I Remember...

There is a thread on the Hero Games Discussion Boards called "When I Was a Kid...." Here's my entry:

- I remember waiting in a long line with my friends to see a movie called "Star Wars". I hadn't heard much about it, except from one classmate who had already seen it. She said it was "pretty good, except for the murder." When I saw it, I was amazed. It was a life-changing experience.

- I remember watching Star Trek reruns on channel 2 after the nightly news was finished--if my parents let me stay up at late.

- I remember that we had seven channels to watch on TV: 2, 4, 5 (out of Cheyenne, so it was a little fuzzy sometimes), 6 (PBS), 7, 9, and 12 (also PBS).

- I remember Tom Baker as The Doctor. I also remember Peter Davison as The Doctor, though I remember him more from "All Creatures Great and Small".

- As a cure for boredom, I remember that my Mom had me read a book called "How to Eat Fried Worms". It's the first book I remember reading and really enjoying. I've enjoyed reading ever since.

- I remember being mad that President Carter cancelled our country's participation in the Olympics in 1980.

- I remember nuclear disaster drills in school. (I grew up less than 10 miles from a nuclear power plant.)

- I remember being in Spanish class in high school one morning when one of my classmates walked in late and told us (rather nonchalantly, I thought, although I didn't know what 'nonchalant' meant at the time) that the Space Shuttle had blown up. I also remember going to a scholarship awards dinner that same night at Colorado School of Mines.

- I remember having an AM radio from Radio Shack that included a handlebar mount so that I could listen to it on my bike.

- I remember being in elementary school the first year that the Broncos made the playoffs. It was a big, big deal.

- I remember being in the south stands at the old Mile High Stadium with my Dad the first time the Broncos ever beat the Dallas Cowboys.

- I remember, the summer after I turned 16, driving with a few of my friends to Wyoming to buy 'illegal' fireworks. We were terrified that we were going to get caught or that someone we knew would see us and turn us over to the police. I also remember that when we went into the store, the very first person we saw was Mr. Palmer--my high school chemistry teacher.

- I remember learning to write computer programs on a TI 99/4A. We had several of them at school (middle school), and my parents even bought one for us to use at home. It had an adapter switch so that we could use our (one) TV as a monitor. If I wanted to save a program, I saved it using a cassette recorder.

- I remember having to re-learn programming in high school because the high school didn't have TI 99/4As. It had Apple IIes.

- I remember learning how to drive on a 1/2-ton International Harvester pickup truck. It did not have power steering, power brakes, or air conditioning. It did have a manual transmission (a 'stick') with a really stiff clutch. It also had an AM radio that got about four stations.

- I remember driving a 1971 Jeep Wagoneer in high school. It was a great car, but it got terrible gas mileage. I remember using pliers to change the hubs on the front wheels from two wheel drive to four wheel drive. I remember only ever needing help once getting the Jeep unstuck (when I high centered it on a snowdrift). Otherwise, you could just shift it into 4WD Low and you were good. Perhaps most amusingly, I remember a stripe of faux wooden paneling down the side. When it got faded, my mom went out with a can of wood stain and made it look like wood again.

Slightly More Interesting than Watching Grass Grow

When I mow the lawn, I like to think of my yard in sectors. It makes the sometimes Herculean task seem easier (and more rewarding) when I can say to myself, "Alpha Sector secure, moving on to Beta Sector."

Alpha Sector is the northern half of the back lawn.  It is the most physically demanding sector because it is the largest and the steepest.  It's also where the grass tends to grow the fastest, and there's a tricky acute corner where the north and east fences meet (right at the top of a hill, no less). I usually mow this part of the lawn first. I usually have to empty the bag after 1½-2 circumnavigations of Alpha Sector—when the bag will stay on the mower, that is. It hasn't done that very well lately. I guess it's a good thing we own a rake.

Beta Sector is the southern half of the back lawn. It's not as large or as steeply hilled as Alpha, but it is challenging for two reasons. First, there's a low-hanging box elder tree in the southeast corner of the lawn that's hard to mow around. Second, not far from that tree is a swingset/slide unit we got from Mr. and Mrs. Lumberjack last summer.  Aside from these two obstacles, though, it's not bad. I need to use a trimmer to clear the grass under the playset, though; it's boxed in, so there is literally no way to get the mower under it.

Gamma Sector is the side/front lawn. It is the smallest and flattest part of the yard and is separated from Alpha and Beta Sectors by a tall wooden fence.  Due to the layout of the circle where we live, Gamma Sector essentially consists of two connected triangles. The upper triangle (next to the house) is larger and pretty much flat. The lower triangle (next to the driveway) is smaller, generally gets less sun, and is more sloped. This is the easiest part of the lawn to mow, and I usually save it for last.

This time last year, we didn't even have a lawn. We had flooding in our basement about a year and a half ago due to a burst sprinkler pipe. They ended up having to dig up and seal the foundation to fix the problem. This pretty much trashed the yard, and there wasn't time (or money, apparently) to put in new sod at that time—winter was coming, and the cold would have killed the new grass before it could take hold. So we waited until spring...and then until summer...and then we waited some more. When our 'yard' was full of waist-high weeds at the height of fire season, the landlords finally did something about it. The new lawn looked amazing.

The lawn is looking a little ragged right now. I mowed it on Thursday, and parts of the lawn are starting to look dry and brown. That's because we've had temperatures in the 90s for the past week and a half, and the landlady still hasn't had anyone come out and turn on the sprinklers. I've been spot-watering for the past few days, but our lawn is about a fifth of an acre, so there's only so much we can do with a hose and a rotary sprinkler head. The guy was supposed to come and turn on the sprinklers yesterday or today. We'll see, I guess.

Meditations upon the Classic Blunders

Once upon a time, there was a turtle who was about to swim across a river. As he started to wade in, he heard a small voice saying, "If you're going to cross the river, let me ride across on your back too."

The turtle looked and found that the small voice belonged to a scorpion. "No," the turtle said. "If I let you ride on my back, you will sting me and I will die."

"I won't sting you," promised the scorpion.  "We both want to get to the other side of the river. If I sting you, I won't make it across either. It's in my own best interest not to sting you."

"But you will," replied the turtle. "It is your nature. You make promises now, but when the time comes, I know that you will sting me."

The conversation went on like this for a while, and at length, the scorpion convinced the turtle that it would not sting him. Reluctantly, the turtle allowed the scorpion to climb onto his back, waded into the river, and began to swim across.

As the opposite shore began to come into view, the scorpion stung the turtle.

The venom spread quickly, and the turtle, already beginning to slip into the water, cried out, "Why?! Why have you done this to me? Now we are both going to drown! Why?"

The scorpion simply shrugged and said, "Welcome to the Middle East."

--

This story is the first thing I thought of when I heard that our nation is going to start supplying weapons and support to anti-government rebels in Syria.

The hostility of the current Syrian government toward our nation and toward our allies and interests in the region is well documented. But I'm not convinced that overthrowing (or helping to overthrow) that government is the answer. We have no guarantee that the government that replaces it will be any better than—or even as good as—the current one.

We all got excited about the Arab Spring movement a couple of years ago. Has it really helped? Has it resulted in more enlightened governments, greater recognition of human rights, and greater safety and stability in the region? In Egypt, at least, the answer seems to be 'No'.  The Egyptian movement just replaced one oppressive government with a slightly different oppressive government.  There's already talk of another overthrow movement.

Do we expect the overthrow of the current Syrian regime to end differently? If so, why?

Back in the 1980s, we as a nation sent weapons and support to Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen combat Soviet invaders. We saw them as the lesser of the two evils. But the Afghani Mujahideen evolved into the Taliban. Our investment in defeating Communism in western Asia came back and bit us in the butt.  It's a classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, or as Terry Goodkind calls it, Wizard's Second Rule: "The greatest harm can result from the best intentions."

Do we expect the overthrow of the current Syrian regime to end differently? If so, why?

Our current political leadership was elected largely on American discontent with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that same government wants to throw us into the middle of a civil war in Syria? Where's the outrage now? Where are the protests, the vitriolic commentaries from the mainstream media, the celebrities speaking out against our involvement in other nations' internal affairs?

To me, as an American citizen, it comes down to this: There are too many people in that part of the world, and especially too many in positions of power, who value American deaths more than they value their own lives.  There is no way to have a productive relationship—political, military or otherwise—with people like this.

I hope that this decision does not lead us into a land war in Asia—or worse yet, another terrorist attack on our own soil in twenty or thirty years.