Gong Xi Fa Cai / Gung Hey Fat Choy !

To celebrate the lunar new year, I made yummy meatloaf. 

Spam, ground beef, brown rice, wild rice, egg, salt, pepper, and cumin. 

What makes it lunar new year meatloaf is the shape!

I'm so hungry I could eat a horse! 

In a land where dreams come true

You might just end up spending all night at school.

I have had that dream often enough.  Wandering through corridors and sitting at the hard desk that is all painful angles.  Feeling like I am not in the right room.  Or thinking I have not done my homework.  And always, always having to go to the bathroom.  Looking for the rest room, not finding one, then finding one and it is severely out of order and/or occupied by gangs smoking pencil shavings...

Be careful about dreams.  There really are places where dreams come true! 

You gottta walk it by yourself

28 January 2014:  American folk singer Pete Seeger dead at 94.

I remember the energy of Pete Seeger in an outdoor concert on a summer afternoon in San Francisco in the 1980s. 

Some folks say that John was a Baptist
Some folks say he was a Jew
But the Holy Bible tells us
That he was a preacher too 

You got to walk that lonesome valley
You got to walk it by yourself
Nobody else can do it for you
You got to walk it by yourself

Oh I don't think those words meant what Mr. Seeger thought they meant. 

He thought it was something about putting on a kind of liberal uniform and joining a movement to stick it to The Man, man. 

When he sang, there was a life force that made thousands join in song.  When he wanted to "be a preacher too"  -- God, what a commie asshole. 

Pete Seeger.  Rest in peace.  May God have mercy on his soul. 

Glimpses on the road

There are memories that form for me a kind of mind-Tumblr. 

In dreams I may see half a second of a real place -- a place I have seen but never visited.  The memory places I am thinking of are places seen while on a family trip long ago. 

A donkey in a back lot along California Highway 99...

A pool in the Silver Fork of the American River seen from U.S. Highway 50...

A clump of blue chicory blossoms along a fence line way out Jackson Road...

A grouping of granite and pines somewhere up route 41 toward Fish Camp...

Countless mental snapshots of places we never stopped.  These can be the beginning or the end of a meandering, morphing dream terrain, or they can be background images flashing by. 

Lying on my stomach on a warm boulder watching beautiful graceful Japanese fish dancing in the clear water below... Best. Dream. Evah. 

Remember the Pueblo. And the Benghazi consulate.

On this day, 23 January, 1968, the USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea, well outside the 12 mile limit off the North Korean coast. 

Alone and overpowered, the ship was forced west.  When Pueblo stopped outside the 12 mile limit, the ship was fired upon and Navy seaman Fireman Duane Hodges was killed.  Pueblo was boarded, its crew mistreated; ship and crew were taken to Wonsan harbor. 

President Lyndon Johnson was asleep at the time.

The White House response from Johnson and his crew of smart guys was to minimize confrontation with the communists at all costs.  Negotiations at Panmunjom at last produced the release of the crew (and Hodges' remains) across the DMZ into South Korea on 23 December 1968 -- following a formal written apology by the USA to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  Pueblo is still in North Korean possession. 

By the apology, Johnson set a precedent for bowing to foreign dictators. 

After 1968, one could see a few "Remember the Pueblo" bumper stickers.  But memories are short.  The official response had set a precedent of "what difference, at this point, does it make?"

By the way, today is exactly one year since Hillary blew off Senator Ron Johnson's question about why she lied about events leading up to the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and the murder of ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. 

I'll only be here a few minutes...

I am sure that's what Mr. Stretch-Cab Pickup-With-Trailer said to himself when he blocked -- BLOCKED! -- the municipal parking lot here in my town on Tuesday 7 January 2014. 

Hey, Jerk:  I realize the downtown area is not very friendly toward long trucks with long trailers.  But you know what?  You're just going to have to find a spot someplace, away from the metered parking spaces, and you may have to walk a few blocks.  Life is hard.  Man up. 

But no!  You decided that YOUR convenience trumped EVERYBODY else.  I'm willing to bet that is a kind of a habit with you. 

Your time is important to you.  And it's just for a few minutes.  You deserve special treatment.  You're an entrepre-freakin-neur, after all. 

Asshole. 

What I am reading . . .

War and Peace. 

Because I want to.  Because I am now old enough to meet some of the characters (Pierre) with less sympathy than when I was a student. 

The translation I am using is Project Gutenberg EBook #2600 (posting date January 10, 2009).  The text version says the translators are Louise and Aylmer Maude.  So far it seems much easier to read than the Rosemary Edmonds translation in the Penguin Classics version I first used in college in the Great Books program back in the 1970s.  The Maude translation for the Kindle has some of the trickier French phrases asterisked and translated in a slightly different font at the end of the current paragraph, rather than having to click a footnote.  The Maudes' English seems more free of affectations of haute couture than Edmonds'.

I love my Kindle.  Kindle Keyboard 3G.  I can embiggenate the text.  The effect is much easier for my eyes to focus on.  Plus the Kindle text is black on white, not grey on beige (in 6-point Badly Kerned Olde Booksquiggle).

At well over half a million words, War and Peace is a big book.  But the title (and the content?) must be more intimidating than the size.  It's shorter than Atlas Shrugged, and there are plenty of people who are happy to buttonhole you and tell you all about Atlas Shrugged. 

Anyway, I'm having fun with it.