Rain, Rain

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Today – Rain with a few thunderstorms – some locally heavy downpours are possible, especially during the afternoon hours. High 71 °F (21.7 °C). Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected.

Tonight – Showers and thunderstorms likely. A few storms may be severe. Low 66 °F (18.9 °C). Winds S at 10 to 20 mph (16.1 to 32.2 kph). Chance of rain 90%.

It is a great day, if you are a duck. I know where my raincoat is- it is in the back of the JG’s Explorer, which is now in the garage at the Farm after I washed the bird crap off of it that came with the swallows nesting in the beams of the barn above it. In order to make room in the actual garage, more boxes had to be emptied, and then the contents moved into the cavernous rear of the SUV.

Sooner or later it is all going to be cleared out and a nice workbench set up with all the tools in the right places. But I couldn’t do much about that even if I was down there today. I am behind on fighting the weeds that are coming up through the gravel, and the rain is going to make the grass high as an elephant’s eye by the time I get back to cut it again.

Being as how the coat is in Culpeper and I am not, it is not going to be doing me much good today as a couple inches of water submerge us.

I started out this morning with an analysis of some government numbers- doesn’t really matter, they are all clever fabrications these days- regardless of which ones you look at.

I mean, there is a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that 20% of American families do not have a working member. And then we have the same BLS report whatever it is we are supposed to think is the official unemployment rate, which this month is reported to be 6.7%.

It is sort of sad- once you get into the business of twisting things for the best possible interpretation, and everyone knows it, why would you believe anything the Government says?

Then someone rolled a hand grenade into the morning communications about the North Carolina study on multiple voting….ah, you know, the systematic thing that is supposed to be rarer than getting hit by lightning. Yawn. They are just getting better at it.

Anyway, I can’t get all energized about it because of the rain. It is dark and the blacktop outside is boiling as the bands of clouds sweep through. I like it when it rains. It makes me want to stay in bed. It makes me want to…well, you know what it is like when it rains and the window is cracked just a bit open and the fresh moist air, redolent of earth and growing things wafts in and the eiderdown is so wonderfully conformant to the body and there is the smell of fresh-ground coffee there waiting in the kitchen just in case you ever felt like getting up to go investigate it.

And the merry sound of eggs frying in the cast iron skillet. Well, that would be the sound If I could pry myself out of this marvelous cocoon. End of April, this soggy month came in like a lion and is going out moist and gentle as a lover’s kiss.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Phi-Esta

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I thought it was sort of cute when I first read about it, but thankfully I caught myself. It is Dartmouth, after all, one of the bastions of academic integrity and expensive enough to be smug about it. Still, the wanton act of naked micro-aggression could not go unpunished.

Meaning no disparagement of those who prefer not to wear clothing, or are otherwise engaged in immodest or promiscuous behavior, since that is completely in the eye of the beholder and should be respected, unless it is not.

You are aware of this disturbing trend in which privileged groups- or ones allegedly privileged, since they are directly disenfranchised by that self-same privilege by the disadvantaged, who are curiously empowered in their disadvantagement- may say or do something that might be completely innocent, but which constitutes a direct micro-threat to someone who might be offended if they brooded about it endlessly. It is insidious, this thinking and perceiving thing, and must be ruthlessly scourged.

Despite it being a First Amendment right, free speech has to be restricted to avoid offending anyone at any time. There is a lot of that going around these days- I forget which Amendment protects citizens from unintended offense- the 54th? But thank God- if I can say that without offending you, and if I do, I apologize profusely in advance, not wanting to force patriarchal concepts on anyone- they nipped this one in the bud.

If I can say that. It is perilous territory out there these days.

Anyway, Phi Delta Alpha and Alpha Phi moved decisively to cancel a social fund-raising event they called “Phi-Esta,” which had been scheduled for the 5th of May. Apparently there is a holiday called “Cinco de Mayo” that is celebrated in a respected, self-affirmed and sovereign nation somewhere in this hemisphere that happens the same day. Sometimes with actual alcoholic beverages, meaning no disrespect to the Irish, who have their own day, but don’t seem to mind.

Apparently the offensive word-play occurred when the Greek Letter ‘phi’ (I made a call to the Embassy of Greece to see if there were any objections to the use of their letter but as of press time have not had a response, by which I do not mean to imply that the staff is anything but hard-working and highly professional).

What is more troubling is that ‘phi’ is the basis for the Golden Ratio, Section or Mean, which was known to the ancient Greeks as the “dividing line in the extreme and mean ratio of 1.618,” not that there is anything wrong with being old and ethnic, though the mean and extreme thing should be noted and castigated along with anything that smacks of bullying, cyber or not.

In the Renaissance, artists used the term as “The divine proportion,” but I am staying away from that, based on the quasi-religious allusion and the highly inappropriate notion that one number is better than any other.

Adding ‘esta’ as a suffix completed the offensive term, which according to detailed research by our fact-checkers is revealed to be a word meaning ‘to be’ in a major Romance language, by which I certainly imply nothing inappropriate in relationship terms, or anything inter-personal, for that matter, begging your pardon.

Phi Delta Alpha president Taylor Cathcart and Alpha Pi president Courtney Wong were overcome with remorse when the anonymous offended people made their concerns known to the Dartmouth Administration. They immediately dropped the idea, moved the fund raising on-line and raised $5,000 bucks for a local hospital.

They denied that they had tried to come up with a clever play on words that invoked the word ‘fiesta’ which previously had been non-controversial, but clearly deconstructed was a dog whistle of disguised hate speech. The idea that the Greeks- not meaning the Greek per se, the fake ones, I mean, not that being proud of an ethnic heritage you don’t have is wrong- who thought it might be funny to couple it with a Mexican-themed party that would have featured non-alcoholic tropical drinks and “globally inspired” burritos.

I have no idea what that last part means. I mean, are they round? And by that, naturally, I mean no disrespect to basketballs.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Spring Red Tie Reunion

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The New Look for a venerable organization began at the Spring Red Tie Reunion meeting at the ANCC Arlington campus. The new clubhouse is an elegant venue, and totally appropriate for the new look that Chairman Bob Murrett and President Norm Hayes envision. The Arlington venue permitted greater than normal participation by the uniformed contingent from Suitland and The Pentagon- we have not had this much Khaki in at the event in years!

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Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

A Civil Disobedience

 

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(The May Day demonstration against the War in 1971 was billed as the “largest civil disobedience action” in American history. It is regrettably forgotten in the tumult of the end of the astonishing decade of the 1960s. There may be something else going on these days.)

It was asses-and-elbows trying to get out of the apartment and on the road to the farm yesterday morning. The day was brilliant and beckoning, but there was the matter of the laundry from the trip and the stuff from the days before-and-after to marshal, and loading the perishables to consume over the remainder of the weekend.

Plus, there was a stop to be made. I had agreed to meet a comrade at the Show at the Dulles Expo Center on the way at an impossibly early hour to be in Fairfax, and of course Japan was calling just at the time I was trying to walk out of the unit and get in the Panzer.

So I was on the verge of being beyond fashionably late when I rolled up to the vast parking lot in front of the big hall out by Rt 28. It was packed.

I drove around for a while before finding a spot about a quarter mile away from the entrance, but it was all right, and half way to the restaurant where we were going to have lunch later on. I trudged up to the entrance and my comrade was waiting patiently- I think he has come to accept my abandonment of strict compliance with military timing.

We wandered over to the guys behind the ticket counter and ponied up the $13 bucks for admittance and then approached the lady who was taking the tickets and stamping our hands for evidence of eligibility for re-admittance.

“Are you carrying weapons?” she asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and maybe it is these days. We said “Not yet,” though this was not a mission to look for anything in particular. I have wondered if there is some requirement that has not been met to some degree in the hysteria of the last few years, and we generally agreed that there was not.

The Nation’s Gun Show is as overwhelming as venturing into the Lowe’s or a Super Target. I immediately forget whatever it was that lured me to the stores to begin with, and wander lost through the aisles. There were hundreds of tables with vendors selling everything related to firearms- long and short, lethal appearing and innocuous, old and new.

“Just looking, right?” said my comrade, and I nodded, preparing to wander in dumb amazement down the crowded aisles.

I have come to view the Show as a sort of unofficial straw poll about how people think things are going. I mentioned yesterday the three ‘d’s’ I noted over the past two years: Desperation, Despair, and Determination. There was a wave of panic purchasing that was evident after the Sandy Hook massacre, that abomination of horror.

You would think that a rational consensus on what to do about this armed society might have resulted, or at least that is what some thought at the time. Instead, the lines seemed to have hardened. Connecticut, New York, California and Colorado passed some modest legislation about magazine capacities and types of semi-automatic weapons that would be permitted to be owned by its citizens.

The modesty of the legislation enacted turned out to be a matter of some personal difference with the citizens affected. New York’s Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act (SAFE Act) has been rolled out in stages. The ban on high-capacity ammo magazines (more than seven rounds for some reason best known to Albany) and ammo sales background checks took effect on Jan. 15. The requirement that mental health care professionals report anyone “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others” took effect March 16; and the assault weapons registration and ban took effect April 15.

The State Patrol there said they would not be enforcing the ban on magazines for a perfectly good reason: no firearm comes with magazines of that capacity. That essentially renders any magazine-fed firearm illegal under the provisions of the law. I am sure some weapons must exist with a five-round capacity, they must, but no one is paying attention to it. The SAFE Act permitted owners of previously legal rifles to gain “grandfather” status for them if they went to the Patrol and registered them, and showed proof that a certified gunsmith has made the cosmetic alterations to comply with the law.

So far, citizens are not leaping on the opportunity to do so. It appears to be something in the grand tradition of civil disobedience. In Connecticut, compliance with a similar law is estimated by some to be in the range of 15%. In Colorado, all but two of the state’s sheriffs have announced that they will not be enforcing the new laws, and two of the State Senate’s ranking members were recalled in the controversy by a consortium headed by a local plumber without previous electoral experience.

It is interesting here in Virginia, being adjacent to the Free State of Maryland and the District (which both feature draconian penalties for gun possession). We are teetering between Red and Blue. Downstate is still firmly red; Northern Virginia and the Tidewater are reliably blue, and outgrowing the rural areas. The mood at the last Show was a fourth ‘d:” Disapproval for our new Governor’s Second Amendment component of his social agenda.

I don’t know what other reaction one would be looking to find at a gun show, for goodness sake, but the mood is what is important.

There is a lot to not like about Governor Terry McAuliffe, mostly about his casual relationship with crony government capitalism, at least from my perspective, but I had to note that the collective mood seemed to be one up from Desperation. That was the common theme at the show before that one was evident in the very long lines at the tables for the ammunition vendors.

I would have to say that the events of the last few years have solidified an apparent mood of Defiance. I saw one citizen who was selling shirts in support of something I had not previously heard: “Operation American Spring.”

“Support the Constitution,” said the bearded man behind his counter. “Come out to the National Mall on the 16th of May.”

I thought back to the first time I came to Washington as an alleged adult, to participate in the May Day civil disobedience action of 1971 against the Vietnam War. That was billed at the time as the “largest act of civil disobedience in American history,” though it is not remembered much these days. After the melt-down of the Students for a Democratic Society and the bewildering military campaign of the Weather Underground in the late sixties, history seems to have decided to forget about May Day.

In context, though, leaders of the Anti-War movement had come to believe that peaceful protest was not effective as a means to influence public policy and decided that more aggressive actions were needed. I remember the figures of the day: Rennie Davis, Jerry Coffin and the rest of the cast of characters in the War Resister’s League.

The scheme for the event was that small groups of activists, cloaked in the larger demonstration, would take direct action to disable cars at key intersections in the District. It turned out to be not as successful as the 1967 Abbie Hoffman-Jerry Rubin attempt to levitate the Pentagon, but no matter. It was pretty spectacular watching the kids versus the cops, and the one irate driver I observed get out of his car and knock the shit out of the people trying to raise the hood on his car and pull his spark plug wires.

I actually was not sure I opposed to the war in SE Asia from a geopolitical perspective, since I thought then (as I do now) that Communism sucks.

Still, I was a pragmatist in my views since I was directly affected by the career choices the war entailed and was reluctant to be drafted as a rifleman to participate personally.

The “2S Student Deferment” printed on the draft card in my wallet and the number “77” I drew in the lottery gave me a certain nuanced perspective. They were drafting up to around the number 115 in those days, and it was entirely possible that my services would be required- but not for another couple years and there were ways to string that out if necessary.

Mostly I just wanted to see this part of democracy in action- you know, the civil disobedience thing.

I wished the bearded man the very best of luck, and as we walked away, I leaned over to my comrade: “In the age of the drone, I think the National Mall would be a very good place to avoid that Friday.”

My pal nodded stoically. He is another retired Federal Officer like me who knows enough to know better. “You would have to be nuts to go reveal yourself to the Feds as a supporter of the Bill of Rights,” he said. “You know that is trouble these days. What do you think about lunch?”

I said that it was lawful, at the moment, and that I had seen all I needed to see at this edition of The Show. “I mostly like these things as social-cultural events to see what people are thinking. I don’t need to buy anything. I think I have everything I need,” I said

“Me too,” he said. “But what you require is a club sandwich and a beer.”

I nodded solemnly. Weapons and then beer is the right way to go, and certainly not the other way around. As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Buffalo Nite

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(This might have been the best darn chocolate-cocoanut-nut and wonderfulness cake I have ever tasted. Kate Jansen’s baking is unreal at Willow).

This week was a blur- it started at the Broadmoor in The Springs and culminated with Buffalo Nite, via the Big Pink Finance Committee and Spring Red Tie Luncheon with the Professionals.

Buffalo Nite was early this month, the last Friday in April. Almost can’t get any earlier, so it is not surprising that Tracy was swamped at Willow. I could go down the list- her husband got hurt, there was the beer tasting dinner on Tuesday, the end of Lent and the big Easter buffet last week on the day the restaurant is normally closed.

Accordingly, Buffalo Night kind of snuck up on everyone, but we managed to rally. A full boat was at the bar, except for The Lovely Bea, who was tied up at that big conference out of town that has had her wrapped around the axel for the last month. Jon-without and John-with, Jerry the Barrister, Old Jim, the Master Chief, former Long-Hair Mike and Ray the Jarhead.

That is not to mention the earlier stint that afternoon I did at the Spring Annual Meeting of the Professional Association held at the Army-Navy Country Club’s posh new club house. I played Jimmy Olsen, Cub Reporter for a Major Metropolitan Daily, with my Canon D50 camera, getting some great shots of a resurgent organization. There is new management with grand plans that I will continue to support as best I can, given the current regrettable downturn in the industry where most of us retirees labor.

And later today- noon on- it is the second Gnarly Hops and Barley Brew Festival down in Culpeper. I may stop at the gun show at Dulles Expo on the way out to sample the mood. The way the crowd feels translates pretty well to an unofficial exit poll of public sentiment, and has ranged from desperation to determination to defiance, and that is just the words starting with “d.”

Tomorrow the Tango holds forth in dance and song at the Kennedy Center. Senior Executive Jerry is singing in it and it should be a great show. I don’t know how I am going to fit all these activities in one sack- but it certainly appears that the winter is finally done and a huge backlog of energy is being released all across the National Capital Region. I don’t know how I am going to do everything- or really even get started on anything.

And did I mention Fabio of Deep Blue rolled the tarp cover off the pool, power washed the grim of winter off the concrete, patched some cracks and re-caulked the gaskets on the underwater lights? That clear clean water is even now slowly filling the big cement rectangle?

How could like get any better?

I would go on- you know I do have that inclination- but I need to get showered, the Panzer loaded, and get on with the day. Do not for an instant consider that I am not fully engaged on the other Great Issues of the Day.

I am going to join State Department spokesman Jen Paski in her decisive tweet that could overwhelm Russian aggression in East Ukraine, but I think she has got the message to President Putin that he is in deep kimchi on social media- and I am not just talking about Twitter, but even Facebook.

Before I get on the road, I am going to ‘unlike’ Mr. Putin. That should do it.
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Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Crossing the Line

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(This isn’t mine- I have no idea where the one I had framed wound up. Perhaps it is in that stack of art I will never look at again in the office off the garage at Refuge Farm. I hope the mice treat it with due respect.)

Mission Statement from Commander Salamander:
“PROACTIVELY “FROM THE SEA”; LEVERAGING THE LITTORAL BEST PRACTICES FOR A PARADIGM BREAKING SIX-SIGMA BEST BUSINESS CASE TO SYNERGIZE A CONSISTENT DESIGN IN THE GLOBAL COMMONS, RIGHTSIZING THE CORE VALUES SUPPORTING OUR MISSION STATEMENT VIA THE 5-VECTOR MODEL THROUGH CULTURAL DIVERSITY.”

The Commander is on a roll this morning. He starts out by mourning the passing of one of the great Military Spouses of all time, Phyllis Galanti. She passed this week after being married to her Airdale husband for 51 years. She rose to greatness after Paul was shot down over North Vietnam in 1966. I don’t know if you recall, but in that asymmetric struggle, keeping the status and identity of the POWs was part of a concerted information strategy designed to extract concessions from the US, and Phyllis spent all the days of Paul’s captivity organizing and publicizing the plight of the men held hostage as “war criminals.”

Anyway, old wars were on my mind after the story from yesterday, and the obituary for Phyllis drew my attention to CDR Salamander’s blog.

He is a great source for current reporting on the madness that currently infects the sea service. That was the direct entrée into a longer discussion about foreign policy disasters (you can pick the top few, take your choice) and the decision from SCOTUS about the constitutionality of the Michigan law banning affirmative action on university admissions and a host of other government activities (it is legal, 6-2).

The dissenting opinion was drafted by Sonia Sotomayor, which is an interesting read if you have a chance to look at it. That exercise in twisted reasoning led directly to an involved discussion of how the Michigan law came to be passed by 58% of the electorate who voted on the referendum, and that goes back a couple of decades and frankly, I am too close to be objective about it. So, that led to the alarming reference to a Naval tradition that I was informed was a “Homosocial Ritual.”

Not that there is anything wrong with it, of course.

The Commander cited a request from the staff at the University of Bristol in the UK to solicit stories about the Crossing the Line ceremony as practiced in the Blue Water Navies. I sighed in relief. This is a line of inquiry that is non-controversial, as opposed to everything else these days, or at least would be if you did not push things too far and start railing about how things were tougher (and presumably more authentic) in the Old Navy.

That is the moral equivalent of standing on my porch, yelling at kids to “stay off my yard!” and I don’t have the energy to go there. One thing I have decided is that I don’t like pain. Travel hurts. Participating in anything that requires an initiation probably hurts. I am done with that- thinking back on the ritual harassment of numerous organizations- the Scouts, the Frat, the Marine Drill Instructors, the Crossing the Line thing. I think I decided after successfully transitioning from Pollywog to salty Shellback that anything that required humiliation and pain was out of the question, and I was having no more of it.

As I made the resolution, my torso was covered in garbage, my lips smeared with Vaseline from kissing the Master Chief’s belly and blood was dripping off my knees from crawling on the flight deck on the way to wading through the slops in The Coffin.

The line-crossing tradition dates back to at least to the sixteenth century, and takes place on various kinds of vessel, military and merchant, when a ship passes over the invisible line of the equator, usually from north to south.
The ceremony both inverted and strengthened shipboard hierarchies, since the enlisted troops were often in charge of the initiation of their officers, which offers them the rare opportunity for pay-back.

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(Slimy Woggs crawl forward under the watchful eyes of seasoned Shellbacks. USS Midway, 1979).

I crossed the line in 1979 on the Good Ship Midway. It had been a while since they let Ma stray that far south, so there were thousands of us Polliwogs. We outnumbered the Shellbacks, but there was still a fair amount of old-school casual brutality. I was crawling on the non-skid of the flight deck behind my Skipper, CDR Denny “Rattler” Wisely, a Silver Star winner in the SE Asian War Games.

As we crawled along, we were encouraged in our forward process by blows to the posterior with short lengths of canvas fire hose. One of the Shellback troops got Rattler with a well-struck snap and he jumped up, lectured the sailor, and then dropped back to his knees to continue the slog to the garbage swim and the unsettling Kissing of the Baby.

Woe betide the poor kids who showed up after that ceremony in the Indian Ocean- the next time the ship was almost 100% Shellback- not the ratio you want as a new guy.

But looking back on it, I recall tossing the shorts and t-shirt I had been wearing for the ordeal over the side. I then walked aft, naked as a Jaybird, with the endless vistas of the pale-blue Indian Ocean empty as far as the eye could see.

Last initiation, I said to no one in particular. The very last.

They give you a little card with fancy script on it that provides the date and longitude of the crossing. I had mine laminated, and carried it in my wallet for years just in case any slimy Shellbacks tried to accuse me of being a Pollywog and force me to do the ritual again.

A sailor has to set standards someplace, you know?

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Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Broadmoor Art

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(I could not remember the name of this conference room in the South Building of the resort to save my life until I got serious this morning).

I am blinking at the breakfast table. I appear to be in Arlington again and I am not sure exactly why. The radio tells me there is wreckage washing up on Australia’s west coast. Parts of MH-370? I need to drag myself back into the real world. The Broadmoor was much nicer. I could become accustomed to that lifestyle. Prices were right- it is still the off season, and I basked in the luxury of their very cheapest room.

The staff was unfailingly solicitous and courteous- it made me wonder about how they create an artificial world that owes much allegiance to the world of 1918 when the venerable Western hotel first opened. People do not act with such decorum in the larger society any more. It was quite remarkable, and I followed an orientation group of new employees as they were introduced to the fitness center near the entrance to the resort golf course.

Wandering along the trail around the large artificial lake I noted the wry humor of the place- positively western. The signage on the grounds is remarkable: “BROADMOOR” is spelled like that, apparently because one of the early incarnations of the hotel logo had been printed by someone who thought that the word “brod” did not contain an “a” and one had to be added in the available space afterward.

The art in the buildings is quite remarkable. In fact, beyond remarkable. I was in the Broadmoor South Building. On the Mezzanine Level are three meeting centers and a Board Room off the corridor from the grand public lobby where the flagstone fireplace burns merrily, as it has since the building was first constructed.

One is devoted to one of my favorite artists, western or not: Frederick Remington.

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(Frederick Remington: Self Portrait on horse.)

Adjacent to the Remington Room is one devoted to a fellow I had never heard of: Charles Schreyvogel.

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(Charles Schreyvogel, January 4, 1861-January 27, 1912)

The Art of the West can be a little over the top to modern sensibilities. Remington’s work included the element of humor as an essential component of larger-than-life personalities in a wider-than-the-imagination landscape. His animals- horses, bison and the like- are extraordinary. He was not the only one to exploit the mythic aspects of the Conquest of the West. I am not sure that narrative would fly today- I mean, it all happened, though perhaps not quite the way it is depicted in the heroic canvases.

But the hell with it. I liked that old narrative better than the one they are peddling today.

It is more than a little ironic that the two galleries are next to one another. Schreyvogel was represented by perhaps five very large paintings. His approach was to capture the moments of collision between Native American and settler, but more particularly the cavalry troopers.

The first painting I saw literally took my breath away. In it, a bold trooper shields a young blonde girl as he rides away from half-naked savages:

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You can feel Director John Ford channeling his inner Schreyvogel in his great film “the Serachers.”

These are larger-than-life works- heroic enough in size to dominate a salon of the Gilded Age of which Schreyvogel was part. They say that he was book-eneded by Remington, who died a couple years before him, and Russell, who came after. Although his gallery is displayed in the room adjacent to that devoted to Remington’s work, the two were involved in a bitter dispute over the historical veracity of his painting “Custer’s Demand.”

No one would be doing work like this anymore, and in fact, given the subject of the body of his work (mostly done in his rooftop studio in Hoboken, NJ, though with frequent research trips to places like the Ute Reservation just overt the mountains to the west).

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I am surprised no one has taken offense at the blatantly martial and blatantly racial component of the paintings. Around the room were images of bold troopers silencing the Indians. The “Silenced War Whoop” is an exemplar of the style:

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(The Silenced War Whoop, Schreyvogel, 1904. On the north wall of the conference room).

There were three more images in the room- originals, I surmise, most of them painted in Schreyvogel’s most prolific period just after the turn of the 20th Century. I could not for the life of me remember his name, after having completely forgotten to do what I normally do in these days of failing short-term memory: take a picture with my smart phone.

I was wracking my brain. A German name, I thought. Starting with a consonant?

I finally went to the Broadmoor site and looked at conference room names and found him. Schreyvogel! Of course! From a family with a lot in common with mine- both families fled Prussia in the 1840s to get away from Militarism, only for the young Charles to become enraptured with the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show.

Wild Bill befriended him, and the legend inspired more legends.

Schreyvogel only sold about a hundred paintings in his short life- blood poisoning nailed him at the age of 48 in 1912. In his prime, he was despised by Remington over the 1904 painting: “Custer’s Demand:

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Remington claimed there were numerous material errors of fact in the painting- which he very publicly trumpeted. For his part, Schrevogel produced documentation from Custer’s daughter and the only surviving officer who had actually been at the meeting to vindicate the veracity of his image. I don’t think that is the New Jersey Palisades in the background, but you never can tell.

Artists!

But I am gratified that I was able to figure it out. Some of the original Schreyvogel paintings have gone for more than a million at auction, including one that was in the estate of Marge Schott. She was reviled as “insensitive” and worse in her time owning the Cincinnati Reds. Oh well. I don’t claim to understand great art, but I do know it when I see it. Coulld those have been the originals on the wall of that conference room at the Broadmoor?

Amazing. And what would Remington have said that Schreyvogel was closest to the entrance?

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Hacked Off

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I am looking out the window of a nice room in a nice hotel in Colorado. I am hacked off. partly in panic and partly in despair. The ducks and the swans on the pond seem unaffected. The mountains are stoic, and the white puffs of clouds drifting across the peaks aloof.

I opened the email account on the iPad while I was still abed. This is a sort of Spring Break, after all, even if it is a latter day version that collides with the last trimester of life. Coffee rather than a cold beer for breakfast, that sort of thing.

I was astonished- no, forget it. There is nothing that is purely astonishing these days, considering the enormity of what we are supposed to accept as matters of fact.

Bemused, maybe, is the better term. Perhaps, having come so recently from the land of dreams, this was just another phantasm. I blinked at the seventy-odd messages, apparently from me, reading: “Undeliverable.”

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I found several of them, all the discouraging ones that sooner or later have grabbed us all- a note from a trusted pal, with a link. The ones from me went like this:

Hi!
Have you already seen it? http://battle.blip.crap.eat me.php

I checked the outgoing folder to see if I had been sleep-typing. I certainly was not going to click on the link- and for your protection, I have scrambled the real one that appeared. Nothing in my record indicated I had sent anything, but going back to the in basket, I saw non-deliveries to addresses that have not been current in a few decades.

OK, OK. I know it is time to lose the AOL account. I joke about it when I give it out these days- my usual line is “Yes, I am that old.”

Still, I was appalled when one of my heroes, General Colin Powell got phished on his private AOL account and some jerk downloaded reams of his personal electronic correspondence. As are we mortals, he is guilty of occasionally acerbic commentary, which perhaps he might have tempered if he knew they were going to be in the papers one day. I kept the stupid account because it is easier to embed pictures of cats doing impossibly cute things.

Or something.

I scrambled around to immediately change the password to the account, the digital equivalent of closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped. Then I tried to figure out what to do.

Naturally, I ran the virus scan again. Nothing there that my software program recognized as a threat. Then came the embarrassing- no, humiliating- series of notes began to come it, clueing me to the obvious: “Hey, looks like you have been hacked.”

It is about the same as being paraded naked through the digital village on a cart. I did some research to see what might have happened. The logical one was that someone was reading along with me, looking invisibly over my shoulder, or perhaps looking at my scowl through the remotely-activated camera on my laptop.

That this should have happened so rapidly on the heels of the disclosure of the HeartBleed security vulnerability made me queasy. If you had not had that heart-stopping moment when you realized that your transactions on many services had been vulnerable to undetected monitoring for nearly two years, you have been living in la-la land.

The watchdog website Mashable compiled a list of the ones that were thoroughly penetrated:

F Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google/Gmail, Yahoo, GoDaddy, Netflix, YouTube, Soundcloud, USAA, Dropbox, WordPress, Health.gov

Whew. What a relief! I was only vulnerable on nine of them. I spent several hours frantically changing passwords to new, stronger ones that I will never remember.

This latest breach made me queasy enough to contact AOL. Perhaps the geriatrics who run the service were aware of a vulnerability that might have permitted someone to access my address book, but in a way that meant only NSA was actually looking at my ravings. I clicked on the “live chat” icon to talk to someone offshore about it. I wondered if the help desk was in the same internet café with the guys who keep telling me that my internet address had been personally selected by Bill Gates for a massive prize, which would be delivered to my bank account if I provided my routing and account numbers.

I waited a long time, long enough to realize that someone had done it to me again, after I changed the password on the account . Either the internet café was short on terminals, or there were more people in trouble than usual. I toggled between accounts to kill time, and eventually the “your inquiry is very important to us, so just sit there like a deer in the headlights and maybe we will get to you.”

Eventually they did:

“Thank you for choosing AOL Live Help. My name is Aljay R. and I’ll be assisting you today.I apologize for the long wait. I appreciate your patience for waiting on the line. Before we start, can I have your full name first?

Jay Are303
Sure. Vic Socotra.

Aljay R.
Pleased to meet you, Vic.

Jay Are303
Thanks, Pleasure is mine. Someone has accessed my complete address book twice today. I changed passwords after discovering each breach, one last night, Mountain Standard time and once this afternoon at around 1500.

Aljay R.
Let me see if I’ve got this right. As I understand, that someone is using your email address to send spam mail. Is that correct?

Jay Are303
Correct.

Aljay R.
Thank you, Vic. I appreciate all the information you have provided . I’m sure we can take care of this. This is not the experience we want you to have. I will do my best to resolve the issue for you.

Jay Are303
Hope so. I will have to deactivate the account if we cannot fix this.

Aljay R.
Did check your Sent Mail box to see if you can locate any outgoing email that you don’t recognize sending from your AOL account?

Jay Are303
I have. There is nothing that appears to be multiple attempts to send spam.

Aljay R.
Perfect! If you DON’T find any spam emails in your Sent Folder. Your account has most likely been spoofed.

Jay Are303
So what do I do about that?

Aljay R.
Email spoofing is a technique that spammers use to send spam without it seeming like the message was from them. The spammer is sending out messages and entering your email address in the From: field. This makes it seem like the spam email is coming from you, even though it isn’t coming from your account or from AOL servers. It’s actually being sent from their email account.

Jay Are303
Then how are they accessing my complete contact list? Some are ancient addresses.

Aljay R.
Contact can be captured in a different way like compromised account, forwarded mails, social media like facebook. Unfortunately, this won’t stop whoever is spoofing your account right now, but it will help secure your account from being compromised in the future.

Jay Are303
Not much help if they already have everything. Looks like I have to shut down AOL, which I have had since the 1980s. That is when it was sort of edgy. Probably before you were born.

Aljay R.
We are instructed not to give out personal information or our physical whereabouts. We recommend that you change your password as soon as possible at account.aol.com to help prevent your account from being compromised or spoofed in the future.

Jay Are303
I have changed it twice today. So what you are saying is that they have all my contacts and can continue to do this indefinitely, right?

Aljay R.
Yes, Vic. We need your help to gather more information about the spammer who impersonated your email address.

Jay Are303
What do you need?

Aljay R.
Please forward us one copy of the email to aol_phish@abuse.aol.com. This helps to ensure that future email from this source will go to your spam folder. Rest assured that by reporting the email as spam you are not blocking or reporting yourself! You are helping us identify the source of the spoof email.

Jay Are303
OK. It will be on the way shortly.

Aljay R.
Those are the steps that you need to perform. You should be all set.

Jay Are303
Thanks, Out here.

Aljay R.
You are most welcome. I enjoyed talking to you and it has been a pleasure assisting you!

Yeah, I thought to myself as the text box shut down. A pleasure for sure. Horses are gone, barn is empty, and this completely sucks. This is what I do most of the day, and someone is screwing around with it besides the NSA. I thought about looking at some YouTube videos or posting something the Tumblr, or maybe checking my account balances on USAA, which I suddenly realize has an auto-deduct from my bank account.

And that was how I paid for my taxes. Oh, crap.

image

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Spring Break

a320
I think I am going to go to the airport- I am not sure which one yet- and take a flight some place. I am done with the resurgent cold. My pals up in Michigan just made the record for snow accumulation, and to cap it all off, they lost power in much of the Metro Detroit area for a couple days.
You would think they would be prepared for it, but this winter is one for the record books. Here in DC they are telling us to bring the plants back in for another day or two- I hope the plants in the Russian Garden next door are all right.
It seems endless. Accordingly, it is time for a change of pace. More from the road, though it is likely to be more sporadic than usual.
Enjoy your Easter weekend, if I may be permitted to recognize a known religious holiday. I hope it doesn’t offend anyone- I would hate to do that.
You know how sensitive everyone is these days. Hahaha
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
Twitter:  @jayare303

Boston Strong

041614-bostonstrong

Ah, the running life! My brother Spike is headed for Boston tomorrow to run the Marathon, his second, I think. I am very proud of him. I was pretty cocky about having completed seven of the 26.2 endurance contests, but while he started his marathon career later than I did, his accomplishments quickly eclipsed my much more modest efforts.

He was not there last year- schedule conflict or something- and I am delighted that he missed the deadly attack, which I was startled to remember was a year ago yesterday.

That was a doubly memorable day. Our pal Mac Showers was laid to rest over at Arlington in one of the great celebrations of his life, and of the craft that hundreds of us shared with him. It was a cloudy day, but temperate. Not like what we had here, with sheets of rain and plummeting temperature so abrupt that I had to bring in the plants from the patio on the near-certainty that the frost would kill them.

We walked somber back from the grave to climb into the cars. I had left the satellite radio on in the Panzer, and the first words we heard when I turned the ignition were of the bombings in Boston. It was a personal affront- I don’t think anyone who has ever plodded the full distance hasn’t had at least a thought of doing it well enough to Qualify for Boston.

It is a mantra. It is that powerful.

We listened in disbelief as we drove to Willow for a gathering to honor Mac’s memory in a way he would have appreciated, but the news was bad, and brought back the dark mood that followed 9/11, when the Pentagon was still burning.

That is what swirls and draws the memories of the hundreds of miles of training runs back, and tinges them with a sense of rage. People work hard to accomplish even one of these races- and for the vast majority of us we will never qualify for something as grand in tradition as Boston.

A pal down in North Carolina is on the path of enlightenment through sweat. She reported that she successfully completed the Hickory Half Marathon last weekend, as I lolled around on the first 80-degree day of spring at the farm. She wrote: “OMG! Hills and heat. Do I need to say more? It was pretty tough — I was so slow and had to walk up the last part of a few hills. But I did it!!!”

I had to smile. Everyone runs their own race, but all the races have something in common when they are done. All have their little challenges, over and above the build-up of lactic acid in the blood, and the burning lungs. Somewhere in there is the legendary “wall,” that thing you hit when the legs begin to get rubbery and you can see nothing except that little circle of gray pavement in front of your feet. i

My first marathon in Honolulu in 1982 taught me a lot. Vaseline on the nipples and a slippery singlet prevents chafing and bleeding. Avoid bleeding through you shoes, if you can. It does get easier, if you have put in your roadwork. I have done them prepared and unprepared, and trust me, prepared is much better.

041614-honolulu

(The 1982 Honolulu Marathon official poster. Wish I still had mine. Broke four hours, which is all I wanted to accomplish. Besides finishing, of course).

Most of the races have an insult in them, just when you are least prepared to deal with it. In Honolulu, it was the flank of Diamond Head that had to be scaled on the Kamehameha Highway, about two miles from the finish line. At Boston, it is the fearsome rise of Heartbreak Hill at the twenty-mile mark, when the acid is in the blood and the quadriceps are aching from the downhills of the course leading up to it.

The most insulting in my experience is at the end of the Marine Corps Marathon in Virginia and the District. It is one of the smallest hills, but it comes at 26 miles, the little rise on which the Iwo Jima Memorial sits is just that last little decimal point of a mile- and it feels straight up hill to the finish line.

The Huffington Post has 26 excellent reasons not to run a marathon- it is a little snarky in tone but true enough, and worth a look:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/why-not-shouldnt-run-marathon_n_4171186.html

But that is just a laundry list of excuses to sit it out. I think I spent too much time running on the steel of the flight decks of the ships I rode, or on the concrete in Hawaii and Jacksonville and here in DC. I don’t have much left in the way of cartilage in my knees, and after tearing out my left quadriceps, I doubt if I will ever be able to run again.

But I don’t regret any of that in the slightest. It is something special to wake up in the morning, and realize you could run to the office in the morning if it came to that.

Andy what my brother is doing this coming Monday is the culmination of intense personal discipline and the raw animal joy of motion. And it is harnessed to something else. No one is going to intimidate us, and no one is going to stop the Boston Marathon.

I am very proud of everyone who is going to run or is going to root the runners on up Heartbreak Hill. I am particularly proud of my brother. This year, he is Boston Strong.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303