❖ Robin Chapman News ❖

Return of the Killer Shrews Is A Wrap!

2012-02-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

My friend, Steve Latshaw, the Hollywood screenwriter and director, has a lot to celebrate this year. His new movie, Return of the Killer Shrews, has just been completed and is ready for distribution and sale.

That's the business side. There is also the news that Steve is getting married this year. I know he's a little superstitious and is afraid to let people know he's happy for fear, if he gloats, he might tempt the gods to smite him down. So I will gloat for him.

Steve Latshaw on the Return of the Killer Shrews shoot in Southern California.

Steve wrote and directed Shrews, which has a corker of a cast in John Schneider, James Best, Rick Hurst, Jennifer Lyons, Sean Flynn (grandson of Errol Flynn) and Bruce Davison. Pat Moran, who worked on the script and is a former colleague of ours from WESH-TV in Orlando, is also in the movie.

If you haven't seen the first Killer Shrews (1959)--hard to believe you missed it--don't let it worry you. Steve sets the scene of Return with black and white flashbacks to the original movie, produced by Ken Curtis of "Gunsmoke" fame.

Steve has been through the whole Hollywood thing since he left local television and moved to Southern California. He's been hot and he's been not and now he's hot again he's more prepared to cope with the roller coaster that is the movie biz. Like all things we love--we learn to take the bad with the good.

And this time he will have his fiancee Tiffanie by his side--and we will all be celebrating their nuptials with them at the end of March. (If I can find the right dress ... )

If you would like to know more about the film, just click on the link at the end of this blog. If you want to know how Steve made the transition from young Sci Fi movie fan, to television director, to movie director--try hard work and persistence. How he ended up with the lovely Tiffanie--well, we will just have to rack that one up to excellent luck.

I say, Steve. Good show. (In more ways than one.)

Return of the Killer Shrews

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What To Do When Your Lawmakers Break the Law?

2012-01-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

Our present, bucolic, civic center property, with our library in the distance.

Those of you who don't live in my little town of Los Altos, California, may feel that I've been spending too much time on my local issues here on this blog, and that these local issues don't relate to you. The truth is, what is happening in my town is applicable to the serious problems we are all seeing at the federal, state and local level in recent years. Government is acting in its own interest or at the behest of special interests. Taxpayers are finding their interests least represented.

There is a law that prevents my local government from campaigning for a bond issue. I believe my local government is breaking this law. You tell me what you think.

1. In November 2011, when I stumbled across the literature that the Los Altos City Council was producing to "educate" the citizens of Los Altos about the need to build Phase I of a Community Center Master Plan ($85M, with three subsequent phases costing an amount estimated at $165M) I spoke before the council and said their materials had the appearance of campaign literature and I hoped they would make them more transparent. I honestly thought they may not see clearly how this materials might appear to an educated voter. After I sat down the council members looked at one another and one spoke directly to me. "Just a correction on what you just said. We're prohibited by law from campaigning for a bond. So we're not doing that. We haven't decided whether to propose this bond or not. We are in the education and outreach phase right now."

2. The next week, November 30, 2011, our local paper had an interview with our mayor which pointed out she had just two years to go in her term before she was term-limited out. The paper wrote, paraphrasing her comments to a local gathering of Realtors: "She ... expects to oversee the funding, design, and ground breaking of the first phase of the civic center overhaul. " Since the "civic center overhaul" can't be done without a bond measure, I saw this as evidence that indeed, the city council had made the decision to go forward with a bond.

3. As the city council continued to state it was simply working on "outreach" and "education" before Christmas it signed a contract with TBRB Strategies. Visit their web site at: TBWB STRATEGIES. Tell me what you think it is this company does.

4. The mission statement of TBWB Strategies says: "TBWB Strategies works with public agencies to design winning public finance measures for the ballot and works with communities to run the advocacy campaigns to ensure these measures are approved by the voters. We maintain a nearly 90 percent win rate."

5. The contract with TBWB is costing taxpayers in Los Altos more than $100,000. In a city of just 25,000 people, surely, if this were just "education" and "outreach," it could be done for the cost of a Power Point presentation, which almost anyone could produce for the city council at no cost to taxpayers. Five city council members could divide our voter list and practically speak to each one of us personally, if information was what they had to offer us.

6. When one of the voters I know sent an email to the assistant city manager requesting several specifics on the Community Center costs and financing, assistant city manager James Walgren wrote him a non answer that said (and I quote from his email): "We are preparing now to train our outreach representatives and are providing them with our consultant-developed PPT and brochure and a Q & A document addressing the issues you raised below. Charles Heath with TBWB Strategies is very specific about how to frame the discussion at this stage and will continue to advise the City on this matter." Since a taxpayer cannot now get an informational answer from a city employee, whose salary that taxpayer funds, this sounds an awful lot like a campaign organization, in which everyone is carefully trained to stay "on message."

7. When I visited the police station last week to report an issue in my neighborhood, I sat and read our Los Altos Recreation Department newsletter for January/February in which I learned, quote: "The City has decided to pursue an August 2012 general obligation bond measure to finance Phase I of the Master Plan. Phase I includes a new Community Center, focused on recreation, senior, teen, and continuing education program, and a new Police Station." Sounds to me like the Los Altos Recreation Department, headquartered on the present Civic Center property, has been told the city has decided to propose a bond. Council members told me that once they had made that decision they would be prohibited by law from campaigning for the measure.

8. In its editorial, proposing the city council wait two years before proposing the bond, our local paper, the Town Crier says: " ... the city's consultant has suggested a mail-in ballot for August."

9. On the TBWB Strategies web site it states that August mail-in ballots are one of their best strategies to pass general obligation bonds, since fewer votes vote in these elections, thus more special interest votes can be pursued. And, during general elections (we all have a big one this November) there are other tax and bond measure that might "compete" for taxpayer dollars. The August special election will cost taxpayers approximately an extra $100,000.

TBWB's web site they state: "Sound research, such as polling or focus groups, helps public officials understand how residents and voters see their local government and what types of services they are willing to pay to support." In other words, if voters are more likely to approve a measure for a senior center, TBWB Strategies will help your city council make it appear (emphasis mine) that the bond measure is about seniors, even if a senior center is just one part of the plan. Note: this autumn the city council commissioned research on senior issues in Los Altos.

10. Among the other things TBWB Strategies advises (on their web site) is saving up deferred maintenance dollars, and technological improvement dollars to set aside so that these dollars can be used to "seed" the bond issue. In the literature our city council has approved on this issue it tells us that in the present Civic Center "... roofs leak, many of the restrooms are frequently out of service and can't be used, outdated electrical systems are unreliable and cannot accommodate modern techology ..." All this might happen, of course, if a city were setting aside maintenance and improvement dollars for several years in order to "seed" a project that this very lack of maintenance and IT improvements might appear to make even more necessary. When I read this, I wrote our City Engineer and said I was very concerned that his department was unable to keep our buildings in good repair, in a city with such high property taxes as we pay. I, for example, live in a 60 year old house and my roof and bathrooms work fine, as I keep them in repair. No answer yet from the city.

I believe my city council is spending taxpayer dollars to influence those very taxpayers to approve a bond. This is, by anyone's definition of one, a campaign. And if what they are doing doesn't break the letter of the law, it ought to.

I'm hoping to talk with both the ACLU and Common Cause to see how they view the issues I've presented here. Since a number of us have questioned what the City is doing and city council members have been very uninterested in hearing from us, and since, if we have to defeat this bond measure we must do so against what is essentially a professional bond-measure-influencing machine that is being paid a six figure salary out of tax dollars we now no longer have ourselves and thus can't use to hire our own advocate--we may need legal help in order to bring an end to it.

Let me know what you think.

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Dancing With the Candidates

2012-01-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

This ... is... Jeopardy! The CNN "debate set."

I'm going to have to watch the Republican "debate" tonight (Thursday, January 26) on CNN. These live spectacles have been riveting this year--kind of like a train wreck.

I'm posting this with a news release photo of the CNN "debate set." Is it just me, or does it look like it ought to go with the theme from "Jeopardy?"

During the last few debates I confess to having such a hard time with the concept of any woman wanting to be Newt Gingrich's mistress, that I know I've missed a lot of the really important details.

Like: whether or not Mitt has a "passion deficit" as Senator Lindsey Graham says. And why Rick Santorium's poor old grandfather from Italy was forced to dig all that coal in Pennsylvania with his hands. (Didn't they have mining tools back then?)

Though the set looks like a game show, the "debates" have more of the feel of a reality show. I'm waiting for Simon Cowell to roll his eyes and send one or two of these guys off the island. Wait, that's another show.

Newt Gingrich has a charge account at Tiffany and Co? I guess that could help attract a mistress. But since he can afford that--why can't he get himself a personal trainer?

And Mitt. I agree with Senator Graham that it does seem as if--when Mitt speaks--his mind is elsewhere. Maybe he's mentally running through the interest rates on the money he has parked in the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands? Who besides Bernie Madoff has an account there?

Of course, the Democrats hate the fact that Romney is so rich. Though why it was okay for JFK to be rich and not Romney--I'm not sure. First generation wealth is so five minutes ago.

Anyway: this year's bunch has me peeking at the whole thing through my hands, like the audience in The Producers when they see the first act of "Springtime for Hitler." At least I can relax a little when they let Ron Paul get a word in. He's always good for a laugh.

Why does this not seem like a thoughtful way to pick a president?

I mean, I know this works well on "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" but--oh dear, I'll have to excuse myself. I've just had a vision of Newt Gingrich in spandex.

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Paving Paradise (Continued) ...

2012-01-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

Our new "streetscape" on First Street in Los Altos.

One week after our local paper criticized our Mayor and her City Council for not meeting any of their deadlines on a downtown "streetscape" which has closed our key intersection since July 2011: Voila! The street is now open.

That's a relief anyway--though our formerly tree-lined street now has what looks like a prison wall along its edge. It does go to show how fast you can get our mayor to move if you have the nerve to criticize her.

I don't envy poor old Skip's Place. That wall is vaguely reminiscent of what is known as a "Jersey barrier" and looks more like it is designed to keep out terrorists than welcome visitors.

After outraged protests from local residents, our soviet-style council agreed to leave two mature trees along the two, new "streetscaped" blocks. Because they wanted to remove the others, the city decided they were "diseased." Now the last two of our old trees appear somewhat lonely, marked as they are by some sort of altar. Anyway, it all cost $1.3M and you better like it or you are "against progress."

The main intersection that is the entrance into our little town, which formerly had mature trees on all four corners, is now a large sea of concrete and asphalt. Definitely not an improvement and along with that prison wall-planter thingee along First is neither charming, nor village-like. "Village" is the buzz word at council meetings where they endlessly discuss our "village atmosphere" before they approve another condo project.

Look! Eighteen Acres of Opportunity!

In a somewhat related story: I have been intrigued to read in their "marketing materials" that the City Council says they have "set aside funding" for our new/proposed City Hall/Community Center: and all we have to do is adopt a $61M bond so they can chop down our apricot orchard and build the rest of the concrete and asphalt stuff they want to put there.

I've learned, however, that $6M of the "funding" they have "set aside" is in Certificates of Participation. That means, in other words, the "funding" they have "set aside" will only be able to be put aside, if they borrow it. Certificates of Participation are certificates that allow you to borrow.

This is what modern government calls "funding."

So with "funding," "progress," and "streetscaping," we are developing a whole new Orwellian lexicon here in my little town. Oh, excuse me, my little "village." And honestly, it did used to look like one.

You are now entering Los Altos. Leave your dictionary and all hope of shade behind.

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Everybody Talks About the Weather ...

2012-01-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

Bainbridge Island, Washington State. Wednesday, January 17, 2012.

When I was in journalism school at UCLA, I learned of a survey that revealed the Los Angeles Times, with its headquarters in the middle of one of the most temperate regions in the United States, had more front page weather stories than any other paper in the country.

It seemed like a quirky thing. And yet I've long remembered it. Wild weather is always really fascinating--especially when it isn't happening to you.

So, when I was at the gym yesterday here in California, hiking my way along the treadmill, watching the news on the screen before me and occasionally glancing out at the sunlit park beyond, it was truly mesmerizing to see that Seattle was snowbound. Why was it so interesting? I guess because it wasn't happening to me!

I called Lisa-my friend-from-childhood and asked if she was snowbound up there on Bainbridge Island and indeed she was. I asked for photos and she agreed, once again, to serve as a foreign correspondent for robinchapmannews.com.

Lisa's deck on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Besides not having to shovel the snow myself, I enjoyed the photos because they show Lisa's first tentative photos out her window ...

Snowbound tree, out Lisa's Bainbridge Island window.

And then she clearly bundles up and goes outside for a real look 'round.

... And there is absolutely no one about. That is one of the delightful things about snow--when it doesn't happen to you--you remember how quiet everything gets as the snow softens the sounds and people stay indoors by the fire. No traffic. So lovely. Even the mailman isn't out and about.

Mailboxes near Lisa's house and a tree, decorated by the snow.

It all brings back a blizzard I once covered in Washington D.C., where the weather was so bad and the driving so uncertain they made me do my live report standing (in the blizzard) on the sidewalk out in front of the station.

"But Raben," I remember saying to the news director, "Everyone, all day, has been trying to come inside out of this weather. Won't it look silly for me to be standing out here in the blizzard, just a few feet away from the door of a building where every other intelligent person is located--you know, inside?"

He looked at me as if I were a true dim-wit.

"Oh Robin," he said. "Get real. This is television."

And it probably was good television too. Because the people watching snow-covered Robin were all inside and were saying to themselves: "Boy oh boy. That's fascinating. (I'm glad it isn't happening to me!)"

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The Joys of Dorothy L. Sayers

2012-01-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

Murder Must Advertise was written in 1933.

Every now and then, we all come across a book we can read and read again, and which continues to delight us each time.

Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L. Sayers, is one of those books for me and I keep a copy around for just that reason.

Sayers (1893-1957) was a remarkable person in many ways.

She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford (graduated in 1915, women were finally awarded degrees in 1920). She published a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, she invented the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, and she worked in advertising--all quite amazing accomplishments for women today, much less in her own. During her advertising career, she was responsible for one of the most famous Guinness ads of all time.

I was reminded of this when a tour guide in Dublin recited the jingle to us on a bus tour--unaware, I'm quite certain--that the Englishwoman Sayers was the author of this ditty for the very Irish brew. The ad shows a Toucan with his bill arching over two pints of Guinness and the copy reads:

If he can say as you can

"Guinness is good for you"

How grand to be a Toucan

Just think what Toucan do

All of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels are good, but I think they get better as they go along. Murder Must Advertise is the eighth in the series and in it Sayers is really at the top of her game. The story includes a clever plot that turns on something as modern as illegal drugs and in it she produces a good mystery while offering a running commentary on the ups and downs of office politics and the vagueries of the advertising business.

When an unidentified man is murdered, the police hope to learn who he is from dental x-rays, but, as she writes:

"Irritatingly enough, the deceased turned out to have an excellent set of teeth ... Nor were his shoes helpful, being ready made though by an excellent and much-advertised firm. In fact, the wretched man had gone to meet his Maker in Farley's Footwear, thus upholding to the last the brave assertion that, however distinguished the occasion, Farley's Footwear will carry you through."

Just as the Dublin tour guide brought to mind Sayers' Guinness ad, my visit to the bell tower in Dublin reminded me of her complex mystery novel The Nine Tailors (1934), where I first read about the obscure subject of change ringing. Each of her stories has its own charms.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) includes a suspect emotionally damaged by his years in the trenches of World War I--a PTSD victim, we would say today. The plot turns on the minute of silence observed to this day by the English in memory of that terrible war.

In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey meets and falls for a very modern young woman--some say she is modeled on Sayers herself--who is accused of poisoning her lover. I won't give away what happens there ...

But if you had to start with one story, I would start with Murder Must Advertise because of her wry observations about our consumer-oriented society.

At one point she has Wimsey muse:

"If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow grease?"

It is a good question. Now, when everybody from our presidential candidates to our local city council hopes to mould our decisions through marketing and advertising, it is an even more relevant world in which to set a mystery.

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Weather News and Other Oddities

2012-01-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

Anchorage, Alaska, January Sunday 2012. Click the pic to make it bigger and note the frozen peak in the distance. Brrr.

I have two sets of cousins who live in Alaska. One set are teachers who live in Kenai. Another are lawyers and live in Anchorage. Since I read in the paper that Alaska is really getting slammed this winter, I wrote my cousin in Anchorage and asked for a picture.

I guess I didn't think about this request very hard. It meant somebody had to go outside to get a photo ...

And on Sunday morning, it was -8°F when my cousin's wife went out on their deck to take the above photos. "Not a creature was stirring," said my cousin. Much applause for his wife who braved the cold for the readers of robinchapmannews.com.

Anchorage has had 88 inches of snow so far this season, though my cousin says it has been "dry snow" and hadn't caused them much trouble.

In nearby Cordova, Alaska, they've had 179 inches of wet snow--very hard to shovel, that--and have had to call out the National Guard to help dig them out.

So I guess they wouldn't be impressed up there to know that the temperature in my backyard was down to 28ºF this morning. I went outside and found a bird iceskating on the bird bath.

I punched a good size hole in the ice so I could show it was ice. Until I did, it just photographed as water! This is fairly unusual for us--quite cold for Northern California.

Meanwhile all our rain has apparently gone up to Alaska as snow, and our days have been sunny and dry.

So much so that my mother's Christmas Cactus finally bloomed for the first time since her death. Why it didn't bloom last Christmas--I don't know.

Someone gave it to my mother as a gift and she was always delighted to see it bloom each year in the middle of the winter. And now, so am I.

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How Many Gov't Agencies Does it Take ...

2012-01-11T09:57:00.000-08:00

Historic Hangar One, Moffett Field, 1/10/2012.

A friend was over at Moffett Field this week and sent me some photos that show the work on historic Hangar One. The "de-skinning" is going along much faster than any of us expected.

There is an offer on the table from the Google founders to "re-skin" it, if they can just store their fleet of planes there--who knew they had a fleet of planes? But their offer is a good one, and would save the hangar. And there the offer sits.

It has been absolutely fascinating to see the skin come off this amazing building--it is ten football fields long, for one thing. Much less discouraging than I thought it would be, since it looks even more astonishing with the skin off, than it did with the skin on.

But, how long can those girders last when the winter rains come? The Navy is doing the clean-up since the toxins in the hangar "belong" to the old Navy base. NASA is the landlord of the property that includes the hangar today.

When the cathedral-like landmark turns into a big rust bucket: no one will want to claim her.

So as the two government agencies sit amidst their red tape and each stares out to a different spot on the horizon, the offer from Google just sits there, getting lost under the paperwork.

Google's founders say they would like to "re-skin" just when the "de-skinners" have completed their work, so that they can take advantage of all the scaffolding and equipment that is being used for A, which would reduce the cost of B.

It is difficult to imagine the government lawyers in Washington trying to figure out the logic of that simple formula!

Meanwhile, I cross my fingers and hope that Hangar One does not turn into an historic pile of rusty girders--while silly people dither and a truly sensible solution from private industry vanishes into the sunny California sky.

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It Takes a Village: If You Can Keep One

2012-01-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

State Street and Second, Los Altos, California.

The little town where I grew up turns 60 years old this year. From its beginnings, the city government went to a lot of trouble to keep it from developing into just another suburb. The city worked hard at keeping its sense of place.

Nestled up against the Coast Range, built along the now-long-gone Southern Pacific "Daylight" rail line to San Francisco, it kept strict height limitations on its downtown, and limited residential lot size to no less than a quarter acre.

The result is the picture you see above. A truly amazing contrast to the congestion in nearby Mountain View (home of Google) and Palo Alto (home of IBM and Stanford U).

At least it was until our present mayor came into office five years ago and collected a group of "stakeholders" to parlay about changing the zoning downtown. Though 99% of tax revenue in Los Altos comes from the people who own homes here, our mayor wanted to encourage a business boom downtown.

Now that she and the rest of the City Council have rezoned downtown to "encourage development" we have what I saw today adjacent to the parking lot of our local drug store. As I pan from the new building, my camera goes over to the back of our (mostly one-story) Main Street buildings and then returns to the 45' structure:

Now, our city council is going to spend $25K of our tax dollars on a survey to "ascertain how the community uses downtown currently, how satisfied residents are with the downtown as it exists today, and what additional changes they would or would not favor."

Odd, isn't it? That, in a city of just 9,000 voters, city council members couldn't just walk around and talk to people and "ascertain" the answers to these questions in a couple of weekends?

I haven't heard one resident say these oversized structures are a good thing for our community.

Odder still: if you really cared what the residents thought--wouldn't you have taken this "survey" first? Before you made the changes? Odd indeed.

The application to other communities? Government has a very sensitive ear to the money men and the business community. The average taxpayer? Government perceives our views as something to be managed with "outreach" and "marketing."

All I can say is I hope local residents give these survey-takers an earful. But why is it I fear the questions will be rigged to "ascertain" a pre-ordained result?

The corner of Main and Second, one story building looking toward the four-story structure looming in the distance.

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Surf's Up Along the California Coast

2012-01-08T18:55:00.000-08:00

Surfers paddling out into the surf at Half Moon Bay, California.

As I was driving around running errands on Friday I heard on the radio there was a big wave warning for the California Coast this weekend. They were telling visitors to the beach to be careful and not to linger too long on the edges of coastal cliffs.

Hooeee. I thought I might drive over and see some big curls!

There is a big, one-day surf contest called the Mavericks and they actually don't want you going over to Half Moon Bay to observe it. In recent years some of the big waves have hit the cliffs and knocked over a couple of people in the audience. They were lucky that is all that happened.

But today was not the Mavericks day--the contest officials pick one day when the surf will be the highest of the season and this was not the day. I hauled along my video gear in vain--well, it was just my iPhone. So, just to prove I was there, I rolled a little anyway and did catch one guy (near the end) taking a very short little ride.

So the good news is that no waves came along and knocked anyone off a cliff. But the better news is that it was about 70 degrees over at Half Moon Bay today--right in the middle of winter at what can be the very chilly California Coast. Lovely.

Nobody has figured out a way to tax this! Or regulate it! Or hold a focus group on it! Or a charrette! And there is no Master Plan affecting its future.

And then--another reason to be happy: I was just in Denver, Colorado ...

My brother-in-law Dan keeps in shape clearing the snow, 12/22/2011.

Nothing against Denver, but I think surfing is better exercise.

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"Demonstrations of Temporal Cloakling"

2012-01-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

Robin and niece Lena. This was during a temporal non-void when we were wearing coats, not cloaks.

I just read this article about how scientists have figured out a way to create hidden pockets in time by altering the speed of light beams.

These physicists can cause what they are calling "tiny temporal voids." Tiny means really tiny. Maybe a picosecond--which is a trillionth of a second. But they're working to stretch it out to something like a nanosecond--or a billionth of a second.

I really love this idea.

The Defense Advanced Research Agency of the USDOD thinks this could be used to "cloak" just enough time for them to do a little spying without getting caught.

I've been thinking of another use. I could use these "tiny temporal voids" to not make stupid decisions--and not say things I wish I hadn't--in all those regrettable picoseconds of my life.

Things I've blurted out that were at the top of my mind and should have been stored elsewhere---ooops "temporal void pocket" and presto change-o! Robin doesn't say that dumb thing at all!

Truth be told, there is a whole lot of my life I would "cloak" if given half a chance. Tiny Temporal Void--I seek thee! A picosecond would have given me a chance to choose that better job! Not marry that guy! Not get that weird haircut! Not buy those ridiculous shoes and invest the money instead in a practical annuity!

I'm so bereft that researchers have discovered this remarkable thing so late in my life. For someone who has stumbled around, I've actually been incredibly lucky. No thanks to myself and my brain.

Imagine how well I could have done with a really good cloak.

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"One of the Few Remaining Apricot Orchards of Santa Clara Valley"

2012-01-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

Los Altos City Hall, looking across the apricot orchard to the Youth Center and the Police Station.

At late as the 1970s, the Santa Clara Valley was still economically dependent upon agriculture. According to the Santa Clara Valley Historical Society most of the County's orchards of apricot, prune, cherry and almond were small and family owned. Cooperatives helped the region's families sell and distribute their products.

California still produces 95% of America's apricots. Most, however, come from the San Joaquin Valley, inland from Los Altos, Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale--little towns where the lovely climate and proximity to San Francisco and Stanford University transformed orchards into suburbs.

Looking from the Los Altos City Hall toward the Los Altos Library. With the advent of electronic books, libraries will need hardscape less and less.

The Los Altos Civic Center includes City Hall, the Police Station, the Library, a Youth Center, and, more recently the Los Altos History Museum. All are surrounded by an old apricot orchard that city fathers decided retain, when the Civic Center was built in the 1960s, as a reminder of the city's origins and as a means of softening the look of the civic buildings. In a 1988 remodel and update, the trees stayed.

Here's the opening paragraph on the web site of the Los Altos History Museum:

"Located in one of the few remaining apricot orchards of Santa Clara Valley, the Los Altos History Museum explores the rich history of local people and how the use of the land over time has transformed the agricultural paradise once known as the "Valley of Heart’s Delight" into the high technology hub of today’s Silicon Valley."

When one thinks how valuable a treasure an old orchard can be--as a teaching tool for history, as an open space for all God's creatures--it is difficult to imagine that anyone in the government of a small town that has such an asset, could look at those trees and imagine large buildings, asphalt, and "streetscape" as an improvement.

But there are people like that. Maybe that didn't live here when kids made summer money "cutting cots" and apricot orchards bloomed in the spring over acreage covered by seas of yellow mustard and orange California poppies.

Perhaps the missing sensory memory explains it. Perhaps there is another reason for their goals to bulldoze the orchard. It is odd though: Los Altos hasn't grown in population since I was a child. Still, it is possible that ambitions have grown.

Perhaps some of the people in government just need to get out of their cars and walk around a little more than they do. They might be amazed at the treasure that is right before their eyes.

I wonder how many of our council members ride a bicycle? To meetings?

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One Person's Checkroom From the Year 2011: Things Lost and Things Found

2011-12-31T16:27:00.000-08:00

The found photo of my father.

As the years go by, I've begun to think of each year as a large Lost and Found checkroom, where things turn up that have been missing and from which other things go missing, perhaps to turn up in another year, perhaps to vanish forever.

Above is something I found this year: a photograph of my father I had never seen before--a picture of him lost for at least four decades.

My sister found it somewhere and she kindly gave me a scan of it. It is the only time I've ever seen my dad in a helmet. I can't see his rank, but he's wearing a Sixth Army patch on his shoulder and his hands look enormous. They were enormous--as were his feet. Gosh darn it if he didn't pass them down to me.

It looks like early morning reserve duty at Ford Ord, California. One enlisted knucklehead seems to be catching some zzzzs in the background. Ah the army reserve! What fun to have this photo turn up in 2011 just when I was missing Dad.

One of the re-discovered parasols.

Here's another surprise: In 2007, I sent my friend Holly a couple of Japanese parasols and they were, we believed, never delivered. We entered them in the ledger of things lost things in 2007. Turns out, they had been delivered--but to the wrong address--and in July 2011 a neighbor of Holly's turned up at her door with them. He'd found them in his basement where his wife placed them four years earlier, thinking he had ordered them! Thus; honesty turned up in 2011 along with the lost gift.

Meet baby Grace (shown here with sister Rebecca and mother Devon). Gracie turned up in earnest, but not in a cloakroom.

I found two new nieces this year. There's Grace (the immovable object, above) and (below) the irresistible force known as Mary. Mary's father is deployed, but we expect him to turn up again in 2012.

Lady Mary with my sis in Denver at Christmas.

Just about the time I found the statue of Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson kneeling in prayer in the lobby of our City Hall, I lost my faith in the integrity of my local government. I'm glad they're asking for divine intervention: I think it is very much needed in my hometown.

Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson join in prayer in the entry of the Los Altos City Hall.

As non-PC as the statue is--perhaps it was a good reminder that someone else is really in charge--and I'm not talking about Alexander Haig.

I found myself on Catalina Island this year (see photo above). And now, I've completely lost interest in it! Lost and found in one quick visit. No more worries on that score!

But I found something different when I visited Ireland, in November.

The James Joyce statue, Dublin, Ireland.

I rediscovered my interest in the fascinating Celts. While there I found the first church, outside of a book (The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers), where change ringing is still practiced. And lo and behold, while I was there I found something else ...

My smile. The kind that starts in your heart. It came back in Ireland. I hadn't even known it was missing until I got it back. And when I arrived home, and Christmas came along--though I can't be sure ...

... I think my zest for life returned as well. My mojo, my elan, my je ne sais quoi. Maybe it was watching Baby Mary with her 9-month-old's enthusiasm and resiliency. Maybe it is just that sorrows ease with time. Lost and found. Found and lost. Each year--a checkroom filled with things we store away.

I found I had many blessings in 2011. I lost some heartaches, found new friends, and lost an illusion or two. On balance a very good year.

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To Whom We Owe so Much: Even Our Pursuit of Happiness

2011-12-25T13:08:00.000-08:00

That's Lady Mary there on the sled with me as the sun comes out after the snowstorm in Denver. Hard to spot her in her snuggle bunny suit.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Just wanted my friends to see at least some of the Col's family on Christmas morning in snowy Colorado. Fire on the hearth. Blessings galore. Sled in the snow.

Christmas in Denver, 2011.

Prayers from here for our country--may selflessness and integrity return to our leadership. May facts replace marketing in our public discourse and civic virtue return and our leaders re-learn they are accountable. To We The People.

These things the Greatest Generation fought for, died for, and handed over to us--in trust. For their sacrifice may we be worthy.

We owe them all the peace with honor they won us. May the promise of the season be fulfilled in all we do and say.

Happy Christmas to all!

Ah there she is: the face emerges: Lady Mary--not so sure about this stuff.

... now feeling a bit better about it all...

And her smiles were so delightful.

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Once Upon a Christmas Birthday ...

2011-12-22T07:38:00.000-08:00

One memorable Christmas Eve: the silly knit cap was from me and Sis bought Dad a toy helicopter--which I believe he has just launched (with a blow pipe) into the rafters.

December 22, 2011 (Earth time)

Dearest Dad;

Today is your birthday and though I realize time is no longer a concern for you, we still have to slog along down here by the calendar and the clock. So, when December 22 rolls around, I always think of you--well, I always think of you anyway, but on 12/22 I think of you more often.

In fact, I was thinking this morning about how you caught a bad break being born so close to Christmas. Your birthday always got short shrift, falling in the shadow, as it did, of Christ's arrival in Bethlehem. That's what we used to call "being Bigfooted" back in my news days. (No sacrilege intended.)

Funny thing about you--you never seemed to mind about your birthday. You never even seemed to care about your birthday! Once the War was over and you and Mom got the house and family rolling--I guess just about every day was a good day for you.

Remember the year Sis came home from her flight attendant training on Christmas Eve? We all dressed up in our best--the way people did in those days--and drove to SFO in the Olds to meet her UAL flight and bring her home.

We were four once more. Isn't her uniform cool? A helmet hat. And look! She's even wearing white gloves. Dad looks relaxed and very spiffy in the tweed suit and waistcoat.

Sis had finished college by then and I was soon to follow. It was the last year before the fledglings spread their wings and thus, one of our last together, as just the four of us.

I had not started my work in journalism, but I had a new Kodak Instamatic camera and it appears I thought I had--documenting the event as if I expected to file a report on it later. I guess this is later! That's me behind the camera: reporting on my pretty sister's return from glamorland.

Did Mom give Sis that cookbook? What I like best about this picture is the navy Samsonite suitcase--part of my sister's UAL kit. Hardsided! Weighed a ton! No wheels!

Dad, you seemed especially happy that night. Perhaps that's why I like to remember it.

Sis and me.

And then my mind zooms forward to the last Christmas/birthday we spent with you, on the eve of 2010. We knew how ill you were, but on your birthday--though you were quieter than usual--you did your best to be as present as you could be.

Sis and her family were there, too. Two of the granddaughters. We even got the neighbors to come and bring Sunny, your favorite neighborhood dog--an old dog just like you. She sure was glad to see you and the feeling was mutual.

Dad and Sunny.

The only thing you said was: "I guess I know who planned all this." I still have no idea if that was a compliment. Coming from a Scotsman, it was often hard to tell.

The brain is a great time traveler, isn't it? Even on that last Christmas/birthday I did not see you as others did--old and ill. The mind works like that with those we love. I saw you working in the yard, as Sis and I played. Your hair was black. I saw us together in the park that day when I was visiting and you were well and your hair was white and Mom took our picture and the red in my jacket matched the red in your shirt.

In Los Altos, 2004.

Dad, I still miss you. The promise of this Season softens our loss and so do passing days. The things you taught us remain: faith and integrity. And you walk beside us still--straight and true.

Love,

Robin

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Maybe I Should Not Have Read That Book ...

2011-12-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

Part of the apricot orchard the covers the ground between our City Hall and our Police Station. You and I see this and say, wow that's pretty. Someone else sees it and exclaims (as they do in a recent city brochure) "Eighteen Acres of Opportunity!"

It is curious how one book can resonate so differently with the same reader at different times in her life. I first read How the Irish Saved Civilization on a long business trip across the Atlantic, and I found it so witty and diverting I didn't even scowl back at the surly flight attendants.

Cahill's premise, that Irish monks laboring away in scriptoria saved the Great Books of the Greco-Roman world while Europe was awash in manuscript-burning barbarians, may be debatable. But he makes such a delightful case for it, it sounds like it ought to be true.

When I read it again, before heading to Ireland this winter, it struck me in a completely new way.

In order to fulfill the premise of his title, Cahill needs must present several chapters on how and why the Roman Empire collapsed in the first place. And since it took Gibbon six volumes, written over the course of thirteen years, to do the same thing, Cahill has to get into and out of that part of the book with alacrity.

Cahill's premise is that Rome's spending became so grandiose, as it spread its armies further out from its core, that it had to look for more and more ways to impose taxes on more and more of its citizens. The wealthy moved into villas as far away from the tax collector as they could, or, if that didn't work, bribed the tax collector, or, if that didn't work, kidnapped the guy.

It left the little people, whacking away at the wheat fields with their scythes, to support what had become an upside down pyramid.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Well, that's how it struck me too.

His second premise is similar to Gibbon's in that both believe the society had begun to rot from within and that "the gradual loss of civic virtue" caused Romans to outsource the hard work of their empire to non-citizens from across the border(s) who eventually rose up and helped their fellow "barbarians" put a torch to the whole thing.

That also rang a couple of warning bells. A "loss of civic virtue." What a sad phrase that is.

Thus, the second time I read Thomas Cahill, his erudition and wit and love of the Irish went right past me as my mind dwelled on the similarities between the decline of the Great Roman Empire and our own.

I came home from Ireland with this on my mind. Asked a neighbor to get out of her Lexus for one night to go sit through a city council meeting where several of us were convinced hijinks were abroad in the land. She was just too busy. And in defense of the Lexus, I asked another friend, who drives a Volvo and she was too busy too.

It has finally dawned on me why the city council in this tiny town was so rude to the four of us who did show up. Because they can. They knew the lady with the Lexus and the other lady with the Volvo wouldn't join us. They know everyone's "too busy" to attend. This Orwellian council and its sisters and brothers across the USA have oozed into the vacuum created when civic virtue oozed out.

Winston Churchill read Gibbon when he was stationed in India with the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, and I think we can say that he bucked up and recovered from this cautionary tale and found his optimism in time to save the universe.

Maybe if I read all six volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I'll find some little piece of history in there that will buck me up too.

A math teacher told me once that every problem contains the key to its own solution. And, he said, if you look at the problem from every side, you will eventually find the key.

I'm looking teacher. I'm looking.

Our library is in the distance. Each of our civic buildings is linked by our apricot orchard, a living reminder of this valley's agricultural past. (You can Google that. Google now lives just down the road in Mountain View.)

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Serfs Don't Coming Hanging 'round My Door!

2011-12-15T17:29:00.000-08:00

Drawing by John Tenniel from the 1868 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, from my own collection.

"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Rob Long (who didn't write Alice in Wonderland, by the way, we'll get to that in a minute) is a very funny writer whose credits include "Cheers." He is also a conservative who produces biting, laugh-out-loud satire for the political magazine National Review.

That's why I was surprised to read a serious Rob Long piece [National Review November 14, 2011] in which he focused--almost to his chagrin--on what he called "the kernel of truth" in Occupy Wall Street.

"There is something wrong with this country," a billionaire friend told Rob Long (who clearly travels in elevated circles) after an investment bank arranged to replace the billionaire's expired passport and have it delivered to him in person at JFK for an international flight with just a few hours notice. Even the rich guy found that kind of power disturbing.

After hearing the story and seeing what has happened to America during the last three difficult years, Long said he found himself reading the Occupy Wall Street placards and saying to himself, "Well okay, most of that is stupid, but I get where the dude is coming from."

And I agree with him. Something is really wrong.

This was so obvious to me when I joined four other thoughtful citizens this week in a city meeting where we hoped to have an impact on a set of "educational" materials that we, the taxpayers, are funding and that we, five citizens, felt were not transparent, honest, nor educational.

The materials are, to any other eye but this city council, marketing material for a $175M Civic Center our present City Council has decided to build. The worst part, to them, is that they are forced to go to the taxpayers for a series of bonds to fund this nightmare. Thus the materials. They want to soften us up first.

They saw the five of us coming, and first, tried to sneak the materials through by putting them on the Consent Agenda, which allows for no discussion.

Then, when we requested our right to speak, our new mayor moved the item to the end of the long, dreary meeting, hoping we would go home, or at least, that the local reporter would go home, before we had the temerity to address their august and very busy body.

We stayed, though our mayor was right and the room was empty by the time the agenda slogged along and finally ploughed into the obstruction of We the People. When we pointed out the challenges we saw in the taxpayer-funded "outreach materials" our mayor laughed at us and told us she "had an MBA in Marketing from Stanford" and we clearly didn't know what we were talking about. As I watched her chins jiggle in false merriment, this picture of the Red Queen popped into my mind.

My hands instinctively reached for my neck. I felt reassured to find my head still attached.

Then the council turned away as if we were invisible. Approved the materials and dismissed us.

"There's something wrong with this country," the Occupy Wall Streeters are saying. "There's something wrong with this country," the Tea Partiers are shouting. "There's something wrong with this country conservative satirist Rob Long wrote.

"There's something wrong with this country," my little group of five said as we left our meeting with our heads (metaphorically) tucked underneath our arms.

We were all stunned. I'm a second-generation in this town and most of the rest have lived here almost all their lives. We had no idea how insignificant we had become.

But, like the billionaire who got the passport expedited by an investment bank--and felt uncomfortable about it--we learned a lesson that George Orwell articulated in his 1945 Animal Farm: "... all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." It appears the average taxpayer is now least equal of all.

I tried to get a number of my fellow citizens to join the five of us in our Don Quixote quest, and though all were sympathetic, not one showed up.

It is possible they've figured out the deal and are going about their lives as best they can, buying Chinese flat screens and driving Japanese SUVs and thanking God they don't live in Syria, Myanmar, or Egypt. Still, looking away doesn't make evil actually go away. It just makes it invisible to you.

"'I don't think they play at all fairly,' said Alice. 'They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'" Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Another John Tenniel drawing from the 1868 Alice.

"There must be some kind of way out of here,

Said the joker to the thief

There's too much confusion,

I can't get no relief." "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my Old Home Town

2011-12-13T23:40:00.000-08:00

What a pretty orchard it is. Tell it adios. The suits want it plowed under.

In my hometown we have an ill-mannered, fat lady mayor who always reminds everyone at each city council meeting that she got her MBA in Marketing at Stanford.

I used to have a high opinion of Stanford until I found out they gave out MBAs in Marketing.

They actually have graduate school classes in that? I thought Marketing was a trade. But anyway ...

This bad-tempered fat lady is determined to build a $175M new City Hall Complex where our modest Civic Center now sits, surrounded as it has been for decades by a lovely apricot orchard. The orchard, of course, would be the first thing to go once this lady mayor (with the Stanford MBA) gets her bond issue passed and gets out there in our orchard with her 'dozer.

I wasted my time at a city council meeting this week trying to get the council to send out honest, intelligent materials to the voters about this project. Four or five of us hopeless Don Quixotes showed up to try.

We complained about a slanted survey in the materials. Ha ha ha, they laughed and said aw heck, we caught them! Tee hee, they said. It isn't really a survey! Let's change the name and call it something else! Whoops! Now it's a "tool to engage the public in a dialogue." End of problem! Same spurious survey--different name!

Hello George Orwell? You out there?

I felt like Kevin McCarthy when he woke up in his hometown one day and discovered the Body Snatchers had taken over all the real people.

The only good news is I sat there so long at that council meeting, I missed my dinner--which is only a good thing because at my age I have to do everything I can not to end up looking like our mayor.

Anyway, our council members only ever talk to each other, so they thus believe we will be easily fooled by the marketing materials they will be sending out (that we will be paying for) and that any idiot can see are made of cotton candy--all part of their marketing campaign to get their bond passed. Marketing, after all, is our mayor's specialty!

This is the same city council that has brought us a disruptive, not to mention ugly, downtown renovation and new tall and ugly buildings that were banned by our zoning code until they came along.

I'm wondering if they just imported this whole city council--lock, stock, and smoking barrels--from the last town I lived in. You could switch them the way they do wives on those reality shows, and neither the council nor the constituents would ever know the difference.

It would be a comedy, if it weren't so sad and I didn't love my home town so much. I keep thinking of the statue of Adams, Jefferson, and old Ben Franklin in the lobby of our city hall. Those poor old fuddy duddy idealists. They would roll over and die if they knew what was going on.

Lucky for them they already are. Dead that is.

I think it must be about time for me to bury my ideals right next to them.

Can you tell by looking at this marketing material that they are selling us an $81M program to tear down all of the buildings in our Civic Center so they can build newer, bigger, taller ones (and chop down our city's apricot orchard)?

If you looked at that "educational material" a little differently, you might see it as a picture of me, marketing a project I don't like, to myself. (But my hair is a little longer.)

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Those New City Sidewalks? Gosh--They Sure Don't Look Like a Million Dollars

2011-12-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

Our new, seven-figure sidewalks after just a few months of use.

We had new sidewalks installed in downtown Los Altos this past summer--which surprised a lot of people since we had new sidewalks installed just ten years ago and the ones we had looked really nice.

Some of the stone benches even had wonderful tromp l'oeil paintings on them by acclaimed local artist Jan Meyer. Looking at these new one--I sure miss the old.

The new ones? Well, the faux stone "pavers" in the sidewalks, "bump outs" and zebra crossings seem to be absorbing every bit of car oil, spilled coffee, ice cream and every other kind of whatzzit people drop on sidewalks and crosswalks as they drive and walk around our downtown.

New zebra crossing at Second and State.

I recall having a conversation with an executive at Walt Disney World's Epcot once, over a similar issue at Epcot's French pavilion. He told me Disney Imagineering had learned not to use absorbent "pavers," because they so easily turn filthy looking.

This is Los Altos, not Epcot. Epcot couldn't afford to have its attractions look like this.

"They stain like crazy," he told me. "And the only thing that cleans them is to pressure wash them with acid."

And that, as he pointed out, is challenging when you have thousands of people walking all over them every day.

Kind of like you might have in the downtown of a city?

New State Street sidewalk at "bump out."

I sure hope, after all the aggravation we experienced from this seven-figure change to our ten-year-old sidewalks, we haven't been stuck with the "absorbs dirt like a sponge and has to be washed with acid" pavers.

They look really bad right now.

"Pavers" and new planter/bench on State.

Our City Council insisted on this change and took a great deal of flak from surprised taxpayers for the big disruption and expense, so I suspect they will have a solution on hand to the glaring ugliness we see around us now.

The construction still isn't finished and won't be until long after the Christmas shopping season is over.

Having the new work look seedy before the other streets are even completed is what you might call a bad omen for the future.

First Street isn't expected to open for several more months. It is the main route through Los Altos.

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"To Secure The Blessings of Liberty For Themselves and Their Posterity ..."

2011-12-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

Pearl Harbor survivors Ted Ivey of Cupertino, California at left, and Warren Upton at the Moffett Field Museum's reception honoring the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. The photo is by artist Anna Jacke.

A crowd of more than seventy five people stopped by the Moffett Field Historical Museum, Wednesday, December 7, 2011, for a reception and art exhibit in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. Among those present, were five special guests who on that day were young men in uniform serving on ships and at bases around that famous anchorage.

Warren Upton, 93, enjoyed the camaraderie at the Moffett Museum's Pearl Harbor Day event.

Warren Upton was a 23-year-old radioman aboard the USS Utah. As the first torpedo hit his ship, he and all but one in his group scrambled up a ladder to safety. When the Utah sank eleven minutes later she took 54 of his comrades with her.

Ted Ivey, aged 90. The photo is by artist John Deckert.

His friend, Ted Ivey, was an Army gunner at Schofield Barracks that morning, on Waikiki Beach. The two men have been longtime members of the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. They were among those who voted to donate their flag to the Moffett Museum this year when the chapter shut down--due to dwindling membership.

The art exhibit at the Moffett Museum was part of the event honoring Pearl Harbor Day. Photo by Anna Jacke.

Veterans of World War II and other American conflicts, active duty military, family members, and artists who were exhibiting their paintings of Moffett's iconic Hangar One, all mingled at the reception. Almost everyone stopped to thank the Pearl Harbor survivors.

Charles Merdinger (Captain, USN ret.), 93, was on the USS Nevada on December 7, 1941. Gunners on the ship shot down four Japanese planes, but the Nevada was badly damaged by at least five bombs. Sixty men were killed that day on the Nevada, and 109 were wounded.

Korean War veteran Joseph Cusick had a special reason to stop by. He donated his Navy flight suit to the museum awhile back, and learned that artist John Deckert had turned it into a painting.

Joseph Cusick, Commander (USN ret.) poses with his fifty-year-old flight suit and with artist John Deckert. Cusick came to honor Pearl Harbor Day, and Deckert came to meet Cusick, whose flight suit he had painted.

John Decker's painting of Cusick's flight suit.

"What do you think about your flight suit now?" asked Herb Parsons, president of the Moffett Field Historical Society.

"That fellow was pretty slim," Commander Cusick said with a wry smile, to much laughter.

Seventy years had turned a day of tragedy and sorrow into a day in which a nation honored these awe inspiring veterans. So many had sacrificed so much--and America and the richness of its liberty, the breadth of its diversity, the wonder of its many freedoms remained secure.

This has been their legacy.

* * * * *

Diana Jaye's painting of Moffett Field's Shenandoah Plaza.

One personal note: in the middle of the event, a young man with a military bearing approached me and asked how he might go about buying one of the paintings on exhibit. I told him I was happy to help. And he walked me over to one of my favorite paintings in the show--by artist Diana Jaye.

"How did you know about our reception today?" I asked him.

"Oh, I read about it in the paper," he said. "I'm a reservist with the 351st Civil Affairs Command in Mountain View."

He must have been surprised when he saw me stop and catch my breath. My father was one of the founding officers of the 351st. When he retired from the unit as a full colonel, he served as the group's alumnae president for many years.

It was an emotional reminder of why I was a volunteer, at that event, on that day, in that place my father loved. As the tall young officer walked away--for just a moment, I felt my father there with me once more. He really would have enjoyed himself. He always loved a reception where there were lots of free cookies for him to eat.

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Art and Free Expression on The Seventieth Anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

The Roy Chapmans on Christmas morning, 1941. The winter darkness seems to mirror the mood of my grandmother Mary, my grandfather Roy, and my father's sister, Helen. Only family friend David, whom the Chapmans were caring for because his father had been called up, seems to be excited about Christmas. My father, along with most soldiers that year, did not get Christmas leave.

America awoke to terrible news on this day seventy years ago. The Japanese had bombed our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Thousands of sailors and soldiers were dead.

My father was already in uniform on that day. His reserve unit had been called up in July, 1941 because President Roosevelt knew this day might come.

Dad's log book shows he took up a J-3 cub for a test flight on December 6, 1941 in South Carolina, and he and his engineering unit were just moving into their quarters at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia that fateful Sunday morning.

Dad was in the shower, he said, when his roommate stuck his head in to announce: "The Japs have just bombed Pearl Harbor."

My father's response? "Where's Pearl Harbor?"

He was a 21-year-old kid and had no idea what the Japanese might have against us. Now, as America mobilized, he was in uniform "for the duration."

At the Moffett Field Museum, where I am a volunteer, we've made the decision to mark this day with an exhibit of art work from our first "Paint Out"--where plein air artists came and painted pictures of this historic--now decommissioned--Navy base.

We will have as our honored guests, two Navy veterans who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor seventy years ago. One is 90, the other is 93 and though they've disbanded their survivors group because so few of them are left, they agreed to join us for our event.

What is the connection between art and Pearl Harbor Day?

It goes back to that thing that got America started in the first place. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What lots of people don't know is that more than two thousand artists served in all branches of the services in World War II. And when Life Magazine--which employed artists as correspondents--asked one Marine officer why he wanted men in uniform around him fighting the war with paintbrushes he said: "Because if we lose this thing, these guys may never be able to paint freely again."

A Thunderbolt ground crew cleaning its guns. Painted by Ogden Pleissner, artist and correspondent for Life Magazine.

So, on this anniversary, an art exhibit seemed a fitting tribute to the men and women in uniform from Pearl Harbor on through the decades to this very day, who risk their lives so that we might live, and work, and write, and yes, even paint pictures, freely and with the feelings that are in our hearts.

We salute them all today.

"P-3 Orion with Hangar One" by artist Andy Ballantyne, September 2011.

If you would like to join us for the exhibit, and meet the Pearl Harbor survivors, here are the details:

Opening Reception for "The Great Moffett Paint Out"

The Moffett Field Museum (enter at the gate off Highway-101 and they'll point the way)

2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

December 7, 2011

No charge. The museum will also be open for tours.

Many of the paintings, drawings, sketches and photos are for sale.

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Of The People, By the People, For the People?

2011-12-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

Downtown Los Altos, California, summer 2011.

In my little hometown, we've been living a construction nightmare for a year. Based on the letters to our local paper, the Los Altos Town Crier, the majority of our citizens have been mystified, then angry, to see every downtown intersection torn up during the past twelve months.

This is partly because our city installed new sidewalks and benches downtown just ten years ago.

Lots of people liked them. Ten years is a very short half-life for sidewalks and intersections in a town of only 28,000 people.

Well, now we have new zebra crosswalks. We used to have the painted kind which stayed neat and tidy because they could always be repainted with a couple of bucks worth of Benjamin Moore.

Our new ones, which caused interminable traffic tie-ups during their installation, are made of some sort of faux stone which is so porous that after a few months of use they are now stained with the inevitable splashes of soda, ice cream, chai tea, coffee, and car oil that follow wherever there is foot and car traffic.

The intersection of Second and Main Street in Los Altos, California with our "new" zebra crosswalks.

In other words, after all that construction, and all those millions of dollars, our intersections now look like they belong in the dirty parking lot of a wrong-side-of-town strip mall.

The city council that approved this, also approved the removal of some on-street parking so they could build "bump-outs" at some of the corners. Now, with fewer places to park, this same city council says we really need to build multi-million dollar high rise parking garage. And aren't those pretty?

Along First Street, the main route through town, the work was supposed to be completed before the holiday shopping season. But it isn't. Thus merchants, who were sold these changes as big improvements for local shoppers and thus told they would bring a boost to their businesses are frantic. After a year of no shoppers due to the construction--not to mention the dubious economy--they now face a disincentive for locals to go downtown during Christmas.

The new 45' office-and-condo building going up adjacent to one of our parking plazas.

And this first controversy--replacing sidewalks and intersections that were not in need of repair or replacement--doesn't even touch on the new three-and-four-story buildings we've all spotted rising like giant intergalactic aliens amidst the one-and-two-story adobe buildings of our historic downtown.

But worse is yet to come. This same city council has approved a "Master Plan" to tear down our entire City Hall, youth center and police station, as well as our beloved apricot orchard, to build an $81M "Phase One Community Center Plan" including new and larger versions of the above as well as a new senior center--and to slip this past the voters with a propaganda campaign devised by a consultant which mentions nothing but the goals of "helping to keep our seniors independent" and "helping to speed our police officers' abilities to respond quickly in emergencies." Indeed.

In other words, the taxpayers of Los Altos just paid a consultant a $100,000 to figure out how to sell themselves a bond issue by telling themselves as little about it as possible.

Our present City Hall and police station sit behind a traditional Santa Clara Valley apricot orchard, a living monument to our valley's agricultural roots.

I honestly thought these kind of tactics were only found in Washington D.C., where I once covered budget bills passed at 2:00 a.m, or in big corrupt eastern cities. As a result, I've been tossing and turning the last few nights and wondering how this charming little town--where my parents found refuge after the trials of World War II--managed to lose control of its government.

I can only deduce that power and greed are irresistible motivators, even in a small town. If we are very generous, perhaps we can rack it up to bad judgment.

Yet, I retain faith in my fellow citizens and believe once they are informed about what is going on, they will turn their puzzlement in to anger and their anger into energy and their energy into action. Both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill prevailed when the enemy inside their governments was almost as demoralising at the enemy without.

The Los Altos City Hall and the apricot orchard is slated to be torn down, for two more years of construction, as part of the $81M "Phase One" of a Master Plan approved by our city council.

For now, our local leaders are sowing the wind. I look forward to the follow up. That's when those who sow the wind, must reap the whirlwind.

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An Amazing Tale For Our Time--Two Centuries Old and As Modern as Today

2011-12-03T08:02:00.000-08:00

I picked this book up in a Dublin shop and I couldn't put it down. Read Wedlock, by Wendy Moore and your jaw will drop and stay there as you read this true tale in which the victim finally--with the help of a small cadre of servants--prevails over her abuser.

Even today, one of the worst things that victims in abusive relationships must face--whether it is a child with an abusive parent, or a person with an abusive spouse--is how little credence the rest of the world places in that person's suffering. We just don't want to believe that the nice man down the street has a layer beneath the one we daily see--and that in this underside of his life he is very frightening.

That charismatic woman we meet at the office? What if she is lovely in public and cruel in private? As humans, we don't seem to want to know these things.

So, if you get a chance to read the true story of perhaps the worst bounder in English history and how his heiress wife finally turns the tables on him, you will find it, not only better than the best 18th century potboiler, but an eye opener. Heed what you read, because it goes on around you.

Wedlock by historian Wendy Moore seems like something out of Dickens or Daniel Defoe. It is even more flabbergasting for being an absolutely true story.

It tells the tale of Mary Elizabeth Bowes, one of the wealthiest of Britain's Georgian heiresses and how, after she was widowed at a young age by a peer who was almost as wealthy as she, she plunges into a true nightmare of marriage with a man who appears to be a charming, financially secure Anglo-Irish officer.

It may not be surprising, considering how most of us tend to take the people we meet at face value, that it took eight years for the people who loved Lady Mary to even begin to grasp the horrors she was forced to endure. Worse yet, her legal protection in the 18th century was very limited.

As a married woman, her property and money--even her children--were legally believed to belong to her husband. So when she does finally find the strength to escape her abuser, she has a huge struggle to assert her legal standing.

But even the law courts of her time found her case extraordinary. And when the case finally did go before the bench, it set a number of precedents for the centuries to come.

Victims like Mary Eleanor Bowes are diminished twice--first by their abusers. And then, by those around them who cannot or will not believe that what the victim faces is true. As Christine Ann Lawson writes: "Invalidation has two primary characteristics. First, it tells the individual that she is wrong in both her description and her analyses of her own experiences ... Second it attributes her experiences to socially unacceptable characteristics of personality traits." Blame the victim--this is not a new phenomenon.

Thus we say to ourselves: "She has always been difficult. No wonder she makes her husband so angry." Or, "It is too bad she and her mother can't get along. There must be some jealousy involved." Or, "I've never even seen him angry. What can she be talking about?"

This amazing book should at least make the reader aware that monsters do exist, even in the best possible circles. That victims can be well-educated, wear lovely clothes, have wonderful manners and values, and speak many languages. And their abusers can look just like that too. The abuse of children and the abuse of spouses takes place even in the best of families--not just among the poor.

For society in any century--as we have seen in the recent abuse cases at Penn State--denial is so much more comfortable than confrontation.

Wedlock is an eye-opener for our time. It reads like a novel. But it is as modern and real as it can be. And though it took place centuries ago, if you look around you carefully, you will see it before you in the 21st century. (P.S. Mary Eleanor Bowes, through the youngest of her sons from her first marriage, was the several times great great great grandmother of the present Queen Elizabeth's mother, the late Queen Mother, nee, Miss Elizabeth Bowes Lyon.)

Wedlock

Wendy Moore

published by Orion Books

2009: London

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Your Heart Starts Singin' When You're Homeward Wingin' Cross the Foam ...

2011-12-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

As that famous traveler, Dorothy Gale once said ....

"There's no place like home! There's no place like home!" (click, click.)

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The Origins of Dracula in Dublin

2011-11-29T02:47:00.000-08:00

St. Michan's Church, Dublin.

Bram Stoker and his book Dracula (1897) may not freely associate in your mind with Dublin. But the author was born in Dublin, attended Trinity College, and began his career as a free-lance theater critic in the city.

In Ireland, there is speculation that what he saw in a tiny north side church, may have played a part in the vampire story that made him famous.

On a gloomy day I went to visit the ancient church of St. Michan's with its infamous mummy-filled crypts. As I crossed the River Liffey, it felt as if I were entering a somewhat dodgy neighborhood.

The old church is almost hidden by the surrounding buildings.

The neighborhood can't be too dodgy, I said to myself, since it includes Ireland's law courts. It is true the area looked as if it could use a good scrubbing--but the sidewalks are nevertheless filled with well-dressed toffs in old-fashioned collars and robes.

Just when you feel you are in the heart of creepy-ville at St. Michan's ...

... a posh barrister strolls by and adds a bit of Dickensian cheer to the scene.

The foundation of St. Michan's goes back to 1095, so its crypts may be a millennium old. When the church was rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries, workers discovered that the caskets beneath the church, filled with the oldest of the remains, had rotted away, and some of the bodies had mummified.

St. Michan's is consecrated ground: and yet ...

The mummies caused a sensation and became a tourist attraction. One of the remains, about 800 years old, had his legs crossed Crusader fashion. Another is missing a hand. And both feet.

The vaults are indeed strange, and though pictures aren't allowed, I can show you Peter, our guide, opening the doors as we prepare to enter ...

Peter was so good at telling his ghoulish stories, I feared he might start dragging a leg--like Igor.

The heavy lead doors actually do creak on their hinges ...

... and you see the entry, which one needs to be a little acrobatic to negotiate.

I can also share with you the eerie ambience of the surrounding churchyard.

Bram Stoker did grow up nearby. Dubliners believe he visited the mummies. He did write a gothic tale about characters who retreated to coffins. About the rest: we can only speculate.

Coincidentally, one of his contemporaries--also a Trinity college friend----Oscar Wilde, wrote a haunting book with a theme that is not dissimilar to Stoker's most famous work.

The Oscar Wilde statue in Dublin.

Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), explores--as Dracula does--the dark dream of earthly immortality. I have long thought it is Wilde's most interesting work.

Today, we think of both Dracula and Dorian Gray as horror stories. But both are much more than that as they examine the price men and women might be willing to pay to gain some edge on old age and death.

Stoker died a successful, middle class, family man and Wilde died in infamy. But they had these tales in common. Maybe it was something about Dublin--maybe not.

But their works survive and brought each a literary immortality.

To the generations that follow, that's the most valuable legacy of all.

The remains of Ireland's Norman conquerer Strongbow in Dublin's Christ Church.

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Ringing the Changes at Christ Church

2011-11-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

On the walkway near the roof of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin on my way to the bell tower. I seem to be holding onto that book bag for dear life. (It was windy.)

One of my favorite mysteries--in fact, one of my favorite books of all time--is The Nine Tailors, by the late Dorothy L. Sayers. Written in 1934, it takes place in and around a medieval church and uses the obscure art of English change ringing (of church bells) as one of the important elements of the story.

It is a wonderful book: and if you haven't read any Sayers, this is a lovely introduction to her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, the shell-shocked veteran of the Great War and second son of the Duke of Denver.

This is all leading up to the fact that today, on a tour of the bell tower of Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, I actually met my first expert in change ringing, who, at least, attempted to explain this unique feature peculiar to English churches.

We definitely got a bird's eye view of those flying buttresses.

First, we had to get up the eighty-two stairs to the bell ringing room of Christ Church, which has a crypt that dates back to the Normans (eleventh century) with beams down there that hold up the fifteenth century stone building above.

When we got up on this gangway between the two staircases, one in our number had to turn back with that Hitchcock thing--you know ... Vertigo.

This is probably a good time to point out that Christ Church was indeed, originally, a Catholic cathedral--but Henry VIII changed all that when he had his dust up with the Pope. And what with the English lording it over the Irish all those centuries, Christ Church became an Anglican church and stayed that way. And that's even though the first Norman ruler of Ireland, Strongbow, is buried in this church, and he was a Roman Catholic. Everything in Ireland is complicated.

But meanwhile, back upstairs in that bell tower, we learn that our guide, who helped me better understand The Nine Tailors, was, coincidentally named Leslie Taylor. Nine tailors (a corruption of toll-ers) were once rung at the death of a man--followed by one ring for each year he lived. Thus a village learned the news of a neighbor's death.

This Mr. Taylor told our small group he had been ringing changes at Christ Church since he was fourteen.

I noted in a plaque on the wall that he now rings the lead bell, called the treble.

Mr. Taylor, explaining change ringing.

Ringing changes are mathematical formulae based on the number of bells in the tower and the number of combinations each one can be rung in relation to the other bells, without repeating. Six bells have 720 possible "changes" which take six bell ringers about thirty minutes to ring.

On April 11, 2008, Mr. Taylor and his fellow ringers rang a full peal of Plain Bob Major on the Christ Church bells 0f 5056 changes that took them three hours to ring.

While we were trying to absorb that complex calculation he told us that the hand grip on each bell rope, is called a "sally." In this church, the sallies are made of colored velvet.

Mr. Taylor, who is very likely always on the hunt for good bell ringing talent, had us all take a turn at the ropes--telling us each to be very careful not to let the bell pull us to the ceiling! I believe this is known as "an over pull." Clearly, change ringing takes both brawn and brains. Several in our group were, at least, able to make the bells speak.

And though we weren't yet ready to ring Grandshire Triples or a change of Yorkshire Surprise Major, nobody ended up pulled to the ceiling and no one fell through the trap door to the choir--so all in all, we did pretty well.

And we all safely got back down the cramped, six-hundred-year-old stone stairs, negotiating them without incident. Thus; no one had to ring the Nine Tailors for any of us.

That's my foot relieved to be on its way down the medieval staircase.

Goodbye to the bell tower.

(If you are interested in the Dorothy Sayers book, The Nine Tailors, it is still in print and available at Amazon.)

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Let Slip the Dogs of War: But Not Right Here!

2011-11-25T00:28:00.000-08:00

Government Buildings, Dublin, early in the morning.

It took me several days of getting my bearings to figure out that my little Georgian hotel sits just a few steps from the Dáil Éireann, the home of the Taoiseach--the Irish Prime Minister--as well as their lower house of Parliament. It is a bit like being in a hotel across the street from the White House and the Capitol.

This formidable set of structures sits between the National Library and the National Museum of Archeology, so when I went to see these museums I noticed, through the iron fence, lots of men and women in the nearby courtyard with cell phones stuck to their ears--called mo-biles here in the Euro Zone--rushing about between meetings.

Government Buildings, Dublin, from the other side. This is the front entrance. My hotel sits near the back gate, which seems to be the way everyone comes and goes--also where all the demonstrations take place.

Then, as I walked back from Thanksgiving dinner with some family friends who are living over here, I spotted the barriers.

Crowd control barriers, with my hotel in the background.

Hmm, thought I, those barriers look like they are being set aside for crowd control, in the event of a demonstration. Later, watching their television news, I learned about the General Strike being called for next week. Labour--now out of power--is organizing the event as a protest against the budget cuts the new government is proposing to keep Ireland solvent.

Crowd control barriers, looking the other way, toward the Dáil.

Ireland--unlike America--still has a thriving newspaper industry and the papers have been full of all the twists and turns of the challenges to the Euro. With German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now the strong lady of Europe, the new Irish government is struggling to find a path to thrift that won't give Germany new control over their finances.

In the lingo of the economists, Ireland is now in danger of joining Europe's PIGS--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain--all on the brink of the economic precipice.

So, while the new Taoiseach needs support for his austerity plan, he faces a General Strike, egged on by the Labour backbenchers. Just like a thriving democracy--very messy in times of crisis.

What it means to me, is that some of the mess seems sure to take place right along the narrow street in front of my hotel. Hence, the pile of barriers. The good news is that it will provide a ringside seat onto history.

The bad news is that this all will be taking place right about the time I will need transportation to the airport. The hotel porter assures me nobody will pay any attention to the call for a General Strike. And anyway, he said, this being Ireland, essential business will go forward.

Ah, here's an essential business going forward in front of my hotel bar.

On the other hand, a couple I met at breakfast, Americans over here via Great Britain (he, of course, in Big Boy jeans) said to expect a rough time, especially if traveling via London, which fortunately I am not.

With luck, I'll get to witness the fuss, and still have a means of getting home. But, I might just need the luck of the Irish.

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Walking Through the Heart of Dublin

2011-11-22T15:08:00.000-08:00

Dublin statue of James Joyce.

"There are two important books in every Irish home," said my young guide, a student of history at Trinity College, Dublin.

"The Bible and James Joyce's Ulysses." He paused an Irish pause.

"Alas. Both unread."

Thus began my guided walk through the landmarks of Dublin with the kind and funny Ronan. We saw the bullet holes that still mark the General Post Office from the Easter Rising in 1916 ...

And, since the building is still a working post office, I was able to mail a letter to my Aunt Ruth. The stamp was the first and only thing I've bought here for under 1 Euro: it costs just 82 cents to send a letter across the Atlantic to America.

We then found the last Royal Mail Box remaining from English rule in the 19th century. "The Irish being the Irish," said Ronan ...

"We kept it and just painted it green. Is it a good disguise, do you think?"

My guide Ronan and the non-royal mailbox.

Moving on, I had to confess--when asked--I was not sure who Phil Lynott was, of the band Thin Lizzie. I did recognize the name of one of his hits, "The Boys Are Back in Town," (one of my nieces loves it for its association with the film "A Knight's Tale.") Anyway, the late Afro-Irish musician (drugs, unfortunately) not only has his own Dublin statue, he seems to be particularly well-remembered by the Japanese.

Musician Phil Lynott, and friends, in Dublin.

Down the road from Phil, The Occupy Wall Street people have produced a sister movement in Dublin: this group is occupying the plaza around the Irish Central Bank, a cold, damp spot for a vigil.

All was quiet at Occupy Dublin, surrounding Ireland's Central Bank.

Every now and then--it seemed like every block or two to me--we would pass a pub and Ronan would say: "Now there is a pub that was one of Brendan Behan's favorites."

McDaids Pub.

Behan, the author of Borstal Boy and A Quare Fellow among many other works is quoted as calling himself "a drinker with a writing problem." Oh wait, there's another of his haunts:

The Foggy Dew pub.

But talent is often leavened with misery and we cannot take one without the other. Behan died as he lived--collapsing on a Dublin bar stool at the age of 41. Tortured, not by failure, but by his own success.

Ronan and I walked miles and miles through Dublin on this sunny, cold, sparkling day, speaking of Irish poets and patriots. James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, J.M Synge, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Charles Stewart Parnell, Eamon deValera, Michael Collins--not to mention the works of the Irish of the diaspora.

We could have gone on, but by 1:30 p.m. we had walked so far as we talked I was too exhausted to go another step. Ronan is a student at Trinity College and wants to be a journalist. He's such an engaging storyteller he should become a great one. What he could not tell me is how a people on an island this small could produce so much great talent?

I walked slowly back to my hotel as the light began to fade and pondered the wondrous mystery of the Irish.

Dublin's Bohemian Temple Bar neighborhood is now known for its nightlife. I stayed in a quieter quarter, lucky for me.

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Visiting the Book of Kells

2011-11-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

Am I in focus yet?

I've been lucky enough to have seen the Book of Kells once before on a trip to Ireland in the 1980s. It seems to me we walked into the Long Room of the Trinity College Library and looked at it in a glass case, open to one page. The story they told us then about the one thousand year old manuscript was that a page of it was turned each day, so that visitors could come and see something new and beautiful in it each time they were there.

The ancient illuminated Gospels, known as the Book of Kells, is a big draw at the Trinity College Library in Dublin.

Nothing stays the same. Now one must buy a ticket to see the Book of Kells and the exhibit follows the Disney formula exactly: there is a pre-show, a show (the book, open to one page of the illuminated manuscript and one page of text) and the whole thing ends with the final and most important part of the formula--the post-show, which is always an exit through the gift shop.

The pre-show is filled with helpful background on the astonishing beauty and age of the Gospels and the anonymous scribes who created it by hand, most probably in the monastery on Iona, off the coast of Scotland, founded by the Irish Saint Columba, otherwise known as Colm Cille (there are several spellings of this name) in Gaelic.

It is especially helpful to those who haven't bothered to read about this wonderful thing in advance.

The Book of Kells pre show.

The truth is that nobody really knows if it was created during St. Columba's lifetime (during the 6th century) or even at Iona, the monastery he founded, or at Kells where it spent most of its life, until it was donated to Trinity College in the 17th century.

The Vikings did a lot of raiding in Iona and Kells and monasteries there were constantly either losing or hiding their treasures, eventually closing down their coastal monasteries entirely and moving them to safer ground until those nasty Vikings decided to settle down, marry the local girls and turn Ireland into a Danish-Celtic land filled with red-headed children.

More Book of Kells pre show. You can't actually photograph the book itself.

Anyway, visiting this treasure of Western Civilization was nevertheless a delight. I could have done without the pre-show and the post-show-cum-gift-shop, but it is standard these days--for both the sacred and the profane. I suspect the increase in tourism made it necessary to create a a traffic flow for the crowds--though since I'm off season I didn't have to worry about that.

The gift shop.

The weather was cloudy as I exited the college, and on the stroll back to the hotel I felt my first sprinkles of Irish mist. Time to go sit by the fire in the cozy hotel lounge. And though that's partly show too--it's a gas fire--I'm not letting it get me down.

"Things aren't what they used to be," my father was wont to say near the end of his life, putting on his deadpan face. And then he would laugh and add: "And what's more, they never were."

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Its a Long Long Way to Tipperary

2011-11-20T11:40:00.000-08:00

Merry Christ's Mass to you--in Celtic

I'm just getting oriented--a good word since I traveled a long way to the East from California--and after a day on the road and a longish nap today, I left the hotel for a stroll on Dublin's famous Grafton Street.

Ah, there's that famous Celtic restaurant now!

The Mcdonald's on Dublin's Grafton Street was jammed. The Burger King several doors down was not.

A local Irishwoman in a candy store recognized my accent and said Grafton Street was busy because the Christmas lights had gone up and people liked to come in and see them. Otherwise, she said, things had been not so good--reflecting Europe's recent economic troubles. "But its Christmas," she said in her lilting voice, "And everybody likes Christmas."

The Molly Malone statue in Dublin's City Centre, her bronze bosom gleaming.

One more important stop: I needed an adapter for my MacBook so I didn't blow it up. On previous trips to England and Ireland I have used adapters I had purchased in the States without much success. Once, using my hair dryer at an Irish B & B with an "adapter" I had brought with me, I blew out all the building's fuses. On another trip, this time to England, I nearly set fire to my niece's dorm room bed when my curling iron began to smoke. So, this time, right near the statue of Molly Malone, I found what I was looking for.

I don't know what a "Premium Reseller" is: but they had the do-dads I needed to remain connected, even though the kit cost me 39.99 Euros. Ouch.

I'm not using my iPhone, so I've turned off the roaming but it has a great camera in it so I'm using it for that. Except for one thing--when I give it to someone to take my picture, they never seem to be able to tap that little box correctly in the center of the screen and thus, even the Polish porter who is in his 20s and an iPhone kinda guy who I asked to take my photo in the hotel lobby, focused the room beautifully. I was, however, out of focus--as usual.

Which is a little how I feel on this my first night in Dublin. A good night's sleep ought to fix that.

Slightly out of focus me at my hotel.

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Visions of Celtic Lands

2011-11-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

On my first trip to Ireland.

I've been planning a trip to Ireland--a country I haven't seen now for more than two decades. I do have Celtic in my background--McHutchison was my paternal grandmother's family name--but it is, I believe, of the lowland Scot variety.

I like to pretend I'm related to T.E. Lawrence, whose father was the Anglo-Irish baronet Sir Thomas Chapman.

Unfortunately--at least for Lawrence of Arabia, as T.E. Lawrence was later called--his father, Sir Thomas, already had a wife in Ireland when he ran off with the family governess. The governess was T.E.'s mother and the family lived under her name, Lawrence, for many years.

By his living wife--who would not divorce him--Sir Thomas had only daughters, and his sons being on the wrong side of the blanket, as they used to say, did not get to inherit either the name Chapman nor the title and it died out. T.E. never used the name Chapman and never even married, much less had any children.

But I could be related through a branch, don't you think?

On the McHutchison side--Mc and Mac in Celtic mean "son of" and if the name is "Mc" it is usually believed to belong to an Irish Celt and if "Mac"--to an Scot. But, this isn't always true. My father's mother's family came here from Glasgow and their last name started with a Mc.

The Anglo Saxons were very inexact at spelling these--to them--foreign names, and since it was these English-speakers who were doing most of the spelling back then there are a variety of Mcs and Macs on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Chapman, of course, is an English name. It means "seller of things." Or "a man who sells things." So our origins are humble, as you can see.

By the time we get to Sir Thomas Chapman, however, the baronet wasn't getting any dirt on his hands doing any selling. Though, he does appear to have been a bit of a scamp.

I have a friend who is Anglo-Irish who says every time he touches down in Ireland, or Scotland, or the Isle of Man--any Celtic place--he feels as if he is home.

I'm home in America. But I'm looking forward to visiting that green land again where my ancestors once walked in the mist: long, long before the dawn of history.

An ancient Celtic stone. I photographed it on my last visit to Ireland.

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Blame It On Catherine Oxenberg

2011-11-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

Robin interviewing Catherine Oxenberg in Los Angeles, on the set of ABC's "Dynasty."

For some reason I decided to look up the actress Catherine Oxenberg on the 'net, and not just her bio: I looked up some recent photos of her as well. That was my mistake. The worst viruses I've ever been spammed by, have all come from celebrity photo sites. Something I, for the moment, forgot.

I had interviewed the blonde beauty early in her career, when she had a part during the last couple of seasons of the ABC series "Dynasty."

That's me and WJLA-TV photographer Mike Forcucci on the grounds of the Harold Lloyd estate in LA where we interviewed the cast of "Dynasty."

To make her even more exotic and enviable, Oxenberg is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia--not that Yugoslavia recognizes its royalty anymore and oh, BTW, Yugoslavia isn't even a country anymore. This, however, makes her a cousin of Britain's Prince Charles. Well, we all have relatives we don't brag about.

Anyway, fast forward twenty-five years or so and I wondered how she was holding up. Turns out she is even more beautiful now than ever. Totally stunning.

But don't go on any web site and check out her photos!!!! After I did, all the people on my electronic address list got emails from me with a link to a site selling cheap Viagra.

Most of my friends sent back funny notes. I haven't heard from the Old Boyfriends on the list. I hope they know they were being spammed. As Governor Rick Perry would say: "Ooops."

And it was all the fault of this gorgeous princess. No, not that one--the one facing the camera. So long ago and so far away, we thought of Spam as a bad main course for Sunday supper.

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Irving Bacheller Pops Up Again

2011-11-10T15:40:00.000-08:00

Irving Bacheller on the grounds of his estate in Winter Park, Florida, circa 1930s.

I was awarded a grant several years ago to research the life of writer Irving Bacheller, a best-selling novelist in the first half of the 20th century.

He's not well-known today. But, when I was writing a small book about Winter Park, Florida, I kept stumbling across his name. He had a winter home in Winter Park, and I discovered that in his day, he was a big literary light to shine in such a small town.

Now, I've stumbled upon the old fellow again.

Irving Bacheller was so famous he faced the ignominy of the public figure: publishers sometimes misspelled his name on the postcards they produced of his Winter Park estate.

I was watching Turner Classic Movies, as I often do when I'm cleaning or ironing, and when I glanced up from a pillowcase, up popped a short subject called "Whispering Bill." The introduction said it was "based on a poem by Irving Bacheller." Produced by MGM in 1933, Bacheller's name was still well enough known that it earned him a place above the title, as they say in the movies.

Irving Bacheller in the study of his Winter Park, Florida, home.

After watching the short film, I went On Line to see if I could learn more about the poem. I found a copy of "Whispering Bill" in the book In Various Moods: Poems and Verses by Irving Bacheller, published in 1910 by Harper and Brothers.

Bacheller's old-fashioned style can be tough slogging for the modern reader. But the poem "Whispering Bill" is something of an exception. Though it is not a great poem, it does have a poignant and universal theme--how the wounds of war resonate within a family and a community, long after that war has ended.

In fact, the tale of "Whispering Bill" is so terribly real, it makes me wonder if Bacheller, who began his career as a newspaperman, may have reported on a similar case. It tells the story of a boy who returns home from war with a traumatic wound that leaves his father telling a local politician:

"An' ye've filled our souls with bitterness
that goes from sire to son,
So ye best be kind o' careful
down there in Washington."

And though the poem was written before the devastations of World War I--in which Bacheller served as a correspondent--his anti-war theme was well-suited to the public mood in America in the 1930s.

An autographed photo of Bacheller. All of these photos are from the archives of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Bacheller served on the Rollins board.

Bacheller was in his seventies by then and very worried that his career was on the wane. He feared being forgotten. So the sale of his 1910 poem to MGM in 1933 must have been a real coup for him. What a surprise that his work has found new life again in another medium nearly eighty years later.

And, it appeared on the eve of Veterans Day: a reminder to all of us to remember and be very grateful to those who have risked it all for our freedom.

(To read "Whispering Bill" click on the link below and scroll through the index to the poem.)

"In Various Moods: Poems and Verses by Irving Bacheller"

Ken Kraft, at left, is now the owner of Irving Bacheller's nifty old Ford. I got to ride in the rumble seat.

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"Gunking" and "De-Gunking" on Ascension

2011-11-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

I've just received a booklet of my father's tales and reports about Ascension Island, from Shari Parkhill of the Ascension Island Heritage Society

They are a treat for me and, I hope, will help researchers of the future get a glimpse into the daily lives of the young men who freed the world back in World War II.

I was too shaken when my father died, in March 2010, to go through these papers myself. I found three boxes of his Ascension papers in his things and I just couldn't look at them.

So, I kept a few and sent the rest to the Ascension Island Heritage Society.

There, the papers were sorted and catalogued and now some of them have come back to me in the shape of a booklet they've produced called History of the 898th Engineer Aviation Company & Other Articles by William Ashley Chapman.

I'm excerpting a brief piece on my adjacent site. Click to have a look.

Ah, The Feel of Castile

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Out of the Past ...

2011-11-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

I have many happy memories of being young and foolish. I don't have any idea if I was actually happy back in the days of my youth: but looking back--from the perspective of a wiser person who has lived the joys and sorrows of the life that intervened--looking back has often brought a smile.

At least it did until the Internet came along, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Myspace and findanyone.com and now I can actually see the people that brought these smiles to my face, not through the gauze of my imperfect memory, but it the harsh glare of an overhead fluorescent light as if on a Skype call from the past.

I want my old misty, gauzy memories back please.

I want to be unavailable to all these people again, and available to them only in their memories. I don't want to be totally and completely and utterly linked-in with them and their friends and their friends-of-friends and everybody else on the planet.

I don't want to know how they turned out. That's what I like to dream about.

I want this hackneyed uber real realty show out of the foggy, gas-lit recesses of my brain. I want their old faces young again, the way they are in my heart.

Do they have a program for that? The UnLinkedIn, UnBookedFace, the NoSpace but My Memory Space?

You know what I hate most about all this? I'm beginning to sound just like my mother.

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When Artists Went to War

2011-11-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

An American Thunderbolt ground crew in England, cleaning its guns on June 6, 1944. By artist Ogden Pleissner, for Life Magazine.

Following a trail of facts that lead to an interesting story is what reporters love to do. That's how I happened to learn about the artists who went to war in World War II.

I stumbled upon the program when I found two framed color prints of Ascension Island in my father's things. My father had served on Ascension and I could see the prints were of really good paintings. But, they had captions beneath them and looked as if they had been cut from a magazine.

Who frames magazine prints, I wondered? Perhaps these old paintings had some meaning.

They reminded me of my dad, so I put them up on the wall in the kitchen and studied them. Something about the graphic style said Life Magazine to me.

With the help of Google I learned of the World War II artists program. When the war broke out, the Army sifted through a list of WPA artists and assigned seventeen of them to engineering and combat units. Painters had been part of the Corps of Engineers since the Revolutionary War. But, when the War Department discovered the program a Washington donnybrook broke out. Artists in combat? Congress had a fit!

So, most of the artists were then hired by Life Magazine and given the same status as war correspondents.

(As the war went on, other artists, who were already in the uniforms of the other branches of the service, were also tasked to paint and draw for the record by their commanding officers.)

The originals of my father's Ascension prints were by Peter Hurd, a mid-20th century artist who married into the Wyeth family. They did indeed appear in Life Magazine.

Peter Hurd painting of Ascension Island, Life Magazine, April 30, 1945.

GI movie theater on Ascension Island. A glimpse into the off-hours of soldiers' lives. Painted by Peter Hurd, Life Magazine.

A lithographer I admire, Howard Norton Cook (1901-1980), known for his New York and New Mexico scenes, served as a "correspondent" with the infantry. One of his pieces, Bougainville Barracks Bags, captures the dreary grind of war's endless work.

Detail from "Bougainville Barracks Bags" by Howard Cook, 1945. Salmon and black color lithograph.

Rendova Island, Solomon Islands.

Then, reading the obituary of Pulitzer-prize winning news photographer Brian Lanker, whom I knew slightly as a colleague, I discovered that he had produced a documentary about the war artists program called They Drew Fire. Aired on PBS in 2000 it is an emotional look at a touching corner of World War II. I found it at my local library.

And I found at least one of the Life Magazines--on eBay--with twenty-four pages of work by the war artists.

Artist Aaron Bohrod on the cover of Life, which gave readers many pages of war information for just a dime. Bohrod served all over the world, including Rendova in the Solomons with artist Howard Cook.

Among them were Tom Lea, Aaron Bohrod, Ogden Pleissner, Fletcher Martin, Tom Craig, Bruce Mitchell, Millard Sheets, Peter Hurd, James Turnbull, and Reginald Marsh. Their work is now in the archives of all the branches of the U.S. military and some in the archives of the now defunct Life. You can find these paintings if you look for them.

Wartime street scene in Brazil by Reginald Marsh.

It is such a democratic thing to do: sending artists with paintbrushes to war. Not for propaganda, as was true in some of the countries we fought; but to record their personal visions of the largest conflict the world had ever seen. And to leave behind these images for the generations to come.

"In Broken Caen" by Aaron Bohrod who traveled with Allied troops (here British and Canadians) from D-Day in Normandy across Europe.

Find "They Drew Fire" at Amazon.com

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I am Not James Herriot, But ...

2011-11-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

You can't tell she's Ms. Gimpy when you see only her side view.

I''m still monitoring the progress of the Blue Jay I dubbed Ms. Gimpy after an accident immobilized her right leg, September 19. Actually, I never did know if it was her leg, hip, or pelvis. But, after she hopped around on her left leg for three weeks, she began to put weight on her right again.

She continues to heal and to visit. How can I spot her?

She has a definite list to port.

She is also missing a few of her tail feathers, so I can also identify her when she is flying around. She is a clear second banana to her brother, Mr. Peanut (he, of the double peanut take-offs), something new to their sibling dynamic since the onset of her disability.

Mr. Peanut, who is here hiding booty in my garden--something Jays have in common with Magpies.

She waits 'til he's eaten to appear. And if she's eating and he pops up, she's off.

I'm outta here.

I continue to feel protective toward her, though I know she is a wild bird and not a pet.

Still, I can root for her and hope one day to see her stand straight and true. It is the least I wish for all of us.

The tough Ms. Gimpy.

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The Ghost on the Sculpture Committee

2011-10-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

"Imagine That" by artist Tom Williams. Lincoln Park, Los Altos, California.

I got a call this week from someone looking for Faye Chapman. Faye is my late mother, and since I kept the family land line when I moved into the family home last year, this kind of call isn't uncommon.

Usually it is someone looking for a donation. But this time the call contained a surprise.

The caller was a young reporter from the Los Altos Town Crier who wanted to speak with my mother because she was on the city's Public Sculpture Committee. The reporter was so abashed when I told her my mother was dead, I ended up comforting her.

The surprise was that I had not known about this compartment in my mother's life. She had never mentioned it. So, I went on the city's web site and there she was: still listed as a member of the Public Sculpture Committee.

I can only speculate: but I think my mother (and father, as they were always a team) got involved in this when our city began soliciting designs for a Veterans' Memorial in 1997. Mom and Dad were in their seventies then: still healthy and active. Like everyone in our family, they had strong likes and dislikes.

The City of Los Altos has had a public art program since 1985. I enjoyed seeing it blossom over the years as I came home on visits. And though all of the art--mostly sculpture, as it sits outside--is striking, a great deal of it is non-representational.

"Space Dance for Peace" by Mircea Paul Goreniuc, Lincoln Park, Los Altos, California.

"Pax Nova" by Bill Laculla, McKenzie Park, Los Altos, California.

"Magic Fish" by Hardy Jones, Los Altos Main Library.

I suspect my folks worried that the Veterans' Memorial might end up looking like a big Peace Cube or something. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

"Dancers" by Michele M. Alcantra, Grant Avenue, Los Altos, California.

Perhaps--and I don't know this for sure--thanks to their input, and the input of many others in town, the Veterans Memorial was a representational figure. A figure of a soldier. And, like an American soldier, this one was just a little bit larger than life.

Veterans' Memorial, Shoup Park, Los Altos, California.

Designed by California artist R.J. Truman, it is called "Cradle of Liberty." My father and mother really liked it and took me to see it many times. The infant held up by the wounded G.I. is supposed to represent Liberty, according to the sculpture's description. But to my father, the infant was an infant--and children, as he said many times, always brightened the day of a war weary soldier. And vice versa.

"We loved seeing kids," Dad said. "They always made us think of home."

In fact, when he returned from Japan following the last bloody battle of World War II, my mother asked him how it was, and he reportedly said: "Those Japanese kids were really cute."

This, I believe, are the origins of my mother's civic involvement near the end of her life. A nice coda, for a daughter to stumble across. I wish she had talked about it.

I notice the committee meets monthly and I do wonder that someone hasn't noticed Faye's absence since her death in 2009.

I think I better call them. According to the city's web site, Mom's term runs through 2013!

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There's Nothing New Under the Sun

2011-10-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Robin and Kimberly at our Echo Drive home with friend.

Keeping the rain off the rhubarb and the locusts off the grain goes back a long way.

I had to search the attic of my brain for memories of how my ancestors kept the crows away (see the previous story). The word "scarecrow" emerged from the foggy mists of my failing synapses.

I dug the photo out of the old scrapbook and there it was. There we were. Posing with that earwig-infested monster Dad built to keep the birds away from his cherry and peach crops.

Since it is close to Halloween, and everyone these days is doing a lot of decorating, I drove to one of those crafts stores to see if they had something scarecrow-ish that might work for me.

"How's this?" the young lady said holding the thing aloft.

It looked more like Raggedy Andy than anything that would scare a crow. But the price was right ($4.00) so I figured it was worth a shot. No, wait, not a shot. (That's my final option.) I meant a try.

When I first took a hammer to his head (I had to, to stake him into the ground) he seemed to be lacking something.

I hung those bells around his neck. No, not quite right. Then, this morning, I got an inspiration. I found a couple of those wire hangers Joan Crawford discarded and, voila!

... With his arms out in a gesture that says "Stop! Don't cross my lawn, you crows!" he looked just a teeny bit tougher. I put a couple of feathers in his cap (so I could call him Macaroni).

Crows are very intelligent. It is indeed likely they will not be deterred by this ruse. However, my neighbors have already found my display hilarious. It is so rare, in these trying times, to have this much fun for just four bucks.

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Attack of the Killer Crows! Or: Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds May End Up in A Pie

2011-10-23T12:15:00.000-07:00

Many people in California don't even have lawns anymore: it is that water conservation thing and a good change it probably is.

But my lawn has been here for half a century. It was attached to the house my sister and I inherited. So, I was unprepared for the terror that awaited me when ...

... a flock of crows attacked the lawn on Friday and again on Saturday. They were looking for grubs, I think. Whatever. They made a really big mess.

I realize, that as troubles go, this does not rank with divorce, death, and disaster. Still, the mess these crows made--and I actually caught them at it this time--did cause me to want to go out and get a blunderbuss.

Now I'm wondering if, last year, when I had my previous lawn damage and went to all that trouble to hire the Critter Catchers, I did that skunk and his friend the 'possum a great injustice. Was it this local gang of crows all along?

Crows are going to be considerably more difficult to dislodge.

They're smart: they wait until you've left the property or are inside doing your laundry before they go on their Hells-Angels-in-Hollister rampage.

I don't know. A rock garden is looking better and better every day.

Or a pie.

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The Case of the Brazilian Haircut: A Snip of the Good Neighbor Policy in World War II

2011-10-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

My father on leave in Recife, Brazil, 1943, had this studio photograph taken for his mother and father.

I have been having a conversation--by email--with a young man from Brazil, who is writing a book about his country's role in aiding the Allied victory in World War II. President Roosevelt called it the Good Neighbor Policy, and it was of enormous help to the U.S. in many ways.

The writer found my website about the U.S Army Corps of Engineers who built Wideawake Field on Ascension Island, and, since Ascension is in the Atlantic, about midway between West Africa and Brazil's state of Natal, he wrote to ask if my engineer father had any experiences in Brazil.

I remembered my father told us that in 1943, after almost a year on Ascension, he got a pass to go to Recife, Brazil on leave. He recalled the trolley cars there and how, at one point, all the passengers had to get out and push one after it had a collision with a car. He told us the name of the Army Air Corps Club where he stayed was called "Casa Verde," which of course means Green House.

The Army painted everything Army Green!

After my father died, I found a photo of him in which he looked very young and seemed to have an awful lot of hair--for a GI. When I took the photo from the album and looked on the back I saw he had written: "Dear Mother; This photo was taken in a studio in Recife. I do not really like the way the barber combed my hair. Love, Ashley."

So, I told my new writer friend in Brazil about the photo and sent him a digital file of it with my father's comments. He apologized for his English, which I told him was enormously better than my Portuguese (which is non-existent) then he wrote me this about my father's photo:

"I showed a photo of your father you sent me for my father. My father is 78 years old. He told me that this kind of haircut was known as 'Praieiro.' 'Praieiro', a word that is translated into English means 'people of the beach.' That means that the user would normally be a man of the sea, a fisherman, a sailor. It was the kind of haircut popular with Brazilian women of the time. It showed a man with a lot of masculinity. Well, other lands and other cultures and his father probably did not know anything. Today this type of haircut is no longer used. Very interesting. Thank you."

When I wrote back about the Casa Verde, he wrote again, telling me he had a friend who was looking into where that building might be. But he was still feeling apologetic about my father's haircut, which wasn't necessary, since this haircut was well before my own time; since I think my father looks very handsome in it; and, since it was cut this way almost 70 years ago and that is now, one might say, a lot of trimmed hair under the barber chair.

"Mrs. Robin: What happened to the hair of his father was due to lack of competent professionals in many sectors, inclusive among barbers. In fact, for a young American was in the northeast of Brazil, was very different from Alabama."

As my father would put it, in his Alabama twang: "Yer darned tootin'."

(I have more serious news to share about all this, including a report the Brazilian writer uncovered of a heartbreaking wartime search for a B-25C that was scheduled to land at Wideawake Field. And I will soon fill you in on the latest on my father's papers, which have now been catalogued by the Ascension Island Heritage Society.)

But, isn't it a joy to know this terrible war brought a friendship between Brazil and America and gave the people of these two great nations a chance to meet? Who could know that many years on, my father's experience would lead to an email conversation with a Brazilian writer?

The people of Brazil were wonderful to him, he often told us, and the girls very beautiful and proper.

He would be abashed that he ever mentioned that haircut.

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Ascension Island Wideawakes

Who Is John Galt and Where is He?

2011-10-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand. Photo courtesy of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Europe is looking really bad. Like it will blow up at any moment. Not blow up as in ICBMs: but kabooming into some sort of unprecedented economic chaos. Then, I just read a piece by economic journalist Michael Lewis about how the city of Vallejo, California is actually in bankruptcy, the city of San Jose is pretty close to it, and the entire state of California is next. Followed by the whole of America, I guess.

I started remembering how, in that crazy Ayn Rand book, Atlas Shrugged, this character called John Galt takes all the smart, creative people to a secret valley in Colorado and starts America over again.

Like many precocious teenagers, I found Atlas Shrugged, with all its melodrama and bodice-ripping simplicity, to be impossible to put down. I remember a summer day when I had to walk to town for some reason (maybe the book was due at the library!) and I read Atlas Shrugged for the whole two miles. (Probably not as bad as texting and driving.)

But when I tried to re-read the book as an adult, I couldn't get through it.

Ayn Rand was a bit like one of the characters in her book(s)--if that is possible. You can read about her enormously eccentric life in one of her biographies.

But, we can at least say she had experience with the world falling apart when, as a child, she and her family in Saint Petersburg, witnessed the Russian Revolution, the White Russian counter-revolution, and the famine and purges that followed.

So, I guess it isn't any wonder that when she got to America she looked at everything through that lens and wondered if the worst might happen here too.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if, just because she took that idea to a novelistic extreme, it doesn't mean she couldn't be right. (Lots of qualifications in that sentence, you'll notice.)

I'm sad to say, within one of the recent articles I've read about all the economic problems facing the West, I have learned a new word: autarky. "The state of being self-sufficient."

I really hope it doesn't come to autarky, as I think my blood sugar couldn't tolerate a strict diet of just my tomatoes, along with my apple, blackberry, apricot, and guava crops. Though, if I could just find my father's .22, I could supplement those with a few squirrel pot au feu for extra protein.

The worst thing I fear about economic breakdown is that I'm afraid someone will make me read Atlas Shrugged again.

But, just in case: does anyone have John Galt's iPhone number?

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Doin' That Facebook Thing

2011-10-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ed Heiland and Robin Chapman at WESH-TV News in Orlando.

You may or may not believe this, but I've tried very hard not to make this blog about recherche du temps perdu. That is: I try to live in the present: and the present, at present, is a pretty fascinating place to be.

Still, when I had to join Facebook to add a comment to the page of a friend, I discovered this gave me my own Facebook page and my life began to spiral out of control from that moment. Because it was there I discovered all my old pals from the biz. What a hoot and a half.

I resisted joining Facebook for just this reason. Skeletons! Old memories! Connecting with old high school sweethearts! Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, I could hear myself whispering: "The horror. The horror."

Oh well. Turns out it is fun, after all. Heard from my former co-anchor Ed Heiland today--now a talent at the University of Central Florida and in independant production--and it was great. He was one of the hardest-working and nicest of the on-camera men I worked with over the years. Not that I don't still love the others! They were great too! (You can't say anything bad on Facebook or it follows you around for the rest of your life.) I love all you guys! Really! All so talented!!

So there you are. One cannot resist the advances inherent in the march of the time.

Now, between my blog, my Facebook page, my iPhone, my home phone, my two email accounts, and that wonder of invention--Internet Shopping--I will never, ever have to leave my house again.

Surrounded by my old scrapbooks, like old Miss Havisham, and (unlike Miss Havisham) my numerous electronic devices, I can sit in my ruined mansion with the dust on my old audition tapes and the spiderwebs on my collection of TV logo mugs and quietly finish out my days.

(Robin rings bell by her table and calls for aging servant to bring in ancient tea service.) Cup o' tea, anyone?

Don't know why, but I always hated this picture. Those earrings remind me of large invertebrates.

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USS Macon Anniversary and Exhaustion!

2011-10-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

Just me and the Macon model. Alone at last.

The 78th Anniversary Celebration of the arrival of the USS Macon to (then) Naval Air Station Sunnyvale--later NAS Moffett Field--was a huge success, thanks to the help of the staff of NASA/Ames Research Center--the present landlords of the old Navy base.

The story of a retired engineer and his single minded mission captured the hearts of the public and brought NASA and the Moffett Museum and Historical Society a lot of attention. It seems people couldn't get enough of the tale of the man who vowed to bring the USS Macon home.

Jack Clemens and his model, in motion.

Jack Clemens' 1:40 scale model of the Navy dirigible cut its way through all the requirements and flew in Hangar Two today right on schedule. The crowd cheered, reporters stood by to cover it, and (for the second time in this adventure) Jack was so happy he nearly cried.

I'm sure you've read in my previous posts, about this man's journey to build a successful flying model of the old airship that was lost off the Pacific Coast in 1935.

And though Jack has held tests flights earlier in the month for Canada's Discovery Channel, and yesterday, for KNTV-News (NBC) San Jose, today was the "official" anniversary flight.

It was smoother than the Goodyear Blimp on a CAVU day. (That's "ceiling and visibility unlimited" in aviator talk.)

Flying under the beautiful rafters in the cathedral-like space of Hangar Two.

Coverage included the previously mentioned Discovery Channel of Canada, KNTV-News, San Jose, along with the Palo Alto Daily News, the Mountain View Voice, the San Jose Mercury News, and KLIV Radio News. If I left anyone out I apologize. Doing media relations for the museum on a volunteer basis--I haven't worked this hard since I actually got paid to cover stuff like this myself!

Movin' fast.

Everybody worked hard--from museum director Herb Parsons and his wife Diana, to all our docents and other volunteers, to NASA's Flight Ops contact Steve Patterson, to NASA media relations wonder Ruth Marlaire.

Careful! Don't let it get tangled in the rafters!

I'll bet they will all be glad that the airship model finally completed its odyssey home, and will now settle quietly down into exhibition space at the Moffett Museum.

All this began for me when, after my parents' deaths, I found in their papers their lifetime memberships in the Moffett Museum and Historical Society. Since their lifetimes had ended and I was grieving--I wrote the museum and bought a lifetime membership for myself, in their honor.

Robin and her father about to go flying. Moffett Field 1990.

I forgot that rule Dad told me he learned in the military: never volunteer!

But I'm truly glad I did.

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The Dawn is Breaking: Quick Get Some Glue!

2011-10-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

The edge of Moffett's Hangar Two at left, and then, across the field from that, the famous Hangar One, as the sun comes up over the Santa Clara Valley. The moon still shines on California's Coast Range, in the distance.

I was up at oh-dark-hundred this morning, in my volunteer role, escorting a news crew from KNTV in San Jose, for the Moffett Museum. We headed in the dark over to Moffett's Hangar Two so reporter Bob Redell, from the local NBC-TV affiliate, could do some early morning live reports on Jack Clemens and his hand-built, flyable model of the old airship, USS Macon.

A twenty-foot-long flying toy blimp! Good pictures for television and that's for sure.

Clemens' blimp in a test flight July 2011.

Reporter Redell was smart and talented and the live reports, at 5:30 a.m., 6:15 a.m., and 6:50 a.m., were excellent. The scene felt so familiar to me! Model builder Jack Clemens, who is 78 years old and has cochlear implants to help his hearing, was a champ at working his radio controls, answering the reporter's questions, and still keeping his helium-filled airship model from crashing into Hangar Two's rafters. Sigh of relief.

Jack Clemens with his USS Macon model, over his house in Brentwood, Contra Costa County, California in July.

I was having so much fun kibitzing with the reporter and photographer, and watching the live shots, I forgot to take out my own camera. Guess I dozed off there for a minute and thought I had a cameraman there to do it for me.

It didn't matter: the best part came at the end. After we wrapped up, I walked out of massive Hangar Two, and dawn was breaking over the Santa Clara Valley--my valley. It is so very beautiful here.

This time I remembered my camera. It is so great to be home.

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The Birdman of Alcatraz

2011-10-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

My stories about the the wounded Blue Jay in my backyard, prompted a Facebook discussion among some of my friends about the film, Birdman of Alcatraz. As this film approaches its fiftieth anniversary, I thought it might be a good time to revisit one of Burt Lancaster's best roles.

Burt Lancaster in Birdman of Alcatraz.

In Birdman of Alcatraz, we have already begun to feel ourselves siding with the apparently persecuted prisoner, Robert Stroud, when he finds a wounded sparrow during a solitary walk in the prison yard.

Once he has befriended that little bird, any doubts we might have had about the title character, played by Burt Lancaster, fall away.

The imprisoned, wounded bird becomes the symbol of our anti-hero. His ability to nurture and study birds is an allegory for the life we believe Stroud would be living, had it not been for the evils of society, which have driven Stroud into prison.

All this is, of course, a bunch of Hollywood baloney. The real Robert Stroud was a violent, anti-social, psychopath: convicted of one murder in society, he was convicted of another one in prison.

Except for the part about studying birds--which the highly intelligent Stroud did do in his prison cell and write about--the film doesn't have much to do with reality. But sitting in the dark and watching the film, you aren't checking the plot points against your encyclopedia. Burt Lancaster is a genuine movie star: he does a swell job of making a bad guy look awfully good.

He had a lot of help. John Frankenheimer was just thirty-two years old when he took over direction of Birdman from the beleaguered Charles Crichton. Producer and star Lancaster was not the easiest man to work with, according to an interview Frankenheimer gave, late in his life, to Turner Classic Movies.

It is a paradox of the film business that it has to be a collaborative art; yet it requires movie stars with talent so powerful and individualistic, the best collaborations are nothing much without them.

It took director Frankenheimer, who was seventeen years younger than Lancaster, to stand up to the star and cut, edit and re-shoot the four-and-a-half-hour original version, to turn it into the Oscar-nominated triumph it became.

But half a century later all that behind-the-scenes stuff counts for zip. Each time I tune in to Birdman--and I really dislike prison movies!--I can't seem to get myself to tune out.

That's one definition of an excellent movie.

We could have a full and fair discussion at some point about whether real lives should be distorted in this manner to make Hollywood hokum. Oliver Stone has made it into a sort of calling, and his films aren't nearly as good as Birdman.

Probably a discussion for another day.

First--enjoy the movie. Later, turn your boat around, and row into the heavy seas of miserable reality. The salt spray will smack you in the face and remind you that--in spite of what you see in the movies--not every person who takes in a wounded bird, has a heart of gold.

(Although--in one particular case--it does apply to me.)

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

United Artists/Hecht-Lancaster

Nominated for four Academy Awards

Music by Elmer Bernstein

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The Story of Ms. Gimpy and Mr. Peanut

2011-10-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Ms. Gimpy still slightly favoring her right leg. This photo captures her hopping on her left, using her right as a stabilizer.

I got to know two Blue Jay fledglings this summer, almost by accident. The two noisy youngsters began coming around to visit when I was in the garden.

One day, I dug into my cupboard and found a few stale almonds for them. Our friendship was sealed.

One of them always liked to see how much food he could get into his beak and still manage to fly off with it.

First he practiced on the almonds ...

When he did the same thing with unshelled peanuts I was impressed, though I did laugh when he tried and failed to negotiate three--at once.

Nevertheless, his two-peanut take-offs were a garden delight--though very difficult to photograph!

And ... he's off!

Oops. Just got his tail that time.

So he became Mr. Peanut. The quieter one, who was always second in line for food, I assumed must be his sister. They both still had a few downy feathers when we first met.

I was very worried when, on September 19, 2011, the female appeared for breakfast looking dishevelled and dangling her right leg. Her more aggressive sibling, perhaps fearing she might attract predators, chased her away from the food, and she spent the morning huddled in one of my shrubs--her feathers fluffed around her for comfort.

I kept my eye on her all morning from my kitchen window as she sat on one leg and leaned on branches to support her right side.

It was that day I began to call her Ms. Gimpy. Several friends, who are birders, told me her prospects were dim. I watched for her, and made sure to distract Mr. Peanut with his favorite food, so she could take a turn at meal time. In spite of her very apparent handicap, she kept appearing daily.

She would tuck her right leg under her and hop around the table on her left. Sometimes, her left leg got so tired she just eased herself down, with a sort of a sigh, and nibbled at the food from table level.

Ms. Gimpy, at rest, on two different days.

It has been a fascinating experience watching her heal. I've learned to listen for the quiet inter-family communication between the two birds. I've watched Mr. Peanut begin to take turns with her again at meals as she's grown stronger. This week, for the first time, she has been putting weight on her right leg. Yesterday, she even fooled me for a minute: I thought she might be her brother.

She still favors her right leg, but on Monday, she went from dining in the shade ....

... to a swoop right up to the top of my sunny roof, where she appeared to stand straight and true.

Jays, Crows, and Magpies are all corvidae and are among the most intelligent of birds. The bird book says corvidae have the ability to imitate the human voice. So I've been trying to teach Ms. Gimpy to say: "Hello Robin."

"What is that human blabbing about now?"

No luck so far. Perhaps she doesn't feel like talking. Or, perhaps she doesn't like the idea of speaking the name of that other colorful denizen of the garden.

Ms. Gimpy, three weeks into her recovery, watching the world go by.

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More Classic Horror for Halloween

2011-10-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

Last October we listed ten of the best Classic Horror Films for Halloween. This year, we toss a few more into the hopper. Here's to frightening fun ...

Dead of Night (1945) I first saw this creepy English classic in the 1980s when I rented a VHS version of it from Erol's in Washington D.C. It is a series of tales, linked together by the story of an architect who goes to spend a weekend in a country cottage and discovers it is the house he has seen in a recurring nightmare. Since each tale is unique, you can't tell where this is going: so the ending is a goosebump-raising surprise.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) I don't know how I happened to leave this one out last year. The remake in 1978 isn't bad, but it doesn't compare with the quality of the strange story that slowly unfolds in this first version. Perhaps it is the sunniness of the setting when the movie opens: perhaps it is the terrific cast, including Kevin McCarthy, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones and the absolutely gorgeous Dana Wynter. But when those pods start snatching the bodies of the town's leading citizens (hey, maybe this explains my own city's recent troubles?) you really want our two lovers to get the heck outta there. Director Sam Peckinpah has a bit as a meter reader. Rumor has it, this movie was so scary, the studio decided to add a slightly upbeat coda to the ending.

Return of the Fly (1959) I just watched the three original Fly movies, now out in a DVD collection, and I think this one, the second in the series, holds up very well. Though it is in black and white (the first was in color) and doesn't have all of the production values of the first, it does move along a little faster. With a 1950s spy twist, it still manages to include both Vincent Price and that weird glass booth where people are supposed to get teleported but always keep getting their atoms mixed up with little creatures along the way. This time there is both a guinea pig and a fly involved and one combo gets squished under the boot of a bad guy. Eeeeew. For even stranger fun, also see The Curse of the Fly (1965) starring a slightly paunchy Brian Donlevy with the cast of mutants he keeps out in the back barn.

Devil Doll (1936) Lionel Barrymore plays a good bad guy in this one, wrongly sent to Devil's Island, who uses miniature people (he has stolen a formula that enables this shrinkability) to seek out his murderous revenge. Directed by the legendary Tod Browning, the film has Barrymore in drag most of the time, playing a little old lady shop keeper. Stay out of his/her Paris store, but don't miss this truly odd thriller

Homicidal (1961) I sometimes get this one mixed up with the Ed Wood "classic" Glen or Glenda, but it also has more than a little in common with Psycho. Very hokey, but it is a William Castle spook fest, with some very peculiar cross-dressing thrown in. Some of the scenes were shot in the Danish-California town of Solvang.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) George Sanders, Hurd Hatfield, Angela Lansbury, Donna Reed and Peter Lawford star in this cautionary tale based on the Oscar Wilde story. It might be a roman à clef for today's plastic surgery addicts--not to mention the impact of corruption on one's soul. The painting and the narrative are truly haunting.

The Killer Shrews (1959) In my friend Steve Latshaw's honor, I'm recommending you see the original, so you can better enjoy his Return of the Killer Shrews (2011). Ken Curtis of Gunsmoke fame reportedly funded this little gem (and co-stars) with profits from his role in the long-running TV series. Also starring James Best (later of Dukes of Hazzard) and the lovely Ingrid Goude (Miss Universe 1957). Oh, and there is a mysterious island with shrews on it, grown to epic proportions--a horror (sans island) many of us will have run into in our very own lives.

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The Soul Man of the New Machine

2011-10-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

The San Jose Mercury news made Steve Jobs' death its top story: "above the fold" in newspaper parlance.

He died Above the Fold, in more ways than one. He was so iconic, just a photo of him and a couple of words in a Silicon Valley newspaper were all that were necessary. His name may have been in small print, but his image was writ large.

He was from my hometown, Los Altos, California. But like most geniuses, he came more from the planet inside his head than anywhere else.

I came to the party late. It was my first iPhone that did it. The design perfection stretched from the box it came in, to the chamois included to clean its screen, to its easy and logical directions. Even better than that were the dandy things it could do. The terrific camera. The easy downloads. The "apps." Oh yes, and it is also a telephone.

Take something as (relatively) unimportant as its charging cord:

It comes apart and turns into a cord that can be used to sync up your iPhone and download your photos.

It is the same cord that works with an iPod. They're interchangeable. These are simple ideas that come from a perfectionist--among the thousands that make Apple products so good for the user.

My iPhone led me to a MacBook computer which is, of course, a wonder--though I realize my iPhone makes even an Apple computer somewhat of an anachronism. Small and hand held--that is the future.

Why it is that bright stars like Steve Jobs burn so fiercely and are gone so quickly is something none of us will ever understand, no matter what our religion. Don't you wonder if there is a special heaven for geniuses? Will Jobs get to meet Einstein there? Will their legendary personalities improve in eternity?

We can only imagine.

But Steve Jobs life does show that striving for excellence can bring about a remarkable legacy. That, in itself, is a good life lesson for all of us.

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"Old World Designs" for Needlepoint

2011-10-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

A small business success in Menlo Park, California.

Little shops come and go in suburban villages these days, so it is always intriguing to discover one that has been serving customers for more than two decades. Old World Designs--a nirvana for needlepointers--is one such story.

Its owner, Linda Mendenhall, doesn't just do all the smart businesswoman things--marketing, marketing, marketing, and supplying what her customers need--she has one more key to success. She turns her customers into friends.

Everything is pretty at Old World Designs: even something as simple as a wall of yarn.

From the first time I wandered into Old World Designs, on Santa Cruz Avenue--Menlo Park's main street--owner Linda Mendenhall's warmth was as present in the room as the canvases and yarn. No chilly, "Can we help you?" here. "Let me see what you are working on," she says with real interest. Or, "What color do you need? Gee that's pretty."

The lighting is wonderful in this charming little shop. That's another key to making customers feel comfortable.

Linda is an avid needlepointer herself (that goes without saying--and yet I did it anyway) and she is genuinely interested in people. That last attribute may the one thing that has kept her needlepoint business going, through good times and bad, for twenty-one years.

Linda's smile is also a source of light at Old World Designs.

My father had just died when I first stepped into Old World Designs one day with a needlepoint canvas I was obsessively working on to keep away the gloom. It was something I bought in Washington D.C.

Linda took one look at it and told me the name of the store where I bought it! Did I say she really knows her business?

The next thing I knew we were exchanging family stories and both pulling out our hankies. Our friendship has grown from there.

A business that knows its business in a niche of color and beauty. With a sunny owner who is always interested in a chat. That is why I nominate Old World Designs as the place in which I would most like to be caught during a torrential rain storm. Not that we have any of those in California.

Old World Designs

727 Santa Cruz Avenue

Menlo Park, California 94025

Open: M-F 10-5:30

Saturdays 10-5:00

650-321-3494

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