Fragments From Floyd

Well, yes, I did notice that I cut the pointy top of his head off in this grab shot. I just liked that this image captured Tsuga's usual goofy expression and the fact that this is such a great action shot, thanks to my new (used) 80-200 lens. The imperfect dog shot also is consistent with Themeless Friday Blogging. On Fridays, I think even less about what will go up on the page. So shoot me.

* Woke this morning to more than 600 comment spams after no more than 10-15 daily for a month--some new feature of the recent MT upgrade, I suppose.

*I am on house arrest for three days: the son (in the Subaru) is visiting college friends in TN and wife (in my beat-up truck) is working Friday and the weekend. But I'll stay busy. We are having our January thaw early this year. With the warmer weather, I have no excuse not to clean the gutters today. And the pre-snow cleanup around the woodpile needs to happen soon, otherwise I'll be tripping over and pushing the big-wheel cart around ice-and-snow-covered lumps to get to the wood.

*I have entertained the notion of a second blog. Fragments has a fairly regular readership of folks who come expecting apples and roses. Sometimes I want to write about pickles and peppers. The first crowd doesn't care for these stronger tastes. But apples and roses, pickles and peppers is who I am. Mark this for reconsideration after the coming semester has ended.

*Some progress is being made on the App Studies Association Conference presentation (for March 18). I'm using Powerpoint so far to fade images in and out against various backgrounds and just reading the related texts (most of which have appeared in Fragments or in the radio essays.) Partially completed sections include the introduction about finding my place in the Blue Ridge; spiderwebs; the creeks; trees and leaves; nature; and winter. I want to include a short section on the house and barn, and then a final few minutes to bring it all together. Miles yet to go.

*My alma mater (Auburn) and our nearest university (Va Tech, 15 miles north as the crow flies) face each other in the Sugar Bowl. I will listen via the web, rooting for Tech the first half, and Auburn the second. And whoever wins, I've cheered for a winner!

*I've been studying the idea of getting a good color photo printer and have decided on the Epson 2200 because it will print up to 13 x 19 and uses archival inks. But with the purchase of the extra lens, there went the printer fund. I wonder if those PayPal thingies ever bring in any pennies. Ann keeps reminding me how deferred gratification doesn't make very much sense when you're our age. But I haven't found a vendor yet who'll give me a senior discount on that Epson.

*Okay. I've wasted enough of your time. Duty calls: time to scrape frost off the windshield and warm up the truck for today's bread-winner. The woodstove is ticking those hot, comfy sounds; the dog is snoring softly from the next room; and there just might be one more cup of coffee in the pot. Time to take the wrapper off a brand new day and see what's inside!

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The Bible uses the analogy of the birthing process to describe events as history of the present earth draws to a close. Apparently there are those among my Christian brethren who believe that the more pain the woman has, the better.

The lack of environmental concern to the point of abetting the process of resource abuse (and the social evils that go with it) is characteristic of the end-times vision of a large body of conservative Christians. They see "nation against nation" and "brother against brother" and the death of one third part of the sea as apocalyptic warning signs to be welcomed, or at least ignored, so as to hasten the second coming of Christ.

I'm not sure how pervasive this Biblical interpretation is. The popular info-channels (for example, Bill Moyers recent condemnation of this anti-stewardship mentality) increasingly report this phenomenon, and it seems there are grounds to the claims (See "The Godly Must Be Crazy"). The environmental reversals and haughty disregard for the future so prominent in the current administration's policies certainly gives credance to the charges of Moyers and others.

I fear the tendency of the general unchurched public to paint with too broad a brush to taint all of Christendom with this doctrine. Not all evangelical Christians hold to this view by any means, although the proportion I am afraid is quite high among those who voted the current administration back into office. But there are others who also hold to the idea that God's kingdom will ultimately come on earth. They share the understanding that there will be increasing disorder and decreasing charity in the working out of history, as is alluded to in many places in both Old and New Testaments (not just in Revelations, as often misconstrued.) But as this unfolds over years, centuries or millenia, this latter group of Christians see themselves as responsible stewards who are to be "salt and light" in a fallen world to the very end, not irritants and catalysts here to throw gasoline on the fire.

As antidote to the appaling disregard for earth-care among this increasingly visible and politically powerful subgroup of Christians, I remember the Evangelical Environmental Network, whose declaration I read some years ago. There is a long list of prominent supporters, both Republican and Democrats among them, I am sure, and this gives me hope. Surely those of us who believe that God so loved the world will not let it be sacrificed to feed corporate greed or satisfy the apocalyptic lusts of the few.

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I am thankful each day simply to be out standing in my field.

I feel a sense there of gratitude for the serenity and seclusion that this forested bowl of rock provides. I can and do indulge in all manner of odd behavior--sitting at the edge of it for an hour watching ice form in the creek, lying on my back in the fresh-mown pasture watching chimney swifts wheel and tumble at dusk--without having to explain myself to a curious neighbor.

On a frosty morning this week, I stood pointing my camera at the "empty" hillside. Self-consciously, I dropped it to my side and pretended to be about some mysterious manly work when an anonymous truck drove down the road. "What could that man possibly be taking a picture of?"

Order. Order in chaos. Order in chaos, and this, glazed with frost--another layer of crystalline order all its own.

In the seemingly-random jumble of frost-covered tree branches there is pattern and purpose. Phyllotaxy is the name for the very mathematical way that leaves are distributed on twigs. Twigs follow another set of orders so that a maple tree has a different and predictable pattern of twig-on-branch than this magnolia from the edge of our pasture. Trunks branch and divide, not at random, but in response to ancient messages going back through countless repetition of seed, shoot, trunk, branch, twig and leaf.

Like the dew reveals the invisible pattern in a spider's summer web, frost on a rare winter day makes visible the faint but certain forest math of twig and branch. Because of the way we're made, there is a close kinship between order and beauty, between beauty and praise. So I am thankful for dew and frost, for poetry and for prayer. I am thankful for that which reveals pattern and purpose in this world shot through by chaos and indifference.

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We will have snow soon. If it stays as cold as the past month has been, we'll get flakes when the next moist system passes through. Until then, we get hard, clinging frosts almost every morning. Frosts confers some of the same aesthetic benefits (and challenges) as snow, photographically speaking, without the travel woes or the need to find the snow shovel somewhere over in the barn.

I'm remembering how the big, orange snow plows come down our white-cloaked valley the day after a big snow, pushing it out of the road into chest-high blocks and mounds at the margins of the frozen road. It was there in those jumbled ice cakes I first saw the light coming from the shadowed crevices: the blue-green light of water and atmosphere passing through a lens of snow. This was my first experience of what arctic travelers refer to as "blue ice."

Summer forest: deal with the excess of green light passing through and reflected off of a lens of foliage overhead. Winter fields: keep the snow white, since this is how our eye interprets it, without distorting what other colors remain in bare tree trunks, lichen-covered cliffs and the green-black rhododendrons.

But for now, we have frosts that make the finest filigree of every twig and branch in that short interval between the rising of the sun over the east ridge and the sun's insipid heat that is sufficient to melt it all away.

Wife and son here, coming back from their second trip around the pasture, having left the slow-walking guy with the camera immersed in the fine details of watching the sun come up on a frosty morn.

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In this house, where usually there are just the two of us, how wonderfully discombobulating it was for those few days last week to have a house-full of family. Rooms were peopled, chairs weren't empty, silence was unheard of. There is something different about housing family: I find no urgency to entertain, have no guilt that each moment is not filled with structured activity. We are simply together.

And so it was not long before everyone nestled into their own niche, making themselves at home in our home--reading something entirely for fun, wrapping something semi-secretly or bantering cheerfully with another guest-relative to settle ancient debates about the silliest of matters. With histories that go back lifetimes, there was seldom the need to look outside our shared stories for conversation.

I recognize and lament how seldom I see both my children under the same roof over the past few years, and so am busy squirreling away little vignettes for future reveries when they are here. Few of these special moments can be captured in a picture, though, so I don't often try. Family snapshots too often miss the unposed and spontaneous nature of the times. But there are exceptions.

Abby's mom, in her full sweep of the house for the family's dirty clothes, exchanged a played-in top and bottom for a warm fleece blanket. Our three-year-old people-puppy, swaddled in her favorite wrap, found the warm dog lying next to the woodstove and draped herself lovingly across him. How could a photographer resist!

And so, here is the picture: perfect in that both the subject of the image and the photographer are found in that rare state of perfect bliss and contentment. Happiness is a warm puppy, a warm little girl, and a warm grandpa behind the camera.

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This image was sent by a friend. It was labelled "How A Dishwasher Really Works."

I thought it was interesting because this is the very model we have at our house.

(But if you ever come to dinner, we'll use the new paper plates.)

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"Mommy, I want a puppy!" Abby cried tearfully in her mother's embrace after being bitten and scratched by their unloving adopted pound cat, in their home for the free meals only from his point of view

It is true. A child needs something to love. At first, something merely soft-- a doll, a blanket, even a square of fuzzy flannel--brings them security and fills the need to caress. Soon, they need their affections if not mutual, at least received without malice in return.

Cats grace our homes to be served and admired. But when Abby ran with clutching arms toward our 13-yr-old cat, CJ, it quickly disappeared to the dark safe child-free space under the porch.

In Tsuga, Abby found the object of her affections. No matter how overly-eager or rough her clinging love became, he not only tolerated it, but came back over and over for more.

My only regret, that I missed the action sequence we saw repeated many times in Abby's short stay with us this week. If I had it to do over again, I'd put the camera on "continuous" and have an action sequence to show you:

Frame One: The dog stops in his tracks as he courses over the pasture ahead of us, grandma, grandpa and Abby, on our walk in the cold sunshine. He's found the scent of a mouse or a mole and he buries his muzzle in the tangled grass.

Frame Two: Abby catches up to the dog who is utterly focused on the smell of mole. She throws her arms across him, partly a hug, partly a wrestling hold, leaning on and over him enthralled in puppy love.

Frame Three: The dog suddenly moves on, leaving Abby with no visible means of support. Like a felled tree, she leans and falls toward a face-plant in the frosty grass.

Frame Four: Dog is far outside the frame by now. Abby in pigtails looks up from her reverse snow angel in the grass with a satisfied grin. Get this shot quickly, because in an instant, she'll be up and off and the whole sequence will roll again. And again.

Sometimes, the best shots are the ones that got away.

Have a blessed and peace-filled Christmas, everyone.

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This story appeared in the Floyd Press, Dec. 23, 2004 and was broadcast on WVTF, Roanoke, last Christmas. I wanted to share it again with you, Fragments readers, and wish you the most blessed Christmas ever!

Long ago we lived next to a country church in another southwest Virginia county. During summer preaching, the open doors of the church let in the cool breezes. They also let in our black dog Zach who would often wander up the hill and find us in our pew. Just behind the pulpit through the open back door you could see cows grazing nearby against the backdrop of Walker Mountain twenty miles away through the blue haze.

We have many wonderful memories of that church and of the families there who became our friends. But perhaps the most indelible memory from that little brick church is the year a small miracle happened at Christmas. This is that story.

"The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars and used the Lord's name in vain. They hit little kids and cussed their teachers and set fire to Fred Shoemaker's old broken down tool house."

These are the opening lines of the play "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever." The year our daughter turned twelve, she was the narrator for the community performance, so the script sticks in memory from her endless recitations. And the year after she performed, we moved to the country, and to our dismay, we would be living down the hill from that community's Herdman kids.

Our little farm bordered the cemetery of a tiny church on the hill behind us. There on a good Sunday, forty souls dotted the sanctuary-all of them from five families that had lived in that farming community and gone to that little brick church for generations. My wife and the kids and I were the rare new members. Warmly welcomed, we quickly became comfortable there.

Across the gravel road from the church the shell of a one room school house decayed on the crest of the hill. Socks and overalls hung now from clotheslines strung from its corners. Chickens found shade underneath during the days and spent the nights perched in pine trees that grew where the school's playground had last heard the laughter of children long ago. Rusting appliances framing the front door testified to human apathy and neglect.

In the ramshackle school house, a man and woman lived sad lives, and yet, the county had placed little Mary and Silas in the home to live with their aunt and uncle. The children seemed to them nothing more than a source of income. Mostly, the money for their support quenched their Uncle Johnny's thirst for liquor. The brother and sister lived an unruly and impoverished life, deprived of more than groceries or new shoes.

It came time for the annual children's Christmas Drama. The nice thing, my wife said, would be to ask Mary and Silas to come and take part. Furtive and distrustful, like wild creatures, everybody knew what they would do. Like the unholy Herdman kids they would come into church and grab fistfuls of cookies and cake. They'd stuff as much as they could get into their mouths and pockets, and then run off. Even though we knew they would not behave and would never participate, the caring thing would be to ask them, especially now when the other children in the community were so excited and full of anticipation.

It seemed a miracle. When asked, they came and they joined in. Mary was even chosen to play the starring role. She sat silently beside the manger, holding the Baby Jesus doll in her arms, lost in her own thoughts. Silas was a rumpled shepherd who appeared in my bathrobe, a towel wrapped around his head and a broomstick for a staff. He marched trimphantly up the center aisle toward the manger, his sister and the baby. In his eyes that night for the first time, we saw joy and hope.

On that cold December night, two small outcasts were welcomed in. They played parts in a story far greater than the sad script of their own bleak lives: a story of wonder and expectation and the promise of unconditional love.

Of all the little towns of Bethlehem that I've ever seen, that was the best Christmas Pageant Ever.

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I'm feeling a little guilty of too much attention to the grand-daughter and not enough to Tsuga for the last couple of days. So, seems the least I can do to use my borrowed tele-lens to get a portrait of the dog of the house. Soon, a picture of the people-puppy and Tsuga together. They are quite the duo!

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Is it fear or exhilaration that makes us in late December more keenly aware of tomorrow's weather? This is a concern, a self-interest that not all of our city friends can feel with us, nor do they entirely understand why we would put ourselves in such exposure to the vagaries of climate as we endure here at our own choice.

We heat with wood that we cut ourselves from our valley. We don't have air conditioning. We try to grow our own vegetables as the weather will allow. Our road becomes impassable in flood or blizzard. I suppose some would say we have romantic attachments to a simpler way of living. It is true we do find pleasure in adapting our rhythms to the season's vagaries. We are full-immersion types; a sprinkling of autumn or winter somehow doesn't seem efficacious in our relationship with the land.

But why, in this modern age, should the weather matter? With the exception of natural disasters, most Americans can control their comforts at the flip of a dial and give it not another thought. After all, isn't climate-independence a measure of our civilized victory over the elements and something we have worked long and hard to accomplish for our species?

In the same way that one suburb is unrecognizable from another with the homogenization of our neighborhoods, climate control takes the unpredictable extremes out of our personal weather. We travel and rest in constants and sneak glances of change out our window, perhaps, from time to time. No small wonder, then, that too many think too little of the threat of global climate change: it's the out-there weather, after all. Our season-free in-here bubble of constant comfort need not change.

The weather has become a reality show that has its own channel on television. I can't help but think that this kind of let-them-eat-cake meteorological snobbery and detachment from seasonal change may be part of the problem with our politicians who yet again have spurned international efforts to confront what is probably the single most important environmental issue of our time.

I fear it won't be long before they, too, will feel the heat.

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If someone could have sat very still unblinking in the cold dark Monday night, in a few hours they would have watched the metamorphosis of Goose Creek as it changed into its winter skin. And I would ask this determined someone "where does it begin?"

Does ice grow inward from the edges? Doe it build around jutting rocks, or start everywhere at once as if the White Witch suddenly cast a spell that turned loose liquid into solid crystal?

It is crystal, you know. As liquid water cools towards freezing, a new order takes over. Tiny hydrogens begin sticking to lumbering oxygen molecules in a new and very precise arrangement, one molecule fitting in just so in the growing lattice. A framework takes a six-sided shape in the perfect order that we see most clearly in the amazing shapes of snow flakes.

Water moves toward this crystalline state as the temperature falls towards zero and its molecules move slower and slower. As it cools towards zero, because of its precise laws of chemical partnership between these simple atoms of H and O--who would have thought?--it becomes less dense and expands! And so Goose Creek's frozen skin lifts above the usual water line, not below. Because of this universal feature of water, winter lakes and oceans don't ice up from bottom to top. How wonderfully convenient for aquatic life on earth!

If I had the discipline, the will, and enough hot coffee, I could see if for myself. I could be there next year on the first night that the creek freezes over to witness it form and flow toward me like cold lava of glacial ice--thicker, wider, white, then clear. It would be an education.

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We just had our first power outtage of the winter. My APS surge protection promised five minutes of battery backup. I got maybe 30 seconds (that's problem one).

Problem two--I can't figure. Firefox ver 1 didn't close properly with the power outtage. When we got our juice back, the browser window (only FireFox) has a bad case of the jitters (enough to make me seasick) and all my bookmarks are missing.

I've rebooted a couple of times--nada. I uninstalled and reinstalled a fresh copy of FF1. No help. There's somethin veery speecious happnin here, Luceee.

Any ideas what has been corrupted that isn't fixed with a fresh install? Doh.

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I suppose this gizmo is all over the TV station ads, which we miss (as in "don't see"...not as in "long to have seen") but I've heard it marketed on one my truck's radio stations. To someone like me who is very nasally-oriented, this thing sounded really interesting the first time as I listened. The name, ScentStories, made me think that somehow, music and scents or voice-stories and scents were somehow produced together in a multisensory and unique way. Neat idea! Then, when I learned it was a product by Febreze, the mystique vanished: the little "player" is a heater and fan arrangement that blows dryer paper scents into your room (no music, no stories)--five scents per special disk, for thirty minutes per fragrance.

Then one day a week or so after my first introduction to this novel smell-generator, I was perusing a magazine while proctoring an exam. There was the ScentStories ad as I turned the page and I was able to learn more about the aroma-player. It seemed a shame that there were only five or six scent disks available to use in the little machine. The world of smell is so rich and varied, so emotionally evocative and transporting. There really ought to be many more disks, and I got right to work on this important task before I left the classroom that day. Of course sitting there surrounded by first-semester students, my first thought was "what disk could I design that would evoke the ambience or memory of the college dorm experience?"

And thus, my first supplemental InDeScent Story was born. I think I will call it "Overnight in Dorm C". Eventually, I'll model my new disk on one like, oh, "Mountain Trail" that you can see demonstrated here. (You really must view the demo to understand my new disk!) I'll have sound effects just like the ones on the demo link to go along with each of the five aroma selections. Some day, my disk will be on the clickable menu between "Wandering along the Shore" and "Strolling Through the Garden." Just you wait. For now, here are the selected fragrances for "Dorm Room", first new disk:

Aroma One: A Hundred Dirty Socks. After all, how can you expect freshmen to spend time doing laundry when there are frat parties every night except Tuesday? Let'em pile up. There are better ways to do laundry! This aroma will connect you via olfactory memory to another fragrance: Locker Room, coming on a future disk!

Aroma Two: Puddles of Stale Beer. It accumulates under the bottom bunk where your room mate threw the half-full can that just missed your head. And your retaliatory can, half-empty, ended up under the dresser where the dirty sock collection is housed. That was Tuesday night, a week ago. (If you're really a nasal sophisticate, you can tell what brand of beer has gone stale in this aroma sample!)

Aroma Three: Regurgitant. Ah, the emetic experience. Traces of frat party excess will linger in the stairwell long after the pain of knee-walking to the porcelain bowl has passed, reminders of what a good time somebody told you you had. In this case, you'll note how strongly the scent brings you immediately back to the experience.

Diane Ackerman said it well: "Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a trip wire of smell and memories explode all at once."

Aroma Four: Burnt Popcorn. A guy has to eat. It is a vegetable, you know. And when everything you once had in your stomach now is either in the stairwell or the porcelain recepticle, well is there anything healthier-smelling than popcorn? (If the package says nuke for 2 minutes, five will be all the better!) The oily smoke saturated your clothes--even masking the smell of dirty socks--but it cannot do for you smell-wise what Aroma Five can do!

Aroma Five: The Lysol Solution. How can one indulge in the nostalgia of college dorm aromas without including this one! Remember? One tall can stayed in the bathroom you shared with your suitemates; its aroma was often experienced in olfactory medley with Aromas Two and Three. But perhaps the most signficant nasal memory will be of this piney product sprayed regularly on your dirty socks (Aroma One) and underwear (why not!?) Daily use reduced laundry visits to once a semester! What great memories--brought to you by InDeScent Stories--all the smells you wish you could forget.

Okay. Now, to brainstorm the sound clips for these aroma-scapes. Hmmm.

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The pattern appears because small branches or needles that lie by chance along the curve of lines concentric to the sun are especially illuminated. Is this a perceptive bias or is there an explanation of this from the physics of light? Why light about the circumference of the sun and not along its radians? Anyone?

In this certain kind of light you will see a pattern also in the spring after sap rises and growth begins. In that first warm light you can see the phototaxic turning toward the sun of myriad growing tips, giving the view a lilting, lifting quality not present in dormant winter twigs and branches.

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I read Wendell Berry's piece in Orion this week while my class was taking their exam. It so disturbed and challenged me that I know I pounded on the desk reflexively a couple of times. I am sure I must have muttered "Yes!" or "Amen!" audibly, and I wanted to stop them in their test-taking and tell them in Mr. Berry's words what I had tried in subtle ways to tell them all semester long: we are compromising our natural birthright for a pot of soup.

I determined before the exam was over that I would excerpt this essay at Fragments. While my students marked little black circles on their scoresheets, I marked all the simply worded, impeccably reasoned things the author said to me in the piece. And now that I am able to extract the best parts, I find there are few paragraphs unmarked. The pages are covered in thrice-circled sentences, exclamation marks and marginal notations. To excerpt from it could not possibly do justice to the message.

But it is my message, too. I cannot put it into words with Mr. Berry's eloquence and wisdom. But I see every day the consequences of the compromise of which he speaks. It makes me angry. It makes me very sad. And it makes me want to work harder in my own county to bring stewardship, not volume discounts. There is a culture war going on--at a strip mall or national forest near you. The author ends the piece saying "Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable." We can do better. We must. And against my own best advice, because I know not many will take the time to read the entire essay, I will offer a few bits for your consideration:

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be slaughtered all at once...

Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work...

There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify...

We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts...

As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them...

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I downloaded and used Google's desktop search utility for a couple of weeks. I uninstalled it a few days ago, unimpressed. I fell back on Lookout for mail and document search in combination with the File Finder that is part of the freeware PowerDesk software.

But I think I may have replaced them both in one fell swoop, today, with the download of Ask Jeeves Desktop search. I think these guys have the leg up on the competition--not that Ask Jeeves is nearly as broad or powerful as Google--but for three additions in their search utility that are missing from the others I've tried:

1) The tabbed interface lets me search on a term across files on my hard drive, but then select the tab that includes, for instance, only my image files. This is not unique, but is very clearly set out graphically.

2) A single click on each file in the results window brings up a preview of the file's content. In the case of images, it shows a thumbnail of the image along with file size and creation date.

3) and one really bright spot: the AJ Search becomes part of all search dialogues--obviously the time you really could use retrieval capabilities of something better than Word's File Open dialogue that only lets you chose from files visible in the folder but not across all folders. A little AJ window opens directly above the "file open" window and lets you type in your terms to find the file wherever it is on your hard drive. Very Clever!

I don't like it that it will not open a web link in FireFox--MSIE only for now. There are a few other little irritants, but hey--it's only in beta--and I read that bigger things are planned for the near future.

This also is a tight program (only about 700k, I think.) It did a fast index of my hard drive in less than five minutes.

I think this one might be a keeper! Review / Download

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I've handed in my final grades to the registrar. In the end, the "curve" was flat, with about equal numbers of scores in each grade rank. After "curving". And so my students did okay this semester, grade-wise. Or did they?

If you set the standards of expectations for a course at a level that, based on your experience, reflects average competencies for an average student, I've argued that should be the firm level of the bar. I told my class as much when they expressed their shock at the poor class performance after the first test. "It's not fair to you to lower my standards when those standards come from the real world you will face with your education in four years."

Have I violated my own principles by artificially inflating the grades so that a third of these first-semester freshmen non-majors wouldn't flunk my class? I can argue both sides of this conundrum. And did. And eventually "scaled" the outcome. I had my reasons, but I'm not entirely comfortable with the decision.

Have I devalued the worth of "excellence" in some way similar to the "awards" post above that cheapens the word "freedom?" Have I invalidated the award of grades "above average" by lowering the average to bring an artificial success to the many?

There is no solace in the fact that performance below standards was universal across the dozen sections and half dozen teachers for this same course.

I do know that the equation will be different next term with my Anatomy and Physiology class.

They are not dumbfounded freshmen. They have chosen their healthcare related professional paths and should have some sense of the importance of this class to their ultimate future. And their ignorance of the subject matter (especially for the nursing students) can literally have deadly consequences.

I know where to set the bar. It is almost certain to be fixed regardless of performance. I will do my very best to bring them all up to my real-world expectations. It is not likely to be an easy task.

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Medal of Freedom? For SHAME! Freedom? What have our language and our virtues (remember honesty? integrity? humility?) come to?

"Sometimes the medals are intended more to flatter the giver than to honor the recipient. The medal Bush gave this week to former CIA Director George Tenet — along with others given to retired Gen. Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer, administrator of the U.S. occupation — does neither.

Everyone makes a mistake from time to time, sometimes a catastrophic one. Most don't expect to get a medal for it." Houston Chronicle

Keep the medal. Change the Name. Let's call it The "Medal of Loyalty". Or, let's add a New Virtue for the New Century.

Nah. The "Medal of Obsequiousness" is just too hard to say.

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So he tells me. Photographically speaking, of course. His lenses are way longer than mine. Now he's got a gigapixel Canon EOS HyperDrive Mach VIII that I'll get to take a look at today. It will take an image big enough to spread out across the downtown section of Floyd. He also has the printer equal to the task.

Sure, I understand that a photograph is a representative sample of reality. But hey: a few more generations of biggie-sizing digital CCDs, and... well, let's just say it puts me to mind of this quip:

Lewis Carroll, in Sylvia and Bruno (1889), made a somewhat related point (re "the map is not the territory") humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character in the story notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

Hmmmm. Life-sized landscape panoramas. Would they sell? Whaddaya think, Douglas?

And oh, when you visit DougThompson.com today, read his tribute to a quarter-century of marriage and wish him and Amy a very happy 25th.

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Okay. I'm out of my medium here on this one. I defer to those with more current IT experience.

Though I was an early adopter of ICQ in 1996, I've not needed instant messaging for quite a few years. Well let's face it: I just didn't have any kin or friends geeky enough to bounce these little messages off of. And I sure don't want to go looking at random for buddies. How desparate is that!

Just prior to discovering blogging, I gave ICQ another look and it was populated with spammers and worse. All I didn't need was IM-SPAM and IM-P_RN. I thought surely there must be a community in cyberspace worth getting to know; and I found you nice folks! But now I need to use an instant messenger as a means of communication with my upcoming class.

I have had AIM recommended to me by someone at the univ that uses it with his students. So, after uploading and getting it set up, it seems you can't send a message unless someone on your list is online. Pooh. With ICQ, after you created your "buddy list" you could send messages regardless. If they weren't online, your message popped up as soon as they logged on. THis is a very desirable feature from my perspective. So...

Other than ICQ, are there other IM's that will allow offline messages? Which of these IM's would you use for this purpose, and what are the strong suits of some you have found useful? I'd sure appreciate the benefit of your experience before I randomly sign up in ignorance.

Teach this chronologically-gifted canine some new tricks. Arf!

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Or, "What I Did (and Wish I Hadn't) on My Christmas Vacation"

Ah yes! My first day since August to be home on a Monday. For the first time since 1987, the phrase "Christmas Break" had such a sweet sound this morning as I laid out my day: write a few personal emails; tinker a while with some images for the March presentation; finish the next piece for the local paper; and ponder a blog post or two.

But no. This is not the way it has gone. It is ten o'clock and the past two hours have been a trial of unspeakable carnage. And not even fresh carnage.

You may remember the tale of the illegally-shot deer the week of Thanksgiving. Only a few days later we discovered to our horror that there was a very dead deer up the valley, wedged under a root along the edge of Nameless Creek. We had to drag the dog off it every time we made the loop, and we tend to walk this path several times a day. Ann noticed (while its deerlike form was still recognizable as such) that it had two empty places on the top of its skull.

Well, that solves the mystery. It was shot by someone not far from where it lay submerged in the creek. Whoever this was, clearly trespassing in the middle of our property within sight of the house, had killed the deer, removed the antlers and shoved its carcass into the creek. It was not his problem any more. He had proof of his manhood and skulked back across our fence at the top of the ridge. We, however, were left with a deteriorating problem of some considerable mass: about 120 pounds of rotting flesh, to be disgustingly precise.

Me, I would have been content to simply ignore it and let nature dismember the thing over the winter. Ann, on the other hand, has had this idea all along that we needed to relocate it so she could take her essential walks without the dog getting in it. The imperatives "should, ought and must" increasingly peppered her pronouncements of how the problem would be dealt with. I managed to divert the conversation, or ignore her, or outright refuse--until today. After 34 years, I've learned when to just do it.

A stern wind bent the trees on the ridges. The wind would make it a misery to be wet, and there was no way we could stay dry in this gruesome task. We set off, grumbling man and twittering wife, with a length of rope, two pine planks, and two pair of rubber gloves.

The stench of decay hung over the creek. Ann slipped the rope around its neck and the truck pulled the thing up into the pasture. But the bloated carcass did not simply pull apart like an overbaked ham, as SHE anticipated. I'll spare you the details. We got the grisly job done.

And now, back at the computer again, I don't seem to have my earlier zeal or inspiration. Can't imagine why.

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We have lead a pay-as-you-go style of living for more than thirty years of our married life. While we have stayed out of debt, we've put proportionally quite a bit into this house and land. What savings we had for our post-retirement years is less than we'd need, and even that is smaller than it was by half since the investment bubble popped a few years ago.

So now, we're faced with a decision: can we afford to give up full development value on our property by putting it under conservation easement? It seems the right thing to do as stewards of the land in a county quickly being fragmented by development. Will we have enough to live on without selling the place we hope to live out our lives?

Until November, we were planning to go ahead with the easement, trusting that social security would be there to provide for basic needs when our income stream dries up. We no longer harbor that trust. The future of Social Security was already bleak four years ago. This "Trojan Horse" of privitization put forth by the current administration gives me a queasy feeling, reminding me of the kind of deception a Senior Someone ten years ago spoke of as "blue smoke and mirrors."

I'm meeting with a CPA this week to help us decide: can we make it through our actuarial lifetimes without expecting to get back all or most of what our working years have contributed? Can we afford to protect our land from becoming a future commodity? It may be about the only card we have to play.

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Nights grow longer. The shortest day of solstice is a week away. The insipid sun will sink its lowest in the southern sky, barely lifting above the open notch at the end of the valley. I will watch it settle through the trees on the western ridge before two o'clock, its light scattered, cold and broken. And our dusk begins.

We are blessed with an abundance of clear creek water, unbreathed air and serenity here in this hollow. We do suffer a bit, though, from want of sun in the winter months. I feel it settle in--the pale, chronic anemia of a colorless season ahead.

How often I've walked our valley on the gaunt, gray days of January, longing for color as if it were a vital nutrient missing since October leaves. The barn's faded red roof and the vital green of algae on its north side stop me in my tracks. I remember the full pallette of color, the full warm sun.

To everything there is a season.

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I didn't sleep well. Ann rarely does, last night less well perhaps than usual. I blame my nocturnal oppression on angst molecules that wafted across the demilitarized zone in the middle of the bed. I lay there with my wheels spinning along with hers. The world was painted black.

The last thing before bed, we discovered that, as they say, there's no accounting for taste. Especially if you're a dog. We watched Tsuga eating the gold tinsel off the newly-decorated tree. We laughed in the light. In the dark, I worried about long strands of undigestable plastic bypassing the gastric acids in a dog's stomach. All he wants for Christmas is an intestinal impaction. Sheesh. (Fluff pillow, adjust covers, listen to the sleeping dog wheeze.)

The tasks ahead of me in the next month, at midnight, seemed overwhelming. There was no way humanly possible that I was equal to the job. In the futile trudging through the Slough of Despair, I could find no starting place, gain no traction to begin to tackle the details--I suffered semi-conscious Sisyphusian nightmares of failure and futility til the alarm went off at 4:00. (Try stomach sleeping; focus on breathing nice round breaths; contract-relax muscles.)

And lying over all this like a dense fog of mustard gas over the trenches on the Western Front was the weight of a question I ran across not long before bed: "What idea, if embraced, would cause the greatest threat to mankind?" (Sit up on side of bed; massage neck; consider just getting up and plugging in the coffee. Crap. It's just 2:45.)

I mulled over that question at a surface level and arrived at an opinion, if not exactly an answer for the question as worded. Anyhow, my 'greatest risk' response was "unlimited technological control over matter and energy in an amoral environment." And yes, that answer came out of other ponderings and reading during the day, about which perhaps I will post in the next day or so. This deals with an issue not imaginary, not temporary and not trivial--and most definitely a great potential risk.

But I'm awake now (if groggy from lack of sleep) and things don't look quite so bleak. I've already made some progress this morning in moving the immovable objects I stressed about all night. But I have an idea I'll be taking some cat-naps during the day to catch up on what I missed overnight--and maybe, some sweet dreams for a change.

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I have never been a spreadsheet kind of a guy. Until this semester of teaching--my first in the age of computers--I've never found a reason to use a spreadsheet. I always thought I needed to understand how to use Excel, but every excuse for using it turned out being more trouble than it was worth--until I needed to chart the scores for a couple of dozen assignments and tests for seventy students.

Now, at the end of the semester, I need some help computing final grades. I have a column that was calculated by an equation. Now when I attempt to include that column in an equation for a later calculation, the number that is picked up for a given cell in the column is NOT the number computed in the equation. I'll say no more here (yawn...) but if there are those among you who can answer a simple question that I will gladly elaborate on via email, give me a holler. I'm determined to solve this problem so I will know the answer when it crops up again. Thanks!

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A colleague kindly offered to share links to his online syllabus and course content as I begin to explore different approaches to the coming Anatomy and Physiology class next term.

When I followed the links in his email, I got "404: Page not found" errors, and wrote him to tell him so. He replied back soon saying sorry, he had failed to include one character in the address and that is why it failed.

I saw him later in the copy room as I ran off my final exams. "It was the tilde. I forgot that stupid little character. Where the heck did that little squiggle come from, anyway" he wondered.

"That's a good question. It resembles the marking over some Spanish words. But it isn't in a superscript position. It's where a dash should be, only it wiggles."

I told him I'd be curious to know if he came up with answers. This morning, I think I have found it myself. Here.

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Oh good. It's Friday: the "casual day" in the blogging week. The day we wear our jeans and cowboy boots at the keyboard and just say what's on our mind without the usual slight attention to how words or ideas look on the page, how they fit together. Friday is come-as-you-are blogging at Fragments. A day to drink too much coffee. I'm well on my way there already.

Last night between one and two, I was groping my way into the necessary room when suddenly, everything flashed blue-white. It must be coming from outside, I thought, though in truth, my first reaction was the horror "you just had a stroke!" Then the reassuring thunder reverberated down the valley in the dark. Lightening in December. I think the almanac-inclined have a theory that, for every peal of thunder in December there will be X inches of snow in January. That's good. Only thundered once.

I was pleased with the first newspaper column that came out yesterday. I'm calling it "A Road Less Traveled." Cliche, I know. I struggled with this a bit. But it seems to suit: it describes where we live so far from things; it fits Floyd County, both for its place on the geographic borders of the bustle in the Valley of the Interstates not far away and for the unique flair and mix of its citizens; and finally, perhaps, it describes some of the off-center ways I look at and write about things. Anywho, the piece was nicely laid out. There was a separate long column for a bio (Local Resident Begins Column) and the same little picture that appears on the blog is part of the header for the column that will run every other week.

Today: the last day of class. What a bitter-sweet semester it has been. I've said very little about the experience, at least when compared to the constant private ruminations that have not ceased since the first day of class. How might I measure success in the classroom? Not by the slope and center of the grade scale, certainly. Not by the meaningful dialogue and exchange that (never) happened in class. Not by the academic maturity evident in my students from start to finish in the semester. I will confess, I can't draw much evidence from any external signs that my words have made any difference at all. But neither can a gardener know, on sowing seeds, that some day with warmth and water and invisible chemistry, fruits will appear. I've scattered and watered, weeded and fertilized. Now grow, you little plants. Grow!

Okay. Coffee is all gone. For those who've waded this far with today's ramble, I'll send you to the newest Fragments image gallery. There won't be many (if any) images you haven't seen here. But it might be worthwhile to see them a little larger and all together. Y'all have a good weekend.

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A Malaysian tanker may be breaking up at this moment on an environmentally sensitive island off the Alaskan coast. The cost to that island's ecology could be devastating. If there were more time in the semester, we could talk about this real-time event in our discussion of the "costs" side of the equation in our continuing dependence on fossil fuels. If I had it to do over again, we would begin every class with a 'current event'. I would make them responsible for supplying the material at least some of the time. Frankly, I've enjoyed having a reason to attend to environmental current events this semester--for my own sake, mostly; might be that a few things we've discussed have made it through the freshman fog.

That class is over. Anatomy and physiology looms less than a month away. So now, my news clipping and web browsing will be searching for items related to human biology. Having been immersed so deeply since August in ecology whose subject matter ranges so widely, I will find it hard, at least at first, to restrict my attention to only one organism. Looking ahead while my feet are still planted in the study of the biosphere, the human body seems a microcosm of integrated systems no less marvelous or complex than an estuary, rain forest or Arctic refuge. I will become enthusiastic in the new topic matter, but it will take a couple of weeks to gain momentum and confidence in this new direction. But..

I've started my human biology links file for the coming semester. Here's one:

Seems it might not be only chestnuts that are roasting. Laptop computers can raise testicular temperatures to a dangerous level, decreasing sperm count and reducing the odds that the laptop user can father children. That should get their attention. Ya think?

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Situated at the far western tip of Floyd County, the old mill is the most photographed spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway. About two million visitors pass this way each year; and most of them stop.

Almost all of the pictures of Mabry Mill that you might see will show it in full sun and in the months between April and October. The grass will be green, the sky will be blue, the water a bright mirror. But not my first and only mill photos!

When I drove by on Tuesday of this week, even though it was miserably foggy and the wind was driving a heavy mist hard against my windows, I pulled in. Mine was the only car in the parking lot. The weather outside only a duck could love, but I couldn't complain about the crowd. I put on my jacket and pulled my cap down hard to keep it from blowing into the mill pond.

The tripod was barely able to hold the camera steady against the wind for a thirtieth-second exposure. I got two shots--this portrait view and a landscape--before water drops on the lens began to appear through my viewfinder. I gave up fighting the wind and the sideways rain and brought my two images home.

What developed from the two images is a gothic sort of effect, really. But this moody view pleases me. We lived in just this kind of ambience at the edge of the world in a cabin on the parkway for more than two years before moving to Goose Creek. I am no stranger to fog. It cuts you off from sight and sound, strips away color and depth. The wet-white air isolates a lonely soul inside their own thoughts in a way bright sunshine cannot do. One day of fog, maybe two is mysterious, enchanting; a week of it, a form of sensory deprivation that can move a mind into melancholy or despair.

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Yesterday's business-related trip down the Parkway yielded but two of the images I had hoped to bring back from the excursion. When I left the house for this trip, patches of blue had been showing through low clouds. But when I reached the Parkway twenty miles south, it lay in that Other World: the wind howled, blowing mist sizzled against the windshield and a angry cloud rampaged across the ridgetop. When I pulled off to take the image above, I couldn't get the door open against the wind, so I snapped this one through the window.

Tomorrow I'll post the most cliched photo-subject in all of Floyd County that came from yesterday's trip. After living here for seven years, I guess I must have my own rendition of the--well, those who live around here can anticipate what tomorrow's Fragments picture will show.

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We have this year's tree up as of yesterday, and we are still married.

It's not the tree that comes between us. Especially not now, since I'm no longer grousing about the $40 we used to pay to have an amputated tree shedding needles in our house for a month. Amputated no less, our recent trees have come for free from the unkempt hillside behind the house. And as usual, the chief criteria for selection is "Look. It's pitiful. Oh, I feel sorry for this one." We begin our selection process in January. The little trash pines that get worse as the year goes on move higher on our list. We have gone so far in our Culling of the Tree to select two of them--with bare spots on opposite sides--and wire them together. After all, tinsel, twinkling lights and our shabby collection of macaroni ornaments can cover a multitude of sins.

The source of dread and of my scrouginess on the day of fetching home the tree I have blamed on the Cursed Tree Stand of Doom. It is an object familiar if loathed in our family's history of Christmases past. Perhaps one day long, long ago, its red base and green appendages simply fit together, stayed together and bore the tree both plumb and steady. But somewhere along its 34 year lifetime, it became twisted and evil. And now, the very sight of it gives me prickly heat. It represents almost three dozen Cursings of the Tree and as many moments of unquietude and brief bouts of hostility on a day that should, in a world free of evil inanimate objects, be a day of celebration and warm family fuzzies.

I have taken a Spokian perspective on my predictable grumpiness regarding this annually recurrent issue. While it is true that the tree we select is never straight and hence has a center of gravity out near the end of the longest branch is not the reason for our day of disharmony. (We solve this problem with liberal use of folded newspaper under one or more legs, and have even gone so far as to nail the sucker to the wall as a reasonable accommodation for the tree's disfigured form.) Nor is the central problem the fact that the entire Orwellian-looking three-legged beast is covered entirely in the sticky ooze of thirty-four fallen pines--an aesthetic flaw we are willing to cover, in the end, with a sheet and perky red flannel tree bib. (The sap-ooze issue is especially pernicious when it comes to the gummed-up L-shaped screws--one of which is usually missing when the tree stand is finally located in storage, all of which will twist only with vice-grips, so corroded with the resin of the ages are they. And the fact that two of the three are also bent and the treads are stripped on one of them doesn't help one bit, though it does contribute significantly to the customary expletives now associated with the event.)

Also ruled out: the fact that She always selects the wettest, coldest day of the season yet as THE DAY for getting the tree; not the fact that her eyeballed "vertical" is without fail some 20 degrees off plumb; not the "told you so" recriminations after the trunk is cut too short, or the tippy-top is too tall for the angel because SOMEONE insisted the trunk was just right. It's not the sap on the pants or needles down the sweatshirt; not the first falling over when the dog walks under the lowest branches I insisted should have been cut off in the first place. No, none of this is the source of conflict centered around this red and green, well-worn, cantankerous and malevolent tree stand I blame for my curmudgeonry. In the end, the problem arises because putting up the tree is a two-person job that insists on cooperation like few other things we do together all year long.

She has her way. I have mine. She frets about the details. I have a bigger hammer. Somehow, for thirty four years, in spite of all our differences; in spite of pine sap, cold rain and the dreaded tree stand, the tree goes up. Not straight up maybe, but up. After the holidays, it is still standing, less a few needles. And so are we.

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"The day is my model. But in my case, the model can't come back tomorrow. I want to make models of every individual day and treat it in a very personal way as time progresses through my own life."

So says rural landscape painter Harry Orlyk who paints every day from ordinary places, farms mostly, close to home. You can see some of his work here. And hear him speak about his calling to paint, here.

"A quarter century of painting has been an act of the imagination to determine who and what I am with respect to the earth and sky. Process, rather than product oriented, searching for the daily painting, has become a way of living in relationship with the earth. To become a human being, a part of nature rather than someone separate observing it from the outside, like hunter-gathers, I am led from one opportunity to the next, being directed by seasonal stages. The relationship has become the trust I give it to show me where my next painting will be. Each painting entails facing a swath of creation and observing something of its story, becomes a long log of small truths." bio

The beauty of the ordinary, the marvel of light, the precious passing of a day. For this painter, it has become a life's work--to seek it out, to record the detail, to share.

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It happens this time of year. Image archives at 300 in September went up with the autumn foliage to 400 in October, then dropped to fewer than 100 images come the bleakness of November. Soon, there will be frost, ice and snow and there will be a photographic surge with the novelty of winter. But November is a neither-nor month. The camera sits idle. There is not much for the eye to settle on in a flat gray landscape.

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This semester of biology class has had far less (apparent) impact on the students than I hoped for. Their instructor, on the other hand, has been forced to look long and deep (after years of denial) at the looming biological and societal issues and decisions that must be dealt with by these young people and by my children and grandchildren in the coming decades. It has been a sobering study.

If there were more time in the term, I would use this excellent NRDC piece on urban sprawl to bring together many of the issues of biology and environment we have touched on this semester. So many individual and collective matters of land use and human population biology come to focus in how we design our cities, our economies, decide how and where we live in relation to each other and to nature. Our individual 'environmental footprint' is largely described by the kind of community we live in, the kind of places we build for ourselves.

This piece has so many pertinent and disturbing statistics--about cropland loss, urban air and water pollution, the ugliness of "tragic suburban boulevards of commerce" and other related issues--that it is impossible for me to do more this morning that snip some early paragraphs (below). I hope you'll read it all. Print it and give it to an apathetic young person for Christmas. Ask them to become part of the solution.

"While the United States continues to enjoy the appearance of abundant farmland, the best of that land is being lost at an amazing rate. At the conclusion of exhaustive research on the subject, the American Farmland Trust has reported that from 1982 to 1992 we lost to urban and suburban development an average of 400,000 acres per year of "prime" farmland, the land with the best soils and climate for growing crops. This translates to a loss of 45.7 acres per hour, every single day...

To make matters worse, there is an unfortunate congruence between that land most suited and productive for farming and that land most in danger of urban encroachment. As Professor Reid Ewing has put it, the "lands most suitable for growing crops also tend to be most suitable for 'growing houses.'" This is because inland urban settlements in the United States have tended to situate in river valleys and other fertile areas that are also highly productive for farming.

Perhaps as a result, most of the country's prime farmland is located within the suburban and exurban counties of metropolitan areas. Such "urban-influenced" counties currently produce more than half the total value of U.S. farm production; their average annual production value per acre is some 2.7 times that of other U.S. counties. Yet, ominously, their population growth is also disproportionately high, over twice the national average. Those counties with prime and unique farmland found to be threatened by particularly high rates of current development collectively produce some 79 percent of our nation's fruit, 69 percent of our vegetables, 52 percent of our dairy products, and over one-fourth of our meat and grains. Among the farming regions most seriously endangered by sprawl are California's Central Valley, the Northern Piedmont near Washington, DC and Baltimore, and the Northern Illinois Drift Plain near Chicago."

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The semester comes to a close this week, and thus ends my 15 week stint on the vaudeville stage. And I shouldn't quit my day job. My attempts at humor, irony and pun has consistently taken the pratfall with the 18-year-old crowd. Case in point:

One of our recent labs used brine shrimp (a little crustacean called Artemia) to study effects of salinity on survival. In the usual manner, at the start of the lab, I discussed what we were going to do and why and how. This particular week I was giving them some background on these organisms, which in my day were called Sea Monkeys; they were widely promoted as family pets inside the front cover in lots of comic books in the 1950s and 60s. (A few of you will remember.)

I told the class that day in longing, wistful tones how often I'd wished I had my own family of Sea Monkeys. The little creatures seemed so happy and the ads told about how playful and mischievous they were. How I envied those kids who became friends with the Poppa and Momma, little sister and brother Sea Monkeys. They seemed so happy, so convivial (though I would have been more comfortable with them if they'd been wearing some clothes.) I just knew that they would like me.

Then, just that morning before lab (as I told the tale) I had looked through the microscope for the first time at actual, living Sea Monkeys.

"You can imagine my dismay when I discovered today that they don't have little faces and as I watched them, they didn't seem to know or care that I existed. I feel so disillusioned, so disappointed."

No one smiled. They looked at each other and squirmed in their seats. They felt my pain. They pitied me. BaDaBang.

(Do read the text of the ads here and here to appreciate the truth-in-advertising disaster these portrayals really were! "They play tag, they scratch each other's backs, they respond to your commands and do tricks for you!")

Link to Sea Monkey ads from Exclamation Mark

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It has been more than a week since two of the six presets on my truck radio went to All Christmas All The Time. No, strike that. Not Christmas. Giftmas.

I've sampled these channels off and on now in a week of driving. I can tell you with confidence: you will not hear the first carol. In the unbroken stream of jingling bells you'll hear no mention of the manger or Jesu or the King of Kings. There will be no hint that the holy day once the reason for the season was about something called the incarnation or advent, that it had something to do with God's miraculous entry into human history.

Don't expect to hear Handel's Messiah, either--only hallelujahs and homage to the holy season of Santa in all his many jolly incarnations. You can hear about mommy kissing him, hear a sultry young lady crooning for him to come on down her chimney tonight, listen as a lisping child implores the giver of good gifts to bring two missing incisors; and please, daddy, don't get drunk this Christmas. Santa's flying deer get plenty of air time, too, of course. And snow and sleighs, chestnuts and tinsel, lights and bells and cheer and expectation.

Not that I would wish away visions of sugar plums in this time when, despite the shifted center of the holiday, at least we temporarily harbor warm feelings towards family and who knows! we might even make eye contact with complete strangers once or twice before the end of the month.

But my radio station's king is Santa Omnipotent; his elves bring us cheer, fuzzy family feelings and hope. I hear over and over that Santa's kingdom has come. His songs implore us to sacrifice here in this special time of year when we carry our offerings of gold, MasterCard and VISA to lay at the feet of the national economy.

The gift-buying Musak burrows its way deep into my subconscious and I risk becoming a borg of Giftmas. My shopping mall procrastinations are held before me like the ghost of Giftmas past, and over and over the bells and the voices of tiny children and singing chipmunks cheer me on to spend more and spend soon! We can hardly stand the wait, Oh Giftmas, don't be late!

This rant began to bubble up as I drove home yesterday--with the radio turned off, of course. A blog post was brewing. The bottom line: I detest being the object of a marketing blitz; and I remember: Christmas used to be different.

Then, last night a fellow by the name of John Boykin nailed this perspective on the unholiday in a three minute NPR radio essay. So I might as well hush. If you feel my dis-ease in the tiniest way, you should listen to his thoughts. Boykin, a Christian, recommends we take Christ out of Christmas. Yep, that's right. As he points out, Christ asked us to remember his life and events at the end of his time on earth, not his birth. And besides, he did not come to be "the patron saint of fourth quarter earnings."

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Maybe it has to do with the fact that, in the Deep South where I grew up, the only clear water I ever saw came out of the tap to fill the bathtub. Any other water had both body and color: the greens of warm ponds and fertile lakes; the thick browns and reds of river water moving over Alabama clay. Clear water dazzled me. The cold creeks of the mountains to my young eyes looked like liquid crystal. It still does.

Ann saw this picture and scolded me for "doctoring" the water. Not so, I told her. The only thing my camera did to change its usual appearance was to stop it cold--at a blink, a thousandth of a second. You can see here what the eye unaided cannot see: the braided flow of a thousand strands of current; the froth and flux of aerated water bubbling like champagne.

I hear the creek from the front porch this morning in the dark, its surf crashing over cataracts of rock that plunges it under, sends it leaping, gives it voice.

The impeded stream is the one that sings-- Wendell Berry via Via Negativa.

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Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight. -- Thomas Hardy

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Two years ago November, the blog was six months old. The personal identity of being a writer was emerging from the habit of sitting down the keyboard and the empty slate of white screen and simply writing every day--"without hope and without despair." Still, when I recorded that first essay at the radio station in November of 2002, it was with an uneasy sense of pretense that I asked for my byline to say I was a "writer and photographer living in Floyd County." I legitimized this by acknowledging that I wasn't claiming to be a certain quality of writer, not good or successful--only that I would allow myself to take the verb for what I had been doing early every morning for six months and ascribe it to myself. One who hunts, even if he comes home from the woods with nothing, is a hunter. And in this way, I was a writer. The weblog was evidence I took that daily walk, hunting for words.

Being a writer simply means acting on the impulse to say what you think and feel. All of us are writers. Those who may claim the name are merely the ones who translate their memories, fantasies, fears and perplexities into word-images that others share. We are not all skilled and gifted writers, and I have no illusions of being such myself. But great writing exists, perhaps, for the nonfiction writer in finding that genuine voice that tells the true story of their thoughts. Success in writing is an internal good and it is rarely rewarded in the larger world. Wouldn't you agree that most writers do not write to eat, do not write for praise? Necessity and mere ambition make an ugly muse.

We are all writers because we each have a different story to tell. We may not all be bouncy-bouncy fun-fun-fun, but like Tigger, each of us is the only one! We all have a story and are inherently interested in the unique, personal accounts of others. Just look at the popularity of "reality" TV. (No, on second thought, don't look.) Weblogs have given some word-hunters like me the purpose, the accountability and the audience for their stories. And these "fragments" of daily life that I write--about the dog, the creeks, the garden and travel through midlife--each show, for better or worse, some small truth about this one-of-a-kind life. Taken together, the inconsequential details--a memory, an insight, a hope revealed--weave the fabric that is uniquely each of us.

I wish I had a dime for everyone I've spoken with in the past two years who has said "I always thought someday I would like to write about (my life, this or that adventure, some special person.)" And I encourage them to start with the same simple mission someone offered me two years ago: write every day; write from the heart; write what you know. You might be surprised where it takes you.

The weblog began as a personal journal, but from the beginning, there was the ultimate hope of connecting to others--to gain some sense of community, even living as isolated as we do in rural Virginia. Over the months, readers have visited Fragments from Floyd from all over the world, but just a few of them have come from my home state, fewer still from my neighborhood. This week I was invited to contribute a twice-a-month column for the local paper, the Floyd Press. So now, I will meet my readers in the library, pass them on the street, sit at the next table at Oddfellas. Who would have thought words from a remote and quiet place could find their way to so many homes and connect mine to so many other lives?

Your kindness and encouragement in the last two years, dear Fragments readers, gives me a certain peace in this new medium of local print. The rapport and community that has grown from our daily conversation in the weblog encourages me to trust my own best advice now: tell your story in your authentic voice; do the best job you can to make the reader hear and feel what you do; have a thick skin; and grow with the opportunity.

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This report from Fox News throws a kinder light on the avian flu potential, but also supposes the new outbreak will be modeled on previous 'relatively mild' outbreaks. This, perhaps, is not warranted.

"The models are sobering. For example, Longini's earlier work shows that if a flu outbreak were like the relatively mild 1957 Asian flu virus, it would infect 93 million Americans and cause 164,000 U.S. deaths.

Would a bird flu outbreak be worse? Probably. But Longini says it's highly unlikely that a bird flu would be as deadly as some people fear.

"Based on past experience, we don't have to panic," Longini tells WebMD. "It's clear that pandemic flu is inevitable. It is going to happen, and it could be a fairly pathogenic strain and could be a real problem. Right now, H5N1 bird influenza looks like it is fatal in 70 percent of cases. But this 70 percent figure is totally absurd. It has never been true of any human flu strain. I have never seen any evidence that human influenza is anywhere near that virulent. Case fatality of even highly virulent strains are a couple of deaths per 10,000 people infected."

And yet, of the 40 some-odd people to be infected with H5N1, 70% have died. Past experience does not include H5N1's history of crossing species lines so easily. I don't know how Mr. Longini can determine that current mortality was a biased sample and not representative of the virus should it spread more widely in humans.

It's also likely that human-to-human bird flu infections would spread slowly, at least at first. That would buy time. And since the bird flu bug is sensitive to Tamiflu, an oral flu drug, public health officials could buy even more time by giving the drug to all contacts of infected people.

"With good surveillance, with antivirals, and easy-to-implement public health methods — strategies such as closing schools and public places and limiting movement — we should be able to contain the pandemic at the source, wherever that may be," Longini says. "That would buy time to make vaccine to deal with it if it should spread. Emphasis should be on good surveillance everywhere, especially in Southeast Asia, and quick response with targeted use of antivirals."

When we learned the regular flu vaccine was going to be in short supply this year, Ann and I asked our MD to write a script for Tamiflu, which we keep on hand, just in case. While it won't prevent the disease, it does seem to ameliorate the seriousness (lethality?) of flu, and hopefully by this account, this includes bird flu. Might not be a bad idea to keep some on hand.

Late breaking addendum: Suspected case of bird flu lands in France

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I clearly remember standing at the podium in a biology classroom in 1981 telling my biology class about a new and disturbing viral disease that attacked the immune system. In some populations it was highly infectious and there were no known cures present or forseen. I told those students I had a bad feeling about this newly-described disease, thought previously to be limited to African Green Monkeys. Six months later, the evening news had given it a name: Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome--AIDS. Thousands might die, they said.

This morning I had a terrible sense of deja vu. I pulled up a web page to show my class via the overhead projector. "This looks like a biological problem with the terrible potential of AIDS, but could spread much more quickly" I told them. Then we used this to talk about antivirals, antibiotics and prevention, epidemiology and population issues related to modern health concerns--like this one.

Avian influenza has been around for some years. In fact, man is a secondary host for all the influenza viruses, birds the first host. But there is a relatively new strain that grows more lethal by the day. The H5N1 variant, once limited to chickens and predominately in Asia has recently spread to domestic ducks. In the ducks, it produces no symptoms so farmers don't know which birds to cull. When infected ducks were fed to tigers in a Thailand zoo, 120 of them died or had to be killed; usually, avian flu doesn't infect non-birds. This one does. It has also apparently been found in wild birds, increasing the potential for spread.

There have only been a small number of transmisions from ducks or chickens to humans--so far. Recently there was also at least one case of transmission from human to human. We should expect that, if it's not common now, human to human infection could be widespread soon: unfortunately this viral variant readily picks up genes from other viruses. Once a human or other animal is infected with both viruses (H5N1 and a flu type that already infects from human to human) the possibility of recombinant forms exists. Indeed, the experts are predicting that it is only a matter of time before this happens--a case of when, not if.

I see the potential mortality figure of 100 million deaths world-wide more frequently this week and coming from increasingly credible sources like the World Health Organization. Others feel WHO's figures are far too conservative and have projected up to a billion infections. Let's hope they are way wrong.

We've heard some overstated warnings about things like SARS in the past years. But the sheer lethality of H5N1 Bird Flu throws it into a more grave realm of concern: SARS mortality was 15%; this bird flu strain is closer to 70%. The H5 subtypes are new to the human immune system, so we have no natural immunity to it. Worse, H5N1 sets off a strong over-reaction of the immune system, and this effect kills healthy victims, not just very young, old or compromised.

I will follow this with great concern over the coming months, via the WHO, CDC and OSHA links. Other reliable links you might find would be appreciated.

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When I drive my old beat-up stick-shift truck, I know I will never make the light at the top of the hill on Jefferson near campus--a fact I anticipate with dread. Having to start up on an incline, there is never any doubt that I will go through the same obsessive-compulsive rechecking of the gear shift to make absolutely, positively certain that somehow it hasn't slipped mysteriously out of first gear. I check it, and I recheck it again. Try as I might to just leave it be, I must be sure. And I can tell you exactly how and when this odd habit began.

I was fifteen. I had recently gotten my learner's permit, and at every opportunity, I grabbed the keys to the car--a VW Beetle. On this particular drive, it was tax season. My father was a CPA and mom helped. That meant eating out almost every night, since my family's center shifted in March and April from home and meal preparation to work and tax preparation. My mother, brother and I were on our way from Crestwood to our favorite diner in Woodlawn. Mills Restaurant, the painted sign said: nothing fancy, nothing expensive; home cooking, served with a smile by our waitress, Ruth, who saved "our table" in her section for us, knew how sweet we wanted our sweet tea with extra lemon, and saved us a slice of our favorite pie if they were running out before we got there.

The railroad tracks crossed 56th street on the edge of Woodlawn. Back in those days, there were always trains--often long--and we had to wait a few minutes for this one to pass. I was first in line at the top of a moderate rise, waiting, confident in my new driving abilities, listening to see if I could make the tac-tac-tac rhythm of the passing train sync with the backbeat of MoTown on the radio. In the dark, the stroboscopic flash of lights from the tiny crossroads flashed hypnotically between each blurred boxcar.

Finally, the red light of the caboose passed, and I was hungry. I eased off on the clutch as I had practiced so many times, balancing the clutch expertly against the accelerator. But the car did not go forward. The engine revved as we rolled backwards, gently at first, down the incline. More gas. The engine raced, the lights of town disappeared behind the rise of the tracks, and we hurdled backwards in the dark. More gas! and the engine screamed near redline, and still the car would not respond. On a weeknight at suppertime, mercifully, there were not many cars on the roads, and I coasted to a stop at the bottom of the hill. In neutral.

We laughed about this at the time, and it has been a family joke now for forty years. But the horror of rolling backward out of control in the darkness traumatized this young driver in a deep and persistent way. I check and recheck now to convince myself I am in gear when stopped on even the least hill. Because of that one mild trauma as a fifteen-year-old driver, I still re-enact the same pointless behavioral script, fearful of the terrible consequences if I make the same mistake again.

This is one of those personal foibles that brings me closer to the rest of the frail human swarm. I think of the traumas suffered by fifteen-year-olds around the war-torn world--not the innocuous scars of driving mishaps on the way to a pleasant dinner at the neighborhood restaurant. Deep, terrible psychic wounds of terror at the hand of neighbors, of hunger and squalor and senseless death. These horrors cannot help but leave lasting scars of fear, of mistrust, of hatred that last into adulthood and will not wash easily away. I think of this as I check the cold knob of the gear shift, making certain that yes, I will go forward.

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