by Gary | Oct 5, 2017 |
I am writing this from roughly the middle of the East China Sea on a twenty hour sea passage from Shanghai to Okinawa. Actually, I’m not going to Okinawa but to Ishigaki-Jima which is a part of the Okinawa chain of islands which are, in turn, are part of Japan. I don’t want to insult anyones intelligence by dwelling on what you already know, but, if you, like me, missed this part of the world in your world geography class, a little context might be useful. Okinawa is a chain of 150 or so islands midway between Japan and Taiwan, and lies, as I previously indicated, in the midst of the East China sea. Of the 44 islands which are inhabited, a...
by Gary | Jul 21, 2017 |
I never really thought much about the land…the land from which we draw sustenance. I know that most of us have a connection through our ancestors. Somewhere in our lineage are those who at some time or other have scratched a living from the land, but few of us have actually pulled a cultivator behind a tractor to prepare a field for planting or even mowed a pasture. Until I retired from the corporate world, my connection to the land was tenuous at best. As a restless teenager, I used to visit an aunt and uncle in the panhandle of Texas who were honest-to-god cotton farmers. They lived in a small frame house just north of Lubbock; some irrigation...
by Gary | Jun 20, 2017 |
I’ve written at some length about cruise etiquette (or lack thereof). You can find it in my blog, Thinking Allowed in the archives for Jan 20, 2009 at a post entitled Cruising at the Bottom of the World. I’m now convinced that entire sociology texts could be written about this subject, and further I’m hereby positing that the social norms of any particular cruise are heavily influenced by the demographics of the instant cruisers. To wit: our recent ten day cruise of the western Caribbean. Let me explain. The demographics and the resultant on-board groupings are determined by several factors. Obviously the cruise itinerary, including the...
by Gary | May 12, 2017 |
Let me start by saying I am not a Vietnam Veteran, nor am I an historian or political scientist… but I am a veteran of the Vietnam era who was never shot at, nor did I ever shoot at anyone. I served in the U.S. Army from February of 1966 to March of 1969, an span that history suggests was at the height of the war and a time in which public sentiment turned against the war. I should also say that I’m pretty sure I would not be where I am today except for the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is my war. The war of my generation. The war that killed and maimed, and psychologically damaged hundreds of thousands of men of my age. The war that became...
by Gary | Apr 26, 2017 |
The urge to write has always lurked in the recesses of my brain, and at various times manifestited itself in different, even unusual, ways. My first writing outputs were of the write-on-command type. You know the kind. Five hundred words on the Ural River Valley, or an essay on the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. The subject, form, and length determined by someone else. I wrote because I was required to in order to satisfy some other requirement, such as a class assignment. Indeed, I got pretty good at it… not only for myself, but for others as well. I found I could knock out a paper on almost any topic (typed, double-spaced, with one carbon copy) at...
