Rumors

I wish I could say I am the writer of this but I’m not.  A friend sent it to me and it’s simply too good to pass up.  Enjoy.

This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for today, May 1st, 1945, read by Alvar Liddell.

Confusion continues to surround the last moments of Adolf Hitler, who died yesterday in his bunker in Berlin.

Incredibly, the world’s most-wanted man had been living in the heart of the capital of the Third Reich, in plain sight of millions of Germans who maintain they were not supporters of the Nazis and had no knowledge of the Fuhrer’s crimes again humanity.

First reports suggested that Hitler had been shot through the head in a fire-fight as special forces from the Red Army stormed the building. It was also claimed that he grabbed his long-term mistress Eva Braun, whom he had married in a secret ceremony, and used her as a human shield. Miss Braun was initially said to have suffered a flesh wound, but is now known to be dead. Subsequent statements from Supreme Allied Command indicate that the Fuhrer may have swallowed poison, before shooting himself between the eyes. The conflicting reports are attributed to ‘the fog of war.’

Hitler’s body was burned in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, although the Allies are refusing to release photographs because they are ‘too gruesome.’ Russian troops filmed the corpse, but it is feared that publication could inflame the excitable Nazi ‘street’ and lead to reprisal attacks.

A picture apparently showing Hitler lying on his back with a bullet hole in his forehead has been dismissed as a crude forgery. Conspiracy theorists claim that the body in the bunker was one of half a dozen Hitler-lookalikes recruited to throw the Allies off the scent.

But a spokesman for the Prime Minister said Mr. Churchill was satisfied it was Hitler. Although DNA testing has not yet been discovered, the Fuhrer was identified by a well-documented deficiency in the trouser department — a technique which also confirmed the identity of the propaganda minister Dr Goebbels, another who died in the bunker. The Allies say Hitler’s remains were disposed of in accordance with established Christian practice. But Hitler apologists and fifth-columnists have complained that he should have been given a proper burial, with full Nazi ceremonial honors, not chucked on to the back of a Red Army truck. There are also concerns about the legitimacy of the military operation which led to Hitler’s death. Pacifists want to know why the Fuhrer couldn’t have been captured alive and put on trial.

Some have claimed that the invasion of Germany was a clear breach of international law. Marshal Petain, formerly head of the Vichy Government, protested that Allied forces had illegally violated the borders of France, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries in their six-year pursuit of the Nazi leader.

The leading human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Robertson QC, said the death of Hitler set a dangerous precedent. If a notorious despot, with the blood of millions on his hands, could be ‘assassinated’ in the bosom of his family, while in the comfort of his own bunker, then no one was safe.

Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, called the death of Hitler a ‘war crime’. He said the evidence against the Fuhrer, including the murder of six million people in concentration camps, had been fabricated by the ‘International Zionist Conspiracy’ as part of its campaign to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

Sir Oswald also alleged that the carpet bombing of Coventry, Plymouth and the East End of London was carried out by MI5, on the orders of Mr. Churchill, simply to discredit the Nazis. He called on all Nazis to rise up and avenge their Fuhrer, before being led away by warders for a nice lie down in his padded cell.

Meanwhile, the Allies are planning to raze the bunker to the ground to prevent it becoming a tourist attraction and a shrine to Hitler.

Questions have also been asked about the source of the information which led the Allies to Hitler’s lair. Did one of his trusted aides betray him in exchange for a huge reward, a false identity and a new life in South America? Or was it the ruddy great Swastika flag on the roof and engraved gold ‘Fuhrerbunker’ nameplate on the front door? We may never be sure.

Despite the continuing confusion and speculation, there is no doubt that Herr Hitler’s death and the prospect of an end to the war in Europe has given Mr. Churchill a considerable boost in the opinion polls and he is now on course for a landslide victory in the forthcoming general election . . .’

Aging, Part I

Back in the day when I still enjoyed alcohol and other things that altered my inefficient consciousness, I honestly liked getting sick.  A three- or four-day flu was my specialty—the sore throat, achy chest and runny nose enabled me to legitimately take stuff like Robitussin and Nyquil, along with a variety of antihistamines, and almost knock myself out. The alcohol in cough syrups is designed to speed the medicine through the system, and it does this wondrously well. I could not be accused of being under the influence, I was ill, and anyone criticizing my way of dealing with my wretchedness was simply heartless and mean.

Things have changed. I now take great pains to avoid alcohol in any form, including medicine, and I have developed an intense fear and dislike of pills of all kinds. I no longer trust the prescriptions I am told to take and look them up on the Internet before I do. Are they addictive? Are they opiates or derivatives? What are the side-effects? I am, at best, a recalcitrant patient.  Unfortunately, I also seem to get sick a lot more often now than I did two or three decades ago.

The aging process, we know, depends on a combination of both genetic and environmental factors, and it will occur at different rates in different people. Overall, genetic factors seem to be more powerful than environmental factors. Aging causes functional changes in cells; the rate at which cells multiply tends to slow down, and T-cell lymphocytes, important for our immune system to work properly, decrease with age. In addition, age causes changes in our responses to environmental stresses or exposures, such as ultraviolet light, heat, not enough oxygen, poor nutrition, and toxins.

Age also interferes with apoptosis, which programs cells to self-destruct or die at appropriate times. This process is necessary for tissues to remain healthy, and it is particularly important in slowing down immune responses once an infection has been cleared from the body. Cancer, for example, results in a loss of apoptosis. The cancer cells continue to multiply and invade or take over surrounding tissue, instead of dying as originally programmed. With Alzheimer’s, amyloid builds up and causes the early death of brain cells, which results in a progressive loss of memory and other brain functions. 

And here’s unhappy news for all dieters: The proportion of the body that is made up of fat doubles between age 25 and age 75 and this change in body composition has an important effect on how the body handles various drugs. For example, when our body fat increases, drugs that are dissolved in fatty tissues remain in the body much longer than when our body was younger and more muscular. On a more positive note, body weight in men generally increases until their mid-fifties then decreases, with weight being lost faster in their late sixties and seventies. In women, body weight increases until the late sixties and then decreases at a rate slower than that of men. 

We can also look forward to progressive changes in the heart and blood vessels that interfere with the body’s ability to control blood pressure. Nor does the body regulate its temperature as it could when younger. This can result in dangerously low body temperature from prolonged exposure to the cold or in heat stroke if the outside temperature is too high. There will be aging-related changes in the body’s ability to develop a fever in response to an infection. Another issue: The regulation of the amount and makeup of body fluids is slowed down in healthy older persons and problems in fluid regulation commonly develop during illness or other stress.

 All this explains why getting older is not a particularly fun process. Want to see what you’ll look like when you’re old?  Go to http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Transformer/

Choices

Quantity or quality? What’s your choice: a long life, say, well into your 90s, with the concomitant deprivations and mental and physical diminutions , or a lifespan shorter by perhaps 15 to 25 years, where you will eat, drink and partake of semi-licit substances, cross against the lights, walk in storms sans ombrelle,  and challenge waterfalls in a barrel?

I’ve already had two almost-bought-it-for-good experiences in my life, both when I was in my 20s. I nearly drowned in the Chesapeake during a storm that swamped the small boat I was sailing. I went overboard, the boat turned over on me and I was trapped beneath it for what were seconds but seemed like hours. I went under twice, kicked back to the surface and hung on to a halyard that had broken loose. Other boaters came to my rescue but the water was rough enough that it took almost 20 minutes to get me to safety.  The second instance happened when I was riding my motorcycle back from a trip to Canada with a friend. We were in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes, cruising through one of the national parks. It was dark and I hit a deer, an eight-point stag that leaped into the road from nowhere. I flew over the bikes, landed on my side and skidded about twenty yards. The bike followed and sparks ignited the gas tank which was mercifully almost empty. I saw myself (a common near-death phenomena) arcing through the air, landing with a thump. I saw my helmeted head bounce off the pavement, my eyes wide and strangely nor frightened.  My friend pulled me away from the bike and miraculously managed to hail a passing car. I ended up in Ramapo General Hospital, no broken bones but scraped and seriously bruised. The bike was totaled and the deer was butchered and sent to an orphanage, or so I was told. The cop who investigated the accident told me about a dozen or so bikers had died on that stretch of road in the last decade.

So me, I don’t know. Basically, at the very least seventy-five percent of my life is done, and I am entering that phase where I am told I should really take care. Cancer, cholesterol, diabetes, back issues, psoriasis, chronic sneezing, high blood pressure and God knows what other vagaries are lurking, still in the shadows but no longer fully hidden. Additionally, we (I use the term generically) have entered an interesting period in gustatory history where essentially almost everything we eat, drink and breathe has been declared partially or fully noxious. If sugar were to be created now, I have been told, the FDA would probably classify it as a dangerous substance.  Wheat and gluten are bad, as are all white foods such as rice, flour and potatoes. Meat, particularly cooked on charcoal, is dangerous, and fish carry mercury. According to a recent study, a frightening amount of the chicken we eat is so full of the noxious e coli bacteria that it’s a wonder we haven’t all keeled over with our faces in KFC buckets. Most oils are bad. So are the additives, colorings and sweeteners we ingest by the gallon because we like pretty and syrupy foods. Canned foods are aswim in preservatives, hydroponic veggies never make contact with soil, dairy products are hell on the lactose-intolerant, and peanuts cause anaphylactic shock.

In the past few months I have given up (mostly) white bread, rice, sugar, and artificial sweeteners. I don’t smoke or drink alcohol of any kind, and I verge on the ridiculous when it comes to avoiding drugs, be they over-the-counter, prescription or illegal. I am not a vegetarian, and don’t plan to become one even though my intake of meat is sparse. Once a week I have breakfast with friends and eat far too much pork products, but that’s about it. I go through a bag of radish every three days or so and regularly eat apples and oranges. I have not given up cheese. I am, after all, French. I have discovered that brown rice and pink (yes, pink) beans with a dash of sour cream makes a great meal. I no longer have a motorcycle as I’ve realized my reflexes are not what they once were, and I doubt I’ll ever again speed along at 30 miles per hour on a pair of inline skates. The idea of a crash at that speed makes me shudder, which it did not ten years ago.

I suppose the question is how much we are willing to give up—on any level—before we realize that it ain’t worth it anymore. It’s going to be an interesting choice!

C&O Remembered

For the past few decades, my friend Paul and I have hiked along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal almost every week, except when it rains, snows, or is uncomfortably wet. Or when the lure of coffee and bagels is simply too overwhelming. We are fair-weather walkers and occasional rock climbers, Paul and I, who revel in the local flora and fauna. It’s rare if during our walks we do not encounter a snake or two, turtles by the dozens, aloof great blue herons, the occasional bald eagle, hawks, owls, deer that disappear into the hues and shades of the landscape. We’ve met snapping turtles as large as my chest ambling on the path with us, and young beavers swimming at our pace.  There are strange bugs too, multicolored caterpillars and confused moths. One time we fished such a creature from the waters where it had fallen. It was a wondrously large insect with velvet wings big as the palms of my hands. I don’t know if it survived our ministrations but I remember that the rescue made me feel good for the rest of the afternoon.  On weekdays, there are very few people, and they, like us, walk along the canal with a degree of reverence and wonder. It’s hard to imagine we are mere miles from the center of the Western world, from the White House and Pentagon and the roaring Beltway traffic.

According to the National Park Service, the C&O is almost 185 uninterrupted miles long. The C&O Company was chartered in 1825 to construct a shipping canal connecting tidewater on the Potomac River in Washington, DC with the headwaters of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania, thereby providing an economical trade route between the eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. During the canal’s peak years following the Civil War, some 850,000 tons of coal were towed in 500 barges that plied the waters daily. Following major flood in 1889, the C&O Company went into receivership and was bought out by the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. In 1938, the railroad in turn sold it to government, which placed it under the National Park Service.  

Very little has changed along the canal in more than a century. The path used by mules to tow the barges is exactly as it was in the 1800s. There are locks, now unused, and a series of mostly vacant lockhouses. The vegetation and wildlife remain the same, as do the granite tailings from rock quarries that lined the Potomac River. The walls of the locks are made of large stone blocks painfully hoisted into place, and these have been inscribed with the marks of the stonemasons who worked them, American hieroglyphics, mystifying and untranslated.

I like going there because, within my own reference of years gone by, time has indeed stood still and I am taken back to the days of my twenties and thirties with bicycles and canoes, fishing rods and picnic baskets. I spent long summer afternoons there with friends now gone for good, Michael and Christine and Bart and Maddie and others who still have large real estate holdings in my mind. I went there with my father a time or three and he too was enchanted. The place reminded him of the English countryside where he summered as a child. My mother once organized a nature walk for the ancient ladies of the Franco American Friendship Society.  They all wore hats and dark dresses and trod along the path like elderly members of an arcane but gentle cult who had somehow gone astray.

The National Park Service’s budget has suffered in recent years and there are places where the canal no longer flows. Cave-ins, storms, erosion of the banks and floods have all taken their tolls and there are not enough funds to fix everything. Still, the canal and path endure. That’s reassuring in times of constant and confusing change. I might go there this afternoon.

The Zound of Music

Deep down, I’m a Luddite. For those of you who may not know the term, it means I am generally opposed to rampaging new technology. In the past few decades, it seems as if incoming expertise does not have the time to make itself (or me) comfortable before something grander, faster and more
complex (to me) comes along to replace it.

The original Luddites were textile workers in 19^th century England who resisted the mechanization of their trade. They occasionally destroyed the automated looms that could be operated by unskilled labor and cost the artisans their jobs.  The movement crested in 1812 when Luddites burned factories and machinery, clashed with the British army, and eventually were dragged through mass trials that resulted in the executions of many and penal transportation to Australia of even more.

Luddites seldom win. We are the buggy whip-makers of society, the guys who stick to cars with carburetors when fuel-injection is the thing, the ones with lace up sneakers in a Velcro world. I, personally, am a recording Luddite. I believe in tape, in real sounds generated by real instruments played by the real hands of real people. I will tell you that the Beatles recorded their first songs on a four-track cassette deck with one microphone hanging from the ceiling and that all the new technology of compact discs, virtual recording studios and sampling (taking the music of one composer and inserting bits and pieces into the music of another) is complicated nonsense.

But… Recently, I’ve become acquainted and fascinated with a computer program called Sonar.

Let me back up. I’ve been writing songs for decades, and for several years played with a band that recorded a CD and sold it (a remarkably low number, I should add) on iTunes. The band broke up some time ago and since then I’ve wanted to record the stuff of mine that didn’t make it on the
original. Trouble is, it’s hard to find musicians who’ll play what I like and have the time to devote to a project that make take months, if not years, to put together, and holds no promise of fame and fortune.

Enter Sonar. Sonar will allow me to become a one-man band.  If, that is, I can master it. For a low price, my home computer has acquired a sound studio that is so complex I’ve signed up for two on-line courses so I can start understanding what I am dealing with. Dithering. MIDI (musical
instrument digital interface). Sequencers. Matrix views.  Loops, events, vertical and horizontal zooms.
The how-to book put out by Cakewalk, the creators of Sonar, runs to more than 1800 pages. So far, I have recorded one highly repetitive guitar track, tried to ‘import’ a set of MIDI drums (and failed), and been faced with a myriad of pop-up screens asking me if I want to clip-lock, clip-mute, insert effects,
show trimming, or bounce this to that in order to create the other.

To be honest, it’s fascinating. The trouble is I do not have an engineer’s mind, and what may be entirely logical to another’s brain defies my thinking. I make very small breakthroughs and am amazed to know that kids a third my age can do this stuff in their sleep.

Here’s the thing, though: I have, potentially, the means of recording symphonies in which, thanks to modern technology, my electric guitar can be made to emulate every instrument from harp to French horn.  Yesterday, late into the night, I discovered I could make tuba sounds. I did so for 45 minutes. I sang some lyrics and made a choir of myself, sopranos, altos and baritones joyfully chanting with me. I compressed, equalized, reverbed, phased, synthesized and boosted until I had a sound that had never been heard before in the history of the world. Then, realizing the difference between music and cacophony, I erased everything.

I suspect that at this stage, I am doing the musical version of finger-painting. I expect to get better, and I’m in no hurry. This is fun, a great outlet since I am presently stymied finding a plot for my next book. 

I’m sure I will write more about this as I develop my skills. In the meantime, ta ta. I am off to play my bassoon.

War Through the (American) Ages

The first war in which the not-quite-yet United States were involved lasted 13 months. From July 1675 to August 1676, colonists were busily fighting an assortment of Native Americans, including the
Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nipmuck Indians. Once that war was over, there was a brief hiatus until the French threatened the new colonies and King Philip’s War began in 1689. It would last eight years and fairly easily segue into Queen Anne’s war, still against those pesky French. That one went on from 1702 to 1713, to be followed by the King George’s war, pitting the French colonies against Great Britain.  Eight years later, the conflict started up again and was named the French and Indian War (or Seven Year War) and at about the same time, the colonists took on the Cherokee Nation so that from 1675 to 1761, the country was involved in some sort of conflict for a total of 34 years.

It didn’t get much better as time went on.  The American Revolution lasted from 1775 to 1783, to be followed 15 years later by the Franco-American Naval War, which ended in 1800. But as soon as that war was done, America launched its navies against Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli (piracy was an important issue) which enabled the Marine Corps to write a moving anthem. Then came the war of 1812 against the Brits, with Americans simultaneously carrying on a two-year conflict against the Creek Indians. Twenty-two years later, Texas went to war against Mexico, and a decade after that, the US as a whole fought against its southern neighbor. The Mexican-American War ended in 1848. There were 13 years of peace before the country went to war against itself from 1861 to 1865, licked its wounds for three decades, then got involved in the Spanish-American War. Total, 26 years of conflict from 1775 to 1898.

The First World War was fought from 1914 to 1918, and the second from 1939 to 1945. Then came Korea in 1950, ending in 1953. Vietnam started seven years later, and lasted a decade-and-a-half, during which time we also saw the attempted invasion of Cuba and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In 1983, we invaded Grenada to rescue medical American students who, it turned out, were not in need of
rescuing. In 1989 the US invaded Panama for reasons which to this day are unclear, and a year later we started the first Persian war against Iraq. In 1995 and 1996 US troops were in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in 2001 we invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq in 2003. We’re still there, and have also taken on Libya. All in all, in less than 100 years since 1914, this country has been involved in some sort of armed conflict for a total of 53 years. This does not include covert activities that took place in Central America and elsewhere.

I’m no historian, but that’s a whole lot of wars.

Granted, many were responding to aggression. In others, we aided allies, but the wars we’ve started or participated in since and including Korea make for an astounding 40 years of conflict since 1950. In other words, the US has been fighting something or someone two out of every three years in the last six decades.  War, it turns out, is as American as apple pie, though probably not quite as healthy.

That’s a whole lot of conflict. It’s also, of course, a whole lot of money for the people who make arms and ammo, and a whole lot of advancement opportunities for the military officers who, in peacetime, might retire with too few stars on their shoulders. And let’s not forget--there’s nothing like a good little war to show the world who’s the boss.

Why Are These People Smiling?

The world's most celebrated smile can be found in Paris' Louvre museum, protected by one or two
armed guards and half-inch bullet proof glass. Variously known as La Joconde, the Gioconda, or the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci's model with the winsome smile, elusive, mysterious, and perhaps amused,
has been tantalizing fans for more than four centuries. There may be something to the fact that the world's most famous painting reflects a very human expression. Only homo sapiens can smile. Animals, despite our best efforts at anthropomorphizing them, cannot. As a matter of fact, there is probably nothing quite so human as a smile, which serves to explain why ever since the first ad was devised, a smile has been used as a lure.

I subscribe to a half-dozen magazines--Time, New Yorker, Wired, Newsweek (which I will not renew since I don't like Tina Brown as an editor. Sorry, small, necessary aside), a couple of specialty
automobile publications and the Washington Post, and every ad featuring a human also features a smile. An ad for an HBO special on Jerry Weintraub? He's smiling. Siemens? Smiling woman. Young,
attractive. Geico has a smiling gecko. There are smiles for the relief of intestinal gas pain, depression, bunions, razor blades (both men and women); smiles for hand cream and condoms and expensive automobiles. Smiles from younger people for cheap automobiles, too. We are awash in smiles, not one of which has the charm of the original Da Vinci creation.

I’m not sure what this means other than a deep lack of originality in the advertising arts. Certainly the other photos, particularly those in my morning paper, are seldom smiling. By and large, the faces depicted there are anything but happy. There are tears, winces, exhaustion, disgust, severity and the
occasional empty affect, but there are damned few smiles. People whose homes are being taken away don’t smile. Neither do men totting guns for some African or Middle Eastern cause. Most American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t smiling, or at least they’re not doing so for the home-town crowd. There are a lot of smiles in the obituary pages, though, where the portraits of the
recently departed reign. Maybe they know something we don’t, or maybe they don’t know their photos would illustrate their all too-short lives.

The point, I suppose, is that at some point we learned that facial muscles can be used to show intent, and we somehow moved from displaying teeth as aggression to showing them as apparent subservience. A smile really is nothing but a snarl that’s undergone minor surgery, and it serves pretty much the same purpose—it’s an attempt to disarm the other guy, to make him leave us alone and
not challenge our turf ownership. We don’t try to scare the foe (although some folks have truly frightening smiles) so much as engage him in an attempt to bargain.  A smile says we’re in this
together, you and me. A smile leads to a handshake—another negotiating tool since the open hand denotes an absence of weapons.

That still doesn’t answer the original question. I don’t know why all these models in ads are smiling. Frankly, I don’t find it disarming. I find it creepy.