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Last month, I took the train from Champaign up to Chicago as final step in my move up here. Now I own a little stuffed dog called Albert (less mess than a real dog, and talks more), and I didn’t have the heart to just stuff him into my backpack and leave him in the dark, as it were. So I let his head peak out the top. Now this is of course “something little girls do” - certainly not grown-up men. Or so I realized from the reactions of random fellow passengers.

Some just stared, but a few asked about the dog, probably wondering if I was sane (a fair question, to be sure). This was a good thing, in fact - it got me talking to people, when otherwise we would just have walked past each other blindly. For example, I got to talk to a couple going up to Chicago for their 40th wedding anniversary.

So, did I unwittingly undermine some gender stereotype by openly carrying around a stuffed animal?
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I know a lot of amateur scholars, including myself (ask me about New York City circa 1911 sometime). Many of them concentrate a fair amount of their scholarly impulses on science fiction, and that includes my friend Douglas. He’s taken advantage of the fact that U.C. Berkeley has a collection of the papers of A.E. van Vogt, for example. He also tells me of a movie review of Metropolis written by H. G. Wells.

Yesterday, Jose Padilla was convicted of charges of conspiracy to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas. He faces life in prison. He did not actually commit any acts of terrorism at all, and the contention that he - a poor, uneducated man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago - provided “material support” to terrorism is laughable. Before he was even granted a trial, he was held incommunicado for three years as “enemy combatant”; during this time, he was likely tortured, psychologically and physically.

There are minor annoyances here: the way the media describe the verdict as “a victory for the Bush administration”, when it in fact demolishes their claim that (alleged) terrorists can’t be tried in civilian courts; the regurgitation of the dirty bomb accusation that was always absurd. But the main issue is this: a man, a US citizen in fact, was destroyed by the state, and precious few people were outraged by it. Why would they be? He was only a gang member, a convert to Islam, a nobody.

Padilla may well have been guilty under the incredibly lax standards needed to prove conspiracy charges (in itself, this legal construct undermines the constitution, in my opinion). But don’t we have a right to trial by a jury of our peers precisely so the law can be tempered by the people’s sense of justice? Why did not a single juror stand up and refuse to convict after a trial so obviously unjust?

I published this a decade ago at a now-defunct website called Gravity, run by Cuda Brown (a pseudonym). I’ve been looking for a time and a place to republish it. This is the place and, in the words of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, now’s the time.

The first time I heard the phrase — “white black man” — Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a July 4th party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, three-quarters of a life ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn’t quite understand why this man was so important. But I listened and listened and, gradually, I began to understand his music. There was Armstrong’s tone — by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender — his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience. It was exciting.

Above all, there was the blues. There was its emotional provenance, grief, resignation, longing. And there was the sound, the particular notes, those so-called “blue notes.” It wasn’t until much later that I learned enough about music theory to know which notes these were, to know that these notes didn’t exist in any European musical system. But I could hear these notes, I could grasp their expressive power. I wanted to make them mine.

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“Unprecedented” may be the word I might use to describe for the possibility that the Federal Reserve and government apparatchiks will baldly and simply overtly “change the score” on the economic scoreboard to both serve financiers and bail them out of their circular firing squad. [It’s been done in the past but covertly.] Yes homeowners who were duped into buying homes way beyond their means will suffer probable bankruptcy, but they don’t have much to lose in the sense that many didn’t have a down payment and some may have even extracted equity.

Financiers seems to have moved from a pyramid scheme to a game of “hot potato” or perhaps “musical chairs.” So filled with greed and hubris from the massive fees they could charge for every transaction and the cheap money merry-go-round provided by the private Federal Reserve Board, they gave out loans, sliced and diced them, repackaged them and shipped them out…to each other! In so doing they ended up screwing themselves as well as the American public.

Before, in the Depression and during wars, these same financiers and industrialist could stand to gain both power and money by allowing a contraction of supply and a stimulation of misery. But now their books are interconnected and they don’t really have someone to sucker, er, dump their liability on.
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If you try to light a match under micro-gravity conditions (we all got used to “zero-g” so some smarty pants had to go and call it “micro-gravity”) and just hold it in one place, it will self-extinguish. The match will use up enough of the oxygen in its surrounding volume of air to extinguish the flame. It doesn’t have to use up all the oxygen, either; most flames go out in air that still has enough O2 in it for people to breathe—barely.

Depending on the fuel, (e.g. hydrogen needs less oxygen to burn than methane does), the usual figure given is that 14%-16% oxygen is needed to sustain a fire. People can manage on a bit less; Biosphere II dropped below 14% before they pumped in some additional O2, but they didn’t have to contend with elevated CO2 levels; in fact, what they’d been losing was CO2, by absorption into their nice new concrete structure, with bacteria converting soil organics and O2 into CO2. They’d had a bit of a “slow burn.”

Your basic candle flame is fed fresh air by gravity, specifically, the air coming in to replace the hot gases that have become lighter than air in the hot flame. That’s called the “fire draft” and fireplaces exist to direct the fire draft upwards, so the smoke doesn’t choke the people warming themselves by the fire. The chimney/flue of the fireplace also accelerates the fire draft if you build it right, and both Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (Count Rumford), invented some tricks that are still in use.

So fires always produce an updraft. In truly big fires, the question becomes how the updraft interacts with the local weather. If the local winds are stronger than the updraft, and the fire is big, uncontrolled, and uncontained, you have a conflagration. If the fire creates its own winds, you have a firestorm.
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This post is about the GNF. That is to say, it is at one and the same time, silly, serious, sacred, and utterly beyond mortal comprehension. It tells about a remarkable event that became manifest on 4 December 2006 in the sacred habitat of 3Tops.

As you know, her most sublime visage is outside the East portal of Bergen Tunnel in Jersey City. Here’s a shot of the tunnel I took just s few days ago:

I was in that area on 4 December taking photographs just before sundown. I was standing near the mouth of the tunnel and looked in, as I had done many times before. This time I saw, to my great surprise, a yellow light shining some undetermined distance inside the tunnel, like this (note also the white light coming in from the far end of the tunnel, the Western end):

Please excuse the blur. I was far enough inside the tunnel that the light was fairly dim. I had no tripod to steady my hand for a long exposure, so things are a bit blurry. But the essential phenomenon is clearly visible: There is a light shining within the tunnel at some undetermined distance. I’d been to this tunnel several times, walked inside it too, and this was the first time I saw that light. Couldn’t figure out what it was, but guessed - against all logic - that there might be some kind of air shaft through which light was entering. (If THAT was it, then why hadn’t I seen it before? That question didn’t occur to me.)

So I walked into the tunnel to investigate, figuring that when I got below the shaft I would take a shot up through it. No shaft appeared. I did take this shot once I’d gotten well inside the tunnel to the point where the light seemed to hit the tunnel floor - say 50 or 60 yards.

You can see my shadow in the middle. Look how long it is. Count the number of ties my shadow crosses. Well, doing that’s difficult, they blur together further out and, of course, the shadow doesn’t start with my feet, more likely somewhere near my knees. But there are a goodly number of ties there, at a distance of, say, 16 inches from center to center. Whatever light that is, it’s hitting me at an oblique angle. It can’t possibly be coming in from an overhead shaft. It must have been coming in from behind me. But what light could that be? There are no street lights or other artificial lights in the area.
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By Michael Bérubé

Well, I’ve been meaning for weeks to write something about Barry Bonds and steroids and sports, to follow up on Bill Benzon’s work. I remember Bill asking me whether Tiger Woods’ Lasik surgery should be considered a form of performance enhancement, and I replied that laser vision is useful mainly for putting and chipping, not for the rest of the game; when Bill asked how much of the game consists of putting and chipping, I said, “uh, most of it.” But right around then, Tiger went and lost the U.S. Open to Angel Cabrera, and he lost it on the greens while Cabrera boomed out these ungodly long drives. I believe Cabrera had the longest driving-distance average for the week, and long drivers never win the Open. (It requires more precision than long drivers usually possess.) So go figure. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Cabrera smoked cigarettes on the course throughout the tournament. Unheard of! Don’t tell me nicotine isn’t a performance enhancer. . . .

Anyway, within a few weeks, Lance Armstrong had publicly defended Floyd Landis, tossing in the claim that some hockey players are juiced; Gary Player showed up at the British Open and claimed that ten (unnamed) golfers are steroid users; and before I knew it, the issue of steroids in sports had gone way beyond my ability or my desire to deal with it. (Just for the record, though, I am typing this post without the aid of caffeine, my daily performance enhancer. I wanted to be “clean” just this once.) So here’s all I have to say about Barry Bonds today:

One of the most revolting things about this spectacle is that it allows a certain kind of white guy the opportunity to profess his undying, if retroactive, admiration for Hank Aaron, regardless of how said white guy actually felt about Hank Aaron 33 years ago. Now, I’m not saying that Aaron doesn’t deserve our undying admiration. He damn well does. But for all I know, some of the same people who were fuming about Aaron surpassing Ruth in 1974– hell, maybe some of the people who were threatening Aaron and his family– are now pretending to be outraged at Bonds on Aaron’s behalf. Feh. What a truly disgusting scene that was when Aaron was chasing the record; no one can blame Aaron for not wanting to relive those years. And how very stupid of Babe Ruth’s racist supporters, as well, since everyone knows the Babe was black.

And then we have the secondarily disgusting spectacle of the ghoulish Bud Selig, who, having colluded with other MLB owners in the great Free Agent Collusion Scandal of yesteryear, is now posing as a beacon of integrity and rectitude in fallen times. Feh and feh again, I say.

At least one thing remains clear, however: the record for career home runs by a white guy is still owned by Harmon Killebrew. I don’t recognize that drug-bloated McGwire fellow as a legitimate wearer of the crown.

Some preferences and prejudices are so deeply ingrained that often we don’t even realize we are harboring them. And even if we are consciously aware of them, the correctness of our particular perspective on the matter seems so patently obvious that it doesn’t even occur to us that anyone else in the developed Western world could have a differing view, because, how could they? Why would they? They couldn’t, and they wouldn’t. Right?

When one is suddenly confronted with a radically differing view of something (regardless of, or perhaps because of however mundane it may be) that couldn’t possibly have a differing view, the shock of it rattles to the core. First, because you are caught off-guard - you can’t be prepared for something you didn’t know existed. Second, because without warning, you have an entirely different world view of the matter to contemplate. And in situations where the long-term, ruminating over it for years type of contemplation is not required, it still might be something that stops you in your tracks (literally), and demands that you drop whatever you’re doing and contemplate it right now.

One of my so-deeply ingrained-it’s-below-my-radar prejudices got hit with a brick recently on the seemingly mundane subject of teeth. It happened when I read a passage in a book about the late, great British cellist Jacqueline Du Pre.** In the Winter of 1967-68, Jackie’s sister, Hilary, relates that Jackie said the following while relating tales of her experiences giving concerts in America:

‘You know, Hil, I’m fascinated by American mouths’, she suddenly announced, changing the subject completely. ‘Rows of perfect teeth, set in a hideous grin and a gushing “aren’t we pals” expression.’
Her mouth stretched to reveal a mass of grinning teeth, as she pranced around the kitchen.

What?! A Brit making disparaging remarks about American teeth? Granted, the statement is mostly a reflection on the socio-cultural differences between the British and Americans, but it’s the physical appearance of our teeth that lends the genuine creepiness factor, not the behavior. That a British person would find one of our most prized physical characteristics to be the icing on the altogether off-putting cake that is an American never even entered my mind. The Brits don’t make fun of our teeth, we make fun of theirs. That’s the order of things.

Or so I thought.
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Hot gingerbread and dynamite
Boy, I drink nothing but that each night
Back in Nagasaki/Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo!

It was a lovely morning In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came.
Can’t you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day?
And behold the mighty city broken in the dust again,
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again.

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion’s walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh’s wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

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