Tuba is a Good Instrument for Protest...

It's the 21st century. Maybe I grew up and kept the imagination of a baby boomer child and thought that this was going to be a magical time. Now that we are here sometimes it seems we are going backwards away from the magic. 

We should have a world where all are welcome, all are fed, all have healthcare, housing and education. A world where we don't hear echoes of 1930s Germany in the politics and the brown shirts on the streets, a world where cities are not bombed, children are not killed and countries are not invaded because they have what someone wants.  

If you don't find these are good reasons to protest I think you may find yourself as part of a machine moving away from human dignity. You are still welcome to have your own beliefs . Don't forget that I have mine.   

 

Just like I may not agree with you I may not agree with the degrees of every protester. It's a compromise that we all need to work on to make something better when we have that chance. 

Yesterday I played a mix of old folk tunes, patriotic songs and gospel standards for the Ice Out for Good rally. This was nationwide. Judging from local reaction most people did not know this. Tuba is a good instrument for protest. It's loud, it draws attention and around the country I was not the only one using this instrument. 

It's not something that worries me, being the only one. What worries me is the loss of magic, the loss of rights, the loss of hope.  

The Glenn Miller Orchestra at the Pines Theater...

Yesterday the Angelina Arts Alliance offered another fine show with two performances by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Glenn was not with the group. During WW2 when he was enlisted with the Army Air Corps the flight transporting him across the Channel from England to France for a series of performances meant to raise wartime morale disappeared with all hands never to be found. This group did great service to the music with wonderful performances of the many hits the Orchestra had during it's short heyday from 1939-1944.  

Miller had more top 10 hits than the The Beatles and Elvis in his short span as a band leader. There were some critics who declared the music too commercial, too many novelty tunes and too rehearsed but it was much loved, I like it and it is so familiar it invokes sentimental and emotional reactions in those who hear it. Isn't that what music is supposed to do?     

There were good solo section work outs as is common with big band music, plenty of individual solos and good singing. With baseball season and warm weather approaching one of our favorite things is to sit on the porch, Cathy tracks the Astros on the MLB app on her phone and I play old swing records with music like this. Just seems to go together. 

Many of Miller's arrangers went on to work with other great groups and singers so there was a general covering of the great American songbook. 

If you are browsing thrift and antique stores I recommend keeping an eye out for the Readers Digest Box sets of swing music. For $5 or $10 you get a 5 or 10 record set of good music. 

If you get a chance catch this group. Great musicians and I bet there's health insurance, 401Ks and vacation time. It's a first rate show. 

I think they may have had the original charts used in the clip.

 

I Read Books and Tour Old Forts...

I think I'll write book reports as a 2023 New Years thing. A good idea that will help me keep up with what I read and it will probably be fun until I read something totally trashy, escapist and embarrassing that I don't want you to know about. The first book is one I picked up in the museum store at Fort Pickens while on our recent travel trailer trip.  It's called The War Lovers. 

I like to tour the old forts that ring the coasts of the USA and I've also seen one in Puerto Rico. It's generally either free or I they waive all fees if you have a parks pass. Most of the forts began construction after the War of 1812 when we decided we did not want the British over here again. I think there are ruins in various states of repair over looking all the coasts. I am pretty sure that none of them ever fired a shot at another country's navy. Some of them, including Fort Pickens did their best work during the Civil War when Americans decided to shoot each other with the guns entrenched there. Here's a photo of me on the ramparts of Fort Pickens with a gun that was used by Union troops to great effect firing 300 pound shells that destroyed two Confederate forts across Pensacola Bay. From the looks of the emplacements I'd saw there were at least 9 of these in addition to smaller guns for close range targets. 

Leading up to the Spanish American War, which is the topic of The War Lovers, ships had become more armored so these guns capable of a 300 pound round were replaced with guns that fired shells in excess of 1000 pounds. If you check the Fort Travis link the industrial military complex pretty much began gun replacement projects, money making projects, at these forts as technology advanced up until the late 1940s when man tried his best to make war a push button affair. 

So all this brings us around to the book about loving war. Seems like in the 1890s you had a generation that held in great esteem the exploits of their forbearers during the Civil War and the genocide that subdued the Indigenous people of America. Only thing was there was no war for them. Men like Roosevelt and Lodge or the newspaper man Hearst who was busy setting the pattern for the modern news network by making up stories that divided the opinions of the everyday person. The upper class Angelo Saxons felt a certain anxiety and neurosis by not being able to charge into battle which was a nobel thing man should aspire to so they thought. Anyone who opposed this was called a mugwump which though they meant in in a bad way actually comes from an Indian word that means independent thinker. My dad was a mugwump because after he landed on Omaha Beach in WW2 he told me to never join the army. 

A little background to all this is that a few years before the Spanish American War these people tried to drum up a war with England over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. When they failed it was Spain's time in the barrel and they were more successful. 

More successful if you were Hearst and Roosevelt I guess. The triggering event of the war, the explosion of the battleship Maine has pretty much been proven an accident attributed to poor powder storage. It's estimated that combined there there were as many as 60,000 dead from the war of which 90% of these were from yellow fever. I did not look up causalities for the guerilla war in the Philippines that followed. 

Though Roosevelt might be a personality that would be what we would call toxic masculinity these days he was a fair president so like many men, myself included there's good with the bad. I really can't like Hearst at all. 

Here's Cathy with a gun at Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine, Fl. It's the oldest masonry fort in the USA and construction was begun by the Spanish in 1672. It has actually been in a battle of the Spanish vs. the British undergoing a couple of sieges and much cannon bombardment that had little effect on the walls. 

 Read a book. Tour a historic site. See if what you believe adds up with history. Real history not something written by William Randolph Hearst. 

 

              

     

 

Secret Flounder Fishing Spot Revealed Texas History and Always More...

Old Colonel Travis cut a dashing figure at the Battle of the Alamo. The legend of the line in the sand is certainty inspiring but the reality of his presence in Texas is that he was avoiding his debts elsewhere and when he stuck his head up over the battlements that day in San Antone and when he had it blown off pretty early in the battle he accomplished that. Same thing would probably happen to me but it was enough for Travis to have this fort on the tip of Bolivar Peninsula named after him. It's now a Galveston County Park. Entry is free and we took the self guided walking tour and Cathy showed me the equally legendary Cooney family flounder fishing hole that Bill snuck all the kids into in the 1970s before the park was developed and the property was off limits to trespassers which I guess kind of makes them like Travis, intent on avoiding trouble.       

The area had fortifications as early as 1816 but this spot saw building began in earnest in the first years of The Republic of Texas to protect Galveston Bay from invasion. Slave labor was used to erect the big dirt battlements and construction continued in one way or the other till WW2 when about 2500 troops were stationed here.   

There are good stations with historical facts located on the paths through the park. Cathy stands on one of the biggest gun emplacements and as far as I could tell there was never a shot fired in anger from this Fort. It seemed from the information available that every time a new gun was installed there was always some development in the enemy tactics or their own countermeasures such as aircraft and radar that made the gun obsolete and because of this some emplacements never even had guns installed. This brings to mind Ike's farewell address where he warned us about the military industrial complex. Nothing was really defended but people made money building.      

Even though the fort was sold as military surplus in 1949 chemical warfare is still a concern. 

Cathy heads to the smaller batteries that guard the narrow part of the pass. 

Cathy says these were open in the 70s and she went inside. 

Cathy located the secret flounder hole right here. In the 1970s the park was not developed and Bill would take Cathy and her younger brothers, Jim, John and Matt over a fence, along a jungle type path (it's all open, clear park space now) down the 15' seawall and fish for flounder from the rip rap breaking the waves. Cathy recalls the little boys hanging up a lot and requiring her deckhand skills but the water stretches out shallow for a long way making it great for the big flatfish.    

I saw no one fishing here on the rainy weekday morning we visited. We decided the climb down the seawall and over the rocks was probably easier when you are 16 instead of in your 60s and admired Bill for doing it with little kids as crew. 

Cathy says her brothers are going to kill me for reveling this spot but I don't thing they have visited it lately.    

Like the fort it's self all the gun emplacements are named for men killed in the Mexican War or WW1. Even with the sneaking in, the advancing over treacherous terrain and the uneven footing of the rocks no one was ever lost during a flounder trip and with it's development the park is a great tour and I bet the flounder are still there. 

  

 

Friend of Davy Crockett or FOD...

 

Next time you see some catfishing photos posted on this blog or you can simply click on the catfish tag below and notice the orange cap Cathy wears while on the lake. It has the famous Davy Crockett quote, "you may go to hell and I may go to Texas." She has kind of a fan girl thing going for him.

 In hindsight we know that Texas turned into a terrible mess for old Davy but we are left with a courageous historical story that is probably part fact and part myth. Cathy got worried that maybe Crockett was not such a nice guy as many historical figures sometimes seem to be in it for their own benefit. So she did some research and turns out he was an ok guy who stood up for the indigenous people's rights, stood up against Andrew Jackson in politics when history shows was not such a nice guy despite saving New Orleans from the British and as this newspaper clipping proves Crockett was a friend to my 4th great grandfather George Massingill.

You can read the clipping which is said to have appeared in newspapers across Texas in 1883. George seemed to be a pretty nice guy also even though my research shows he served under Jackson (I'm not a fan) in a unit of wagon guards and road builders in the War of 1812. He was at the battle of Mobile Bay and "probably the Battle of New Orleans" is the best I can find out. 

I don't know if he was at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, an Indian fight led by Jackson that occurred in 1814, the year before New Orleans. I hope not as this adventure, conducted on intelligence that the Indians were siding with the British turned out to be an opportunity to take land from the people living there to be occupied by landowners who moved in the imported people they owned to farm cotton.  

I don't think Crockett was at this battle and I don't know for certain about George but Sam Houston was there, Jackson was there as were some of the Wileys on my mom's side of the family. Makes me wonder if the average guy new what all was involved in these war strategies. 

Enough speculation though and back to George Massingill. Somehow George avoided Crockett's Texas trip but by 1837 having divorced Hannah Gann (yes, I'm related to Ganns and he still owns the court the legal filing fee of $12.90) he married Polly and they arrived in Nacogdoches with 10 kids on a wagon train. They were rewarded land in the Shawnee Bottoms area which is still kind of a remote place from town in these times but soon moved to Angelina County. 

George died in 1884 and is buried in the McKindree Cemetery off Highway 103 East probably 5 miles from my house.  

George Massigill is on my Granny Wallace's side of the family. Massigills married Albrittons who married Nerrens who married Wallace's. I don't know how long the Albrittons been in the area but the Nerrens have been in Angelina County since the 1840s.   

     

I have not been in any famous battles or I doubt that anyone I know will have an enduring legacy like Davy Crockett so I guess maybe my ancestors will recall I wore a mask during Covid 19. It's been the best I could do.

I still enjoy a trip to the Alamo and may enjoy it more in the future given these newfound facts. Cathy, in Davy Crockett fan girl mode says she knew there was something about me.  

Was Just Too Spooky...

On a New York trip in Spring of 2019 our walking route back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing often took us past the KGB Museum. Open and maintained by a father daughter team of Lithuanian immigrants it reportedly provided an unbiased view on the cold war and a large collection of espionage equipment. We never darkened the door because coming of age in the Cold War era when nuclear war was possible and perhaps still likely any exposure to items that might have been used by Russian agents in an attempt to gain world domination gave me the creeps.  There was a restaurant next door with a sign advertising boiled crawfish. I did not darken the door there either because like KGB espionage crawfish in New York City is an experience I chose to avoid. 

So I write about things like this on a day that Russia invades the Ukraine. Some say to mark this as the day WW3 began because like at the beginning of WW2 the USA tried to stay out of it. Like at the beginning of WW2 there are various opinions on which side we should take with some even calling Putin a genius. They use the term in a good way and he is certainly a genius at emboldening  dictators and opponents of human rights across the globe. 

Right now there are people dying in a real shooting war. Americans, on the other side of the globe will moan about rising gas prices which I am sure are higher at the pump this morning. Not as bad as tanks in the streets but remember that Europe imports 27% of it's crude from Russia and they combine with the USA and several other countries to provide 70 percent of the natural gas. It's estimated that 60 percent of Russian export income comes from fossil fuel. This pays for their military adventures. 

The rest of the winter in Europe promises to be expensive, cold and without much driving. 

I often get to observe the effects of climate change brought on by the effects of fossil fuel use in my little corner of the world. I can't help but think how different things would be with renewable energy sources which will certainly bring about a difference in the way we do things but would be crippling to people like Putin who can influence the politics and perception of fault with the turn of a valve. We would have a better planet and screw a dictator. I'm all in. 

The KGB Museum closed, like so many people in these times a victim of Covid 19 impacts. The exhibits are to be or maybe already have been auctioned off. I don't know if the restaurant has crawfish this year but we ate some at a local boil joint the other day and they were good.

       

   

 

Big Slough Afternoon...

After a week where I played about all the tuba, guitar and banjo I could stand, washed the windows, and dusted the cobwebs from the room corners and ceiling fans I needed to go somewhere today. I picked a duck hunting trip to the Big Slough Wilderness Area. I saw one duck. It was a wood duck hen. I shot it. Cathy will make a delicious dinner out of it for us.  

Hunting and guns can be kind of controversial. Believe me, the time I have spent hunting, which was really mostly just sitting in the woods is not even proportional to the time I have spent killing. I have enjoyed eating what I killed, all small game and the times spent just sitting were good also. There were some sitting times where I was stuck, lost or broke down way out in the woods somewhere and we won't go into all that here.  

Duck hunting is something I did with my dad, learned from my dad, the tactics I used today were the same as he would have used and it was in a place he had showed me. I guess you can say while you could not impress anyone with the taking of one duck I thought it was pretty good since it's the first duck I have shot at in about three years and it does bring back some old, good memories.  

You can see from these photos me and duck hunting go way back. I remember listening to my dad and his brothers tell stories of places they went to hunt with names like Wild Hog Bend, Ice Box Slough and Wildcat. I could have carried the shot gun in this photo below on the hunt today. It's my dad's old Model 12, one of the best duck guns ever manufactured. I have hunted with it quite a bit in years past but it's pretty worn and the action is what I would call "loose." Instead I carried the shotgun my dad gave me for Christmas when I was about 16 years old. It's nothing special, just an all purpose general use hunting shotgun. I have never had reason to purchase another.

One thing I hate about hunting today is as with most things concerning guns it has become militarized. Lots of camo on clothes, boats, cars and survival type equipment that would not be out of place in a commando unit. Note in the photo my dad's flannel shirt and kaki duck pants. That's how he dressed to hunt his whole life. No camo for him. Maybe it was too uniform looking. He had landed on Normandy Beach in WW2 and survived the hedgerow campaigns that followed. He would not ride in a jeep. He told me, "never join the army."     

So I'll remember my dad with a duck hunt now and then. Hopefully that tradition will carry on. I have carried it on with my son. 

A duck tastes good around Christmas and in the photo with my brother Glenn you can note the Christmas cards on the wall behind us. 

I did wear a camo shirt and game vest today but the white beard shinning through the woods probably negated any effect they had on the ducks. 

 

9/11 Memorial, New York City...

I've stood at the Alamo. I've walked the old Civil War battlefield at Mansfield, La. I've seen the concentration camp at Dachau. This past May when we visited New York we saw the 9/11 Memorial. 

In all these places people died, lots of them in horrible, tragic, violent deaths. The veil between us and them is thin here and we feel that on visits to their memorials. They whisper to us from beyond. 

"Do your best, be kind, pray, it's not like you think."   

Take these things, go. 

Resistance...

Lots of talk these days of resistance. Sounds of war drums in the air. Strange treatment of humans on airplanes and in prisons. Seems like it may portend things to come. I don't think so. These things have always been with us and I am writing today about a historical thing that happened to a 21 year old German woman named Sophie Scholl and a nonviolent resistance movement she was a member of in the city of Munich in 1943. 

The info I am going to summarize is available on Wikipedia. The photos are my own made at the University of Munich this past summer. 

Sophie was religious and influenced by the sermons of Cardinal John Henry Newman which were about a "theology of conscience." Sophie joined a group called the White Rose that advocated passive resistance to the Nazi government. The White Rose had distributed a pamphlet authored by Sophie's brother Hans. Horrified by reports by Sophie's boyfriend, a German soldier deployed to the Eastern Front of Nazi war crimes against Russians and Jews the group proceeded to author three more pamphlets. The writings used Biblical and philosophical reasoning to support intellectual resistance to the Nazis. 

Outside the University of Munich pages of the pamphlets are set in the brick walkways just like they scattered them when Sophie, Hans and Christopher Probst were arrested on campus Feb. 18, 1943.       .   

You may have noticed that in the good old USA trials take time. Guilty or innocent you get time to prepare a defense in a free country. In a dictatorship no such luxury. On Fed 22 the trio was tried and found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Sophie's only defense recorded were these words:

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.

A cell mate's letters later reviled her last words before going to trial:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

At 1700 hours the same day as the trial Sophie, Hans and Christopher were beheaded by guillotine. The sixth pamphlet that had been written by the White Rose was smuggled out of Germany and dropped by the millions of leaflets as propaganda against the Nazis by Allied forces.   

The internet tells us that the White Rose is remembered as an example of spiritual courage and social dissent against a "society of  violent repression, censorship and conformist pressure."

So that brings us to strange doings today. People singled out and dragged from airplanes. Death row inmates hurried to execution because of approaching expiration dates. Rumors of war, which I guarantee is making many young men nervous tonight. What's next? 

Maybe to tie things up here is another photo I made. It's a wall of a building with shrapnel damage in Munich. It's a one of a kind because from the impression I get is that most of modern Munich has been built since 1945. German war memorials are pretty low key and simple. It's not a mother of all bombs but people did die on this street just like Sophie and friends did on the execution block. 

     

   

I Guess I Was Not Home When He Came By...

Judging from the uproar on the internet Obama took up yawl's guns last week. I was gone duck hunting so I guess I missed the call or whatever it was everyone else responded to and I still have mine. I did vote for him and I think maybe I was the only one but I really don't think this is some kind of special treatment or surely I would have been invited to the White House or received an ambassadorship to a wretchedly ethnic country where it's too hot to wear clothes and the national anthem is a cumbia. 

Maybe we were overlooked because we were up early trying to catch the worm so to speak. Here's Mary navigating the canoe before dawn. Thank you Mary for helping old dad watch where he's going, backing him on drums and otherwise keeping ,me safe and respectable. The other kids do their part but Mary is handy to keep a thumb on me. 

I don't know whose reflection that is but that's Mary stalking the backwater carrying the old Winchester single shot shotgun my dad gave me when I began my hunting career. It has seen a lot of action and I expect it always will. It's a good all purpose item. I once saw the same model in the military museum at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Shotguns like this were apparently issued to various isolated mountain tribes in the Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia region during the Vietnam War so the locals could harass the Communist backed troops in the region. That does not seem to have made much of a difference in outcomes of our interventions in that area but I bet these old shotguns brought plenty of monkey meat to the table and there was no worry like happens when some insurgent group you just gave shoulder fired anti aircraft missiles to changes alliances.  

We stashed the canoe under a bushy tree. One bunch of about 15 ducks made a circle looking at our decoys but went on their merry way. Maybe they spotted us or the canoe. I don't know. I do have some camo tank netting but it's a bit bulky for the stripped down operation we are running. 

I got about three good photos of this(not swimming in my belly) hawk.  I used one on facebook and here is another. I can't decide which one is the best. He's kind of like Obama I guess. He did not see me. 

Signs...

So my neighbor was surprised. You think you know a guy after living next door to him but then he goes and does something like put an Obama sign in his yard.

He asked me, "you really voting for Obama?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "I can't. I just don't think this country is ready to have a Muslim as President."

I said, " I don't think he's a Muslim."

He said,"I don't believe that."

If you watched any of the debates you know that some of the charges leveled back and forth were simply best deflected by much better debaters (can I say that word here?) than me. In this case I just mumbled something about how I thought my candidates had a better social justice agenda that seems like it might come closer to ending problems in society with health care, addressing root causes for the need for a law that legalizes abortion, as well as evening out the tax system in favor for the little guy. I could go on, but as I admit, I mumble. I'm just an old peace queer, what do I know.

My neighbor allowed how he was afraid he would be taxed $50,000 if the Democrats got in office. Not a problem for those making less than that these days.

Reasons for being sleepy...

I reported here that I was tired over the weekend and required two big ugly naps. Makes me think of something I write in my patient notes. "Patient was drowsy but arousable and participates in therapy as requested."

I think I discovered the reason for my tiredness. I had changed the type of caffeine I consume in the morning. Let me tell you the morning routine.

Alarm wakes. If I need a shower, like after an active evening of good sweaty soul purging night screaming I make sure I have two cups of coffee before I get in the shower. I kind of deal in the business of people who fall and break something, not the shower, but a bone or something so I like to be fully alert for this morning shower even though I have about 20 or so years to go before this really comes to be a concern. It may never be a concern since male members of my family seem to only live to a median age of 69. I might not fall. I think I'd like that.

But the concern I deal with here is the change in morning caffeine. Cathy requested that we do the cold brew coffee thing, where you create a concentrated coffee mix and have it in the ice box so you can just pour two fingers in a cup, add water and whatever and have a little drink. Tastes good, but I don't think that the caffeine is there. This is the beverage I was using last weekend and ended up so drowsy.

My beverage and it kept me going all yesterday is the cheapest instant coffee available, as many scoops as necessary, one pack of splenda, milk to taste and you are gone. I check the label and yes it is a good product. Comes from all Southern to us countries where we have crushed the rebels. I don't know how they do that. Make it come from all countries. I know how they crush the rebels.

Anyway you can just sort of make a power sludge out of this and eat it out of a spoon if necessary, there are no restrictions on uses. I like a product like that. So many times these days they say don't put it over your head, don't take it in the water, read the directions and so on. Kind of refreshing the coffee and the possibilities.

I am a bitter old man this morning, wide awake, hating war, restrictions on product use and wide awake. Did I say wide awake?