Cold War Confessions

The map had two pink countries, three green ones, two yellow, an orange and a brown.

They said you could make one in just four colors—a math professor from New Jersey proved that—but I didn’t try. We used a five color press. I worked at Modern America Printing. We made maps.

“Never a border without a color change. You don’t want Russia to bleed into Turkey, or Spain into France.” That was rule number one. There are other rules you don’t notice. “Too much green in the upper left,” they said. I liked green and they didn’t. It made the land solid and alive. “Use it for highlights. On long, thin countries like Chile.” What a rule! That was their idea of a map.

I wanted to do more. A color here, the right combination there and it could change things. The colors would mean something. Greenland isn’t yellow anymore. I did that. And I always wanted Russia pink. We didn’t have dark red like the Ruskies wanted, but pink was pretty close. I would send the map down pink and they would send it back. “Pink too heavy in the northern latitudes. Try yellow.”

I wanted to change Canada, too, but it was always pink. That was a rule. Everything England ever touched had to stay pink, like its prissy little queen. And Russia and Canada both in pink drowned out the US. I thought Canada would have been a lovely orange. But it stayed pink and Russia went green in the ’62 version, yellow in ’63, then went purple in ’64 and looked like it would stay that way.

This map had it green. It was a ’62. A lot of complaints came in that year. “A red garden spot,” they called it. Then yellow pushed it too close to China—that was the story around the office. But finally purple reminded them of the tsar. That’s Russian for Caesar. It’s what they wanted. I just wanted pink.

A ’62. That’s six years back, but it’s a North-East Europe and nothing changes there. The action was in Africa. The old maps had colonies all in one color—except the important borders like French and Spanish Morocco. Now it’s a rainbow. That was my work. It was my first challenge. Then Asia started changing. Jake handled that though. He was pretty good. I trained him before I left.

I looked at green Russia and beside it, at Poland, all brown and boxy.

I was watching Poland tonight. That’s my job now. I watch out for Poland every day. I got drafted into the Army after American Maps. Maps weren’t strategic enough for an exemption. That’s what my draft board said.
I had always wanted Poland green. The key was uniting Germany. Its two colors unbalanced everything. And Poland turned up brown. I heard Russian maps had only one Germany, but they did lots of tricks. They moved Moscow—to fool our airplanes—and even moved some lakes and mountains around. We couldn’t do that. There was a rule.

Germany always went down divided. It would be sent back otherwise. Jake said he would keep trying to make it one. He called it my dream, that and a pink Russia.

I looked down at the typewriter. “Troops of the Polish 83rd Armored Division in maneuvers. Four radio transmitters active 1400-2000 hours on 1 Dec 1968. Practice communications noted.” I added, “All other communications normal.”

I should have reported the messages that Bitzer brought in but that was at 10 and this was supposed to go out at 9:30. I signed the form and carried it to the radio room. Work was almost over. My shift was eves--that’s evenings in army talk--and it went until midnight. Joe came in then but tonight he was at the movies and I told him to see the end. It was a John Wayne. He liked that stuff.

The map hung in the front of the room with lots of desks facing it. You could look up and see Poland, just waiting there. I was in the back desk. It was safer. Sgt. James usually sat under the map and watched us. He was in charge but got orders from upstairs. They came through a pneumatic tube. It would spit out orders for him. And snort when we sent up replies.

Pins with little flags stuck in all over the map. These were divisions. They had 10,000 men. I lost two divisions one day, but we got them back. Stillman went through the trash that night and found them. He used to work here too.

Sgt. James had a long ruler so he could point anywhere in Poland without getting up. He never said city names, just motioned that his mouth was full and pointed. At first he tried to say the names but we would correct him. Bydgoszcz, Rzeszów, lots of good, spitty sounds. Sgt. James was the only one who didn’t speak Polish in the room. “I speak sergeant and that’s good enough.” That’s what he would say.

Pointing worked OK, but sometimes we would get the towns mixed up. It was hard to tell them apart from so far away. Remember I sat in the back. The reports got confused, but Sgt. James never knew. He didn’t read them. He was waiting to retire after 19 years as a cook.

Our desks were lined up on straight, white lines painted on the floor. Sgt. James was proud of that. He did it one night. Before him, it was a maze. Once you could only get to the back desks through the latrine. Stillman did that. He would map out secret routes to the door and leave them on my desk. I had to burn them though. He stamped TOP SECRET on them. You can’t leave secrets lying around—that’s a rule.

Sgt. James’ desk was centered over the lines in the front. He would check desks every hour. The room was very neat. But I would usually kick Joe’s desk out of line, then he would bump mine and then all the others got twisted a little and the file cabinets moved. Then—WHAM—Stg. James banged Poland with his ruler and we would realign the room.

At 1530 we sent our reports. Except now I sent out mine at 2130 because I had got changed to eves. My message would be passed around in Washington in one half hour, or if something important happened, it would go faster. There are lots of secret ways to send it. I won’t tell you about them.

I was looking at Poland. It is a flat country, like a big hayfield. My grandmother told me that. She was from Zielona Pole. That means green field. It’s near the 10th Division today.

I still had to type up the numbers that Bitzer had heard before my shift ended. There were about ten pages of numbers. “46523 66525 76428 66904.” That was the first line. I got most of them right.

They put the messages in a computer in Washington. It rearranges them three billion ways. Sometimes they figure out the code. The Poles are pretty smart but they buy their codes cheap, from Germany. They don’t always get the best. The last message Washington figured out was an order for band-aids. We put it in the file.

Here’s how it works: Bitzer listens to the messages, I figure out who sent them, and downstairs they resend them to the US. We are a post office for wayward messages.

“We are intelligence, not spies.” That’s what Sgt James told me. But I know the truth. We can be shot for this. I mean blindfolded and shot, not normal shooting-back shot that most soldiers get to do. There are rules for wars and we broke some. Sgt. James never mentioned this. I had to look it up. It is rule number seven. No dum-dums—those are bullets that hurt more than regular ones, no saw teeth on your bayonet, no shooting nurses and no reading other people’s mail. Radio messages are a kind of mail. So I was a war criminal like some of those Nazis: Hitler, Gerring and Patton.

I typed the Polish messages on US forms. Downstairs they put them in US code and radioed them. I wondered if Polish Intelligence troops listened in and typed them down and sent them in their code which we heard and coded and then they listened for again. It kept us going.

I was halfway through when I remembered that Stillman had left his weapons cache. I wanted to try it. It was in the safe under secrets. Stillman left last Thursday. They said he was lucky. He would have Christmas at home. Then he would go to Vietnam. “I’ve got the luck of the Irish,” he told me. I’m not sure I know what that means.

The safe combination was secret, so we couldn’t write it down. We had to keep it in the safe. I can tell you now because they change it every month. It was 7 right, 20 left, 36 right. No one could ever remember so we made up a code on the map. We made three new divisions this month: the 17thRifle Division, the 30th Land Mortars, and the 46th Rockets. You probably figured out the code. Just add 10. We kept the new divisions near Russia. Sometimes they moved towards Germany and Sgt. James called an alert.

I took the box out of the safe. It was in the secrets folder painted red. Stillman had built it. It was filled with lists of Polish generals and their phone numbers. I pulled out the false bottom and saw what I was looking for. Stillman had worked on it for two years. He was all alone at night. There wasn’t much to do. Poland is pretty quiet these days, but Stillman worked harder than I do. I sleep under the desk. Some sleep in the latrine but under the desk is better.

I took one out of the box and shot at Warsaw. We weren’t supposed to. Stillman invented the dart gun. It was really a blow gun that shot map tacks stuck through pencil erasers with onion skin cones taped on the eraser. They could bury themselves in concrete. Who would have believed that?

Before Stillman we just had rubber bands. Water guns were too messy.

Stillman smuggled in a bamboo tube to shoot with. I just rolled up a desk blotter and left no evidence. They caught Stillman smuggling out the bamboo. He had a message on him too. It was the Polish Band-Aid Secret. They didn’t arrest him though. He was lucky.

I shot at Warsaw again and hit the suburbs. Warsaw is a good target. It had lots of people. Stillman could hit town hall. I was just a suburbs man.

Stillman liked playing beer darts, too. He played with the Germans in town. They just threw them at the target, though. Stillman said, “They are the best.” They can dot the I’s in Wiener Schnitzel. That’s a small town near Poland.” He liked jokes. But the Germans could never shoot at Warsaw or even get near our map. There was barbed wire around the building and soldiers guarding us who didn’t understand what we did. The Germans all knew. Only the guards believed the parachute trap story. That’s what we had to call our big radio antennas.

Warsaw was getting pretty tattered. Stillman wanted to replace it with Chicago. They are a lot alike. He cut it out of Illinois. I thought we should just replace all of Poland. Even the countryside was ruined with pin holes. The divisions moved around a lot.

Really, we should order a new one. I like new maps. The countries are all clean and bright. All in order. That’s the real reason why I worked for Modern America. I would sit in the storeroom and just watch the maps. It was like travelling, but not as messy. One inch to ten miles is the best. Then you can see everything.

I hope some of Jake’s maps are still there in American Maps. They go pretty fast, I hear. He doesn’t do them anymore. He got drafted too and I don’t know who took over. Jake wrote me sometimes. He said Poland was almost green last year. They changed it back at the last minute.

Joe should be here soon. We talk a lot. It’s lonely here at night. There used to be four guys on. Then you could play cards. Two left for Vietnam in August. Miller might come back. Jackson got shot though.
I just delivered the messages, but you never see who radios. You put them in a slot and ring the bell. It’s like being a mailman. You can’t get in because it’s very secret. They have a door like a safe and you need the combination. I tried some numbers written on the wall once. It’s good they didn’t work. They might have shot me.

I guess I’ll tell you. Stillman said he might not show up in Vietnam after Christmas. He said Canada looked good right now. His job would have been to tell them where to drop bombs. That’s what they use this stuff for. He didn’t want to do that.

Joe talks about Vietnam too. He thinks we’ll all get sent. He’s tall and scared he will get shot. Tall guys make the best targets. I’m short so I’m OK, except for mines and booby traps. That’s what Sgt. James told me.

I checked the map yesterday. Just in case I go. Vietnam is pink on the top and green on the bottom. Sort of like a flower.

Brushes with history

Was lying in the backseat of an African-American sgt’s Ford sedan, covered with a blanket, the way that he advised, in Birmingham a block from the Sunday school bombing, when I was hitchhiking down to New Orleans.

Was getting ready to take the bus towards France after telling my bosses that the Soviets would not invade Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia, just before the tanks came in.

Was heading out of Monterey for a visit to the east coast the weekend Janis and Jimi started playing at the Pop Festival.

Was in the 10th grade remembering when I lived near Greensboro listening to the complaints about northerners causing trouble at the dimestore lunch counter.

Was coding in Pascal on my Lisa, transferring the executables over a RS232 connection to my 128K Mac as I readied the thermodynamics tutorial for the Stanford campus Mac rollout.

Was watching McGovern give a speech in Baltimore wondering how he got the nomination so easily, and then had everything fall apart as the autumn campaign against Nixon started.

Was watching the full moon out the window in Germany with the TV showing grainy pictures from the guys on the moon.

Was listening to the radio in the storage room while all the cadets in my Virginia military college were getting ready to enlist the next day, as Kennedy made his speech announcing the blockade.

Had just seen the billboards near the Texas border: “K.O. the Kennedys” with rifle sights printed over their faces, when I heard the news.

Was stubbornly doing the 4th assignment of my Stanford programming class on my Apple IIE watching it take 7 hours to compile, as the first student doing the course on a micro.

Was watching TV in a bar in Oaxaca with expats and mexican friends when Roberts messed up on the swearing in.

Was listening to KSAN-FM play "the wicked witch is dead" for a couple hours straight on the day J. Edgar passed on.

The New Four Freedoms (Republican Style)

Remember the Bill of Rights. Remember Roosevelt’s four freedoms. No one talks about the four new (non family-friendly) freedoms that we have these days. (Note: Freedom to get health care is not one of them):

1. Freedom to think ignorant stuff. You wanna be dumb, just do it. We don’t really care if you get educated. Just repeat everything on talk radio. Teaching you to read books woulda cost us plenty.

2. Freedom to do stupid stuff. Run away, take drugs and booze, hang out with weird people. Lie around homeless. Go psychotic. Whatever. Just don’t bug us or try to get anything we’ve got. You aren’t family. We don’t need to help you.

3. Freedom to get sick. Just lie there. By the freeway entrance. In the park. It's ok with us. We use hand cleaner. Its cheaper than medicine for everyone.

4. And biggest of all: Freedom to Die. Anytime you want, anyway you want. But don’t expect us to bury you. Not in our plots, whatda you think, you’re family?

Nudge-it's another book review chock full of ideas.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler

I have trouble with Nudge.

Not with its first premise: people make bad decisions. Nudge backs up my current understanding of our lower lizard brain (as opposed to our higher (literally) thinking brain--the good-at-reasoning and math and statistics, real-smart-monkey brain) that I talked about earlier when reviewing the book Kludge—a sibling monosyllabic title that also explicates the two-brain theory of humans, but starting from evolution. (I understand that Blink does something similar but celebrates the lizard in us all).

Nudge avoids evolution and draws from research. Rather than dwelling on the non-evolving lizardness of your brain-bottom, it demonstrates lower functioning with examples from personal finance, health and school choice, and extended warranties. Homer Simpson personifies the lizard-brain man and pops up often. His inability to delay any gratification, start anything worthwhile or plan more than two seconds out from the present demonstrates our brain at work.

Then the book presents its second big idea. In crazed optimism the authors expect the government to exploit these tendencies of non-thought for the good of us all. Not by prohibitions or enforced actions, but by a nudge--a method that exploits our weakness to guide us to be our best selves. An example is to make the default option in any choice the best option, taking advantage of our inertia against making change (for example, 401Ks should be opt out rather than opt in).

The authors seem to forget how things are done here in the USA. We aim folks on the path to hell for an extra buck. We advertise exploiting sex (part of the lizard brain appeal) to sell toothpaste and floorclearner. But most of all, we don’t buy our congressfolks to make life better for everyone; we buy them to make life better for me, right now. That’s the American way. We have a marketplace and the market decides. He who pays most, gets most--and that means controlling those default choices, hiding outcomes, and downright lying.

Nudge technology, like atom bombs, can lead us to good choices or to very bad choices (well maybe there are no good choices with atom bombs, come to think of it). That most likely path is not discussed.

The Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes you see something you missed in your life of reading.
GBS was one of those. He was only an icon to me with a pointy beard, no longer popular, especially with the hip and then hippie set. I only knew of him thru references on Sesame Street –Miss Piggy-malion--and reading the credits to My Fair Lady.
So last week I ran into him lying on a shelf in the local library, an edition about 60 years old. Why not?
GBS was witty and could write dialogue for Bringing up Baby or any of the fast talking, screwball comedies. Oh, I forgot, they copied him, not the other way around.
How class-bound England was/is. Sometimes I forget about social class when I hang out in Silicon Valley (where they hide their fancy-pants au-pairs and yardmen). Those Victorians cemented class but left cracks for upward money. And you forget how eccentric and extreme edge political those landed lords (and their lesser cousins) could be without disrupting upper class manners.
GBS writes polemics about mistreatment of the working class in the middle of snappy dialog. But readers skipped those pages to get to the characters spitting it out at each other as they danced around rituals of love and old fashioned hate, too.
You see how socialism was perceived b4 the communists took over Russia and hatched Stalin. GBS watched England losing its markets for manufactured goods because the rest of the world made things cheaper and predicted an England going broke. (sounds familiar?) , where they could only export workers. He didn’t forsee our overstuffed world and ad-driven continuous style-change buying that remade the world in its own image.
He sought a moral force that was rational. Religion was hocus-pocus; the church was just finishing up dealing with Galileo and the Pope declared himself infallible. GBS looked for non-revolutionary change to a more equitable world thru education. And he started the London School of Economics to explain it all.
But in this book, GBS creates the rational man as hero, the anti-romantic, that would have been a detective if he were born in the 40’s, I bet. And the tough thinking woman could be played by Kate Hepburn or maybe Becky Sharpe if she gets incarnated in the computer game world. These two finally marry after his first wife sentimentally dies off and they accidentally get engaged in about a paragraph and realize love would only mess things up.
Hope I didn’t mess up the ending for you.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus

Now, if you don’t want to blame your momma anymore, this is the book for you. All those problems -- making those questionable food and partner choices, believing in the devil and not in NASA’s moon trip, making dumb math mistakes, forgetting just about anything sometime—These problems are not your mama’s fault; they are not your fault. Those proto-monkeys and lizards did it. They spawned and recreated, bequeathing you a bottom brain that smolders and cooks up schemes for living in the jungle, not the city. Your brain stays always alert for that big, furry, pointy-toothed thing you have nightmares about, while always ready to grub for smelly roots, tasty rabbit parts and potential breeding partners. We have a lizard brain that is worse than our parents’. Gary Marcus explains our thinking tools as a big kludge—just a pile up of lizard, mammal, and, finally, faulty reasoning circuits that do not play well together.

The worst is--we default to the lizard brain when life gets tough.

Most people know how evolution failed us by standing up four-legged hoofers to a life of backaches and, eventually, metal knees. But the million year old brain is just as bad—we react; we don’t plan. We were evolved to eat, not to do math. According to Mr. Marcus, it’s a wonder we can even post well-reasoned stuff like this. He wrote a slim little offering, but it is a nice intro for the layperson. Note: I prefer Amos Twersky talking about wacky thinking or Eleanor Rosch explaining how we make categories in our heads.

Growing Nails

Everyone knows the two big growth areas in America are finger nails and coffee shops. But coffee isn’t hot anymore. Starbucks is closing shops down. What can you do after you have every street corner covered? You close low performers or do like Peets--sneak in tea. Read its full name sometime “Peets Coffee and Tea.” Tea is metro and hip and you pick your infusion (not just caffeine). So the curve is bending towards the tea guys. Just look at the SF (a culture leader, if there ever was one) tea house map.
But I don’t want to talk about drinking drugs today. I want to talk about nail shops. There are lots of them and they haven’t completely starbucked America yet. My prediction: nails have room to grow.
When I was a kid all the women I saw did their own nails. I remember moms and teenagers sitting on the porch with their wet toes shining bright red, sipping on a coke in the 100 degree summer heat, waiting for them ten guys to dry. Now it’s different. Do you know how many people do nails for someone else‘s feet? The census says 51,000 nail doers do it. And the Stats of US Businesses says 12,000 nail places were selling gels and acrylics and all sorts of nail stuff in 2008.
But I thought about it and the census number seems really wrong. I drove by more nail places than that last year.Look at the map of LA metro. Google shows 11,000 nail salons (That’s Google‘s term, not mine). So with about 20 million people that’s one nail shop for every 2000 people. If every shop has only 4 nail doers then that’s 1 nailer for every 500 folks (including old retired guys like me and babies too who don‘t do their nails often).
OK go ahead and argue that LA is nail happy and different from the rest of the US. So let’s look somewhere that doesn’t make you think about body parts right away--How about Casper Wyoming (I stuck my cursor in the map with my eyes shut to get it). I think boots and saddles for Casper, not nails and pedicures, but it has 23 nailerys for 50 thousand folks. That’s pretty close to the same as LA--one nail shop for every 2000 people.
So for the US with 300 million folks that means 150 thousand nail shops. And using my very conservative 4 nail doers per shop you get 600,000 nail doers.
We just need more growth companies like nail salons. Poofy dog shops are growing. Weird phone ringtones are hot. Two thousand dollar bikes with show-all tights are doing well. And all the old guys at the gym talk about how their wives like their snuggies.
America is on the move. Don't let those panhandlers standing around fool you

Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.

Hot and Scaly

Every morning when I go for a walk all the people living here are bundled up in parkas and heavy jackets with knit wool caps on their heads and scarves over their noses, mouths and chins. Even dogs have big red-plaid, flannel jackets which the Soriana store down the street sells like hot cakes (Hot cakes are big here.) Brrrrrrr, the people say (in Spanish) as they walk to work.

So where am I? In southern Mexico and it is almost 60 degrees at 8AM. Then in the afternoon when it is pushing 85, the schoolgirls are down to wool sweaters, skirts and long knit socks guarding their heat supply.

What’s going on? The people here are plump, so it’s not skin and bones cold (like I saw in India) that they are suffering. I think these folks just learned that comfortable means pretty warm. Maybe sweaty. And anything less means cold.

They like it much above our hallowed 68 degrees that I learned about in grade school for the thermostat in the livingroom. And maybe I learned in my skin and bones that sweat is bad and cool is, well, cool.

But I have been happy a lot warmer. It was pretty hot back in the womb. My little cells learned to sweat just fine in there. And it was damp, actually it was downright wet. But then I chilled out in the northlands for 50 years and forgot how happy hot can be.

I have been trying to reset my inner thermostat to 85. That seems right for this part of Mexico, especially next month when it heats up a lot. But the old thermostat seems stuck. I still love those cool evening breezes and the local people marvel at my ability to wear only a t-shirt and shorts when it is 65 degrees out.

They tell us that hot is coming everywhere. We need to get ready for global warming, not just get ready for hiding out from winter in Mexico when we get old. If our inner thermostats get set when we are a couple years old, maybe we just need to wear snow suits until we start school. That’s what they do down here in Mexico. Maybe we could keep kids hot longer after they are born. Make our nurseries into damp, big wombplaces. I bet if my mama had used more blankets at nite then maybe I would be comfortable down south and even enjoy sweating a bunch, like the people here do.

Or maybe I need to call on our good old genetic engineers to work on the thermostat reset gene. So we all could be really comfortable at 85. Then we would be ready when the polar bears start shaving off all that heavy fur and the penguins lose all their cute, heat-holding, baby fat.

While you are at it, Mr. and Ms. Engineer, can you do something about this skin? Its red and burned every day and I have to grease up my face every night like Doris Day used to do in the 50’s, to keep that handsome womanizer (in the movies that is) Rock Hudson out of her bed. I know I have my gringo skin because my ancestors stayed in the hut all winter and there wasn’t much sun anyway up where they lived with the reindeer and moose. Thanks to their shady lives, my skin looks like those glassfishes who live in dark black caves and watch their stomachs digesting shrimp that glow in the dark.

But when things heat up (it’s that global warming again), this old white skin is about as useful as a bay window with a great big skylight over top for keeping out the sun. I feel more related to a shedding snake than my thermo-hero, a lion who just lays back and naps in the jungle heat.

What I need is something darker and oily. Maybe with more hair. Then when the seas rise and I am on very high ground where the sun really beats down, I can cool it all day long.

Going WACKO

I studied electronics a while back. When they used tubes that looked like light bulbs from outer space and glowed purple and green in the dark. It was neat. That’s when I learned about making things go WACKO. I did that a lot and burned out all mom’s radios and tvs. It was fun.

Here is how going WACKO works:
(1) Process a signal in a black box. That’s electronics talk and it just means putting something somewhere, doing something to it, and then spitting it out—sort of like putting cats(the input) in a basket (the black box) and shaking them and then getting out mad pussycats(the output).
(2) Then you put part of the output back into the black box (that’s called positive feedback) and—WACKO—the black box goes crazy: like taking a mad output cat (feedback) and throwing him back in; then watching all the cats get madder and madder until they rip up the basket.

Sort of like what happened in my old radios.

With my electronic stuff, before it blew up, I would get a loud rrrmmmMMMMRRR noise when it went WACKO, like in the school auditorium when the principal got his mike (the input) too close to the speakerbox (the output) or now when I get my hearing aid upside down. The sound goes WACKO.

So Rule 1 is: if you take too much output and stick it into the input, then everything goes WACKO

Sounds like it could be fun, but in lots of cases it is bad.

Black boxes are all over the world. Banks are a good example--a bunch of people worry about their money and go in the bank and they take their money. Then some of them tell others that the bank didn’t have much money (positive feedback) and then more people get scared and go in and take even more money out and then WACKO—all the people are crazy to get their money. Its like the mad pussycats scratching out the tellers’ eyes until they get their money and making all the cats standing in line get really upset.

But this can’t go on forever. Like the school principal who pulls the plug on the mike to shut up the sound, the bank pulls the plug and locks the door. The tellers are safe.

But (this is important) in electronics I learned that all you need to do is turn the output upside down and then no more WACKO. In electronics talk that’s negative feedback. Lets look back at the cats to understand it better. If you take part of the mad cat output and reverse it 180 degrees (that means, maybe, in this case, give an output cat lots of tranquilizers) then throw him back in the basket, it calms things down.

OK, maybe basket cats are not the best example but they sort of illustrate Rule 2: if you take the output, turn it upside down and stick it into the input, then everything calms down.

You do this in electronics to make the output sound even better and calm down the circuits. But lets look back at the banks: how do we turn the people upside down when they come out the bank. Here’s how: We tell them if they leave their money in the bank they will get a whole lot more interest than they planned for. Then a bunch of them leave their money in and tell people in line that they are getting rich putting money in the bank. That’s how you flip the output.

OK, there is a problem. The bank only has a little greenback money and the rest is in crazy stocks and ponzi schemes. So our real problem is how to make more money when the bank safe is empty.

(We could use the government to do that. But it scares the bejesus out of everyone and they run even faster to the bank.)

Here’s my plan. Don’t give just regular interest. Throw in some big payback items when people ask for their money. When I was a kid the bank gave out a set of dishes when you put more money in. That won’t work now because everybody already has dishes. My plan is use churches to print up some holy money and give that out. Churches have a special bargain for the next world already. Let’s get the Pope and Rev Ike and anyone else with a fancy robe and a printer to sign on to the bank’s team (Maybe for ten percent of BofA).

When the banks run out of greenback money, then they can give out something easy to print up with lots of value. Lets call them Heaven Bucks—the kind you CAN take with you. To buy all sorts of heaven stuff: better wings and bigger harps. Or maybe it can buy you a one way ticket from hell. OK, this heaven stuff doesn’t work for everyone. If you believe in reincarnation you can get Karma Coupons that bump you up like frequent flier miles. No next life as a cockroach. There are all sorts of schemes. And remember the churches tried it before and it worked fine until Mr. Luther messed everything up. They had the big fire sale on indulgences (sort of like holy get-out-of-jail-frees in Monopoly) in the 1600’s. Right now they have holy water coupons you can buy from preachers on TV if you stay up late and watch weird channels. Holy bucks are a marketing paradise.

So we just balance the bank money in and out with holy bucks. No more WACKO in banks. We print all we want. It has lots of value (if you believe in it). It’s great stuff, just like real money.

Insurance People

When I was ten, I went to the movies a lot. I saw horror movies and monsters and sometimes watched travel trips to the Congo and Egypt and even New York. Those far away people took up lots of space and ran around like crazy. I wondered why so many lived in the world. About a thousand people seemed right, I thought. Then I could get to know everyone and they could all get together and eat a big meal and play football and visit. Just like when I went to grandmom’s and met all those strangers who turned out to be uncles and aunts and gave me candy.

But my teacher asked me what if someone drops a big bomb on your head (This was the 50’s when we hid under our desks on Thursdays when the siren went off at exactly noon for air raid drills). So I got scared and figured we needed those people out in Missouri, Montana and some over in China, too They were our insurance people, just in case the siren goes off for real. Then at least someone gets to stay here and live on earth. After all, we do want some people left around even if they aren’t me.

Last night I turned on the TV and they were showing ten great new ways the world can end. This week’s show has meteors smashing us like they did the dinosaurs. Back when only the birds survived by flying over it all and escaping the meteor mess. But everyone else died. My teacher told me that.

The TV said a meteor, somewhere out there, has our name on it. That’s why we need to think about insurance people again.

They say the rich will hide in caves for hundreds of years and come out and still be in charge, but I bet that they keep on fighting just like the dead dinosaurs did, and no one will make it out alive. Then in a thousand years only the birds will be here. No one else. Not us people, that’s for sure.

We really need those insurance people to make sure somebody stays in charge here on good old earth. Just putting them in Montana and China won’t work this time.

So I say let’s freeze a thousand people clones and hide them way down under the South Pole. I say this because that’s where The Thing lived for a million years. (Remember The Thing monster movie—then you will understand). Even if the meteor smokes the earth like the TV said, it will stay cold down under the ice. The Thing proved that.

In the movie, explorers found The Thing and melted him out. (Then The Thing tried to eat them. He got a couple before they smoked him with atomic grenades.)

Our insurance people clones will need thawing, too. Who will do it is the question? We will be gone—done in by the meteor. We need to find someone who will still be around after things smooth out. I’m betting birds make it thru the next extinction like they did the last one. They will sit it out on some pacific island doing bird things and having a good time.

So what we need is to add some good genetic memories to those birds for melting people out of ice; add some neuronal plans and put them in the bird genome. Neuronal plans like birds already have for bird things like going south in the winter or eating worms for breakfast.

OK, I know this is hard to do, but we pay you genetic engineers a lot of money; so start working on it.

And we don’t want you to fix up just any old birds. Some are pretty stupid and will be there beside us people getting extinct. We’ll need really smart birds to save our insurance clones. I am betting that crows make it thru extinction. We need to program some crow DNA to save us. Fix their little bird brains so whenever they see a frozen human in ice, they sit on it, like one of their little chickies, and thaw us out. That’s the plan. Pretty good, huh?

Then we do a little more genetic work to make crows taste good. I’ll tell you why later.

Now here is the insurance people clone plan in full: (You can make a movie out of it if you want.)

(Scene 1) We are all having fun and doing people things when (Scene 2) WHAAM a meteor smokes us all. But deep beneath Antarctica one thousand frozen insurance people clones are buried.

A couple thousand years later Antarctica warms up and a flock of crows sees our insurance clones thru the ice and BINGO that old genetic memory kicks in. They start sitting on the ice thawing out people and attracting more and more crows. Finally the ice melts, the people wake up and see a feast of good-tasting crows right in front of them. They chow down and the world is saved.

Genetic Engineering does it again.

(OK, you probably guessed. I had a big pizza and saw The Thing rerun last nite. I saw it first when I was 10 and didn’t sleep for months without having my mom lock the bedroom door. It was pretty scary. Like a meteor with my name on it. Or even those old atomic bombs. Actually any good size bombs will do.)