It Snowed in the Desert Last Night

It snows in Arizona, at least in the high desert it does...

We got maybe an inch of dry snow and a light ice glaze last night.  The locals are fond of assuring us newcomers "As soon as the sun comes up it will all melt."

No TV, No WiFi

Means I have time to catch up on my reading...

Since my arrival in Prescott my book list has been about half serious, half SF.

Ancient Angkor, by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques

A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology, by William E. Hordern

The Black Swan: TheImpact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings, by Tatha Wiley, is very readable book about a pretty inscrutable topic. Author Wiley is erudite and even-handed in her examination of topics Christians have killed each other over.

In Deep, by Damon Knight, is a collection of short stories. The first, "Four in One" is an absolute hoot!

The Upanishads, translated by the late Eknath Easwaran, is delightful and rich.

The Black Death, by Phillip Zeigler, is an eminently readable history of one of the turning points of Western civilization.

Downtiming the Night Side, by Jack Chalker is intricately paradoxical and deftly plotted. It's among the very few time travel stories I've read or seen that didn't make me roll my eyes and shake my head. I haven't read any Jack Chalker before but I will be happy to try him again.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung, is an interesting time capsule from the interwar years when Freudian and Adlerian methods were still in play. Chapters 9, 10, & 11 were the best in a very chewy read.

The Eye of the Monster, by Andre Norton, is a quick and unspectacular read. About the first time I didn't get my money's worth from the dollar shelf.

Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov, was an example of his early work. He got much better as the years progressed.

Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, by Gerd Gigerenzer, is thought provoking stuff that demands close attention and critical thinking.

To the Stars, by Harry Harrison, is three novels rolled up into a single volume. Turns out I'd read two of the three stories in their solo iterations. Oh well.

I have not made time to read or listen to the Quran, but I'll get back to it after the Solstice...

Seriously, having no TV and no internet is fine inducement to appropriate literary habits. Try it.

My School Has An F-104N Starfighter...

...does your school have an F-104N Starfighter?

In the month or so since I began my cool new job at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Prescott Campus, I've encountered sights didn't quite expect.  I posed in front of the school's F-104N Starfighter NASA chase plane (N811NA) on static display.  I've seen a solid fuel liquid oxygen hybrid rocket come apart during a test at the school's rocket motor test stand.  I attended a public lecture on the history of the U2 spy plane presented by a former U2 pilot and retired ERAU professor.   I've been on three observation flights, complimentary ride-alongs with student pilots and their instructors offered to staff and faculty.  Two were in Cessna 172 aircraft.  One evening earlier this week I got to take a IFR flight in a Diamond 42.  Quite the ride!  Quite the school!

A Monument Valley or The Monument Valley?

There is only one and I visited it Sunday, October 20, 2013: Day Four...

After visiting Arches National Park I drove through Moab, which suddenly seemed crowded and noisy.  I drove south on U.S. Route 191 until I arrived at Monticello, UT.  I passed the night at a roadside motel operated by a Hindu family.  Sunday morning I continued south.  As I crossed into Arizona I chose to not pass up the chance to visit Monument Valley like I had Arches 28 years ago.  It's quite the rugged and time consuming thing to drive into the valley in your own vehicle so I didn't see all of the sights.  But I snapped a few pics before returning to the pavement.  As the hours passed and I closed in on my goal I drove through Flagstaff, Sedona, and Jerome.  Yes, once again I chose the scenic route, this time State Route 89A.  Scenic?  Yeah, mountain goat scenic...

Purple Mountain Majesties

Leaving the fruited plain behind, October 19, 2013: Day Three...

Up before the sun I drove south on Interstate 25 to Denver, where I had breakfast with two friends of my younger days, both named Steve.  Steve Jacksteit was a peer at Signetics in the days before 811 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, California, became the parking lot of a Home Depot.  Steve Belecky was my tenacious investigator during my stint at Silicon Graphics Inc in the days when it still made the go to UNIX box for 3D graphics and other computationally intensive applications.  We enjoyed breakfast and coffee and the retelling of our best and favorite stories.  Then I was back on the road this time headed west on Interstate 70 over the Rockies (and through the Eisenhower Tunnel) to Grand Junction.  There the helpful fellas at the Chamber of Commerce suggested I take an alternate route to the goal of my day's excursion.  In 1985, when I drove from Minnesota to California, I passed the sign marking the turn to Arches National Park, telling myself I'd be back some day.  Well, 28 years later is some day I guess, so this time I made up my mind to visit the park.  The scenic drive the volunteers at the visitor center recommended was Utah State Route 128 and boy, is it scenic!  The nondescript two lane road crosses over land for a time before descending into a deep, winding canyon cut by the Colorado River.  This route through weathered red sandstone treats the sightseer to steep turns, steep cliffs, and blind corners without shoulders.  Scenic indeed, especially if you like watching white knuckles on the steering wheel.  It let me out in Moab, Utah, a few miles south of Arches.  The sun was approaching the horizon as I entered the park so I did not have time to visit the entire place.  Still, I encountered some arches.  I am in the desert now.

Arizona or Bust

Friday, October 18, 2013: Day Two...

There were still cattle carcasses in the fields along the interstate due to a recent early blizzard so my plans to travel south through the Badlands National Park via secondary and tertiary roads were quashed by several concerned locals.  Since I'd be sticking to the interstate that meant I could visit the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, just a few minutes west of Kadoka.  The Visitor Center and the above ground portion of the Launch Facility Delta-01 were open, but the Missile Silo Delta-09 was closed due to the recent storm.  Sobering stuff for those of us who lived through those days...  My version of Blast From The Past completed I drove almost to Rapid City, South Dakota before turning south and then west on a route that took me into Wyoming.  A couple more hours...and then a couple more...put me in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I reconnected with my college room mate, Tim Clouse, whom I had not seen since 1997.  The local dining was tasty and his sofa was quite comfortable.

The Drive to Arizona

Thursday, October 17, 2013: Day One...

The drive from Bloomington, Minnesota to Kadoka, South Dakota took me southwest along U. S. Highway 169 until I linked up with Interstate 90 westbound.  I stopped for mug of dark roast at River Rock Coffee in Saint Peter, where Cassandra attended school at Gustavus Adolphus College.  While doing so I passed Treat Site History Center that Cassie and I promised ourselves we'd visit some day while she was attending school.  We have yet to do so...  But for the marketing efforts of Wall Drug and various other tourist traps along the way there would be precious little to look at other than 380 miles of rolling prairie.  The picture above is of a rise covered with a variety of iron sculptures.  Uh...thanks.  I called it day when I reached Kodoka.  We stayed there in July of 1999 while I rode with my brother Steve for two days of his American Lung Association Big Ride from Seattle, Washington to Washington, DC.  It has not changed much.  By the way, if the picture on the Kadoka website reminds you of scenes from Paul Verhoeven's 1997 classic Starship Troopers, that's because the movie was filmed in the area.  

Where in the World is Eclectic Breakfast?

Waldo is right here...

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Prescott, Arizona, USA.

Michael Brady, MA, CPP
Director of Campus Safety & Security
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
3700 Willow Creek Road
Prescott, AZ 86301
928-777-3333 dispatch
928-777-3738 desk
928-442-6867 cell
bradym3@erau.edu 

How I got here and what I saw on the road between Minneapolis and Prescott will be detailed in a series of future posts.  In the mean time I still have unpacking to do...

Another Guest Post At The Eclectic Breakfast

My father, Larry Brady, aged 79 years, is very fond of telling stories...

My grandfather Owen Brady and my aunt Patricia one cold North Dakota day the 1930s

For Christmas of 2012 he made a gift to the family of these memories from his early life in North Dakota.

One of the thoughts that has been floating through my head as snow arrived in Minnesota was the way children were taken to school in those days.  I was too young to go to school but I do remember riding with our dad in a kind of shed on skis, with a little stove to keep everyone warm.  I really don't remember going to school as much as the ride home.  I think I remember him talking about next year when I would be in school.

Another memory that keeps coming back is about a time Mom and Dad left my sisters on the farm to take care of my younger brother Jimmy while I got to go to Devils Lake with them.  We didn't leave Devils Lake until after dark.  I got to sit on front with them.  Our mom was unhappy about something and Dad was trying to cheer her up - he was very happy about something else.  When we got home Dad had to go out to the barn to milk the cows and do the chores.  They had bought me a pair of white farmers gloves in town.  Mom let me wear them as I went out to the barn to help with chores.  Being it was dark I ran into the barbwire fence and got blood on my new gloves.  I can remember crying a lot, not because of the scratches but because I got blood all over my new "farmers gloves."

The last memory on the farm was when Dad was so sick he couldn't get out of bed.  There was a snowstorm but Mom thought she should call someone to come to the farm to get Dad to a doctor.  Dad said not to that.  Harvey Rice, the mailman, would be along any minute and eh would get the help that was needed.  Dad was taken by sleigh to the closest train station to be transported to the Veterans Hospital in Fargo.  I was told they had to put my Mom and Dad in the mail car.  It was heated. But he could not be in the regular part of the train because they didn't know why he was so sick.  That all happened during the winter of 1939-40, which started a whole new life for all of us in the little town of Crary.

Jimmy and I loved Crary; our sisters didn't feel the same way.  I didn't mean for this to end on such a dark note...but that's the way memories go.

Days of War, Nights of Love

I feel their pain but I cannot commit to joining them where they are...

This very special and challenging book was a gift from my dear friend David, whose life much more closely adheres to the philosophy championed in this earnest volume.  Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink For Beginners by CrimethInc is like reading about a different species; an uncannily familiar species we might admire despite its awkward alien-ness.  Its angry anarchic, rejectionist, contrarian prose exhorts us to an garbage-grubbing interstitial life at the margins subsisting on the leftovers and leavings of modern, capitalist, industrial society.  Were we all able to return to the egalitarian, communitarian, small group societies the authors aspire to we would find ourselves in a hunter-gatherer economy with no technology more sophisticated than "stone knives and bear skins."  Call me bourgeois, but I kinda like the internet, iron, penicillin, and beverages extracted from coffee beans grown on other continents. Still, we should endeavor to understand and learn from the authors' pain, ennui, and weirdly compelling aspirations.  They're not wrong...exactly...they're just 10,000 years too late to put up or shut up.  Damn you, agriculture, Bronze Age, and civilization!

The Terror: A Novel

By Dan Simmons, master storyteller...

Anyone who has read Dan Simmons' classic Hyperion Cantos, or his more recent Ilium and Olympos will tell you this gifted author knows how to spin a yarn that is completely realized, utterly uncanny, and amazingly literary.  Of all Simmons' writing talents the one I enjoy the most is the way he draws deeply upon classic, modern, and popular literature, culture, and traditions to inform his story.  In the Hyperion Cantos he called upon Roman Catholicism, medieval history, and The Wizard of Oz to color his canvas.  In Olympos and Ilium a future earth is shaped by the Homeric epics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In The Terror: A Novel, Simmons uses the history of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845 as his stalking horse.  The story of the Sir Franklin’s lost expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage is horrifying enough, but to the crushing ice, bitter cold, endless night, numbing hopelessness, privation, want, exposure, the stench of scurvy, gangrene, and suppuration that actually occurred, Simmons adds A Monster stalking the ice intent on their destruction.  Simmons summons Edgar Allan Poe to make scenes of shattered bone, torn off limbs, and freezing sprays of blood magically surreal.  To call it Master and Commander Meets The Thing would be glib, but such a description might get you into the ballpark visually.  This wickedly clever mash-up of historical fiction, arctic exploration during the age of sail, and horror chilled me instantly and left me so for all 766 pages.

The Terror is one of those novels you can't quit reading for fear the story will leave you behind. I knew the Franklin Expedition ended badly but loved being dragged into Simmons' even more hopeless version.  I’m glad I did not read it when it was first published in 2007.  Those were especially dark days in our house and this horror story would have made the gloom even worse.  Five years on I didn’t want this carefully crafted world to end, leaving me to find my own way back to a safe and slightly banal reality.

In The Terror, Simmons is a gory-minded storyteller with a heart made of grinding shards of ice.  Not for the squeamish, but I loved every minute of it.  The Terror is bloody, brilliant, and bloody brilliant.

What Better Day

To remember we usually get risk wrong...

click on image to enlarginate

As a society - perhaps 21st century Americans especially - we’re strongly inclined to get risk wrong. We worry about different things for different reasons, depending on our temperaments.  We worry about rare events we cannot control and ignore mundane hazards we can avoid.  As individuals - especially those of us in the resilience trade - we need to resist all the cognitive short cuts that make that possible.  I am reminded of a funny and challenging 2008 Op-Ed by Lenore Skenazy, the silly media firestorm that followed, and her refreshingly sensible blog.

Image credit: http://www.yalescientific.org/2011/05/cultural-cognition-and-scientific-consensus/

Mourn The Past Or Prepare For The Future?

I much prefer the company of those who dedicate themselves to prepare for the future... 

The 11th Annual Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance has arrived.  The flag is lowered, we bow our heads, and are inclined to look back to mourn the past.  Arnold Bogis, a writer at the excellent Homeland Security Watch blog, recommends rather that we honor our heroes by training new ones.  I agree with him.  

As the most social of all primates, humans will follow the group, for good and for ill.  The herd, the troop, the tribe will choose compassion or cruelty.  Leadership creates the direction.  The able response mounted by emergency services at the Boston Marathon modeled appropriate action and made it easy for witnesses to become rescuers.  Like most all animals, we have three responses to threat: flight,fight, or freeze.  As individuals we do not rise to the occasion, we default to our level of training.  Effective training and frequent drill can create the difference between evacuation or rout, resistance or riot, a moment of evaluation or mindless panic.  As leaders we instill in our team members, communities, and families the habits they present to the world and the reflexes they will apply under stress.  Whether we model habits mindfully or carelessly is up to each of us, every day.

 

 

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

It wasn't all just sleeping in, sipping dark roast, and reading...

 

First, there was a deck and railings to power wash, scrape, sand, repair, prime, paint, strip, brighten, stain, and re-stain wet.

Then there were ornamentals and stone.  About it I wrote to my friend Jim yesterday: 

Here is our latest completed project. It's been some time since I moved a ton of gravel...by shovel and wheeled barrow.  The tree is a hydrangea, the evergreens are a low growing juniper, and the annuals at the far end are mums. There's a slate paver between the flowers that increased my total weight lifting by 50 pounds or so. Then I tuned the irrigation system to treat its new charges properly. All this for a house in which I no longer live and which we will likely sell before we have time to witness any growth.

Jim, a retired Roman Catholic priest in his late 60s who planted a stand of oak seedlings just three years ago, replied:

"What is planting except belief in the future...that is not our own. We are the planters; others will reap what we have sown." - Oscar Romero

I am not worthy of friends as wise as him...but I am grateful.

Why I Hate DIY Landscaping Projects

Some people do this for fun, others hire it done...

No, that wasn't an old root, it was the main irrigation line.  Yes, that is a shovel inflicted gash just below the clamped splice.  Ack!  Thpppt!

Yes, it is good to live near a Home Depot.  An hour later, I managed to break even and returned to prepping the front yard of the house where I no longer live for some shrubbery.

To paraphrase Greta Garbo, "I want to be in a condo!" 

Alas, Seamus Heaney Is Dead

And more's the pity...

Irish poet and man of letters, Seamus Heaney translated my favorite edition of Beowulf. I made a gift of that translation to my late and much lamented friend Eric S.H. Ching one Christmas not so long ago.  Heaney's passing also reminds me of my embarrassing, odd, and unrequited ambivalence about my Irish heritage.  

Rest in peace, Seamus Heaney, aged only 74 years...gone too soon.

How soon the grave beckons, inexorable, regardless the quality of our contribution.

Homegrown Violent Extremism by Erroll Southers

Brought to our attention by Arnold Bogis at Homeland Security Watch...

Thanks for bringing our attention to Erroll Southers’ new book Homegrown Violent Extremism

Coincidentally, Mr. Southers is currently working for Johnathan Tal, of TAL Global, an associate of mine from the Silicon Valley days.  Southers has a blog where he discussed his book in a recent post in which he reminds us:

Absent a set of specific criteria, we will continue to direct the vast majority of our national security efforts against only one violent ideology (i.e., Muslim extremism).

The federal government has had a legal definition of terrorism for quite some time.

Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

 
By that measure most (almost all) of the terrorism we have experienced in the U.S. since 1865 has been the work of angry white men, not transnational Islamist extremists. There was a time when the federal government aggressively investigated the bombing of churches and the assassination of civil rights workers without regard to the skin color of the perpetrators or victims. Unfortunately, these days our frightened neighbors and their political representatives are not much interested in chasing anti-government extremists, white supremacists, anti-semites, tax protesters, violent homophobes, or “right to life” bombers and assassins, especially, it seems, if they happen to be white and nominally Christian. There is some tolerance for tracking down the tree-hugging arsonists, animal-loving vandals, balaclava-clad anarchists, but they’re radical lefties and probably atheists after all. I suppose it all depends on whose ox is gored, or what sort of news coverage sells the most advertising.

I look forward to reading Mr. Southers’ book.

Back to School

At good old iTunes U...

Got some serious drive-time coming up so I'm loading the iPhone 5 with my usual variety of courses from iTunes U.

Bibliology/Theology Proper

Knowing why Bible-believing Christians bestow upon their scriptures inspiration, inerrancy, and authority is interesting to me.  Is there a practical difference between Biblicism and Bibliology as practiced by the fundamentalist? Perhaps I'll find out in the course of 51 episodes.  So far Dr. David J. MacLeod - Dean for Biblical Studies and the Program Director for Biblical Studies, Bible Exposition and Theology at Emmaus Bible College, is earnest but not compelling.

Crass Plagiarism

Instead of Jewish authors cribbing foundation myths from their Babylonian captors, Dr. John Currid - professor of Old Testament at RTS, argues that Moses engaged in a polemical take-down of other Near Eastern theologies.  Interesting spin from the Reformed tradition.  Now where's that Occam's Razor?

Genesis Through Joshua

Dr. Richard P. Belcher, Jr. -Professor of Old Testament at RTS, engages in all the acrobatics necessary to explain a literal and inerrant Genesis (even without mentioning non-literal scholarship) without much success.  Seems it helps to believe it before trying to make sense of it.  UPDATE: Finished. It's not a bad course if a person wants to understand a literalist view of the Pentateuch from a Reformed perspective.

Colonial and Revolutionary America

Evolution

New Thinking: Advances in the Study of Human Cognitive Evolution

Thought and Experience

Philosophical Problems

Philosophy of Mind

Religion x3, check.  History x1, check.  Science x3, check.  Philosophy x2, check.

Diet Coke and beef jerky?  Oops, almost ready...

C'mon, open road!