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Slowing Down Your Racing Mind

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Twisting and Turning at Night?

Twisting and Turning at Night?

Last night I went to sleep quickly enough, but I awoke around 1 am worrying about, of all things, a spreadsheet I was working on to reconcile UBS brokerage statements with the General Ledger based on them. One brokerage account in particular was a mess, with the broker going wild buying and selling bits and pieces of stock and mutual funds to the point of wretched excess.

I have learned, however, that it is not possible to solve problems by worrying about them. Sometimes my mind at night goes racing around and around until I come up with endless permutations, but no solutions. I am not saying that you can’t solve problems in your sleep, but if a solution arises, it always arises suddenly.

So what I do to stop my mind from racing is to get up and watch some television—the only time I ever watch it—until I find something that engages my interest and stops me from thinking about work. It usually takes about thirty minutes before I’m ready to hit the sack again, usually successfully.

Sure enough, I produced the spreadsheet this morning with no particular difficulties. The account was indeed messed up, but now we have something to use to correct it.

Everyone has his or her own solution to this,  but I also find that taking some melatonin half an hour before bedtime also helps keep me deep in the arms of Morpheus.

 

Petting a Lizard

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Pepperdine College Main Campus in Malibu

Pepperdine University Main Campus in Malibu

The Pepperdine University campus in Malibu is, to my mind, one of the prettiest in Southern California. It is scattered across several foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains and boasts a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean.

It was a warm Sunday in August, so Martine and I decided to take a walk across the up-and-down campus. A ring road surrounds it, and it takes about an hour and a half to navigate it.

During our walk, Martine managed a feat that astonished me. She snuck up on one of the little lizards that are scattered through the area and actually managed to pet it for a second or two before it realized what was happening, whereupon it fled into the underbrush in abject terror. Having gotten away with this feat once, Martine tried it on all the other lizards we encountered, but to no avail. The word must have traveled fast.

deeratpepperdine

Deer on the Pepperdine Campus

Then, as we left, we drove around the ring road looking for deer, which we can usually see in abundance around sunset. Of course, it was hours to go until sunset, so we saw nothing.

But we had a  nice walk and an interesting talk about old time TV.. Martine is a bit of an expert on television series in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She has a collection of autographed 8 x 10 photographs of many of the stars which she got from attending the old Hollywood Collectors’ Show in the San Fernando Valley, mostly in the 1990s and through the late 2000s, when many of the celebs were still alive.

A Grim Secret

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Union General Ulysses S. Grant

Union General Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was an altogether unprepossessing man. He didn’t have the swagger or gravitas of such Union generals as McDowell, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, or Meade; but on the other hand, he was not a coward, a poltroon, or pathologically cautious either. His successes were due not only to his pertinacity, but to a grim secret that he knew and made use of as head of the Army of the Potomac.

Yes, the South had the more dashing generals, but they were on the wrong side when it came to the numbers. You see, the North had a larger population of eligible males to sacrifice to death, disability, and capture than the South. The South had, for all practical purposes, 100% conscription. At the end of the war, there were still at least 2 million eligible men who hadn’t worn the blue uniform. Take a look at this website by the Civil War Trust or charts and tables on Civil War casualties.

This Chart Says It All

This Chart Says It All

The other factor was that Grant never ran. At the end of the battle, he was still there and still game for more bloodshed—not for the sake of shedding blood, but for the sake of ultimate victory.

I have been reading the second volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Even with his Confederate sympathies, Foote could appreciate Grant’s grand strategy at Vicksburg. If the North won Vicksburg, the whole Trans-Mississippi South would be lost. The problem was: How to get at it. The most obvious way was to invade Mississippi and take it from the rear. Unfortunately, that failed; and in any case the area was controlled by the South’s most ingenious and fierce commander of cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest. (After the war, Forrest was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.)

Grant was not afraid to fail, and he failed a total of seven or eight times before he found a way of marshaling his army and navy forces to effect a landing on the eastern side of the Father of Waters, well out of the way of Forrest’s cavalry. He made straight for Jackson, Mississippi, where he wrecked the railroad lines that supplied the Confederates at Vicksburg. Along the way back toward Vicksburg, he fought two battles at Champion Hill and the Big Black River. Then and only then did he directly besiege Vicksburg. From then on, it was pretty much a matter of starving the rebels until they surrendered early in July.

It was right around then that the North won its decisive victory at Gettysburg.

It wasn’t long before Lincoln concluded that, in Grant, he had a general who could outfight Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. That is exactly what he proceeded to do in what has come to be known as his Overland Campaign. It didn’t matter how many men he lost jat battles such as the Wilderness, the North Anna, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor just so long as he didn’t fall back after each battle, as the Army of the Potomac was wont to do. He not only did not fall back: He pushed Lee’s forces step by step closer to the final showdown in front of Richmond. And by then, it was all over.

Too bad that Grant made such a terrible President. He was a smart man, and a great military leader, but none of us are perfect.

 

 

Fading from View

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At Vatnajökull

At Vatnajökull

I have been back in Southern California for three weeks, and only now am I no longer dreaming about Iceland. It is time to get on with the rest of my life. From time to time, I will return with a post about Iceland, but it is no longer occupying the front and center position of my life. (Of course, I would dearly love to return and spend some more time in the Northeast of the island.)

In the above photo, I am standing at the tongue of Heinabergsjökull, one of the extensions of the gigantic Vatnajökull icecap, the third largest in the world after Antarctica and Greenland.

At the same time that Iceland is starting to fade from view, so is Vatnajökull itself. Over the last eighty years, the glacier has pulled back from the edge of the sea for several miles and shows signs of a further retreat. In the 1930s, if I were standing in the same position, there would be perhaps a hundred meters of ice below me (or above me).

What I hope will never fade from view are my memories: Iceland occupies a special place in my heart—along with Patagonia, the American Southwest, Yucatán, and the islands off the coast of Scotland. Visiting those places has, to a large extent, made me the person I am today. I went from being a little kid whose family was too poor to take him anywhere to a grown-up who has developed an insatiable itch for travel.

Who knows what the next few years will bring? My gaze is still skipping around the globe, looking for places that might interest me. And I hope that Martine can accompany me, because her presence and her sense of wonder make everything better.

 

“6-2-6, You’re Wild and Free!”

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The SGV’s Fung Brothers

The SGV’s Fung Brothers

I must be going out of my mind: I am about to recommend for your consideration an Asian-American rap duo which calls itself the Fung Brothers from the SGV—that’s San Gabriel Valley to you libtards. The SGV is where L.A.’s Chinese-American community is centered, in communities like Monterey Park, San Gabriel, San Marino, Rowland Heights, Rosemead, Temple City, and a dozen other places.

Where does 6-2-6 come from? That’s the Area Code of much of the SGV, and is used much like Beverly Hills 90210 for that hoity-toity place west of West Hollywood.

I recommend you visit YouTube first of all, to see their song and dance video about their neighborhood, and then their website, which you can find here. (Beware, however, their website reset my cursor to chains, but restored it when I restarted the system.)

This is a part of Los Angeles I love visiting when I want authentic Chinese food, such as when I wrote this blog earlier in the week.

The New Meaning of Treason

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Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden

On one of his last days in office as President of the United States in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against what he called “the military-industrial complex”:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

Well, we didn’t follow his advice, and so now the military-industrial complex pretty much rules this country. As you can see from the headlines, the United States is involved in all kinds of activities that make us the global bad guys, from the NSA spying on the phone calls of U.S. citizens to drones at home and abroad.

Private Bradley Manning

Private Bradley Manning

A new kind of “traitor” has sprung up—not a traitor to the nation, but a traitor to the military-industrial complex and what it is doing to make us feel as if we were no longer “the city on the hill,” but rather pirates cavorting on the Dry Tortugas. Private Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are now threatened with dire penalties for the crime of letting us in on what our government is doing.

In my book, that makes them heroes. And I think it will not be long before the rest of the country comes around to my way of thinking. It may take years, even decades, for that to happen; but I think in tomorrow’s history books, they will not be discussed under the same heading as Benedict Arnold or Edward Everett Hale’s Philip Nolan, “The Man Without a Country.”

Left Whingers

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Between the Devil and the Deep Blues

Between the Devil and the Deep Blues

If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you know that I am hostile to the ideals, such as they are, of the American Right. Does that mean that I am comfortable with the Brie and Chablis crowd of whining, whingeing Progressives?

By no means! Every day I cringe at the political e-mails I receive from various Democratic operatives soliciting funds and great gobs of my time as a volunteer. (To what—snarl at voters?) And if I don’t give generously, it’ll all be my fault what happens were the Right Whingers to take control and turn this into a Totalitarian Taliban Theocracy.

On one hand, there is outrage and whingeing; and, on the other, outrage and whingeing. I guess it all depends whether one feels more at home with Pentecostals or Agnostics, whether one prefers NASCAR or Grand Opera, whether one listens to the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Stephanie Miller.

Well, I’ll take neither, thank you. Life is difficult enough without all those pre-packaged ideologies to which one has to subscribe. And if you think that makes me wishy-washy, I’ll be happy to disabuse youse!

Sheer Funk

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“Fighting Joe” Hooker

“Fighting Joe” Hooker

It is no secret that, until he decided on Ulysses S. Grant, President Lincoln had nothing but trouble with his generals in charge of the Army of the Potomac. They were specialists in losing battles, such as Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg, who would have attacked again into the teeth of Robert E. Lee’s guns had Lincoln not removed him. When he did, he replaced him with “Fighting Joe” Hooker, one of the more promising of his subordinates.

At the outset, Hooker looked good. Not only was he dashing and debonair, but he seemed to have put together a good plan for attacking—and encircling—Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

But then, something happened. Lee and Stonewall Jackson worked out a highly successful attack on Hooker’s right flank at Chancellorsville. That flank folded, spectacularly. And then, surprisingly, Hooker folded. It was a case of sheer funk. He started issuing contradictory orders while Lee picked him apart. Even when one of Hooker’s generals (Sedgewick)  re-took Fredericksburg, it still made Chancellorsville one of the North’s most spectacular losses.

It reminds me of the time I was backing up my car in a parking lot, not thinking someone was right behind me. It was a woman driver who just panicked as she saw my car coming at her at the frightening speed of 5 mph.

There had been no sign in previous battles that Hooker would lose his marbles once he was put in charge. But he did nonetheless.

Incidentally, the term hooker to refer to a prostitute comes from Joe Hooker’s surname. Before he took charge, he was quite a drinker and parter. Perhaps he should have had a few drinks at Chancellorsville, together with some loose women. The result couldn’t have been worse.

Unfortunately for Lee, he lost his favorite subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, to a case of friendly fire. What was at first a wounded arm wound up being an amputated arm followed by a fatal case of pneumonia.

Iceland Is for the Young

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The Gamla Youth Hostel in Ísafjörður

The Gamla Youth Hostel in Ísafjörður

For some reason, I usually wind up staying at a youth hostel at least once on each vacation. In Iceland, it was because I delayed too long waiting for Martine’s health to improve before making my reservations. The impression I had was that not too many people traveled up north to the remote Westfjords. It turned out that I was wrong. Although I got two nights at the business-class Hotel Ísafjörður, my last two nights in the Westfjords were to be spent in a dorm room at the Gamla Guesthouse.

Now this brings up an interesting contradiction. Although I prefer to stay in a room myself with a made-up bed (a shared bathroom presents no particular difficulties for me), I always fear that my goods would be stolen by my fellow roommates. And, not only do I avoid talking to other tourists staying at the same hotel or guesthouse, I tend to make more friends with the young who stay in the hostels.

My roommates were a German couple and a French student named Jamie, all three of whom I grew to like—to the extent that I didn’t mind sharing information with them. (With American tourists dressed in their usual country-club resort togs, I usually answered all questions in Hungarian with a confused look on my face.)

The Westfjords were full of European backpackers looking for the weather to break so that they could catch a launch to the even more remote Hornstrandir area across the fjord. A hike there usually involved several days and could be ruined by the typically bad weather of the Westfjords.

So why did I like these young people so much? For one thing I admired their courage. I would never venture to carry a tend, sleeping bag, and several days of food on my bag with the threat of uncertain weather looming. For another, for the most part my fellow tourists at the Gamla Youth Hostel (shown above) were a congenial set of people. What I shared in common with them is that I had booked my trip myself and did a lot of preparation reading about the history and the culture. I even knew a fair bit about the Hornstrandir Peninsula, though I had to admit I was too old for its rigors.

In Iceland, there are two classes of accommodation, which can be roughly described as made-up bed accommodations and sleeping-bag accommodations. For the latter, a bed is provided—but without a pillow or cover. (I paid extra, because I knew what it was like to sleep in a stinky sleeping bag from past experience.) So I had what was, in essence, a made-up bed in a sleeping bag accommodation youth hostel. I got a few snarky looks from the management, but I succeeded in pointing out to them that Booking.Com, through which I made the reservation, said nothing about sleeping bags. And I was willing to pay the extra 1,700 kronurs for breakfast at the neighboring guesthouse under the same management, which was pretty good. (I especially liked the lumpfish caviar.)

Needless to say, I felt accepted even though I was by far the oldest person staying at the hostel.

Politics and Food

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Sesame Green Onion Bread

Sesame Green Onion Bread

This last week, Martine watched a replay of an old Huell Howser visit to the China Islamic Restaurant in Rosemead. Now I used to go there some twenty years ago, but for some reason I thought the restaurant had gone out of business. A quick Internet check showed me that, no, it was still there.

Today, we drove out to Rosemead and I was able to indulge in what I used to eat there: sesame green onion bread (pictured above) and dough slice chow mein with lamb. I was in seventh heaven. I suspect, however, that my glucose reading this evening will be a tad on the high side, so I’ll have to compensate. Then again, I was waiting for twenty years to relive those flavors. So it goes.

Although I am not Muslim and do not find myself drawn to Islamic beliefs, I think that politics and religion have zero effect on my tastes in food. Even Martine, who is considerably to the right of me, loves hummus and chicken kebabs.

Afterwards, we drove to the 99 Ranch Market in San Gabriel for supplies to cook my own chow mein during the week. I was low on Kimlan Soy Sauce (my favorite), corn starch, bean sprouts, and Nanka Seimen chow mein noodles. The 99 Ranch Market is a huge Chinese supermarket with great prices for fruit and vegetables. The pork I bought there for the chow mein was also a good deal.

Martine was a bit put out by the crowds at the market, but I knew why the crowds were there.