Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 8
If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.
UNITED NATIONS MEMORIAL WALL
It commemorates all those who died in the Korean War (a.k.a. U. N. Police Action), and who served under the aegis of the United Nations. The wall was dedicated October 24 2006. It contains over 40,000 names The United States contributed 35,000 dead, and, to complete our contribution, 103,000 Americans were wounded during the Korean War. The Korean War wall is largely unknown in this country, mostly because it is in the United Nations Cemetery in Pusan, South Korea, but also because that war ended ingloriously in a draw.
A privately funded Korean War Project Newsletter (for American Korean War Vets) started up in the December 1998, but had to shut down for a couple of months in 1999 due to lack of funds, Then last year, again, it went el foldo. It has been since resurrected by contributions, largely because of an AP story in November 2006 which was picked up by American, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese news agencies. I hope some of the contributions for the newsletter came from South Koreans, as their economic prosperity is due, in no small part, to the outcome of that war, and they need look no farther than the fate and lives of their North Korean brethren to appreciate their own good fortune. So much for a war which ends with an inglorious draw.
The Korean War Project e-newsletter now goes out to over 40,000 addressees. The Loon is one of them*. A popular section in the newsletter is best entitled “Letters to the Lost”, those written by veterans posting obituaries, those trying to hunt down military buddies, and those making inquiries about the location of friend’s graves. Some of the letters are not easy reading.
* The Loon doesn’t want to give a wrong impression. He was in the military during the Korean War, but not in Korea. The closest he came was Nagoya Japan. And so, he is worse than a REMF (which is the military acronym for “Rear Echelon MF”) The Loon was more like a “RRREMF” (“Really Remote Rear Echelon MF”)
HOUSTON LIVESTOCK SHOW AND RODEO
The 75th Annual Houston Livestock show and Rodeo runs for several weeks. The rodeo is flacked as the world’s largest, and that's believable. Rudy and the Loon were spotted tickets by our daughter, Britt and her husband, Giancarlo. We attended the rodeo with them, friends and 57,000 of our closest Texas acquaintances. We had great nose-bleed seats to watch dwarfs in chaps get thrown off disagreeable miniature Brahman Bulls and tiny fractious bucking horses, however, we got a closer look at the man vs. beast mayhem via video re-plays on a giant TV screen—something Rome coliseum fans never had. Sniff! Can I hear a big round of applause for technological progress? Rudy loved the barrel racers; I liked the chuck wagon races—they reminded me of my boyhood Saturdays spent watching oater movies starring Skipalong Hotspurs. We ate barbeque, cruised the livestock stalls, petted some unusual cute rabbits and briefly hit the carnival. Our daughter, Britt and Giancarlo took one of the vomitorium carnie rides—not the Loon; he don’t fancy paying to have violence visited upon his aged self. .This was our youngest daughter, Britt’s, 40th birthday party—something to give a father a bad case of “NO-WAY!” denials”
The blue ribbon champion steer went at auction for $300,000, $85,000 of which went to the 13 year old FFA girl who raised the steer—the rest went to charity. Imagine this scenario; the rich philanthropist who bought the steer had it slaughtered and put in his freezer. (A fat steer will yield about 35% packaged meat. This fat steer looked to be about 2,000 pounds X.35 = 700 pounds of beef in the freezer, at an average of about $400 a pound.), The rich guy then throws a backyard barbeque for friends, and grills some Texas-sized battleship-burgers (three-quarter pounders) and then, tells the friends that they are each eating a $300 hamburger? Yassir! Everthin’ is big dowahn hair in Tex-ahss.
VEHICLE FUEL—THE LOON’S PRIMER
1. A newspaper guy, Loran Steffy, bought a Chevy Suburban which ran on either gasoline or ethanol. He found that $1.92/gal. E85 was slightly more cost efficient than $2.20/gal. gasoline.
2. Burning a years worth of E85 in his Suburban produces 6,500 less pounds of emissions, than if he burned a years worth of gasoline. Wow! The Suburban doesn’t weight that much.
3. E85 is vehicle fuel which is 85% ethanol, and I haven’t the slightest idea what the other 15% is, but you can rest assured that it renders E85 undrinkable and also unhome-stillable into White Lightening
4. E85 is subsidized by the government at $.51/gal, which means that ethanol could not now compete with gasoline without the subsidy. Who knows what the future holds for petroleum prices.
5. There are not too many stations which now sell E85; Minnesota has perhaps the most, Texas much fewer. Hey! Minnesota has corn; Texas has oil wells.
6. Even if all of our arable acreage was used to raise corn, and all the corn was used for the production of ethanol, we still would not have enough E85 to run all our motor vehicles, and we would have a dire shortage of tortillas.
7. Ethanol faces other economic restraints, it now takes 71 units of energy to make 100 energy units in ethanol, while it takes only 6 units of energy to make 100 energy units in gasoline/diesel
8. Cheap oil is running out, which does not mean that expensive oil is not still available in large quantities.
9. In a free-market economy, which is what we would have if the government stayed out of the way, price will drive fuel preference. In a perfect world of the future, ethanol will be produced more efficiently from wood chips and other relatively worthless cellulose sources, thus costing much less energy to produce. See, the Loon apologizes for beggaring the obvious, but corn has to be sowed, cultivated and harvested by fuel-using machinery. It has to be fertilized and kept free of weeds and bugs by herbicides and insecticide, all of which cost energy to produce. New technology marvels notwithstanding, future petroleum will be much more costly to extract. And when that happens, E85 may economically compete with gasoline/diesel without a government subsidy. The removal of the ethanol subsidy will sadden the farm bloc, but gladden OPEC. When E85 is more economically efficient than diesel/gasoline, E85 will become the fuel of choice. This will sadden OPEC, but gladden the Greenies. Hey! Even in a governmental-meddling, highly-modified-free-market economy, any change will produce winners and losers.
10. When the fuel emissions in the air are reduced, the greenhouse effect will be reduced. It will get cold. There will be mass migrations out of Minnesota. The polar ice cap will thicken. Polar Bears will be gladdened, and clap their furry paws together. The sea level will drop. Pricy ocean shore dwellers in Palm Beach and Malibu will still be in sight of the ocean, but only barely, however they will have lots of beach to play on. For a peek at the future, come to Houston where rickshaws are in competition with taxis. The fuel of preference for rickshaw drivers is fat**
** Fat yields 2.25 times more energy than either of the other two fuels for the human engine, carbohydrates and proteins.
11. Don’t take the Loon’s word for any of this; you can look it up yourself.
LOON MINI BOOK REPORT
The book is a slim paperback entitled,” Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo” by Eric Hansen, a man who harbored an obsession for walking across Borneo. Borneo is a large island with no interior roads, and is mostly covered bu tropical rain forest and some of the most primitive tribes on earth, Hansen did it in1986 taking only what he could carry. When he got to the other side (it took him 4 months) he decided to walk back across Borneo, and he did that too. All told, he traveled about a thousand miles in Borneo. I hate to rat him out, but he cheated, as he often traveled with the natives in long dugout canoes. However, he mostly walked through steaming jungles replete with lots of leeches, wild pigs and snakes, but no McDonalds or Big 6 Motels. If adventure can be defined as glorified inconvenience, Hansen went to heroic extremes to inconvenience himself. He made many friends with the natives, but some considered him to be the ultimate evil incarnate that had come to take the blood of innocents. He got his penis pierced….twice. It’s the custom there…the ladies seem to like the addition of scar tissue. Most often he walked with nomadic native guides. Otherwise, he would have been lost, but not for long, as he would have quickly starved to death.
This book was a well-written adventurous account of one man’s absurd and almost insane struggle against overwhelming odds (think The Odyssey).
The Loon found two interesting features in this book:
Ample evidence that hunter-gatherers are remarkably resourceful and live in the “now” They must live off what they can kill or find. They know what is good to eat, and what is poisonous, what is medicinally appropriate and what is not. Time of day is important to them, as are the seasons, but otherwise “time” means nothing to them. A journey has a start and an end, but no duration. They are creatures of the moment.
Ample evidence that man is not a uniformly introspective. Hunter-gatherers do not think like westerners. They spend all of their waking hours using their senses. It is vitally important for them to be constantly cognizant of their surroundings. No idle musing for them as they amble through the countryside. They are not philosophical people who weigh ideas and concepts, and balance facts with beliefs. We are clever but vulnerable omnivores which evolution has robbed of many redeeming instincts, and so, when faced with subsistence survival, we must be eternally pragmatic. Safety and survival requires primitive natives they be constantly and entirely aware of their environment; that is how they learn, and holds the only hope for survival.
Some examples of barter equivalents used in Borneo are: one stick of chewing tobacco = 5 rice meals. One shotgun shell loaded with buckshot = a day of labor, or one year in jail if the police catch you with it. 375 shotgun shells = one full grown buffalo. Forty heaping teaspoons of mixed colored seed-bead = one old Indonesian head-hunting sword.
The Loon’s friend, Ron, gave the Loon this book, and the Loon knows not what for, but it damned sure didn’t make the Loon lust to walk across Borneo. If you want the book, say so, and it will soon be in the mail.
ANOTHER LOON’S MINI BOOK REPORT
Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces at play in the struggle over that ancient strip of desert known as Palestine, nee The Promised Land, and by easy extension, to understand social and political pathology in the entire Middle East.
Friedman lived for several years in Beirut during the major “troubles” there, and in Israel during an intiifadi. Friedman is a Jew born in Minnesota who now writes for the New York Times, and he has made it his business and life work to understand what makes the Middle East tick; I think most American believe they understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I know I did. Hey! It’s simple; Jews and Palestinians both want the same ground. That is true, but from that point, the complexity explodes as geological, political, ethnic, religious, class and tribal allegiances come into play. No place are these fine distinctions more evident than in Lebanon during their civil war, when dozens of militias were fighting dozens of other militias. It was almost every Beirut neighborhood against all other Beirut neighborhoods.
The Palestinians are not unified. Some have a beef because they and subsequently several generations have been displaced from what were their homes in what is now Israel. Some still live in Israel.Others have never lived anywhere in Palestine. Some are devout Muslims, others are not. They have their own hawks and doves, as well as ethnic, religious and tribal affiliations tracing back centuries.
Further, and even more complex, Jews are divided into subsets by where they live (e.g., in Tel Aviv or in the occupied territories), by religious sentiment (orthodox, conservative or reformed churches), by ethnicity, (e.g., native Israelis, or returning diasporic peoples from Russia, Spain, Ethiopia, Germany, etc.), by age, (older Jews belonging to the heroic generation of the 1967 war, and the younger generations looking toward a western worshiping vision of a modern Israel), and political (hawks or doves).
Overlay this complex stew with class. The Jews populate the upper classes, and are technologically adept, while the Palestinians are the lower classes who do the scut work for the Jews.
Freidman objectively explains the roles of American Jewry, United States governments, and Middle East Muslim countries as they have affected the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Friedman deftly teases out the adversarial interplay over time, explaining how and when sea-change political shifts occurred. He points to the lost opportunities, and finally, in an added chapter, predicts the future and gives advice to both sides. And, most important, he gives equal measures of hell to both the Jews and Palestinians when they deserve it, and he reserves special venom for obstructionist leaders for both the Jews and Palestinians.
When it comes to the Middle East, Friedman is the only columnist the Loon cares to read, as he appears to be the only one, who does not gather information while sitting on his ass in New York City or Washington D.C. He goes to where he wants to write about.
This book is from friend, Pat, and it is already promised to friend, Gene. Go to Amazon for an el.cheapo paperback copy—the words, though smaller, are the same; and that’s a promise.
Allen Hall, The “gurgle” Loon
March 14, 2007, and suffering a deluge in Houston—5&1/2 inches in two days, with more on the way.
.
’07 Installment # 8
If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.
UNITED NATIONS MEMORIAL WALL
It commemorates all those who died in the Korean War (a.k.a. U. N. Police Action), and who served under the aegis of the United Nations. The wall was dedicated October 24 2006. It contains over 40,000 names The United States contributed 35,000 dead, and, to complete our contribution, 103,000 Americans were wounded during the Korean War. The Korean War wall is largely unknown in this country, mostly because it is in the United Nations Cemetery in Pusan, South Korea, but also because that war ended ingloriously in a draw.
A privately funded Korean War Project Newsletter (for American Korean War Vets) started up in the December 1998, but had to shut down for a couple of months in 1999 due to lack of funds, Then last year, again, it went el foldo. It has been since resurrected by contributions, largely because of an AP story in November 2006 which was picked up by American, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese news agencies. I hope some of the contributions for the newsletter came from South Koreans, as their economic prosperity is due, in no small part, to the outcome of that war, and they need look no farther than the fate and lives of their North Korean brethren to appreciate their own good fortune. So much for a war which ends with an inglorious draw.
The Korean War Project e-newsletter now goes out to over 40,000 addressees. The Loon is one of them*. A popular section in the newsletter is best entitled “Letters to the Lost”, those written by veterans posting obituaries, those trying to hunt down military buddies, and those making inquiries about the location of friend’s graves. Some of the letters are not easy reading.
* The Loon doesn’t want to give a wrong impression. He was in the military during the Korean War, but not in Korea. The closest he came was Nagoya Japan. And so, he is worse than a REMF (which is the military acronym for “Rear Echelon MF”) The Loon was more like a “RRREMF” (“Really Remote Rear Echelon MF”)
HOUSTON LIVESTOCK SHOW AND RODEO
The 75th Annual Houston Livestock show and Rodeo runs for several weeks. The rodeo is flacked as the world’s largest, and that's believable. Rudy and the Loon were spotted tickets by our daughter, Britt and her husband, Giancarlo. We attended the rodeo with them, friends and 57,000 of our closest Texas acquaintances. We had great nose-bleed seats to watch dwarfs in chaps get thrown off disagreeable miniature Brahman Bulls and tiny fractious bucking horses, however, we got a closer look at the man vs. beast mayhem via video re-plays on a giant TV screen—something Rome coliseum fans never had. Sniff! Can I hear a big round of applause for technological progress? Rudy loved the barrel racers; I liked the chuck wagon races—they reminded me of my boyhood Saturdays spent watching oater movies starring Skipalong Hotspurs. We ate barbeque, cruised the livestock stalls, petted some unusual cute rabbits and briefly hit the carnival. Our daughter, Britt and Giancarlo took one of the vomitorium carnie rides—not the Loon; he don’t fancy paying to have violence visited upon his aged self. .This was our youngest daughter, Britt’s, 40th birthday party—something to give a father a bad case of “NO-WAY!” denials”
The blue ribbon champion steer went at auction for $300,000, $85,000 of which went to the 13 year old FFA girl who raised the steer—the rest went to charity. Imagine this scenario; the rich philanthropist who bought the steer had it slaughtered and put in his freezer. (A fat steer will yield about 35% packaged meat. This fat steer looked to be about 2,000 pounds X.35 = 700 pounds of beef in the freezer, at an average of about $400 a pound.), The rich guy then throws a backyard barbeque for friends, and grills some Texas-sized battleship-burgers (three-quarter pounders) and then, tells the friends that they are each eating a $300 hamburger? Yassir! Everthin’ is big dowahn hair in Tex-ahss.
VEHICLE FUEL—THE LOON’S PRIMER
1. A newspaper guy, Loran Steffy, bought a Chevy Suburban which ran on either gasoline or ethanol. He found that $1.92/gal. E85 was slightly more cost efficient than $2.20/gal. gasoline.
2. Burning a years worth of E85 in his Suburban produces 6,500 less pounds of emissions, than if he burned a years worth of gasoline. Wow! The Suburban doesn’t weight that much.
3. E85 is vehicle fuel which is 85% ethanol, and I haven’t the slightest idea what the other 15% is, but you can rest assured that it renders E85 undrinkable and also unhome-stillable into White Lightening
4. E85 is subsidized by the government at $.51/gal, which means that ethanol could not now compete with gasoline without the subsidy. Who knows what the future holds for petroleum prices.
5. There are not too many stations which now sell E85; Minnesota has perhaps the most, Texas much fewer. Hey! Minnesota has corn; Texas has oil wells.
6. Even if all of our arable acreage was used to raise corn, and all the corn was used for the production of ethanol, we still would not have enough E85 to run all our motor vehicles, and we would have a dire shortage of tortillas.
7. Ethanol faces other economic restraints, it now takes 71 units of energy to make 100 energy units in ethanol, while it takes only 6 units of energy to make 100 energy units in gasoline/diesel
8. Cheap oil is running out, which does not mean that expensive oil is not still available in large quantities.
9. In a free-market economy, which is what we would have if the government stayed out of the way, price will drive fuel preference. In a perfect world of the future, ethanol will be produced more efficiently from wood chips and other relatively worthless cellulose sources, thus costing much less energy to produce. See, the Loon apologizes for beggaring the obvious, but corn has to be sowed, cultivated and harvested by fuel-using machinery. It has to be fertilized and kept free of weeds and bugs by herbicides and insecticide, all of which cost energy to produce. New technology marvels notwithstanding, future petroleum will be much more costly to extract. And when that happens, E85 may economically compete with gasoline/diesel without a government subsidy. The removal of the ethanol subsidy will sadden the farm bloc, but gladden OPEC. When E85 is more economically efficient than diesel/gasoline, E85 will become the fuel of choice. This will sadden OPEC, but gladden the Greenies. Hey! Even in a governmental-meddling, highly-modified-free-market economy, any change will produce winners and losers.
10. When the fuel emissions in the air are reduced, the greenhouse effect will be reduced. It will get cold. There will be mass migrations out of Minnesota. The polar ice cap will thicken. Polar Bears will be gladdened, and clap their furry paws together. The sea level will drop. Pricy ocean shore dwellers in Palm Beach and Malibu will still be in sight of the ocean, but only barely, however they will have lots of beach to play on. For a peek at the future, come to Houston where rickshaws are in competition with taxis. The fuel of preference for rickshaw drivers is fat**
** Fat yields 2.25 times more energy than either of the other two fuels for the human engine, carbohydrates and proteins.
11. Don’t take the Loon’s word for any of this; you can look it up yourself.
LOON MINI BOOK REPORT
The book is a slim paperback entitled,” Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo” by Eric Hansen, a man who harbored an obsession for walking across Borneo. Borneo is a large island with no interior roads, and is mostly covered bu tropical rain forest and some of the most primitive tribes on earth, Hansen did it in1986 taking only what he could carry. When he got to the other side (it took him 4 months) he decided to walk back across Borneo, and he did that too. All told, he traveled about a thousand miles in Borneo. I hate to rat him out, but he cheated, as he often traveled with the natives in long dugout canoes. However, he mostly walked through steaming jungles replete with lots of leeches, wild pigs and snakes, but no McDonalds or Big 6 Motels. If adventure can be defined as glorified inconvenience, Hansen went to heroic extremes to inconvenience himself. He made many friends with the natives, but some considered him to be the ultimate evil incarnate that had come to take the blood of innocents. He got his penis pierced….twice. It’s the custom there…the ladies seem to like the addition of scar tissue. Most often he walked with nomadic native guides. Otherwise, he would have been lost, but not for long, as he would have quickly starved to death.
This book was a well-written adventurous account of one man’s absurd and almost insane struggle against overwhelming odds (think The Odyssey).
The Loon found two interesting features in this book:
Ample evidence that hunter-gatherers are remarkably resourceful and live in the “now” They must live off what they can kill or find. They know what is good to eat, and what is poisonous, what is medicinally appropriate and what is not. Time of day is important to them, as are the seasons, but otherwise “time” means nothing to them. A journey has a start and an end, but no duration. They are creatures of the moment.
Ample evidence that man is not a uniformly introspective. Hunter-gatherers do not think like westerners. They spend all of their waking hours using their senses. It is vitally important for them to be constantly cognizant of their surroundings. No idle musing for them as they amble through the countryside. They are not philosophical people who weigh ideas and concepts, and balance facts with beliefs. We are clever but vulnerable omnivores which evolution has robbed of many redeeming instincts, and so, when faced with subsistence survival, we must be eternally pragmatic. Safety and survival requires primitive natives they be constantly and entirely aware of their environment; that is how they learn, and holds the only hope for survival.
Some examples of barter equivalents used in Borneo are: one stick of chewing tobacco = 5 rice meals. One shotgun shell loaded with buckshot = a day of labor, or one year in jail if the police catch you with it. 375 shotgun shells = one full grown buffalo. Forty heaping teaspoons of mixed colored seed-bead = one old Indonesian head-hunting sword.
The Loon’s friend, Ron, gave the Loon this book, and the Loon knows not what for, but it damned sure didn’t make the Loon lust to walk across Borneo. If you want the book, say so, and it will soon be in the mail.
ANOTHER LOON’S MINI BOOK REPORT
Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces at play in the struggle over that ancient strip of desert known as Palestine, nee The Promised Land, and by easy extension, to understand social and political pathology in the entire Middle East.
Friedman lived for several years in Beirut during the major “troubles” there, and in Israel during an intiifadi. Friedman is a Jew born in Minnesota who now writes for the New York Times, and he has made it his business and life work to understand what makes the Middle East tick; I think most American believe they understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I know I did. Hey! It’s simple; Jews and Palestinians both want the same ground. That is true, but from that point, the complexity explodes as geological, political, ethnic, religious, class and tribal allegiances come into play. No place are these fine distinctions more evident than in Lebanon during their civil war, when dozens of militias were fighting dozens of other militias. It was almost every Beirut neighborhood against all other Beirut neighborhoods.
The Palestinians are not unified. Some have a beef because they and subsequently several generations have been displaced from what were their homes in what is now Israel. Some still live in Israel.Others have never lived anywhere in Palestine. Some are devout Muslims, others are not. They have their own hawks and doves, as well as ethnic, religious and tribal affiliations tracing back centuries.
Further, and even more complex, Jews are divided into subsets by where they live (e.g., in Tel Aviv or in the occupied territories), by religious sentiment (orthodox, conservative or reformed churches), by ethnicity, (e.g., native Israelis, or returning diasporic peoples from Russia, Spain, Ethiopia, Germany, etc.), by age, (older Jews belonging to the heroic generation of the 1967 war, and the younger generations looking toward a western worshiping vision of a modern Israel), and political (hawks or doves).
Overlay this complex stew with class. The Jews populate the upper classes, and are technologically adept, while the Palestinians are the lower classes who do the scut work for the Jews.
Freidman objectively explains the roles of American Jewry, United States governments, and Middle East Muslim countries as they have affected the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Friedman deftly teases out the adversarial interplay over time, explaining how and when sea-change political shifts occurred. He points to the lost opportunities, and finally, in an added chapter, predicts the future and gives advice to both sides. And, most important, he gives equal measures of hell to both the Jews and Palestinians when they deserve it, and he reserves special venom for obstructionist leaders for both the Jews and Palestinians.
When it comes to the Middle East, Friedman is the only columnist the Loon cares to read, as he appears to be the only one, who does not gather information while sitting on his ass in New York City or Washington D.C. He goes to where he wants to write about.
This book is from friend, Pat, and it is already promised to friend, Gene. Go to Amazon for an el.cheapo paperback copy—the words, though smaller, are the same; and that’s a promise.
Allen Hall, The “gurgle” Loon
March 14, 2007, and suffering a deluge in Houston—5&1/2 inches in two days, with more on the way.
.
posted by Allen Hall at 3:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home