2006 In Memoriam

So another year has come and will shortly pass away into memory. What sort of year has it been in Smitty's World? Let's recap, shall we?

In January, we talked about an exciting upcoming deployment, to Basra, in Iraq. That did not pan out, and though I was a bit disappointed at the time I'm glad it didn't. I had hoped, in January, that if the deployment went off I'd be home in early June and would be out of the service very shortly thereafter. See what that gets you...
Also in January, we discussed the need to buy Danish, the rudeness of modern technology, and we were first introduced to Taylor Hicks for the first time on American Idol.

In February, I had a great bottle of wine, which was occasioned by my acceptance to UVA Law. I had hoped to be enrolled there in classes now. That was also the day that Tampa got something like 11 inches of rain. Back in them days I was planning a fun August trip to Nebraska for a friend's wedding and the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, but that never panned out. I'm still looking for an excuse to take the tour. I went back to Valdosta, where I did pilot training, and was disappointed at the results. I did some soul searching, already apparently wondering whether law school was the right thing or not, but didn't come to any great conclusions. Dick Cheney gave in to bloodlust, we had the Olympics, saw a picture of the future, and talked about the major league sports market. Sort of a schizophrenic month.

March saw me off to the Everglades for a wonderful vacation. March also marked the famous polemics about trees, wherein I attempted to provide a list of 100 native Florida trees you can plant instead of oaks (to which I am, particularly in March, allergic). Then I went off on the Chinese Stinking Pear (also called the "Bradford Pear") and provided photos of twelve attractive native flowering plants that are better. I also got to fly again, for the first time in a year, and it was pure bliss. Although I spent part of the month laid out with back pain, March was a good month.

April provided the first inkling of an opportunity to go to Djibouti, to deploy again for the first time in a year and feel like I was actually contributing to the war effort, misguided though it may be. I went off to a wedding, attempted but did not make a solo flight to Atlanta, and managed to finish the worst book I read all year, I am Charlotte Simmons. I also turned… um… an age. Yes.

May was a wonderful glorious month, for in May I met Smittygirl. I also spent a week at the cabin in North Carolina, did tons of writing, went on some cool hikes with Lucky Bob and Rambling, and went to a friend's wedding. I had a great time at a rave, and finished the best book I read all year, Straight Man--although that's not quite fair, since I'd read it once before.

June was apparently very dull. I'm sure there were some interesting politics-related posts or something, but as you can see, I had nothing to say in June.

July was a fine month. Although it started well, with guests in town for the Fourth and such, the middle part was lousy, with my departure for Djibouti. But it finished great when, on the 29th, I finally finished Lauderdale.

August is a complete wash. I can't remember it. I lived in a tent. I worked out some. I reviewed, but had long since finished reading, A Walk in the Woods, the best non-fiction book of the year. I went out into the countryside of Djibouti to see some cheetahs. That's about it. August was a wash.

September… hmm, yes, September. Yes, well. I moved into a CLU out there in Djibouti, but that post is not on the blog at present. It was a happy day, but frankly, I don't think well of much of Djibouti anymore. The only significant thing to happen that month was that I made the decision to attend Burning Man in 2007. I hope this works out but I'm not sure. I am buying tickets though, on the 17th, so if you think you might perhaps possibly consider thinking about maybe going, let me know and I'll get one for you. You can sell the things on eBay or Craig's List so it's not a big if you get a ticket and then can't go.

October is usually such a wonderful month. It is. Usually. I don't even want to talk about it. I did read the best fiction book of the year that I had not read before. That was something. It was a rough month, though, precipitating as it did the removal of almost half the posts on this blog, and several other things best left in the ground. I had to say goodbye to Cinders in October, as it became apparent he would not be around when I returned. Probably the hardest thing I did all year.

November was a substantial improvement over October. We had an election, which was pretty cool. I finally solved the monthslong dilemma of Conocarpus lancifolius. I began work on (but in no way completed) a quirky novel about superheroes or something. And I went on a wonderful safari with some terrific people. Had a great time. Almost made the whole deployment worth it. Almost.

In December, bless the Lord, I came home. Smittygirl was waiting for me at the airport. It was wonderful. I paid off my car, celebrated a wedding and a reunion at the same time, celebrated Christmas, and now here I am, on the 1st, recapping what was ultimately a rather crappy year.

I dated this post for 2359 last night, although I didn't write it then. Duh! I was watching fireworks and stuff. But it seemed like a post that should be in 2006.
So what would I say about the year that's passed? Well. I don't wish to be negative. I did meet Smittygirl, after all. I said goodbye to a good friend, too. I read some good books and some lousy ones, wrote a mediocre one, went on some great trips, worked an incredibly pointless job in a dirty, unpleasant country, made some decent money, and paid off my car (it's really exciting!). We crowned an interesting new American Idol, saw some great displays of athleticism at the Olympics, and had an interesting election. We lost some good people, and some bad ones. On balance it wasn't the worst year I've ever passed.

Hmm. You know, if it wasn't, I don't know which one was. Here's to 2006. May it rest in pieces.

Safari Post III

When last we spoke of Safari, I was still staying at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi. Well, we couldn't very well stay there all week, so off we went one morning on one of the numerous taxicabs, deep into darkest downtown Nairobi. There is a large intercity bus station there, but we ended up on some cross street swarmed with jitneys, jalopies, and other things that start with J, not to mention hordes, throngs, and milling thousands of people. Of course, on our way there we had a flat tire and had to watch the milling thousands pass by us in their diesel-belching jitneys and jalopies, but once we arrived safely in the midst of the horde we left our cabbie behind and hopped on board the Riverside Shuttle, a 26-seat bus complete with rooftop luggage rack. Remember that it had been raining off and on since we arrived in Nairobi, so I was none to happy about leaving my luggage on the roof, but there was no room inside; by the time we left, 29 of the 26 seats were occupied. You read me.

On our way south to the city of Arusha, in Tanzania, I took this beautiful picture of a mountain that is not Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was on the other side of the bus, as it turns out. Not that anybody saw it. The road to Arusha--shown in dark blue on our maps of the area, the equivalent of I-40 or the M4--was a 1.5 lane jostle-o-matic massage with purely theoretical paving but only occaisonal intrusions by poultry and livestock (not to mention the people). We were never so happy to see a hotel as we were when we finally pulled up, some six hours later at around eight in the evening, at the Impala Hotel in beautiful Arusha.

The Impala bills itself as "the only four star hotel in Arusha." They are exaggerating, or else the Arusha Chamber of Commerce has created a new grading system. Nonetheless, if you go to Arusha, you should stay at the Impala. It is not the nicest hotel in town--we stayed at the New Arusha Tourist Hotel on our return from safari, and the rooms there were much more luxurious--but it has four terrific restaurants on premises and a pool and you would do well to stay here lest you suffer the cooking at the New Arusha Tourist Hotel (and suffer you shall).

In the morning I took the elevator to the top of the hotel and snapped this shot of the city of Arusha, such as it is. Arusha has about 150,000 people, by the Tanzanian government's definition (which may and probably does include vast swaths of the surrounding countryside), but it is the point of embarkation for at least three quarters of safaris to the Serengeti, Tarangire, and elsewhere in northern Tanzania. It is fairly smoggy, but all in all we agreed Arusha was much the nicer city than Nairobi, on the whole. The city is dominated by Mt. Meru, which you can also see from the top floor of the hotel.

In the morning we headed into town to visit Sunny Safaris, who had planned our safari. I highly, highly recommend Sunny Safaris if you are considering a safari. If you want the full luxury safari with stays at Serena Lodges every night and so forth, you'll want to go with someone else, but if like us you have a budget to work with Sunny is the place to be. We met our driver, Bryson (who appears in only one of my pictures and I am quite annoyed about that and need to get a picture from one of my traveling companions), and took a seat in our chariot for the week, a massive nine-passenger Toyota Land Cruiser. Sweet ride.

We stopped at a convenience store of sorts, to stock up on goodies. You get the feeling that Sunny and this place have an agreement and everybody stops here on their way out of town on safari. The place was stocked with every conceivable kind of liquor, plus chips, candy, and sodas, and a variety of other things. We bought some beers and cider, and several bags of Chili-Lemon chips, which turned out to be absolutely great and I'm kinda craving some right now.

On our way out of town we passed the various sites. For example, there was this coffee plantation. Believe it or not, the air smelled vaguely of coffee. (There were no tea plantations that I saw, but all week I drank plenty of good Kenyan tea.) Later, we passed the Arusha International Airport. No, really. You can catch a commercial flight into this from Dar es Salaam or Nairobi, or several other cities in Tanzania. What fun that would be.







Much later--it's a four hour drive to Mto wa Mbu and the first national park you visit--we passed by this traditional Maasai village.

Finally you come through Mto wa Mbu, and head to Lake Manyara National Park. That's where we'll pick up next time; here's a photo of the national park to tide you over. There are actual animals in the park! And I'm through building suspense; next time we'll see elephants, giraffes, and all sorts of cool things!

Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

Knight Life

I finished Peter David's Knight Life and One Knight Only while on safari. These had been mailed to me by the incomparable Lucky Bob, who has already reviewed both of them. His reviews are better, so the links above just send you straight over to him for the full story. Suffice to say I enjoyed both of these, as you might suspect being sort of a political junkie with a slight affinity for the truth. The notion of King Arthur returning in the present day to run for office and what that might entail… it's a gold mine.

I will say that, Peter David being a fantasy writer and not a political writer, the books—in particular One Knight Only, tended much more toward fantasy than political fiction usually does. Had I written them they would have gone off in an entirely different direction, and readers like me who don't do a lot of fantasy literature might wish Mr. David had spent more time considering how King Arthur reacts to modern politics and less time on the dirty doings of Morgan le Fey and Gilgamesh. But that's just me. I still had a good time.

Knight Life

I finished Peter David's Knight Life and One Knight Only while on safari. These had been mailed to me by the incomparable Lucky Bob, who has already reviewed both of them. His reviews are better, so the links above just send you straight over to him for the full story. Suffice to say I enjoyed both of these, as you might suspect being sort of a political junkie with a slight affinity for the truth. The notion of King Arthur returning in the present day to run for office and what that might entail… it's a gold mine.

I will say that, Peter David being a fantasy writer and not a political writer, the books—in particular One Knight Only, tended much more toward fantasy than political fiction usually does. Had I written them they would have gone off in an entirely different direction, and readers like me who don't do a lot of fantasy literature might wish Mr. David had spent more time considering how King Arthur reacts to modern politics and less time on the dirty doings of Morgan le Fey and Gilgamesh. But that's just me. I still had a good time.

River of Grass

I finished this book in November the day before the safari. Like Some Kind of Paradise, this is a book about Florida history—at least to some degree. Published in 1947, this is really the original Florida history, the first important popular book about Florida to attempt any decent coverage of the pre-Columbian period. And it set the tone, in many ways, for every Florida history that was to follow, by drawing its narrative around the state's ecology.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was for many years after this book's publication regarded as the foremost Everglades scholar, historian, and protector, and she fought for Everglades restoration until her death a few years ago. River of Grass was not so much the end of a long studied interest in the Glades as it was the start of a career. The book also started a lot of other careers, got a lot of people in South Florida and elsewhere interested in the unique patch of ground we have at the end of this state and have been trying to destroy for two hundred years. For that alone the book deserves high honor.

But it was written in the 40's. New scholarship and new ideas have changed the way we think about some parts of the state's early history, and this can be jarring if you're up to date on what we now think about Ponce and the Calusa and everything else. But Douglas was the first writer to say in any popular format that Ponce de Leon was not, in fact, looking for the Fountain of Youth, and indeed may not have even known the myth. It was added later by Spanish romantics looking to idealize what was a brutal and difficult conquest (and one that didn't exactly pay off for Spain).

The first few chapters are about Glades ecology, and here it is clear Mrs. Douglas really knew and loved the Glades, had spent time in it and talked to the people who'd lived in it. And it's clear how important it was to her to make the Glades seem like more than some God-forsaken swamp at the end of the Earth, which for most people at that time it still was. Occasionally the prose is a bit florid, the description just a mite too romantic to be entirely real, but it's still wonderfully evocative.

After the first five chapters, Mrs. Douglas settles down into a linear narrative, something Some Kind of Paradise could have used a bit more of. She is a gifted storyteller, and that is the key requisite for a popular historian. Though River of Grass covered much of the same material I'd read just a few months earlier, I found this book a faster read, more like a story, less a witty retelling of facts than a gripping old-fashioned yarn. That's what popular history should be.

The book focuses exclusively on south Florida, south of Lake Okeechobee for the most part with occasional notes about goings on elsewhere in the state but nothing in-depth. For this reason it's not the best available history of the state, if that's what you're looking for. But it is hard to beat River of Grass for a good historical adventure, and you'll get a great insight for the Glades and the people who've sought to tame them.

River of Grass

I finished this book in November the day before the safari. Like Some Kind of Paradise, this is a book about Florida history—at least to some degree. Published in 1947, this is really the original Florida history, the first important popular book about Florida to attempt any decent coverage of the pre-Columbian period. And it set the tone, in many ways, for every Florida history that was to follow, by drawing its narrative around the state's ecology.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was for many years after this book's publication regarded as the foremost Everglades scholar, historian, and protector, and she fought for Everglades restoration until her death a few years ago. River of Grass was not so much the end of a long studied interest in the Glades as it was the start of a career. The book also started a lot of other careers, got a lot of people in South Florida and elsewhere interested in the unique patch of ground we have at the end of this state and have been trying to destroy for two hundred years. For that alone the book deserves high honor.

But it was written in the 40's. New scholarship and new ideas have changed the way we think about some parts of the state's early history, and this can be jarring if you're up to date on what we now think about Ponce and the Calusa and everything else. But Douglas was the first writer to say in any popular format that Ponce de Leon was not, in fact, looking for the Fountain of Youth, and indeed may not have even known the myth. It was added later by Spanish romantics looking to idealize what was a brutal and difficult conquest (and one that didn't exactly pay off for Spain).

The first few chapters are about Glades ecology, and here it is clear Mrs. Douglas really knew and loved the Glades, had spent time in it and talked to the people who'd lived in it. And it's clear how important it was to her to make the Glades seem like more than some God-forsaken swamp at the end of the Earth, which for most people at that time it still was. Occasionally the prose is a bit florid, the description just a mite too romantic to be entirely real, but it's still wonderfully evocative.

After the first five chapters, Mrs. Douglas settles down into a linear narrative, something Some Kind of Paradise could have used a bit more of. She is a gifted storyteller, and that is the key requisite for a popular historian. Though River of Grass covered much of the same material I'd read just a few months earlier, I found this book a faster read, more like a story, less a witty retelling of facts than a gripping old-fashioned yarn. That's what popular history should be.

The book focuses exclusively on south Florida, south of Lake Okeechobee for the most part with occasional notes about goings on elsewhere in the state but nothing in-depth. For this reason it's not the best available history of the state, if that's what you're looking for. But it is hard to beat River of Grass for a good historical adventure, and you'll get a great insight for the Glades and the people who've sought to tame them.

Punch Drunk Love

I have a serious question here. Smittygirl and I watched this movie, Punch Drunk Love, last night. Or, no, it was the night before (we watched Over the Hedge last night, which was much better).

Um... well. It was... well, I'm not going to say it was awful, but I didn't like it. I didn't really get it, much of the time. I didn't get how Barry was able to track down the sex talk people. I didn't get why Lena liked him... I mean, I didn't get that at all, he's a wackjob. I get that his sisters were domineering but is there NO ONE in Barry's life who can see them for what they are? It's absolutely absurd that everyone would think Barry was the only nutcase in that family. Although I will admit that accident/harmonium scene in the beginning is totally awesome and I like the way it sets up the story, sets up what is about to happen in Barry's life. It's very poetic.

And because of that scene I find myself thinking that it may, in fact, be a good film. I just don't care to ever watch it again and didn't really think it was especially entertaining. It was a lousy movie. But it might have been a good film. So, if anybody's seen Punch Drunk Love, please, I want to know what you thought of it and why.

Work Avoidance Policy

I'm supposed to be cleaning my house right now. I have several books to review, though. And... and I'm sure there are other things I could be doing to avoid work. But I shouldn't...

Safari Post II

So we flew to Nairobi, in Kenya. Although there were cool giraffes outside the airport, I was not terribly impressed with Nairobi. It is a very big city and the infrastructure is generally fairly poor. There are some nice hotels; the best are self-contained worlds with everything you need under one roof (or at any rate within one walled compound), which is what you want because frankly Nairobi is large, busy, dense, dirty, and not terribly safe. But it's still better than Djibouti.

So we spent a couple nights at the Safari Park Hotel on the outskirts of town. It's a very nice place, although it is about a two hour drive from the airport at rush-hour in traffic that very nearly sits still the entire time. And oh, the aroma! Most of the traffic consists of these things that look like updated Volkswagen microbusses and spew exciting leaded diesel fumes.

But the hotel was great. They had a terrific IThailian restaurant (Italian, but it sounded like the guy in the front office said "Thai" and we were all hungry for Thai the rest of the week), and a Japanese restaurant, and free breakfast with good tea, and a full hour massage for 1500 shillings--which is about $22. Not bad. And then there's this restaurant, the "African Barbecue" restaurant, where you can get dinner for $18 (including a bottle of wine!). What you get for that price is a salad, soup, and all the meat you can eat, to include goat, camel, and crocodile. The crocodile tastes like a whitefish filet with the consistency of a good ribeye. I couldn't get used to it and didn't eat much. The goat was excellent. The camel tasted wonderful but was chewy, like a clam strip. There were, of course, other meats, which were tasty, and a terrific (and extremely athletic) dance show. Without question this was the best thing we saw/did in Nairobi.

It was rainy most of the day when we were there, but after the massages my friend and I decided we should take a dip in the hot tubs anyway. The water comes out of these little elephants. It's rather nifty. Unfortunately, as you'd expect in a place where the outside air temperature rarely gets above 85 or below 60, the outdoor "hot tub" is more of a "warmish tub," especially after half an hour of rain. There's also a waterslide out of shot to the left; the water temperature was between "Oh my God!" and "Holy @$#$!", but I went down the slide anyway. Twice. The trees with the yellow flowers are Thevetia peruviana, two of which live in pots on my porch. They aren't that big.

The morning we left it was raining, but I was able to snap this nice photo of a Bird of Paradise flower in the rain. The grounds also have several traveler's palms and bananas, both of which are related to the Bird of Paradise. Odd. Do not eat Bird of Paradise fruit.

This is a large trumpet plant at the hotel. I thought this was unique, that it was so large, so I snapped a photo to show my father, who is a fan. Then when we got to Arusha I found that there were literally thousands of the plants around town, some of them twenty feet tall with hundreds of blooms. But I never got a picture of those so this one will have to do.

Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

The first Safari Picture

Yes yes, I know, it's been like decades or something since I said I'd post safari pictures. Well, there were almost 600 of them. Give me time.

But to sate your apetite for photographs, I thought I'd post one. This picture is of the first animals we saw on safari, and they weren't even in the park. These fellows were hanging out on the roadside in the town of Mto wa Mbu, Tanzania (pronunce it Mitowahmboo and you'll be nearly correct; the name means "Village by the Mosquito River," in case you're wondering whether you want to honeymoon there or something). We saw more in the nearby Lake Manyara National Park, but these guys were special because... well, because they were first.

They're baboons, by the way, if for some reason you are unsure.

If you go to Mto wa Mbu: The place has the best bananas to be found anywhere on Earth. Buy a bunch on your way through town and enjoy them as a meal, pondering that with bananas like these it's easy to see why many poor folk in Uganda and Tanzania get more than 50% of their daily calories from the humble fruit.

Safari Post I (Introduction)
Safari Post II (Nairobi)
Safari Post III (Arusha – The Safari Begins)
Safari Post IV - Lake Manyara A
Safari Post V - Lake Manyara B
Safari Post VI - Lake Manyara Lodge
Safari Post VII - Off to Serengeti!

Ah.....

I paid off my car today.

Yaay!

I've never done that before. I wrecked the last one before I paid her off, and the one before that I didn't pay for, so it was no big deal. But this one...

It feels good. It'll feel better in a couple weeks when the title comes.

Home in Tampa

Well, I've returned to Tampa. It's nice to be home.

Apart from an extremely uncomfortable flight from JFK to Tampa and some bad gefilte fish on the flight out of Djibouti (which I'm only just now recovering from), it wasn't a bad trip. I even got to get out of the airport for a while in New York and walk around midtown Manhattan. Ah, New York is such a wonderful city. It was chilly, but not unbearably so. The city is all decked out for Christmas. I almost spent the money and went ice skating in Central Park, but it's been so many years since I tried that I think it could be dangerous.

It was in any event a glorious afternoon, but it took some getting used to that, even at one in the afternoon, the sun was at the same point in the sky as at 10 in the morning in Djibouti. I've forgotten how much more sun there is in the tropics. Sunset occured shortly before five (even here in Tampa it's before six, and the sun rises a lot later than it did in Djibouti).

There are safari pictures on the way. Soon. I promise. Just, don't hold your breath or anything.

Last Post In Djibouti

Well, I'm back, but there are so many safari pictures I've only just started going through them all. I haven't even opened Photoshop yet to shrink any of them so you'll just have to wait a few more days before you can see them. I know, I know, it sucks. I apologize.

I've been very busy since I got home so this will be the last post to come to you from Djibouti. Very soon I shall be home again and in Smittygirl's arms, and All will be Well. Yaay!

Respite

Well, my time in Africa, to no one's dismay, is finally drawing to a close. Before my much anticipated return to Florida, however, I get to take a little vacation. I'll be going on safari in the heart of the Dark Continent for a few days, so this will be my last post until, probably, December 1. I'll post again before I head home, of course, and said post will include pictures of lions and zebras and rhinos (oh my!). At least I hope so because if it doesn't it won't have been much of a safari ("and here is the Serengeti. The animals don't come to work until January but we have some lovely grasses…").

But seriously, folks, enjoy Thanksgiving and the mad crazy shopping crush on the 24th. And remember that I have to do all my Christmas shopping after I get home.

Nifty

I just learned something cool! Burning Man 2007 is going to feature (well, not really, but it will occur during) a total lunar eclipse! On Tuesday night! At 0308 (technically Wednesday morning)! How cool is that? Clearly I have to go now.

Also readers of mine who don't read up on fellow Elm Street blogs owe it to themselves to drop over to Lucky Bob's place and read his recent post about Our Place. Good food for thought, and we can all use some good food now and then.

Lack a daisy

I don't honestly know why I even came to computer lab tonight. Check email, I suppose. That's about it. It's one of those days, weeks... I won't say months. Last month was one of those months.

I'm about three weeks out, now. I'm ready to come home, in almost every sense but one--and that one is, now that I have a new job, I want to make it my own and improve it before I hand it off to somebody else. I need a bit of time to do that, but it'll get done. I've made a few changes already.

I was going to go to the gym tonight, but it's after nine and I haven't yet so the safe money is that I won't. It's been like five days. I don't feel as bad about it as I thought I would. I came out here with this great goal, this idea that here I was in a place for four months and change where I'd have nothing really to do but go to the gym. I was going to come home all buff and drive Smittygirl crazy (I may still drive Smittygirl crazy, but not for the same reason). Instead I've been to the gym less in the last four months than in any four month period before this going back at least two years. Oops. I could blame outside factors but the truth is I think Djibouti has just made me lazy. Lately I've actually been looking forward to going home so I can go back to the gym again. Really.

And what exactly have I been doing other than going to the gym? Um... let me get back to you about that. Really, I promise I will. I think. I'm thinking I may at least start riding the bike again. It's something. Not much but something.

I haven't written a great deal on the November book--I'm somewhere around 8000 words--but it does have a title now and the main character has finally been introduced, and with him has come the shape of a plot, or at least a driving idea. See, the main character is The Reporter (also the title). But really, the main character is also Mordecai Metropolitain, who is a reporter for the Porktown Banner.

Porktown is a very bizarre community, as my previous snippets from the book should make clear. The conceit is that Mordecai Metropolitain, although he lives in Porktown, lives in the real world. He eats at McDonald's and watches American Idol and reads Spider-man comics. Everyone else in Porktown--well, not everyone, there's a sizable expat community of people who, like Mordecai, grew up outside Porktown and know how ridiculous the place seems--eats at the local Chinese-Italian restaurant, Ramakrishna's, which usually has a mariachi band playing; they watch tv shows like Operation Fungicide, and read comic books like Creamy Porridge. And they think this is perfectly normal. To cash in on this Mordecai started drawing a comic making fun of Porktown, which he publishes in the Banner because the Banner is the newspaper of choice for expats (natives read the Bugle). And then he decided to turn the comic strip into a comic book, and created the hero, The Reporter, and the comic has become very popular.

And I haven't quite figured out how it's going to work, but at some point Mordecai, to his horror, starts to turn into his creation, starts to become a part of the bizarre insanity of Porktown. And of course the characters already introduced will themselves become a host of villains and minor heroes--obviously we know where The Canary stands in this group, but Melllllllody and Van (of the Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski clan) are still a bit up in the air. (Also, there's a Col Mustard now, and someone known only as The Candlestick, who were introduced waiting to see The Canary in his Conservatory). Obviously there's no way come hell or high water I'm going to get 50,000 words written by the end of the month, but this is certainly an amusing project and I'm keen to see where it goes.

And that's about all there is from Smitty's World for today.

Conocarpus lancifolius solved!

Well, I won't say I didn't expect it… but my search for the truth of Conocarpus lancifolius has ultimately proved me right. To quote Marc Frank, the University of Florida Herbarium's Extension Botanist, "You have been misled by bad information on the web." And how.

Conocarpus is not a monotypic genus. The New York Botanical Garden has it wrong—but don't blame the Garden. The Garden posted inaccurate information on the internet, information from an early 20th Century botanical study by a fellow named Nathaniel Lord Britton, who took the time to include nice illustrations. It was the nice illustrations that led the Garden to use pages from the unpublished and incomplete work in its species descriptions on its web site. Other sources, including Princeton's WordNet and the writers of Wikipedia, took the Garden's information as gospel, because the NYBG seems a trustworthy source. But the Garden makes no claims as to the veracity of the information on its web page. It is, after all, there because of the pretty pictures.

In fact, Engle described Conocarpus lancifolius a few decades before Lord Britton began work on his botanical study. But Lord Britton was primary interested in plants of the American tropics, and there's only one Conocarpus species in the Americas. Had he done more research he'd have turned up lancifolius and not claimed Conocarpus was a monotypic genus. Why he didn't is anyone's guess.

In any event, armed with pictures, a page from a study of Somali plants helpfully scanned and emailed to me by the Florida Herbarium's (an excellent institution) Marc Frank, and the truth, I will be taking it as my mission to correct the inaccurate information in WordNet, at the NYBG, at CABI, on Wikipedia, and elsewhere on the web, thereby making the Internet a better place.

Now the question is, how would I go about getting a permit to import specimens so I can deliver them to the Herbarium…

If Chins Could Kill

I was sent Bruce Campbell's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by the inestimable Lucky Bob, who encouraged me to read it someplace where I wouldn't be concerned about laughing out loud. I am never concerned by such things, and I am already regarded by many people here as not fully sane. But the end of October seems to have reduced my ability to laugh out loud, even in private, at least for a while. So I didn't laugh out loud that much at the book.

But in any other month… well. This is a great book, a great read, funny and warm and full of passion. Mr. Campbell did what most people don't think they can really do—he followed his dream. He wanted to be an actor, because being an actor isn't really very much like working. Or at least that’s how it seemed. For Bruce Campbell, at least, acting turned out to be very much like work, hard sometimes, unpleasant, crazy, not especially remunerative. But throughout it he was what he wanted to do, what he had always dreamed of doing, and so the hardship and the struggle were never so bad, and what might have been grueling work seemed much more fun.

You may not have heard of Bruce Campbell. He admits this much on the back cover. But he also points out that his book isn't just for his fans. It's for anyone who wants to know what life in Hollywood is like for the majority of actors, for the working stiffs who come in every day and do the small roles and don't command $20 million per picture, who don't feed the tabloid machine and don't go testify before Congressional committees about their dimwit political opinions and don't headline summer blockbusters. There are lots of such people, far more than there are big stars, and to some degree Campbell is speaking for all of them.

If Hollywood is a hard place to make a living, but a kid from suburban Detroit with a big chin can make it, then what's to scare the rest of us off from trying our hand at what we really want to do? That's the message that underlies the whole book, and what a great message it is. Bruce Campbell may not be a household name, and you don't get the impression he wants to be anymore, but the friends he ran with as a kid all went out to Hollywood to make their way, and one of those friends (who appears throughout the book) is Sam Raimi, the fellow who made those little movies called Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. I don't know if you've seen those; they're only the best superhero movies ever made. Clearly you can do well doing what you really want to do.

I could philosophize a while here about how this was exactly the right book for me to read right now, and it was. But I'll spare you. I may not have laughed out loud every other page, but I wouldn't have laughed out loud at much the last couple weeks; doesn't mean I don't appreciate the humor. And whether you're a fan of Evil Dead or Army of Darkness or Brisco County, Jr. (or The Hudsucker Proxy, one of my favorite movies of all time) or not, Bruce Campbell is a funny man, a down-to-Earth guy with a great story to tell and a great way of telling it. You're going to like this book. Go read it.

If Chins Could Kill

I was sent Bruce Campbell's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by the inestimable Lucky Bob, who encouraged me to read it someplace where I wouldn't be concerned about laughing out loud. I am never concerned by such things, and I am already regarded by many people here as not fully sane. But the end of October seems to have reduced my ability to laugh out loud, even in private, at least for a while. So I didn't laugh out loud that much at the book.

But in any other month… well. This is a great book, a great read, funny and warm and full of passion. Mr. Campbell did what most people don't think they can really do—he followed his dream. He wanted to be an actor, because being an actor isn't really very much like working. Or at least that’s how it seemed. For Bruce Campbell, at least, acting turned out to be very much like work, hard sometimes, unpleasant, crazy, not especially remunerative. But throughout it he was what he wanted to do, what he had always dreamed of doing, and so the hardship and the struggle were never so bad, and what might have been grueling work seemed much more fun.

You may not have heard of Bruce Campbell. He admits this much on the back cover. But he also points out that his book isn't just for his fans. It's for anyone who wants to know what life in Hollywood is like for the majority of actors, for the working stiffs who come in every day and do the small roles and don't command $20 million per picture, who don't feed the tabloid machine and don't go testify before Congressional committees about their dimwit political opinions and don't headline summer blockbusters. There are lots of such people, far more than there are big stars, and to some degree Campbell is speaking for all of them.

If Hollywood is a hard place to make a living, but a kid from suburban Detroit with a big chin can make it, then what's to scare the rest of us off from trying our hand at what we really want to do? That's the message that underlies the whole book, and what a great message it is. Bruce Campbell may not be a household name, and you don't get the impression he wants to be anymore, but the friends he ran with as a kid all went out to Hollywood to make their way, and one of those friends (who appears throughout the book) is Sam Raimi, the fellow who made those little movies called Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. I don't know if you've seen those; they're only the best superhero movies ever made. Clearly you can do well doing what you really want to do.

I could philosophize a while here about how this was exactly the right book for me to read right now, and it was. But I'll spare you. I may not have laughed out loud every other page, but I wouldn't have laughed out loud at much the last couple weeks; doesn't mean I don't appreciate the humor. And whether you're a fan of Evil Dead or Army of Darkness or Brisco County, Jr. (or The Hudsucker Proxy, one of my favorite movies of all time) or not, Bruce Campbell is a funny man, a down-to-Earth guy with a great story to tell and a great way of telling it. You're going to like this book. Go read it.

O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

The Prophet and The Messiah

I don't know how to review this book, The Prophet and the Messiah, by Chawkat Moucarry, which is I have not reviewed it before now. The book was written by an Arab Christian who has made a career teaching Muslims and Christians about each other. That such a job is both vitally important and woefully neglected is undeniable. The book was written to reach people the author cannot reach himself.

It is certainly a good book and absolutely worth a read by any Christian, any Christian at all whether he or she engages with Muslims or not. There are too many myths, too much shouting, too much demonizing and burying of truth in our society. Shouting pundits and crying televangelists do nothing to bridge the yawning gap between our faiths and in fact simply make it wider. We American Christians foment hatred and false truths about Muslims just as surely as Middle Eastern Muslims do so about us.

The book is valuable especially to Christians working in evangelism. Moucarry does not begin his discussion by claiming Islam is wrong and its practitioners evil, as so many evangelists do. It's hard to minister to a people you think to be demons, doubly so when you don't understand where the people are coming from. Muslims are justifiably proud of their faith, and any attempt to evangelize to them that starts with "you're wrong and here's why" will cause offense and close ears and minds and hearts, and is a waste for both parties.

Moucarry starts by discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity; this discussion is clearly geared toward a Christian audience and seeks to put to rest the myths Christians tend to hear about Islam. He then goes on to discuss the myths Muslims are taught about Christianity, at some length, and where they come from and why they are myths and, to some degree, how Christians can explain these things to Muslims without offending them. He then goes into specific doctrines of Islam that Christians can question validly, and why similar doctrines of Christianity are defensible against questioning by Muslims. Finally he treats the question of the truth of Islam, of whether there is genuine revelation in the faith and what we might learn from it.

It can be a difficult book to read, especially in the early going when Moucarry cites Islamic false claims about Christianity in one chapter and only in the next chapter gets around to laying out the truth. Reading with an open mind is absolutely vital, and a Bible is a necessary resource. But difficult though it may be, the book is a worthy read and I recommend it highly.

The Prophet and The Messiah

I don't know how to review this book, The Prophet and the Messiah, by Chawkat Moucarry, which is I have not reviewed it before now. The book was written by an Arab Christian who has made a career teaching Muslims and Christians about each other. That such a job is both vitally important and woefully neglected is undeniable. The book was written to reach people the author cannot reach himself.

It is certainly a good book and absolutely worth a read by any Christian, any Christian at all whether he or she engages with Muslims or not. There are too many myths, too much shouting, too much demonizing and burying of truth in our society. Shouting pundits and crying televangelists do nothing to bridge the yawning gap between our faiths and in fact simply make it wider. We American Christians foment hatred and false truths about Muslims just as surely as Middle Eastern Muslims do so about us.

The book is valuable especially to Christians working in evangelism. Moucarry does not begin his discussion by claiming Islam is wrong and its practitioners evil, as so many evangelists do. It's hard to minister to a people you think to be demons, doubly so when you don't understand where the people are coming from. Muslims are justifiably proud of their faith, and any attempt to evangelize to them that starts with "you're wrong and here's why" will cause offense and close ears and minds and hearts, and is a waste for both parties.

Moucarry starts by discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity; this discussion is clearly geared toward a Christian audience and seeks to put to rest the myths Christians tend to hear about Islam. He then goes on to discuss the myths Muslims are taught about Christianity, at some length, and where they come from and why they are myths and, to some degree, how Christians can explain these things to Muslims without offending them. He then goes into specific doctrines of Islam that Christians can question validly, and why similar doctrines of Christianity are defensible against questioning by Muslims. Finally he treats the question of the truth of Islam, of whether there is genuine revelation in the faith and what we might learn from it.

It can be a difficult book to read, especially in the early going when Moucarry cites Islamic false claims about Christianity in one chapter and only in the next chapter gets around to laying out the truth. Reading with an open mind is absolutely vital, and a Bible is a necessary resource. But difficult though it may be, the book is a worthy read and I recommend it highly.

Smitty's Polipicks Scorecard

Well, I said I'd edit this post, so I have. This is as of Thursday at 1900 local.

So. The picks were:

LA 2 - Jefferson in second place
TX 22 - Lampson wins, by 2-5
FL 16 - Mahoney wins, by 3-5
FL 9 - Bilirakis wins, by 8
FL 13 - Jennings wins, by 4-6
FL Guv - Crist wins, by 8+
FL AG - Campbell wins, by 2-3
FL CFO - Sink wins, by 4-6
FL Ag Commish - Bronson wins, by 20+
Hills Commish - Norman wins, with less than 40%
FL Sen - Nelson wins, Harris makes 40%+
RI Sen - Whitehouse, by 4
PA Sen - Casey, by 7
NJ Sen - Menendez, by 4
MD Sen - Steele, by 3
VA Sen - Allen, by 2
TN Sen - Corker, by 5
OH Sen - Brown, by 10
MO Sen - McCaskill, by less than 1
MT Sen - Tester, by 5
Dems gain 4 Senate seats
GOP retains control of Senate.

Okay, so how'd I do? I score one point for a correct call, minus one for an incorrect call. Plus one if I get the score exactly right, minus one if I'm more than four points off, no score otherwise.

In LA-2, Bill Jefferson came through in first place. Minus one.
In TX-22, Nick Lampson won by 10 points with over 50%. Plus one for the call, minus one for underestimating the size of the victory. -1 overall.
In FL-16, Tim Mahoney won by one point. Score one for the win. 0 overall.
In FL-9, Gus Bilirakis won by 12. Score one for the win. +1 overall.
In FL-13, Vern Buchanan seems to have won, although there will be a recount. Assuming his win holds, that's minus 2. -1 overall.
In the FL Guv race, Crist won by 7. So close. 0 overall.
In the FL AG race Bill McCollum won by more than 2. -2 overall.
In the FL CFO race, Alex Sink won by 8. -1 overall.
In the FL Ag Commish race, Charlie Bronson won by 13 (far less than 20). -3 overall.
In the Hillsborough Commission District 7 race, Jim Norman has won but got more than 50% of the vote. -3 overall.
In the FL Senate race, Bill Nelson won (+1), by 22 points (+0), and held Krazy Kat to under 40% (-1). -3 overall.
In the RI Senate race, Whitehouse won by six. -2.
In the PA Senate race, Casey won by 18. -2.
In the NJ Senate race, Menendez won by 8. -1.
In the MD Senate race, Cardin won. -3.
In the VA Senate race, Webb won. -5
In the TN Senate race, Corker won by 3. -4.
In the OH Senate race, Brown won by 12. -3.
In the MO Senate race, McCaskill won by 1. -1.
In the MT Senate race, Tester won by 1. 0.
So I'm net zero, not bad, really, considering I lost most of those points for getting the margin of victory wrong and not for the actual pick. Of course, add in the fact that the Dems gained 6 seats (probably; there's always the chance of a recount but Webb is ahead by 7000 votes) and took control of the Senate, and I'd be at -2. Not very good.

Still, imagine if you'd bet against the house!
And, just so I can feel a little better about myself... if I didn't score the margin of victory at all, I'd actually be +10 for races, and +6 taking into account the control of the Senate, the Hillsborough county race, and Harris being kept under 40%.

Polipicks

Every even year for some time I've made a handful of political picks in certain races. Mainly these are just bets I make with myself and I don't often mention them to others. But I figure I'll put them here this year so that I can't pretend I picked any upsets I don't actually pick, and so that you can all laugh along with me when we see how far off I am on Wednesday morning.

I would consider this post more under the heading of "gambling/parlor games" than actual politics, since these picks are not based on my own personal leanings. However, in keeping with my no-political-content policy, I am not posting my reasoning behind these picks; rest assured I have some and am not just throwing darts (although that might be more accurate).

To give you some idea of my record, in 1998 I called Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and said Howard Dean would run for president in 2004. In 2000 I called Bush for president, but also said Ralph Nader would take at least 5% and guarantee the Green Party nationwide ballot access and a spot in the prez debates in 2004. In 2004 Senate races, I said Mel Martinez would lose in Florida (I was wrong and I've forgotten who his opponent was) and Inez Tenenbaum would beat Jim DeMint in South Carolina. I've gotten progressively worse as time has gone on, so this should be an interesting batch of picks.

1. U.S. House, Louisiana, District 2

The incumbent is democrat Bill Jefferson, the fellow who had $90k in bribe money stashed in his freezer when the feds raided his office earlier this year.

I predict Jefferson will finish in second place but force a runoff. I also predict he will win the runoff in December.


2. U.S. House, Texas, District 22

The incumbent is republican Tom Delay, who is barred from running again because he says he moved to Virginia, but didn't say so in time to get his name taken off the ballot, so the GOP candidate is a write-in.

I predict Nick Lampson, the democrat, will win by 2-5% against GOP write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. I also predict he will only get one term.


3. U.S. House, Florida, District 16

The incumbent—-well, not anymore—-is Mark Foley. His name is still on the ballot, and to vote for state rep Joe Negron, the GOP's replacement candidate, voters will have to mark the box by Foley's name; write-ins will not be counted.

I predict the democratic candidate, Tim Mahoney, will win by 3-5% of the vote.


4. U.S. House, Florida, District 9

The incumbent, who is retiring this year, is Gus or Mike Bilirakis, whichever one is the father.

I predict Gus or Mike Bilirakis, whichever one is the son, will win by 8% despite high democratic hopes.


5. U.S. House, Florida, District 13

The incumbent is republican Katherine Harris, who is running for the Senate this year.

I predict democrat Christine Jennings will win by 4-6%, and will be re-elected in 2008, and will swiftly enter the democratic leadership (by 2009). (No, I don't know her personally and I did not donate to her campaign.)


6. Florida Statewide Races

Governor: Charlie Crist, the republican, will win in a walk, by at least 8 points.

CFO: Alex Sink, the democrat, will win by 4-6%.

Atty Gen: Skip Campbell, the democrat, will win by 2-3%.

U.S. Senate: Bill Nelson will best Katherine Harris by 17-19 points; he will not hold her below 40% of the vote.

Agriculture Commish: Republican Charlie Bronson by 20+.

7. Hillsborough County Commission At Large District 5

Jim Norman is the incumbent. Norman faces an independent candidate, Yamel Arronte, whom no one takes seriously, and democrat strip-club/fitness center magnate Joe Redner, whom no one takes seriously. Jim Norman will win, but the other two candidates will have a higher combined vote total by more than twenty points (i.e. Norman gets less than 40%).

8. Hot Senate Races

Rhode Island: Sheldon Whitehouse (D) by 4

Pennsylvania: Bob Casey (D) by 7

New Jersey: Bob Menendez (D) by 4; also Menendez will not serve a full term

Maryland: Michael Steele (R) by 3; also he will not be re-elected in 2012

Virginia: George Allen (R) by 2; also he will retire in 2012

Tennessee: Bob Corker (R) by 5

Ohio: Sherrod Brown (D) by 10

Missouri: Claire McCaskill (D) by less than 1; recount and lawsuit to follow

Montana: John Tester (D) by 5

Assuming no upsets in other races, this amounts to a net gain of four for the Ds, so the GOP retains control of the Senate.

Hey, a lot of people make picks every Saturday and Sunday on football games and so forth. I don't know too much about football (although, ahem, I am beating Mike Golic in ESPN College Pick 'Em), so I make picks in politics. The principle's the same.

Joy

I'd forgotten how excited you get when the end of a deployment starts creeping closer. With shorter deployments, of course, you don't get real excited about going home until about two weeks out. But with four months, the anticipation starts to build a bit sooner than that.

Yesterday I put in my pax request to go home. This may sound odd, and in fact it is—we have to actually fill out paperwork to be permitted to go home. Obviously it's a formality, since the deployed unit doesn't have the authority to keep you more than a few days past your expected departure date. But it is still sort of funny, having to do the paperwork. And it's also sort of exciting—if I didn't have to throw in the paperwork I wouldn't be thinking about going home yet, but of course now I am. And I'm just giddy with anticipation.

Okay, that may be going a bit far. But it may help to explain the sort of things I've been writing lately in this November novel I'm not working nearly fast enough on. (All the same it'll be an amusing thing when it's done.) For example, consider the following:

It was inevitable that an impressionable young man like Cartwright would fall into the seedy underground of the music performance business, working with such notorious musical gangsters as Joel "The Piano Man" Williams and Vinnie "Three Fingers" Dragovich, the noted Serbian banjoist and jewel thief. By the age of twenty, Cartwright was running an illicit distribution ring for throat palliatives and medical tape, and five years later he made his name with the great Horn Mute Heist of '72, which forced the cancellation of an entire season of the Porktown Philharmonic and nearly brought down the stock market.

I've been having great fun coming up with titles for the comic books published in Porktown: Megatronic Superzoids, Ratboy and Catwoman, Fungible Man, and of course Lusty Pirates!, my personal favorite. In addition to the Reporter, a noted comic book superhero available to Porktown readers is Creamy Porridge, "a superannuated superhero popular with the over-80 set." Who wouldn't want to read that?

I feel like posting a picture, so here is one of Looking Glass Mountain in North Carolina.

I'm not sure where this little book is going, but The Reporter is a character in the book and also a superhero in a comic book in the book, although I don't think the comic book is based on the character. Although I haven't even started his backstory (I know what it is, though), it appears as though I've laid the foundation for his main villain, Canary Cartwright. It's interesting, I came up with The Canary's name without realizing that Cartwright was one of the dozen parts of Van's name (Van being the character who starts the whole thing off). Clearly the two are related (and I've been watching too much Bonanza), though I haven't figured out how yet. They don't seem to know each other very well, if at all. I'm not writing fast enough to make 50k by the end of the month (especially with the safari), but it's certainly entertaining. At least it's entertaining me.

The Conocarpus lancifolius Saga

They say in prison a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied... (ten points if you know the quote)
The same is true on deployments. Since this is the first location I've ever been to that had actual trees, I thought I'd try to determine what kind of trees we had on this base. Acacia nilotica was easy. The others... not so much.

I started by going through the list of trees at the Djibouti Flora website. I’d copy down the latin name of the tree and paste it into a Google image search. Frequently if I didn’t find any pictures with the genus and species names, I’d try a search with just the genus name.

In so doing I searched for the genus Conocarpus, meaning to look for Conocarpus lancifolius. Conocarpus is the genus name for the Buttonwood tree (sometimes called Button Mangrove although it is not a mangrove), a common tree in South Florida and the Everglades to there and to the Caribbean and parts of South America and west Africa. The buttonwood is notable for, among other things, the fruit it produces, which is a small cone-like structure (hence the genus name) containing dozens of tiny seeds and borne in clusters on the branch. This is an excellent picture of buttonwood leaves and fruit. The picture posted here is one I took of Conocarpus lancifolius for comparison, as are all other pictures posted here (linked pictures are of other trees).

The search for Conocarpus turned up numerous pictures of buttonwood. Here is another good picture of the leaves and fruit, this time of a plant with more lanceolate leaves than in the other picture, and the fruit is still very young.

Although those are pictures of Conocarpus erecta, they were similar enough that I concluded the mystery tree was most likely a Conocarpus lancifolius. This made sense as the two species seemed quite similar: both are commonly used for firewood and especially charcoal, as the wood is very dense; both bear cone-like fruit in bunches (the mystery tree’s fruits are smaller and don’t seem to turn red, although I can’t verify that); both are popular for their salt tolerance. The lancifolius has thinner, more lanceolate leaves (hence the name), smaller fruit, and seems to grow taller and is more commonly a single-trunked tree than erecta, at least by my observation. But they are clearly similar trees and it makes sense that they would share a genus.

Although there were no good pictures of lancifolius on Google, there are three very good descriptions of the plant. This comes from a university in Kenya, part of a series on trees that would be good for agroforestry in Kenya. It notes the local name of the tree, in Somali (it doesn’t appear to have an English common name), is Ghalab. The name in Arabic is Damas. Among other things the paper notes that the seeds are difficult to extract from their covers (as are the mystery trees seeds), germinate in standing water, and their viability is quite short (which means I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to get any home, though rest assured I plan to try).

The next resource is from the IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species, which provides the tree’s entire taxonomy, notes it is native to Somalia and Yemen, and says the genus contains just two species. The Redlist (it’s worth surfing around the Redlist’s site if you’re ever curious about threatened or endangered plant species native to your area that you could plant in your garden) is interesting in that it is the most up-to-the-minute information available. Changes in taxonomy take several years if not more, so if the mystery tree had indeed been removed from the genus Conocarpus, we can assume the IUCN would know.

Far and away the most fascinating piece is this history of the Haller Park Bamburi Nature Trail in Mombasa, Kenya. It doesn’t have any pictures of Conocarpus lancifolius, but the tree was used by the Bamburi Concrete Company in their successful rehabilitation of the wasteland created by their excavation of limestone from a quarry not far from Mombasa. The essay is several pages long but well worth a read because it’s quite an interesting story, especially given that the Bamburi Concrete Co. undertook the rehabilitation in 1971 for no reason beyond that it seemed like a good idea at the time. There was no government grant, no Greenpeace protest. This was just plain good corporate citizenship in a country noted more for corruption than good corporate behavior. This study is actually referenced in the university website linked above.

Conocarpus lancifolius was used by the Bamburi Co. as a pioneer species in the limestone rock, and the tree was considered the most successful of the three species so used (the other two being coconut palm and Casuarina (also called Australian pine), a plant you should never ever plant ever for any reason anywhere in the United States no matter how pretty you think it is).

So I was satisfied that I’d positively identified the mystery tree. And then I came across Conocarpus latifolia.

I found it because two months went by between when I first located lancifolius and when I started looking for it a second time, by which time I’d forgotten the correct name. I knew what it sounded like, and tried latifolius instead. This led me to latifolia. And this led me in turn to some surprising information. For example according to Wikipedia, the Buttonwood is the only tree in the genus Conocarpus. This was attested by the Free Dictionary among other dictionaries, all of which clearly used the same basis for their information since the wording was exactly the same. This source seems to be WordNet 2.0, from Princeton University. Princeton, though a fine institution, is not known for its botany program (it doesn’t have one; the closest it has is a strong program in evolutionary biology). Nonetheless, I decided that perhaps I had been mistaken all along, and that the mystery tree must not be a true Conocarpus.

According to the Wikipedia article, the tree formerly known as Conocarpus latifolia is now called Anogeissus latifolia; it surprised me that this had not come up before when I was searching for information about this tree in August. I looked up Anogeissus, which turns out to be a tree native to India that is clearly not the mystery tree. These pictures should be enough to satisfy anyone as to that.

Once clear that Anogeissus latifolia was clearly not the tree I was looking for, I started trying variations of latifolia, and hit upon lancifolius, where I rediscovered the articles I’d seen two months before. Now I was satisfied that indeed the latifolia, native to India, and the lancifolius, native to Somalia, were clearly not the same tree. But why all the references to Conocarpus being a monotypic genus?

I went to every resource I could find that described Conocarpus erecta, the Buttonwood, in any detail, looking for references to it being the only species in its genus. Floridata, Purdue horticulture, Virginia Tech, the University of Florida… on and on, no site that described the Buttonwood indicated that it was alone in its genus. No site that described lancifolius indicated that it was alone in the genus, but neither did any site mention what other species might be in the genus.

I went back to Wordnet, whence the “monotypic” definition seems to have sprung. It is not a dictionary of exhaustive research, but rather an attempt by the Cognitive Science Laboratory to “produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications.” It was created and is maintained by a psychology professor. No doubt the mission of WordNet is a good one and the results positive, but how certain can we be that the definitions therein of an obscure botanical taxon are necessarily correct?

So I emailed Wordnet to see where their definition came from; no response as yet. I also commented to the individual who wrote the Wikipedia article to see where his/her definition came from. Then I sat back and waited to see if anybody actually knew anything or if this was just some sort of information loop.

The individual who wrote the Wikipedia article got his information from the New York Botanical Garden, which indicated a monotypic genus. However, on my description he looked into it at other places, including the IUCN, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, and CAB International. CABI, however, indicates that Conocarpus lancifolius is also the same as Anogeissus lancifolius, an assertion that frankly seems to be incorrect.

Anogeissus lancifolius is only described in a two locations: one, CABI, and the other being the recently edited Wikipedia article which links to CABI. I’m not one to say CABI is wrong but, CABI certainly doesn’t have anyone agreeing that it’s right. I strongly suspect that CABI has created their description on the basis of whatever authority moved the former Conocarpus latifolia into the Anogeissus genus; but latifolia and lancifolius are not and have never been the same tree.

The FAO page linked above describes both Conocarpus lancifolius and Anogeissus latifolia, leaving little doubt that the two trees are very different things. IUCN we’ve already discussed.

It’s worth pointing out that there are multiple taxonomic authorities, two of which have dealt with Conocarpus. Listed as Engl. and Bedd., there is clear disagreement between the two; Bedd. seems to believe that latifolia and lancifolius are the same thing and creates the nonexistant Anogeissus lancifolius. Meanwhile Engl. clearly describes Conocarpus lancifolius as a separate species unrelated to Anogeissus. At any rate, this seems to be the case based on CABI; that may simply be a typo and I've found no other descriptions of the tree citing Beddome, only those citing Engle. (Engl. is Adolf Engler, a German botanist and taxonomist in the late 19th Century. Bedd. is Col. Richard Beddome, a British military officer and amateur naturalist who described many of the plants of India.)

I went ahead and wrote to the University of Florida Herbarium (FLAS) to ask if they could shed any light on the matter, being as they are a notable repository of information and particularly qualified to discuss Conocarpus, as the Buttonwood is a Florida native tree. Haven't heard anything back yet. I have, however, gone on and put up a Wikipedia article for the mystery tree under the name Conocarpus lancifolius, and we'll see what happens.

You may ask, why do you care, Smitty? And so I'll refer you back to the very top of this post: On deployment, a man'll do most anything to keep his mind occupied...

November Novel Update

It's been quiet lately at work and I've been doing a bit more reading in the evenings than the last week or so. One of the books I started was Bruce Campbell's autobiography, which has been great fun. And lately I've been engaged in a fierce (well, not really) debate about the correct taxonomy of one of the common trees on this base, Conocarpus lancifolius, which doesn't have an English common name but is called ghalab by the Somalis. It's quite a nice tree but there's a dearth of agreement as to what, exactly, it is. I'm going to post a couple pictures shortly along with a long and rather dry explanation of the naming controversy, which is not as yet settled (I've brought in the New York Botanical Gardens and the University of Florida Herbarium to help, and may have to try to get myself a wood sample to bring home). This is fair warning.

And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.

As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.

This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.

Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.