Good bye, Robin

Munro's bookstore on Government Street always has an excellent remainders table and it contributed another inhabitant to my overflowing bookshelf this morning, The Italian Renaissance Reader, edited by Julia Conoway Bondanella and Mark Musa. How could I resist when I encountered lines like this, from Leonardo himself:
There are some who are nothing more than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects, are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.
Who did he have in mind when he wrote that, I wonder?
Fom Castiglione we have this advice:
You must, therefore, know that there are two means of fighting: one according to the laws, the other with force; the first is proper to the man, the second to the beasts;but because the first, in many cases, is not sufficient, it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second...
Since, then, a prince must know how to make good use of the nature of the beast, he should choose from among the beasts the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot defend itself from traps and the fox cannot protect itself from the wolves...
But the page that would not let me walk out of the store without purchasing the book held these lines of Petrarch:
come quickly now, because death steals away
the best ones first and leaves for the last the worst;
this one, awaited in the kingdom of the gods,
this lovely, mortal thing will pass, not last.
And later today when I learned that my cousin Robin passed away last Saturday, I found in that verse a measure of comfort. His was a gentle soul that could never come to grips with this rough and tumble, deceitful, false world. But Robin, I don't think it was very friendly of you to leave without saying goodbye, considering how I used to have to change your diapers. I love you anyway, little brother, and you will always be in my prayers. Say a good word for me up there. I sure need it. By the way, I know you'll like that quote of Leonardo's.

The Prairie Inn

I had to pay a visit to Saanich Peninsula Hospital today for a medical test. Not what I really wanted to do on a day off, but old age brings on its ailments. No matter.
Saanich Peninsula: it's like a vertical plank on the wall that has separated from the rest of the house except for one nail holding it on at the bottom. Victoria is at the bottom, the BC Ferry dock is at the top. If you want to get up Island (the rest of the house) from the ferry dock you have to drive almost to Victoria first, or else take the little ferry from Brentwood Bay. Our airport is also located on the peninsula. Otherwise it's a quiet, rural sort of place.
I like quiet, rural places, green crops ripening in the sun, the smell of manured fields and freshly mown hay, and Central Saanich is as picture perfect a rural scene as you'll find anywhere. If you went to sleep in Spruce Grove, Alberta and woke up at Keating Cross Road it might be a while before you realized you had been whisked off somewhere else. Only the mountains in the distance would give the game away.
Saanich Hospital is on Mt. Newton Cross Road and so is the Prairie Inn. I don't know how old the Prairie Inn is, probably from the early 1900's. If it was waiting for me, it's wait is over. I finally got to try it out after I was finished at the hospital. That way the day wasn't totally wasted. It's a cozy little place, oriented to sports fans. Lots of TVs. Pool table. The food was plain but good and reasonably priced. I had a reuben sandwich with potatoe salad. I love reuben sandwiches, and the Lighthouse IPA went great with it. The waitress was pretty and attentive. I liked the place. It caters mostly to the farmers around there, but a burgeoning population of well-to-do city folk buying up property all over the peninsula adds to the clientele. A special bonus at the Prairie Inn is a free and speedy wireless connection.
One thing nice about taking the bus is that you don't have to worry about having a few beers.

Little Deuce Coupes

It's a cool and cloudy Sunday but fans of the classic Deuce Coupe have not been deterred. Traffic trying to get down to the Empress where a gathering of the clans is taking place has been clogging Douglas Street all day. I sure wish I could get down there because I love old cars, but I'm stuck here at my job site. Lots of duded up deuce coupes going by...and is there any classic more appealing to us red neck types than a souped up Deuce Coupe? I don't think so. A lot of them were cruising around Saturday, too, and I managed to get a few pictures before my camera batteries gave up the ghost. Looks like I'm going to have to get new batteries and charger as these old nicads of mine don't want to take a charge anymore. Can't complain. I've had 'em for about ten years and recharged them hundreds of times.
This event, to commemorate the 75th birthday of the V8 Ford, is a little special. This is not the first time local organizer Al Clark has got a show together, but it's definitely the biggest. This year he had to cut off entries at 752, with 400 of them '32's. Participants were from as far away as California and New York.
It always perplexes me why people get into there cars and head straight to where they know a traffic jam will be, but they do. I always hated special events when I was a cab driver. If you can't get to your fare you can't make any money. But now I don't have to worry about that anymore--I just watch from on high, like the gods on Olympus.
Although I love old cars I'm a total dunce when it comes to mechanical stuff--so I passed on the opportunity I had of getting a '68 XKE in the early seventies, and I gave my '62 Spitfire back to the finance company when the bendix went. I had no idea what a bendix was, let alone a ring gear. But now I wish I had stuck with that little guy and had him safely under cover every winter waiting to be let out to play in the summer. But that was the year I ruined my life and a few others. The Spitfire is the least of my regrets, but if I'd spent more time on learning mechanics and less on partying things might have been different.
These guys who fix up their old cars have my respect and admiration. Wives and girl friends who grow impatient with their grease monkey men just remember--it keeps them out of mischief.
Victoria on Vancouver Island and the lower mainland are a lot less destructive of metal than most other Canadian locales. It seldom snows and so the streets and roads don't get that buildup of salty slush. And most car owners are quick to wash their vehicles following those few occasions. This means that quite often an old car in a fairly good state of preservation can be found in a barn somewhere. Even cars on the road continuously for thirty or forty years are not all that uncommon. When I lived in Vancouver's West end several years ago an old lady who must have been the original owner had a '30's era coupe which she tried to drive about once a month. I say tried to drive because she seemed to have a lot of difficulty getting it in and out of her parking space. I see an early '60's Dodge Dart convertible with what looks like the original paint is parked beside my construction site as I write. It looks a little shabby but perfectly serviceable. Probably got a slant 6 in it, one of the all time great motors. Somebody's project car. I wonder if it has push button transmission. Whatever happened to those, anyway?
I wonder if there is an equivalent to the Deuce Coupe today. Frankly, I can hardly tell one car from another anymore.

The New Roman Empire?

The Romans have always been popular as a benchmark in making comparisons to one's own culture, so much so that the practice has been out of style among the scholarly types recently. But apparently it's a respectable practice again as I've noticed a number of writers comparing present day America to the Roman Empire. Personally, I don't think there are many points of congruence between the two. To begin with, compared to Augustan Rome, the USA is still a mere infant. According to Titus Livius, the origins of Rome date back 1200 years before his time when Aeneas, a Trojan prince escaped the destruction of Troy at the hands of Agamemnon's famous army. That would be the equivalent today of something that happened during the era of Charlemagne. Another 1000 years were yet to pass before the founding of the American Republic.
Traditionally, Rome itself was founded by Romulus ca. 750BC, and a lot of things happened between then and the time Rome came of age, when they at last triumphed over their most deadly adversary, the Carthaginians of North Africa, in 246BC, following more than a century of warfare. This conflict decided who was going to control the Western Mediterranean. If the Romans had not destroyed Carthaginian power there would never have been a Roman Empire.
I enjoy Livius' history of Rome. Modern historians criticize the ancient historians, but i think the ancients compare rather favorably with these moderns, both for honesty and depth of understanding. Of course, the earlier writers didn't have libraries or the internet to help them. Books there were, but without printing they had to be laboriously copied by hand on expensive materials. Not many people could read or write, writing being a fairly recent invention. Travel was slow, difficult and dangerous, presenting many obstacles to research. Nevertheless, Livius was assiduous in seeking out sources such as inscriptions and family records. Family records, of course, were intended to glorify the family and may have been largely fictitious. Adding to his problems, the Latin language had rapidly changed over the centuries, so much so that it was difficult for him to read. Taking into account all these considerations, I think he did a remarkable job.
It's a fascinating account in which he shows that Rome expanded as a result of being attacked. First the neighboring Latins, then the Etruscans, then the other peoples of italy, and so on. He doesn't speak much about one of the primary benefits of warfare to Rome: slaves. But this would be like a modern historian writing about the California citrus orchards and failing to say much about the petroleum industry- without which there would be no way of marketing oranges outside of California. Slavery in ancient times was ubiquitous, the only way of organizing labour beyond the scale of family operations. I'm not justifying it, just pointing out that it was so common as to be barely worth mentioning to a Roman readership. But there is no doubt that war in those times was a way of getting rich. For the Roman senatorial class, the governorship of a province was the route to fabulous wealth. Rome, it can be reasonably argued, became an entrepreneurial warfare economy. They developed a model of tactics and strategy that was unbeatable in its day, and after conquest sent out traned administrators to organize the new conquest and to keep the peace.
For the United States slavery was an aberrant phenomenon economic structure that had the effect of holding back progress in the South. That's why the confederacy was at such a disadvantage in the War Between the States. The North had wage labour and this is always an incentive for a business to innovate. The innovation of the cotton gin was what led to industrial scale labour in the South by creating a huge market for cotton. Up until that time cotton was the most expensive of all the textiles to process. So while this innovation led to more jobs and business, an expansion of wealth to all segments of Northern society, in the South the institution of slavery led to stagnation.
The other difference between ancient and modern slavery is that the latter was race-based. But history has a way of going in unexpected directions. If it hadn't been for race-based slavery there would be almost no people of African descent in America today. Jazz would probably never have been invented. Strangely, when the blame game is played these consequences are rarely mentioned. Neither is it mentioned that the African slave trade was largely controlled by Arabs, and that it was the most important source of wealth to the West African kingdoms. Some of the loudest opponents to the abolition of the slave trade (a crusade led by the English Christian abolititionist William Wilberforce) were those very African Kingdoms.
It's true that the American Founders were inspired by Greek and Roman theories of governance, and the architecture of the capitol was based on classical models, but the circumstances of the founding of the Republic were just not comparable. Rome was a military society throughout it's history. America has always been entrepreneurial, individualistic and innovative. What the founders tried to do was to fulfill the promise of the Classical era, not imitate it. They saw not only its virtues but also its failings and tried to prevent their new country from falling into the same traps. Governing by consent of the governed was the principle. Putting in structures to prevent government from becoming too powerful was the object of the constitution they devised. For instance Republican Rome had a practice of appointing a dictator during times of emergency because the corporate method of lengthy debate was not agile enough to cope with a sudden invasion. The President in American practice was given certain powers to override a divisive legislative branch. Thus he is commander in chief of the armed forces and has other powers of his own such as the right to veto legislation. However there are checks on his power as well.
American expansion on its continent was one of the fruits of giving the presidency the powers needed to lead the country in a new direction. Thomas jefferson was able to take advantage of Napoleon's need for money to obtain the Louisiana Territory. This was an exceptionally prescient move since nobody at the time had much of an idea of what lay between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Most experts of the day thought there was a series of large lakes from which some rivers flowed east and others flowed west and south. It was for Lewis and Clark to discover that instead of lakes in the middle of the continent there was a series of mountain ranges. Nevertheless, Jefferson new that the viability of the country depended on its control of all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific. After the Civil War settled the political direction of the country, its energies were devoted to filling up those spaces.
Yes, it's true there were already people there who thought of it as there own. But let's face it folks. Hunting and gathering, stone age farming, and buffalo herding are just not viable economic strategies any more and nothing in that environment could possibly prepare the tribal leaders to function in the coming century. Undoubtedly injustices were committed. The treatment of the Cherokees comes to mind, a very sad and tragic episode. But there was never a national policy of extermination, and this is in itself an innovation by historic standards. Generally, when a new populace took control of another's territory the old one was exterminated...when they could. This includes native American groups. There were no compunctions about it. Overall, the American policy was to try to integrate native Americans in the new ways. In Canada residential schools were established for that purpose. Little did they know that the main beneficiaries would be future lawyers.
Although the Romans tried to adapt the peoples of its empire to Roman ways of doing things they didn't hesitate to exterminate whole populations. The example that comes to mind is Caesar's slaughter of the Helvetians, a Celtic people who tried to migrate into Gaul from Switzerland under pressure of German tribes. Caesar massacred them, man, woman and child... a very labour intensive task in the days before explosives.
There's a lot more to say on this subject and I'll try to return to it in the near future.

It was nice to se the sun come out after a week or more of cloud and rain, so I took the opportunity to take a little photo walk. I took the bus to Gonzales Bay and walked back along Hollywood Crescent and through the Ross Bay cemetery. At one time it was called Foul Bay but at some point the name was changed to protect the sensibilities of the residents. The street that comes to an end at Gonzalez Bay is still called Foul Bay Road, however. No matter what it's called, I think it has one of the prettiest beaches in Victoria. And Hollywood Crescent is one of Victoria's prettiest streets. Unfortunately, with the gentrification of the neighborhood all the old cottages with their flower filled front yards are rapidly being replaced by larger houses with pretensions and paved front yards. It's a pretty short street and it connects Gonzales Bay with Ross Bay and the Ross Bay cemetery.
I read something the other day about San Francisco that absolutely shocked me. I'm not sure of the details, but I think it has been since the earthquake or shortly after that it has been illegal to bury anyone in that city. All the previously established cemeteries were closed and the remains reintered elsewhere. How extraordinary for a city to want to obliterate its past! Surely this must have something to do with what it has become, and how it can elect a Congresswoman who seems to hate her own country.
But Victorians have always paid reverence to their predecessors and so we have many well known cemeteries, and I am always rather moved when I read the inscriptions on the stones. Since this is not a modern industrialized cemetery, the headstones are mostly of the upright variety.

The Cathar Conspiracy

Believe it or not I've never read a Harry Potter book. Probably the only person on the planet. I've never been to Thailand, either. From what I saw yesterday it does make me think I would not want to write a book that inspires people to wear funny hats.
Neither have I read The DaVinci Code but I have read some of the sources the author used to concoct his tome, such as Michael Baigent who wrote an unintelligible account of some mysterious doings in southwestern France. I forget the title and the co-author. Alignments, paintings, codes, in which with a really fertile imagination someone could discern the most astounding things. Templars and Frankish Kings, oh my. Great stuff. I've always been a little bit gullible when it comes to mysterious doings that might illuminate unknown forces in history. Although antediluvian civilizations are my favourite fantasy, a good conspiracy theory can be fun, too. But when you already know that Dan Brown's thesis is poppycock then it spoils everything. Opus Dei as a candidate for a subterranean force that has shaped history just doesn't add up.
However, I'm not dismissing the possibility that there has been a hidden influence, an organization unknown to conventional historians, and I do have a candidate. The Manicheeans. That's just a label of my own convenience I use to designate what most students call Gnosticism. A protean creed, it is rather difficult to describe but it is basically a kind of materialism where our bodies and all matter is a creation of an evil being. Who that evil being is may vary according to which version is being studied, but usually it's the creator god depicted in Genesis. The true story according to the Manicheans is that this god was a fallen angel who created this world as an act of rebellion. We human beings are actually sparks of the divine imprisoned in matter. All matter is therefore evil, including our bodies. A good source of texts (intended I think, as promotional material) is Willis Barnestone's The Other Bible. When I first came across this very interesting collection I was inclined to his position, but it was while comparing these gnostic writings to orthodox Christian scripture that I came to realize they were not comparable at all. The Christian scriptures are on a different plane altogether. But The Other Bible taught me a lot, and I still like to read from it from time to time, if only from a historical point of view. It tells us a lot about how religious belief evolved during a time of great spiritual ferment.
Manicheeanism, a sort of bastardized amalgam of Neoplatonism and Judaic lore, was very influential in the Roman Empire during the early years of Christianity. In fact, they were competitors. I'm pretty sure the false teachers St. Paul warned about in his epistles were Manicheeans. The impulse by the early church to regularize the scriptures was probably due to Manicheean influence. Barnestone and others of his like call this regularization of the canon suppression and try to claim that these non canonical writings are as true or even truer than what we read in the Bible. But the Church Fathers knew what they were doing. They had a strong oral history to draw upon that was in direct line from the apostles, and they had a very sharp understanding of the logical implications embedded in any given religious dogma.
There were many versions of this belief system floating around in the late Roman empire. There was a Judaic Manicheism, a Pagan Manicheeism, a Christian Manicheeism. St. Augustine was originally a Manicheean. It was after meeting an apostle of that creed that he converted to Christianity.
The vital difference between Christianity and Manicheeism (from the point of view of doctrines) is that according to Christian belief the world and ourselves are creations of God and therefore good. It's true we have a fallen nature due to Adam's sin, but we are redeemable, and have been redeemed by the intercession of God, who took on the form of a man, suffered as a man, and gave up his life in the place of ours so that we could be redeemed. Logically, of course, if you think the world is evil then it follows that its creator is evil, and this cannot be countenanced by a religion that believes God to be infinitely good and infinitely loving.
Nevertheless, I think a lot of Manicheeism did infiltrate Christian beliefs and may be responsible for the aversion to sensual pleasure which led to the mortification of the flesh, a prominent feature among the early Christian hermits.
After Christianity became the official religion of the Romans, Manicheeism seemed to die out. But did it? During Medieval times there were repeated breakouts in widely separated European locations of cults that were obviously very similar to Manicheeism. One peculiar logical consequence of viewing the body as evil is that it doesn't matter what you do with your body. Thus there is really no morality. The world is intrinsically evil, so you can do whatever you feel like. Thus many of these cults were orgiastic. I'm pretty sure that well known trove of medieval poetry known as the Carmina Burana is a Manicheean document. I think it's more than likely that Manicheeans were deeply involved in alchemy and the 'black arts.'
There were Bogomils in Eastern Europe but it has been the Cathars in southwest France who have attracted most of the attention lately. The inquisition was largely a response to the Cathars, who were accused of witchcraft. After that they seem to have disappeared from history. But what if they just went underground? What if it continued as a religion but in secret? Is it possible that Cathars have blended in with every Western institution since then, including the Church, the banks (an early center of European banking was located in Cahors in southwest France), the courts of princes, and learning institutions. Maybe there were Jewish Cathars, and Cathars networking throughout Europe. Maybe there were Muslim Cathars in Spain. Maybe they learned how to occupy positions of influence wherever they went, in universities, publishing, etc. Maybe they were the original Masons, maybe they were the Templars. I don't know. It's just a wild speculation. Dan Brown has proved it isn't necessary to let facts stand in the way of a good book but I would hesitate to put forward this speculation of mine as truth. Nevertheless I halfway believe it.
Those ancient Church Fathers were a lot smarter than people today realize. They knew beyond any doubt that what people believe is incredibly important, that beliefs have consequences. This is in direct contradiction to the modern commonplace that one belief is pretty well as good as another. Well, thanks to bellicose Islamists we are finding out all over again that beliefs do matter. Islam may teach of the existence of one god, but that is where the similarity to Christianity and Judaism ends. Islam glorifies force and conquest, the methods used from the beginning in its expansion. Christianity teaches love, not killing. True it is that many who claimed to be Christians used the faith as justification for war, but that's not how Christianity came to dominate the Roman world and what came after. Christianity was spread by persuasion and acts of charity. Unarmed bishops stood up to barbarian invaders with nothing except moral force to back them up. The story of Christianity in Dark Age Europe is of Christian preachers gentling warrior chieftains. A lot of gentling was needed, as Gregory of Tours chronicled. They were taught by the Christian preachers, who often wandered alone in pagan territories, of a new way of thinking which was instrumental in growing the West into the greatest civilization the world has yet known while Islam, centered in the Near East where civilization as well as Christianity was born, languished and stagnated.
Our ability to stand up to the new Islamic onslaught has been compromised by a secularism that bears many similarities to Manicheeism. Whether this secularism is attributable to an occult organization or to some sort of cyclical turning of social beliefs I do not know, but I do often wonder how people come to believe the things they do.

Youth and beauty

Yesterday when I sat down at the bus stop a pretty girl sat down next to me. I've always had radar when it comes to pretty girls, and this one was very pretty, indeed, as I noticed even while I was putting my newspaper in my pack and getting my fare ready. Those little chores completed I looked in her eyes and smiled, trying not to look too much like a dirty old man. She reminded me a lot of Natalie Wood- that kind of cool and elegant good looks always makes me go gaga. Tastefully dressed as she was in a light sleeveless wine red sweater and a pleated white skirt, the waiters at Maximes would treat her like a princess. Her lips, cheeks and eyes were only touched lightly by the makeup brush. There was only one problem: she was only about twelve years old.
Of course it's commonplace to see twelve year old girls dressed up like tarts these days, and I think it's sad they are in such a rush to stop being little girls. Who can blame them when all the cultural influences conspire to sexualize them as soon as possible. Even in elementary school they are taught about oral sex, or so I've heard. I remember I picked up four girls in my cab from their soccer game a few years ago and they started off the conversation by asking, "Do you get laid a lot?" I didn't have a comeback for that one. I was stricken dumb.
But in a way I found this Natalie Wood reincarnation even more disturbing. She was only twelve and she had already mastered the art of looking the elegant young woman. This implies much more careful study than is needed for the coarse, slutty MTV look preferred by her schoolmates. I can imagine her poring over tons of fashion magazines looking for the right 'look,' just like them. Only she has a more carefully cultivated and artful sense of taste. Personally, I wonder if their great grandmothers who spent their own freshly flowering years making cookies and darning socks weren't a lot happier than this crop. Of course young people have always yearned for the imagined independance and freedom of adulthood, not knowing about the burdens and duties that are inescapable concomitants of maturity. They don't know that the rules their parents impose on them so unfairly are nothing compared to the rules the world imposes once they are outside that protected space.
I remember reading a story a few years ago about stores like Gap selling thong underwear for preteens where it was claimed it was the girls' mothers who were buying them. This did not surprise me as I had long before come to the conclusion that mothers get a certain vicarious pleasure at seeing their daughters dressed up to look sexy. It's as if they get to relive their own ingenue days. They like their daughters to have boyfriends...boyfriends to whom they are attracted to themselves. Maybe it's analogous to fathers who like to see their sons win fights. On the other hand fathers tend to be jealous of their daughters' boyfriends, so in a family setting a balance is maintained.
When I was twelve girls of my age didn't dress like tarts. Girls dressed differently than women, with an emphasis on innocence rather than sexuality. They were rarely allowed to wear lipstick, paint their nails, wear high heels or anything like that. What was allowable started changing pretty rapidly in the late fifties but it was still assumed that every girl's goal was marriage, a home of her own and children, and it was every boy's assumed destiny to be a husband and provide for him and his wife's joint home and family.
You know, I do think Middle America was a much happier place under that system.
I hope my Natalie Wood lookalike has a lot of happiness to look forward to, with a husband and family
who still love her when her youthful bloom is a distant memory. Sometimes I wonder how my schoolboy sweetheart and her bratty little brother are doing these days, so many years later.

Live Earth

In the blogs I read there has been lots of commentary about Al "Chicken Little" Gore's concerts to save the planet from global warming. Since I hate rock and roll as much as I hate TV, the whole affair hardly crossed my radar. The spectacle of environmental activists jetting all over the world to telll people to stop driving their cars is beyond parody. No wonder comedy is almost dead. Who could make up anything stupider than this? I can't bear to look. And I'm really, really tired of all this global warming BS. Listen. It's really simple. About a million years ago, maybe more, maybe less, glaciers started forming in the higher latitudes of the earth's surface. Before then the whole world was semitropical. There were no glaciers, none. You could easily call this phenomenon global cooling, but the name that stuck was 'Ice Age.' Previously it was thought that fossils, unusual soil deposits and so on were evidence of The Flood. As time went by researchers added data, refined their analytical skills, and came to some interesting conclusions. The Ice Age was really a series of glaciations. For most of the past million years vast sheets of ice covered areas where we now have farms and cities. But there were also periods of melting, called interglacials. These interglacials varied in length but 5,000 to 20,000 years seems fairly normal. We are living in an interglacial that began about 12,000 years ago. The Ice Age is not over. It is merely in abeyance. It could come back at any time. And you know what? This wasn't the first Ice Age that the planet has experienced. There have been others that were far worse. All this is common knowledge, stuff that should be taught in any grade 7 general science course. Is there any reason to think that human beings can have the slightest effect on these geological cycles of climate? No, none at all.
So why are we deluged by warnings of disaster? Some say it's because all this scare mongering puts a lot of money into funding for climatologists. That is undoubtedly a factor, but I have generally favored the "Global Bureaucratic Conspiracy,' a theory of my own devising. In Europe they are going to make it a crime to disagree with global warming, putting it in the same category as disagreeing with the haulocaust. I have never believed it should have been made against the law to not believe in the haulocaust because I think reasoned debate is the best way to tackle idiotic ideas. And now we see the result. At least the haulocaust, the shoa, was a verifiable historical fact. It happened, and a case could be made that denying this fact could lead to another pogom. But the outlawing of a thought has set a precedent and we can already see what's next. In Europe parents are being sent to jail for the crime of teaching their children at home. This is what the bureaucratic conspiracy is about: abolishing human autonomy. And what better tool than a law to make inconvenient thoughts illegal. It would like to extend this model of justice over the entire world. Having to justify policies to the public is such a nuisance. We can be so stubborn. Remember the Meech Lake Accord, Canadians? The Brian Mulroney government made the mistake of thinking it had us all sufficiently brainwashed to vote the way we were supposed to. But we didn't, to the consternation of the combined forces of government, media, union brass and bureaucratic mandarin.
The global warming theory is just a theory originally based on an oversimplified computer model of atmospheric circulation. It has since been puffed up by blatant examples of scientists fiddling with the statistical evidence, selectively reporting facts which support the story line while suppressing evidence that contradicts it. That's the way they work.
I stand by my earlier analysis, but I've come to an alternate hypothesis of why the Jackass Brigade has become so frantic over the issue of global warming. The credibility of the whole environmental movement is at stake. Once the public realizes what a bunch of hooey it's been peddled then it will look at the Greenpeace canvassers with different eyes. And who knows, once the public has learned to be suspicious of this bit of propaganda who knows where it will all end. It could be big. We might have help from the jihad in this. A few more bombs going off just might wake us up. It's tragic if that's what it takes to make us come to our senses.

Tourists

This Saturday morning crews are on site to take down the forms from the six foot thick slab that will be the support for the whole building. That's one way to get rid of a hangover from Friday night. Now that the crane is up things are supposed to go a lot faster but there's still a fair amount of blasting to be done. I thought that six foot thick slab was massive but it's small potatoes compared to the one in San Diego they've posted in the office here which took a 258 vehicle "truck ballet" over a period of ten hours to pour ten feet of concrete. The prices of the condo units on that project are pretty massive, too...starting at 800k going up to 12 million. I moved away from San Diego 40 years ago this year and I have a soft spot in my heart for the place. Can't remember the geography very well so I couldn't make out exactly where the project was being built. The name 'Bayside' suggests Mission Bay, one of my favourite SD locales, but there was no light rail at that time.
Every winter around the end of November I get a strong craving to escape to Mission Bay until April. That would have been feasible 20 years ago when those little cottages could be had for $100 a week but if condos now cost 12mill I guess those days are over. In the summer and early fall I much prefer Victoria weather and it looks like summer has arrived at last. Victoria has perfect summers: warm sun and a cool breeze with very few hot nights. The summer sky at twilight reminds me of a line in a Hank Williams song: Have you ever seen a falling star light up a purple sky. The sky isn't exactly purple but somehow has a purplish character to it that I love to see. The word 'gloaming' comes to mind, that scotch word related to glamour which originally had supernatural connotations. The horizon glows with a halo above it until 10 or 11 in early summer. I have seen such a purple sky change within minutes to black clouds and torrential rain. Fifteen minutes later it's all over but the tourists are in their hotel rooms watching TV and won't venture out again. Too bad for them. They miss out on that fresh smell rain always leaves behind when it soaks our dry earth. Victoria has a mostly stony soil and it doesn't take long for the grass to dry out and turn brown.
For the first time in many many years I won't be hustling for that tourist buck. A lot of Victorians complain about tourists but as a cab driver I'll take a polite and interested American tourist over a drunken Canadian university student any day. Canadians in the 'hospitality' trades delight in telling stories about dumb questions American tourists ask but in fact I think Americans are quite well informed. There are exceptions. Black Americans especially have some difficulty comprehending the idea that Canada is a separate country.
Canadian tourists in the US have a reputation too...for being cheapskates. These would be the mythical snowbirds who delight in telling their friends back home about how little they paid for etc, etc. It's a little hard to understand how a country that spends almost nothing on its army can still have higher taxes than Americans but so it is. Part of the cheapskate reputation Canadians have relates to their reluctance to tip. There's no doubt that Americans are the best tippers but I can't complain about Canadians. Some tip, some don't. Teachers, who seem to think everyone is out to cheat them, are the worst. In fact, they might take it into their heads that you've taken them by the infamous 'scenic route' and refuse to pay the full fare.
Australians don't tip either if they've never spent any time out of their own country because tips are included in the price there. Some people think this is a good system, but think about it. When the customer has control over a good portion of what a server earns then that server has a good incentive to give good service. When the gratuity is spread evenly among the staff regardless of the quality of the service then shirkers are rewarded as much as good workers .
You don't see as many Japanese now as in years past. I'm not sure why that is, but you can't expect a tip from a Japanese either. For one thing, they don't like to travel alone, only in groups. So the tips are usually rolled into the tour price and the tour operator wouldn't think of sharing tips with a cab driver. There was one restaurant in town that used to specialize in Japanese tours. They would order anywhere from 5 to a dozen cabs to the hotel where we would usually have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes to take the customers to the restaurant. It was a short trip for which we were paid a flat rate which was a little less than the meter rate. And the Japanese tourists were advised not to tip the cab driver. You can imagine how enthusiastic the drivers were about servicing that account. When I heard the radio message 'car 18 first car to blah blah' I would suddenly discover I already had a fare. The restaurant went under a few years ago, not to be missed by me.
They say that tourism has gone down over the last few years, what with the more stringent border security and some other factors, but cruise ship traffic increases every year. Most ships only come in for a few hours but the tour buses, the horse buggies, the pedicabs, antique cars and just about every other possible conveyance are lined up waiting for them on shore like starving vultures. Yeah, that includes taxis.
People who drive downtown during the tourist season usually complain most about the buggies. They move pretty slow it's true but at least they make a pleasant clip clop sound, and the residue they leave behind is good for gardens. I don't mind barnyard smells, 'that familiar oaken reek of horse piss." You can't really get mad at a horse because a horse is just a horse, a dumb animal who isn't there on his own volition. (I don't think there is any cruelty in it. These breeds of horses have to work to stay healthy, and they seem to enjoy being out and about just like dogs and people)
They don't bother me in the slightest now but it was the Kabuki pedicabs that used to get my goat the way they were always cutting in front of me and blocking lanes. And then there are the buses, endless streams of buses, spewing noise and diesel fumes. Since the cruise ships can't come into the Inner Harbour due to their size, they use the docks at Ogden Point in James Bay. So to get downtown the cruise ship passengers, most of whom are not physically able to do the 15 minute walk into town, usually take one of the many buses waiting to relieve them of their money.
I meant to take a few pictures of the cruise ships last night. They are quite impressive in the dusk lined up with their lights blazing. But circumstances beyond...
And today those purple skies have been replaced by grey clouds.

Strategic Victoria

It may seem that Victoria will always be a little out of the way place where history or great events pass us by. Wars, revolutions, all those sorts of things happen in other places, not here. It wasn't always that way. The British who established a port here set up naval batteries in 1878 to prepare for a possible war with Russia and if it hadn't been for the Royal Navy Victoria would probably be an American city.
Vancouver and Seattle are the metropolises of our area where rail and road connect the North American heartland with the Pacific sealanes. Seattle is home to two large corporations, Microsoft and Starbucks as well as a large part of Boeing's operations. North of Seattle, in Everett, the US Navy keeps its Pacific Carrier fleet. Vancouver has the best harbour north of San Francisco...or I should say harbours in the plural. There are docks in Vancouver proper, on the North shore, in Burnaby, Port Moody, on the Fraser River, and there is the huge Roberts Bank port where trains continuously supply the steel miills of Japan from BC's coal fields.
Again, it wasn't always so. Before the railways arrived Victoria had a larger population than Seattle- in 1880 almost 6000 compared to less than four thousand. In the days of steam ships Vancouver Island was an important source of coal to keep the boilers going. Sailing ships, which persisted into the 20 C did not need coal but by unloading their cargoes in Victoria avoided the tricky waters and finicky winds of Puget Sound. Victoria was an important supply center for the Yukon Gold Rush and was just as wild as San Francisco, opium smoking Chinatown and all. Looking at Victoria's surviving buildings from the 1800's it's easy to see that the city had ambitions in those days.
But now Victoria is a quiet government town with very little international trade prowess. It would be senseless for shipping companies to unload their goods here only to have to load them up again for major population centers on the mainland or overseas. We don't do much manufacturing here and we don't have much in the way of natural resources. Besides, Victorians tend to think small. Ambitious people with big ideas tend to leave. And so the bombings and so on that we read about seem unreal and unconnected to us. It makes it easy for us to pontificate and tut tut about how it could never happen here, it's all the fault of George Bush who is responsible for all the trouble in the world, blah blah. A lot of Victorians think that way. Our self image of a slumbering backwater makes it easy to either ignore history or to fantasize about it. It doesn't matter what we think, it is assumed. But this is a very naive attitude.
Victoria, while it shows no sign of ever becoming a financial or industrial powerhouse, occupies a very strategic geographical position. There is the long corridor of Juan de fuca Strait that terminates at Victoria where the waters open out to Puget Sound and Georgia Strait. Anybody who controls Victoria could potentially control the whole works. Plug it up and you could cripple the world's largest economy. If you want to get in or out you have to go by Victoria. We are sitting on a powder keg. I don't think many Victorians understand this, and I doubt if anybody in Ottawa has given it the slightest thought. It may not happen in my lifetime but wars will be fought over this beautiful place. Undoubtedly people hostile to our way of life are perfectly capable of looking at maps and figuring things out so history could happen to us any time. They may already have plans in the works which we probably wouldn't like. Most people, rather than face this possibility prefer to hide their heads in the sand. This will make it all the easier for bad things to happen.
So I'll try to forget about history when I go out for my walks or bike rides around this beautiful part of the world and try to enjoy this transient sense of peace and security.

The secular roadside bomb

I think I went a little bit overboard yesterday in my 'Canada day rant.' Every country has skeletons in its closets and when I'm in a generous mood Canada's skeletons seem pretty tame. What always gets me about the 'Canadian character,' if there is such an animal, is that there isn't one. Maybe Quebec is an exception to that rule, and not just because of language. The influence of the Church is definitely a factor. For centuries the parish priest was the main pipeline to the outside world for all those farming communities stretched along the St. Lawrence River. There is also the matter of blood- an unfasionable word now- which included the idea of genetics but also a spiritual sense of ancestry and connection to the past that modern genetic scientists would find suspect. During this period of Quebec's history Its population burgeoned. The priests, keen to spread the faith, knew that the key to success was located in a mother's womb. It was this progeny that explored North America before anyone else. "How about the 'First Nations?" you scoff? Well, the fact is the North American natives' knowledge of continental geography was severely limited due to the incessant warfare between adjacent tribes. To venture out of one's tribal territory was to risk the most fiendish tortures imaginable. That's why the inquiries made of them by the early explorers were met with such fanciful replies. But while the French voyageurs were endowed with indominatable courage, unbelievable physical endurance and a native intelligence so great that they routinely learned dozens of Native languages in their travels, they were uneducated and so left no written journals or maps. That was the work of literate Scots and Americans.
What was I saying? Oh, yes, about national character. Quebec, to its misfortune, became afflicted along with the rest of us with a certain disease in the '60's. Unfortunately, no adequate label has yet been invented to describe this destructive cancer. Political correctness, socialism, leftism, secularism, even postmodernism fails to do it justice. In Quebec it was called the Quiet Revolution, a catchall term that had room in its nebulosity for every socially destructive fad of the 20th century. Quiet. But effective. Today the Nation of Quebec is on a fast track to demographic oblivion. Quebecers should have listened to those priests. The leaders of the Quiet Revolution detonated a time bomb far more destructive than what the Islamists did to the World Trade Center.
Looked at from that perspective the Islamists are doing us a favor. They are showing us how bankrupt the various isms have been. We have even been convinced that it's all right to kill our babies. If you can believe that you can believe anything. Islam is a backward facing religion that closes down the human spirit. In my own analysis it is the ultimate atheism, but I won't go into that now. It has one virtue. It supplies an identity and an iron clad formula for social cohesion. It may lead to a dead end, but it is stable and it is able to go on the attack. It supplies its adherents with focus and passion. And it produces babies. Our isms do the opposite. They are corrosive and dissolve all the ties that bind our societies one to another and between the generations.
Isn't it a bit ironic that a society under the influence of a celibate clergy should be so prolific while the secular society's abandonment of sexual morality has led to the collapse of populations all over the world? This may not seem like a bad thing to the envirocultists who regard mankind as the scourge of the earth. They fail to take into account that well known dictum that that says nature abhors a vacuum. Certainly, the human ecosystem abhors a power vacuum and a community that fails to have children is just asking to be replaced by one that will.
The secular society has substituted the pursuit of pleasure for the self sacrifice of child rearing. They aren't compatible. Children crave the stability of a home. They want to know who their parents are, and they want to know they are loved by them. The creche works for ants but not for humans. But children get in the way for people who want to earn lots of money and want to spend it. They get in the way of promiscuous sex. They cost money to maintain with no obvious benefits in return. They require a long period of education and by the time they are old enough to look after themselves the parents are getting old and have missed out on the good life. And who wants to confine oneself to having only one bed partner for his entire life, one who gets older and less attractive with each passing year. Who wants to cheat himself out of all the fun he could have if only he didn't have a wife with saggy boobs and squabbling brats all over the place.
A strange thing about the logic of feelings and sensual gratification is that in very short order it grows boring. You can only eat so much. You can only screw so much. You can only live in one house at a time, wear one pair of shoes at a time, drive one car at a time. And then what? A sense of grievance. What's missing. Who is responsible. Try drugs, anything to stop that dull ache, anything to shut up that busy brain. After sex, after all the chocolate you can eat, after the single malt scotch palls, and if you don't go in for arts or have an all consuming interest, like electric trains or Ming vases, then there is one pleasure left, more potent than all the rest: power. And if there is anything that stands out about the left it is their craving for power. Not power to accomplish good but power for its own sake. They will do anything, say anything to get power. Whatever works. Lie, steal, cheat, but above all lie. Don't worry about getting caught, brazen it out. Bill Clinton showed how to do it. The trick is not to let anything embarrass you. Eradicate any sense of shame you may have, and cultivate an easy grin. Women especially are suckers for a loveable rogue. Cultivate grievances among the resentful. Pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. Make promises you have no intention of delivering. It's a well worn path. We have lots of that type in Canada, too.
What is surprising, and I always have to remember this, is that in spite of the best efforts of Michael Moore, Al Gore, and every lying, BSing public figure you can think of, the average everyday jerk just chugs along living his life, raising his kids, doing useful work and being a good friend and neighbor. I was thinking about that as I watched the crew that set up the crane last weekend. They had worked three weeks straight but there was no slacking off. Every man on the crew knew his job and did it well. They never complained, being too busy joking around, kidding each other and doing their work for that kind of nonsense. True, they were getting overtime, holiday pay and everything else. I said to one of the guys that it would all be worthwhile when they got a chance to spend some of that money, "They'll only take it away in taxes," he said matter of factly. I had forgotten, we live in a country that punishes people for working hard. These were real Canadians and when I'm around guys like that I'm not sorry I'm a Canadian, too.
Somehow or other, despite the tireless efforts by our elites to destroy everything that matters in our culture, most people are still pretty good. And there is something distinctive about Canadians that I like. Luckily, it seems to be indestructible.

Canada Day Rant

"Canada Day" was commemorated on the weekend. I put that in quotes because the national holiday used to be called "Dominion Day." Apparently 'Dominion' was too strong a word for the tender ears of our kinder, gentler era and the wise folks in charge of these things toned it down. Dominion, domination, sounds a little bit cheeky to me, like something Hillary and Bill might like to do in the privacy of the white house with the cameras rolling. Grokked at in that light, it might deserve a second look as a name for our holiday. Goes with the drag queen parades, don't you know, whips, leathers, tatooed goth babes leading muscular she males around on leashes, that sort of thing. Think of all the possibilities for innuendo and veiled references to the evils we face in the modern world, like the deprivation of poor Saddam of his job, the joos who everybody knows are responsible for the melting glaciers, avian flu, the obesity of our youth, and leave us not forget the Great Satan aka the United States of America and GWB, its evil mastermind.
By whatever name, Canada Day was a gala affair. After the lavish fireworks display that lasted at least ten minutes, our local youths, by now filled with liquid courage and eager to lay to rest the myth of the well-behaved Canadian showed their affection for the Dominion by throwing as much garbage on it as they were able to bring to the party.
Perhaps the real reason it was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day was because the old designation was too truthful to be allowed. Because Canada isn't a real country. It's a patchwork of discontinuous jurisdictions with very little in common with each other spread across the part of the continent directly north of the USA. It's essentially the empire of Upper Canada, Upper Canada being that area on the left bank of the Great Lakes that was mainly settled by refugees from the English colonials to the south who didn't want the responsibilities that come with freedom. Ontario, I mean. They much preferred the system of patronage and dependancy that came with sucking up to the crown. That was the era when the predominant economic theory was mercantilism. In that system the goal is captive markets. You get captive markets by having an empire where you don't give the colonials any choice in which companies to deal with. This way you can charge whatever you want and don't have to worry much about customer satisfaction. Originally that meant The Hudson's Bay Company owned Canada. Steady profits for the well-connected. Have you heard of the Highland Clearances? That was what happened in Scotland when the landowning class discovered that sheep were more profitable than tenants. This meant that The Hudsons Bay had a big pool of labourers to draw who had little choice but to accept employment in the godforsaken Canadian Canadian wilderness where they would be surrounded by howling savages. So the Canadian hinterland was administered by employees of a corporation, unlike the American free for all.
We prefer to forget about these inconvenient memories (unless there is profit to be gained by the legal profession as in the residential school scam) they are so untidy.
Unfortunately for Canada, all the romance of our history took place in those days. The stories of the missionaries and the fur traders are amazing. But if CBC suddenly decided to embrace that history in a TV series it would surely find some way to make it dull and boring. It would probably spend so much on commitee meetings trying to twist it around to conform with politically correct ideology there wouldn't be any money left over to actually film anything.
Ahh, the CBC. Over the years I gradually (being a little slow on the uptake) came to the realization that, according to the CBC, since I am from Alberta I'm not really Canadian. Alberta is a region, you see, and not part of the civilized world. Albertans are primitive, ignorant tobacco chewing yokels who should just shut up and leave the running of the country to their betters...who run the CBC. Now, as long as Albertans were mere dirt farmers and cowboys they were at least quaint and picturesque and tolerable, but now that Alberta is the richest province in Canada Ontarians are livid. Why, we even had the temerity to vote into parliament a political party headquartered in Calgary. You should have heard the howls of outrage. I did, and I haven't forgotten.
When I was a boy we were taught to be proud of our past. Today the only time we are urged to even remember it is to show how evil and oppressive we white males were. But how can you be proud of your country when you are taught to despise your history as we are taught now? Why would anyone want to fight for such a country? Obviously, the socialists and liberals don't think it's worth fighting for. Armies, ugh...they're so imperialistic.
Here in the west it is our duty to shut our mouths and just hand over our money because at the other end of the country Upper Canada has a different strategy: bribe them to stay in the country. And in order to bribe the maritimers they need our money. And let's not mention that before Nova Scotia joined Canada it was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Now it's a welfare state and if you want to get a vote in Nova Scotia you'd better not say anything against 'equalization payments.'
This is pretty well the same policy Upper Canada has to entice those inconvenient Frenchies who plug things up in what used to be called Lower Canada. Appeasement? It's the Canadian way. So it's not too surprising when a few dozen Indians setting up a blockade on a railway track can shut the country down. Who in his right mind would want to admit to being a citizen of such a dumb country? Quebec, whenever it wants us to cough up more cash threatens to separate. I've got news for Quebec. I wouldn't miss you. The only condition I would impose is that you take Ottawa with you. As for the Indians- excusez moi, First Nations- who claim the whole country and expect the rest of us to be their slaves, my idea is they can have the rest of Ontario.
Well, for some reason I still prefer living in Canada to anyplace else. Edmonton is still my hometown and I'm still very fond of the place. But I now feel my home is the whole west coast and have often wished the border was somewhere east of Alberta instead of inconveniently located between BC and Washington. And I care more about what happens in Seattle and San Francisco than in Toronto or Montreal. It would be really nice if I could vote against Patti Murray or Nancy Pelosi. Let's face it. The USA is where the action is and I would rather vote against them than Jean Chretien who I despise every bit as much as these American nitwits. But Jean Chretien is a nobody. The American Republic is the engine of the world's economy, the fount of innovation, and the only country in the world where the contribution of the average citizen is valued. The US has a cutural life beyond anything that Canada has and the culture kampfs really matter. The destiny of the world is now in American hands, for better or worse. Canada is a backwater, deliberately made that way by the mediocrats who run the country. They think small. They quiver and wring their hands. Since they don't matter, since nothing they do has any consequences they can stand on the sidelines and be sanctimonious.
I wish I had more to offer on this Canada Day week than just a meandering complaint. But just to show I'm an equal opportunity complainer I would like to mention that I'm not too crazy about Washington DC either, and I've never liked Texans. As a matter of fact, I'm in one crabby mood today.

Animal souls

I always look forward to the first of the month when new issues of my favourite 'e-zines' come out. The New English Review is one of those favourites and John Derbyshire has a good article in this issue which I haven't finished reading yet entitled, "The I's Have it." He cites a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary named Nancey Murphy and John F. Haught a theologian at Georgetown University who want to erase the traditional distinctions that set humans apart from the rest of the animal world. My own position on the matter is pretty close to Epictetus.' It's our capacity for self examination that sets us apart, and that's what leads him to reserve for man the possession of an eternal soul. However while I concur with the first part of the argument I have some doubts about the second part. The most important points in discussing the soul (the existence of which I haven't the slightest doubt) is will and sensation, both of which definitely set the lowest of life forms apart from inanimate matter. A rock doesn't care what happens to it but the meanest paramecium does. It seeks food, it reproduces, it prefers life over death, and presumably distinguishes between things that feel good and things that don't. Therefore it has purposive behavior. Darwinists by some tortured logic that has never made any sense to me seem to be saying that matter is inherently purposeful. And then they say it isn't, it's just random. Whatever that means. Maybe so, but it doesn't seem to have occured to them to propose any theories to account for it. Is it just complex carbon-based molecules that have this capacity or are other elements like aluminum or argon also able to spontaneously start moving about and striving to increase in complexity, or do the various constituents of living things we know about have unique properties? Because if just any old material can tranform itself into brain cells why don't we see it? Or why do we never see a Sahara sand dune spontaneously make itself into a medieval castle? I believe our material bodies are like machines that have been assembled and directed by a force or power outside what we normally think of as the universe and denying that possibility blocks our progress in understanding the makeup of our world.
Leaving that train of thought, I should mention that I have a bit of a problem with Christians who cite 'Christian thought' in arguments against animal souls. Although I read the bible regularly I don't even come within a mile of being an authority on it, but isn't the idea of a soul a fairly recent innovation in the bible? My guess is that the Hebrews got it from either the Greeks or the Persians. It was really at the time of the advent of Christianity when theories of the soul abounded in the Roman sphere, and the New Testament takes a definite position, but it is as a participant in a widespread debate. So I think it's perfectly fair to say that Christian thinking on the subject could be more accurately described as a variety of late classical thought on the subject. Thus I do not regard Christian teaching on the soul as the last and final word. It's something that has to be thought about a lot more than it has. The modern materialist view is that there is no 'proof' for such a thing. I am convinced they are wrong but they bring important ideas to the debate. And so does somebody like Nancey Murphy who wants to show that we aren't the only ones with souls. This may be wrong, too, but it's an extremely valuable line of thinking and should not be dismissed.
Derbyshire is rightly worried about the knee jerk deconstructionalist thought patterns of our wacidemics, but Epictetus dealt with that one almost 2000 years ago and his point is still valid. A wish to deny that there is any such thing as a lower or a higher form of life is at the root of the deconstructionist fad and it's so easy to demolish that logic it's almost proof positive that the academy has been taken over by cretins. In the navy we used to have a lot of Marine jokes. One of them was about the Marine Corps IQ test. It's just the same as all the other IQ tests except that if you score over fifty you fail. Some ideas are so stupid ridicule is the only response necessary. You do get tired of being polite.
Further along in the article Derbyshire takes us on a bit of a tour of some of the thinking that goes on behind the campus gates and an entertaining tour it is. It makes me think of the tours they used to have of Bedlam, the famous institution for the demented they had in the London of yesteryear.
It is important to point out that while the English language is well equipped with technical jargon it's metaphysical vocabulary is extremely vague. In contrast, Greek, which was the educated language of the Roman world, had a very precise metaphysical vocabulary. Many of our problems in modern metaphysical discourse can be traced to this deficiency in the English language.

Putting up a crane

They were busy putting up the crane at my weekend job site and judging by all the passersby its a process everyone is curious about. One fellow (pictured) is a bit of an afficianado of cranes. According to one of the crew members he has shown up to see every single crane erection they've done in the Victoria area. And they've been busy, having worked for three weeks straight. But after this one they were due to head home to the Lower Mainland for a few days off. As another crewman told me toward the end of the day, "It's almost Miller time, and I'm getting excited."