Dog days of summer

A friend and I have a thing going back and forth on Facebook—kind of the corgi channel. Not sure how it started, but it’s predicated on the idea that no matter how far down in the dumps you are, videos of corgis will lighten your spirits.

This compilation isn’t all corgis, but it begins and ends with them, so close enough.

Besides—all the dogs are comedians in this.

A patch on history

Looky, looky what I found just a couple of blocks from where I live:

It’s a micro-park honoring Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer programming. It’s basically a patch of lawn and trees in front of RiverHouse apartments, which is apparently where Hopper lived late in life.

It’s nice to think that I might be walking paths that she did back in the day; a little connection with a kick-ass, brilliant woman, right here in the neighborhood.

At a grocery store near you

When I came out of Wegmans the other morning I noticed that another shopper was apparently disabled in places not immediately visible, except in their wake.

Because who, at 0820 on a Saturday morning, cannot be arsed to push their empty shopping cart 15 unobstructed yards to the cart return shelter?

Seriously—what sort of Leona Helmsley-delusional lout do you have to be to decide that only the peons need to get their carts out of the parking spaces? Are you expecting your mom to toddle behind you tidying up and putting your toys in the basket? 

Grow the hell up.

Of course they poop!

In case you’re thinking that the research and issues reported in the venerable Science magazine are too hifalutin for the average reader, I direct your attention to a story that was published in the 23 March 2016 issue.

If the title, “Why watching comb jellies poop has stunned evolutionary biologists” doesn’t get you, what about the opening sentence: “No buts about it, the butthole is one of the finest innovations in the past 540 million years of animal evolution”?

Well, if that doesn’t draw you in to the article, I just don’t know what will.

I love that there’s apparently a comb jelly(fish)—formal name ctenophore—and that they call it Ctenopolooza. I’m betting these evolutionary biologists really know how to party.

And I love it that videos of the ctenophores engaging in acts of ingestion and egestion were received like a Tarantino film at Cannes.

Well, the excitement doesn’t end there. If you scroll down, the first couple of dozen comments are all asking the big question: how can you write about a revolutionary video of comb jellies pooping without including the, you know, video?

(Yeah, the comments end up going to hell when some troll gets into the act and someone else feeds it. They go on for a couple of dissertations, but once you see Frankensteinsmonster, you can stop reading.)

In case you're curious about the video, too, I've looked. William Browne, of the University of Miami is clearly keeping it close to his vest, and it's nowhere to be seen. He may be working on a distribution deal.

But wait, there’s more. Because in the 3 June issue of Science, a letter was published from Sidney L. Tamm, PhD, of the Boston University Marine Biological Laboratory, under the title, “No surprise that comb jellies poop”. Tamm, one of the Ctenopolooza organizers, assures us, “It is now recognized that ctenophores expel waste from both ends.”

Well, there you go.

Listen—in a presidential election year, I’m going to take my enlightenment wherever I can find it.

Gratitude Monday: On the beach

From terrorism in Tel Aviv to Orlando, it’s been an utter nightmare of a week. But On Saturday, between coverage of all this insanity, I listened to NPR’s Scott Simon interview Mortimer Caplin, who’s approaching his 100^th birthday. 

At age 27, Caplin was a US Navy beachmaster at Omaha Beach on D-Day. That means that he was one of the first to land, and—working amid body parts and the horribly wounded—he established and maintained communications with the naval armada and he directed the logistics on the beach. Listen to him talking about his responsibilities in that happy, matter-of-fact way. No braggadocio, no self promotion, just, “Yep, that’s what I had to do; that’s what I did.”

It’s a critical role for amphibious landings, the one that’s meant to bring order out of chaos, ensuring both thousands of men and tons of matériel got to where they could do the most good. And Omaha was the most chaotic of the five Allied landing beaches. It was the most challenging physically (beneath cliffs), and almost no troops came ashore at their designated targets. The consequences were brutal; there was one point when General Omar Bradley considered whether to withdraw the troops from Omaha because the cost was too high.

It’s hard for me to imagine a 27-year-old with that kind of responsibility under those circumstances. Partly because for the past ten years I’ve been working with a lot of 20-somethings whom I wouldn’t trust with anything more critical than managing code release. And partly because the image of a beachmaster has imprinted on my mind as that of Kenneth More playing Colin Maud, from the film of The Longest Day.

(The beachmaster sequence starts at 1:13 in this clip, following the bit with Peter Lawford as Lord Lovat landing with No. 4 Commando.)

(The Darryl F. Zanuck production yucks it up in this sequence. And it erroneously plants Maud at Sword Beach, instead of Juno, both British targets. But at the time of the invasion he was 41, and More did display the kind of gravitas that you’d expect in someone with that responsibility. The dog and the walking stick are well within the envelope of British military eccentricity. As is Lord Lovat’s piper. The schtick with Sean Connery—not so much.)

But Caplin wasn’t the youngest beachmaster in the US fleet. His comrade at another Omaha sector, Joe Vaghi, was 23. Vaghi, also a metro-DC resident, died in 2012 at age 92. Both returned from the carnage of D-Day and beyond. Vaghi was an architect; Caplin served as Commissioner of the IRS under JFK, and has been a supporter of the arts hereabouts for decades.

I refer you again to the NPR interview; listen to Caplin’s voice and consider how, before he was 30, his actions contributed to the life you lead today. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, and I’m extremely grateful to him. Not only because of his courage back then, but because he reminded me that, in this world of unspeakable viciousness, there were those who worked steadfastly in the worst of conditions in the hopes of building something better, something bigger than the next iOS app.

Let’s hope there are others like him now.