Deck the halls, and cats beware

Is it too early for heart-warming Christmas stories? Especially with rustic English accents? I mean, it is almost Labor Day, so some stores are already crowding out their Halloween displays for lit-up reindeer, right?

Well, too bad—here it is, courtesy of the BBC:

Fa-la-la-la-la to you and yours.

Strawberries and surrenders

It turns out that I have a connection—albeit tenuous—to the events in Tokyo Bay 70 years ago.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior year in college I met a retired rear admiral who, as a very junior officer, had been one of the scores of men hanging off of every possible vantage point on the USS Missouri to watch the Japanese sign the instrument of surrender.

He was an interesting man, quite active well into retirement. But I’m sorry to say that the only other thing I remember about him (aside from his brush with history) is that my recipe for Strawberries Romanoff came from him.

It was the first recipe I ever had that used booze (Cointreau), and it made me feel ultra-cosmopolitan to have such a thing. Even though I didn’t have Cointreau and had no legal means of acquiring it. I think I was also somewhat vague about the whipping cream, because I’d never seen that on the hoof, only in those squirty cans.

I mean—it was a whole new world for me.

So, for me, the picture of Japanese officials in morning coats and top hats bending over the table to sign the document that ended their empire will always lie alongside the taste of summer strawberries floating in a sea of vanilla ice cream, slightly whipped cream and Cointreau.

And I believe that that’s as good a way to do history as any.

From Manchukuo to the Missouri

Seventy years ago today, representatives of the Empire of Japan boarded the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and signed the instrument of surrender to the Allies, effectively ending the Second World War.

It was a rather pathetic end to their dreams of conquest; of establishing overlordship over much of Asia; of pushing back the empires of Britain, America and Russia; and of taking (in the words of yet another imperial wannabe) their rightful place in the sun. They’d started out more than ten years before, with incidents in Manchuria along the Soviet border (actually, more than 20 years before, if you count the invasion and occupation of Korea), and expanded into China, Southeast Asia and vast swaths of the Pacific.

And they ended with their naval and armies incapable of effective defense (much less major attacks), their homeland in ruins and two of their cities smoldering under nuclear clouds. And thereby agreeing to the terms of unconditional surrender in a formal ceremony on an enemy warship anchored practically at the doorstep of the Imperial palace.

Just about right up to the end, the Japanese government had been living in cloud cuckoo-land with respect to their geopolitical reality. Even when they realized that it was a nuclear bomb that the US had dropped on Hiroshima, they calculated that we couldn’t produce more than one or two more, and therefore their malnourished, ill-equipped and sporadically-led people could fight on in such a way that they could still make an invasion too costly for us to consider. It took the second attack on Nagasaki and Harry S Truman’s promise of “a rain of ruin from the air” to focus their minds on their changed status.

Interestingly, it seems evident that they’ve never quite lost that vague disconnect with reality—even today they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for the atrocities they committed as a matter of policy in every country they invaded in World War II. Their eyes lose focus and slide away from any picture of mass murder, biological warfare, forced prostitution and a whole host of other violations of human decency standards. Most recently, to mark the 70^th anniversary a couple of weeks ago of Japan’s announcement that it would surrender, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed “deepest remorse” and “sincere condolences” to the empire’s victims, but lectured the world not to expect future generations of Japanese to “be predestined to apologize.”

Well, you know, I’d be more inclined to let those future generations off the hook if past and present ones—the ones within living memory of the crimes committed by the government and military of Japan—had manned up and first admitted to their actions; then acknowledged they were wrong, wrong, wrong without any mitigation whatsoever; and then proclaimed multiple times that they are heartily ashamed of those collective crimes and vow never to go down that path again.

This they have none of them done. It’s that old “mistakes were made” shrug, followed by turning the conversation to a new topic.

And that new conversation topic these days is Abe’s attempt to expand Japan’s military remit beyond the defense-of-the-home-islands restrictions that were placed on them 70 years ago. For obvious reasons.

You know, I understand that you could get uneasy looking over your shoulder at China; it’s not a settling kind of view. But it might be less imposing if you’d owned up to the dreadful things your government did to their people, instead of pretending that nothing ever happened under your watch.

So it’s 70 years on from that much-photographed ceremony on the Missouri. But I wonder how far we’ve progressed since then? How far can we if some of us are still in denial?

Quackin' good

You remember that art installation project involving a giant rubber ducky set afloat in Hong Kong Harbour?

Yeah, okay, it was a couple of years ago, so let me refresh your memory.

It started out looking so perky:

Then, somehow, it ended up looking like this:

Anyhow, it’s taken a while, but a meme has emerged, as we all knew it would. And I personally have waited a long time to be able to utter these words:

Bwahahahaha!

Gratitude Monday: Mysterious librarians

I loved this meme that came my way via social media:

Because I love libraries and the smart and passionate people who could have taken more lucrative jobs somewhere else but instead chose to build their careers amongst books, on civil service pay. They manage with shrinking budgets from civic overlords who’d rather spend money on redecorating their offices than on buying books. They put up with patrons making the most outrageous demands (“I need photos of the Underground Railroad.”) and being used as pro bono daycare providers (for both children and adults). They plan a cornucopia of events around the calendar and execute on them with military precision on basically a dime. (These days, probably $0.07.)

Librarians have expanded their offerings from books, story hours and improving lectures on learnèd topics to ebooks/audio books, classes on hog butchery and lending out all manner of tools and implements (musical instruments, sewing machines, I don’t know what all). Around here in the Valley They Call Silicon, they have huge sections of materials (books, periodicals, videos) in Chinese, Hindi, Urdu and Spanish. They adapt to the times and keep on serving their constituency, no matter how much it changes.

They are freaking miracle workers, and I love them.

Anyhow, I passed the graphic to my BFF, a life-long librarian, whom I met when we were both working at the Pasadena Public Library (which now has Wi-Fi, power outlets and a coffee bar in the place where there used to be comfy chairs, usually occupied by homeless guys getting out of the weather).

(She introduced me to Terry Pratchett, as a matter of fact—another reason why you want to cultivate librarians. You get your horizons expanded.)

I asked her if what Pratchett says is true about librarian super powers. Here’s her reply:

“Well, of course it is true. Plus our Head Librarian is an orangutan and he can travel over rooftops in search of stolen materials…”

Do you wonder at all why I’m immensely grateful for librarians?

Okay, great

Look, I’m trying to be positive; truly I am. But dealing with recruiters just kind of wears you down. (And it’s not just me. I could give you lots of stories told to me by others looking for work here in the Valley They Call Silicon.)

So let me introduce you to my new code, via a couple of memes:

But when—for the moment and for so very many reasons—you cannot say what is beating on the back of your incisors trying to escape your mouth:

Over and out.

The best mistakes we know how to make

I recently read How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life, by Joan Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith is a member of the Minnesota Chorale, a truly amateur group in the sense of doing something fine purely for the love of it. She uses various musical concepts as the framework for discussing life itself, and it resonated with me.

In the chapter titled “Creativity’s Compost”, Goldsmith takes on mistakes.

“What kinds of mistakes do you make? Do you err on the side of jumping into possibility when life beckons? Or do you hold back until conditions are definitely favorable? Are you more afraid of not following your heart’s dream or spending your old age bagging groceries?”

From those questions she goes on to discuss how businesses approach mistakes—whether they welcome and learn from them, or fear bagging groceries. The example she chooses, being in Minnesota, is from 3M Corporation:

“A productive mistake is: (1) made in the service of mission and vision; (2) acknowledged as a mistake; (3) learned from; (4) considered valuable; (5) shared for the benefit of all.”

(I have to say that, here in the Valley They Call Silicon, a lot of disruptive game-changing execs talk about innovation a lot, and hit hard on how they want employees to be creative risk-takers. But when you ask them for examples of how they as a company learn from mistakes, you get nothing but caffeine-charged crickets.)

Then she brings it back to the personal level:

“In this life we make the best mistakes we know how to make. Then, with any luck, we go out and make new ones. I don’t make mistakes when I watch TV or take a walk. These activities are pleasant, restful. But I could not make a life of them. After all, the easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.”

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life; you know—the ones that still make you cringe decades later. And I’ve gone through the walking-and-reading retreat periods; I know exactly what Goldsmith is talking about. I know from personal experience that it can be very risky to open your mouth and sing, but worrying about bagging groceries is worse.  

Bubble relief

Well, there’s good news on the Bubble Wrap front. Sort of.

(And if you didn’t know there’s a Bubble Wrap front, there is, if you’re one of the 99.932% of humanity who can’t resist popping the cells of the packing material. Of the people who know about Bubble Wrap, of course.)

It came to my attention after yesterday’s post that some benevolent benefactor has given us Virtual Bubble Wrap.

And if that’s not enough to pull you back from the edge, there’s an Insane Version of Virtual Bubble Wrap, with extra-special sound effects, on the same site.

Plus—you can get it for your Android device. But apparently not iOS. Probably on account of the Flash thing.

In any case—crank up the volume when you click on the bubbles. If you’re at work, on the train or in the library, use headphones.

You’re welcome.

Wrapping it up

We learned last month that the Product Formerly Known as Bubble Wrap is being “improved” and that we, the paying consumer, will no longer be able to pop the bubbles. Because there won’t be any.

So on one of my walks around the Valley They Call Silicon recently, when I spied this in someone’s trash, I almost snatched it for possible sale on eBay:

I didn’t, though. I just don’t have that kind of entrepreneurial drive.

Gratitude Monday: Unasked and unlooked for

On my Sunday morning exercise circuits, I like to add in walking the labyrinth at what I refer to as the Triune Church(es) of the Valley They Call Silicon.

  

Dunno whether the rock-lined Cretan-style labyrinth was an ecumenical project, or whether the Methodists, the Lutherans or the, uh, Very Gooders took point, but I’m glad it’s there.

(It’s kind of interesting to me that they didn’t follow the Chartres style, but this one is a lot easier to install, I’m guessing. Also, perhaps there was disagreement amongst the three congregations as to whether cruciform represented something too close to Papacy and this was determined to be non-denominational and therefore acceptable to all.)

Breaking my brisk pace to follow the mini-pilgrim path is both a physical and metaphorical pulling away for me. I turn off my pod and just walk the path in brain-neutral, instead of my usual mental speed-hopping. Yesterday I was focusing on a part of a prayer I’ve been practicing for a few days, on graces that have come “unasked and unlooked for” in my life.

There are a lot of those, of course, but a lot of the time I’m just not paying attention. So I was focusing on being open to them: to seeing them and hearing them when they appear, even unasked or unlooked for.

Well, as I was approaching one of the turns, I heard the unmistakable honking of Canada geese, and at the turn I looked up to watch a V-formation of maybe 15 of them flying fairly low overhead in front of me. As they passed from left to right, I heard a couple of honks off to the left, behind a tree. “Poky little gosling,” I thought (interrupting my meditative focus, to be sure). And then there appeared a much smaller formation—perhaps half as many—just flapping and honking, like they were doing their very-goose-best to catch up.

It was so quiet in the pre-0700 Sunday air, and they were so low, that I realized I could hear their wings beating. I’ve never heard that before, that whap-whap-whap-whap sound, multiplied by seven or eight sets of wings.

What a joyful thing—completely unexpected, and in the normal course of life around here, mostly impossible. The quiet around me, the quiet in myself, the initial squadron alerting me to their presence and the low formation of the hurry-uppers all came together to give me those beautiful moments, before everything returned to “normal”.

Now, I do not ordinarily find Canada geese charming. They’re an invasive species, taking over whatever environment they settle into, and you do not ever want them congregating anywhere you need to be walking or playing. (The phrase “crap through a goose” doesn’t even begin to approach the enormity of their output.)

But yesterday I was extremely grateful that they appeared so serendipitously, unasked and unlooked for, preparing me for the week ahead.