www.intermod.org

word: exorbitant

exorbitant:  exceeding the customary or appropriate limits in intensity, quality, amount, or size (from Merriam-Webster)

Last Saturday was the annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), held at Manuel's Tavern every year on the first Saturday after Valentine's Day.  This year's first round was about average -- you could make a couple errors and still advance.  I made my annual stupid mistake with "exorbitant", spelling it with an "h" because I had "exhort" bouncing around in my head.  My annual tradition is to obsess about stupid first round mistakes, so "exorbitant" it is.

Nonetheless, with only two mistakes ("ruching"?! WTF?!) I managed to make it to the second round, which I've done a couple times before but it's fairly rare.  All that does is postpone when I can relax and start drinking harder.

Joining us at our table this year was one of Sharon's coworkers and her husband.  This was the first time for Nedda and Keith, and Nedda turned out to do very well.  She got 19/20 in the first round, and 10/15 in the second round, good enough to make it to the third round!  Sadly, the proctors screwed up and didn't announce that she'd made it to the third round, and lacking her sheet (people who are still in the hunt pass them in for scoring) she shrugged it off as a miscount on her part.  Later in the bee the proctors realized their mistake, to some grumbling and even slight booing from the audience.  Nedda wuz robbed!

Here's a sampling of this year's words:

Round 1: etiquette, corollary, echinacea

Round 2: tuff, acequia, intaglio

Round 3: chrestomathy, corybantic, labret

Round 4: cnidarian, nitid, khedive

I've written about this annual event before -- click to see the 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 writeups.

 

Bill Nye on my voicemail

I'm a big fan of The Planetary Society, in particular the blog run by Emily Lakdawalla and the weekly radio show hosted by Mat Kaplan.  I listen to the radio show religiously every week (on WREK and online) for their great interviews with various scientists and other hotshots in the world of planetary exploration.  The Planetary Society has been around for 30 years, fighting the good fight in Washington DC trying to protect funding for real science at NASA and doing lots of really good science outreach.  Most people know who Bill Nye The Science Guy is, but they probably don't know that he has been deeply involved with The Planetary Society for many years and recently became the CEO of the organization.

At the end of every show they have a quick trivia contest every week and occasionally, if the prize is good, I'll enter it but I've never won.   They typically receive plenty of correct entries, and simply resort to chance (via the random.org random number generator) to determine who gets the prize.

I won!  Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye is now on my cell phone voicemail greeting.  Have a listen:

 

Bill-Nye-voicemail-msg

 

Pretty freaking great, huh?

The trivia question was to identify the song that begins with the lines, "We had a lot of luck on Venus / We always had a ball on Mars."  I spent way too much time as a young teenager listening to my cousin Stefan's record collection to let that one pass -- it's Deep Purple's "Space Truckin".  Here's a live performance they did in 1973.  Uncredited in this performance: cocaine.

You can listen to the whole radio show here, and at the 25 minute point you'll hear how I cracked up the radio hosts with my smartass comments. Of course you should listen to the whole show for lots more info, including their great coverage of space exploration topics, in this case the massive new telescope array in Chile that started coming online last year. And they name-dropped WREK for me!

I got to provide the script, which I'll note here:

Hello!  This is Bill Nye the Science Guy, CEO of the Planetary Society, and you've reached the voicemail of Chris Campbell.  Whether it's evangelizing about electric vehicles, or proselytizing for planetary exploration, or simply building satellite communications systems, Chris is apparently too busy changing the world* to bother answering his own phone.  Please leave a message and he'll get back to you shortly!

(* "Let's change the world" is Bill's tagline -- he uses it every time he speaks.)

It's a major award!

Space Shuttle Columbia loss, 10 years later

I'm a huge space nerd.  I've written about the space shuttle here before, having witnessed a launch in early 2009, a landing in late 2009, and a final launch in 2010.  In July 2011, on the occasion of the final shuttle flight, I wrote at length about why the space shuttle needed to be retired.  I've been a diehard fan of space activities, both manned and unmanned, for my entire life.

I was listening in on the radio in January 1986 when Challenger was lost, and I was watching live in February 2003 when Columbia was lost.

Ten years ago this morning, I was sitting in front of my computer at home, eating breakfast and watching NASA TV.  The two-week STS-107 space shuttle mission was ending and the shuttle was coming home to a landing in Florida.  I have watched every single launch and landing for many years and this would be no exception.

I tuned into NASA TV a few minutes before scheduled landing, right around the point that they usually start to pick up the shuttle on long range cameras.  What I saw was a lot of camera shots of the Florida ground facilities and the Houston control room, because the shuttle wasn't in view yet.  But shuttles don't run late -- if there was no shuttle to see, then something was terribly wrong.

The public commentator on NASA TV wasn't saying much.  I listened in and heard the control room ask the C-band system guy for an update, and he reported that they were stilling running in a wide search mode.  That meant that their big antenna was sweeping the Florida skies trying to pick up the shuttle, and not finding it.

Around this time, watching NASA TV closely, there was a moment when you could see a small scrum of people in the back of the control room briefly discussing some news they had just received over the phone -- reports had started to come in from East Texas of a breakup in the dawn skies overhead.  The live public coverage from that morning can be found here.  Here is footage (that came out later) showing what was going on in mission control during that time -- it starts getting weird at 4m45s.  Here is an excellent second-by-second timeline of what was actually happening on the shuttle.

I finished up my breakfast and headed out the door.  I was attending a meeting at a neighbor's house that Saturday morning about a local issue, and intended to show up late so I could catch the shuttle landing.  I didn't say anything to anyone when I arrived, but at some point someone broke away to get something from the kitchen, and must have heard about it on the radio or something.  She screamed "the shuttle exploded!"  That pretty much broke up the meeting.

---

Wayne Hale is a big name in the space business.  He was rising through the ranks of NASA management when Columbia happened, and went on to distinguish himself as one of the key people to lead the Space Shuttle Program out of the darkness and back into the light.  He retired a couple years ago, and as his final act within NASA he led the effort to publish a book about the space shuttle, a tome of astonishing breadth and depth.  He maintains a blog and a couple months ago started a series of posts recounting his experiences in the runup to, during and after the failed Columbia mission.

Here is the first one:

After Ten Years -– Why Write Now?

... and here is the whole series.  Start at the bottom of the list and simply "next" through each post.

After Ten Years | Wayne Hale's Blog

I can't reach out and force you to read these, but I hope you will.  He's quite eloquent and has a unique perspective on the history of the space program.

Rest in peace, crew of STS-107.

 

New Orleans trip

New Orleans!  With no family commitments over Christmas, and some vacation time to burn, we were looking to take a short trip somewhere, preferably someplace warmer than Atlanta.  We looked at our list of places we wanted to go, and decided that this would finally be the time we go see New Orleans for the first time.

So on the Saturday before Christmas we got into the car and drove 8 hours straight to NOLA.  We arrived at around 6pm, checked into our quirky hotel on the eastern edge of the French Quarter (FQ) hotel, parked the car and marched off into the FQ for dinner and initial look around.

First stop: Coop's Place for dinner, a recommended joint on Decatur Street, which is the main riverfront drag of the FQ.  Oh my god, thanks Scott and Terra for that tip, I want to go there again.  And again.  I had some jambalaya with rabbit in it (tasted like chicken, of course).  It was DAMN good and I think I will have that smell of Coop's with me forever.Great food and drinks, relaxed bar ambiance, and That Smell.  Everytime we walked by for the next 3 days and sniffed the air I wanted to steer right back into that place.

Next door to Coop's was a little bar called "Perestroika at Pravda" which had virtually nobody in it but looked very unique.  A boxy and well-lit space, it had a selection of old ornate furnishing that reminded me of the simple local bars you find in Eastern Europe, as was probably the intent.  Providing the hipster angle were the Russian slogans painted on the walls and the Soviet era posters.  Apparently it has just changed ownership so it's likely to change a bit over the coming months.  We had a few beers, discussed our plans for the next day and head back out into the streets.

To Bourbon Street, which I suppose you need to see at least once, if only to know that you never need to see it again.  By the luck of being a Saturday night, I suppose, we were treated to a scene of debauchery that I imagine you would more likely see in February and Mardi Gras.  Thousands of people wandering the streets (and overhead on the porches), all with drinks, hollering and whatnot.  I eventually noticed that many (if not most) of them had red clothing, and eventually I figured out that these fine human specimens all belonged to the clan of the Ragin' Cajuns, aka fans of the sporting teams of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Later I learned that the 2012 edition of the New Orleans Bowl had occurred earlier in the day, with the Cajuns victorious, so there you go.

Back at the hotel, we chatted with the night clerk and bonded with his dog Oyster.

Sunday!  Sharon grabbed some breakfast items from the awesome little bakery across the street, which apparently draws people from far and wide, but which was literally 20 feet from our bed!  We then walked through the FQ to meet up for our prearranged walking tour of the St. Louis #1 cemetery, presented by the Save Our Cemeteries organization.  Our tour group turned out to consist of just us and another couple -- the other couple being the most adorably pathetic pair of young goths you'd ever seen.  They didn't say much, just kind of slinking around and occasionally eking out a question, so we had the run of the tour guide.  Who was a great sources of stories and had a fantastic command of New Orleans history.  Well, so say I, who knew nothing about NOLA two weeks ago ... Anyway, the above-ground burial method involves entombing up to two people, and then when the next person comes along, they just empty out the casket into the hole ("caveau") below the tomb.  So there can be dozens of people in a given tomb, and there's always room for more, hooray! Apparently the Big Attraction in this cemetery is the (reputed) tomb of Marie Laveau, and people who make the pilgrimage to the site are supposed to do a little spin three times and then mark XXX on her tomb, and leave something at the site.  So, lots of XXX graffiti and a pile of crap on the ground.  And I mean crap -- lip balm, scrunchies, matchbooks.  Dude.

After the cemetery tour, upon the recommendation of the tour guide we stopped for lunch at the Gumbo Shop, a restaurant in the center of the FQ that offered up the usual NOLA staples.  I had a roast beef Po Boy that was delicious.  The place was overrun with tourists (including two separate groups, bus tour types) so I guess it was less "cozy hole in the wall" and more "rote destination for the tourists" but I guess it's to be expected.

After a break back at the hotel, we retreived the car and hit the road.  The original plan had been to intercept the "Women Of Class" parade, which would give us at least a sampling of the famously raucous New Orleans parades.  Alas, we learned during our hotel break that it had been cancelled.  So, we simply drove around on that side of town a little bit (Garden district), working our way away from the river and towards the lake and eventually the City Park area.  There we explored the very classy New Orleans Museum Of Art and less impressive sculpture garden (oh boy, George Rodrigue again).

We had a little over an hour to kill until the next thing, so we got in the car and meandered through the northern reaches of the park (larger than NYC's Central Park) and stumbled across a dog park!  Why YES, I think we CAN kill some time in a dog park!  Much hilarity ensued (including a German shepherd with a water fountain addiction) but eventually darkness began to fall.

We hit the road again, because I wanted to find a certain spot.  Due to my weird geographic memory (from news and maps), I pretty much knew exactly where one of the three major levee breaches had occurred in the Katrina aftermath.  We found the location pretty quickly (Sharon spotted the historical marker as we crept past it in the twilight) and marveled at how the houses had generally all been repaired.  I say "generally" because it looked like cheap construction, and the streets themselves might have well been in Baghdad, being pretty busted up, heaving all over the place like a moonscape.

It was nearly 6pm and time to head back to the park for the Celebration In The Oaks festival in the park.  Turned out to be more of a kiddie thing, and the lines to get in were astonishing.  I thought it would be kind of spread throughout the park, but it was actually inside the fenced/walled off botanical garden.  Uh uh, no way, we bailed.

On to the Rock N' Bowl!  Which is a large bowling hall with a stage and a dancefloor, with a zydeco dance night on Thursday nights that we'd heard was pretty fun, but this was a Sunday night.  The band was a bunch of white guys (and one very white girl) knocking out soul/funk covers, and not really in a good way.  It made for good people-watching though, and we knocked back a few drinks and ducked outta there.  Oh right, the drinks.  I went up to the bar and asked the bartender girl politely, "do you know how to make an Old Fashioned"?  "Not very well", she lamented.  Beer it is!  Sharon ordered the one drink she remembered from college that she figured any idiot knew how to make -- a Tequila Sunrise.  Blecch.

Monday!  Breakfast from the bakery again, and then back on the streets.  Today we'd be mostly hoofing it around the FQ, starting with the Ursuline Convent which was just across the street.  Sadly, closed on this Christmas Eve despite our best planning efforts.  We'd get to it later.

So we made our way over the levee to the riverfront to get a look at the might Mississippi, which actually isn't so mighty right about now.  The drought in the Midwest (yay climate change and disrupted jet streams!) has dropped the river's water levels so low, along its entire length, that it's close to being unnavigable by the barge traffic.

(This is a panorama shot that isn't really formatting correctly here.  Click to open and then click to go full screen.  It's not my best work and obviously the lighting was poor.)

Our walk along the river led us to the Aquarium area and the Insectarium just beyond it.  But -lo- on the way, what do we find?  A casino!  We ducked into the Harrah's and it's like we were instantly transported to Las Vegas, with the steady chiming of slot machines, old ladies parked in front of them, tired old staffers and the everpresent hint of stale cigarette smoke.  We did a 5 minute lap and got spat out the other side of the building, across from the Insectarium.

The Insectarium was an important destination for us -- a museum dedicated to insects.  While kid-friendly, it's well done enough to engage adults, and at the very end we got rewarded with a butterfly garden.  Which wasn't as incredible as the one at Callaway Gardens, but we'll take it.

From there, we hoofed it about 10 blocks to the west side of the business district and the Ogden Musuem of Southern Art.  One of the major modern art museums of NOLA, the Ogden was shrewdly open on a Monday when most other museums were closed, and was busy with patrons perusing its several floors of exhibitions.  From the Tav Falco photography at the rooftop level, to the bewildering installations at the bottom, this was a great place to spend some time and fully check out.

Back to the hotel for a little break, and then back out ...

We wandered from our hotel over to Frenchmen Street, known for lots of music clubs but a bit subdued on this Christmas Eve.  We did have some well-prepared drinks and a snack at an upscale bar, and then stepped into the tiny Spotted Cat Music Club to watch a perfectly serviceable jazz combo accompanied by a couple beers expertly served by a very hard-working and non-nonsense bartender.  At the combo's set break we stepped out and then down the street stepped into another club (The Maison, I think) and another music performance.  This was a much bigger venue and a whole lot more raucous, so we repaired to the back with our beers and soaked it in from afar.  Eventually we noticed that a masseuse had a chair and clients going back there, which was a little odd, but she even got a shout out from the band at one point so I guess it was their thing.

Around 11pm it was time to move on, because we wanted to attend the Christmas Midnight Mass at the St. Louis Cathedral.  Sharon had never been to one and perhaps didn't know what she was getting into.  90 minutes later we finally escaped.  It was really beautiful in there though.

Tuesday!  Christmas Day and Sharon's birthday, so we would definitely try to take it slow today, at least at first.  We hung out in our hotel room all morning, enjoying some gift-giving, breakfast across the street (open!) and general lazying around.  Our hotel for the trip was the Villa Convento, on the eastern edge of the FQ and just across from the old Ursuline Convent.  According to the tour guides of the dozens of passing horse-drawn tours outside our window, "...some people say this hotel is the famous House of the Rising Sun." (It's not.)  Seriously, every horse-drawn carriage that went by: "and on the left you will see the 'House Of The Rising Sun', from that song by Eric Burdon and the Animals". Every 10 minutes, thus ensuring that that damn song never left our heads. Some of the guides were more convinced/convincing than others.

Eventually we got the car and hit the road to go see some of the outer neighborhoods of NOLA.  We drove around the Garden District, got lunch, wandered around the Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, and avoided the celebrity residences that supposedly pepper the Garden District.

For Christmas dinner we had a proper reservation at a nice place just west of the French Quarter called Luke.  They were serving a Reveillon dinner, which is a prix fixe dinner that is a Christmas tradition in NOLA, featuring regional specialties like turtle soup.

Afterwards we headed Uptown to the Maple Leaf Bar where the Rebirth Brass Band was holding their weekly late night session.  We arrived at this little joint packed to the gills with frat boys and girls and just as the band was about to go on.  Their sound guy must have damaged hearing because it was painfully loud (note: Chris has been to hundreds of loud shows, this was bad) and we left after a short while.  Down the street was a tiny dive bar called Snake and Jakes, where we had a couple more beers and eventually noticed two dogs wandering around because of their wagging tails hitting us in the legs.

Odd and Ends:

Crazy Cajun, Ragin' Cajun, Huge Ass Beers, wine smoothies, shop after shop selling t-shirts with various ass references.

Ritzy stores on Royal Street, including one that apparently specialized in bawdy corkscrews.

French Market on Decatur Street, formerly a local market for actual produce and other wares, but now basically a touristy flea market.  Still worth a stroll.    

Checked out three EV charging stations for the national databases. Naturally.

Wednesday!  Time to leave, but we wanted to check out a few things on our way out, destinations that had been closed Monday and Tuesday.  First up was the Ursuline Convent, the oldest building in the entire freaking Mississippi Valley and a nice museum to the early 1700s history of NOLA.  Next was The Cabildo, the main state museum next to the cathedral on Jackson Square.  This place was huge and somewhat of a labyrinth but quite good.

Now it was finally time to leave town.  But wait!  There's more!  On our way out we detoured through the lower Ninth Ward, not so much to see the still-extant signs of devastation (high water marks on abandoned houses, the sad and abandoned Six Flags park) but rather to do a drive-by of the Michoud Assembly Facility.  This colossal NASA facility was responsible, for over thirty years, for building the External Tank (ET) part of the Space Shuttle system.  Unlike the Orbiter and the Solid Rocket Boosters, the ET was the one part that wasn't recovered and reused, so they had to build a new one for each launch.  With the end of the shuttle program the factory was mostly shut down, but they are currently surviving on the scraps of the new rocket program that NASA is developing (first Constellation, now SLS).

Now leaving the NOLA area completely, our plan had been to visit NASA's Stennis Space Center, the facility in southern Mississippi where they do most of their rocket engine testing.  It's not as elaborate as Kennedy Space Center, but they do have a visitors center and hourly bus tours of the rocket testing grounds proper.  Sadly, we had squandered too much time with the day's earlier destinations and didn't make it in time for the last bus tour or even to get into the visitors center.  Oh well, next time.

Mobile, Alabama.  Had a drink at the "Skyview Lounge" at the top of our hotel, a Holiday Inn in the form of a 14-story circular tower.  The bar did not rotate so we just got up and changed seats a few times, which was made asier by the fact that we were virtually the only people there, save for a few traveling salesman types hanging out at the bar proper.

On our way out of Mobile the next morning, we detoured through Foley AL in order to check out a lonely EV charging station; it had actually been the very first public station in Alabama about a year ago and so I went in and chatted up the business owner, also an EV driver of course.   The detour extended to Gulf Shores AL so we could at least get a brief look at the Gulf of Mexico that we'd spent the last five days so close to.  On the way out we got some pretty great barbeque at Hog Wild BBQ, a roadside joint that happened to be in the right place at the right time.  They advertised having the "Best Butts On Beach" (pig butts, I guess) and the lady behind the counter had the most horrible tan I've ever seen in person ("seen" inasmuch as I had to turn away every time I saw her).  A handwritten note on the door warned they were cash-only due to broken credit card machine ("we should get that fixed") but we neglected to notice and so after our meal I had to go drive around and find an ATM.  My own damn fault for not having cash on me, I guess.

Then the long drive home, and normalcy.

Politics, Nov 2012

I don't usually write about politics.  What's the point?  There are few things as tedious as someone else's political opinions.  But once every couple years I do like to write things down, to document where my head is, if for no other reason than to provide entertainment value for the future me.  In January 2007 I documented the carnage of the first six years of Bush, whose worst offenses had then just been put to a halt by the Nov 2006 election.  In October 2008 I noted my thoughts on the eve of the election four years ago.

And so here we are on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.

I'm not a Democrat.  It's just that I find nearly everything the GOP has done in the past 30+ years to be repugnant.  Their social policies are non-starters of course.  But while I might agree with the rhetoric of their fiscal policies, when they get into office they don't actually do what they say.  They spend lavishly on the military and on unnecessary wars, say they'll balance the budget but instead balloon the deficit and debt with supply side voodoo economics, and then have the balls to blame all the resulting troubles on the Democrats.

Follow the data.  That is my political party.  Listen to what they say, and then see if they do it.  The Democrats are far more honest legislators then the Republicans.

But the GOP is better at campaigning.

The GOP is simply better than the Democratic party at "leveraging stupid".  They can exploit what people don't know in ways that lead them to vote against their own interests.  Lubricate the whole process with massive amounts of money and it's no contest.

The GOP is increasingly able to leverage our fickle and forgetful populace.  Recent GOP administrations have been astonishing disasters by nearly every measure, but the electorate still thinks we should swing back to them and "give them a chance".  Do you not remember even four years ago?

The GOP is much more homogeneous then the Dems and can provide a unified opposition, even when the GOP has only a slim lead in a given congressional chamber.  This is why we frequently see compromises coming out of Washington when the GOP is in the White House and the Dems hold Congress, because it's much easier to splinter off some Democrats.  With Obama in the White House and a GOP-held House, the right simply circles their wagons and waits it out.  Heck, with Obama in the White House and both chambers under Dem control, they could barely get legislation passed, because the Democratic party is a big tent and there are lots of competing and conflicting interests -- not to mention that the legislature is typically fighting an uphill battle against lavish lobbyist spending on the other side.  And so we get more center-right legislation passed.

The country has been sliding to the right for decades now.  Obama winning in 2008 was an astonishing and wonderful aberration, and one we're not going to see again in a generation, if ever.  Whether it resumes in 2013 or 2017, it is inevitable that we will soon return to a dominant GOP and their Treasury-liquidating machinations.  All Obama did was put the brakes on the looting for a few years.

When the history of this campaign is written, I think it will show that the crucial factor was the ability of the Obama machine to watch for the tiniest gaffes and amplify them into national news stories. Todd Akin, London Olympic readiness, 47 percent, etc. Actual issues and policies don't really matter; what you need to do is capitalize on the gaffes. And with Obama being such a master of self control and careful rhetoric, the GOP is not going to be able to compete on this playing field (unless they cheat, a la "you didn't build that" and creative editing).

But also keep in mind that while some see the GOP making blunder after blunder, a sizable chunk of the population is subsisting on a steady diet of *precisely* the opposite "news" that the rest of us are: a steady right-wing drip feed of gaffe shockers from Obama / Dems / left wingers, playing into the right wing's own persecution fantasies. They've made their own reality, and now they live in it.

In fact, will conservatives accept the results of the election if Obama wins?  Even if the final tally isn't close, I think August 2009 demonstrated how unhinged the right wing can get.  Here come the pitchforks.

In the dark days of 2011 and the runup to the GOP primaries, I said that Obama was going to CRUSH his opponent, and until October it looked like it was going to be as easy as I thought. Thanks to Romney gaffes and GOP wingnut comments on social issues, the campaign was all about how extreme the GOP had become, and not so much about Obama's failings.

Conventional wisdom was that Romney would kowtow to the rabid right during the primary season and then pivot to the center for the general election. In due course he did jettison all of his previous moderate beliefs during the primaries, even abandoning the one major legislative achievement that he HAD managed to eke out while governing Massachusetts -- his healthcare plan. But has the primaries wrapped up, he didn't pivot to center as we expected. The convention came and went, and he didn't pivot -- he was still way out there on the right. September came and went, no pivot.

Finally, during the first debate in early October (only a month before the election) he finally made the pivot, momentarily (and famously) stunning Obama with his new detachment from the previous 7 years of campaigning. Now Romney suddenly was for all sorts of centrist policies, and in plenty of cases nakedly adopting Obama's own positions.

Even if you believe that we are now seeing the "real" Romney, and the right-baiting Romney from the last 7 years was the aberration, you have to worry about who else comes in the door with a Romney administration.  If you put Romney in the White House, that lets the GOP thugs back into the entire executive branch.  Remember Doug Feith?  AG Alberto Gonzales?  How about all those book-selling candidates that Romney beat on his way to the nomination?  He would likely have to appoint some of them to senior positions, if not the cabinet outright, in order to mollify the right wing.  How does Secretary of State Michelle Bachmann sound to you?

Sadly, a parallel between 2012 and 2004 is how deeply the opposition dislikes the president. Where the center-left fell into a depressed funk after Bush's re-election, I'm quite afraid of the rightwing wingnut reaction following an Obama win. The more rabid conservatives don't take failure very well.   Remember the August 2009 town hall meetings? That was some full-on (and orchestrated) batshit crazy there, with concealed carry permits.

As Matt Taibbi said in his September piece, "This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close".  Even if Obama wins, he won't win by a landslide, and this election cycle won't serve to repudiate the GOP's behavior of the last four years.

And so, either come 2013, or come 2017, our short break from inanity in the White House is likely over. Enjoy it while you can.

In the end, this election comes down to this:

Is the USA even governable anymore?  I think the last 4 years have shown that it is not.  The GOP made a cynical calculation in Jan 2013 that they could simple stand on "no" and wait out the clock, and they were able to manipulate enough of the populace to believe their lies.  The data could not be more clear that GOP leadership is ruinous to our country, and yet they still were able to survive and scuttle any actual progress.

We got a break from the looting; will it be a 4 year break or an 8 year break?

 

Uncle Chris's Science Camp

"Uncle Chris's Science Camp" is the name we've given to the concept of my nieces and nephews coming to visit for various forms of educational fun.  In October 2012 we had the inaugural edition, with my oldest niece, Bridget, coming from California to visit (with her mother) for a few days of activities.

Here's a rundown of the things we did.  I have lots more to say of course, and pictures, but I haven't yet had the time to get that done.  I did want to get this much published and out there ...

 

Wednesday:

arrival

UCSC t-shirts from Aunt Kitty

 

Thursday:

wash car (how exciting!)

hardware store

fly things in park

sundial on sidewalk with chalk

Halloween decor on front porch, and sidewalk chalking

fix the toilet (mentioned only 'cause it turned into A Thing)

dinner at Harmony

 

Friday:

fly more things in a different park

Beltline, with UFO, graffiti and skate park

visit to land trust: big tree swing, city overlook, feed Big Lou!

Sharon dinner and Braves game

Fernbank science center for planetarium ("Cowboy Astronomer") and then science exhibits

 

Saturday:

Howl-O-Weenie in Dunwoody (dachsunds in costumes in suburbia)

Maker Faire at Georgia Tech

late lunch, some relaxation before

picking up Chris N. and meeting up again at

FLUX art event in Castleberry Hill

late night trip to Delia's Chicken Shack

and Kroger for needed sundries

 

Sunday:

Diet Coke plus Mentos equals eruption (next time get bigger Diet Coke bottles); link to paper

Sunspot viewing through telescope (with solar filter!)

annual St. Francis of Assisi pet blessing at Decatur church (with Julia!)

Sharon dinner

SpaceX Dragon launch

 

Monday:

Vinegar and baking soda rocket launch, didn't go so great, better next time!

to the airport!

 

Hopscotch music festival, Sept. 6-8, Raleigh NC

Months ago, I heard about this Hopscotch music festival happening in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Checking the list of bands, there were all sorts of "interesting" acts, but nothing really compelling, and really I'm getting too old for this kind of thing, right?  But then I saw that Versus was going to be playing.  Oh.  Versus was this band out of NYC back in the early 90's that signed to Merge Records back in the day and made quite a few records.  I have their earliest couple singles and they are some of the best things ever committed to vinyl.  Just pure pop rock gems.  So once I saw Versus was on the bill, I went ahead and bought my $100 ticket to the festival "just in case" it turned out I could go.  I figured I could sell it to someone else if I couldn't go.

Then I just let that ticket sit.  September got closer and nothing was interfering, so I was going to go to the festival after all!

Thursday night:

I had to (well, wanted to) be in Atlanta Thursday afternoon for a lecture by some guy, and so left Atlanta at 4:30pm.  Drove 6 hours straight from Atlanta to Raleigh, arriving at 10:50pm.  Parked semi-legally, sprinted into the hotel to pick up my pre-paid all-access pass, 10 minutes to spare before they closed down the pickup desk!  Dropped my bags in the room and head back out into the night.

First stop:  see Alvarius B (aka Alan Bishop, formerly of Sun City Girls) at The Hive, a "venue" with the worst sightlines I've ever experienced, and I'm six foot two!  Might as well be a hallway.  Met up with old friend Scott W. there, who had also driven up from Atlanta earlier in the day.  Anyway, from what I could hear and not see, Mr. Bishop was vicious fun.

On Scott's advice, we then trucked several blocks away to catch Ben Chasny (of Six Organs Of Admittance) at Berkeley Cafe.  Meh.  Freak folk is OK, I'm not wild about it, especially when it's just acoustic guitar, but it passes the time.

Next, haul ass across downtown the big hardcore show -- Trash Talk.  A late addition to festival, the Hopscotch people had some sort of lately epiphany (or booking debacle) and paid Trash Talk to fly out from CA just for this show.  The bands was literally on the east coast for like 10 hours. 

Friday daytime shows:

Bill Orcutt / Chris Corsano / Al Bishop trio -- good freaky jazz noise

Chuck Johnson -- local acoustic guitar folk god; intense and very very good

Guardian Alien -- I saw them by mistake, essentially, when I showed up to see another band but the venue was WAY behind on their schedule.  They were very strange (and exciting) and I didn't really understand what was going on.  Hailing from NY (Brooklyn?), there were three guys (guitar, bass, drums) playing fairly weirded out polyrhythmic rock jazz noise, and eventually I noticed a woman off to the left who was rather animated.   I hadn't noticed her at first because she was crammed into a side spot of the "stage", not a stage at all rather a cleared out spot in this basement bunker of a bar.  At first I thought she was just a groupie enjoying the show from the side of the stage, but then I made out that she had some electronics that she was noodling with.  Eventually, suddenly, she burst out of her little corner to join the three guys in what I can only describe as a full on freak out.  Screaming et cetera.  If this band makes it to Atlanta I will go see them again!

David Daniell + Oren Ambarchi -- I ran into DD at the hotel check-in on Thursday night.  I know him from my Georgia Tech and WREK days, and he tipped me off to this show.  I'm glad I went, very cool guitar drone which is what they are both known for.

Gross Ghost -- I thought I might like this band, based on reviews.  I did not.

Friday night:

Built To Spill at City Plaza (open air) -- I liked Treepeople enough, but I just have never cared one whit about this band.  "You Were Right" is a fun singalong though.

Jesus And Mary Chain at City Plaza (open air) -- and what will probably be the most blasphemous thing written here, I don't care for JMC much either.  Well, I like their records, just don't give a damn about them or this tour.

Black Skies at Pour House -- stoned beard metal, really blissed out stoned, I mean more than you might already expect, and grinning like idiots as a result.  Enjoyed.

Pallbearer at Pour House -- more metal, a bit wanky as I recall; the singer had a seriously good voice and the bassist was playing as if the Holy Trinity was about to burst out of his chest.  This band will probably go places, but I don't need to see them again.

Jackie Chain at The Hive -- speaking of supposedly fun things that I will never do again ... After this "show" I decided I was not going back to this venue.  The audience basically stands a hallway, with no stage riser, so if the performer happens to be sitting (as Alvarious B was last night) or the performer is short (as in Mr. Chain here) then forget actually seeing anything.  I'm six foot two, come on.  Oh and, I'm serious, the venue did not have the sound system turned on for this hip hop act!  And I guess the guys on stage had no idea, with their monitors up, that the room wasn't hearing anything, just watching these morons goof around the stage like they had talent.  What a debacle.  I do wish everyone involved a bright future, it just won't be intersecting with mine anymore.

The Atlas Moth at Kings Barcade -- Very good metal-ish heavy rock.  Would see again A++

John Darnielle at Fletcher Opera Theater -- Listen, I like John Darnielle as much as anyone.  I have been following The Mountain Goats since the cassette culture days and their frequent appearances on the pages of the Ajax mailorder catalog (which I still have somewhere).  But dear God please kill me if I ever am forced to ever attend another show by them.  You want to know who has the most insufferably sycophantic fans in the world?  Apparently John does.  I just hope he can keep his head screwed on right, it must be tough with all that constant fawning.  On piano and vocals, he played a selection of metal covers.  Ha ha.

Killer Mike at Lincoln Theatre -- meh.

Saturday day:

Started out wandering around downtown heading towards the sound of bands playing.  It turned out that they had two separate blocks cordoned off for free street shows.  Cool, I had no idea!  The Martin Street stage in particular had a good lineup, so this was going to allow me to catch some bands that I wouldn't be able to in the evening, due to scheduling conflicts.

In theory.  In reality, while they had listed what bands were playing, they inexplicably did not list what order they were playing in.  Soooo, five bands were playing in five hours, but I didn't know who was when and no way was I going to squander my whole afternoon there.  I stayed through the first few bands though:  Weather Station, nice enough folk rock (sounds horrible doesn't it!), followed by Oneida with the mighty Kid Millions on drums and sparkling teeth, and then Mount Moriah.  That last band was the most surprising -- I expected dreary lesbian rock, and was happy to find a very good rock band.  I dare say that Mount Moriah kept reminding me of Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

Time for a side trip over to Rebus Works, where they had their usual weekly farmers/craft market set up outside this gallery of local art.  Nice diversion.  I intended to take a pedicab over (Raleigh has pedicabs!) but none were running that early in the afternoon, so I ended up hoofing it all the way across downtown to get there.  But on the way, nearly there, I ran into some pedicabs (resting!) and got a business card.  So later on I was able to call them and get a ride back to the center of downtown.

Where The dBs were just finishing their set on the free Martin Street stage.  I could hear them playing as we approached on the pedicab, and ended up catching one complete song.  I wanted to see more of them, oh well.  They had played a proper evening show on Friday but it was on the wrong side of town and I couldn't make it.

That Martin Street show in general added some diversity (for me) to a festival that was getting too heavy on the Heaviness.

Saturday night:

This night would start by hitting a few more distant venues via car, and then leaving the car at one of Raleigh's many free electric car charging stations where I parked it for the rest of the evening.  Nice!

Quiet Evenings at Longview Center, a converted church -- a young duo from Georgia, making quiet electronic ambient noise, nice.

Tow3rs at CAM Raleigh -- reviews had led me to believe I would like this band.  They're good but trying too hard for my tastes, what with the themed costumes and baloons and all.  Should be quite successful though, everybody was enjoying themselves I suppose.

Dead In The Dirt (unbilled) at Berkeley Cafe ...  I kind of just wandered into this joint off the street, looking to kill 15 minutes and knowing that it was going to be another one of those beard metal bills (which I can't resist, apparently). I caught their last two songs (cough) and after their set I asked the merch table guy who that was. He told me DITD and "they're from Atlanta, and we are too", the guy being in another band playing that night. I laughed and pointed out the WREK t-shirt I was wearing. LOTS of people from Atlanta were at Hopscotch. I saw plenty of Hopscotch refugees heading home on I-85 southbound today -- plaid shirts and Streetela stickers, come on, what else could it be?

Mac McCaughan at Lincoln Theatre -- I'm a sucker for Superchunk (a super for Suckerchunk?), and have been for 20+ years now.  Their recent (!) show in Atlanta was one of the best I'd ever seen and I certainly had fun at it.  This time, it was just Mac solo on a guitar, which was a littel strange but you got to hear the songs presented in a way that allowed you to hear just two ingredients (his vocals and his guitar) separate from the rest of the Superchunk fury.

About 6-7 songs in he says "I always wanted to be in Versus, and this is how I managed to engineer it" and out walks Versus to join him in playing a bunch of covers.  Fantastic!  According to this guy's blog entry they were Neutral Milk Hotel covers, which I did not recognize but I was having plenty of fun nonetheless.

Then ... Kurt Wagner came out and this all-star line-up blasted through Lambchop's "Nine" (that's the doo-doo-dooo doo-doo-doodoo song that was their most obvious hit) with Kurt snarling away, lunging at the microphone stand like he's Iggy Pop.  At the end, he drops the mic and makes his deparature.  Click the blog link above for a video (and try to suffer through the awful sound).

Finally, VERSUS.  The band that caused me to come to this thing in the first place.  They were great.  They didn't play the one song I wanted to hear ("Tin Foil Star", from a 1993 7" single, one of the greatest pop gems ever, embedded here, play it while reading!) but it didn't really matter.  For pretty much any of their songs, when they kick into that chorus, they are an unstoppable force of nature.  And the crowd was adoring, so much so that Fontaine Toups (bassist) remarked "wow, maybe we should come back to Raleigh", and then thought to ask "who is here from out of town" and the whole crowd roared.  "Where are you from?"  "Atlanta!" the crowds roars.  Ha!

I stayed through every last bit of the Versus set, stuck around in case of encore, then struck out for the last two acts of the night.  Playing in the beautiful and stately Fletcher Opera Theater (think Woodruff opera hall in Atlanta), Lambchop (proper) played a nice, long, relaxed set.

Sunn O))) at Memorial Auditorium -- Ending with Sunn O))) worked for me. Those sounds made my heart hurt and my teeth ache, literally not metaphorically. It was the same with or without earplugs -- those low frequencies just go through everything. I actually started to wonder about how many dead bodies they'd find slumped in the chairs after they closed down the hall.

 

Regrets:

missed White Hills, twice

missed William Tyler, twice

 

John Cage tribute show series on WREK

In early September, I did a series of shows on WREK about John Cage, in recognition of his 100th birthday.  You can find the official series announcement and schedule details here.  This blog is where I documented my own notes for the show.

It's not really intended for the public, but I thought some of you who tuned in might be interested.  Please do NOT share this page with others, i.e. via Facebook; if you want to share something, use the WREK link above.

Thanks to everyone for their support, including the guys who lent me their Cage material and the Tuesday performers!

Jump ahead to:

General resources

main Sunday Special show, Cage overview

late Sunday night, early Cage material

late Monday night, Cage album "Variations IV" in entirety

Tuesday night Live at WREK performances, including details  of exotic instrumentation

late Tuesday night, Cage album "Indeterminancy" in entirety

 

General resources:

http://www.johncage.info

http://www.johncage.info/index2.html

http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html

http://www.discogs.com/John-Cage-John-Cage/master/26116

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_John_Cage

 

interview snippet:  UBU interview MP3 CD #4, 9:54-17:10, general commentary

interview snippet:  UBU interview MP3 CD #1, 0:00-4:57 early history to 1958

 

main Sunday Special show, Cage overview

 

Imaginary Landscape No. 4

composed (performed?) April 1951

24 performers at 12 radios

media:  UBU mp3, burned to CD?  ~5 minutes long?

http://www.johncage.info/workscage/landscape4.html

 

interview snippet:  UBU interview MP3 CD #1, 9:23-10:00, use of I Ching

 

Music Of Changes

composed (performed?) May-Dec 1951

compositional indeterminancy, but fixed performance

first foray into use of I Ching ("E King", "Yee Jing", etc.) divination system

quartet performances involve many musicians but only four are playing at once

media:  should have tracks "Book 1" "2" "3" "4"; Haller CD #7 has #3 and #4

Wikipedia / johncage.info

 

Williams Mix, 1952-1953

octophonic, tape splicing

named for ...

media:  on Haller CD #8, 5 minutes; also on UBU CD 4m25s plus applause (and boos?)

Wikipedia / johncage.info

 

Variations I, 1958

media:  Curt Wells CD (see more below)

Wikipedia  / johncage.info

 

Indeterminancy, 1959

excerpted during Sunday Special show, played in entirety on Tuesday night, see below

  

Lecture on Nothing, 1959

text is part of "Silence" collection of 1939-1961 essays

media:  UBU mp3 burned to audio CD; Kaegan Sparks and Christian MArclay at Philadelphia ICA (U Penn) in 2007, 67m55s

see UBU notes

 

Cartridge Music, 1960

objects instead of needle cartridges inserted into phone arms, act as pickup mics

media:  Curt Wells CD (see more below)

johncage.info

 

 

Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961

use of star charts

media:  WREK CD

johncage.info

(I didn't play any of this, I don't think)

 

Klangexperimente, 1963

media:  UBU audio CD track 5, 1m 58s

no info at all

Mureau, 1970

spoken word

interview snippet:  UBU interview MP3 CD #4, 4:50 - 8:15, explanation

media: UBU interview MP3 CD #3, up to 1h09m mark, excerpt it

media: UBU audio CD track 8, 4m06s excerpt

(I didn't play any of this)

 

Mushroom Haiku, from Silence, 1969/1972

media:  UBU audio CD track 6, 4m46s

also UBU audio CD track 7, 2m03s, "Disconnected"

 

4'33"

place on hold for that length of time

 

late Sunday night, early Cage

 

Imaginary Landscape (No. 1), 1939

2 variable-speed phono turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano and cymbal

media:  UBU misc audio CD, 8m50s

Wikipedia / johncage.info

 

Works for Prepared Piano, 1940s

media:  Haller CD #3 and #4

Wikipedia

 

Margaret Leng Tan CD

early (1940-1953) compositions on various types of piano

media:  WREK CD

 

Second Construction, 1940

media:  Curt Wells CD (see more below)

Wikipedia / johncage.info

 

Sonatas and Interludes, 1946-1948

prepared piano:  screws, bolts, rubber, plastic; 2-3 hours prep; mathematics, proportions, symmetry, nesting

Wikipedia / johncage.info

 

I also played a whole lot of excerpts from some tribute albums that came out after Cage passed in 1992.  I'll write those up here later.

 

late Monday night, Cage album "Variations IV" in entirety

Variations IV, 1965

scored by shapes on a clear plastic sheet then cut up and distributed around stage; this method mentioned in one of the Brown/Cage Quartet piece intros

performed in Los Angeles, August 1965; CD/LP are excerpts from 6 hour performance

media:  WREK CD, 65 minutes total, 2m52s intro

media:  Scott Watkins LP, 30 minutes

see Wikipedia

(I played the CD)

 

Tuesday night Live at WREK live performances!

I'll provide Wikipedia / johncage.info links here later.

1. Composed Improvisation for Snare Drum (8 min): snare drum solo with timing and form subject to chance; performed by Stuart Gerber

2. A selection from 27'10.554" (exactly 15'55.282" long) for a percussionist; instrumentation included standard drum kit, seed rattle, shell wind chime, kalimba (aka thumb piano), dumbek, a piece of granite, a kazoo and three small gongs; performed by Caleb Herron

3. Child of Tree (8 min); composed for instruments made of natural (plant) materials; in this instance, those instruments were pod rattles, wooden water buffalo bell, beans and a wood block; performed by Stuart Gerber

4. Fontana Mix (10 min); synthesizer, iPad, digital recorder, toddler's toy, 3 tape decks, saxophone, digital samplers, sequencers and mixers; performed by Robby Kee and Robert Cheatham

5. Inlets (10 min, shortened to 5 min by time constraints), gurgling and bubbling of the conch shells, recording of burning pine cone, one conch shell played briefly as horn; performed by Stuart Gerber, Jan Baker, and Caleb Herron

6. The Year Begins to be Ripe (Solo No. 49 from Songbooks) (2 min); voice and table top, using text from the journal of Henry David Thoreau; performed by Stuart Gerber

 

late Tuesday night, Cage album "Interterminancy" in entirety

 Indeterminancy, 1959

both compositional and performance indeterminancy

one story per minutes, sped up or slowed down accordingly to fit

speaker and piano are physically separated, on separate stopwatches

media:  WREK CD, 90 minutes; also Haller CD #5 and #6

fantastic liner notes by Richard Kostelanetz (1992) and Cage (1959) including Zen/boring/2-4-8 quote

 

random selections from Kostelanetz book

In 1988, Richard Kostelanetz published a book of interviews with Cage, entitled "Conversing With Cage".  I have found that Cage is endlessly fascinating, and in fact in leafing through this book recently, it seemed like anywhere I happened to land was interesting.  Which gave me an idea ...

Throughout the shows series I selected quotes from this book at random, using the random number generator at random.org.  This isn't exactly a divination system like the I Ching, but it'll do.  The copy I used is the second edition, published in 2003 by Routledge press.

Ford Focus Electric

I'm quite active locally with the electric vehicle (EV) community locally, in particular going to various public events (e.g. green living festivals, parades, etc.) to advocate for this technology.  Along those lines, the local club of EV enthusiasts was invited to a private Ford event where they were bringing the new Ford Focus Electric (FFE) to town and making it available for test drives.  No way I was going to pass that up, as it was the first time that the public could ever drive one of these new FFE's, which are slowly making it to market this year.

The event was held on May 16, 2012 at the Atlanta Zoo, which is kind of an odd place but apparently the event was in partnership with the city and provided a scenic neighborhood (Grant Park) for the test drive.  They had some sort of presentation / panel event inside the zoo facility proper but I couldn't get there until 1pm so my experience was limited to just looking at (and driving) the cars in the parking lot.

The Ford Focus Electric is a pure electric car, with a range of about 100 miles, like the Nissan Leaf.  But that's where the similarities end, because the car is a step up in many regards, including styling, charging speed and engine power.  It's also quite a big step up in price -- $40K, compared to $35K-ish for the Nissan Leaf and $40K for a Chevy Volt which has the gas engine and thus is much more useful.  Note that all of these qualify for the federal tax credit of $7500, and the pure electrics (Leaf and FFE) also qualify for a $5K state tax credit (which the Volt does not qualify for).  Therefore the net purchase cost of an FFE is actually $27.5K .  So please don't whine about the $40K cost of the car, as it doesn't actually cost you nearly that much in the end!

But all that aside, my purpose at this event was to get a good feel for the car, to experience how it drove, things that you can't learn by reading about it.  They had two or three FFEs there for test drives, and I actually ended up getting two opportunities to drive -- the first with a Ford rep and another person in the car, and then another run all by myself (wheee!).

Observations from my test drives:

• The car had less power than I expected; on paper this looks like a powerful car, but it seems to be tuned less for low speed acceleration and more for high speed cruising.  So around town, it is way less fun than my Volt.  I was really surprised by this.
• The accelerator "tip in" was pretty awful, very jerky.
• The braking is discontinuous.  In electric cars, the same motor that accelerates the car can be used to decelerate (brake) the car.  So when you press the brake pedal, it's actually the motor that slows the car down at first; as you press harder, the car starts to blend in the disc brakes.  This is far more efficient than just using the disc brakes like regular gas cars, because the motor braking "regenerates" power back into the batter.  But the car needs to carefully blend the two braking modes or it feels weird, and it definitely felt weird in the FFE.  It felt to me like the regen was only kicking in a full second after I started pressing on the brake, so I would get a kind of stuttered braking effect.  Very disconerting.
• The D and L transmission modes were indistinguishable to me.  "L" mode in electric cars is typically used to add more regen braking upon accelerator lift (before you move your foot over to the brake pedal).  People used to driving performance cars love this because it similates the effect of engine braking, and allows you to drive with just the accelerator pedal.  The FFE appears to have very weak L mode regen braking.
• The interior is very nice.  The steering wheel tilts and telescopes; heated seats are standard; Ford offers optional power seats with leather.  Everything on the car is standard except for the power/leather seat option and some premium colors, so Ford has followed GM and Nissan by basically throwing nearly everything into the car.
• Due the odd battery placement I mentioned above, there's a lot of weird, wasted space in rear.  The trunk is pretty rotten, and there's a compartment with a lid that interferes with the seats.  I didn't fold seats down to see what that looked like, but it was generally a mess back there.
• The 110V charger cord is using 16 AWG wiring, which is pretty thin wiring.  GM had 16 gauge wiring on their first generation charging cords, and a lot of people had problems with them; GM eventually replaced them for everybody, with the new one having thicker cords.  Ford will probably end up having to do this too.

Taking the longer view again ... There are a number of concerns one should have when considering this car.

First, it's a conversion, meaning Ford basically takes a regular gas Focus and put an electric drivertrain into it instead of a gas drivetrain; the most noticeable manifestation of that is that big battery block plopped into the trunk and messing up the usable volume back there.

Second, Ford only plans to make the FFE in small quantities for now, which generally indicates a lack of committment to the car and the technology, as if they are doing it only because they have to (google for "compliance car").

Third, it's overpriced, if you compare it to the Leaf and Volt, and I think this is actually related to the second item -- Ford isn't going to make many, so they decided to price it high because they know they can probably easily find a thousand or so people that are EV fans and Ford fans.

 In all, it's a nice looking car but it's got a lot of problems, and clearly Ford is just tiptoeing here.  Hopefully future model years will improve it.  Certainly it does get Ford started on the path, and positions them to be ready to react when EVs really start to take off.  Which is inevitable, trust me :)

Ilse "Omi" Conrad, 1917-2012

After a long illness, my grandmother Omi died last week.  She was 94.

Born in East Prussia in 1917, she managed to survive World War II with her family intact.  This included a harrowing escape from Konigsberg in early 1945 with her three young daughters in tow, just barely ahead of the advancing Red Army.

Eventually settling in the quiet town of Annweiler in the Rheinland-Pfalz, she and her husband Walter (my grandfather) rebuilt their lives and raised the three children.  My grandfather was a businessman who owned and operated a metal fabrication plant in town -- water tanks, cookware, etc.  By the early 1960s the three daughters had grown up and started their lives.  The eldest (Gisela) married a local lawyer and settled in the nearby city of Mainz; the other two daughters (twins) moved on to new homes farther afield, my aunt (Renate) settling in Munich and my mother emigrating to the USA.

My mom met my dad and they started a family.  I was part of the first wave of children to hit the three German sisters, and more children soon followed.  In the picture to the right you see me in her arms (I'm about 3 months old) and that's my cousin Stefan, 3 years old and impossibly cute.  Every year or two we would pull up and travel over to Germany for some big family get-together, or would host a visit from some of them coming over to the US.  Germans get a lot of vacation time from work and so they're always traveling somewhere!

In 1980, we started a small "exchange program" within our extended family, where an American kid would head over to Germany for a year to live and go to school with the cousins, and conversely a German kid would come to the US for a year.  We toggled back and forth like this for something like 15 years.  For the 1980-1981 school year, I got to be the first one to do it, and so at the age of 14 I headed to Annweiler to live with Omi (a German term for grandmother similar to "Granny").  She was raising my cousin Stefan, a couple years older than me, so I attended his high school on the top of the hill on the edge of Annweiler.

So I spent the year in Annweiler with Omi and Stefan, exploring the town and utterly immersed in German culture.  I knew a tiny bit of German before I arrived, but once there I absorbed the language rapidly -- it is truly amazing how quickly a child brain can absorb language.  I was essentially fluent within months. Well, verbally fluent, where I could slur my way through the conjugations.  Masculine, feminine, neuter ...

Grandfather Walter ("Opa") had passed several years prior, so it was the three of us in the house (Omi, Stefan and me).  Already 60+ years old by then, Omi was a dynamo, running the household and keep us two boys in line.  Well, mostly me, I think Stefan could do no wrong.  She had some incredible gardens all around the house and a big cherry tree in the back that you could climb and gorge on (Julienne and Teresa have a great story about those cherries).  At night after dinner we'd entertain ourselves with a board game or just TV, and I remember a few thrilling evening outings with Stefan -- thrilling because he was a good 2-3 years older and so all his friends and activities were sooooo exciting for this awkward, dorky teen.

To the left is a picture of Omi with Julienne, my little sister, circa 1978.

After my year was up I returned to the US to start regular high school (having spent my freshman year overseas).  Entering as a sophomore was a little jarring, and ended up somewhat disrupting my curriculum (and grades).  So we all learned from that experience, and while my two younger sisters also eventually went to Germany for a year, they waited until finishing US high school and basically spent a "gap year" in Germany, a 13th year of high school.  Further, by then Stefan had completed his studies at the Annweiler school, and had moved on to college, so while my two sisters followed my example in going to Germany for a year, they did so in Mainz with my aunt's family and our cousins there.

So I was really the only one (of the US kids) to live with Omi and live in Annweiler.  She ran a tight ship (and didn't necessarily suffer uppity teenagers well) but also created a warm and loving household for us to grow up in.  And when it was time for family reunions, they were held in Annweiler.

Eventually she sold the Annweiler house (after some 50 years of residence) and moved to Mainz to be close to the family there.  As she aged she moved into assisted living but always with the extended family extremely close by and visiting frequently, if not daily!

We had a big family reunion in Mainz in 2008 and I got to see her one last time then (and Sharon got to meet her).  I also had a chance to get out to Annweiler and see the old house (now owned by someone else) and meet up with old family friends there.

In June the family will gather in Annweiler and we'll lay Omi to rest next to her husband.  I'll be proud to be there, representing the Monika / US branch of the family.

Rest in peace, Omi.