The Piano and Target Practice

Three years ago I decided to learn to play a musical instrument. Now, this sounds like a harmless enough enterprise, but that depends on whether or not one has any musical talent. I am marginal at best.

For the last couple of years I’ve mentored elementary school kids, probably because I miss my grandkids who live in other states, and they were learning to play the Recorder flute. It seemed pretty simple so I bought one for $1.99, a couple of easy books and set out with high hopes and great expectations. But, for some reason my high notes sounded like I stepped on a mouse, so I bought a more expensive flute ($14.95!), but the mouse squeaks were still there. It wasn’t the flute.

Playing my squeaky flute did force me to learn to read music, after a fashion. You know it’s not really that hard. Since I had little success playing those pesky high notes I thought I would simplify things by getting a keyboard. I got a nice Yamaha for $99 including stand and power supply.

I had been told that keyboard playing is really just target practice so I figured I had it made. If I hit the right key, I played the right note. No squeaking here. And the neat part is I had a choice of over a hundred different instruments if I got tired of the piano.

What I didn’t realize is you get to use both hands. Now that sounded OK, until I tried it. You’ve got two hands playing different combinations of notes at the same time, arghhh. I have trouble brushing my teeth with my left hand. But, it’s still fun playing if you only use your right hand. After all the melody is played with the right hand and that’s the part you tap your foot to.

What made things easier is my realization that I won’t live long enough to learn to play classical stuff. So, by limiting myself to pop music and only trying to have fun, I have a fighting chance.

But still, how hard do you think the guitar would be?

Thoughts on Mother's Day

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and as I have never written a word about this most important Holiday, it is high time.

I lost my mother a few years ago; just as you will someday. Unfortunately, I never fully appreciated her until it was too late. Mom was not perfect, anything but, but the one thing she did better than anything else was love me. No matter what stupid or selfish things I did she was always on my side. No matter what the rest of the world’s opinion of me was, hers was always predictable; she loved me and was on my side.

I didn’t realize, until after she was gone, how important it is to have at least one person in the whole world to be there for you no matter how boneheaded you were. That’s not to say she always thought I was right. She made it clear when she thought I was wrong, but she was still always on my side.

Mom’s are like that.

Molly and the Bond, James Bond--Escape

After watching Quantum of Solace a few days ago, my attention was naturally caught by a real life adventure that took place in Montana last week. There was escape from certain death, a desperate chase, our hero hopelessly outnumbered by heavily armed villains in pursuit using every advantage modern technology could give them. Time after time there were hair raising escapes. But our hero was not a British Secret Agent, but a 1200 pound cow.

A heifer, nicknamed Molly, was awaiting her fate at a slaughterhouse in Great Falls, Montana when she saw an opportunity for escape. Without hesitation she lept over an ungarded gate and hot hoofed it down a road, just like 007. A few hours later she was seen and reported to the enemy who pursued her through the city finally trapping her between a truck and a fence. Undaunted she bolted through the fence, dodged a murderous SUV, ran across railroad tracks in front of a speeding train, cleverly leaving her hapless pursuers on the wrong side, and ran down a road barely dodging a speeding semi. Unfortunately an icy river lay ahead trapping her between it and her ruthless pursuers who quickly surrounded her and slowly moved in to put and end to her desperate escape. True to the double 'O' tradition, Molly jumped into the freezing water and swam courageously for the far bank once more eluding her now enraged pursuers. Exhausted and sinking slowly she was being swept downriver by a strong current, it looked like the end, but she fought the current and the frigid, muscle numbing water and was rewarded for her courage by finding a sand bar. Molly staggered from the river and walked slowly up the river's sandy bank.

Despite her great courage, the foe were too many and she was again surrounded and hit with a tranquilizer dart, she kept going until hit with two more. Slowed by the powerful drugs sped through her body by her noble heart she was finally captured.

Fortunately, Molly's story gained the attention of the nation and her captures were forced to free her to the owners of an organic farm who kindly granted her sanctuary. She is now retired from the fray and will spend her remaining years in comfort and security as a reward for her courage and determination to be free.

Good on you, Molly.

Bond, James Bond--Books Before Movies

OK, I admit it, I'm a move nut. Last night I watched Quantum of Solace and was lucky to escape with only singed eyebrows and powder burns. Now that was some action flick.

Years ago, when I was a student, I read all the Bond novels by Sir Ian Fleming. Sir Ian wrote 12 novels and nine short stories about our hero as well as the children's story, Chity, Chity, Bang, Bang. Casino Royal was the first in the series published in 1958. The first movie Dr. No, is the sixth novel in the series.

Sir Ian was an officer with British Naval Intelligence in WWII, holding the rank of Commander and organizing a commando group which specialized in snatching Nazi intelligence material before the enemy could destroy it. Obviously the inspiration for many of his plots.

Now to say the books are like the movies is like saying Ben Stiller and Daniel Craig are a lot alike. In the books, Bond is a slightly overweight, alcoholic, Turkish cigarette chain smoking sexist who drives a Lincoln Mark 5, has a cruel smile and sleeps with his hand on the Walther PPK under his pillow and has none of the whiz bang gizmo's dreamt up by Q for the movie Bond. As uninteresting as that sounds, the books were really fun and unlike anything I had ever read. It is the opinion of many aficionados of the Bond books and movies that fans either like the books or the movies, but not both.

I like them both and you might as well.

Good Student or Good Memory

I haven’t been a formal student for years, but something still bugs me about school.

How does the educational system differentiate between students who have good memories and can ‘psych out’ the professor or teacher and are good at taking tests from those who really understand the subject and have a talent for it, but whose memory isn’t that great or aren’t good at playing the game or taking an exam?

Of course, I’m talking about myself here, but I’m sure I have a lot of friends out there. You know who you are, the ones who sweat bullets to get by, but enjoyed and had a real feeling for the subject and in real life were good at their job despite not being the best student.

The way things are you are labeled brilliant if you can barf up the right answers, even if a month later you don’t know what the heck the course was about, and average or a little better if you scrape by, but have a feel for what you learned.

Even though I was never interested in Med School, that one as well as the Nursing School a daughter attended comes to mind. Are the students who get straight A’s really going to make the best Doctors and Nurses? Isn’t there an important if not critical quality not measured by grades lurking somewhere?

I think so.

Climate Change

The other day my neighbor told me there can’t be Global Warming; we had a cold snap last summer.

It shows what an unfortunate name Global Warming is; thankfully the scientists replaced it with Climate Change. What’s in a name? Well, if you call the phenomenon global warming, people like my neighbor think it should be getting warmer all the time, when in reality the warming is a trend, going up and down in the short run, but trending higher over the long run. In the midst of the rising atmospheric temperature can be a decade or more of a drop in average temperatures. What matters is that over the last hundred years the Earth’s atmospheric temperature has risen 1.3 degrees.

Now, 1.3 degrees doesn’t seem like much, but when you have meteorological dynamics in such fine balance it doesn’t take much to upset things. I’m sure we’re all aware of the rapid melting of glaciers, permafrost, polar ice caps, etc.

I am particularly worried about the thawing of the permafrost. This can potentially release huge amounts of methane--a greenhouse gas 10 times more potent than CO2. The melting ice, whether in glaciers or ice caps, is scary too as this reduces the amount of light colored ice to reflect heat back into space exposing darker ocean or rock to absorb even more heat melting more ice. When this happens things can get out of control fast.

Of course it doesn’t help my neighbor understand what’s going on when scientists working for big energy companies say that there is no such thing as Global Warming. Fortunately their corporate remarks are mitigated by tens of thousands of scientists, who are not paid to have an opinion, saying there most certainly is and here are the facts to prove it.

It's Round??

I was listening to “Good Vibrations” and that got me to thinking about earthquakes, which led to plate techtonic theory, and how everybody thought Wegener was a crackpot for proposing such a loony idea as continents drifting around on giant plates floating on molten rock, and that got me to thinking about the over 150 year old one-sided debate about Evolution. Scary, huh?

Anyway, as we all know this debate is primarily between religion of a certain stripe and science. We’ve had many of these debates before. A monk by the name of Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 because, among other things, he believed in an infinite number of planets all inhabited by humans. Unfortunately for him the bible didn’t mention that fact.

Copernicus was afraid to publish his discovery, in the 1500’s, that the Earth revolved around the sun instead of vice versa, as scripture revealed, until after his death.

The sun rises, and sets, and returns to its place, from which, reborn, it revolves through the meridian, and is curved toward the North. (Ecclesiastes 1:5).
In the 1633, Galileo, the father of modern science, was tried by the Inquisition for teaching the ‘Theory’ of Copernicus. The Catholic Church finally apologized some 300 years later.

Of course, there was opposition to the dissection of humans for the benefit of medical science, women as men’s inferior and a whole host (no pun intended) of other nutty ideas marching under the banner of religiosity.

Now in the 21st century we have Darwin’s Theory of Evolution kicked around in the name of scripture. (It’s unfortunate that ‘theory’ is tacked on the front as it has a different meaning to scientists than it does to the rest of us, making Darwin’s ‘Theory’ easier to attack).

Hopefully, someday we can accept, what I call, the Law of Evolution with the same rationality we accept that the Earth is not only round, it revolves about the sun.