THE CALIFORNIA RECALL ELECTION

If Arnold wins, visitors to the governor's mansion will be attending functions hosted by a couple that looks like Morticia and Lurch.

I can't help but imagine Frenchmen watching this episode and shaking their heads, "Zey cannot underSTAND why we doo nut tek zem zeriousLEE."

What we see here is the Republican party refining the technical details of the strategy that got George W. into the White House. They put up a lot of candidates, see which one has the best chance of winning through name recognition, personal charisma, anything BUT the issues. Then they pull the rug out from all the other candidates. Metaphorically speaking, Johnny Friendly shows up and says, "Kid, it's not your night." Which certainly is bad news for the sucker, excuse me, team player that bankrolled the recall effort out of his own pocket. Those Republicans. They eat their own.

Then candidate Schwarzenegger, like W before him, spends the rest of the campaign speaking only in vagaries and plattitudes and trusting in the extraordinary ignorance of the American voter.

His expectations of victory are well-founded. This is a Republican strategy that goes back to Grant. Their candidate is basically a face man for a band of advisers and decision makers.

SUSAN SARANDON AND BARBRA STREISAND

If these two wealthy activists want to throw a wrench into the works of public policy by foisting their ill-considered, half-baked, short-sighted political agendas onto a system that was working pretty well just a couple of years ago; and if they expect politicians to follow them like smitten puppy dogs and unquestioningly consent to their silly notions of progress, they should pool their money and buy an oil company.

RTJ--7/07/03

TONSILS

I went to college with a lot of doctors' kids. They all retained their tonsils into adulthood.

STAR WARS ERRATA

In a previous rant I complained that the only southern accent in Star Wars was a fat guy named Porkins. I just watched the special edition on TV and it turns out it wasn't Porkins, it was one of the other rebel pilots. Doesn't change the argument. There's still one southern accent and it's a fat guy.

THE WAR IN IRAQ

Saddam has put a bounty on US soldiers. $5k per each. At that rate, he could duplicate the casualties of the Vietnam war for about a quarter billion dollars. From his point of view that's a cheap war. We're spending that much each month just to keep guys there for him to shoot. That tactic makes it really personal between the US forces and Saddam. If every casualty is personally funded by the guy, then they've got to figure Saddam's wallet is the problem. No wonder they're trying to shoot his ass.

SCHOOL CONSOLIDATION

School consolidation is the hotbutton issue in Arkansas these days. The argument goes that among small school districts some test really well and some test really poorly. The governor figures consolidating the students into bigger buildings farther apart will afford students in low-scoring districts the same advantages as those in high-scoring districts and this will raise their scores.

There's a problem with that reasoning. The governor is a preacher and a lawyer. If he were a statistician he would know that when you test small groups, the average score varies a lot more than when you test large groups. Averaged scores in small districts are likely to make the educational system look better or worse than it really is.

Here's an example. You have two school districts with five students each. In one school district, four students score 100 on their standardized test. The fifth student is just dumb and always has been since he was kicked in the head by a mule and he scores 50. Average score, 90.

In the second school district, four kids score 100 and one precocious genius kid scores 150. Average score 110.

That's 20 points difference in the average. It seems like that ought to be significant, but it's not really. One district supervisor is about to get awarded a plaque and the other is about to lose his job; but if you look at it, the whole difference comes from just one dumb kid and one smart kid. Redraw the district boundaries just a little bit and the situation might be exactly reversed.

So the governor consolidates the districts. Now you've got eight kids scoring 100, you've got one 50 and one 150. Average score 100. He goes on TV and claims a great success because there is one less below average district in the state. Same kids, same teachers, same scores. Nothing has changed for the kids except that there are bigger schoolhouses spaced farther apart requiring longer bus rides. The averages in the standardized tests are going to tighten up only because the consolidated districts will be averaging larger numbers of scores. Consolidation is not likely to result in any real improvement.

RTJ--7/11/03

LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

Surely I'm not the first to see this Beatles song this way, but here goes anyway. Its imagery is primarily based on old near-eastern symbols.

"Picture yourself in a boat on a river." Check the shape of the reed boats carved on ancient temples in Egypt. They're crescent shaped with high, tapered bows and sterns. This mimics the shape of the moon. The river is the Milky Way. That's the obvious interpretation, since the ancients equated the Nile, which divided their country, with the Milky Way, which divided the sky. So the boat on the river is the moon and the Milky Way.

"Lucy in the sky with diamonds." Lucy is very close to the Latin word for "light." If the stars are the diamonds up there in the sky with Lucy, then we're still talking about the moon and stars.

"Tangerine trees and marmalade skies." A sunset perhaps? Tangerines and oranges are both orange balls, like the setting sun. A tangerine tree might refer to a tree silhouetted by the orange globe of the setting sun.

"Cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head." Sunflowers?

"Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone." More sunset imagery? And one measure after the sun girl is gone (or after the reflected sun is gone from her eyes), who comes out? Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The moon and stars.

"Somebody calls you. You answer quite slowly the girl with kaleidoscope eyes." Uh... pass.

"Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rockinghorse people eat marshmallow pies." Moon pies? The marsh mallow, by the way, was not always the sugar and egg confection we know today. The marsh mallow was a plant which grew on the banks of the Nile. The root was used to make a tasty treat which was reserved for royalty. Rockinghorse people might be a reference to the way orthodox Jews pray, but that's just a guess. Pious Moslems also rock back and forth as they recite verses from their testament. That brings up a frivolous point, though. Can orthodox Jews even eat moon pies? Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to accept a Jewish image along with the Egyptian ones. I understand their histories are linked. "Moses," by the way, is derived from the Egyptian word for "child."

The bridge is by a fountain, and I assume it crosses the river mentioned in the song. The constellation Cygnus (the Northern Cross) bridges the Milky Way, and the nearest zodiac sign to Cygnus is Aquarius, the source material for numberless fountain sculptures. His upended water jar is the Aquarian cluster nearest Cygnus. It's not a fountain exactly, but it serves pretty well. How many public fountains are carved so that water pours from a statue's water jar?

The girl with kaliedoscope eyes is not Lucy, but some sort of teacher or guide pointing out interesting features of the night sky to the songwriter.

"Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high." A reference to the aforementioned sunflowers. Maybe it's the rocking horse people who smile.

"Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you away." Egyptian reed boats are made of papyrus reeds. We get our word "paper" from papyrus. Thin mats of papyrus reeds were used as paper in ancient Egypt. A newspaper taxi is a papyrus reed boat, and along the ancient Nile (and maybe even today) reed boats could bee seen lined up along the shore.

"Climb in the back with your head in the clouds and you're gone." "Head in the clouds" is another way of saying you're daydreaming. The songwriter steps into his imaginary papyrus boat and is transported into the storybook world of the figures drawn in the night sky.

"Picture yourself on a train in a station with plasticene porters with looking glass ties, etc." The songwriter substitutes modern imagery for ancient. A boat on a river becomes a train in a station. A boat travels on a river just as a train travels on a track. If the porters are modern English spiritual equivalents of the rocking horse people, then the plasticene might refer to the white plastic collars of the Christian clergy, and "looking glass tie" is a pretty good description of a silver cross that hangs around the bishop's neck. Perhaps the mirror-finished silver cross in verse three is intended further to reflect the Northern Cross constellation mentioned in verse two.

So this song is not at all mystical or occult or psychedelic. In fact, I'd say it's conventional, highly structured, well-disciplined, finely crafted and a hundred percent effective. It's just a description of a stargazing party describing the night sky in the same metaphorical language that has been used for thousands of years. It's organized into three parts of equal size separated by the canon "Lucy in the sky with diamonds." Part one is sunset imagery. Part two is night sky imagery. Part three reiterates part one using modern substitutes for ancient images.

I hope I didn't bust up the magic for anybody. The best explanations are most often simple, direct and prosaic..

RTJ -- 8/12/03

HOW FAR WE HAVEN'T COME

Speaking of your ancient Egyptians, you'll notice how few statues of the great Egyptian kings are intact today. That's because every time somebody got replaced or overthrown, the new king ordered all the statues of the old king destroyed. Even bas reliefs on the walls had their noses pecked off with chisels and their faces were mutilated beyond recognition. This was all standard practice through the ancient world. In fact, it was usually the very first thing done by the new regime. Barbaric, right? Superstitious? Primitive?

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, what's the first thing that happened? The statues of Lenin and Marx came down. Those Russians. So backward and quaint!

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, what happened? They blew up some Buddhist statues. Our media told us this was evidence not only that they were barbarians, but that Islam itself was xenophobic and encouraged vandalism and destruction of non-islamic culture and history.

Soooooo. When the U.S. Army, the great civilizing force of our enlightened society, rolls into Baghdad, what's the first thing that happens? Right. Not only do the Saddam statues come down, but the huge bronze head of one is dragged through the street on a chain. People hop around like monkeys and beat the statue with their shoes.

I don't mean to insult the army particularly. They helped a little, and mainly at the request of the Iraquis in the streets, whom I suspect were eager that the Americans see them demonstrating their hatred of Saddam. But when I saw all that crappy artwork being destroyed, all I could do was shake my head and mutter, "That would bring a fortune on ebay."

Consider the commercial opportunities this country has lost to this kind of political art criticism. Instead of destroying every giant self-aggrandizing statue of every tyrant we've brought down, suppose we had bought them and made a gallery of giant bad guys out in the desert somewhere. It would be a patriotic tourist attraction where Americans could visit the vanquished supervillains, Hitler, Stalin, Noriega, Saddam just to name a few, frozen in time like arch-criminals in a comic book, a garden of evil set in a forbidding landscape, a warning to tyrants yet unborn.

Plus the cash from the purchase of these statues could have gone to reconstruct the conquered territories. Oh, well. Whataya gunnado? Folks would probably say I'm crass for proposing such a thing, and that the proper use of Saddam's statue is as the focus of a riot.

RTJ -- 8/16/03

SNOOP DOGGY DOG AND POPULAR MUSIC IN GENERAL

Kids, I know you don't want to hear anything sensible from an old fogey about a popular music star that you idolize, but.... WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE... and when I reflect on my devotion to musical groups who did not stand the test of time.... How could something that seemed so cool prove to be so lame.

Trust me on this one. Twenty years from now when somebody walks up to you and says, "Fizzim Shizzim," or some such thing, you're going to cringe and try to pretend you're not with the person who said that.

POWER OUTAGE PREPARATION: BATTERIES VERSUS GENERATORS

The recent power failure encouraged me to do some thinking on the subject of emergency sources of electricity. You've basically got two choices: generators and batteries. Hypothetically let's say it's worth $700 to provide your household with an emergency power supply so that the insulin in your fridge and the side of beef in your chest freezer won't ruin the next time there's a 72-hour outage. I chose the $700 price point because that's my estimate of the value of the contents of a well-stocked 12 cubic foot chest freezer. It wouldn't make sense to spend a thousand bucks to insure against the loss of $700 in frozen goods.

For the cost of a good 1000W generator, you could buy a half-dozen golf cart batteries, two 300W inverters and a solar panel trickle-charger. I tested golf cart batteries because they have thick plates, are designed to be deep-cycled, and are cheaper (per amp-hour) and are more readily available than specialty storage batteries.

DISADVANTAGES OF GENERATORS

• Not really useful on a daily basis unless you're a building contractor or something like that. You buy it and it gathers dust until the power goes out, at which time it might or might not start.
• Because of fumes and noise, you have to operate the engine outside and run extension cords inside, leaving a window or door cracked while you sleep to accommodate the power line. You can rig hookups to run the generator into your house wiring, but this needs to be arranged in advance by a real electrician, and that's going to cost as much as the generator.
• While you sleep, the noise advertises the presence of a generator to everybody in the neighborhood at a time when people with less forethought than you are in greatest need of a generator.
• If you're powering an appliance that cycles, a freezer for instance, the generator uses gas and creates noise and fumes whether the appliance is cycling or not.

ADVANTAGES OF GENERATORS

• A 1000W generator can be carried with one hand and weighs about as much as a bowling ball. If there's a neighbor in desperate need, you can take power to him much easier with a generator than with a trunk load of batteries.
• Five gallons of gas will give you power for a week. If you're going to power your critical appliances for a week with lead/acid batteries, you're going to have to pull your car around and hook up the jumper cables every thirty or forty hours.
• Compared to batteries, a 1000W generator makes a lot of electricity. If you drew a constant 1000W from a pair of fully charged golf cart batteries, they'd be totally drained in about five hours, but really only useful for a little over three. Six golf cart batteries will give you a thousand watts for ten hours without ruining the batteries. If your solar trickle charger puts out one amp at 15V, it's going to take some 700 hours of charging to recoup those ten kilowatt hours you just used. (Somebody check my math.) And in the middle of winter, when all the days are short and half the days are cloudy, the noise of that generator will comfort you like the purring of a kitten.
• Theoretically, you could buy a generator, stick it in the attic and it would be ready for you a hundred years from now. Even batteries maintained on a trickle charge will go bad after a few years. Generators are good for the next emergency into the indefinite future. Batteries are like insurance that you have to buy again every six or seven years.
• It takes five minutes to gas up a generator. It takes hours to recharge a battery.

DISADVANTAGES OF BATTERIES

• It takes hours to recharge a battery. It takes minutes to gas up a generator.
• Inconvenient voltage. Golf cart batteries are 6V, so they have to be connected in pairs to make use of converters and DC appliances, which all run on 12V car batteries.
• Heavy and hard to handle. Six golf cart batteries might weigh 250-300 pounds, and they're designed with little thought given to portability. Golf cart batteries are twice the size of a car battery, there's no handle built in and there are no finger notches in the sides. They're made to be handled using a special tool, and if you don't have that tool, you're going to have trouble handling these batteries.
• Battery acid. The plugs are loose-fitting to vent gases because golf carts are most often deep-cycled an quick-charged under high current, so if you're trying to handle them without the proper equipment, you're likely to get battery acid on you.
• Power is not constant. A fully charged pair of batteries puts out about 15 volts. A half-charged battery puts out about 10 volts. Some DC appliances will not work properly under lower voltages.
• Very few DC powered appliances are on the market. You're going to have to use an inverter to convert the DC to AC, and there's about a 7% loss of power in the conversion.
• Even batteries that are properly maintained and never discharged will have to be replaced after a few years. The more you use them, the deeper the discharge, the sooner they wear out.

ADVANTAGES OF BATTERIES

• Dependable.
• Quiet operation.
• Can be used indoors. No need to set up outdoors and run cords through half-opened windows or door.
• No fumes, unless of course you spill the battery acid.
• If you're powering appliances that cycle automatically, like for instance a freezer, the battery doesn't drain while the appliance isn't cycling.
• Batteries can be recharged using your car and hooking up the jumper cables in the familiar old way.
• Simplicity. No moving parts. The only maintenance is to periodically check the charge and the electrolyte levels.
• Your batteries can be set up to be useful while in storage, so long as they don't discharge more than the trickle charger can replenish. For instance, they can be hooked up to power a doorbell, a porch light, a radio, any number of things.
• Redundant systems. If one part of your generator proves to be defective, your preparations are 0% effective at the moment of the emergency. If one of your batteries proves to be defective, you're still in business. You still have 83% of the electricity you've been counting on.
• You can start small and add to your emergency power supply. You don't have to come up with a big chunk of change all at once, as you do with a generator. For two hundred bucks you can buy two golf cart batteries, a power inverter and a plug-in or solar trickle charger. (In truth, over the term of any outage you're likely to experience, a solar panel isn't going to be of any practical use unless it'll put out at least 3 or 4 amps. You'd end up recharging using your car anyway.) Using two batteries and a 600W inverter I have personally verified 14.5 hours of operation on a 7.5 cubic foot chest freezer. That would get you past most power outages.

RTJ -- 8/21/03