One More Thing To Worry About

"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." ~ P. J. Plauger

In late May North Korea tested a nuclear device.

A May 31 story by Time journalist Robert Baer began, "It's not what we know about rogue states and their nuclear bombs that should scare us — it's what we don't know. North Korea's test of a nuclear device on Monday may not have come as a surprise to Washington, but only in the sense that Washington knew Pyongyang was defiant enough to set one off. Beyond that, truth be told, Washington is completely in the dark about North Korea's intentions. It can only expect the worse and hope for the better."

Then there's the nuclear activity in Iran. In recent speeches President Obama has defended the right of Iran to have nuclear power, despite fears in some camps that they are simultaneously developing nuclear weapons. Some paint this picture with very dark pigments as if it were something new, but remember that it was the U.S. that helped the Shah develop nuclear power during its "Atoms For Peace" program in the 1950's. This was long before the Ayatollah threw out the Western blasphemers during the Carter era.

I do not know what to think about the North Korea news. The news that did scare me last week was that the Taliban army was approaching Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. It's hard, from this distance to know what these news accounts mean. Pakistan's President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari states that it is a real threat only if the West does not help Pakistan keep democracy stable over there.*

In other words, send money. Are we being extorted? Is this a bribe? "Help our country and you will be able to sleep better at night." That's what it sounds like to me.

Then there are those Pakistanis who are still bitter that they lost their three wars with India. Most Americans don't even remember those wars because two (1965 and 1971) were during our own Viet Nam distraction. Today both nations are armed with nukes. And with the Taliban army apparently eyeballing the Pakistan arsenal, there really might be something here to worry about.

For now, I have plenty of other things on my plate, and there's nothing I can do about it anyways. It kind of makes you wonder how many other threats there are out there that we don't have a clue about.

* "Nukes could fall into hands of Taliban if democracy fails" HinduTimes Online

The Bet

SHORT STORY MONDAY

"Don't tell me the moon was shining; show me the glint of light on the broken glass." ~Anton Chekhov

This week, instead of sharing more of my own fiction, I wanted to introduce you to one of my own favorite short story writers. One of the great writers of all time, especially noted for his plays, was the short story writer Anton Chekhov. In addition to being a master wordsmith, he was a keen observer of the daily drama of being human. Hence his stories overflow with insight, pathos and the comic.

Chekhov made his living as a doctor, so I can't figure out how he could have been so prolific, producing countless volumes of short stories, in addition to the several major plays, all which must have been enormously time consuming to rehearse and produce. He died at age 44.

I myself went through a "Chekhov period" in which I sought to put my hands on as many volumes of stories as I could find. I remember laughing out loud at some of these.

For the record, literary critics mark him as one of the most significant writers of the 19th century, and certainly on the "top ten" of any list of short story writers.

This story, The Bet, is one of my all time personal favorites. I have often said that if I ever assembled an anthology of short stories, this would be included in that book.

The Bet
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life. "I don't agree with you," said their host the banker. "I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?"

"Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they both have the same object - to take away life. The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to."

Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty. When he was asked his opinion, he said: "The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at all."

A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man: "It's not true! I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years."

"If you mean that in earnest," said the young man, "I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years."

"Fifteen? Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two million!"

"Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!" said the young man.

I urge you to finish the story here. It's a quick read with a wonderful payoff.

An Inexpensive Car That Gets 50 MPG

“Question the unquestionable.” ~ Ratan Tata

One of my biggest complaints with the direction the U.S. auto industry has gone these past many decades is that they just don’t seem focused on one thing that really matters to a lot of people: reduced cost. Not only are the cars expensive, but they are enormously expensive to fix. Poor people can’t even afford the insurance, let alone the car payments.

The new initiatives to produce vehicles which have a lesser environmental impact (environmental cost) still don't address this consumer need. It appears to be a basic assumption that people ought to be willing to shell out more for greener vehicles, as if the two goals are mutually exclusive.

It frustrates me to hear about a proposed battery powered car that requires a $6,000 replacement battery at 60,000 miles. This is just too outrageous. Of course when the executives who make auto manufacturing decision get multi-million dollar bonuses, it’s no small wonder they are out of touch with what the average Wal-Mart employee can afford.

That is why Ratan Tata’s dream was such a breath of fresh air. If you think poor Americans have a hard time being able to afford a car, think about what poor Chinese or Indians or Egyptians can afford. So it was that Ratan Tata in 2003 declared he would build a car for the masses. For this 2008 achievement, Time magazine made Tata one the Top 100 men of the year.

Ratan Tata’s dream, a small car for the teeming millions, has been unveiled. Tata Motors wheeled out the world's cheapest car, priced at 100,000 rupees (2,500 dollars).

A two cylinder 623 cc, 33 horsepower rear mounted, all aluminum, multi-point fuel injection petrol engine can power the car to top speeds of 105 kilometres per hour (65 miles per hour).

The snub-nosed car keeps in the tradition of the Fiat 500, Nissan Micra and the Smart with 3.1 metres (10.23 feet) long, 1.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres high. Tata Nano can seat four to five people and still give you a fuel efficiency of somewhere close to 20 kilometres per litre, or 50 miles per gallon.

Tata Nano Exceeds Indian regulatory requirements on pollution and can meet strict Euro IV emission standards. In terms of overall pollutants, Tata says the car is better than two-wheelers manufactured in India currently.

Tata Nano also exceeds current regulatory requirements with a strong passenger compartment, crumple zones, intrusion resistant doors, seat belts, strong seats and anchorage. Story source here

This latter requirement, that the car be safe in addition to low cost/high mpg, is the real feature, since it really is possible to improve miles per gallon by removing the car's body altogether. Not very practical. As E.F. Schumacher noted, small really can be beautiful.

According to one mechanic I recently spoke with, Detroit automakers have dug in their heels against foreign imports like the Nano and China's Chery, a $5,000 car which also gets 50 miles to the gallon. He said politics has been the barrier to inexpensive cars in America. We've been pushed by power brokers, not possibility thinkers, into the position we're in.

The cover story of this month's Wired magazine details changes that are needed in Detroit in order for the next generation of automobiles to get traction. The top down "control" mindset stifles competition and creative solutions for many of the problems automakers have made for themselves. You can read Charles C. Mann’s piece, “Beyond Detroit: On the Road to Recovery, Let the Little Guys Drive,” here.

Much more can be said, but for now there's plenty here to chew on.

Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.

Playing For Pizza

His books have sold over 250 million copies. For this reason alone literary critics might be unable to call him a "great" writer. His work is simply too accessible, too readable, too much fun. In point of fact, he knows how to tell a story that connects so as to keep readers fully engaged.

I've read a few Grisham books, his claim to fame being the legal thriller genre. Who doesn't enjoy this genre made famous by Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason? Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent is likewise gripping, and dripping with the legal drama that keeps pages turning.

So it took me by surprise to find Grisham tackling the subject of Italian football. What's more, the story begins with the Cleveland Browns, my first and only love in football, though the central character's a quarterback whose claim to fame is as Cleveland's greatest goat, not star. (Echoes of Ernest Byner, for whom I momentarily feel pity.) In fact, the poor Rick Dockery is possibly the NFL's greatest goat. At least that is the reputation he earns as his prima dona quarterback lifestyle crashes beneath a heap of linebackers.

And finally, the clincher event that made passing on the book near impossible... it takes place in the vicinity of some people I have recently begun to fall in love with, in Northern Italy. This statement needs further embellishment.

Earlier this may I received an unexpected email from Mario Monasterolo, who it turns out has become utterly fascinated with capturing the history of his region. Of special interest are the personal stories of old timers whose memories reflect the rich vast past in ways that history books often fail to capture.

Through our correspondence I learned that Mario had been utterly fascinated with my father-in-law's book, especially as it touched upon Italy, because of the unpretentious and down-to-earth observations of an young man with fresh eyes who recorded his impressions without an eye to impressing editors, but simply for his passion of preserving memories.

A brief introduction to Mario: When I was about forty, I began working as a professional in a new and growing sector of our region: historic-cultural heritage safeguard, and its promotion through tourism. I got in strong touch with our wonderful territory on a regional scale and I got to know its history from the point of view of the smaller towns. Torino and Piemonte were industrial areas (they are still now) which had forgotten their past. Cultural heritage was considered of little importance till twenty years ago: now it’s enjoying growing attention, tourism is growing, too, also thanks the Olympic Winter Games 2006, and Piemonte is considered a national leader as far as safeguard and promotion of cultural heritage are concerned. Not ‘cause of me, naturally! I’m just a very small... ant!

Well, this is one "ant" we have grown to love, and certainly he is one more reason we're falling in love with Italy.

John Grisham fell in love with Italy, too. He was doing research in Bologna for a 2005 thriller caller The Broker, and whether it was the food, the wine, the countryside or the whole mix, his heart had been stolen.

This is not the book I expected. And the impression I get is that the food, the music, the charm of the people, the Italian countryside you experience if you ever get a chance to go will exceed anything your imagination attempts to conjure up if you get a chance to take in this boot-shaped land that plunges deep into the Mediterranean. I challenge anyone to read this book without a longing for the food Grisham so wonderfully describes when our hero Rick Dockery first discovers the cuisine of Parma.

What a great world! Still so many treasures to discover.

Here's an excerpt from Amazon.com's interview with John Grisham about his book Playing for Pizza.

Q: American football in Italy seems like an unlikely subject for a John Grisham novel. What was the inspiration for Playing for Pizza?
A: Three years ago when I was in Bologna researching "The Broker", I discovered American football. One of my guides in the area played football for the Bologna Warriors for 10 years. I couldn't believe that American football actually existed there, but the more I heard about it the more intrigued I became.
Q: There is some great football writing in this novel. What kind of research was involved in capturing how this American institution is played in small town Italy?
A: The only way to research the book was to go to Parma and watch a game. The coach is an American who played at Illinois State, and he proved to be extremely valuable. I met many of the Italian players and the story simply unfolded.
Q: Speaking of research, you write lovingly of Italian food and wine in this book. What's your idea of the perfect Italian meal?
A: First course: prosicutto and melon; second course: stuffed tortellini; third course: roasted stuffed capon, all served with a great Barolo wine.

Well, check it out if it's in your library. I listened to the unabridged audio version and just finished two hours ago. I think you can tell I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Photos of green Italian hills courtesy Mario Monasterolo. Click to enlarge.

Another Big Day

"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative." ~Maurice Chevalier

The day we've been waiting for has arrived. Hard to believe it. Tonight we're honoring my father-in-law with a party to celebrate his 90th birthday, something one doesn't get to do every day. Hopefully some of us will be fortunate enough to have the experience. Ninety is a milestone for anyone, but especially for those veterans who left so many of their young friends on battlefields in Europe and the South Pacific.

My father-in-law W. A. "Bud" Wagner was the second Minnesotan drafted into the war. Cook, machine gunner and company agent, Wagner had the privilege of being on the first convoy to make its way across the Atlantic for the European theater. And the good fortune of having survived the duration of the war without becoming one of its casualties, in North Africa and Italy, which included beachheads at Anzio and Salerno.

A lifelong journal keeper, Bud finally set about at age 79 to assemble the book he'd been mentally writing all his life. With the help of his son Lloyd, who lives now and Laos and no doubt wishes he could be here tonight, Bud completed his 186,000 word war memories and reflections titled And There Shall Be Wars, which amounted to 535 pages.

Bud had several motivations for writing the book, primarily to put his diaries into a concise form for his family. When citing the value of diaries Bud frequently quotes the Chinese proverb, "The faintest ink is stronger than the strongest memory."

The big birthday's are pretty special. Last year while gardening out here on our property he said he was looking forward to this one. He made it a goal to be here when it happened.

Congratulations, Bud, for marking another milestone.

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune. -- English Proverb

How Inconvenienced Are You Willing To Be?

If you've been following the news coming in from Afghanistan/Pakistan, the U.S. and Pakistani armies have become pro-active in striving to root out the Taliban from this corner of the world. Like all military actions, there are consequences that are disruptive to the peoples in that region. In this instance, Pakstani security forces have taken action, and 2-3 million refugees have been displaced.

Numbers like these are hard to put your head around, but think about how you would provide water, food and shelter to everyone who lived in your own town if they were suddenly displaced. Duluth has about 80,000 seated at the edge of the world's largest freshwater lake, and I still can't imagine what we would do. Now multiply that number by 300 and place them on the sides of a mountain. Where do you get port-a-potties for 2.5 million people?

One articles relates that Russia has now offered a million dollars in aid. The U.S. has promised 200 million, another story states. To put these numbers in perspective, the new Yankee Stadium was one billion dollars.

Throw in a few suicide bombers doing their "random-acts-of-violence" schtick, and you have a pretty distressing or tiresome situation.

It is in the midst of crises like these that one sees what people are made of. What's interesting is that most of these people are not in government run refugee camps. According to a Christian Science Monitor story this week, "Instead, they're being cared for by private groups and individuals. According to estimates by aid groups and other non-governmental organizations, of the 2.5 million people uprooted, only some 200,000 are living in the dozen or so camps set up by the government with the help of the United Nations. The bulk of IDPs are living in government schools and hujras (community guest houses) or with friends and relatives.

"In Swabi and Mardan districts, many residents have opened their own homes to the refugees. One wealthy family in Swabi is sheltering and feeding some 17,000 IDPs from Swat and Buner in seven private camps."

Personally, I don't mind having company, but it does inconvenience one a little during the stay. In fact, it pretty much interferes with all your routines. So you just have to wonder what it would be like to have 17,000 guests? Maybe we can do a re-write of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

I can picture the conversation. "Hi hon, got a minute? .... Well, I was going to bring a few homeless people over tonight.... Yes, I know it's book club night. No prob, you still can go. I'll take care of the details.... No, I'm not that concerned about clean sheets at the moment... How many? Well, it's just temporary.... uhm, 17,000.... No, we don't have a faulty connection. That's, yes, uhmm 17,000, give or take a hundred or so."

There's a darker side to the events unfolding in Pakistan at this moment some of which you can read here, but for now I'm going to try to keep on the sunny side.