James On the Treadmill

Like a Rat on His Exercise Wheel

I'm not terribly fond of doing cardiac treadmill tests, although improvements in technology are making them a little less annoying. For example, the harness of wires weighs a fraction of what it used to and the glues / adhesives / stickums have improved to the point that it is no longer necessary to wear a mesh vest to keep the electrodes from being washed off by my sweat. Anyway, both Dr. F and Dr. G have been after me for the last couple of years to have a treadmill done and the abnormal waveforms that showed up on my EKG in January's annual physical made me decide to schedule one. Fortunately there was a cancellation; they were going to make me wait until May.

I must remark that my doctors always want me to get a treadmill. New doctor, new treadmill. They worry about my ticker for a variety of reasons: I'm old (62), I'm obese (317.5 this afternoon, which is about a seven pound loss), I'm diabetic, my ticker has followed the beat of a different drummer since I was a teen (a drummer, I might add, with no sure sense of rythm) and my heart is tilted. That last one really throws the doctors: my heart leans at an angle of about sixty degrees, which really skews the output of their EKG machines. Although my cholesterol is 150 (it was 174 to 176 for many years), my lipids and triglycerides have been all over the place but usually not normal. So they worry, and they keep asking me to do treadmills.

I usually drag my feet.

I showed up for my appointment on time today. Well, one minute early, but that's the same thing. I brought a pair of shorts, rather than doing the exercise in long pants, knowing I would work up a sweat anyway. The assistant shaved some of the hair off of my chest (she should have taken a bit more, as she pulled what she didn't shave when she removed the electrodes later), then attached the electrodes, their hub supported by a light canvas belt, the whole rig much lighter than the last one I had to endure about six years ago. The blood pressure cuff was simply taped to my arm and shoulder with silk tape, the medical industry's equivalent of duct tape. A couple of preliminary readings were taken, then the doctor arrived.

Dr. Sprinkle. When I first heard the name, I visualized a priest dipping his little thingy in a bucket of holy water and sprinkling it over the congregation. That picture was quickly replaced in my mind by one of Rocky sprinkling some of his non-holy water over any plastic bag left out on the floor of the house, a bad habit he still has. Dr. Sprinkle (henceforth Dr. S) entered the room carrying a stack of folders slightly over a foot high, along with a cup of coffee, promptly managing to dump the folders in disarray on the floor while seeking to find a safe place for his beverage. I remarked how interesting it was that he thought he would need so much reading material while I was on the exercise wheel. He responded with remarks about the paper work never being done and then proceeded to sign a few papers before continuing with me.

The assistant told me I should stand off the belt of the machine until it was running, then step on it when told to do so. She would then gradually increase the speed while the doctor observed my progress. But the doctor asked me about my work and, when he learned that I had worked on the Pacific side in Panama, he told me he was going to Panama to go fishing in a couple of weeks. So, as the speed increased, I chatted merrily about Panama and what the doctor could expect to find there, advising him to visit the Pacific side locks of the canal if he got the opportunity. Every once in a while he would ask how I was doing, but apart from breathing more heavily than usual I wasn't suffering at all. Finally, he calmly remarked, "I think that's enough."

This was supposed to be the clue to the assistant to gradually reduce the speed of the machine. Instead, she slammed on the brakes, almost throwing me over the front rail. She had misinterpreted the instruction as an indication of some kind of emergency situation.

I think Dr. S was disappointed that I showed no signs of cardiac distress. That is, after all, the purpose of the treadmill test, to stress the heart, to provoke it into displaying a weakness. But there are so many factors that say I should have heart problems: age, weight, disease, history and so on. He finally begged me to come back for an ultrasound examination of my heart, just to be sure.

Sure, why not? Maybe then they'll stop badgering me for a while.

Persian Philosopher

I attended another class at Oasis today. Today's class, taught by Kambiz Zarrabi, was on the subject of "From the Crusades Against the Infidels to the Crusade Against Terrorism". Mr. Zarrabi, a native of Iran who was educated at UCLA, started his lecture by pointing out that, apart from the reference to warfare, the English word 'crusade' has exactly the same meaning as the Arabic word 'jihad'.

I won't attempt to rehash the lecture, nor will I go into Mr. Zarrabi's qualifications, which I consider adequate. I learned that he has been writing for an Iranian Web publication and that several of his articles are available for you to read and, hopefully, enjoy. In roughly chronological order, for this month they are: "Iran's Future: The Relevant and the Irrelevant?", "Reality Versus Opinion: The Rooster's Tail" and "From Omar Khayyam to Hefaz of Shiraz". I had to search out those articles from the thousands on the news site because the link I was given, supposedly pointing to all of the works by this same author, didn't work.

One thing you must understand in reading these articles: they are written from the point of view of an anthropologist examining the cultures involved and attempting to avoid any value judgements. Nevertheless, a few pointed jabs are included to spice things up.

Spring Is Here

It Is The 110th Spring
Since My Father's Birth

My father was born on March 20, 1894. He immediately saw his first Spring.

He was born on a cattle ranch in the dry central desert of Washington state, so the most likely activities at the time of his birth were the rounding up of strays from the bush and their branding, activities that he came to hate as a teen. His dislike of spending weeks at a time alone, on the back of a horse, chasing nearly wild cattle through the brushy land, led him to run away at an early age and join the military. He had to lie about his age, but that was easy because his birth records had been lost anyway. He wound up in the Navy, on a battleship.

His first enlistment was up about the time the first World War broke out, so he immediately joined the Army. They trained him in ordinance and sent him to France with the coastal artilery where, according to him, he did nothing at all. Well, nothing but tend the horses that hauled the field pieces that he also cared for. He did learn that he didn't like the Army, so, after the war, he went back into the Navy.

World War I taught us that our torpedoes were inaccurate and unreliable. They didn't go far enough, they had a tendency to turn around and come back at the shooter, they wouldn't stay at the right depth (sometimes sinking, sometimes floating) and, if they actually hit the intended target, they wouldn't detonate reliably. Research was done following the war to produce reliable torpedoes. My father participated in the testing, first in the Caribbean and later in Hawaii. He had, of course, graduated from destroyers to submarines.

This was the Great Depression and Prohibition. Submarine crews loved visiting ports like Colon, in Panama, where they could stock up on rum for their personal use or for illegal sale back in the states. There was a constant battle between the rum runners and the authorities. This was the basis of most of my father's stories when I was growing up. Later, when he got to Hawaii, after he met my mother, the stories were more personal ... they were about how, for example, when one bottle of the illegal beer that was aging in the old, unused oven on his back porch exploded, all the rest of the bottles started exploding until there were only a couple left, so there was nothing to do but finish off those few bottles of green beer.

He was there when the attack came on Pearl Harbor, up in the hospital with back problems. He never mentioned this during his lifetime ... I learned about it after his death, when I obtained his military records. He always claimed that in his 40+ years of service he was in danger only once, when an air compressor exploded near him.

When Father was born, travel was by steamship, train, horse or foot. By the time I was born, crossing the country in an automobile was sufficiently reliable as to be an alternative to train travel. Air travel didn't become a practical alternative until later.

Fast communication was done by telegraph, with messengers to carry the messages from the telegraph offices -- on horseback in the country, on bicycle in the cities. Normal communication was by letter mail, which only cost a few cents. I still remember penny post cards. Telephones didn't become a practical option, again, until after I was born. Now I have seen journalists reporting on the war with their satellite cellular camera phones, allowing live video from anywhere. They showed soldiers on their tanks making phone calls, possibly to their families, and they said that almost every soldier in the field carried a digital camera.

Speaking of cameras, we now have cameras you can swallow, to photograph your entire digestive system from entry to exit. My father's brother was a professional photographer. He used 8"x10" glass plates in a monster of a camera. He would have to treat the glass plates himself with a rubbery layer that was sensitive to light, then develop them -- you couldn't run down to the local drug store and buy a case of prepared plates. He was only able to make contact prints, too, as such things as enlargers weren't practical in the back country where the light source was kerosene lanterns rather than electric lights. When my uncle was placed in a retirement home, my cousin found nearly 80,000 glass negatives in his house. She used many of them, along with the notes he had left, to write a book on the early history of the region.

My father never saw a computer. He knew I worked with computers, big mainframe things that would fill a room, but he never saw anything like the device I'm using now. And that was toward the end of his life, when he was in his seventies. He also nearly missed seeing man walk on the moon, his death coming just about a month after that event.

One of my favorite flowers is the daffodil, a flower that typically blooms in the Spring when the ground warms after the Winter freeze loosens. This is the 110th season they have bloomed since my father was born.

How the world has changed!

Telephone Envy

We had problems with our old answering machine for more than a year. Part of the problem is that it is an old machine, constructed of pieces of two identical machines given us by the company who used to provide our long distance service when we had paid so much in international calls that they decided to reward our business. Free machines are rarely of the highest quality, but we managed to keep one machine functioning for over a decade.

It worked, but only as long as I lavished sufficient attention on it. Its performance was never stellar. It was noisy, the result of using cheap materials for the various contacts, which often required removing and reconnecting things to clean the connection. Some of the noise never went away, no matter what was done. The clock / calendar wouldn't stay set if the power was disturbed in any way. Any slight bump to the base would misalign the cassette, making recording or playback impossible.

About six months ago I decided to replace the machine. That was the worst possible time to do so, however, as the stores were in their annual process of selling garbage at highly inflated prices. The junk sales season seems to start earlier and last longer each year now. I kept looking, though, and finally found a machine with a decent feature set at an inexpensive price.

I bought one. Delia took an immediate dislike to it.

Her usual complaint is that I made an impulse purchase, buying the first machine I saw. I no longer bother responding to this particular complaint.

Next she showed the non-programmer's syndrome: "It doesn't do what I think it should do". She doesn't bother to learn the steps necessary to do something the way the machine has been set up to do them, she wants the machine to learn to do things her way. In most cases, this would require that the machine have the ability to read her mind. She has to learn the few simple steps required to use the machine and forget about trying to have me or someone else teach the machine her way of the moment.

But the real big problem that has crept in is envy. Every time she visits a friend, she examines their answering machine, returning with stories of the truly marvelous machines other people own, with many features our new machine lacks ... like a caller id that didn't require activation and isn't being billed. Our machine has caller id, but Delia doesn't want me to pay the small monthly fee. But if we could get a machine that does the same thing for free, I should have done so. The rest of the features (on machines costing three times what I paid) amount to cute flashing lights.

But the other machines are better (does that sound like "The grass is always greener ..."?). I should have gotten one of the other machines instead of the one I got.

Puhleeease!

Unifying Iraq

Like Iraq, Iran has a diverse population. Arab, Persian and Kurdish elements were constantly at war with each other. The West gave them a ruler, their Shah, senior member of the royal Pahlevi family. The Shah was a particularly inept ruler, being primarily interested in enjoying the fruits of the great wealth being a ruler brought him. His secret police and the power of the West kept him on the throne. He was totally surprised when fundamentalist Moslem leaders led a revolt that unseated him.

The religious regime didn't last long, either. The various elements within the country were too diverse to put up with such a strict Moslem regimen. The Kurds were ready to form their own independent little country in the north while a civil war was about to break out in the south. We weren't very nice to them, either, so they were undergoing economic hardships.

Our good buddy (at that time), Saddam Hussein, saw Iraq as easy pickings. He figured he could breeze in, blow the opposition away, and take over the whole operation in short order.

So what happened?

Faced by an outside enemy, Iran discovered nationalistic fervor.

Suddenly they weren't a motley collection of Kurds, Suni, Persians and others -- they were Iranians and they were under attack. They defended their nation every way they could, even sacrificing their children aged eight to ten, marching them across mine fields ahead of their army to clear the way, so their pitiful, ragtag army would still be able to fight.

Millions died, both in Iraq and Iran, and the rest of the world just watched it happen for nearly a decade.

But now we know how we can unify Iraq.

Hell, we may wind up unifying the whole Middle East!

The Cost of Stability

Is the Price Too High?

The countries formed by Russia, Britain, France and the United States, among others, in the Middle East at the end of World War II were rather arbitrary. Little care was taken in defining their borders, causing a mixture of ethnic types and language groups in each of the excessively large countries that were formed. The big countries, potientially powerful, were also difficult to control.

But they were rich in oil, so they were worth controlling by any means possible. That meant brutal force, secret police to suppress any hint of opposition and other measures. Changes of government were frequent and violent, but the new governments, generally as violent and repressive as the ones they replaced, were often recognized immediately in the name of stability.

Stability has been very expensive. It has cost many lives. Perhaps too many.

So lets have a war and do away with stability, start taking over governments because their leaders are nasty, violent people ... exactly what we trained them to be.

We know almost nothing about the people in the countries involved. That is, the people making the decisions to go to war know (and care) almost nothing about them. Any new government they set up will be formed for reasons just as bad as those for forming the original government: control of the country's resources.

But if we screw up badly enough, perhaps the people of the area will finally have enough and will take their countries away from us, dividing them up among themselves. We'll resist, but eventually we'll lose.

And in the long run, everybody will win.

After everything blows up and reaches its own form of stability, not imposed from the outside, in perhaps a century or so, perhaps things will settle down.

Of course, the best alternative to starting a war is simple to remove the sanctions we've set up against our enemies and stop paying our dubious friends, letting war happen all by itself. We could even sit back and watch from a distance, not even having to participate. It is likely to be over faster if we wade in, though.

We won't make any friends no matter how we do it.

Straight Lines on the Map

Iraq didn't exist before World War II. Nor did Iran, nor Jordan ... quite a few of the countries we take for granted in the Middle East are newly created. They were invented by the British, the French, the Russians and, of course, the Americans. Spheres of Influence, the new, polite term for colonies, were divided up by the super Powers. Some were given as rewards to particular Arab nobles who had helped in our war efforts.

The divisions were arbitrary, done by placing a ruler on a map and drawing straight lines, ignoring the multitude of native peoples and their thousands of years of cultures. Thus the Kurds had their territory divided over the three countries of Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

None of the new countries, with their mixed populations, was peaceful. They had to be ruled with an iron hand, a brutal hidden secret police and constant pogroms similar to those practiced on a grander scale by Stalin in order to maintain the illusion of peace. Or, as we in the West preferred to call it, stability.

We wanted stability because it allowed us to obtain cheap oil products, such as gasoline costing less than we pay for bottled water. Stability required brutal repression, so we supported some of the most brutal regimes in the history of the planet. We still do.

But the populations of those countries, in addition to somehow maintaining their individual ethnic identities, have discovered what happened to them. They have learned that we are responsible for the mysterious disappearance of their loved ones in the night, often because of no more than a rumor of opposition to the ruling powers.

They don't like us very much.

Now we've discovered that Saddam Hussein isn't very nice. To stay in power he's had to kill people, his own people, lots of them. We've started chanting some ridiculous nursery rhyme about Weapons of Mass Destruction, as if Saddam would use such devices for anything but a source of quick income, and we're telling the world he's not a very nice person. It's open season on Saddam. We're even saying he promotes terrorism, as if that were something new, and we're acting as if we were threatened by anything he was capable of doing after bankrupting his country in a pointless war for about a decade and then being blockaded and embargoed.

Suppose we go to war with Iraq. What kind of message will that send to all of the other sadistic regimes we've been supporting in the Middle East? Your days are numbered? Stability isn't enough?

Think of the Middle East as a big ceramic bowl. You whack any part of it with your big old hammer and the whole thing will come apart, right before your eyes. It may take a couple of years but it will probably take less than a decade.

Then you can kiss your SUV goodbye. Get a bicycle and plan to do a lot of walking.

A New Journal

Journal? Weblog? They're pretty much the same thing ... except for the people who use them.

Xanga has a number of nice features for sharing journal entries. It has a nice community of writers to share and comment on journal entries. There are also some annoying things about it.

I've just started testing a new journal service, LiveJournal. My page is referred to at the left, with a number of other links I consider interesting (at least to me), in my Custom Module.

What does LiveJournal have that Xanga lacks? Well, I can make journal entries on my Linux system, my Windows system, my Sony clié or directly on the LiveJournal site. Also, I can download a copy of the LiveJournal system to one of the systems I have hosted and run my own version, although I will more likely use Zope or something similar for that purpose.

Like Xanga, LiveJournal has both free and Premium services ... but you have to be recommended by a member to get into the free service. They won't take just anybody. They want to keep out the spammers and troublemakers. That seems to be a recent policy, based on sad experiences.

Anyway, come visit me. There isn't much there now but I'll be adding to it.

Small Projects

You may wonder why my garden is limited to six plants and a few hangers-on from last year. It is because I had a bad experience with my gardening a few years ago.

My garden, at that time, was much more ambitious. I had a variety of edible peppers that included bells, habañeros, thai and jalapeños plus a variety of other vegetables and I was taking care of our citrus trees: orange, lemon and mystery, survivors of the twenty year period the house was rented out.

I didn't devote a lot of time to my garden, not much more than was required to provide water to everything and to keep the weeds in check. But the time I did put into the garden relaxed me.

It must have annoyed my wife. Either that or she figured that if a little garden made me happy, a big garden would make me really happy. One day she drove up with her van stuffed full of plants ... but not the kind of plants that interested me. There wasn't a vegetable among them.

She went on and on about how expensive the plants were that she had gotten free or nearly free. She parked them where I had my plants and insisted I take care of them.

I didn't.

I stopped taking care of my plants, too. It wasn't relaxing any more. It was work, nonproductive work.

Her plants more than doubled the scope of my project. They didn't produce anything. They couldn't stand the heat or the direct sunlight in the area where I had my garden. They were simply inappropriate.

I didn't have a garden the following year. Nor the year after that.

Last year I had a small garden project with three kinds of tomato plants. I had two of one kind and six each of the other two kinds. I stuck some garlic bulbs in the ground near the plants. I was overwhelmed with fruit. There was more than we could consume.

I have another small project this year. I am prepared to walk away from it if it gets out of hand, but I don't expect that to happen ... because Cathy has started gardening.

Cathy wanted a lawn in front of the house, something I have managed to avoid for years. She finally planted one and, while it is a bit ragged in places, she has what will pass for grass growing where there was bare adobe and weeds before. Now she has started trying to grow herbs in pots.

Delia can't dump a bunch of plants on Cathy. Cathy would object strenuously and would probably end up trashing the new plants, instead of ignoring them until they died like I do.

Delia doesn't do gardens, she gives orders. The rest of us aren't very good about taking orders.

My Garden

I just finished planting my garden. It took me about an hour, including watering. I have planted a total of six plants, three tomato plants and three pepper plants.

One of the tomatoes is an ordinary sweet red tomato, one is a big golden yellow tomato and the last one is a small orange tomato. Each is in its own pot.

Two of the peppers share a pot, the jalapeño and the hot red cherry pepper. The yellow bell pepper has a pot to itself.

Well, almost. Some of the new plants are sharing their pots with garlic plants and with babies of the tomato plants I grew last year. There is also a pink plum tomato plant that survived the winter. Well, one branch did, although the rest of the plant turned brown. It has flowers and fruit on it and the fruit is almost ready to harvest.

All of the greenhouse plants are bigger than the volunteer plants that came up all over the place. I had several different varieties of tomato last year, so the babies are probably hybrids. It will be interesting to see if some are bush and others are vine, if they come in different sizes, and if they vary from pink to red.

It will be nice if they are as prolific as last year's tomatoes were. The reason there were so many babies is that the plants produced far more fruit than we could consume. I'd like that to happen again.