The Wimps

My 8 year-old is on a basketball team, this summer.  For some strange reason, that kid of mine likes basketball.  He never ceases to amaze me.  I have no idea where or how this basketball thing started with him.  Originally, I was the team coach, but through some theological miracle that may yet cause me to renounce atheism, a guy signed up his kid, then confessed that he is a high school coach. 
Needless to say, our team is doing very well.

One thing Coach Al says is that these kids are only 7 and 8 years old, and we need to chill out, and not push them.  He says that if we try to make these little guys into serious athletes, they'll be burned out by the time they get to high school, and lose all interest in sports.  I really like him.  The more I see him interact with the boys, the more impressed I am with him.
So my son fell tonight, during practice, and hasn't stopped crying, since.  I wanna kill him.
Here's the thing: I think he's big a momma's boy.  A baby.  A wimp. 
The problem with that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that when I look at him, I see myself at that age, and shudder.
I was a big baby.  I was a cry baby.  I was the lamest, most unathletic kid in San Pedro.  My son already has several advantages, and is way ahead of me: He already knows how to swim, and he learned how to ride a bike this summer.
Here's the deal: when I was 6 years old, I took swimming lessons, and caught a cold.  That turned into pneumonia, and next thing you know, I'm in an oxygen tent with a fever of 106F, in a coma, and the doctors tell my mom that I'm going to die.
After that, my mom became the definition of a Jewish mother.  The term "Jewish mother" should be changed to "Eastern European mother", since my mom was Catholic, but you get the idea.  My mom never let me have a bike or a skateboard (I would get hit by a car, and die).
I made up for my childhood enslavement when I left the house: I taught myself how to swim one summer in a friend's pool.  Years later, I got into SCUBA diving.  When I was 30 I bought my first bicycle, walked it over to an empty parking lot, and refused to go home until I could ride it, and not fall off.
This whole rebellion against my mother's smothering is why I joined the Army, but let's not go there.
Anyways, so I've got this kid, and I don't want him to be that wimpy kid who gets his ass kicked in the junior high school locker room, like I did.  I want him to be a real man (whatever that means). 
So, I have no idea if I did the right thing, tonight, or not: I made him get up, and keep running the drills with the rest of the boys.  I didn't yell at him like some pyscho Marine Corps drill instructor.  I looked him over, and clinically evaluated him, and once I determined tht he was okay, I made him get back in there.
If you look at him, he didn't even get scraped, or break skin.  His wrist probably does hurt.  But hey, what if I'm one of these idiot dads who doesn't realize his kid has a broken bone.  I have x-rayed a lot of those kids: The dad stares at me with wide eyes and asks incredulously, "It's BROKEN???" while I glare angrily at him.
Like Vinnie Barbarino used to shout, "I'm soooo confused!"

More bang for your buck

I just read two books about firearms by two guys who could have shared a beer, and gotten along famously, despite having very different political views.

The Gun, by C.J. Chivers isn't merely a history of the AK-47.  It's a history of Stalin's madness, Soviet bureaucracy, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,  the Cold War, African massacres, and bureaucratic incompetence.  Even if you don't care about guns, this book is a good read.  Ostensibly, this book is a history of the AK-47, but the M-16 is discussed at length.

Former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle was working on American Gun when he was murdered by a friend he took out for some firearms practice.  Chris was trying to help a veteran who has not done well since he came home, and got shot for his trouble.  Although William Doyle helped Chris' widow finish the book, you can hear Chris' voice, as you read the pages.  This book is a quick romp through American history.  The technical details of American firearms are cleverly woven into casual histories of various battles and skirmishes-starting with highly accurate flintlocks called American Long Guns or Kentucky Rifles-used during the American Revolution to shoot British army officers from enormous distances.  Chris takes the reader through the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam. To his credit, he acknowledges the bravery, skill, and gunsmithing ability of America's foes over the last two centuries.
When he gets to the introduction of the M-16 in Vietnam, Chris breezes over the problems with the M-16 when it was first manufactured, and issued to front line combat troops.  Unlike Chivers-who extensively details and documents the high rate of failure and the horrific numbers of soldiers and marines whose M-16s either blew up in their face, or jammed after the first round-Chris side-skirts the extensive damage done to American troops by the general staff, and Colt's executives.  In plain English, American troops died unnecessarily and horribly.
I'm going to defend Chris on that last one, even though I'm not happy about it: when I was in, we were brainwashed into thinking that the M-16 was a technologically superior, awesome, precise, well-made piece of American technology, unlike that big, bulky, piece-of-crap AK-47.  I have no trouble believing that Chris was sold the same pile of zebra poop.  Interestingly, Chivers finishes The Gun with coverage of American troops being taught how to disassemble, clean, and re-assemble an AK-47, in an exercise titled "Just in Case". 
Thank God.
Chris Klye does, however, detail the extensive work done over the decades to update and improve the M-16-something that Chivers should have covered in more detail.  Hey, it only took the American military-industrial complex 40 years to fix the M-16.
Much to my horror, the Fed is willing to sell you an original model M-16, without the forward bolt assist.  Holy crap, are you guys kidding?

Note the forward bolt assist a.k.a. "forward assist" on the M-16A1 (lower image).  Any military firearm that comes with a button you gotta push during a fire fight, to unstick your gun, is a scary proposition.

Read both books.  They overlap and complement each other perfectly.

 

THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD

I was at the Quakes minor league game (we wiped the floor with San Jose, 9 to 0), and a cop was wearing a t-shirt that said, "God invented cops, so that firemen could have heroes."
Okay, well let's not get into that perennial dick waving contest.  Truth be told, they both have the hardest job in the world.  Cops have to see the worst of human behavior, like parents who beat their own little boy to death, after burning him with cigarettes, while firemen have to do CPR on homeless people who haven't had a bath in 6 months. 
Usually, my group trains the cops in anti-terrorism stuff; but this week we trained the firemen.  We helped them with urban search and rescue, by setting up a scenario where there are multiple radioactive hot spots, while they search for, and rescue people after  major disaster e.g. an earthquake.

The main point of our being there was to make them comfortable with their radiation detection equipment, and to feel comfortable in a radioactive environment, while rescuing the severely wounded. They had student firefighters (I keep saying "firemen" but there were 3 female fire cadets) who lay inside various "collapsed structures", and the urban search and rescue guys practiced using snake cameras (fiber optic scopes) and cutting through thick, hardened concrete, to get to them. 

They also have a car from one of our local train wrecks.  Scary thought for the day: I have ridden to work on the car, above.  So, we didn't put any radioactive sources inside the train, because that shouldn't happen in real life (but you could have a patient who just had a scan at the hospital, and is still radioactive.  This is what caused the embarrassment in Chicago earlier this year.)

 

They said we could go inside Car 623. 

Okay.

I walked up to the door, and started to climb inside.  Vertigo instantly attacked, as soon as I was inside the train.  I couldn't believe it.  Apparently, the conflict between my eyeballs and my inner ear was too much.  It's really weird, and very real.  I think the 45 degree angle made it so hard.  If the car was on its side, or upside down, it would have been confusing, but not as hard as it was for us to try to walk through.  We couldn't walk the length of the car.  We had to grasp like drunkards at whatever we could, and climb back out.



Note to self: write a blog post about Japanese Americans and their public service.  Pretty amazing that after having their houses, businesses, and other property seized during World War II, Japanese Americans continued to buy into the American Dream, and serve the public. 

GOODBYE, MR. ZEBRA FINCH; YOU POOR BASTARD

A lot of people mistakenly believe that if you are a birder i.e. enjoy traipsing in the great outdoors, staring at birds with binoculars―perhaps even photographing them―that you also would like to have a pet bird. Not necessarily the case. A few years ago, a relative suddenly declared that she and her husband are moving Back East, and foisted her Zebra Finches on us. Didn't ask if we wanted to have the birds; just showed up at our kitchen door with an over-sized white metal cage with two equally white songbirds nervously fluttering around, inside.

Before I go on, a word about Zebra Finches: Somehow, Australia―along with Oceania to its north―became the point of origin for a multitude of those exotic birds that constitute a large part of the international pet trade. If you walk up to the average American or European and say the word "Tropical" they will picture a lush jungle in Africa, or South America. Obviously, the green jungles of these equatorial regions are where parrots come from.

Not really. Lots of parrot species come from areas with oak trees (Mexico to Colombia), or grasslands (Africa, Argentina, Australia). Same goes for other Australian birds like Zebra Finches, who, of course, are not parrots, but small, seed eating passerines. Zebra Finches also bear the distinction of being bred in large numbers for biological research. These laboratory Zebra Finches have been bred in captivity over and over again to the point where they have lost most of the coloration of their wild cousins, and along with our two birds, have become white ghosts with bright orange seed-crushing beaks, and a couple of black stripes on their faces. If you ever walk by a research building on a university campus, and wonder what that chirping, honking sound is coming from somewhere inside, chances are it's the sound of a couple hundred Zebra Finches, bleating with excitement at the idea of escaping the nerds in white lab coats who will eventually decapitate them, and slice their brains into microscope slides in order to trace some neuronal pathway. No such fate awaited our new, uninvited guests.

So, now we had an oversized cage in our living room. Great. One more piece of clutter. As it is, my wife and I have too much stuff, and our small house constantly looks like if we had just moved in, and hadn't decided where to put things, yet. So the Zebra Finches now lived in the same living room that held six large book cases, two vaccum cleaners (an old-fashioned Hoover held together with a bungee cord, and the new, bagless Hoover that is the first bagless vaccum cleaner that we actually kept, after taking back the Bissel and some other piece-of-crap bagless vacuum cleaner that didn't pick up the dog hair), one female Basset Hound (usually found snoring on her Costco doggy bed), one suicidal analog TV (the top of the screen is slowly degenerating into parallel white lines that will eventually invade the entire screen, at which point I will be forced to drive over to Best Buy, and get the biggest flat screen that I can afford), one desk top home PC, a Persian rug, a sofa, two bicycles (can't keep them on the patio: they will rust), a 1910 Singer sewing machine, and a bunch of Christmas tree decorations that my wife really needs to put back into the storage shed.

Well, okay, the sewing machine was the other uninvited guest. Apparently, it was owned by somebody's grandmother (We're not sure who this person was, or how we're related to her, so we can't throw it out. Ironically, the wood used to make this broken sewing machine came from the Singer Tract in Louisiana, where they chopped down an entire forest for the wood to make sewing machines―wiping out the last stronghold of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, pushing it into extinction.

So, of course, we put the over-sized cage on top of the unwanted 1910 Singer, and over the course of time a pile of feather dust and seed shells began to accumulate on the floor, where it joined the dog hair.

Great.

I grew tired of the dust and spit-out seed shells, so one day I evicted the Zebra Finches. My wife would love to evict the dog, but the Basset Hound has telepathic powers, and knows exactly when she needs to pad up to you, nudge you with her wet, black nose, and work her magical eyebrows into a facial expression that says, "I love you, and I need you to love me, too."

So now the Zebra Finches lived on our patio. No problem for most of the year in southern California, where even at our house at the base of a 10,000 foot mountain, it only drops down to freezing temperatures 2 weeks a year. I figured that when we have our annual Christmas-to-New-Years period of freezing temperatures, I'll bring them back inside.

Then I realized something: They actually have freezing temperatures―and believe it or not, snow―in certain parts of Australia, so these hardy little guys can probably tolerate short periods of cold.

To liven up their otherwise boring lives (Imagine being locked in a cage for years with your spouse, unable to escape), I hung one of the hummingbird feeders right next to their cage, and fairly quickly the Zebras began to announce whenever an Anna's Hummingbird visited our patio.

Life was good. We sorta had our living room back, and the birds were fine "outdoors". One fine summer evening I came home from work, and after executing my husbandly duty of picking up the dog poop & hosing down the patio, I noticed that only one of the Zebra Finches was fluttering about in their usual panic induced by the presence of humans.

Mrs. Zebra Finch was dead.

Sorry, Mr. Zebra Finch, we're not getting you a new wife. You'll just have to live out your days as a lonely widower, conversing with the occasional hummingbird or goldfinch that stops by to visit. Maybe in the spring a Hooded Oriole or an Orange-crowned Warbler will stop by.

Now you'll know how I felt when I was divorced, and living alone.

Anyways, so summer turned into fall, and next thing you know, Santa brought the kids newer, more expensive video games, and the big freeze was colder and longer than usual. Mr. Zebra Finch did fine. I actually tried to keep him warm by offering him handfuls of lint from the clothes dryer, and a milk carton that I hoped he would use as a bird box. Zebra Finches must be nest weavers, because he insisted on staying in a used margarine container full of dryer lint, eschewing the warmth and shelter of the milk carton.

The freeze ended, leaving all the banana trees in our neighborhood dead, including the one in a pot on our patio. Hoping for the best, I supplemented the banana plant's nitrogen supply with the occasional dose of liquid urea, and kept watering it. I noticed last week that it has new green leaves climbing past the dead, brown leaves.

Excellent. Wounded, but not dead.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Mr. Zebra Finch.

I got home from work, last night, and was immediately informed that he was dead, dead, dead, at the bottom of the cage.

Ouch.

I threw myself at my wife's mercy, and confessed my sin: I hadn't checked his food supply in several days. I may have starved him to death. A real possibility in this weather. Small birds can survive the cold as long as they can get their hands (or beaks) onto enough calories to keep warm. Just ask your local Hoary Redpoll, or McKay's Bunting. I have no way of knowing for sure if that killed the bird, or it was just his time. He probably died of old age. If I really wanted to know, I could have taken his little corpse out of the cage, and palpated his breasts. If there was a sufficent layer of muscle and fat, then no, he didn't use up his fuel supplies, he just grew tired of living in Claremont.

I informed the wife that I was going to throw out the cage with the bird in it. Straight into the dumpster. No birdy funeral in the dirt of the patio, just gone, vanished, like an American spy in Moscow. Poof. Never existed. She said, "No, don't throw out the cage." Methinks the lady doth protest too much. The ugly truth is this: she can't stand our relative who foisted the bird and the sewing machine on us. Here's where it gets really weird: It turned out that the birds weren't even hers', but her ex-husband's, who she broke up with in a nasty divorce that amazingly didn't make the front page of People Magazine. I gasped, "Those were his birds?"

"Oh yeah, she hates birds. Always has. She's been afraid of them since she was a little kid. Some incident where a bird attacked her."

"Wait a second! We've been keeping her ex-husband's birds, even though she hates birds, and she curses the ground he walks on?"

"Yep."

Somebody shoot me.

Before I left for work, this morning, I stopped and fed Mr. Fish. I stared at him through the glass walls of his tank, and asked him to stay around for a while. Not answering, he non-committally tore a chunk out of a flake of fish food, as it floated by.

***

Side note: My daughter wants a turtle for her birthday. I said, "Yes."

Now my wife wants to kill me.