Disaster Narrowly Averted

Our very excellent vacation almost had a very nasty ending.

We started heading home at 7:00 PM Wednesday, boarding Air Namibia in Windhoek for an 11 hour flight to Frankfurt. There, we had a 3 hour layover, before catching the 10 hour Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Portland.

We had not seen a newspaper or a television for a week and a half. We had no clue that a strike by the union for ground and cabin crews would lead to Lufthansa canceling 82 flights today.

This meant that there were over 300 passengers from our flight alone at the Frankfurt airport, looking for seats to Portland. That can make a standby list a very chancy business.

The Frankfurt airport is a dreadful place to be stranded. All the gates are secure access areas, which passengers may only enter as their passports and boarding passes are checked during the active boarding process. There are very few chairs available for those in transit who are not actively boarding. Frankfurt has, however, very thoughtfully provided a large horizontal surface for passenger relaxation. In the US, we call it a "floor."



We hustled to the Lufthansa transit center, and watched the queues grow longer as chaos descended on Frankfurt airport. When our turn finally came, the Lufthansa clerk put us on the waiting list for a flight to San Francisco. IF we could get to San Francisco, we then had confirmed flights on a flight from San Francisco to Portland.

There was a large crowd of hopeful standby passengers at the gate for the San Francisco flight. We were the last three called before they closed the doors and took off for San Francisco.

This day could have turned out a lot worse.

Hunting Completed

I am in Namibia, checking e-mails on a 9.6 kbps dial-up connection. No
photos by this connection. No opportunity to check the mac.com
account.

We have taken animals from A to Z, aardwolf to zebra. Elizabeth has
taken aardwolf, jackal, oryx, springbuck, duiker, and black
wildebeest. I have taken zebra, red hartebeest, blesbok, and warthog.

Tomorrow we go to a nearby village to make a donation of meat from our
hunts to one of the local boarding schools. We have a sense that if we
watch the meat go into the school's freezer, it will get to the right
place. One never knows with money donations.

Wednesday we start working our way back to Portland. We leave 7 PM
from Namibia for Frankfurt. On Thursday we leave at about 9 am for
Portland, and arrive in Portland at about 11 am after flying for 10
hours. Our internal clocks should be throughly thrashed at that point.

Report from Namibia

All is well so far. E-mail access is not straightforward -- we have a
very slow dialup connection, and our mac.com account is not at all
accessible from here. If there are any messages, please send them to
the gmail account.

The hunting score so far is Daughter 3, Father 2. Elizabeth has taken
very nice oryx, springbuck, and black wildebeest (what's gnu?). I have
taken a zebra and a red hartebeest. Tomorrow our aim is blesbock.

If any of you want to see where we are staying, the website is

bergzicht-hunting.com

More in due course!

Another photo

The internet connection here is a little buggy. It took one photo twice, and another not at all. I will add the skipped photo to this post, because I don't think I have enough time left to correct the first one.

Online in Nambia

We are sitting at an internet cafe in Swakopmund, Namibia, catching up on our e-mail. Out of 98 new e-mails, about 12 are from people we care about, and the rest are spam.

The flight from Portland to Frankfurt was one of the best flying experiences we have had. The comparison of Lufthansa to the various American airlines is stark. The only problem with the flight is that it delivered us to the Frankfurt airport, which is a dreadful place if you have to spend any time there at all. There are very few places to sit, as all the gate areas are closed off until the gate agents are checking boarding passes before the flight. So, after 14 hours in an airport with no places to sit, we boarded Air Namibia for Windhoek.

We were met at the airport by Augustine, who has been our guide since our arrival. We drove through the Gamsberg pass, going from Windhoek to the coast town of Swapokmund, which is Namibia's biggest tourist town. Along the way we spotted several new life birds: sociable weavers, gray chanting groshawks, and snake eagles. The animals we spotted on the drive included ostrich, baboons, springbucks, and at the top of a rocky peak there was a klipspringer.

So far, we have ridden horses on the dunes at sunset, and driven by the compound where Brad and Angelina stayed for their first baby. The horse they gave me to ride was very much like Major at Mathias State Park -- my father will know what this means. In the picture one can see that the horse and I are debating whether to hold still for the photo or not. We have seen greater and lesser flamingoes, and grey herons. Tonight, we are going for a camel ride. Tomorrow, we leave early to go to the lodge.

Team Penning

The Cascade Team Penning Association held an event at the Flying Dirt Ranch in Turner, Oregon last weekend. The Oregonian picked up this photo of mine for their online photo blog, "Oh, Snap!"

Second Amendment Pandemonium

The Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller defined that individuals have a fundamental right to defend themselves, and that the Second Amendment gives them the right to do so with a firearm.

This drives a stake through the heart of plans long cherished by some, to pay lip service to traditions of hunting and sportsmen, while working incrementally to restrict the "right to keep and bear arms" to the ability to check a shotgun out of a repository long enough to shoot a few grouse, then check it back in. These opponents of legal gun ownership operate on the belief that their world would be a safer place if you don't have a gun.

Most of these people have never had a felon with malicious intent in their living room or in their face. After the felon has left, the police are summoned. That is when you realize that to a large degree, the police are society's janitors. There is little chance that they will be there to protect you when the wolf comes to call. That is when you question the wisdom of remaining an unarmed sheep, supposedly for the greater good.

Opponents of legal gun ownership like to couch their advocacy in terms of public health concepts. When advocacy tries to masquerade as science, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Pretty soon, it starts to sound rather like blaming the tornado on the existence of the trailer park. Generally, valid scientific conclusions do not flow from exclusion of contrary evidence, fabrication of data, and incestuous literature references. The canons of scholarly discourse are not in evidence in the antigun health advocacy literature.

Antigun health advocates say that it is simple: more guns means more homicides, suicides, and fatal gun accidents, while restrictive gun laws mean fewer such events. However, this belief is not supported by the evidence. In 1973, the rates of U.S. gun ownership, handguns and all guns, was 176 and 610 per thousand, respectively. The homicide rate was 9.4 per 100,000. In 1992 the handgun and all gun ownership rate had increased significantly, to 304 and 870 per thousand, respectively. The homicide rate was 9.3 per 100,000. While gun ownership rates have increased, accidental gun deaths have decreased. There is no observable relationship between gun ownership and suicide rates. Antigun health advocates will not engage the data that suicide rates are much higher in antigun European nations.

The science which the opponents of legal gun ownership never want to acknowledge is criminology, when it looks at the effects of legal gun ownership on crime. Criminologists generally conclude that gun availability does not lead law abiding citizens to commit crimes, and that the value of firearms in defending potential victims has been significantly underestimated.

But now, the entire debate is shifting. As popular as it is right now for the antigun health advocates to say, "But it's bad for you!," the Supreme Court has said that there is an individual right to own and use a firearm in self defense. The Chicago Tribune at least is intellectually honest about the whole thing, as they call for repeal of the Second Amendment. The LA Times favors a more weasel-like approach, calling for legislation where gun manufacturers are somehow made responsible for target societal rates of gun violence, with surcharges and production limits if the target rates aren't met. Backdoor games to make guns expensive and rare are not likely to meet constitutional muster.

Those who are eager to impose their views on the nation as a whole should pay heed to what those efforts do to their other interests. Democrats have lost many elections because gun owners vote. Sometimes it seems as if the Republicans have the vote of Joe Paycheck despite making corporations supreme and shipping jobs overseas, simply because the Republicans can be trusted to not make a move on Joe's guns. If Democrats wanted to be more competitive in rural America, they could consider the idea of deciding that where antigun legislation is concerned, the voters have spoken against it, and move on to other issues.

One thing you can be sure of is that gun owners are paying close attention right now, to see who is wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth about the Heller decision. Those who see the Heller decision as an unfortunate setback to be overcome are revealing themselves right now. Gun owners do not forget.

Preparing For Travel

As we prepare to travel abroad, it does not does us any good at all to see stories like this:

"NEW DELHI (AFP) - An Air India flight headed for Mumbai overshot its destination and was halfway to Goa before its dozing pilots were woken out of a deep slumber by air traffic control, a report said.

The high altitude nap took place approximately two weeks ago, the Times of India reported Thursday. The report, however, drew a furious denial from Air India."

Meanwhile, my wife, the Thrifty Yankee, is totally outmatched by the types of expenditures required for travel to Africa. She is reduced to looking for bargains on our malaria medicine to satisfy her sense of obligation.

Autism Sensurround

Dan is home for summer break. He has been busily burning new DVD's.

His abuse of DVD drives is legendary. Over the years, he stuffed so many dirty and damaged disks into the G5's internal drive that it finally gave up the ghost. For the last 2 years, if you try to put a disk into the internal hard drive it is never read, and makes noise which are the mechanical version of wailing and gnashing of teeth for an indefinite period, until that disk's time in purgatory has been served and it is released to go to disk heaven.

So, it was no surprise when the external DVD burner gave up the ghost today. This necessitated a trip to acquire its replacement.

I'll say one thing for going to the store towing a 13 year old with autism and Tourette's: you quickly see which store clerks have any awareness and self preservation instincts. The guys at the Apple Store scored very highly on these scales, meeting me at the door while swearing up and down that whatever I was looking for, they didn't carry it. (OK, in the interests of fairness, they only said that about external DVD burners.) The guy at the Mac store, however, was going to give me his full unhurried chatty customer service.

Meanwhile, Dan went to the demo computers whirring on desks across the store.

I Looked at Dan. I looked at the clerk. The clerk did not take the hint. He couldn't find a DVD burner on the shelf. He flashes a dazzling customer service smile, and offers to go the extra mile by looking it up in their inventory. He strides with purpose to a customer service computer, and ponders the responses to his opening keystrokes.

Meanwhile, Dan has zeroed in on the computer hooked up to the Bose mega sound system, complete with satellite subwoofer.

Earnest Clerk returns. He doesn't think they have any, but he is going to quiz Stockroom Guy, saying "our inventory database isn't the most intuitive." He disappears.

Danny launches Safari. He types "Thomas" into the Google Search window, and uses the thumbnail video screen shots to navigate to the YouTube offerings of Thomas The Tank Engine videos.

Earnest Clerk returns from the stockroom with the external DVD burner we so desperately need under his arm. He tries to patiently explain all its features as I happily interrupt him with, "That's just the one I was hoping you'd have. Let's ring it up!" I speed towards the checkout counter, hoping to pull him along in my wake.

Too late. The opening notes of the Thomas theme reverberate through the store. The steam whistle blows. You know, with a really good sound system, it sounds just like you are really in a train yard.

A rapid calculation ensues. I am at the checkout counter, and Dan is 30 or 40 feet away and very happy. Good luck has led the other customers to vacate the store before the performance started. It's just me and the employees. The calculation is that the best strategy here is to finish the transaction ASAP. Devil take the hindmost.

To their credit, only 2 of the employees appeared to be in pain from being subjected to Thomas the Tank Engine at arena rock volumes.

Earnest Clerk got full marks. He showed no clue that there was anything going on beyond him chatting about which of the three addresses in the customer database he should use and how they came to be, about the return and restocking policy and fee, and did I need a bag?

I thanked him, went with the DVD burner to Dan and entered the keyboard commands to quit Safari, and walked with Dan to the door as peace and tranquility returned to the store.

"Have a nice day! Thanks for coming in" was the benediction as Dan and I did the recessional out the front door.

Somewhere there is a crowd of people who could read this story and be absolutely certain that this story is a shocking confession of failure to exert parental control of a child's behavior. I would be interested in seeing how any of them would do in a 15 minute matchup with a teen affected by autism and Tourette's. They have no effing clue.

The straightaway

There is nothing quite like the attraction of a hill which snakes for miles to downtown, on a summer day.

AAARRGGH!

Yesterday was a troublesome day for music.

It was Jazz Sunday at church. We were playing as a quartet: piano, bass, drums, and trumpet.

The leader, the pianist, handed out the music at the 9:30 am performance. We ran through the tunes. The leader asked if we could play the closing tune, "Blue Skies," a step down from what was written on the chart, to accommodate the trumpet player.. No problem, we agreed. After the run-through, he looked back and handed me a chart for "Our Love Is Here To Stay," saying that we would play it as in interlude in the middle. No problem.

However, when it came time to play "Our Love Is Here To Stay," what I was playing on the bass sounded horribly, horribly wrong against the melody from the piano. The pianist's head whipped around to look at me. It was clear to the audience that the bass player was doing something really wrong. What wasn't clear to the audience was that the pianist had given me a chart written in the key of C, while he had chosen to play from his chart written in the key of F. I dragged my bass over, to read over his shoulder from his chart for the rest of the tune.

Fast forward to the closing tune, "Blue Skies," transposed down a step. The tune starts. Again, what I am playing sounds horribly, horribly wrong. Again, the pianist's head whips around to look at me. Again, it is clear to the congregation that the bass player is doing something really wrong. I am baffled, until the trumpet player walks back and tells me, "He's not transposing. He's playing it in the original key."

At least the drummer and I managed to go along with the tune that was rehearsed in 4/4 but performed in 3/4.

Now I've got to deal with the fact that I've been made to look like a total incompetent in front of a large group of people. And, for once it isn't even my fault.

AAARRGGH!

Danny's Summer Break

Dan is home for his summer break from Heartspring.

Turns out that his presence is conducive to blogging. When he is home, it is best not to leave him unattended. So, blogging is one of the ways to spend the time as we play side by side on the twin computers.

Supreme Court Says Enough Is Enough

When I was three years old, it was 4 years into Brown vs. The Board of Education, and it still took troops to get black schoolgirls safely into the Little Rock schools.

Justice Roberts and his robed brethren have decreed "Mission Accomplished." Enough already with this integration stuff, they say. I never thought that men in robes opposing integration could get this far.

Getting Out Of Town

My usual blog is not accessible when I am away from my home computer. I will use this backup site until I have access again.

I Didn't Do It

What parent hasn't heard that phrase?

You hear the crash, go into the room with the broken pottery, and the
child standing there says, "I didn't do it."

Rather like this statement from White House spokesman Tony Snow:

On the first day of the 34th annual Conservative Political Action
Conference (CPAC), White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, a former Fox
News Channel anchor, made a speech in which he argued that terrorists
were to blame for the Global War on Terror, not the United States.

Speaking at the Omni Shoreham Hotel's Regency Ballroom in Washington
DC, the presidential advisor said, "We didn't create the war in Iraq.
We didn't create the war on terror."

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Snow_We_didnt_create_war_in_0301.html

Thanks for your service. Now, shut up.

In October of 2006, a woman who was a long time volunteer at Walter Reed Army Hospital took her friend, Donald Rumsfeld's wife, to the hospital to see the conditions there. The friend was then banned from visits to the hospital.

Last Sunday, the Washington Post broke the story of the deplorable conditions for the injured veterans there. On Monday, the sergeant major for the troops in the Medical Hold Unit at Walter Reed arrived and told them:

1. You will be awake daily at 0600.

2. Inspection will be daily at 0700.

3. You must not speak to the media.

4. If you need help with paperwork or conditions, you must stay in your chain of command.

5. Your first sergeant has been relieved of duty.

6. All platoon sergeants are hereby reassigned.

7. 120 permanent duty soldiers are on their way to take charge of this unit.

That is all.


I particularly like the part about the daily inspections. Perhaps they will gig the individual soldier for having mold or rodents in their room.

Meanwhile, the Commander in Chief has proposed to cut funding for care of veterans.