| A prayer from Depression |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|12:02 pm] |
Oh Resurrected Lord
Shining with the Glory of the Father
And seated at the Right Hand of God
Please hear me as I call to you from the depths of my sorrow.
You who bore all the pain and shame of the world in death
Hear me as I call to you from own pain and shame
I have lost sight of Your light
My eyes are overwhelmed by darkness
And my heart is heavy with dread
The taste of life is ashes in my mouth
And death opens its arms in greeting
Deliver me from my extremity, Oh Lord
Open my eyes to see again your light
Fill my heart with gratitude for your blessings
And my soul with the sweetness of Grace
Remind me of your Love
and give me the strength to return to the world you have made
Rejoicing in your mercy
Fill my mouth with praises to Your name
And my days with works of Your will
So raised with You, I may never return
To the emptiness and despair of self alone.
Amen |
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| Iwo Jima Reunion |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|02:39 pm] |
On Friday, February 20, I attended a 3-day reunion of survivor's from the battle of Iwo Jima, a reunion that also included survivors of the USS Indianapolis and members of the "Lost Battalion", along with a scattering of other WWII veterans. It was a remarkable weekend, and it has taken some time for me to gather the perspective necessary to write about it.
I was there because my father-in-law was a pilot in VMTB 242, a Marine Air squadron of TBM Avengers which took part in the preliminary bombing of the island before the invasion. After the airfield was taken and Mt. Suribachi cleared, half of his squadron--his half--were moved to the island to fly close ground support missions for the attacking Marines--the Avenger being heavily armored against light arms fire and capable of delivering a wide variety of munitions (considering what was available at the time). The primary weapon that they wanted to use were 5" rockets, 8 of which could be mounted under the wings of a TBM. In the event, these rockets proved to be to inaccurate to be too useful against the tunnels occupied by the Japanese defenders. but the four .50 caliber machine guns and other capabilities of the aircraft were put to good use. Three of the squadron's airplanes were destroyed by Japanese artillery; a number of the squadron members were killed by artillery fire or infiltrators.
A total of 31 Iwo Jima survivors attended, along with 6 or 8 survivors from the USS Indianapolis. I never got a count of "Lost Battalion" members, and I think none may have come this year.
There may not be many Lost Battalion members left; there weren't a lot of them in the first place, and a number of people from the other groups who had attended the previous year were unable to attend because of poor health, and a number were memorialized.
There are any number of attitudes a person can take toward a veteran; in this venue there was a pretty small range. Love, respect, honor, and pride... mixed with grief, sorrow, and an unavoidable sense of mortality.
One of the most remarkable moments for me was on Saturday morning. Roughly 250 or 300 members of the Patriot Guard, joined by a Boy Scout Troop and others came to the, lining the corridors leading from the lobby to the meeting hall, shoulder to shoulder, standing at attention, holding full sized American flags.
The first stretch of the corridor was about 40 yards long, and it was an impressive sight. I accompanied my father-in law down the line, and I watched him straighten his arthritic spine, compressed by dive bombing and a near miss by a 14-inch shell. Head up, shoulders back, he walked down the line not so much for himself but for the other members of his squadron; he is one of two left alive.
All around me I saw the fierce, protective love and pride of veterans for each other; the men against the wall from both Gulf Wars, from Viet Nam, Korea... and each old vet pulled himself erect as he approached the corridor, determined to honor those who could not be there.
As we neared the corner I saw the corridor was sill lined, and could see that it extended beyond the next turn as well--in all about 120 yards of corridor lined by men and women standing silently, respectfully, shoulder-to-shoulder. Weekend bikers in fancy expensive leathers next to scruffy riders in denim colors and worn boots, all standing to attention, all silent as a sentry.
Tears streaked many of the faces, and my own eyes filled and overflowed; it was, simply, overwhelming.
I stood outside with one of the Indianapolis survivors and listened to his story--5 days in the water seeing and hearing his shipmates taken by sharks and wondering when his turn would come... and later, why they left him alone. He found out when he was rescued; he was covered head to toe with a thick layer of fuel oil. He also told me about his post war life, words tumbling out like a landslide. Nothing in life was worse than those 5 days, but nothing in life ever brought him a sense of peace or ease at being alive. And in his age, he wondered why he was left alive, even now, when so many had gone before.
On Saturday night we heard from a Japanese who had been training to become a Kamikaze; his life was saved because the war ended two weeks before he was scheduled to take off in his flying bomb. At the end of his speech he sang the Imperial Japanese Army's dirge for all the dead, ending with a sharp military bow, holding it to thunderous applause from men whose hatred long since turned to sorrow enough to share with even the most fearsome of former enemies.
Memorials abounded--a general service for all who died on the Island; a general service for the survivors who died in the last year, and a special service for the family of a Medal of Honor Recipient who died recently.
I watched a pair of 84 year old buglers playing taps. One of them had to stop; both had tears streaming down their lined and weary faces.
I watched aging children and mature grandchildren watching over their fathers and grandfathers, the young hawks soaring protectively over the old eagles.
I was proud to be there, in the presence of men who endured what only other veterans can understand. |
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| How things have changed. |
[Jan. 28th, 2009|05:16 pm] |
Years ago--never mind how many--A newsstand was a place you went to that had a ton of magazines, paperback books, and newspapers, plus cigars and other junk. Some of them--by no means all of them--had a little room guarded by a curtain, behind which a person might skulk and buy what we didn't even know to call porn; they were just dirty books and magazines. People who did so often bought a newspaper or other magazines to hide whatever they might have purchased behind the curtain.
Today I stopped at a newsstand to get a magazine I don't subscribe to that had something in it which interested me. These days, I find, a newsstand is a porn shop that has a smaller section in which you can find magazines, many of which have no nudity or other adult content at all.
Imagine that!
I got the magazine--Model Railroader, if you must know--and picked up a copy of Mad Magazine as well, which I haven't seen for a long time, it seems. (It too has changed!)
I wondered for a moment if I ought to buy some porn to hide my mundane purchases...but I decided to flaunt my unorthodox tastes. and purposefully put the covers of both magazines facing outwards. I read kid humor and model railroad hobby magazines on occasion, and I'm not ashamed for the world to know it!
Please don't tell my parents. |
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| WANT!!! |
[Jan. 22nd, 2009|08:07 am] |
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http://www.albion-swords.com/swords/albion/late/sword-lady-vivamus.htm. |
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| Difficult Days |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|11:07 am] |
I don't seem to have the personal bandwidth for LJ right now. My e-mail is accessible to friends on my user info page if you want to direct me to a post you're proud of or think I would be interested in or uplifted by. Or if you just want to know what's going on.
The hiatus will probably last a while longer, though I am taking steps to try and open things up a bit.
blessings and thanks
HMB |
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| We're Back |
[Sep. 19th, 2008|05:40 pm] |
Exhausted. Worried. A long and difficult road lies ahead.
Thanks to all for prayers and good wishes and affection.
Blessings!
HMB |
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| prayer request |
[Sep. 13th, 2008|07:23 pm] |
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Dealing with a family crisis right now. Prayers appreciated. |
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| Journey To The Center Of The Earth in 3-D |
[Jul. 25th, 2008|08:58 pm] |
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Finally got around to going to the movies. Full reaction behind the cut, but one thing I can tell you is that this is not your father's 3-D. Or even your older brother's.
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| Journey to the Center of the Earth |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|09:05 pm] |
I read Journey To The Center Of the Earth this weekend in anticipation of the homage movie coming out July 17th. I had thought that I had not read it, but I am no longer so sure. Parts of it were very familiar, and not from the various movies that have been made over the years. Other parts were distinctly unfamiliar, so I suspect that I read an abridged version some time during my youth, and didn't hang on to many memories of the book.
This was Verne's second novel, as it happens, and I think he was still finding his voice, though it was a big hit at the time, as was his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
The edition I read was listed as "complete and unabridged"; it was vague as to who did the translation. I note the narrator is named Harry, which is the name given to the narrator in what the Wikipedia entry says is an abridged and altered translation from 1871, the original being named Axel. So I may not have read the full book even now... and any abridged version I read in my youth must have been abridged from this already cut and altered book.
If that is the case, it is no wonder I don't have any strong memories of it.
What surprised me most was how whiny Harry the narrator is. He's terrified through most of the story, and bears it badly, complaining, giving way to panic, and wallowing in his own imagined death time after time. It makes him a tedious and unsympathetic character to me. More than once I found myself growling "grow a pair, boy, and get your whiny ass in gear".
Harry is an Englishman, and his less than heroic character (in this translation) reminds me of something I read a couple of years ago that posited that Captain Nemo was intended to be a deposed Indian monarch, and that the tyrant nation whose ships he sank at every opportunity flew the British flag. The article cited some evidence than Verne--being French, of course--bore no excess love for the English, and that this colored his writing.,
Harry's uncle,--Professor Hardwigg in this translation; Lindenbrock in the original-- is German...and is almost superhumanly optimistic and stoic in the face of danger and disaster. The contrast is striking, as is the nephew's reaction to his uncle's temperament.
As for the story itself, the translation I have is considerably less eventful than the movies which have been made from the book--but Verne wasn't writing for our jaded masses, who want more faster than is typical for a 19th century novel. Again, I suspect my translation as suffering; there was less detail and fewer action sequences than in 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. Of course that book was written 10 years later, and Verne by then was well into his stride... and perhaps feeling the pressure to always top his last effort,. as , indeed, many writers do today.
Apparently the original had a lot of argument between the narrator and his uncle about various scientific theories about the interior of the earth, and these were used as devices for explication of what they were seeing. There were passages somewhat like this, but they were short, and I suspect possibly truncated. I can see why, in once sense; debates over scientific controversies that are long since settled are not the stuff of which gripping dialog is made. But it would have been nice to read, perhaps.
I was familiar with most of the references to the science of the time, having made an autodidactic study of volcanology over the last 5 or 10 years, and it was intriguing to read of the views of people I think of as old explorers being treated as new and exciting, especially as many of those ideas did not hold up through the 20th century. This is not a criticism; the major problems of volcanic mechanisms could not be solved until other crucial elements of geophysics were in place. The problem of lava, for instance, was intractable; all the information available to scientists at the time did not lend itself to an explanation of how rock would melt and become fluid enough to move through the crust in some places and not in others. The pressure on hot rock below the surface seemed to make it plastic, not liquid... so how lava was generated and managed to come to the surface was a genuine mystery, and theories proposed to account for it ranged from the ingenious to the bizarre. (See Haraldur Sigurdsson's Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions for an excellent account of the struggle to make sense of this most spectacular geological event. It's worth the effort to track down, and if you have any interest in geology or volcanism, is well worth owning. I go back to it for sheer enjoyment occasionally--even if you're not much on geology, it's a very good look at how science progresses. )
But I digress...
The appeal of the book goes well beyond forests of giant mushrooms or prehistoric beasts--or even close encounters with lava, though something about molten rock adds to the appeal of the story line, I think. I'm not sure the story would have had the same impact if it began in a limestone cavern instead of an extinct volcano. I know that in my own experience, there is something very different about clambering down into the crater of a dormant volcano and looking at the lava plug stopping the vent at the bottom of the bowl that sends a shiver up my spine that is just not present when I walk through the arching entrance to Carlsbad Caverns, for instance.
I also find it interesting that hey never have to crawl through any constricted spaces; the entire adventure takes place with the characters standing and walking about more or less normally.
There is something archetypal about journeying deep into the earth. The possibility of finding a secret way to penetrate far past the ordinary depths of a cave or a mine seems to resonate with people. I think one of the reasons thee story has worn so well, and keeps getting remade into movies and TV shows is the resonance it has with inner journeys.
at which point my firm belief that one size does not fit all takes hold... and i leave you to your own explorations.
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| Outer Space |
[Jun. 24th, 2008|11:33 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | reflective | ] |
My grandfather bought me a 30 power refracting telescope for my 8th birthday. I spent hours that summer focused on the moon, leaning more than a little about the earth's rotation as I constantly readjusted the position of the tube to keep the object of my interest in the field.
I learned a lot about the moon, too, in the context of what there was to know in 1960, I firmly believed that one day I would walk on the moon myself. Out loud, all I would say is that we would reach our closest neighbor. Inside, I yearned to go myself, and dreamed of the day when lunar passage was close to routine.
The adults around me hooted--"Not in our lifetimes" was what polite adults said; "Not in our (or even your) lifetimes said the less polite. My dreams were obviously fantastic, unrealistic... and to my mother and stepfather, even a little worrying. Clearly I had trouble telling reality from my imagination. (This prejudice of theirs caused me no end of grief-- especially the morning when I woke up early and saw an honest-to-God escaped mental patient standing in the doorway of my bedroom. My waking scared her off-- it was an older woman--so nobody believed me for three or four days until she came back and... but I digress.)
I have written elsewhere ( http://aitchmark.livejournal.com/1706.html ) about standing between two men whose memories ranged from the first use of an aircraft for military reconnaissance to walking on the face of the moon. I never got to the moon myself, but I did get to spend a little time with someone who did, and it was a most gratifying experience.
Over the last several years I have been collecting children's and young adult science fiction--space fiction might be a more accurate term-- from the 50s and early 60s. It's the stuff that stoked my dreams in those days. On the whole, it has been a gratifying experience. Some of the books have turned out to be embarrassingly dated and hokey; but a surprising number of them have held up in pretty satisfactory ways.
Science was generally (though not always) secondary in these books. They were about exploring, adventuring, and looking beyond the horizon to what might some day be. For me, especially, they seemed to be about hope. Looking back, I think I had hope mixed up with a need to escape...but my hunch is that's not an uncommon confusion, perhaps as common among those who are 80 as it is among those who are 8. In any case, I am fairly well convinced at this point that the only journey I will take off this planet is the journey we all take eventually. There is Hope in this as well, but it is a different order of thing than what I felt looking through the telescope and straining to learn the features of the moon's landscape with the aid of books and illustrations.
But I digress again. I have enough of these books now to write a series of reviews/reflections on them, if anybody is interested. Please comment if you are among those anybodies. |
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| Odd Hours |
[Jun. 15th, 2008|08:27 am] |
I read Dean Koontz's new Odd Thomas book, Odd Hours, on Saturday. I ripped through it because I like the Odd Thomas books, and I was waiting for some software to compile so I had some time on my hands. I will probably re-read it, perhaps re-reading the first three books in the series first to give myself a better continuity for the story.
I think it's better than Brother Odd, but it is also the start of what promises be an epic. Koontz has said he likes Odd Thomas, and thinks it will take 7 books or so to tell his story, so this makes me relatively confident in the perception.
For one thing, a new character is introduced who, on the whole, doesn't really have all that much to do with the primary story in Odd Hours, but who will definitely play a large role in any further books. Ot at the least, the next book. There are also elements that point to the idea Odd is part of a team that is nucleating around this new character.
Once again Koontz interjects the angelic into the book, and hints at the demonic behind some events and characters.
So hunker down. It's going to be a longer road than a book or two, I think, and I'm really looking forward to the journey. It isn't Shakespeare, but it's very satisfying to read, and there's some worthwhile moral thinking going on under the storytelling itself. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 5th, 2008|09:28 am] |
Hope is the thing with feathers
--Emily Dickinson
And life is a room full of cats.
--Aitchmark
Discuss among yourselves. |
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| wonderfullness |
[May. 24th, 2008|09:18 pm] |
I am a 56-year old adult male, just dripping with dignity. It is totally beneath that dignity to be on the edge of squee.
Only... Dinosaurs! Red Hot Lava! Stepping Stones In Microgravity !
All in 3D!
http://www.journey3dmovie.com/ ;
Of course it has virtually nothing to do with the book except for the most tenuous relationship. But it has Dinosaurs! Red Hot Lava! Stepping Stones In Microgravity ! All in 3D!
I'm just sayin'... |
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| Simply, from the beginning |
[May. 13th, 2008|11:27 am] |
The key insight of economics in the second half of the 20th century is that a free and fair market is a huge distributed computational engine. A price reached in such a market is the result of thousands of unseen calculations and computations. The computations are recursive--that is, any change in supply or demand ripples through the marketplace, adjusting prices of every priced item affected by the change, and then feeding back the multiple price changes to each interaction of supply and demand which has any dependency on the original supply/demand change.
A key lesson from computer science, one of the basics: garbage in equals garbage out. If you input bad data, the best computer in the world will give you bad results.
Combine these two insights. Anything from outside that market that changes a market price will work to distort all the value calculations that depend on the tampered with price.
The more tampering that takes place, the bigger and more widely spread the distortions will be. The collapse of command economies, time and time again, is proof of this.
So why bring up the basics one more time? Because we continue to ignore the simple realities. All the economic difficulty obsessing the press right now, from the mortgage and credit "crisis" to energy and food scarcity, stem from cumulative governmental tampering with price, supply, and demand.
And what is the political response to the problems this tampering has created? Fervent promises to do more tampering!
It isn't enough to tell people that tampering not only doesn't work, but that it makes things worse in the long run. We've got to be clear on *why*, and we really have to be firmly consistent.
So practice. Remember. Explain.
Even so, it's almost enough to make me vote Libertarian, sometimes. |
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| Happy Birthday to me? |
[May. 12th, 2008|09:16 am] |
I turned 56 this morning. As periodically happens, this year my birthday falls on the Monday after Mother's Day. It was a Monday after Mother's Day 56 years ago as well.
Neither of my parents lived to be 56, so I guess this is a milestone. On the other hand, the two grandparents I know about both lived into their 90s. So if longevity skips a generation, I've still got lots of years to do something useful with.
Cheers!
HMB |
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| A moderately meaningless update |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|08:03 pm] |
I have been ill. Again. This is annoying. Today, in addition to everything else, I got yet another tube in my ear.
I figure if my ear is going to behave like a 5-year old, and my gut is going to go all geriatric, then some part of me ought to act like a 15-year old.
This, apparently, is why I've been letting my hair grow out.
I know what at least three of you were thinking. Shame on you! |
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| Oh, yeah.... |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|03:09 pm] |
I've been offline since Thursday due to a hard disk crash. May take me a while to catch up. As do many others, if there's a post you want to make sure I don't miss, please let me know!
HMB |
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| Ah well.... |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|03:03 pm] |
The nicest rejection I've ever gotten:
I reckon I'll take his advice! |
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| Early news was not bad news, thanks be to God... |
[Feb. 6th, 2008|11:15 am] |
So I got home last night and found my SASE from <SNIP> Publishing in the mailbox. Thicker than a single page rejection, but WAY too soon to be good news.
It turned out to be a handwritten note from <SNIP> telling me his theology editor and review team were evaluating my sample essays and book concept, as was he, and thanking me for the submission. Promised to get back to me before the end of the month.
The rest was promotional material from the company.
Well, I've never gotten a note like that before. Thought about it for a minute and decided he is just a well-mannered man--a pleasure to encounter in publishing!
Anyhow I have not been rejected after a cursory look. That, is good news, I guess, as long as I don't get crazy.
M
later--- edited name of company out after posting rejection. Not sure why. |
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