Progress, sort of

The front of the museum with furring strips completed.

Today's going to be another museum day for me and the S.O. He's gotten stuck supervising the minions working on the siding project. After looking at the budget, the historical society decided we'd do half-round log siding on 3 sides and put up T1-11 on the back wall. The S.O. and one of the other members, a retired contractor, are providing technical advice and oversight of the minions, a couple young guys willing to work irregular hours for not much money. One kid is still in high school, another one just graduated. They don't have much experience, but they're willing to work. Sort of. They're not exactly eager to start super early in the morning (which is fine with the S.O.; he's never been a morning person) and they seem to run out of steam after about 5 hours. When they do, we don't argue. We have lives and other things we'd rather be doing, too.

One of the minions.

This is one of those projects that's technically easy -- put up furring strips, do the building wrap, nail up the log siding -- but can be remarkably time-consuming. The existing log walls are, to say the least, irregular. The furring strips are requiring a lot of chiseling and shimming. Still, the end is in sight. The minions have reached the last wall and, if all goes smoothly today, just might finish the strips. Then it's a case of double-checking the shimming, getting the building wrap on, and starting the siding. It's going to be interesting comparing the gas bills after the siding with the ones from before. The amount of natural gas we burn should drop considerably once we can no longer see daylight between the logs.

Before the minions vanish, I'll have one other task for them: removing the overgrown bushes from in front of the museum. They're a type of juniper that did not get trimmed for a number of years and really need to go. I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind planting them in the first place, but we need something that that's easier to maintain. I'm leaning toward to putting in some native shrubs, like blueberry bushes, but we could always just let it revert to lawn.

Living forever in cyberspace

It seems rather self-evident that cyberspace, i.e., the various iterations of the Internet and the World Wide Web (blogging, chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter, whatever) can be a strange space. Status updates people posted a month ago will suddenly show up as though they just happened. Google searches can seem to indicate multiple people exist with the same name or that no one at all does. And of course there's immortality.

The fact that something can live forever in cyberspace is one of those things that's become common knowledge, at least to anyone who's spent more than a few hours or days wandering around the virtual world. Did you post something rather irreverent or perhaps a tad obscene in an obscure chat room 10 or 15 years ago? It's pretty much a sure thing that's the first thing that will pop up if a prospective employer decides to Google your name. You're busy hoping that the minutiae about your life will include innocuous highlights like the time you won the 5th grade spelling bee or some cute photos of you with your adorable 1-year-old nephew. Nope. What comes up will be an ad saying "See Criminal Record for [insert your much too common name here]" or the reject America's Funniest Home Videos of your teenage self doing something super stupid with a skateboard one of your friends posted to YouTube five years ago.

Okay, so if it's a little annoying to realize that you can stumble across the equivalent of your life's bloopers reel any time you're foolish enough to do a little ego surfing. How weird is it going to be to have that bloopers reel kicking around long after you've taken a dirt nap? Or how confusing for various casual acquaintances or long-lost high school friends when they go looking for you and find references to something you posted ten years ago, a link that claims you're now 65 years old and living in Roswell, Georgia, and a link to an obit posted by a funeral home in Billings, Montana? Which ones make sense? And how creeped out will your close friends be when Facebook sends them a reminder that today is your birthday when they know the funeral was six months ago?

Facebook does actually take into account the fact that while the Internet may be immortal, people are not. Family members can ask to have a dead person's account removed or memorialized, although going by some of the comments I've read in advice columns and elsewhere not everyone is happy with the latter option. That's not surprising. Out here in the real world some people find reminders of the deceased touching or poignant, other people become depressed or unhappy when confronted with visible memorials.

On a personal level, I'd like to hope that when I go toes up someone takes the time to go through my various accounts (blogs, Facebook, whatever) and either delete stuff or do a post warning people not to expect new content. Whether or not anyone does, of course, is something I'll never know.
   

Why are some jobs more important to save than others?

We were watching "Real Time" with Bill Maher last night, and one of the professional political operatives, one of those people I tend to think of as being akin to whores except practicing a less respectable profession, started regurgitating right wing talking points about how absolutely devastating it's going to be to make it harder for power plants to burn coal. You know the type of political operative I mean, the folks with absolutely no discernible principles of their own -- they simply parrot whatever the latest talking points their party is promoting. Sometimes after the fact they'll concede that the nonsense they cheerfully spouted a few years before was absolute garbage, but of course by then the damage has been. You know, like the various Bush administration officials and advisers who are now willing to admit that invading Iraq in 2003 was a super stupid thing to do. Why didn't any of them speak up at the time? Because they preferred collecting a paycheck for repeating propaganda and lies more than they preferred being honest and retaining a soul.

Anyway, the panel on "Real Time" included Gavin Newsom (Democrat), Mary Matalin (Republican, former member of Dick Cheney's staff), and Steve Schmidt (Republican, and chief strategist for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign). Not surprisingly, one of the topics discussed was climate change (California is burning), which naturally led to Schmidt and Matalin going into full-scale parrot mode about the economic costs of trying to do anything. That in turn led to talking about fossil fuels and trying to move away from burning coal in power plants. Except, of course, we can't move away from coal because of the "economic costs." Lots and lots of blathering on about how we can't move away from burning coal because it's going to cost miners in Wyoming their jobs or result in BNSF running fewer coal trains or something. The blathering about saving certain jobs always results in me wanting to reach through a tv screen and strangle someone -- or at least put a 2x4 alongside their head. What about the economic cost of sea levels rising to the point where New York subways become unusable? Or big chunks of Florida uninhabitable? And why is it more important to keep coal miners employed doing what has to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest jobs on the planet than it is to provide adequate funding for schools to keep teachers working? It's fine to slash funding for education or maintaining infrastructure, but god forbid some poor miner in West Virginia or Wyoming end up being laid off for lack of work. It's bizarre.

I have ranted on this topic before, like when discussions of the defense budget come up. It's more important to keep machinists employed building useless crap like the F-35 (the airplane pilots refer to as "the Lawn Dart" because it's so unstable in flight) than it is to make sure schools are adequately staffed, for example. This country's priorities are remarkably screwed up. 

As for the talking heads on the panel, Mary Matalin is, of course, not the sharpest tool on the planet. Or the most ethical, despite the way she kept trotting out the fact she's a convert to Catholicism. Her resume does include that stint working for Darth Cheney, and she is married to James Carville, a political operative who prefers to collect his checks from the Democrats. When you have two people sharing a bed but who claim to espouse opposite ends of the political spectrum, common sense says one (and no doubt both) is simply a paid shill who will say anything if she knows the check will clear. As long as the Republicans keep paying her, she'll keep parroting their talking points. I'm not sure how much longer she'll continue to be invited to do that parroting in front of a camera, though, as the woman is not aging well. She's 62 now but looks at least a decade older -- and the main stream media is not fond of women who actually look old. In any case, Matalin's been a paid shill for so many decades now that it's highly unlikely she retains the ability to think for herself.

Steve Schmidt, on the other hand, is a little more intriguing. He retains some shreds of individuality. He has been brutally honest on the subject of the Palin disaster, and he has brief flashes of honesty. Still, watching political operatives in action always reminds me of a line from a Dr. Hook song, "how much soul must a poor man sell just to rub two coins together?" I once worked for a distinctly conservative daily paper. A few times I found myself having to whip together a last minute editorial, a couple hundred words of meaningless right-wing platitudes that would pass muster with our corporate overlords, because the person whose job it normally was to plug that hole on the page was not available. It wasn't hard to do, but it definitely felt weird. I don't think I could have done it on a daily basis. And, in retrospect, I'm rather happy that editorials were anonymous -- it was the voice of the paper, not that of any particular person. I'm not sure I could ever do the type of publicly visible  political hackwork people like Schmidt and Matalin do. Would I have written those editorials if I had to slap my name on them? I don't know.

As for why we were watching "Real Time" on Sunday evening instead of when it was broadcast on Friday, we rarely see anything on its original broadcast date. We watch "Real Time" through the wonders of You Tube, which means we always see it at least a day late.

You learn something new every day

Subtitle: My pain threshold is a lot lower than I thought.

Did you know you can get bursitis in almost any joint in your body? I always thought of bursitis as being a shoulder thing, although I guess I also knew that you can get it in an elbow. Turns out it can also hit you in the hips, knees, and other joints. It also happens that women are more likely than men to acquire hip bursitis due to having wider hips than men, although why that should be seen as a factor puzzles me. And, not surprisingly, it tends to hit more often as you age. Yet another reason, I guess, to doubt the truth of the adage that getting old beats the alternative.

I got to learn all this up close and personal after making the mistake of moving several heavy boxes of books at the museum a few days ago. I was worried about screwing up my back so was super careful to lift with my knees, just the way I was taught to long long ago when I was a minimum wage peon laboring at a rather physical job. Unfortunately, because I'm not as limber as I once was, lifting the right way simply meant I messed up a different part of my increasingly decrepit body.

Having a real pain in the ass was a strange experience. I've been called a pain in the ass more than a few times, but I'd never actually had the real thing before. My first thought, naturally, was that it was the hip joint that was messed up (i.e., arthritis). Fortunately, no, just an inflamed bursa. Bursitis is acute but fixable; arthritis is chronic and makes your life wretched indefinitely.

I changed primary care providers about a year ago. I decided to switch to seeing a geriatrician, and I think I found a good one. She takes the time to actually talk, she pays attention to what I'm saying, and she does a good job of explaining stuff. She also is willing to admit her limitations. After telling me I had classic trochanteric bursitis, she referred me to the orthopedic clinic for a steroid injection. She said she could do the injection herself but would rather not -- the last time she'd done that type of injection was back in med school. I have known a lot of doctors who think they can do everything; it's nice to deal with one doesn't think she has to.

The injection was an interesting experience in itself. The physician's assistant brought in a syringe that had a point on it that looked to be about the size of a railroad spike. You know it's a large gauge point when the site gets prepped first with a topical numbing agent and then with a local anesthetic before the Giant Needle gets plunged into your body. But it worked. The P.A. said it could take up to 48 hours for the steroid to affect the inflammation causing the pain; it was actually less than a day. It's possible that if I'd just been willing to go through another day or two of sleepless nights and eating ibuprofen like candy the bursitis would have faded away on its own. I don't know. Four nights of tossing and turning and fantasizing about black market opiates was more than enough for me.

I asked the P.A. just how common this type of bursitis is. She said she sees a couple cases every week, which explains why she was so good with that needle. Trochanteric bursitis is apparently incredibly common, which makes me wonder a bit why I'd never heard anyone complaining about having it. I guess it must come down to most people being unwilling to admit publicly they're suffering from a pain in the ass.

Book Review: Cataclysm: World War I As Political Tragedy

Alternative title: A Whole Lot More About World War I than You Ever Wanted to Know. 

This book was, to say the least, a hard slog. It's one of the few times in my life when I've looked up from a book and thought, wow, I really need to take a break and do some light reading -- where did I put that copy of Max Weber's Essays in Economic Sociology? There was just something about the combination of lots and lots of information and the depressing consequences of various players' stupid actions that turned the reading experience into an endurance test. It wasn't the author's fault, other than the fact he does too good a job of piling up the data. David Stevenson can write; the text is crystal clear. So, unfortunately, are the conclusions.

I can remember thinking more or less the same thing every time discussions of World War I came up: how on earth did an assassination in Sarajevo, which was part of the Hapsburg empire, result in Germany, which was NOT part of that empire, deciding to invade Russia and France more or less simultaneously? It made no sense. Well, now I know why they did it -- and it still makes no sense. Let's just say that whenever a country starts to believe it's somehow exceptional or that it has the world's strongest army and the best selection of cool military toys to play with, it's easy to get sucked into believing you can win any war. Turns out, as the Germans found out, that the war you can win easily on paper isn't necessarily the war you're going to end up fighting in the real world.

I am not going to do one of my usual detailed reviews of this book. Take my word for it -- it's packed with data, both political and technical. How many battleships did the Germans have? How many miles of trenches got dug? When did the various countries involved resort to conscription to get the cannon fodder their armies required? Stevenson has all the numbers. How did the civilian populations of the different countries feel about the war? Stevenson gets into the cultural aspects, too. He describes popular culture -- poetry, novels, music -- during and after the conflict. Tons and tons of information, all of which is simultaneously fascinating and mind-numbing.

And depressing, of course. One of the most depressing aspects of reading anything about World War I is how many battles were fought that served no purpose other than to attempt to wear down the other side through attrition. Millions of rounds of ordnance were expended, thousands and thousands of soldiers killed or crippled, and the front lines never budged more than a few yards at a time. It's easy to see why some parts of France and Belgium are still uninhabitable thanks to unexploded World War I ordnance. During one of the battles of Ypres, the British fired over a million artillery shells at the German lines. No doubt the Germans reciprocated. Neither side seemed to have a problem with munitions until the last year or so of the war.

So would I recommend this book to other readers? Yes, if you're seriously interested in military history or World War I. No, if you'd rather not know that history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. The final chapters in Cataclysm are a nice summation of the way WWI laid the groundwork for Hitler's rise to power and World War II.