It’s been a distracting couple of days. I’m right in the middle of the annual budget process at work, which is always a challenge for a numbers-averse guy such as I but is now complicated further by being in the middle of a changing over to a new laptop and operating system. On top of that, Wednesday night was my Fantasy Football draft requiring study on Tuesday night and, as I’m the commissioner, extra duties afterwards.

Then real life its ownself got a little fantastical, as my wife and daughters returned Tuesday night from a trip to visit family in Oklahoma and had to report on braving Hummer-sized cockroaches and sharing their bedroom with a speeding bullet. The Mall Diva has promised to describe her version of the events here in the next day or two, but in the meantime, Tiger Lilly has this account.

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I showed up last night at the official MOB event at Town Hall Brewery at 5:20, and there were no bloggers to be seen on the patio or in the bar. I just figured everyone was being fashionably late. No, actually, what I was thinking was this was some kind of rookie initiation prank to see who can be fooled, similar to the “free turkey” giveaway prank the Vikings vets pull on the rookies each year.

Since it was a nice evening I decided to park it on the patio anyway. While waiting for bloggers to show I heard someone at a nearby table asking why the military couldn’t have just dropped food and water from helicopters to the people near the SuperDome. The juxtaposition of the question so close to my thoughts of turkeys immediately reminded me of the WKRP in Cincinnatti episode where the station decided to put on a Thanksgiving promotion by dropping turkeys to people in a parking lot – from a helicopter. I can’t remember for sure if the turkeys were live or frozen, but the result was disastrous either way, and the scene was perfectly played because the television writers knew the power of radio; they showed the cast sitting in the station listening to the broadcast of the “drop” as narrated over the air by newsman Les Nessman, “Oh, the humanity! The humanity!” The writers left the scene to the viewers imagination, as I have just left it to yours. Also for your imagination is what I may or may not have said to the person at the nearby table.

Anyway, it was but a few moments before I was joined by the eponymous Martin Andrade and Barry from Water Cooler Wisdom and Larry from…actually, I don’t know if Larry has a blog, but he’s not short on opinions. Minutes later Learned Foot and V-Toed Bill showed up to represent the Kool-Aid Report, though their shirts made it appear as if they were about to start representing Hawaiian Punch instead. Soon Swiftee from Pair O’Dice and his wife Trisha (Tricia?) were there as well. It was the first time I’d met Swiftee, and, well, he looks pretty much like I’ve always imagined him, except he wasn’t wearing a pirate bandana around his head.

There was still no sign of our hosts, Mitch or the Fraters, but our patio group was growing and having a great time, especially when David Strom and Margaret Martin showed up from Our House. David was carrying a case that looked as if it held his 8-track tape collection. Instead, he was packing heat – a wide selection of cigars, from which he offered me one. It was great – and I was so honored that I’m not going to wash my hair for a week! Once I managed to keep it lit and my eyes stopped watering I saw Sandy from the MAWB Squad, who introduced me to Peg from What If, who I’d never met.

Then the non-blogging conservative radio host Bob Davis arrived and shortly after that Mitch Berg came out; it appears a small MOB group was gathered in the back room of the bar, wondering where everyone else was. Well, sorry, but there wasn’t a sign or anything pointing out where to go (which, given our proximity to the U, was probably a good thing from a security standpoint), but you can’t really expect an independent group like this to automatically go where they are expected anyway.

The announcement that a beachhead had been established on the patio brought King Banaian out. He wanted to usher everyone back inside – until Stromie gave him a cigar, and the Hennepin County Smoking Ban succeeded in changing behavior after all.

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My brain is still in holiday weekend mode so this is as good a time as any to dispose of this music meme that’s been going around listing the top songs from the year the writer graduated from high school. One thing I’ve been sad to see is that everyone else’s list is at least two years more recent than mine. So let’s climb into the Way Back Machine for a trip to 1976.

Here’s some background: part way through my junior year in high school our family moved from a big city to a small rural town in Missouri, 21 miles from the nearest of even the most basic teenage creature comforts such as a McDonalds. This was not a pleasing development for me. I’ve always figured I just didn’t like small town life; looking back at this list of the top hits and through thirty years of perspective it may be that I just didn’t like the music.

This meme calls for me to strikethrough the songs I hated, boldface the songs I liked and do nothing with the songs that were neutral. I’m also supposed to underline the best and worst, but I don’t have an underline function on my toolbar, so I’ve used asterisks. While there were a lot of bad songs to choose from for worst of the year, I’m going with Show Me the Way by Peter Frampton.

By itself it’s not any worse than the others, but it has a strong negative association. You see, my senior class left on a chartered bus immediately after our graduation ceremony for the Senior Trip to Daytona Beach. The bus had a tape deck and we started out with, I think, three different tapes. Within the first six hours, however, two of these had either broken or developed that tell-tale 8-track flutter. All we were left with was Frampton Comes Alive — over and over and over. Why didn’t we buy another tape at some point in the week-long trip? Well, Missouri had a 21-year-old minimum drinking age. Most of the states we were driving through had 18-year-old limits. Our resources were almost exclusively dedicated to buying beer, and — being high school graduates — we knew that the cheaper the beer, the more you could buy. So to this day I can’t hear Peter Frampton or see a can of Old Milwaukee without a sense of revulsion.

Best song? That’s easy, too: Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Remember the scene in the movie Wayne’s World where Wayne, Garth and two friends lip sync in the car to this tune? I lived this, decades before it was captured on film. Otherwise, 1976 was a pretty dismal year for music, overall. If I sometimes seem a bit crabby on this blog you simply have to remember my early influences.

Anyway, here’s the list. If you want to play along with the year you graduated, here’s the link to the Music Outfitters site that has the lists.

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There was one time I thought there was a good chance the weather was going to kill me. I was stuck in a line of cars on Highway 35W in Iowa during a blizzard with white-out conditions, waiting while a Highway Department snow plow cleared a path for us to turn around so we could try and make it back to Clear Lake. When I heard a distinctive crashing sound behind me I didn’t even check my rearview mirror, but pulled forward and to the left as far as I could. When I did look back it was just in time to see a semi pushing two cars through the space where I had been and into the ditch.

After I got out and checked to see if there was anything that could be done for the people in the ditch (there wasn’t) and then ran to the Highway Patrol car 50 feet away where the trooper was still oblivious to what had happened, I tried to make it back to my own car. Ten feet away from it I suddenly couldn’t breathe and almost passed out. I thought if I tipped over there – on the far side of my car from where everything was now going on – I might be frozen before anyone noticed my lump in the snow. Somehow I made it into my car, and that night — Christmas Eve, 1984 — I slept on the floor of the Zion Lutheran Church in Clear Lake with a hundred or so other stranded travelers, most of whom snored. I was tired, shaken and uncomfortable, but I knew that at some point I was going to get home.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be lying there and not have a home to go to.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be lying there and not even have a home town to go to.

At least I wasn’t hungry. Shortly after our group of wayfaring strangers arrived in the church its members started showing up with hams, turkeys, pies, cakes, mashed potatoes, bread — everything brought warm from their own holiday tables, perhaps even snatched from under the noses of their own families, and carried to us who were hungry, and we were fed. I think I started to think better of the world then, and I know that my own steps along a certain spiritual path — tentative until then — started to quicken.

I don’t have to tell you what has happened in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. I don’t have to tell you to give. I’m confident you’ll understand and empathize with the fear, the uncertainty and the desperation of those who have found a place to lie down (not necessarily to sleep) and are asking, “What do I do now?” I can tell you there are three organizations that I have some experience with and can recommend to you if you know you want to help but aren’t sure where to give.

The Salvation Army – I know the work they did in helping Grand Forks recover from its flood a few years ago, and I know of no group more dedicated and efficient in meeting desperate needs regardless of the creed, color or condition of the people who need help.

Samaritan’s Purse – our family packs several boxes every Christmas for their Operation Christmas Child program and I know the SP organization is masterful at the complex logistics involved in gathering, shipping and delivering materials to where they are needed. Their experience, and the experience of the Salvation Army, will be invaluable in this present situation.

Soldier’s Angels – this group is new to me, but we have adopted a soldier and I’ve been impressed with how this organization has grown up around a simple, heart-felt idea. I have heard that their latest idea is to reach out to the families of National Guard troops from the effected states who thought they were on the front lines, only to have to worry now about the homefront.

Whatever you do, I know it will make a difference and probably in ways you may never ever realize.

Also, see Instapundit’s flood-aid roundup and Technorati’s Hurricane Katrina tags.

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Heard Hugh Hewitt this evening describing Hurricane Katarina as potentially the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Katarina’s body count may well turn out to be staggering, but there are a couple of large events sitting at or near the top of the charts. The Johnstown Flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on May 31, 1839, for example, killed more than 2200.

Johnstown was a growing and thriving steel town built, unfortunately, on a flood plain, downstream from the derelict South Fork Dam. There was always talk about the dam giving way some day, but no one ever tried to do much about it. When the flood struck, survivors took to their attics and bodies were still being found months, and in some cases, years after the flood. It took five years for the town to be rebuilt.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), however, the biggest U.S. natural disaster was the Galveston hurricane on September 8, 1900 that killed a reported 8,000 people. You can find accounts and photos of the disaster here, here and here.

At the time, Galveston was the jewel of Southern commerce, an emerging economic power and the wealthiest city in Texas. It’s deepwater channel made it the most important seaport in Texas through which 70% of the nation’s cotton crop passed, and it was the first city in Texas to have electricity and telephones. It was also a popular tourist attraction for it’s warm, shallow Gulf waters. In fact, it shallow waters had led some experts to predict that the city was hurricane-proof, and a seawall was thought to be unnecessary. Despite telegrams and warnings of severe weather passed on from Cuba and Florida, the inhabitants were unconcerned; hurricanes had always passed them by before.

On the morning of September 8 many people were even down on the beach marveling at the impressive waves that were breaking. At the height of the storm that night the entire island would be underwater; nearly a quarter of the islands population perished and every home destroyed. Modern reconstructions of the storm’s fury calculate that it was a Class 4 hurricane with 130 mph winds and a storm surge more than 15 feet high. While the city was rebuilt (this time with a seawall) over the next decade and regained some of its prosperity, it became secondary to nearby Houston.

So let’s see if we can piece this recipe together. Take a noticeable natural feature, such as a flood plain, a sea-level island or even a city 8 feet below sea-level; mix in human hubris; add water; stir. Well thank goodness we won’t let something like this happen again.

What did you say – something about a San Andreas fault? Silly. It’s George Bush’s fault.

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I came across this quiz yesterday while on my way to somewhere else and almost passed over it. There was a time in my life – mainly my college days – when I read a lot of science fiction/fantasy books. I had more than a passing familiarity with masters such as Ellison, Zelazny, Herbert, Asimov and Howard. While there was certainly an element of the fantastical to their work, what drew me to them was the commentary and views of reality woven through their works. At the top of my list, however, was Robert Heinlein. Interestingly enough, here’s the results of my “What Science Fiction Author Are You?” quiz:

I am: Robert A. Heinlein Beginning with technological action stories and progressing to epics with religious overtones, this take-no-prisoners writer racked up some huge sales numbers.

My first semester in college a friend told me I had to read Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, which had come out a few year earlier (1973) and was in paperback. Next to Wouk’s The Winds of War I think TEFL was the fattest paperback I’d ever picked up. It was also a tremendous story, telling the tale of Lazarus Long, a man some 2000 years old (not to be confused with the Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner creation). It was thought-provoking, even startling, look at the nature of time and social and sexual mores. The sprawling tale itself featured several other stories within it that could have stood on their own as short stories or novellas. And as an extra treat there were two interludes – squeezed in like frosting between layers of a cake – that were described as excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long: pithy nuggets of wisdom and observations of life. From the obvious and mundane — small change may often be found under seat cushions — to the outlandishly practical — Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect — my friends and I would quote these back and forth to each other and most remain with me to this day.

One of the recurring theme’s in Heinlein’s work is that of the individual vs. the mind-numbing mass and his iconoclastic zeal for creativity and independence appealed to me. I can’t say how much his views shaped my opinions, or if I liked his work because it agreed with my own outlook, but I know that all of us become who we are because of the people we meet and the books we read; at the least Heinlein helped articulate for me what I may already have sensed.

Eventually he and I “parted ways”. His later writings – like those of Ayn Rand – ultimately exalted the individual to the point of nihilism, disregarding responsibility to others (at least in my opinion). His views of religion and the supernatural tickled my agnostic sensibilities for a time, but I ultimately came to see that what he viewed as unreal and intangible could be very real and tangible. Lazarus Long said, “What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!” I found there was truth in between every decimal place of his facts, and this portion of his “gospel” I rejected.

Reviewing the results of this quiz, however, brought back many of those Lazarus Long statements to my memory – along with a smile. Many still do a good job of summarizing some of my beliefs. Here are some I think you’ll enjoy:

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