Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

“The dedicated student of human nature will often look for valuable indicators of these most fascinating creatures, by surveying some of the peripheral aspects of their culture. From their literature, folklore, superstitions, and from the games they play or follow in their spare time. In observing two of these phenomena occurring in the later portion of the 10th month of their solar year (marked by the time of 1 complete orbit of their world, Earth, around their star, Sol), this scholar found a curious and, I believe important, link.

‘Baseball’ and ‘Halloween’ exhibit a previously unknown, or at the very least, under-explored relationship. The members of this Board will recall, from both my previous presentations on these two items, that they seem to stem from very different parts of the spectrum of Human Culture. That is, Baseball being a Game played by children and adults with a small, hide covered orb (or ‘ball’ thus the name), and Halloween, described as a pseudo-religious, fairy-tale inspired celebration of a ‘Ghosts, Goblins, and Gremlins – Shop at WalMart’ endeavor for children and low intelligent adults, primarily as an excuse to eat massive quantities of sugar and sharp metal-laden confections – candy.

After close observation and review of the activities of the latest (Game 6) of the seven games of the World Series held last night in the City of the Arch (which artifact has puzzled Tral historians for some time), I propose that the World Series (of Baseball) is in fact the ritual and celebration that leads up to the annual night of offspring sacrifice known as Halloween.

What is most disturbing, and what inspired the thesis I present here today, is that events of Game 6 actually support the existence of Gremlins (or Angels or Devils, depending upon which Movie or Theatrical Performance is referenced). See Damn Yankees, Angels in the Outfield, or Gremlins in the Bullpen, for reference.

What else could explain the baubles, bumbles, and ‘whacky antics’ of two groups of very talented and professional adult Baseball Players, to whom this Human Society has paid millions of dollars (in a very bad economy), to ‘turn the perfect double play’ ?

Gremlins exist, and while this is not the first time that they appeared in World Series Games (See the 1986 World Series), this 2011 World Series is without a doubt, the most extensive showing of the ‘little devils’.

Respectfully submitted for your consideration, I remain,
Honus W. Doubleday, Humanist Studies, University of Tralfamadore

Post Script: Be sure to watch tonight’s Game 7, and observe a possible answer to the true purpose of the building of the St. Louis Arch, which was completed 46 years ago, on October 28, 1965. Is it some sort of time capsule Trojan Horse, spewing out 100′s of Baseball Ghosts (the Dean Brothers or Satchel Paige), to play their part in this scariest of Human Endeavors. I will update this post with the chilling answers. “So it goes.”

“A Lineman for the County” was an amazing introduction for me to Campbell’s voice and music, in a time of my life when AM radio and driving cars gave me a voice that sounded good, as long as I sang along with the blaring single speaker in the ’63 Chevy I drove around Austin in 1968. A freshman at UT Austin, I had no TV but went to the Student Union Building to watch the Smothers Brothers, and saw the too clean cut GC singing.

Glen Campbell on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Now Glen is 75 with Altheimer’s, and I’m older, too, thinking about my ‘never-ending farewell tour’, and how tenuous our mental awareness is. It scares us, as it should. Those of us in our 60′s are ‘holding on to hope,’ and rooting for another victory by the medical community, over another demon of aging.

But back to the music, and how an icon of my life is making a journeyman effort to leave us with a legacy of words and music that will hopefully carry us to our end, as well. All of the 18 selections in “Ghost” are marvelous, and “In My Arms” really celebrates the music. But my favorite, “A Thousand Lifetimes”, has the line that speaks to me and mine, so well.

“Every breath I take, is a gift that I will never take, for granted.”

Warren Zevon left us with “Enjoy Every Sandwich”, as an epilogue and reminder to ‘live today’. And now Glen Campbell gives us more songs to sing along with as we spread our lunch, on the next thousand picnics.

Ghost on the Canvas - Glen Campbell

On this day, observing the most amazing times and events in our history, two things strike me as important: The legacy of my father, and the 24nd annual cycle since we started our Fantastic Journey.

Dad’s Day

A note here about Marvin Argyle (1909-1990). He instilled in me the burning curiosity that got me here, and taught me the most important lesson in my life: “You don’t have to know all the answers. But you do have to know how and where to find them. Look it up.” He was a crossword puzzle freak, knowing at least 17 different 3 letter words for a river in India. Here’s a picture of him from a half a century ago. He would have loved the Internet, since he was the living analog predecessor of Google. I’ve often thought that if I had invented a gozillion dollar search engine, I would have named it marvinargyle.com ’cause he knew something about everything. Happy Father’s Day.

Originally posted June 21, 2009

Marvin Argyle Everett

Decembers always seem to bring transitions, and Saturday, December 11, 2010 will mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of Marvin Argyle Everett (1909-1990), who could have been one of my favorite characters in any number of Robert Heinlein’s marvelous stories. There’s more about “Marv” in a post I did in 2008, called Papyrus 2.0. These two very different individuals provided much of the fabric from which I made my coat of many colors, through my childhood and into manhood.

Marvin Argyle Everett was not a scientist, writer or politician. He was a teacher and factory worker who knew more about the science of making soap for Procter and Gamble than all the junior execs who came through on their way somewhere else. He gently asked them not to step in his pile of floor sweepings in the Dallas P&G plant, while they queried him on the operations of the saponification process section he ran for over 20 years. He was also a Sunday School Teacher for the Men’s Class in the Baptist Church in our town for more than a decade or so. He taught me how to find the answers for all but the most technical or philosophical questions. He did not teach answers but taught how to find them, which is a distinctively different process.

From the juvenile sci-fi books of Heinlein, and more exactly the later adult stories, I learned to open my mind to explore galactic alternatives to the sodden life in South Dallas County in the 50′s and 60′s. From Podkayne of Mars,  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,  The Glory Road and Stranger in a Strange Land, I imagined that my ‘boy hick’ would someday travel the stars, and meet the Empress of the Seven Universes. Little did I realize then that all these tales would come true, not in some distant world, but right here in Parker County. Together my heroine and I conquer worlds of villains, from the comfort of our stone cottage.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein on the set of Destination Moon, in 1949

Marv would not have agreed with very much of what Heinlein had to say in his stories, but in my cooling tower of a brain the two provided me with all the number crunching, text processing, emotional roller coastering that I have needed to build a pretty damn good picture of life.

The enigmatic nature of the literature of Heinlein is that his heroes were often misfits, orphans, accidents, or inconvenient additions to whatever world in which they found themselves. This underdog mythos speaks volumes to most of us nerds, geeks, and generally Animal House denizens, who wind up on the Supreme Court or running the Olympics. Wow! Dinkum good.

These tidbits of fact and fict I pass on to you, who are smart enough to find this needle in the haystack of a Web 2.0 bloggers’ universe. Ha! TANSTAAFL I say to you! Marv would say, “Big Joke!”

The Tektite habitat at the bottom of Lamshure Bay, St John, US VI. Photo by Ed Clifton 1969. I have included this photo in the Meteor, Meteorites, and Tektites pool for obvious reasons. What might not be obvious is why it was called Tektite. This is second hand, so I apologize if I missed something:

The story behind the naming the habitat goes something like this. The original design came out of GE’s space division and someone at GE figured that it could work as an marine habitat. When working on what to name it, they came across the definition of a tektite as something from space that lands on the ocean floor.

Tektite Habitat ~ Originally uploaded by Tom Clifton

Comments on Flickr

1. 

   Ottoman42 (67 months ago | reply) Very nice. How long have you been visiting national sites and how many have you been to?

2. 

   wayman_wynn (33 months ago) Actually, it was designed to be an underwater habitat, brand new, in 1969. Project Tektite was so called because of the Space/Ocean connection, but not as an afterthought. One of the connections is that part of the research done on Tektite was for NASA to study the effects of close confinement for an extended time. Since the aquanauts were living at 45 feet in saturation diving, they could not come to the surface without days of decompression. I was on the team of observers who monitored the 5 ‘naut team via CCTV, tracking their every activity and videotaping special interactions. Quite fascinating.
   There were dozens of rumors, jokes, fish stories that came out of the sometimes mind numbing duty. WW’s Dad

4. 

   wayman_wynn (33 months ago)

   I found this today, looking for more info:

   “An Evening on a Tropical Beach
   The night of February 14, 1969, I sat alone on the south shore of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, listening to the waves lapping against a beach of coral rubble. The sky was brilliantly lit with stars, and a light, warm breeze touched my face. Introspection claimed me, for I was on the brink of trading my familiar sun and starlit world for an alien undersea environment. The following afternoon, three marine biologists and I would splash down to a seafloor habitat where we would spend the next 60 days as aquanauts in the Tektite Man-in-the-Sea Project.

   I was not, I must admit, a seasoned diver. I had become certified with scuba two years earlier and had since made a few tentative dives in the southern Oregon surf zone, where we had hoped to employ underwater observation in our research of nearshore sedimentology. I suppose I had, all told, a total of 25 dives under my belt. My primary qualification for being a tektite diver was probably my willingness to commit 60 days of my life to being the first geologist-aquanaut.

   As I sat in the darkness, I could hear a steel band and shouts of revelry in the distance. The Navy Seabees, who had carved a base camp out of the jungle and who were providing logistical support for the project, were justifiably celebrating Splashdown Eve. I wondered what part of my subaerial existence I would miss most over the next two months. Would it be the stars? The feeling of a breeze on my face? The underwater world seemed dark and forbidding. What did it hold? How was all this going to work?

   As I mused, listening to the lap of the waves and the sound of distant partying, I became aware that there were other sounds in the night: splashes and the popping sound of feeding fish. The sea was alive! Suddenly my introspection dissolved into eagerness to explore this world in a way privileged to very few others. I sat there for a while longer listening to the sound of life in the sea and then returned to the party.

   The Tektite Project proved to be a wonderful, rewarding experience. I returned to the Oregon coast the following summer and we put scuba to full use in the first comprehensive study of a high-energy surf zone. I was also an eager participant a year later in the Tektite 2 experiment, which gained me an additional 20 days of undersea habitation.

   And what was it that I most missed while living underwater (other than wife and family, of course!)? It was something I had always taken for granted—the healing warmth of the sun.

   —H. Edward Clifton, GSA Senior Fellow”

   Found at Gsa.com

5. 

   Ed Clifton (33 months ago)

   Yes, this does bring back memories! And what I said about that evening on the beach is absolutely true. And so is Tom’s note about the origin of the name of the project. According to Brent Thompson, the GE project manager for designing the habitat, the project didn’t originally have a name, While looking for an existing design in the GE archives, he found plans for a space station that had been developed some years before within the GE Space Division. Although it provided the basis for the undersea habitat, no one at GE could recall its origins. Shortly thereafter, Brent was leafing through a dictionary looking for something when he chanced upon the word tektite: “an object of uncertain origin from space that comes to rest on the sea floor”, and said, “That’s what this is! It’s a tektite!” The name did, as WW’s dad indicates, provide a good link of the space-ocean interests and it stuck.

   I also want to apologize to WW’s dad for any discomfiture arising from disparaging comments that I or my fellow aquanauts might have made during our dive about the “shrinklets” who were watching us continuously from the surface. I can only hope that they relieved some of the mind-numbing duty he mentions.

   Tom’s dad (Ed Clifton)

6. 

   Tom Clifton (33 months ago)

   It is definitely cool to get some perspective from the folks who were actually there.

7. 

   wayman_wynn (33 months ago)

   WW’s Dad says: Thank you so much for the response and the the further clarification of Tektite history. No, as one of the later ‘shrinklets’, I have no problem with any or all comments made about the observers on your mission or us late comers of Tektite II, during or after any of those times. I have accumulated some more of the images and articles from Tektite I and II in my photo gallery, Tektite2. I feel the project has never been given the attention it deserves, and while I celebrate Dr. Earle and her accomplishments, it is unfortunate that more attention has not been paid to the other research done during your mission and the missions in 1970.

8. 

   venture herb (32 months ago | reply)

   As a member of the marketing team at GE’s Space Division at Valley Forge, PA, I served as on-site marketing manager for several weeks at the Habitat location in St John’s, VI. Tom Clifton’s description of the naming of Tektite is absolutely correct. Brent Thompson led a team of engineers to design the twin cylindrical tower habitat each measuring ten feet in diameter and 20 feet high. The habitat was shipped via barge from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to the Virgin Islands without incident.

   There were a number of different crews during the Tektite I and Tektite II two dive seasons. Monitoring of the activity was done from a control barge anchored above the habitat in Little Lameshur Bay. The barge also had a decompression chamber on it for both emergency uses as well as to decompress the saturated divers at the completion of their watch.

   Most interesting was monitoring the crew interaction. Subtle changes were noted during their isolation and the ever present stress of saturated diving. The later dive by the all-female crew led by Dr. Earle was noteworthy by the exceptional compatibility shown by the women. As an aside, the Tektite project got underway at the same time the Navy SeaLab program was launched in Hawaii. I recall that that project ran into some problems and captured the attention of the press.

   Lastly, GE was also developing a new closed cycle SCUBA device and was first used during the site preparation for Tektite. Initially developed as a bubbleless breathing device to train astronauts in simulated weightlessness conditions, the Mark 10 version evolved into shallow and deep water diving equipment for the US Navy.

   Venture Herb

9. 

   kennymeyer (32 months ago | reply)

   Like WW’s Dad, I was also an observer, aka shrinklet, at T2. I was there from August-November ’70. Our observer team arrived just as the female aquanauts were leaving–along with most of the glory and press attention. With few exceptions, the only visitors we had were monsoons. It rained a lot! However, we did a lot of snorkling, and diving. In fact, I was able to take a couple of dives with the “new” rebreather. Very neat being at the reef without the bubbles.

   If you’re interested, I recently scanned about 40 or so photos taken during that period at the basecamp and Charlotte Amalie . The photos are on Picasa. Here’s the link: picasaweb.google.com/kennym10/Tektite2Album. I think Ed Clifton was there for some portion of my staty. Perhaps he’s in one of the photos.

10. 

    Tom Clifton (32 months ago | reply)

    Kennymeyer, thanks for the comment and link to your photos, they are great.

    I have found that I prefer free diving than scuba on reefs, just because the noise of the bubbles scares off so many fish. A bubble-less system would be very cool (and something to ask Pop about).

11. 

    kennymeyer (32 months ago | reply)

    Glad you enjoyed the photos. I stumbled across them just a few weeks ago. They’ve been sitting in a box for decades. If you spot an error in the captions, please feel free to make corrective comments or add in details.

    I don’t remember much about the rebreather, but it provided a wonderful sense of freedom. It was bulky but manageable.

    I don’t think many of the observers got to use the rebreather gear. I think the lithium filters were expensive, and it wasn’t until we neared the end of the project and it was clear there would be a surplus, that we got to use the rebreathers. Plus, we were told us gear was dicey. When the aquanauts used them, there was some extra safety measures. (I forget exactly.)

    Of course the diving around Lameshur was wonderful. We we got back to Texas, I think I only took one more dive. It was in water with about 5 foot of visibility. I haven’t had on scuba gear since.

    One other thing that may be of interest…
    Like WW’s Dad, I did support dives to the habitat. We carried down the large pressure cookers loaded with food, supplies, and mail that was to be postmarked at the bottom of the ocean. The pots were heavy, but still had to be weighted for neutral buoyancy. Each support dive was about 5 or 6 pots. We swam the pots up into the habitat’s ingress/egress hole. We were instructed that we were not to talk to the aquanauts. We were to hand off the pots and swim away. However, between missions we participated in the cleaning. I recall the place was muggy and warm–comfortably so. It was bigger than it appeared on the monitors. The connecting tube was small. The cupola spectacular.

    One last thing…
    If your iterested, I also scanned in the observer manual. It has quite a bit of detail about the habitat. Here’s the link: picasaweb.google.com/kennym10/Tektite2Observe rsManual
    I also scanned in some clipping I found from the era: picasaweb.google.com/kennym10/Tektite2Newclip pings

12. 

    Tom Clifton (32 months ago | reply)

    KennyMeyer,

    The manual is great. I will definitely spend some time and read it. I have started a Project Tektite group on flickr www.flickr.com/groups/tektite/. It would be great if you joined. I would love to get some discussions going on the project from folks who were there.

    I don’t know if you would consider posting some of your shots on flickr, but providing links to them works as well.

    Thanks,
    Tom

13. 

    kennymeyer (32 months ago | reply)

    This sounds like a great idea. I’ll join the Tektite group

14. ★
15. 

    Mnegent (6 months ago | reply)

    My father Thomas Nugent who was a deepsea diver with Army77th engineer company sent me several letters from tektite2 and the cancelation stamp showed a picture of the habitat and was stamped “DISPATCHED FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR” I am trying to find pics of him or others that knew him,

…this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Here’s another leader from our past that has words to heed in this time in our country’s struggles. There are those that want to spin truth from lies, that want us to give in to the claims of failed policy. The Media is not without blame in this game of spinning lies into belief. But please go back and read our history. There is always much to learn from the past…  .mp3

Commented on HuffPost: Why Judd Gregg’s Change of Heart Was a Birthday Present to Lincoln’s Protégé –

“Thanks for the refreshing post, running somewhat against the grain of most of the splinter heads in the media (take that! Fox and MSNBC and all in between). Now is the time for the center cut of America to step up and eschew all the fringes. We should be partisans only for all of America, as is our President.”

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

More of my babbling: The State of Israel, the US Air Force, the hydrogen bomb, and myself are all roughly the same age. In those 60 odd years, we have all seen maybe a dozen moments, that in retrospect, could have gone a different way, and literally could have changed the fabric of the universe. A new shirt, or wads of tangled, smoldering thread drifting through the cosmos waiting for another set of complex hydrocarbons to make a stand. We are at one of those times.

When I was 12, I heard the “Ask not…” call, and it thrust me into a state of consciousness that has been both a blessing and a source of intense pain. But the bottom line is, that each of us can, on some level, or with some degree of success, absolutely change the way the electrons spin around the center.

Make a difference? Absolutely. One more important than another? Sometimes, briefly. Have an effect if you say “No, thanks.”? Impossible. That is not to say that “Just say No.” is not often the right answer, and itself can be a game changer. But to slip out of the ring because there might be a problem, or because things might not go perfectly, is unthinkable to me. Now is not the time to drop out.

I believe that Frodo was right not to kill Gollum when he had the chance, because you never know when even the most vile creature can, for all the wrong reasons, cause the right thing to happen. If all this appears to be psycho-literary-elitist babble, then you are just not reading enough history. Final answer. Locked in. “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

Infrastructure. Information. Community.

Enabling Collaboration: Three Priorities for New Administration 5 Feb 09

on dot-gov: Transparency Requires Plain Language 2 Feb 09

White House Memo – Open Government Directive 26 Jan 09

GovLoop Group for Enabling Collaboration: Open Government Directive

Original 30 Jan 09

Government is Information. The basis of US Industry is Information. If we can perfect the model for the development, management, distribution, communication, storage and archival of information for Government, then we can provide a model to re-grow the economy, green the culture, and vastly reduce our addiction to foreign sources of petro chemicals (oil).

Government is Food. If we change the paradigm for food production away from fast food, which uses vast amounts of energy and oil, and sickens our population with sugar and fat, then we can significantly reduce our healthcare costs,  extend our environmental protection, and greatly reduce our need for foreign oil.

Step One:  Fix the Government

1. The Data Infrastructure needs a major upgrade in power and consistency, utilizing all the tools that are razor’s edge now, to bring organizations into standards that work and are secure.
2. Interactive and Collaborative methods must become part of the fabric of the organization from the top down. Part of this re-tool must include thinning out middle management bottlenecks, and empowering individuals as collaborative peers.
3. Green the Government: Telework (40%) must become mandatory for all positions where physical presence is not absolutely necessary. This includes managers. The state of consumer electronics has already proven this viable technically.  What are we waiting for?
4. We must Mobilize our legacy staff and Recruit from the talented pool that have been raised on Web 2.0. In the 30 odd years I’ve been an IT geek, no one ever learned how to help themselves with me around to bail them out. Listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and then walk around most any building in DC. The similarity is shocking.

Step Two:  Fix the People

Any of this sound familiar? Let me know. As we went on our monthly run for supplies at Walmart today, we walked among overweight young people, with bluetooth and 3G devices, piling up their baskets with products made from cheap subsidized sugar, vegetable oil and starch, made with energy from foreign oil. And beer and disposable diapers, for too many kids born to under-employed families. I am a childless older version of those, now diabetic, and now somewhat smarter, looking for good food that won’t kill me faster than the 40 years I spent drinking Dr. Pepper and eating at McDonalds. Of all the bounty in this modern market of deadly, cheap food, only about 23% can be eaten safely by a 60 year old white male with Type 2 Diabetes.

Step Three:  Give Peas a Chance

But don’t do this for me. Do it for yourself. And your kids that are so bright, and now have a real chance to grow up without the venom of a racist America to distract them from the incredible potential that shows in the face of children that want to grow up to become President. We really do now know that any of us can. LMAO. Steal This Blog!

27 January 2009: It seems quite appropriate to re-blog this entry, at the end of this first week of a new chapter in the American story…

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.” – Teddy Roosevelt

“Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Originally posted September 2007…