MONSTER !!!!!

OSAKA, Japan

9 February, 2015

That night was a terribly sad one: the vengeful crowd, in a murderous frenzy,ran amok through the village brandishing swords, stones, pitchforks, and blazing torches, chasing the maligned, yet misunderstood so-called "monster" through the cobblestone streets.       
                            
Out of the town he sped, as fast as he could run. Fleet of foot, the din and clamor of his pursuers grew steadily as he neared the edge of town. There, just ahead of him, in a nearby farmer's field, was a huge windmill. In desperation, he ran toward  it, mounted a ladder, and headed up the tower. A twisted grimace of sheer terror contorted his hideous face, as up, up, and ever-more upward the ladder he climbed, toward the imagined safety of the mill's lofty shelter.

"BURN HIM! BURN HIM!" came the hysterical cries of that dark mass of men. Justice would be done ... at all costs!

The sky then flickered with the glow of hundreds of flaming torches hurling through the air in ember-lined arcs, most of which came to rest at the base of the ancient, wooden structure.

Soon enough, the old mill began to burn, and as it did, the fright of the monster 
increased, and his cries grew more plaintive as the flames rose ever higher.

              

Finally, the blades of the mill themselves caught fire, and then slowly, 

       eerily, they began to turn.

The creature's silhouette could be seen atop the blazing structure, making a few last, 
feeble gestures of defiance.

The ugly mob below began to shout and cheer the imminent death of the different one - 
and no one realized that the real monster afoot that night was none other than 
themselves – the mob!

Only one lone voice cried out:"Let he who be free of sin cast the first stone!"
His voice went unheeded.

But now it was too late: the base of the mill began to crumble, and the tower shifted 
and tilted slightly, creaking as it did so. A shower of sparks suddenly rose skyward.
The creature let out one final scream of pain and sadness, and toppled headlong into
the blazing embers. Soon enough the burning body crashed through the fire and onto the 
ground. The crowd closed in on the now-smoldering corpse, and one villager boldly ran

forward and up to the creature - and plunged the tines of a pitchfork into the creature's 

lifeless body. The men cheered, as if they were victorious. No one among them wept for 

the monster.

It was over - at least for now.

There would be more, for there are always different ones among us that MUST be 
eradicated, but at least for today, the villagers' blood-lust had been satiated.

Tomorrow would be another day... 

                          

                                         ....AND THE MILL STILL BURNS!!!!

From Jesus Christ to Brainy Smurf, and all others in between, the TYRANNY of the majority brings 

BULLYING into an accepted mainstream activity.When someone looks, acts, talks, or THINKS

differently than those around him, that person is ridiculed, shunned, shamed, cursed, beaten, flogged, burned --- and worse. 

This is due to fear. They FEAR the odd, the singular, the different - those different from 

themselves; they fear, because they themselves fear that they just might be wrong. . 

                                             

                                             TV BRAINWASHING: Once again Brainy Smurf                                                                                   gets kicked for being a know-it-all --- even though,                                                                                 by everyone's admission, he was highly intelligent.

                                
                                 Note: other Smurfs got away regularly with naughty pranks.


                                                                      
-                                EVEN "VANITY SMURF" was OK.... Just not being a "smartie."

Individual bullying is decried, but INSTITUTIONAL bullying goes on unchecked, 

with no-one to condemn it. As long as EVERYONE does it, it's OK.

Sunrise in the Land of the Rising Sun

18 November, 2014

Osaka, Japan 

日本 NiHon - JAPAN - It's name means Sun's Source, hence The Land of the Rising Sun!

Pronounced Ji-Ben in Mandarin, Japan was named by the Chinese, who daily watched the sun rise over the distant archipelago.

"The transistor radio comes from far away, and when it's night over here, over there it's breaking day..." song: "Made in Japan" Though the day does not officially begin here, it certainly gets started a full nine hours before it does in Houston. 

From my high-rise hotel, surrounded by dozens of other skyscrapers, I watch as the dark mantle of night slowly disappears, and the city in the distance is bathed in yellow. 

Way down in the streets below, all is still quiet. The concrete and glass canyons are still. A lone man sweeps an already pristine sidewalk, a tiny delivery van makes a stop a few blacks away, and a couple hurry to the train station, pulling their suitcases behind them. 

Slowly it gets brighter, and more light filters down to reveal a few bleary-eyed early commuters, well-dressed in suit and tie, eager to get a head-start on the day.

A bicyclist speeds down the deserted streets, unhindered by the certain onslaught of traffic that this city will unleash in an hour's time. Two or three more small trucks turn down the ribbon of dark asphalt, and the city streetlights now flicker off. Looking up, The tiny sliver of a waning moon has been banished from the sky. 

In the Land of the Rising Sun, the yellow ball ascends to take its rightful place overhead, revealing the mountains in the distance. As the sun rises, a brilliant shaft of golden light gleams - a reflection of the yet-unseen sun. It is hidden from view by a building, but it is there nonetheless, and getting brighter. 

It is time to greet the sunrise;

A new day has begun!!

WHOZYSTAN??

 
I love geography. I always have. In fact, when I was a little kid, I had many books, and, right up there with "Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes" and "The Three Little Pigs" was a Geography book. It showed volcanoes and oceans, and people who live in faraway places. 

My grandfather was an electrician on a ship, and traveled the world, bringing back souvenirs and tall tales about his many adventures in Singapore, Tanjung Priok, and Dar es-Salaam. 

As a child of six, I recall complimenting a lady from India on her beautiful Sari, while nearby a lady from Oklahoma was agog over such an "outlandish getup."

I moved from cosmopolitan Washington, DC to New Orleans. Inasmuch as New Orleans was a world port, and its citizens should have been worldly, I learned very quickly that this was not the case. 

The week after Thanksgiving, 1962, the subject in class was what neat thing our families did for Thanksgiving. It was interesting to me learning how these kids, very new to me, spent this holiday.
They all said practically the same thing. 

My Uncle Johnny was at that time a Communications Attaché at the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. The country was a monarchy in those days. The King of Afghanistan held a Thanksgiving Day banquet for the embassy staff. They were his personal guests. 

When it came to me to say what we did for that day, I said: "Oh, we all got together for turkey at my Aunt Anna's, but," I added proudly, "My Uncle Johnny had Thanksgiving with the King of Afghanistan!"

"WHOZISTAN?" Mrs. Moser, our third-grade teacher asked. (I guess New Orleans was not a hot-bed of Afghani activity back then! Today, everybody knows where Afghanistan is. Funny how we seem to learn geography from wars!)

"No," I replied, "Afghanistan! Khusestan is in Iran."(Pronounced Khoozystan, it is a province of Iran.)

That answer was met at first with blank stares and silence. The kids looked around at each other and then to the "cool" kids of the class for cues as to how they should respond to this. Instead of, for once, impressing my peers with something neat one of MY family members did, I got the strangest looks from everybody, and they evidently thought I was just making stuff up. There were a few giggles and mostly blank stares. In hindsight, I guess I should've just left the answer at the turkey dinners at Aunt Anna's!

In defense of my classmates, these were little kids, used to having children's conversations. They, like me, were in the springtime of their lives, and faraway places with strange-sounding names were unfamiliar to them. 

It was only the third grade. We were all just kids.

Martha

15 February, 2015

San Francisco

I was about 15 years old when I first saw a picture of Martha. It was a study in black-and-white, since color photography was uncommon back then. She was sitting all alone and forlorn - and for a very good reason. 

There was nothing special about Martha; she was only a pigeon - one of billions of her kind that were so numerous that they once comprised some 40% of all North American birds!

Yet here sat this single, solitary specimen - the very last of her kind - languishing in a zoo in Cincinnati instead of flying free. 

At 1:00pm, September 1, 1914, Martha died, and the Passenger Pigeon was officially extinct. 

I read this in a book, given me by my grandparents. It was profusely illustrated with vivid color photographs showing birds of every species, color, and description in the course of nesting, feeding, flying and living. This was the case with all of the birds whose exquisite pictures were published in the book - all, that is, except this one, solitary, unfortunate little bird.

I understood the meaning of the word "EXTINCT" - I practically was on staff at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., having so frequently explored its lofty halls and fascinating exhibits as a young child. But the word only brought images of Wooly Mammoths, Sabre-Tooth tigers, dinosaurs and the like - not something so recent as fifty years ago! 

I stopped reading and stared intensely at the bird's picture; the word "EXTINCT" now had such a final ring to it! 

Mentioning this to my grandfather, he told me that "way back when" - before his time - these birds were so plentiful it sometimes took days for a single flock of them to pass a given point. They were so numerous they blotted out the sun. 

They became over-abundant, the book further explained, and the mega flocks would descend upon farms and, like a noisy plague of locusts, wipe out whole crops. One farmer likened the noise of the birds to a fleet of scythes, slashing their way through crops. 

Something had to be done. Like in locust plagues, farmers did what they could to protect their livelihood. They resorted to attacking the birds whenever and wherever they could. Pigeon kills were organized as normal farm activity whenever a flock was nesting in the area, much in the same way that rat-killing was carried out - and for the same reason. 

Besides protecting their crops, it was to the farmers' best interest in another way: unlike their scrawny city cousins, these meaty passenger pigeons tasted good! The arrival of a flock may indeed mean some crop loss, but it also meant a time of good-eating. The birds became a delicacy.

Soon enough a whole industry developed around hunting these plentiful birds. Whereas only a few perished at the hands of enraged farmers or subsistence hunters, wholesale slaughter was wreaked by a professional industry. The telegraph allowed the location of a given flock to be transmitted over long distances, and railroads would quickly transport hunters to that location. 

Like the buffalo which was also being hunted commercially during roughly this same time period, the massive flocks of passenger pigeons began to dwindle. 

My great-great grandmother, Jenny Ellerd Moye of West Virginia, gave an eye-witness description of those pigeon hunts. The 27 Feb. 1955 edition of the Beckley (West Virginia) Post-Herald quotes Grandma Jennie:

"Best of all were the pigeon hunts!" Granma Jennie recalled.

"The men would all gather together along about dark," she says,"and with each provided with a club, a burlap sack (which they called a tow-sack), and a light, they would start out for a section commonly called the 'pigeon roost.'"

"While the women sat around and talked, the men would take their clubs and kill the pigeons."

"It wasn't a bit unusual to see one man come back with a tow-sack of pigeons he had caught himself.

The others all caught some, too. Sometimes the pigeons would all fly over in a group, and there would be so many that it just seemed like a black cloud. You can't imagine that now, can you? 

But it was a common sight back then."

"When the men returned from their hunt, there was a huge wooden box in which the feathers were placed, and the pigeons were dressed like chickens, except that they were 'dry-picked'—that is, not scalded.

Both the men and women shared the work of dressing the pigeons, but upon completion of this work, the men were through with their work for the evening,so they peacefully sat back and talked and 'watched the young'uns' until the women cooked and served the delicacy"

"Everyone liked pigeons," Mrs. Moye says "and the feathers were used for pillows and pillow-licks"

The "pigeon-roost" she speaks about was located at Jumping Branch, WV.

 Unlike the buffalo hunts that were taking place in the west, that saw bison killed mostly for pleasure, pigeons by and large were killed mostly for food.

What brought the passenger pigeon to extinction was not only the wholesale slaughter of the birds, but also the way they were killed. 

Only adult birds were targeted, but since their nesting areas were the focus of the hunters' attacks, the nesting young died as well. This reduced the pigeon population drastically, and quickly, since there were very few individuals surviving to replace and to reproduce. By the time it was realized that the depopulation was so severe, it had reached the point of no return.

The bison, the passenger pigeon, and later other species would be driven to near extinction by unbridled hunting and overfishing. Add to that factory poisons, etc., and the outlook seems dismal if Mankind does not curb his greed and learn to be a better steward to this earth we live in.

As for the passenger pigeon, one might ask will we ever see great flocks of that beautiful bird grace our skies?

 Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

A MILE OF RUNWAY

Osaka, Japan
28 Feb. 2015

"A mile of highway will take you just one mile...
But a mile of RUNWAY will take you ANYWHERE!"

I thoroughly believe this. It is - and for some time now, has been quite an adventure!!
I remember fondly the views of the ice-covered mountains of Greenland, a nighttime flyover of Port-of-Spain,Trinidad, or Toronto, Canada; the Hudson River approach to laGuardia, the mountainous approach to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and the overwater landings in Osaka and San Francisco.

Then, there's a quiet Moroccan dinner alone at "les Saveurs du Maroc" restaurant in Paris, or a raucous night of it when the whole crew goes together there.There's Ethiopian food in D.C., Nigerian food in Lagos, or maybe some home-made Mexican food at a bus terminal in Mexico City. 

Music fills the air at an outdoor Africando concert in Paris, a harp concert in Brughes, Belgium, or an Arabic Qanun playing at dinnertime in Brussels. 

Steel wheels met steel rails and rocketed north from Paris to Lille on a HIGH-speed train, or an express day trip to Kobe or Kyoto. A fast ferryboat ride from San Francisco to Larkspur pummels the waves as the sun goes down over Alcatraz. An aerial tram glides hundreds of feet above Singapore harbor, or soars high up to Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio. 

There's bus rides through the bustling traffic of London, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris, a cable-car ride in San Francisco,  and a minivan ride to a beach resort layover in Cancún or Honolulu.

There's a hot Café-au-Lait at midnight after a walk across Paris, and a big mug of hot chocolate while admiring Edinburgh Castle in the rain. Perhaps a glass of Bordeaux at "le Volant" with a dinner of beef bourguignon. There's a hot cup of atole with tamales at a sidewalk stand in Mexico City.

All this and much, much more I have seen and done, and have loved it all.

So, what is my FAVORITE destination? Oh, that's easy: Although I love the adventures and travel, my favorite part of anyjourney is the part when I arrive HOME!!

BANDWAGONS - ad populum

3 March, 2012

Houston, TX

It's lots of fun to follow along a bandwagon during a parade! There's merriment in the throng, and pleasure hearing the tunes the instruments strike up. One gets caught up in the moment. I loved doing that at Carnival as a child growing up in New Orleans.

Political, religious, and social causes are very much like bandwagons. They play such merry tunes that many are compelled to follow and sing along - mesmerized by the Sirens' song!

In life, entire parades of bandwagons continually pass in review, and here and there they play such enchanting melodies that we are drawn towards them, often without thinking. We want to jump aboard, and more often as not, there are smiling faces with outstretched hands, all too eager to help us join them.

Jumping onto the bandwagon means you like more than just one or two melodies - it means you buy everything they have to sell - an entire, possibly obscure agenda, without thinking, without reasoning, --- following blindly. You belong.

Sometimes I see a post or hear a speech espousing a particular point of view. In most of them are many points that ring true or move me.

But I am both cursed and blessed by being able to see a much bigger picture. In every story, there are at least two sides, and more often as not, there are MANY sides. Sometimes seemingly opposing viewpoints can be all right. They just as easily can be wrong.

Changing a viewpoint or opinion is sometimes seen by some as a weakness. Refusal to change a viewpoint, or at least to consider another's opinion, even when presented with overpowering evidence is blind stupidity.

So whenever you see something I post that seems contradictory, or I seem to be "back-peddling" on an issue, it is because I have given the matter considerable thought, and I am seeing other viewpoints.

☞ I cannot, and I WILL NOT jump onto anyone's bandwagon!

I'm a freethinking man, and
I WAS NOT BORN TO FOLLOW!!

DEPARTING OSAKA

13 March, 2013

Osaka, Japan

The hotel wakeup call came way to early. Guess it always does. Admittedly, 1:50pm can't really be considered early in anyone's book - that is, unless you're a flight attendant or some such. In that case, 1:50pm can be early, if you haven't had enough sleep. 

SLEEP: this is what I chase! It's like the proverbial donkey and that elusive carrot dangling before him. When I can sleep, I can't; and when I can sleep, I can't. It's all right if you don't get it. 

What I mean by that is simply this: when you're in a position to sleep, you're not always sleepy - and can't fall asleep. Adrenalin is still coursing through your veins at a high dose. But finally, when sleep does come, well, now it's time to hop to it and be lively. Nobody much cares if you're tired or sleepy.

You don't realize it when it happens, but after tossing and turning you drift off. Then, that elusive, peaceful slumber is interrupted by a wakeup call, an alarm clock, or a knock on the door. 

I got ready to go, did my final sweep of my room for forgotten items such as articles of clothing or a plugged-in charger, grabbed my luggage, coat, and water bottle, and headed for the elevator and a waiting bus. 

En-route I stopped for a quick cup of coffee downstairs in the Crewroom, only to find my key no longer opened the door. There will be no morning coffee for me: although I will spend the next several hours serving coffee and numerous other things to some two hundred people, the one cup I'd like to drink to help me get going is a pleasure denied. I don't see any justice in this.

The luggage is loaded, I find my seat, and soon enough the large bus threads it's way through hundreds of tall concrete and glass buildings that make up downtown Osaka, and in a short time, there is open highway and the bus picks up speed.

I listen to some old songs on my playlist, hum along and tap my feet to the rhythm of a few good country tunes, and then an old, nearly forgotten lively train song comes on. 

Old memories of train trips come to mind as my bus courses that westward-leading ribbon of grey. Then I look to one side to see a sleek, modern electric passenger train ease up alongside the bus. 

It gains speed, and then, in nothing flat, that express train was out of sight - leaving a pair of shining steel rails behind it as it sped along to Kansai Airport. 

I can't explain just why I love trains, or planes, or traveling in general. I won't even try. Let's just say I love it, and leave it at that.

All I can say is that the old railroad song and the sight of that train speeding along put me back in a traveling mood!

It's going to be all right, now! That bus is carrying me to a plane that will take me closer to home and the ones I love. If my luck holds out, I'll be home tonight.

I still have many miles to go. That I know. But my heart is lighter now, a smile is on my face, and I am ready for the long journey.

Let's ROLL!