Drug test

By NewMexiKen [1998]

You’ll be pleased to hear that all of your government secrets are in drug free hands. Yup, today was the day I got called with 53 minutes notice for my random drug urine test. Illegal search and seizure if you ask me, but I had to sign a waiver and give up my rights when I got a security clearance. My attorney advises me that this has probably already been litigated, so I went and did my thing for a drug free U.S. federal workforce. Hope Centrum Silver doesn’t set off any alarms.

Actually, I can state unequivocally that I have been controlled substance free, so the test was more annoying than anything. Too bad, if I failed I would have had my security clearance pulled and been given a probationary period doing nothing for the same money for months, as happened to at least two guys in our office last year. Poor bastards really suffered.

Highlight of the experience. I said to the person administering the test, “this must be an unpleasant job.” “Best job I’ve ever had,” she replied. Whoa! In this job she is called a “Collector”. Can you even imagine her other jobs?

And for those who’ve never had this little indignity, no they don’t watch. They just don’t let you take anything in with you and they check the temperature of the specimen to make sure it is body temperature. Of course, they may have a camera in there and I may be action news “film at 11.”

Or in my case, perhaps “America’s Funniest Videos.”

How To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity

  1. At lunch time, sit in your parked car with sunglasses on and point a hair dryer at passing cars. See if they slow down.
  2. Page yourself over the intercom. Don’t disguise your voice.
  3. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want fries with that.
  4. Put your garbage can on your desk and label it “in.”
  5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
  6. In the memo field of all your checks, write “hush money.”
  7. Finish all your sentences with “in accordance with the prophecy.”
  8. Don’t use any punctuation marks.
  9. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
  10. Ask people how old they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
  11. Specify that your drive-through order is “to go”.
  12. Sing along at the opera.
  13. Go to a poetry recital and ask why the poems don’t rhyme.
  14. Put mosquito netting around your work area. Play a tape of jungle sounds all day.
  15. Five days in advance, tell your friends you can’t attend their party because you’re not in the mood.
  16. Have your co-workers address you by your wrestling name, Rock Hard Evil.
  17. When the money comes out the ATM, scream “I won!”, “I won!” “3rd time this week!!!!!”
  18. When leaving the zoo, start running towards the parking lot yelling, “Run for your lives, they’re loose!!”
  19. Tell your children over dinner. “Due to the economy, we are going to have to let one of you go.”
    And the final way to keep a healthy level of insanity…
  20. Cut and send this as an e-mail to everyone in your address book, even if they sent it to you or asked you not to send them stuff like this.

Wrong Turn

Lengthy 2001 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on the evolution of air bags and the continuing importance of seat belts.

“Every two miles, the average driver makes four hundred observations, forty decisions, and one mistake. Once every five hundred miles, one of those mistakes leads to a near collision, and once every sixty-one thousand miles one of those mistakes leads to a crash.”

“Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has done a more dramatic set of experiments, following on the same idea. He and a colleague, Christopher Chabris, recently made a video of two teams of basketball players, one team in white shirts and the other in black, each player in constant motion as two basketballs are passed back and forth. Observers were asked to count the number of passes completed by the members of the white team. After about forty-five seconds of passes, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the group, stands in front of the camera, beats her chest vigorously, and then walks away. “Fifty per cent of the people missed the gorilla,” Simons says. “We got the most striking reactions. We’d ask people, ‘Did you see anyone walking across the screen?’ They’d say no. Anything at all? No. Eventually, we’d ask them, ‘Did you notice the gorilla?’ And they’d say, ‘The what?’…Talking on a cell phone and trying to drive, for instance, is not unlike trying to count passes in a basketball game and simultaneously keep track of wandering animals.”

Amen

Bill Maher: “Yesterday was the first day of school at Harvey Milk High, the first gay high school in the country, that is if you don’t count the one in Fame. There were about a dozen protestors demonstrating in front of the school, yelling out good, Christian things like ‘God hates fags.’ To which the gay kids replied, ‘God hates your outfit.’ Personally, I’m against gay high schools; good-intentioned segregation is still segregation, and it’s wrong. But you have to wonder at the mental health of someone who would fly all the way from Topeka just to scream insults at a bunch of vulnerable kids.”

The Mountain Meadows Massacre
(September 10, 1857)

By Mark Twain [From Appendix B of Roughing It, 1872]

The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long–and which they consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves–they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The now almost forgotten “Mountain Meadows massacre” was their work. It was very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A few items will refresh the reader’s memory. A great emigrant train from Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers. And finally, this trin was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and other property–and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the “spoil” of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly “delivered it into their hand?”

Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite’s entertaining book, “The Mormon Prophet,” it transpired that–

A “revelation” from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee (adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (soread the revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the mandate of Almighty God.

The command of the “revelation” was faithfully obeyed. A large party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the sort of scurvy apologies for “Indians” which the southern part of Utah affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.

At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They retired to the upper end of the “Meadows,” resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer! And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt, they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag of truce!

The leaders of the timely white “deliverers” were President Haight and Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next proceeded:

They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented them as being very mad. They also proposed to intercede and settle the matter with the Indians. After several hours parley they, having (apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages; which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving everything behind them, even their guns. It was promised by the Mormon bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the settlements. The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of saving the lives of their families. The Mormons retired, and subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. The emigrants were marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the Mormon guard being in the rear. When they had marched in this way about a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. The men were almost all shot down at the first fire from the guard. Two only escaped, who fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before they were overtaken and slaughtered. The women and children ran on, two or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid of the Indians they were slaughtered. Seventeen individuals only, of all the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the eldest of them being only seven years old. Thus, on the 10th day of September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known in our history.

The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one hundred and twenty.

Must reads

It’s the Sunday before Sept. 11, so it’s no surprise to start seeing coverage of the two-year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In perhaps the most hard-hitting anniversary coverage, the Post runs two superb A1 stories, one on al-Qaida regrouping in Iraq, and the other examining holes in the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the WP, al-Qaida began planning their new front in Iraq in February. Since then, anywhere from 1,000 to several thousand foreign fighters have entered the country through Iraq’s borders with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. While its tricky-to-track borders (mountainous, unmarked) provide AQ members and sympathetic radicals the ease to travel into the country, the American occupation gives them a reinvigorated reason to make the trip. Based on interviews with European, American, and Arab intelligence sources, this story is a must-read.

The Department of Homeland Security, spawned by the attacks of two years ago, is now “hobbled by money woes, disorganization, turf battles and unsteady support from the White House,” the WP says. Some of the problems belying the 6-month-old agency: The top two officials under Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge are resigning; the department’s headquarters are cramped and ill-equipped; its budget is too small; it has trouble luring talented staffers; support from the White House is lukewarm. “Not a lot is getting done at the top of the department,” an anonymous White House official tells the paper. “Nobody’s got the fortitude to say, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ … It’s sad.”

From Slate’s Today’s Papers

America Goes Backward

The administration has proceeded more stealthily. Welfare cuts can be blamed on the states. The lopsided tax cuts are misleadingly presented as benefiting us all. Shrinking environmental protection can be justified as a defense of the economy. Increased surveillance of citizens’ private activities and of aliens’ movements are said to be “required” by homeland security. A military budget equal to those of all other nations combined can be justified by the vulnerability of the US revealed on September 11, and by the proliferation of threats. Every decision or move can be defended in reassuring language. The public is invited both to take pride in America’s unique might and to worry about the perils that lurk everywhere.

From “America Goes Backward” by Stanley Hoffman in The New York Review of Books.

Bear!

By NewMexiKen [1998]

As we crossed Logan Pass [in Glacier National Park] we noticed a bunch of hikers milling around at the trailhead for the Highline Trail. Why are they standing around, I wondered. We passed an outcropping at the top and started down the other side when Emily yelled, “A bear!”

It was early with no traffic so we backed up and stopped in the road. Sure enough down the slope to our right was a grizzly bear working his way up the hill. He was about 100-125 yards away. A couple more cars stopped. The hikers came around the outcropping to watch. In all, about 15-20 people were admiring the bear as he came closer and closer at a more rapid pace. Emily and I edged back toward the car and she took one more photo before we got in.

Just then we looked and behind the hikers 30 yards behind us was a bighorn ram — bear in front of them, ram behind. My best guess is that the resultant commotion caught the bear’s attention. He began to romp up the slope toward us as Emily put her window up. Before I know it Emily is yelling, “Go Daddy. Go Daddy.”

The bear had come up the slope directly toward our car seeking to cross the road. He was lower than us because of the slope, so had to look up and over the low stone retaining wall to see. What he saw was right into Emily’s eyes 6 feet away (behind the car window). At that moment I pulled ahead a few feet. The bear cut behind our car (in front of the others) and scrambled up the opposite slope. We got two photos as he ran. Emily was sure he had smiled at her.

John Alexander Carroll

“[W]ith his ebony-dyed hair and mustache, dressed in his signature attire–black pin stripe suit, red breast-pocket handkerchief, diamond stick-pin, watch and fob, silver-trimmed gambler’s hat, and black cowboy boots–he cut a remarkable figure.”

Indeed, John Alexander Carroll was a remarkable figure. Recipient of both a Purple Heart and a Pulitzer Prize, he invariably dressed just as flamboyantly as described above. His lectures were works of art — intent on telling a story; equally intent on making the story entertaining. His seminar supplied lessons I still use, among them, “Never be satisfied with the first draft of anything more formal than a postcard.” He required that a bibilography be listed in chronological order — an alphabetical list had no value other than the mere happenstance of the author’s name.

Jack Carroll’s graduate students were his colleagues, welcome at hotel room parties to mingle with the elite of western history; willing listeners to his ribald jokes, or stories of dinner with Margaret Mitchell, or his pre-war tour of America on an Indian motorcyle.

In 1968, after accepting me as a Ph.D. student, Professor Carroll fell into disagreement with the University of Arizona and departed suddenly for other interests. I never saw him after that year — and I always wanted to. He died in 2000.

For a brief essay on the remarkable John Alexander Carroll, see In Memoriam from The Western Historical Quarterly.