paranoia. Despite a panicky renewed emphasis on scientific education and the creation of NASA, the Soviets continued to beat the USA to the punch in space even after Gagarin’s ride. The USSR sent the first woman and the first multi-person crew into space. A cosmonaut also was the first human to “walk” in space.

Of course, the USA eventually trumped the Soviets when Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the Moon on July 21, 1969. President John F. Kennedy had pledged on May 25, 1961 that America would land a person on the Moon before the decade was out. At that particular moment no one on Earth had any idea how to get a crewed capsule to the Moon and back safely. It’d be like President Biden today promising battery-powered flying cars would replace gas-engine automobiles by the year 2032.

The First Human Footprint on the Moon.

Just getting anything from the Earth to the Moon and back in the late ’50s and early ’60s was a nearly impossible task. It took the USA three tries to get a spacecraft to simply fly by the moon before Pioneer 4 did it in 1959. The USSR’s Luna 2 crashed into the Moon nine months later. Neither country was able to manage a soft landing on the Moon — by an un-crewed craft, of course — until the Soviets’ Luna 9 touched down on February 3, 1966. Between the two countries, there’d been at least 37 previous attempts to either fly by, crash into, or soft land on the Moon before Luna 9’s successful mission. The two countries started launching rockets toward the Moon in the summer of 1958 and couldn’t land a machine on its surface until fully eight years later.

Imagine that kind of sustained failure taking place over nearly a decade in this day and age of the 24-hour news cycle and social media. A single failure these days generates hoots and insults. We demand immediate success and gratification. If something doesn’t work the first time it’s attempted, we pillory its imagineers, its creators, and its operators. For good measure we blame whomever’s in the White House at the time.

Persistence? It apparently no longer exists.

04/24/2023
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Optimism

1000 Words: The Body Shop

I went to the grocery store this morning. Stocked up for the week. A normal chore.

Except it wasn’t.

It was my first time out in public, walking, since I underwent my second total hip replacement surgery two weeks ago today.

A few years ago, after I’d completed treatment for cancer in my neck, I decided to embark on a program of fixing up all the things that resulted in me being, essentially, a cripple. Both my hips were diagnosed with Category 4 osteoarthritis, leading me to walk (or, try to walk) like a grizzled old tar on a pirate ship.

Surgery after surgery after surgery.

Standing up from a sitting position took long moments. Sitting down in the first place took even longer. I timed how long it took me to put on my socks and shoes once: six minutes. All this dilly-dallying was in service of me trying to dodge screaming pain. The cats and The Loved One countless times were scared out of their fur by me shrieking in agony because I’d moved one or the other hip joint just the merest fraction of a millimeter wrongly.

My first hip should have been done some time in early spring 2020, but you may recall what was going on in the world at that time. That surgery was delayed for some nine months before my surgeon felt the pandemic was controlled enough so he could resume elective operations. As he threw me out of the hospital after I woke from anesthesia, he said we’d have to wait at least six months before we could re-jigger the other hip.

Next thing I knew, one of my teeth started getting a little funky thanks to cancer radiation therapy, every weekday for six weeks, back in 2016. My oral surgeon said the blood flow through my jaw had been compromised by the daily linear X-ray beam zapping and he wouldn’t yank said tooth until I’d gone through another six weeks, every weekday, of lying in a hyperbaric chamber.

I wrote about the hyperbaric chamber back in the late fall of ’21. Trust me, if you’re claustrophobic, you won’t survive a minute in one of those tubes. The casing is clear, sure, but the space to move around in is only about 36 inches in diameter. The machine creates a high-pressure atmosphere of pure oxygen, forcing billions of O2 molecules into me and engorging my arteries with supercharged, highly-oxygenated blood.

Along about the same time, I visited another surgeon to take care of the enormous hole I had in my abdominal wall. This hernia had led to what’s called an incarceration. No, I didn’t have to go to jail, but the pain caused by this medical incarceration was no less bearable than a nickel stint in Monroe County jail. I’d already decided to juggle the order of my surgeries to take care of the hernia first because, frankly, if the hernia and incarceration got any worse the fallout would be devastating. As in send flowers. He, too, said he wouldn’t touch me without me having been locked in the hyperbaric tube for a good long time.

So, I got my tooth excavated in February 2021 and my abdominal wall patched up ( and the incarcerated organ pushed back where it belongs that April.

Phew.

Now I could have the orthopedic surgeon tackle my left hip. And, by the way, that left hip originally was diagnosed as the worse of the two. As far back as 2019, X-rays showed the left hip completely without any cartilage lining at all. The surgeon suggested we get on it without delay. I told him my right hip was the one that hurt worse, so he deferred to my wishes.

He sliced me open and sawed off the bone ends (ball head of the femur and the acetabulum, or hip socket), screwed and glued replacements for them made of titanium and plastic, and sent me on my way. After I woke up, of course.

Image from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Now that my first hip had been done, I started walking around like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow came. Because I was gamboling about so much I wore down the bone ends in my right hip to the point that they were shrinking, much like the eraser on the tip of a pencil. The pain was insane.

I finally was able to get the left hip done on April 10th. Recovery from total hip replacement surgery is no picnic, I assure you, but no matter how much swelling and soreness there is, I feel 22 times better now than I did on April 9th.

At last my campaign of multiple surgeries is complete. When I started it, I didn’t even have confidence I’d live long enough to get them all done because, well, I have a couple of other medical issues that could, at any time, turn dire.

I recount all this not to elicit sympathy (although if you want to toss a little my way, I won’t fling it back in your face) but to remind you it’s almost always preferable to live and to get your body repaired quickly and properly.

There are exceptions, of course. People suffering with unbearable cancer pain and who’ve been told there’s no hope rightly would prefer to be wrapped in the arms of Mors, the Roman god of death. A dear friend of mine, who’s a citizen of another country, lost both her parents to cancer. Or, more accurately, suicide. The country they live in allows physician-assisted suicide for people who are suffering and for whom there’s no other way out. Her parents threw themselves a nice party, said goodbye to all their loved ones and friends, and then took the gas pipe or the pill or whatever they do in that country.

That’s an awfully good way to go. And their kids were thankful their parents didn’t have to endure the torture of pain and hopelessness.

Anyway, I’m a million miles away from wishing I could die (although there’ve been moments now and again). I’m all taped and sewed up. My hips don’t hurt. My hernia isn’t burning. My tooth isn’t threatening to turn infected.

The conclusion: Life’s pretty good even if it does kick the shit out of us every once in a while.

04/07/2023
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Racism, Republican Party, Tennesse Legislature

1000 Words: We May Be Dumb, But We’re Not Stupid

We’re not stupid. We have brains in our heads and, every once in a while, we use them. We can be fooled, sure. But some scams, some bunk, are so over the top that we’re immune to them.

By we, I mean the liberals, the progressives, and even a few staunch Democrats, for pity’s sake. My we.

As I say, we’ve bought into bullshit before. “Defund the Police,” for one thing. The dumbest most ineffective, most guaranteed to lose us whatever support we’d hoped to gain in America’s heartland (itself a pie-in-the-sky aspiration) slogan ever conjured. The idea behind it made sense: the police are asked to do too much and we ought to devote more resources to mental health crisis professionals, substance abuse emergency responders, and conflict resolution experts to help the cops when they’re confronted by the stoned, the deranged, and the irrational among the citizenry. Defund the Police conveyed none of that message. The only thing Ma and Pa Iowa or Arkansas thought when they heard those three words was, Let’s get rid of the police.

Now any pols who even once uttered that inane slogan are running from it as though from a rabid dog. “What,” they say, baffled, “I said that? Naw! I musta been misquoted.” A prime example: the newly elected mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, who deftly two-stepped away from his earlier support for Defund the Police and was able to win out over his Law and Order opponent.

So, we’re not perfect but we’re not altogether credulous (like members of a certain former president’s idolatrous cult are). That’s why the given rationale behind the Tennessee legislature’s ouster of two of its members yesterday ain’t gonna fool a’one of us. State representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were kicked out of the august Nashville chamber they’d been duly elected to for staging a raucous protest against the southern state’s masturbatorial love affair with guns. After three adults and three kids were gunned down in a Tennessee school the other day, the legislature reaffirmed its commitment to protect the “right” of any and all citizens to possess weapons of war regardless of certain psychological red flags they may already have displayed rather than safeguard a few kids’ lives.

Jones and Pearson led a chanting group of protesters in the statehouse, decrying the legislature’s inaction on sane gun laws. They used a bullhorn to address the room. The protesters made a lot of noise, cried out Shame, shame, shame, and then left the chamber. There was no riot. There was no violence. Nobody died or was injured. Nobody took over any legislators’ offices, defaced paintings and statues, or even took shits on the edifice’s marble floors — all of which happened elsewhere on January 6th, 2021.

Another January 6th? [ABC News video screenshot]

I bring that date up because one of the leaders of the group of majority Republicans who voted Jones and Pearson out of their seats said his party did so because they were afraid the protest was turning into another January 6th.

Jones and Pearson were joined in the protest by a third state representative, Gloria Johnson. She was not ousted by the legislature, although the vote on her expulsion was close.

Gloria Johnson, natch, is white.

She’s not fooled either. When reporters asked her why she’d been spared while Jones and Pearson were not, she replied, sarcastically, “It may have to do with the color of our skin.”

Jones and Pearson were ousted because they are young, troublemaking black men. Period. Gloria Johnson isn’t troublemaking. Perhaps she’s disruptive, an okay way of making waves that’s so valued in the business world these days. In fact, that aforementioned former president is a noted “disrupter.”

Whenever young black men break a rule, it’s a sure sign they’re about to go wild and tear society apart. That’s a lesson passed down by slave masters from two hundred years ago. That’s traditional lore held dear in places like Tennessee.

The mob, the thousands of people who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, hoping to overturn the presidential election, crying out for blood, calling for the neck of Vice President Mike Pence and others, a certain revisionist faux-historian now claims, weren’t really troublemakers. Why they were simply passionate participants in good-natured public give-and-take. They were no more dangerous than a couple of guys sitting on barstools arguing over who’ll win next year’s Super Bowl. One Republican congressperson even compared the January 6th riot to a “normal tourist visit.”

Which takes the wind out of that Tennessee Republican who said Jones and Pearson’s ousters were necessary lest the statehouse protest devolve into something akin to January 6th.

What? A normal tourist visit?

These Republicans had better get their stories straight.

These logical inconsistencies remind my of the bar-room spat I had with a Kentucky good-old-boy back around the time the Tea Party was making news. The real danger facing America, he yelled, comes from the goddamned liberals. “They are the most selfish people around,” he hollered.

“Selfish?” I countered. (And, yes, I was yelling too — something I’ve long ago stopped doing when arguing with a member of the Right. In fact, I’ve flat-out stopped arguing with that ilk, period. No sense giving myself a concussion by banging my head against that brick wall). “I thought liberals were supposed to be sob-sisters and weaklings. Nursemaids. Nannies. You’d better get your stereotype straight!”

I didn’t win that argument, of course. People don’t win arguments anymore. Facts be damned.

I wouldn’t win any argument against that Tennessee Republican by pointing out January 6th was supposed to be nothing more dangerous than a school field trip.

Donald Trump may or may not retain his vise grip on the Republican Party as we near the 2024 presidential campaign. Even if he does, he’ll still play second fiddle to the man who penned these lines:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather Scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

04/06/2023
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24-hour News Cycle, Swatting

1000 Words: Constant News Is Bad News

Back when I was a kid there were basically two ways to get the news of the greater world outside my block.

One was the newspaper. The other was TV. There’d be national news right about at dinner time and then the local news at 10:00pm.

In those pre-video days, it’d take a couple of hours for film footage of a big fire or a shooting in the city to be rushed to the station, processed, edited, and loaded in the control room. If the footage was from Paris street protests or the battlefields of Vietnam, it took a full day or more to get to my TV screen.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t imagine in 1968 or ’69 news getting to me any quicker than it did then. I didn’t even dream of today’s nearly real time reportage via online news sources and social media.

We can, for instance, know just as police SWAT teams and ambulances are pulling up outside a school that a shooter is inside and gunshots have been heard. We know what’s going on before some of the first responders do.

Which leads us to the most deranged development I can think of right now (Don’t worry: tomorrow I’ll think of something even loonier — this is 2023, after all.) Apparently, there’s been a problem with people calling in active shooter reports to 911. These callers, acc’d’g to a report on NPR this AM, provide details such as how many shooters there are, how many shots have been fired, and bits of trivia only a school insider would know. Then, pictures of the school or the area surrounding it are posted on social media, leading to parents panicking and rushing to the scene to see if their kids are alright.

These calls are hoaxes. The phenomenon is called “swatting.”

The city manager of Twin Falls, Idaho fell victim to a swatting incident. He was in a meeting and was told there was an emergency at the local high school. This fellow said he was told, moments later, “there was an active shooter, that there was one person down, that there were three people injured, and it was in a math class.” His kid, he knew immediately, was in that math class at the time.

Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, helicopters, SWAT teams, reporters, and horrified parents converged on the school.

The local NPR reporter said, “There was no shooter. The call was a hoax.”

It took law enforcement officials about an hour and a half to convince themselves nothing of the kind had gone down at the school. But kids in the school, wired in to the internet, caught false reports of the shooting and messaged their parents that they were alive but hunkered down and scared to death.

Even after a police spokesperson reported that the thing was a hoax, he was bombarded with calls from parents calling him a liar, that their kids were still in danger and that the city was staging a huge coverup.

Does it get any more insane than that?

Oh, yes it does. As the minutes turned to hours, even after the all-clear had been issued, kids kept posting that there were dead bodies, that they’d heard gunshots, that things were still in chaos. Their parents took them at their word.

A local TV reporter says, “…[A]ll this was fueled through social media.”

It couldn’t possibly get more psychotic than that, right?

Wrong. A school in a nearby town was reported to be under siege by a shooter at the same time. Then this, per the NPR reporter:

And on March 2, a whole new wave of calls came in all across the country. Highland Park High School in Topeka, Hastings Public School in Nebraska. In Lawrence, Kansas, police officers shared dash and body cam videos of officers responding to the call about a shooting at Free State High School in real time on Facebook.

All hoaxes.

The reporter added there’ve been “hundreds” of such hoaxes all around the USA in recent months.

A few of them — it’s not known exactly how many at this time because relevant 911 recordings have been impounded by the FBI for its investigation — have been made by a man with a foreign accent.

Many of the hoax callers now offer details that are obviously false or easily debunked after a few moments, the name of a non-existent teacher, say, or pix of arriving emergency vehicles from a wholly unrelated town.

The first thing that came to mind was — the Russians.

And why not? The Russkies flooded social media and fake news sites with all kinds of misinformation, libel, slander and general bunkum in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. At first it was thought Vladimir Putin’s directed his spooks to get Donald Trump elected president, and maybe he did. But far more likely, he only wanted to tear America apart.

He sure as hell did.

And now that Trump has served a term in office with the resultant polarization of the country, what more can Putin’s geeks do?

They can sow even more panic and fear. Nothing makes people more terrified than to think their kids are in mortal danger. A nation in a constant state of panic and fear can turn on itself in the snap of a finger. As an added bonus, swatting then sows even more distrust of the government, as evidenced by all those parents accusing officials of lying about the non-existent shooters. Because, they’ve been led to believe, that’s what government officials always do.

My conclusion? It doesn’t do me a bit of good, nor does it do anybody any good, to get news up to the second, every day, 24 hours a day. I don’t have my finger on the nuclear launch button. I’m not an emergency dispatcher. No news is of vital importance to me this very second.

A little taste of the TV news at dinner time or right before bedtime was plenty when I was a kid. The newspapers kept me abreast of wars and famines and local officials who’d been caught bribing each other. Today’s nearly real time reportage via online news sources and social media has harmed us deeply.

04/03/2023
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Biology, Gender, Society

1000 Words: Gender Musing

I don’t know many men who, in the course of everyday conversation, make mention of the raw deal women have gotten in pretty much every society on Earth. Many friends of mine take to the chit-chat soapbox to decry racism, America’s history of slavery, the Native American holocaust, the savaging of our environment, the exploding wealth gap, and even bad refereeing in the NCAA basketball tournament.

But, try as I might, I can’t recall my liberal, progressive brethren pounding on the table and getting red in the face over unequal pay for women, the fact that we haven’t had a woman president yet, and the institutionalized maleness of science labs, corporate boardrooms, and Senate cloakrooms.

I can’t explain this other than to suppose my guy friends’ oxen are not being gored, so why should they get all het up over it? Then again, none of my friends is a Native American and, as I say, they’re uniformly offended by this holy land’s history of wiping that swath of humanity out.

Could it be some vestigial trace of the sex-typing lessons we all endure as little boys growing up? You know, the same gender-conforming pressure that forbids many, many, many men from admitting that, say, another man is handsome or sexy. Be a man. Don’t cry. Don’t be a queer. Other people should take care of their own problems. Guys, we’re instructed from infancy on, don’t feel for people other than themselves and others like them. Women, on the other hand, are encouraged to think of the other before themselves.

A lot of that has to do with biological imperatives, the hard-wiring that separates us, in most cases, into different genders. Women possess uteri, give birth, and suckle their children. All those things and more make the female spec list more conducive to producing loving, empathetic, sensitive humans. The sentient among us wish everybody possessed in more ample quantities those and other altruistic qualities.

Part of what makes me slightly itchy about today’s rewriting of gender rules and roles is the idea that gender is strictly a societal construct, that if it weren’t for some villainous puppet masters directing the rest of us eight billion from a fortified island in the South Pacific, we’d all be able to choose our genders the same way we choose which pair of socks to wear this morning.

And, this new line of thinking goes, we’ll wear a different pair of socks tomorrow morning.

This is not to say people can’t identify with one, the other, both, or many different genders. Me? I’ve always felt more of an affinity and identification with women than men. Maleness, especially toxic masculinity, not only bores me, it repulses me. I never wanted to outdrink anybody. I never wanted to break another person’s nose. When I played baseball, I didn’t care who won or lost, only that I was running in the sunshine. I indulged myself in “womanly” things: crying at movies or while listening to music, often wanting to please people, not caring if my domestic partner makes more money than I do, and so on.

And I accept that there are scads of women who’ll stand on their heads to win a game or are competitive in any other area. I’m happy to live in a world where one may choose to define one’s self according to whatever gender paradigm appeals to them.

But testosterone and estrogen levels play a huge role in those decisions. I know my own surging T-levels, especially when I was a raging youth, have made me act far more guy-like than I’d ever want to be absent them. They don’t totally define me but they do indeed have a hell of a lot to do with my behavior and self-image. Throughout the years, I’ve had to actively wrestled with chemical guy-ness in order for me to, as I’ve indicated, identify more with women than men.

All the above is predicated on the reality that not everybody is constructed according to the strict dictates of the binary gender system. Every one of us is on spectra that cover hormone levels, physical anatomy, psychological predilections, and perhaps a hundred or a thousand other factors.

Maybe I was lucky. I recall gym class at the boys high school I attended. Fenwick, in Oak Park, Illinois. Don’t ask me why but we were compelled to swim in the nude whenever the gym class schedule called for a week in the pool. Don’t get me started on that one, with fully-dressed swim coaches watching over fifty or so stark naked adolescents for 45 minutes a day. I shudder to think what drove that line of thinking.

Anyway, I recall one kid — let’s call him Paul — who, alone among us, had a hairless, curvy, jiggly body and whose genital package was shockingly minuscule. Fifteen-year-old guys universally check each other out to see whose junk is bigger, more dangly, more manly. Paul could never hope to win out that competition over anybody else. His stuff was so small as to be nearly non-existent.

Thankfully, none of us teased or bullied Paul. Perhaps we felt sympathy for him. Perhaps we said to ourselves, Thank god that’s not me. But, make no mistake, none of us failed to note Paul’s differences, even if none of us ever brought them up.

It’s because we swam in the nude that I was able to see that certain people are born with indistinct, undeveloped, or otherwise “un-average” gender anatomy. When I was 15, I began to understand people like Paul very possibly would be candidates for gender reassignment surgery. That’s something his parents would might have suspected from his earliest days. His differences surely were driven into in his consciousness every day he walked into the Fenwick pool along with 49 other adolescent boys.

All this is to say the idea of gender is far more complicated than This one’s a man and That one’s a woman. These lunkheaded anencephalics in Florida and Tennessee and every other statehouse where lawmakers are trying to codify gender may as well try to legislate which way a candy bar wrapper will flutter in a whirlwind.

The Gold-anodized Discs Attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 Space Probes.