Saturday, July 31, 2010

Blog # 152: Nothing Can Stop the Army Air Corps

from Little Eddy #4


Written and first published September 29, 2007




The Lockeed B-24 Bomber, was known affectionately by many of those who flew in it as the “Flying Coffin,” required a crew of ten to fly it. The resemblance to a coffin is obvious just by looking at it.


This week's post requires a language warning as it is impossible to write

about the army of the 1940's honestly without using a certain obscenity

The most life altering experience of my young life came at age 17 when I enlisted, and a year later was called up to serve in the United States Army Air Corps. World War II had begun when I had been a sophomore in Mirabeau B. Lamar High School in Houston, Texas.


I'll never forget the morning of Dec. 8, 1941 when F.D.R.'s voice rang forth over the school intercom system, to announce in that compelling oratorical style of his, “Sunday, December 7th, 1941, is a day that will live in infamy.” (It sure as hell will in my book) He was addressing a joint session of both houses of Congress, and he went on to announce our entrance into World War II. The miracle of radio brought his voice into our High School, and the school’s intercom system brought it into every classroom as he was speaking.


Three years later I graduated from Lamar at age sixteen (It was an 11 year curriculum back then.) They graduated us at midterm so that we could squeeze some college in before we trundled off to war. I chose to enlist in the Army Air Corps rather than letting myself get drafted into the infantry. I figured being flown was preferable to slogging on the ground using my own steam. What the hell did I know?


Return with us to those chilling days of yesteryear


Anyway, we would like to invite you to return with us to those rather naive days of yesteryear, as we do our best to give an honest look back at our time in the United States Army Air Corps, a branch of the Army which after World War II became the U.S. Air Force and was made into an equal branch of service. I was 17 when I enlisted in the Army Air Corps, figuring that riding around in airplanes beat the hell out of walking all over Europe on foot (Much less swimming from island to island in the Pacific Ocean).


After a lonely overnight Pullman ride to San Antonio, Texas, I entered into the service in October 1944 at the tender age of 18, inducted in the Army Air Corps (serial #: 18228386) at Ft. Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. I immediately got shipped to the Air Corps basic training facility at Amarillo, Texas. There we were assigned to whatever our specialty was going to be for the rest of our term of service.


To receive our basic assignments, as for everything in the service, we formed a long line. “Hurry up and wait,” If you want to know the truth, that seemed to be the motto of the army. The man in the line ahead of me was in his early thirties and had been a truck driver all of his civilian life. When he got his job assignment he found himself assigned to the kitchen detail as a baker. He looked shocked and surprised, whispering to me he didn’t know how to boil water, much less bake anything. A corporal standing nearby explained, “that’s the way the army prefers it. They get to teach you their way.


As for me, I had two eyes and a trigger finger and was too young to know better, and so naturally I was assigned to be a Sperry Ball Gunner on a B-24 aircraft. And as soon as I completed basic training I would be shipped off to join an air crew.


The man in the line behind me was also in his thirties, and had been a chef for all of his working life. He was assigned to: what else? To drive a truck. It might not sound believable, but believe me, it happened just as I have described it.


We referred to ourselves as GI’s (which stood for Government Issue) and we even had a phrase for what happened in that assignment line, a phrase whose initials were S.N.A.F.U., which stood for: situation normal, all fucked up.


One of the strangest things about my time in the service was the transformation of language. It was as if all constraints had been lifted from polite society’s speech, and the verb fucking suddenly quit its verbiness and became an adjective, one which was often used many times during a typical sentence. And one strange after effect came after the war was over, and authors trying to write honestly about the service found they could not use the word fuck in the literature of that time. Imagine, not being able to write GI speech without using the word fuck. The substitutes, of which fugg was one of the most frequently used ones, just didn’t cut it. It took Grove Press some years later, publishing books by Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, to finally liberate the language, including the public’s word for making love.


The PX’s machine made unforgettable plain cake doughnuts

It is strange what we remember most about basic training. For me it was the plain cake doughnuts that the PX vending machine made from scratch, doughnuts which were completely machine made, but which to me tasted incredibly delicious served with the PX coffee, and I have been chasing plain cake doughnuts ever since. I even made my own plain cake doughnuts for awhile from an old Vermont recipe which I got off of the internet, but strangely none I have ever made or bought have come near to matching my memory of those Air Corps vending machine doughnuts of basic training. Strange what you remember sometimes, isn’t it? They were unforgettable.


My First Supreme Blockage

My dear late mother had a thing about bowel movements, in fact she lived in constant fear of missing a daily movement herself, and she often consumed laxatives to help “keep herself regular,” and she administered every kind of laxative known to civilized man/woman to me, all the while espousing that not moving one’s bowels for as much as three days was sure to lead to a grave infirmity, if not my actual demise. ExLax, Milk of Magnesia, Oil of Citrinella, you name it, she dispensed it, those were just a few of the concoctions she would serve at the slightest hint of congestion. If it moved ones bowels she was all for it.


Well, when I went into basic training my system went into a kind of shock, and I did not have a bowel movement for 16 days. Really, I counted. I ended up having one mighty jam up down there when finally things started moving again, but that incident rather punctured Ma's myth about the necessity of daily or semi-daily excretion. I have never since worried about missing a day, nor have I ever taken a laxative since. Nor have I ever had a problem with constipation. It’s all in your mind after all? What was it FDR used to say, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He said it about something else, true, but it applies.


The One Skill I Learned


Memories of basic training have now become blurred, but I ended up learning one thing that has served me well throughout the ensuing years of my life. It happened during gunnery practice, and it was how to correctly fire an M-16 rifle.


According to what we were told, you take a normal breath, exhale half of it, then gently squeeze the trigger while sighting down the cross-hairs before exhaling the rest of your breath, making sure to follow through your squeeze as your weapon fires.


I have not fired a rifle since basic training, but I found that formula essential in the taking of good, sharp photographs. Sighting through the view finder framing what you want to appear in your photograph and then carefully focusing the lens. Bracing yourself against something if possible, or else make yourself as steady as possible, take in a breath, let half of it out, then gently squeeze the camera's trigger, not forgetting to follow through after the lens is tripped. This is a formula which if adopted is guaranteed to help you make clear, razor sharp photographs, providing of course you also got your subject in sharp focus and exposed properly.


Legend had barbed-wire fence


Only Thing Between Amarillo and North Pole


Legend has it that the only thing between Amarillo and the North Pole is a barbed-wire fence. I was stationed there in the fall, and you couldn't prove that statement by me, but from what permanent party told it, it was probably true. We did take an overnight camping trip while I was there where the weather turned cold giving a hint of its potential. It was on that trip that I learned that the less clothes you wore in your sleeping bag, the warmer you were. That is because your bare skin keeps sending heat waves back and forth with the sleeping bag. And to speed the warming process you needed only to breathe inside the sleeping. The permanent party there claimed that it was truly so, and after that one camp out I believed them.


Fortunately by winter the gods of the Army Air Corps had sent me about as far south as I could go and still be in Texas. I was to be assigned to a B-24 air crew as a Sperry Ball turret gunner and was sent to Harlingen, Texas for crew assignment and initial training. Ah, the sun soaked Rio Grande valley, the only Air Corps base I'm sure with an active fully functioning, fruit bearing orange grove taking up much of its real estate.


In telling you about Harlingen I could tell you about Rosita, the famed exotic dancer from across the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, a young lady who used muscles most females never even dreamed they had, which she used to extract fruits and vegetables from her most private areas. But, alas, this is not that kind of post. Besides, I was a good boy, I never actually saw Rosita myself, only heard about her from others more curious than myself. From all accounts, though, she really was the stuff legends are made of.


Sperry Ball Turret Explained


I should say a few words about the Sperry Ball turret along about here. It was round, literally a ball, and when the plane was in the air the ball sat completely outside of the airplane. For landing and take off it was cranked up inside the aircraft so as not to scrape the ground.


Once you entered the turret you lay on your back in a near fetal position, you rotated the turret by way of the two machine gun triggers, and you sighted and tracked your target through the gun sight between your legs.


The turret was heavily armored, and the gunsight itself was about 8” square, and was an analog computer reputed to be able to accurately mathematically figure the speed of your aircraft, and by your tracking of the attacking plane, the speed of the attacking aircraft. You controlled the turret with to two 50 caliber machine gun triggers, which like game controllers also controlled the turret. And supposedly the gunsight computed the correct lead for hitting the attacking aircraft you were tracking, as you fired at your enemy. Fortunately I was never in a position to be able to test the accuracy of the computer’s gunsight.


At Harldingen they told us that in the European theater of operations B-24 crews pulled the turret out of the aircraft, replacing it with a ring which held a machine gun on a track with which you could try and shoot at planes coming up at you from below. No fancy computer to compute your lead however, you had to guess what lead to give the approaching aircraft.


Also at Harlingen we were told the story of a Sperry Ball gunner who while on a gunnery training mission, his crew's B-24 had dipped a little low on the gunnery range, slightly scraping the ball turret along the ground. When the crew got back to the base, and cranked up the turret so they could land the plane, they found the gunner inside covered with sand. His hair had turned white, and he had lost the power of speech and the ability to walk. Stories like that really prepared us well for the big war which lay ahead. Right.





The Sperry Ball Turret lay completely out of the airplane when it was in use. The gunner was stuffed into the ball in a fetal position, controlling the turret from the machine gun triggers, and sighting his target through the analogue computer which figured the aircraft’s speed, and the target you are tracking, and computing a lead for the target.


The Sperry Ball Turret was fairly heavily armored, and the gunsight itself was about 8” square, and was an analog computer, and was reputed to be able to accurately mathematically figure the speed of your aircraft, and by your tracking of the attacking plane, the speed of the attacking aircraft. And supposedly it computed the correct lead for hitting the attacking aircraft you were tracking firing with the two 50 caliber machine guns you had at your fingertips. Fortunately I was never in a position to be able to test the accuracy of the computer gunsight.


Things Not to Do: Ditch the Aircraft


B-24's were large, bulky aircraft which when crash landed in water had a floating time of about a minute and a half (compared to a Boeing B-17 which had been known to float for up to thirty minutes upon a sea landing (in the vernacular it was called ditching the aircraft.) B-24's were known not so affectionately by those that flew in them as Flying Coffins, and were the gift of the Lockeed Aircraft Co. They stank of aviation fuel, were drafty, and were extremely conducive to air sickness. I didn't throw up during every flight, but it was pretty close, probably six or seven out of each ten flights.





We got paired into crews at Harlingen Army Air Corps Base, probably the only Air Corps base with a full fledged fruit bearing orange grove on it.


What I remember best about Harlingen was the orange grove on the base which took up quite a bit of the base real estate. On many mornings when we were to be assigned duty I was very much in luck, my last name being Badeaux, it's prounciation seemed to lie beyond the skill of the average detail sergeant, and so in their embarrassment they would either skip over my name altogether, or else mangle it so badly it wasn’t recognizable. For quite a few mornings that enabled me to disappear into the orange grove when the sergeant wasn't looking, where I would pick oranges and eat oranges for awhile, before ending up in the PX getting coffee and those incredible cake doughnuts. In any case because of my French sounding name I was able to miss many an army work detail, and so ever since I have been so thankful for my name.


Shooting Skeets from the back of a pickup truck


We practiced shooting at moving targets on the ground at Harlingen by shooting at skeets flying through the air using shotguns mounted in the back of moving pickup trucks. No fancy computational gunsight, in order to hit the skeets you had to gauge the proper amount of lead to give the target yourself. It was a little weird, but kind of fun. We also fired at real targets from our airplane turrets with our 50 caliber machine guns. The targets were hauled alongside us by airplanes which pulled the targets on very long leashes.


One day a farmer's cow was machine gunned (not by me I am quick to point out), for sport I presume, or perhaps, just because it was there. And all of a sudden all hell broke use. Soon afterwards our entire training program was shut down and all of our units were shipped to Muroc, California for continuation of crew training. The base is now named Edwards Air Force Base (and these days acts as an alternate landing field for the space shuttle), back then it was known as Muroc Army Air Field and was primarily used at that time for testing new types of aircraft.


The most unusual aircraft I saw there was called the Flying Wing, and that is exactly what it was, a huge wing painted black with the crew quarters, the bomb bay, everything, inside this gigantic wing. It was a four engine plane as I remember, it looked just like some gigantic flying bat, and I had always thought that if the Air Force had built a hundred of these apparitions and flown them over Japan the Japanese would have been so terrified they would have given up the war on the spot. The air force eventually came up with an alternate way to scare the Japanese into surrendering, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My way would have been far less traumatic and injurious to the health of fellow human beings. But armies always seem to prefer overkill, and besides they were dying to test that awe inspiring weapon which the scientific community have given them.


While we were stationed in Muroc we saw a couple of other test planes. The first one flew alongside our formation of B-24's while we were heading for gunnery range practice. The plane flew alongside us for about ten minutes, then suddenly pulled away, making us look like we were standing still. It turned out to be the XP-59, the very first jet fighter plane developed in the U.S. for the air force. The XP-59 never was put into service, and therefore never had the X (which stood for experimental) removed from its name.


One day all the flags on the base were flying at half staff. I asked one of our officers what happened, and he said President Roosevelt had died. A short time later the flags were also flying at half staff and this time I was told they signaled the end of the war in Europe. Germany and Italy had surrendered.


A couple of weeks later our crew was on a photography mission (our turrets were loaded with cameras loaded with film, and when we reached our target we were to use the cameras to photograph our target. The film would later be processed and our accuracy determined by the processed film.) At any rate on that day another strange looking aircraft flew alongside us. This plane was really sleek looking, and after flying alongside us long enough to attract our attention, it too flew away, this time at a speed so great it made us look like we were flying backwards.


Some damned fool, which as I remember was me, but don’t tell a soul, took pictures of that mysterious apparition with the film destined to be used on our targets. (This plane turned out to be the highly secret XP80 which did later get the X dropped from its name, and did get put into service late in the World War II), and that night when our film was developed the base notified the Inspector General's office in Washington that pictures of the Air Corps newest secret weapon had been developed in their darkrooms, and a couple of days later we had several FBI types disguised in Army Air Corps uniforms trying to find out what lout had had the gall to photograph this highly secret aircraft.


Paranoia was the order of the day, the rumor mill had some Japanese agent riding rampant over America's secrets (he would probably have been German had not the war in Europe recently ended). As far as I know they never found the culprit (me), and if you ask me it was the usual complete waste of the army's money. Don't fly strange exotic airplanes by us when we have loaded cameras if you don't want some damn fool like me to take pictures of it. We never heard anything more about it, and they never caught up with me. I don't know if that incident had anything to do with what came next (I very much suspect it did), however a few days later all of our crews were transferred to Tonopah Army Air Force Base near Tonopah, Nevada.


If there was one geographic characteristic you could count on it was this, next to every large mountain the air force would build an airfield. I suppose the rationale was to keep the pilots sharp and on their toes. And it put the Fear of God is those of us non flyers who were reluctantly along for the ride. Tonopah, like Muroc before it, was desert. Pure desert. On other bases when they wanted to manufacture pointless work they formed grass cutting details. At Tonopah there was no grass, we whitewashed the rocks that lined the pathways white.


The two bases were nothing alike. Muroc was all air force, and it was an important cog in the wheels of the air force. Virtually every plane that was developed for the Air Corps was tested there. Still is. Tonopah, on the other hand, had an old Calvary General as its commanding officer, and the Air Corps be damned, he was bound and determined to run the base as a traditional Army Cavalry base.





A formation of B-24s flew into the Pacific sky.


The usual missions we flew from Tonopah were called Navigation missions, and they consisted of virtually the exact same mission, where the navigator plots the course and the pilots fly it under his direction. The usual course never changed, and consisted of flying north to Reno, then due west to San Francisco, then turning south to Los Angeles, after which we turned east to Las Vegas, and finally North once again to Tonopah. Since we flew the same course every damn time I failed to see how the Navigator got much hands-on experience by charting an identical course ad infinitum.


The trips were interesting, though. Especially when we got near the ocean near San Francisco. One of the sights I will never forget on those missions was seeing the giant fog banks off in the ocean rolling into San Francisco in the late afternoon. If the fog had already rolled in, which happened once or twice, you couldn't see San Francisco at all except for a few tall buildings poking through the haze.


We flew at around 30,000 feet, and either by some miracle, or some bureaucratic oversight, I had actually made corporal by this time, but one day when the automatic heated gloves and shoes on my flight suit didn't work, I was so cold and miserable I unplugged my oxygen mask and elected to pass out. And I got busted for my trouble. Actually there were two of us back in the waist who had passed out. We had oxygen checks every five minutes while flying, and when our station didn't answer they sent the engineer back to find out what was what. We both got busted. I like to think that that oxygen deprivation had no long term effect on my brain, but come to think of it that might explain a thing or two, here and there.

I managed to pull off one other real gaff which would have also gotten me busted if I hadn't been busted already. When an officer came in the barracks the first person to spot him was supposed to jump to his feet shouting, "ATTENCHUT!" Well, one day our captain came into the barracks, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and not a word did I utter. Much less shout. In truth I was philosophically opposed to calling a barracks full of tired crewman who had risen at 4:30, been briefed at six, and flown from 7 until 1:30 to attention just because an officer happened to come into the room. I'm not sure who was more embarrassed, the captain or me.


At any rate, the sergeant in the top bunk across from me happened to look up, saw the officer, and shouted "ATTENNCHUT!!!" on his way down as his feet hit the floor. The men of the baracks, as one man, hit the attention stance, me included. I didn't object to standing at attention, only to calling the others to attention. Needless to say my time off hours for the next few weeks were occupied in white washing the rocks that lined the walkways. Such did I serve my country? However, a short time later I did some job for another Captain, and he was so pleased with my work that he insisted on inserting a letter of commendation into my official record. That must have confused the hell out of them over at command central.


I ended up flying 256 hours in the Air Corps. It wasn't much fun. The planes were cold and drafty and reeked of gasoline. I got air sick on most flights. I'll never forget the day I ate a pint of strawberry ice cream just before take off, and not 30 minutes later at 20,000 feet I threw every last ounce of it up again, and it had refrozen onto my oxygen mask, looking exactly as it had looked before I had eaten it. The only difference was now it reeked of the odor of bile.


Another thing that was unnerving was when the engines torched in flight. An engine torching meant that it was playing like it was a comet and shooting a tail of fire out it's exhaust, and because all of the gasoline for the flight is stored in that same same wing with the torching engine, the whole event managed to be just a wee bit unnerving. B-24 engines would torch frequently, but I remember the worst torching incident happening after dark when we were on a night Navigation mission.


The engine was not only torching, but orange flickering flames were licking their way across the very wing in which all of our gasoline was stored. The tail gunner and I were both scared out of our minds and we had our parachutes on, and we were standing beside the bomb bay in case there was an evacuation in our future. The Tail gunner was praying, and I was trying my best to remember how to.


How did the pilots put out the torching engines, you might well ask? They did it by blowing out the fire, which meant revving the engine up to its maximum capacity in hopes the ensuing wind would blow out the fire before it ignited the wing tanks. Fortunately on that night blowing out the fire worked, allowing me to keep my parachute jumping record at Zero!


In Tonapah Every 3rd Establishment a Gambling Joint


In the town of Tonopah virtually every third establishment was a gambling joint. There was one three day period while I was there when a blizzard prevented all means of transportation into or out of the town. As a result the Friday night base payroll would not be able to be met. You might not believe this, but when it became evident that the army's payroll wasn't going to be able to be met the town's gaming establishments all got together and put up the entire payroll for the base. They weren't exactly being altruistic or patriotic, they did it so that the men could come into town that night and lose a great deal of their pay back to their benefactors. Ain't free enterprise great?


The war with Japan ended the night we graduated from crew training. We were given a delay in route on the way to where else, the east coast for deployment to Europe? The war in Europe had ended months earlier, but there's army logic for you. I spent VJ night in Las Vegas, Nevada, waiting up all night to catch a morning flight to Houston. I could not buy my ticket in advance, so I had to spend that entire night surrounded by crap tables and slot machines, all crying out loudly for my flight money. I gingerly fed a slot machine here and there, and went to an all night movie theater to kill a few hours. And when the next morning finally rolled around I managed to make it safely to the Las Vegas airport and I was only a few dollars short for my ticket, but luckily they had a fund to help GI's pay for tickets home when they were short of money. They are realists in Las Vegas.


After my delay in route home I took a bus to Greensboro, N. C. for the ORD (Overseas Replacement Depot) which was to send us to Europe. When you came into the town of Greensboro your duffle bags were confiscated by the Air Corps base, no matter what branch of the military you were in. Every duffle bag, whether it be soldier, sailor, marine, or air force, it mattered not, wound up at the base. It was government thievery pure and simple. To reclaim your gear you had to go out to the base and look through moutains of duffles. Well to make a long story interminable my bags were nowhere to be found, and I had to get all new issue, and at that point the army was winding down, and all they had in the way of clothes were terrible fits.


I was skinny, I went into the army weighing 118 and came out one year, ten months and twenty one days later weighing 128. The waists on the clothes I was issued were huge, they were for soldiers much fatter than I. I wore them anyway, of course, I had nothing else, and I would repeatedly get stopped by officers who asked me where the hell I had gotten my uniforms. I explained how my bags had been confiscated when I had arrived in town, and had been subsequently lost, and these clothes I was wearing were what I had been issued.


They asked me why I hadn't gotten them altered, and I told them I couldn't afford it on my private's pay. They tsked, tsked, but not a one offered any government assistance in the costs of alteration.


Once we had gotten to the base the army figured out our points and decided we had too many of them to be dispatched to Europe. So they made us what was called permanent party in Greensboro.


Free enterprise lives on even in the oppressive throes of the USAAC. Greensboro was an Overseas Replacement Depot, the men there were restricted to quarters at night, they weren’t given passes to town because of a fear that they would take off and not return. And so a buddy and I would go into town, buy much bread, mayonese, mustard, lettuce, lunchmeat and cheese, and we would make sandwiches which we went through the barracks selling to the men who were restricted to their barracks.


It was quite a little business, the men appreciated our freshly made sandwiches, our bread and meat much fresher and more generously applied with dressing. We weren’t the only permanent party doing this however, and the PX ended up complaining to the MP’s that some soldiers were free lancing and ruining their business (our sandwiches were freshly made and consequently a lot better than those dry, stale ones the PX sold), and so one night, catching sight of roving bands of M.P.’s my friend and I decided to bring our little bit of free enterprise to a screeching halt.


Several months later after a furlough and another trip home, the army added up my points again and decided to give me an honorable discharge. They sent a whole train load of us dischargees back to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Our troop train had an overnight layover in New Orleans. We were allowed to go out on leave for the night, and for what was probably the first time in history of the army, not one soldier missed getting back to that train on time the next morning. They staggered back in all stages of inebriation, many in the company of their connubial partners of the night, but come back they all did. Not a single one missed that discharge train.


I was discharged from the A.A.C. on August 11, 1946 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, the very base at which I had entered the service. I served 1 year, 10 months and 21 days. My service number had been 18228386, a number which I remember to this day. However my story has two postscripts.


I would have you know that 10 years later, in 1956, an army vehicle pulled up in front of 1608 Haver St. in Houston, TX where I was living with my parents, and a young soldier brought two mostly empty duffle bags to the front door. Every bit of the GI issue had been removed, not one sock or pair of olive drab boxer shorts remained therein, all that was left were a few musty possessions of long ago, an electric razor, a long dried out fountain pen, a box of yellowed stationary, and what not.


I have often wondered how much money had gone into tracking me down 10 years later so that the army could return those few mostly worthless personal effects which they had arbitrarily deprived me of in the first place. And gee, wasn't that a super idea in the first place, confiscating all of that G.I. luggage?


There is a second ending to my story. In 2003 I was diagnosed as having Chronic Myeloid Lukemia. There is one drug for this, Gleevec, which costs $3,000 for a monthly dose. When it became evident that Texas HealthSpring was quite understandably not going to pay for the drug, my youngest son, Joel, who just completed his residency as a doctor, got me to enroll in the VA. When the clerk accessed the VA computer, there I was. Alive and well on his computer. It was all true. I really had been in the Army Air Corps just like I had said. And I was eligible for health care via the Veteran's Administration. As part of their treatment the VA oncologist did another bone marrow scan and found that I had been misdiagnosed the first time around, and that I did NOT have cml


I never found out whether the VA would have paid for that $3,000 a month medication, but I strongly suspect that it would not have. But it is nice to know that at 84 years of age I now have only two conditions to worry about, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis. With just a touch of Acid Reflux on the side, of course.
When I stop and think back on it, there is nothing quite like the army. We had a saying, there was a Right way, a Wrong way, and the Army Way. And as we reported earlier, SNAFU was a term used universally, and stood for Situation Normal, all Fucked Up. And it always was. Every day and in every way.


The book "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, published in 1961, summed up life in the Army Air Corps in Europe during World War II more lucidly than any other account I have read. In my mind Catch 22 should be required reading for everyone, and from all I can gather from the current news media, things haven't changed an awful lot, military wise. Read the book. It's an education. Never before has so much truth been written so lucidly.


Catch 22 should be taught in the schools. Having it compulsive reading in our High Schools might even save our country from future disasters like Vietnam and Iraq. However, the gentlemen who really need to read it are the Senators and Legislators in Congress. Peace in the world, or the world in pieces.





The Man Watching Our Back. Julian Assange, the Australian who stands behind the website Wikileaks, a very important resource which brings us materials leaked by both governments and corporations, materials that we need to know about. Our Government hates Wikileaks, but that is exactly how it should be. To access Wikileaks for yourself, go here!">here!


And so we have come to the end of yet another Little Eddy Blog. This week’s blog was first published as Blog #4, but this reprise appearance brings it illustrated with photos to help bring the words to life. We slog along each week with a new, or sometimes a revisited work. We invite you to join us again next week for our next effort. We upload on Saturday morning as I am having my breakfast coffee. See you next time. Bye Now.


The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Blog # 151: GOP, Cancer Conspiracy Theory

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Ganging Up to Repeal Health Reform



Republican Senators McCain and DaMint were among the senators who according to theONION announced the joining of the GOP with the disease Leukemia in a joint effort to bring down President Obama’s Health Care Reform legislation.


Speaking Truth to Politics


Republicans, Leukemia Join Forces to Defeat Obama’s Health Care


From the irrepressible theONION comes news that Republicans and the disease Leukemia have joined forces to team up to seek the repeal Obama’s Health Care Law.


WASHINGTON—Citing a mutually shared vision of health care in America, congressional Republicans and the deadly bone-marrow cancer Leukemia announced a joint effort Wednesday to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic new bill that extends health benefits to 32 million Americans nationwide.


"Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than Leukemia," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in White Blood Cells.


"Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and Leukemia share,” the disease’s spokesperson announced.


"And believe me, if anyone is angrier than the Republican Party that children can no longer be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions, it's Leukemia," DeMint countered. "We're a match made in heaven."


It is no secret these days that parody news sites like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s the Colbert Report, are looked upon by the younger generation as being more to the core of truth than news reported by legitimate news sources like NBC News or CNN. They dare to say out loud what legitimate news sites withhold as not provable fact.


For instance, the line of exaggeration between the truth and theONION’s account of the Republican battle to undo Obama’s Health Care Reform, is small indeed. In real life a disease like cancer can’t join forces with Republican lawmakers to fight Obama’s Health Care Reform, but we all know if it could, it would. To read theONION’s entire article go here! §


–†•†–

Graham Stands Tall on Principle

While dissing Republican attempts to undo some of the good of the Obama administration, we would like to take this opportunity to commend Senator Lindsey Graham, who stands five foot 7 with his shoes on, but who stood tall as the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote for the confirmation of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court. Graham not only voted for the nomination, but he gave his fellow Republicans a lecture as to why.


"I think there's a good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that's provided in the Constitution itself," Graham told his peers before reading to them from Federalist No. 6, by Alexander Hamilton. "The Senate should have a special and strong reason for the denial of confirmation," he read, such as "to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment and from a view to popularity."


Graham said Kagan "has passed all those tests" envisioned by the Framers, then he challenged his colleagues: "Are we taking the language of the Constitution that stood the test of time and basically putting a political standard in the place of a constitutional standard? That's for each senator to ask and answer themselves."


According to Dana Milbank in his Washington Post column, Senator Cornyn (he was still in the room) studied his cuticles. Senator Coburn stroked his chin. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) raised a hand to cover a yawn. And no other Republican stepped up to Graham’s challenge. §


– ☯ –




This week’s photos from the Washington Post appeared Wednesday, 7-21-2010, and consisted of baby animals born in the zoo.


Kibibi (above) was born in January 2009 to 26-year-old female gorilla Mandara and 16-year-old Baraka. Kibibi, a female, represents the seventh successful gorilla birth for the zoo since 1991. Photo: Murphy-Smithsonian Institution




GOP’s Politics “as clear as mud”


Republican reasoning, as we used to say as kids, is “as clear as mud.” Workers unemployment insurance is about to expire and the President and the Democrats want to extend it to keep America’s jobless workers afloat for the time being. Republicans refuse to go along, in spite of the fact that unemployment insurance is paid out of a fund that workers pay into. And without one or two GOP votes the Dems do not have the necessary majority to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.


Republican reasoning? Well our debt is a few trillion too large, and a line must be drawn somewhere to keep our economy from going “belly up.” This sounds all nice and good, with Republicans drawing the line to help our grandkids and theirs from being taxed to death.


But then the Republicans talk about extending George W.’s tax cuts to the ultra wealthy, tax cuts which are about to run out, and which many see as having driven us off the economic cliffs in the first place. But won’t extending the Bush tax cuts add to the deficit, you might ask a Republican? What about all that high minded talk about protecting our grandchildren from endless debt? In short, in spite of their high sounding talk Republicans never saw a tax cut they didn’t like, even if it bankrupts our children and theirs.


Although inheriting a surplus from President Clinton, the Bush administration managed to outspend all of the administrations which preceded it combined, handing over a sky high national debt to go along with a broken economy to the Obama administration.


Bush’s tax cuts were one of the major reasons the nation is up to its ears in debt at this time, and that added to the Bush administration’s starting two wars, giving the elderly medication relief (without leveraging lower prices from drug companies), and the cleanup connected with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, none of these major programs being paid for, each and every one of them adding to our mountainous national debt. And the Republicans continue to shamelessly cast votes for Obama’s failure by opposing every policy he proffers to try and jump start the economy.


All of this while trying to cajole Democrats into extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which will continue to significantly boost the deficit, while the GOP continues to oppose extending help to those who have lost their jobs and whose unemployment insurance has run out.


Why should Democrats care about and support the unemployed? Because if they can be tided over until the economy improves, they will become tax paying members of our society once again. Look at it as an investment in our work force.


Renewing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy makes the rich richer, but does nothing for the economy in spite of Republican claims to the contrary. For none know better than the rich as to the tricks for holding onto their money. Extending unemployment benefits for the unemployed, however, directly helps the economy as it gives unemployed workers a lifeline which allows them to buy food and otherwise support the economy. §


– ☯ –




Two newborn Przewalski's foals explore their pasture at the Conservation and Research Center. Both foals were sired by a 9-year-old stallion named Frog, the most genetically valuable Przewalski's horse in the North American breeding program. The Przewalski's horse is native to China and Mongolia; the species was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution


Is There a Jobs’ “Reality Distortion” field?


A lot has been written about Steve Jobs’ and his famous “reality distortion field,” that mysterious malady which hovers over Apple and “twists its victims’ perceptions beyond recognition.”


This is pure bullshit, of course. There is no reality distortion field. There is simply Steve Jobs’ unmatched enthusiasm combined with an unparalleled degree of persuasion. But the reason that the “distortion field” is bullshit is that the products that Apple’ manufactures are every bit as good as their hype would indicate. And more so. (Mac computers, iPods, iPhones, and the newly hatched iPad.) There are Apple products. And then there are the products of every other vendor. Do Apple’s measure up? That’s the question each purchaser must ask him or herself.


But what is perfectly clear is the amount of skill and care Apple puts into their products. And as a result, Apple products “just work.” Seamlessly, out the the box, and not only with one another, but with virtually every other manufacturers products. Not everyone is likely to prefer Apple products. People have different tastes after all. Some people might actually prefer an OS that makes them constantly aware of it, and makes them fight their way through their computing experience every step of the way. It appeals to their Geekiness.


Then there is the matter of taste in design. Apple’s products are organically designed by arguably the most talented industrial design artist in the business, Jonathan Ive. However, there may be some out there who don’t respect lean, organically designed products. That’s fine, we all come with different tastes.


What is silly is having the blog Gizmodo beating the “antenna-gate” drum on the iPhone 4, sounding the beat for much of the blogsphere in revenge for Apple raising hell about that test model iPhone 4 which they reportedly paid $5,000 for, and which they subsequently returned to Apple at Steve Jobs’ request.


As a side effect of the sideshow the spectacle showed how truly irrelevant Consumer’s Reports really is. In spite of CR’s announcing that iPhone 4 is a truly exceptional smartphone which excelled in virtually every smartphone category, and admitting there was no other smartphone that could touch it in many areas, C.R. could not bring itself to recommend the phone unless and until Apple admitted some kind of antenna problem, and fixed same.


Really? iPhone 4 has flown off of the shelves in numbers like none of its previous incarnations, 3 million in 22 days. And its return rate is also lower by far than all of its predecessors. So just where is all that that consumer discontent the Consumer Reports is so diligently guarding its readers from? Don’t the other smartphone companies just wish they had a return record of 0.55 per hundred on a supposedly flawed product.


So who gives a tinkers damn about whether or not Consumer Reports can recommend what they themselves admit is far and away the best smartphone money can buy? Obviously consumers at large aren’t listening to them or reading their recommendations. Sorry fellas, good try, but marching to Gizmodo’s drum does not make you relevant. And uncompromisingly holding onto a fiction like “antenna gate” only leaves you with egg on your face. Being uncompromising will work only when you are uncompromising about reality.







Dilbert creator on his Scott Adams Blog, appreciates the true heights Jobs reached in his non apology. Adams quotes Jobs famous nineteen words.


In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."


Jobs got a lot of heat about his response. Where was the apology? Where was the part where he acknowledged that the buck stops with him, and that Apple made a big mistake that never should have happened? That's public relations 101, right?


I'm a student of how language influences people. Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."


Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.


Scott Adams’ complete blog post makes fascinating reading, and can be accessed here! §


– ☯ –




A tammar wallaby joey peeks out from its mother's pouch. The marsupial baby will nurse and develop in the pouch for several months. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution


Borowitz Again on Out Radar


It has been awhile since we have brought you an Andy Borowitz
Report. We will endeavor to make amends now:


WASILLA (The Borowitz Report) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today defended her use of the word “refudiate,” telling her critics, “Look it up in the fictionary.”


While claiming that “refudiate” is a real word, she reserved her right to make up new words in the future.





Sarah Palin



“Everyone makes up words – Shakespeare, George W. Bush, Levi Johnston,” she said. “The only person I know who doesn’t do it is my husband Todd, who doesn’t sp
eak.”


Gov. Palin also lashed out at those who criticized her use the word “refudiate,” calling them “incohecent.”


In a related story, Gov. Palin would defeat President Barack Obama if she ran in 2012, according to a poll published in Mayan Prophecy Weekly.


The L.A. Times recommends Andy’s Twitter feed. A few of its recent entries are: “When the Incredible Hulk gets even angrier, he turns into Mel Gibson.” “I'm nostalgic for the days when Mel Gibson was just an alcoholic anti-Semite.” “BP denies involvement in Lockerbie bomber's release: "We release oil, not people." To access the Borowitz Twitter feed yourself go here!"a>! §


– ☯ –

It was the experience of my year getting to watch the PBS Masters program on Pete Seeger last Wednesday night. I had missed it in its original incarnation, but the nice thing about PBS is that most things float by again and again. It was a real experience to see his children, Dan, Mika, and Tinya, who I knew as children, in their grown up personas. And of course, Pete and Toshi looked great (if forty years older), as did Pete’s brother John Seeger, who I worked for for six summers at his children’s camp in Vermont, Camp Killooleet, and who unfortunately passed away in January of this year.


Pete is the most extraordinary individual I have ever had the honor of knowing, his wife Toshi I think of as equally extraordinary, and I really believe (as brother John expressed on the program) that Toshi was the reason Pete has been able to achieve all he has. And seeing his three children all grown up was a mind altering experience. By program’s end neither of my eyes was dry, and I must check out Amazon to see if the DVD is available, and if so, for how much.


–†•†–

Friday, August 23 was D Day (Dread Day) when I was due to get my cml (chronic myeloid leukemia)
scorecard, and guess what? I do not have cml.
I do have something, a malady that is causing my white corpuscles to try overrunning my red cells. My oncologist says is a dna mutation, or that’s how I understood him. Shades of the Cold War, take that you commie red cells.


Dr. Rakkhit said he would give me no medication for the condition at the present time. He did say he wanted to do an ultrasound on my, I think he said my spleen, but my heart was beating so loudly as those magic words, no cml reverberated through the room, that I couldn’t hear straight. He also said he wanted to write a paper on my case.


And so I guess when is all said and done we will see what we will see. Of course, this brings up another problem, which I am going to have to put my nose to the proverbial grindstone with in the immediate future, but that is yet another story, one which I will share with you at a later date. Meantime no cml is good news. Let Heavens’ bells ring from the mountains to the prairies, and from sea to shining sea.


– ☯ –

And so we have reluctantly swum to the end of another stream of real sense and nonsense, a blend we attempt to brew each week on our Little Eddy Blog. We would like to thank son Daniel Badeaux of Seattle, WA. for sending us the link to theONION article which once and for all nailed the GOP’s Health Care Repeal campaign to a tee.


We offer our vision of the world each Saturday morning, uploading our weekly missive as we are having our breakfast coffee. Each day of the week brings me a different flavored coffee. On Saturday mornings we grind a flavor called Dark Chocolate Almodine, a twitteresque bit of information which I’m sure you were just dying to know.


At any rate this week seemed to fly by somewhat faster than previous weeks. My teeth and jaw are still not without problems, but have improved by leaps and bounds since my tooth abscess experience of a few weeks back. During the coming week we’ll do more of this rooting around for things that are interesting, and we do hope you’ll drop by again sometime next week to find out just what we’ve come up with.


Meantime, take our Republican friends with a gigantic grain of salt, or whatever you favorite credibility seasoning may be. A group that has so consistently voted against everything the President has tried to do for us does not deserve the time of day, much less our precious vote. They are not to be trusted, much less voted for. And have yourself the very best kind of a good week. Bye now.


The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com













Blog # 151:
– ☯ –



Ganging Up to Repeal Health Reform



Republican Senators McCain and DaMint were among the senators who according to theONION announced the joining of the GOP with the disease Leukemia in a joint effort to bring down President Obama’s Health Care Reform legislation.


Speaking Truth to Politics


Republicans, Leukemia Join Forces to Defeat Obama’s Health Care


From the irrepressible theONION comes news that Republicans and the disease Leukemia have joined forces to team up to seek the repeal Obama’s Health Care Law.


WASHINGTON—Citing a mutually shared vision of health care in America, congressional Republicans and the deadly bone-marrow cancer Leukemia announced a joint effort Wednesday to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic new bill that extends health benefits to 32 million Americans nationwide.


"Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than Leukemia," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in White Blood Cells.


"Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and Leukemia share,” the disease’s spokesperson announced.


"And believe me, if anyone is angrier than the Republican Party that children can no longer be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions, it's Leukemia," DeMint countered. "We're a match made in heaven."


It is no secret these days that parody news sites like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s the Colbert Report, are looked upon by the younger generation as being more to the core of truth than news reported by legitimate news sources like NBC News or CNN. They dare to say out loud what legitimate news sites withhold as not provable fact.


For instance, the line of exaggeration between the truth and theONION’s account of the Republican battle to undo Obama’s Health Care Reform, is small indeed. In real life a disease like cancer can’t join forces with Republican lawmakers to fight Obama’s Health Care Reform, but we all know if it could, it would. To read theONION’s entire article go here! §


–†•†–

Graham Stands Tall on Principle

While dissing Republican attempts to undo some of the good of the Obama administration, we would like to take this opportunity to commend Senator Lindsey Graham, who stands five foot 7 with his shoes on, but who stood tall as the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote for the confirmation of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court. Graham not only voted for the nomination, but he gave his fellow Republicans a lecture as to why.


"I think there's a good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that's provided in the Constitution itself," Graham told his peers before reading to them from Federalist No. 6, by Alexander Hamilton. "The Senate should have a special and strong reason for the denial of confirmation," he read, such as "to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment and from a view to popularity."


Graham said Kagan "has passed all those tests" envisioned by the Framers, then he challenged his colleagues: "Are we taking the language of the Constitution that stood the test of time and basically putting a political standard in the place of a constitutional standard? That's for each senator to ask and answer themselves."


According to Dana Milbank in his Washington Post column, Senator Cornyn (he was still in the room) studied his cuticles. Senator Coburn stroked his chin. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) raised a hand to cover a yawn. And no other Republican stepped up to Graham’s challenge. §


– ☯ –




This week’s photos from the Washington Post appeared Wednesday, 7-21-2010, and consisted of baby animals born in the zoo.


Kibibi (above) was born in January 2009 to 26-year-old female gorilla Mandara and 16-year-old Baraka. Kibibi, a female, represents the seventh successful gorilla birth for the zoo since 1991. Photo: Murphy-Smithsonian Institution




GOP’s Politics “as clear as mud”


Republican reasoning, as we used to say as kids, is “as clear as mud.” Workers unemployment insurance is about to expire and the President and the Democrats want to extend it to keep America’s jobless workers afloat for the time being. Republicans refuse to go along, in spite of the fact that unemployment insurance is paid out of a fund that workers pay into. And without one or two GOP votes the Dems do not have the necessary majority to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.


Republican reasoning? Well our debt is a few trillion too large, and a line must be drawn somewhere to keep our economy from going “belly up.” This sounds all nice and good, with Republicans drawing the line to help our grandkids and theirs from being taxed to death.


But then the Republicans talk about extending George W.’s tax cuts to the ultra wealthy, tax cuts which are about to run out, and which many see as having driven us off the economic cliffs in the first place. But won’t extending the Bush tax cuts add to the deficit, you might ask a Republican? What about all that high minded talk about protecting our grandchildren from endless debt? In short, in spite of their high sounding talk Republicans never saw a tax cut they didn’t like, even if it bankrupts our children and theirs.


Although inheriting a surplus from President Clinton, the Bush administration managed to outspend all of the administrations which preceded it combined, handing over a sky high national debt to go along with a broken economy to the Obama administration.


Bush’s tax cuts were one of the major reasons the nation is up to its ears in debt at this time, and that added to the Bush administration’s starting two wars, giving the elderly medication relief (without leveraging lower prices from drug companies), and the cleanup connected with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, none of these major programs being paid for, each and every one of them adding to our mountainous national debt. And the Republicans continue to shamelessly cast votes for Obama’s failure by opposing every policy he proffers to try and jump start the economy.


All of this while trying to cajole Democrats into extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which will continue to significantly boost the deficit, while the GOP continues to oppose extending help to those who have lost their jobs and whose unemployment insurance has run out.


Why should Democrats care about and support the unemployed? Because if they can be tided over until the economy improves, they will become tax paying members of our society once again. Look at it as an investment in our work force.


Renewing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy makes the rich richer, but does nothing for the economy in spite of Republican claims to the contrary. For none know better than the rich as to the tricks for holding onto their money. Extending unemployment benefits for the unemployed, however, directly helps the economy as it gives unemployed workers a lifeline which allows them to buy food and otherwise support the economy. §


– ☯ –




Two newborn Przewalski's foals explore their pasture at the Conservation and Research Center. Both foals were sired by a 9-year-old stallion named Frog, the most genetically valuable Przewalski's horse in the North American breeding program. The Przewalski's horse is native to China and Mongolia; the species was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution


Is There a Jobs’ “Reality Distortion” field?


A lot has been written about Steve Jobs’ and his famous “reality distortion field,” that mysterious malady which hovers over Apple and “twists its victims’ perceptions beyond recognition.”


This is pure bullshit, of course. There is no reality distortion field. There is simply Steve Jobs’ unmatched enthusiasm combined with an unparalleled degree of persuasion. But the reason that the “distortion field” is bullshit is that the products that Apple’ manufactures are every bit as good as their hype would indicate. And more so. (Mac computers, iPods, iPhones, and the newly hatched iPad.) There are Apple products. And then there are the products of every other vendor. Do Apple’s measure up? That’s the question each purchaser must ask him or herself.


But what is perfectly clear is the amount of skill and care Apple puts into their products. And as a result, Apple products “just work.” Seamlessly, out the the box, and not only with one another, but with virtually every other manufacturers products. Not everyone is likely to prefer Apple products. People have different tastes after all. Some people might actually prefer an OS that makes them constantly aware of it, and makes them fight their way through their computing experience every step of the way. It appeals to their Geekiness.


Then there is the matter of taste in design. Apple’s products are organically designed by arguably the most talented industrial design artist in the business, Jonathan Ive. However, there may be some out there who don’t respect lean, organically designed products. That’s fine, we all come with different tastes.


What is silly is having the blog Gizmodo beating the “antenna-gate” drum on the iPhone 4, sounding the beat for much of the blogsphere in revenge for Apple raising hell about that test model iPhone 4 which they reportedly paid $5,000 for, and which they subsequently returned to Apple at Steve Jobs’ request.


As a side effect of the sideshow the spectacle showed how truly irrelevant Consumer’s Reports really is. In spite of CR’s announcing that iPhone 4 is a truly exceptional smartphone which excelled in virtually every smartphone category, and admitting there was no other smartphone that could touch it in many areas, C.R. could not bring itself to recommend the phone unless and until Apple admitted some kind of antenna problem, and fixed same.


Really? iPhone 4 has flown off of the shelves in numbers like none of its previous incarnations, 3 million in 22 days. And its return rate is also lower by far than all of its predecessors. So just where is all that that consumer discontent the Consumer Reports is so diligently guarding its readers from? Don’t the other smartphone companies just wish they had a return record of 0.55 per hundred on a supposedly flawed product.


So who gives a tinkers damn about whether or not Consumer Reports can recommend what they themselves admit is far and away the best smartphone money can buy? Obviously consumers at large aren’t listening to them or reading their recommendations. Sorry fellas, good try, but marching to Gizmodo’s drum does not make you relevant. And uncompromisingly holding onto a fiction like “antenna gate” only leaves you with egg on your face. Being uncompromising will work only when you are uncompromising about reality.







Dilbert creator on his Scott Adams Blog, appreciates the true heights Jobs reached in his non apology. Adams quotes Jobs famous nineteen words.


In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."


Jobs got a lot of heat about his response. Where was the apology? Where was the part where he acknowledged that the buck stops with him, and that Apple made a big mistake that never should have happened? That's public relations 101, right?


I'm a student of how language influences people. Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."


Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.


Scott Adams’ complete blog post makes fascinating reading, and can be accessed here! §


– ☯ –




A tammar wallaby joey peeks out from its mother's pouch. The marsupial baby will nurse and develop in the pouch for several months. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution


Borowitz Again on Out Radar


It has been awhile since we have brought you an Andy Borowitz
Report. We will endeavor to make amends now:


WASILLA (The Borowitz Report) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today defended her use of the word “refudiate,” telling her critics, “Look it up in the fictionary.”


While claiming that “refudiate” is a real word, she reserved her right to make up new words in the future.





Sarah Palin, Shakespeare Reincarnated?



“Everyone makes up words – Shakespeare, George W. Bush, Levi Johnston,” she said. “The only person I know who doesn’t do it is my husband Todd, who doesn’t speak.”


Gov. Palin also lashed out at those who criticized her use the word “refudiate,” calling them “incohecent.”


In a related story, Gov. Palin would defeat President Barack Obama if she ran in 2012, according to a poll published in Mayan Prophecy Weekly.


The L.A. Times recommends Andy’s Twitter feed. A few of its recent entries are: “When the Incredible Hulk gets even angrier, he turns into Mel Gibson.” “I'm nostalgic for the days when Mel Gibson was just an alcoholic anti-Semite.” “BP denies involvement in Lockerbie bomber's release: "We release oil, not people." To access the Borowitz Twitter feed yourself go here!"a>! §


– ☯ –

It was the experience of my year getting to watch the PBS Masters program on Pete Seeger last Wednesday night. I had missed it in its original incarnation, but the nice thing about PBS is that most things float by again and again. It was a real experience to see his children, Dan, Mika, and Tinya, who I knew as children, in their grown up personas. And of course, Pete and Toshi looked great (if forty years older), as did Pete’s brother John Seeger, who I worked for for six summers at his children’s camp in Vermont, Camp Killooleet, and who unfortunately passed away in January of this year.


Pete is the most extraordinary individual I have ever had the honor of knowing, his wife Toshi I think of as equally extraordinary, and I really believe (as brother John expressed on the program) that Toshi was the reason Pete has been able to achieve all he has. And seeing his three children all grown up was a mind altering experience. By program’s end neither of my eyes was dry, and I must check out Amazon to see if the DVD is available, and if so, for how much.


–†•†–

Friday, August 23 was D Day (Dread Day) when I was due to get my cml (chronic myeloid leukemia)
scorecard, and guess what? I do not have cml. I do have something, a malady that is causing my white corpuscles to try overrunning my red cells. My oncologist says is a dna mutation, or that’s how I understood him. Shades of the Cold War, take that you commie red cells.


Dr. Rakkhit said he would give me no medication for the condition at the present time. He did say he wanted to do an ultrasound on my, I think he said my spleen, but my heart was beating so loudly as those magic words, no cml
reverberated through the room, that I couldn’t hear straight. He also said he wanted to write a paper on my case.


And so I guess when is all said and done we will see what we will see. Of course, this brings up another problem, which I am going to have to put my nose to the proverbial grindstone with in the immediate future, but that is yet another story, one which I will share with you at a later date. Meantime no cml is good news. Let Heavens’ bells ring from the mountains to the prairies, and from sea to shining sea.


– ☯ –

And so we have reluctantly swum to the end of another stream of real sense and nonsense, a blend we attempt to brew each week on our Little Eddy Blog. We would like to thank son Daniel Badeaux of Seattle, WA. for sending us the link to theONION article which once and for all nailed the GOP’s Health Care Repeal campaign to a tee.


We offer our vision of the world each Saturday morning, uploading our weekly missive as we are having our breakfast coffee. Each day of the week brings me a different flavored coffee. On Saturday mornings we grind a flavor called Dark Chocolate Almodine, a twitteresque bit of information which I’m sure you were just dying to know.


At any rate this week seemed to fly by somewhat faster than previous weeks. My teeth and jaw are still not without problems, but have improved by leaps and bounds since my tooth abscess experience of a few weeks back. During the coming week we’ll do more of this rooting around for things that are interesting, and we do hope you’ll drop by again sometime next week to find out just what we’ve come up with.


Meantime, take our Republican friends with a gigantic grain of salt, or whatever you favorite credibility seasoning may be. A group that has so consistently voted against everything the President has tried to do for us does not deserve the time of day, much less our precious vote. They are not to be trusted, much less voted for. And have yourself the very best kind of a good week. Bye now.


The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com












Saturday, July 17, 2010

Blog # 150: Reality Distortion? Hah!

Toddler Tossing During Mass Baptism





Playing catch with babies as they are being baptized during a mass ceremony in Mtskheta, Georgia establishes the Priests authority with the faithful at an early age. Photo: David Mdzinarishvili-Reuters


– ☯ –

L.E.’s Health Care Prognosis Looking Up



However with what I would term a middling amount of squeamishness, and what my Good Doctor would undoubtedly term agitation at a near intolerable level, I did manage to get through Friday's bone marrow procedure. I should get the results a week from today (Friday), and if the result is clear I will report on my status in my next week’s blog.


At the moment I feel the closest thing to good as I have felt in awhile, and as a result I have higher hopes for this week’s blog. And so let us take off our shoes and socks, and dip out feet into the blogging pool.


Real Social Network Trailer Appears


The first real trailer for the up coming Aaron Sorkin film tracing the birth and development of Facebook has appeared. A few weeks ago we brought you the teaser, and it is with pleasure that this week we can bring you a trailer which features content from the up coming film. Aaron Sorkin is perhaps best known for his creation and sole writing for several years of the NBC White House dramaseries, the West Wing.







My own Facebook experiences are mixed to say the least. Son Joel sent me an invitation to his Facebook page to check out the pictures of his recent graduation. I attempted to join Facebook, with several other family members sending me encouragement and invitations to their own photo pages.


Alas, my attempt failed. I got no further than the section where you are supposed to upload your picture. I found a recent photo of myself captured by my in-computer camera, but for some reason or other, in spite of the fact that it was lovingly processed in Photoshop, when I put it out on my desktop, and highlighted it for the Facebook program to upload, the picture must have broken a lens or two along the internet, because for the longest time nothing at all happened. And after awhile I gave up the attempt. Joel eventually sent me the photos attached to two emails.


Forgive me, DeAnna and Cedar and you other family members who were so quick to welcome me into Facebook. I might make it in one of these days, and I’ll be your friend from now until then. Meantime, Little Eddy’s image leaves yet another internet server array shattered beyond repair. §


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Sunbather’s Swan Song





A swan waddles past a sunbather in Vienna, Austria. Herwig Prammer-Reuters


Apple reworks the commercial again


First off, I would like to show you a video advertisement which I think is the most effective piece in its genre I have seen in quite awhile. And being originally in radio with its focus on advertising, and having thereafter been a lifetime observer of the medium, I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of commercials, if there be such a thing. And if there isn’t let us create one post haste.


First off, I must confess that it is from Apple, in whose corner I am enormously positioned. It is yet another in the long line of ground breaking commercials that began with the now famous 1984 Superbowl commercial introducing the Macintosh computer, continuing with the “Think Different” commercials which were introduced after Steve Jobs had returned to the job of running Apple and was endeavoring to set the company on the right path, and culminating with those nifty little iPhone commercials which helped make Apple’s brand new entry in the smart phone market an established part of the industry within its first year.


The new commercial is for a newly enabled iPhone 4 feature, called Face Time, in which the iPhone 4 has made simple the task of using two phones as picture phones. Although it would mostly be between iPhone 4 users these days, surely Apple is aiming for a world where many phones would have a front-facing camera, and seamless Face Time possibilities.


Tech Crunch’s M.G. Siegler wrote the original article which pointed out the excellence of the commercial. Originally likening it to a 3 yr old episode of the tv show Mad Men, he then explains how the new Face Time commercial also covers this territory. Here is an excerpt of what he wrote.


As we’re all well aware, video chat, even on phones, is nothing new. Sure, Apple has simplified it, but they’re not really showcasing that here. Instead they’re going right for the heart strings. They’re doing something rather incredible. They’re conveying how you’ll feel if you use the product, by making you feel alongside those in the commercial. They’re creating this sentimental bond.







I would like to lead off by reporting my personal reaction to the viewing of the commercial. It brought on a huge personal Louis Armstrong concert courtesy my iTunes collection. I started with the full version of “When You’re Smiling,” and it was so infectious I spent the rest of the morning listening to the delightful music of the incomparable Satchmo. What a remarkably talented singer and jazz improviser he was. And how fortunate those of us who had had a chance to hear him live were for having had that experience. I’ll tell more about Armstrong, and an incident I had interviewing his remarkable clarinet player, Barney Bigard at a later date.


But back to the commercial, as Siegler so astutely points out, the video adroitly manages to help you feel and share in the pleasure these people are having with their video calling. It is particularly eloquent in the example of the final couple, the male of which is obviously hearing impaired, and without this technology there would have been no phone call at all.


Apple followed this commercial with four other commercials showcasing elements of Face Time, but they are all also rans, lacking the breath and luster of the original. All of them can be accessed here


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A work boat operates near the Q4000 drilling rig in the area of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Present indications are the leak in the Gulf has stopped.


Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said on a conference call that pressure readings from the cap have not reached the level that would show there are no new leaks in the well.


Allen said BP's test of the cap, which started 24 hours previously by shutting three valves and stopping the flow of oil into the water, would continue for at least 6 hours. It was scheduled to last up to 48 hours. Photo: Dave Martin-AP




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More on Apple’s History


For years the computer industry has been divided into two camps. Apple, which did not invent the GUI (Xerox PARC invented it, but when it became obvious that the mother company was not interested in doing anything with the many innovations its development arm had developed, gui, email, etc., the head of PARC invited Steve Jobs over to see what they had developed and later allowed a return visit by Jobs who brought along many Apple engineers.)


As a result Apple was the first company to bring a workable version of the Xerox Parc innovation to the computer market. The Mac made its debut in 1984, and it was 11 years before Microsoft was able to bring a workable version of a GUI to the rest of the computer industry with Windows 95. After the debut of the Mac, Apple subsequently lost its way by firing Steve Jobs, and later trying to license its operating system to other computer manufacturers.


Jobs in the meantime bought a computer animation studio named Pixar from StarWars creator George Lucas, and also formed a computer manufacturing company called NeXTSTEP. (As a footnote to history Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the world wide web on the NeXTSTEP operating system on which he developed the first browser and html editor. The first www server was a NeXTSTEP computer.) §


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A state marine biologist displays shrimp, fish and other marine life caught during a test trawl near Dauphin Island, Ala. Officials say they are finding normal numbers of healthy shrimp and other marine life in Alabama coastal waters despite the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: Jay Reeves-AP


As our final Apple item we take note of Steve Jobs’ response over what he termed the iPhone 4’s “antenna-gate” problem. He promised a fix, a free cover from Apple or other vendor, to any dissatisfied iPhone 4 purchaser, or a full refund should they prefer to go that route.


But Mr. Jobs took note of several things: thanks to Gizmodo, and other bloggers looking to be critical of Apple’s success, he is getting a mountain of free publicity stretching well out of the tech arena, and into the arena where the American buying public lives.


This product has been flying out of the stores well ahead of any and all preceding iPhone rollouts. And requests for returns have been few and far between. In short, even those self-important engineers at that dinosaur of the Magazine Age, Consumer Reports, do they think that they know what the buying public does not? That’s why they covered their asses with the phrase below.


The signal problem is the reason that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a "recommended" model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the latest Ratings of smart phones that were released today.


The iPhone scored high, in part because it sports the sharpest display and best video camera we've seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller. But Apple needs to come up with a permanent — and free — fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.


In our book it was Gizmodo who was beating the drum for the blogosphere’s reaction to “antennagate,” in revenge for Apple barring them for having paid $5,000 for that lost (stolen?) iPhone 4. And in a desperate bid to prove its relevance Consumer Reports joined the bandwagon. When consumers (with a small letter) begin to shun Apple, Jobs and company will have something to worry about. But the Consumer Reports (with the capital C) is only a magazine with its own relatively small following in these days of establishment irrelevance. Anyway, while adroitly admitting no fault, Mr. Jobs fully satisfied C.R.’s qualifications. Take that Google, RIM, and Nokia. And as for you, Steve Ballmer, your company is no longer a player in the mobile field, in spite of your big words upon the iPhone’s introduction. §


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Revelers run with bulls on the treacherous Estafeta corner in Pamplona, Spain. Photo: Alvaro Barrientos-AP.

All of our photographs today were previously published in Thursday’s Washington Post online, which daily offers an incomparable collection of meaningful photographs. We respectfully urge you to check them out daily on the web.




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A Few Thoughts as We Trot Off


As we brace ourselves for learning the outcome of last weeks bone marrow biopsy, and what it will mean in the treatment of cml if indeed we have it, I have trundled together some random thoughts regarding the state of the nation as I see it. Most troubling is the downsizing the office of the Presidency is receiving at the hands, mouths, and minds of lots of people. The president is given short shrift by several groups of people, including the most important group of independents which helped put him in office in the first place.


And it seems to us to be so undeserved. For instance, he entered office with the economy in the tanks as it had not been since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. But by using imaginative and forceful tactics he has managed, if not to return the economy to its pre Bush Administration state, at least return it to a point where it is no longer threatening our way of life.


In addition he was able to get what no other president, Democrat or Republican had been able to do, enact a Health Care Reform that , among other things, would police the private insurance companies so that they would no longer be able to drop their policy holders the minute they got sick.


There is more, and all of this was done with little or no Republican assistance. Republicans have consistently fought every Obama initiative tooth and fang, and by doing it seemed to be hoping that by doing their best to have Obama fail, a grateful voting public would steamroll them back into the leadership in both houses of Congress.


Such is the result of their “whatthehellcouldtheybesmoking” dreams. Will the public further turn from the Democratic leadership, and stampede an unruly band of screaming naysayers back into the leadership of either or both houses of Congress? A leadership that led from OUR pocketbooks, spending without bringing in money to pay for its expenditures. Reactivate a bunch of screeching non-activists who not only have contributed nothing to the country’s well being during these past two years, but have mostly done their damndest to throw roadblocks in the way of those trying to make things right.


We certainly hope this will not be the case. We dearly hope that the American voter is too smart to turn the country back over to the party that got us into this economic mess in the first place. What do you think? Are you satisfied, or better still happy in the direction the Dems are taking us in? Or are you waiting to ride the GOP fantasy tide back to the future.§





The moon moves in front of the sun during the solar eclipse in Easter Island. Photo: Victor Rojas-AP

Tourists watch the solar eclipse from a beach on Easter Island. Photo: Martin Bernetti-AFP/Getty Images


Little Eddy was fortunate enough to experience a solar eclipse in Maine during the first summer I worked for Blueberry Cove. And BBC director Henry Haskell gave me the day off because I exposed and blackened film so that counselors and campers one and all could see and follow the eclipse.


A complete solar eclipse is a rare thing to experience, we ended up driving many miles to be able to witness a cloudless display. But it was well worth the experience, as you can probably tell by noting the expressions of dedication on the faces of the people watching it below.


To anyone who has read Mark Twain’s A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain’s description of the solar eclipse which climaxed the story was unforgettable. We told of our own experiences while watching the Maine solar eclipse on our Blog #113, A Few Things Considered, in our Blog Entry entitled, Pursuing a Mark Twain Moment in Maine. You can access it by pointing your cursor here and scrolling down.


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And so consider this as being another of our weekly blogs as having reached its natural conclusion. We are going to drop in the url for son Dr. Joel’s “Payday” YouTube video again, for any of you out there who might have missed it the first time around, or who might enjoy seeing it again. Simply by clicking here! you are practically guaranteed to bring forth a myriad of vocal and visual delights. Bye now. §


The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com