Eight Feet Deep

One of these days we’ll fig­ure out what kind of look we want for the blog as well as a for­mat that doesn’t make your eyes cross look­ing at code. My Tokyo friend Paul changed the look some­time between now and last night. I like it. I will have to see now if I can nav­i­gate within it.

Like all large and lucra­tive indus­tries, the tele­vi­sion indus­try doesn’t like to be told what do by gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tors. So indus­try offi­cials have agreed to set stan­dards for them­selves which would soften loud TV commercials.

The TV big­wigs announced their pledge to self-regulate at a recent hear­ing con­cern­ing leg­is­la­tion by Cal­i­for­nia Demo­c­ra­tic Rep. Anna Eshoo (Bless you!) which would have required the FCC to set vol­ume lev­els for commercials.

Cur­rently, the level for TV ads should be no louder dur­ing com­mer­cials than the peak vol­ume within the show being broad­cast. But these ads are often placed next to very quiet moments dur­ing the show, or so the expla­na­tion goes.

Since it was hot­ter than blue blazes this past week­end where I live — in South­east Texas — I decided the healthy thing to do was stay inside read and watch TV if some­thing decent was on the tube. I had read recently about this pro­posed law and I thought it was a good idea if it would make a dif­fer­ence in low­er­ing ad vol­umes. My thoughts on this mat­ter sur­faced more than once this week­end when com­mer­cials by Time-Warner cable almost jarred me from my chair.

I am sure that if the TV indus­try (includ­ing Time-Warner) actu­ally does some­thing to soften the loud­ness, they’ll find other ways to annoy their cus­tomers. And, I am talk­ing about some­thing more than leav­ing callers on hold indef­i­nitely or giv­ing the viewer poor cus­tomer service.

It’s been kind of a heavy week what with the death of Far­rah Faw­cett and Michael Jack­son. So I thought I would lighten my thoughts as they are por­trayed out there on the dubya, dubya, dubya, dot, thing. Oh, this is “Jok­er­man” type from the Open Office word pack­age in case you thought you were hav­ing some kind of an eye affliction.

Plenty has already been said about Jack­son and more is sure to come in the days ahead. We prob­a­bly would have heard more about Far­rah had she not had the mis­for­tune of dying just prior to that of the “King of Pop.” One of my best friends also died of anal can­cer, by the way, not at all a pleas­ant affliction.

So here our soci­ety has turned another cor­ner in its cul­ture of celebrity, show­ing pre­sum­ably an already dead Jack­son being bagged by para­medics on the way to the hospital.

In the mean­time, life goes on. The ships go sail­ing in and out of the har­bor. A never-ending stream of cars and tractor-trailers buzz by on the inter­state while some guy with­out a shirt and a ban­danna around his head holds up a card­board sign say­ing “New Orleans” in his left hand while he sticks out his right thumb.

It’s another scorcher and worker bees do the work while way up some­where in the high floors of the office tower a young woman looks out the win­dows and thinks of that mar­garita she is going to have at the bar after work.

Bo and Tyrone are fish­ing off the jetty. They’ve not caught a thing and don’t much like the 100-degree heat, but they sure are glad to be where they are and with who they are hang­ing out.

So ends another sad week in Amer­ica. The funny thing about it, it seems just almost like any week, doesn’t it?

Sit­ting here try­ing to cool off from what I hope is my final trip out­side today, I can’t help but notice how my lit­tle Weather Bug icon is blink­ing between its lit­tle bug and an omi­nously red 103. Actu­ally, the tem­per­a­ture down the street at the Catholic school is 102 with a heat index of 109 degrees.

It occurred to me just in the few min­utes inside, and out of the scorch­ing day, that I have learned some truths about extrme heat in my half-century plus of mostly liv­ing in cli­mates sub­ject at times to hot tem­per­a­tures.  Those truths:

In the old days before air con­di­tion­ing young women spent their spare time com­ing up with new meals to cook on con­crete walls.

1. If it’s hot,  get out of the heat.

2. Noth­ing, not any­thing at all, beats a glass of ice water when it’s really hot.

3. Air con­di­tion­ing is both a bless­ing and a curse.

It is tempt­ing to feel sorry for the guys I see work­ing on the street con­struc­tion project down­town in which they are tear­ing up the side­walk with a jack­ham­mer to replace it with some­thing to give down­town an old-time feel. 

How­ever, these guys are get­ting paid to do what they are doing. They may or may not have air con­di­tion­ing in their homes and/or cars. The places they came from in Mex­ico or Cen­tral Amer­ica may or may not have air con­di­tion­ing. These men will prob­a­bly make enough to buy all the air con­di­tion­ers they need for when they get to be my age.

When I was a young sailor explor­ing the wares of Magsaysay Drive in Olan­gapo, in the Philip­pines, I once thought I dis­cov­ered the absolute cure for those mis­er­ably hot and humid days in which the only way a shower can be sooth­ing is to stay under it the entire day. That cure, I thought was the local San Miguel beer, pulled drip­ping in ice from a chest in a dark bar. But that is kind of like some­thing else I dis­cov­ered: Stay­ing in the water is great for sooth­ing a bad sun­burn. Get­ting out of the water isn’t so great and you even­tu­ally will have to leave the water unless you can some­how turn into a mer­man or mermaid.

I could sur­vive this day with­out air con­di­tion­ing. It would be mis­er­able, at first, but even­tu­ally I could accli­mate myself  to where it would be barely bear­able.  I never lived in a place with air con­di­tion­ing until I joined the Navy. Once I left the Navy, I did not stay com­pletely immersed in air con­di­tion­ing until I grad­u­ated from col­lege. I worked as a fire­man dur­ing most of that time period and sur­vived some hot times but also suf­fered from heat exhaus­tion. But once I started hav­ing employ­ment in which I didn’t want to look like one big mass of sweat, I became more and more a crea­ture of A/C.

So to para­phrase TV’s “Defec­tive Detec­tive” Adrian Monk – the Tony Shal­houb char­ac­ter in the series “Monk” — in his amus­ing catch phrase: air con­di­tion­ing truly is a “bless­ing and a curse.”

Those magic waves of cool air make life more com­fort­able. Why should we sweat and suf­fer prickly heat when we can sit back and, you know, be cool?  But A/C is addict­ing. You start out, you might only use it at home and in the car and at work. Even­tu­ally, you’ll be spend­ing every moment of your life inside because you can’t get enough of that coolness.

It’s truly a mon­key on one’s back. But damn, if it isn’t soooo cool!

“What hap­pens in Iran is not going to be because of what Obama says, or Rush Lim­baugh or any other Joe S**t the Rag­man who might or might not have the voice of Americans.”

Here are my two cents on the Iran sit­u­a­tion. The esti­ma­tion of my opinion’s worth is most likely inflated at that but here goes.

I haven’t had much use for the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment since the rev­o­lu­tion 30 years ago dur­ing which more than a few dozen Amer­i­can cit­i­zens were held hostage for an entirely too long period of time. This Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, the pres­i­dent who it seems got mil­lions of votes last week for reelec­tion out of nowhere, is quite sim­ply a jackass.

Mil­lions of Iran­ian cit­i­zens appear to want real change, and even their own ver­sion of free­dom and democ­racy. It is less than clear that the lead­ing oppo­si­tion can­di­date, Mir Hos­sein Mous­savi, is the George Wash­ing­ton of a new Iran. From what I read and hear it does seem he might be the best hope for those crav­ing a new Iran. But my guess is that most Amer­i­cans are like me and can pos­sess no more than a gut feeling.

Our own oppo­si­tion party in the United States, it should be remem­bered, wants noth­ing more than to kick Barack Obama and the Demo­c­ra­tic party until they can’t func­tion with­out leav­ing any vis­i­ble bruises. Per­haps some of the lead­ers of Repub­li­can party who crit­i­cize Obama at every turn in the Irana­ian cri­sis and every other mat­ter in which the pres­i­dent is involved are as sin­cere as their rhetoric. Unfor­tu­nately, GOP lead­ers don’t have much of a track record since the last elec­tion to prove that theirs is any­thing but a cyn­i­cal attempt to dam­age the Obama admin­is­tra­tion which has been quite con­sis­tently kick­ing the Repub­li­cans’ asses in the realm of pub­lic opinion.

Today, Obama’s lan­guage became a lit­tle stronger against the cur­rent Iran­ian regime. I think he should main­tain the care­ful course that he has trav­eled since this cri­sis began. It does no good for the admin­is­tra­tion play into the hands of a fool for a leader of a coun­try (Iran for those of you who might get con­fused too easily) that could either be a dan­ger­ous enemy or once again a valu­able ally.

What hap­pens in Iran is not going to be because of what Obama says, or Rush Lim­baugh or any other Joe S**t the Rag­man who might or might not have the voice of Amer­i­cans. Only the Ira­ni­ans can be mas­ters of their own destiny.

No, Sen­a­tor John McCain, the Ari­zona Repub­li­can who lost the pres­i­den­tial race to Barack Obama, isn’t chas­ing a North Korean ship. Instead the USS John S. McCain — named after McCain’s admi­rals father and grand­fa­ther — is shad­ow­ing the Kang Nam.

Before there was a John S. McCain III …

The ship is sus­pected of car­ry­ing weapons or nuclear mate­r­ial, pos­si­bly to Myan­mar. Even more odd or per­haps not, the guided mis­sile destroyer, shad­dow­ing the North Korean ves­sel is com­manded by an offi­cer born in South Korea.

Cdr. Jef­frey J. Kim, accord­ing to the McCain Web site, was born in Seoul and grew up in Albany, Calif., after immi­grat­ing to the U.S. with his fam­ily. He holds an aero­nau­tics and astro­nau­tics degree from MIT, a master’s in pub­lic pol­icy from Har­vard and also stud­ied as an Olm­sted Scholar at Lei­den Uni­ver­sity in the Nether­lands, fol­low­ing Dutch lan­guage train­ing via the Defense Lan­guage Institute.

Does that give this mis­sion an inter­na­tional flair or what?

It was for­tu­nate for me that my old J-school chum Paul is an early riser since we we work­ing on my new blog site Sat­ur­day night via Face­book chat. That is because Paul is in Japan and I am in South­east Texas. And I guess that tech­ni­cally means that Paul wasn’t work­ing on my new blog site on Sat­ur­day night. Ohh. I’m so confused!

Any­way, I am almost to the point where I am ready to switch to Word­Press even though there will still be some rough patches along the way. The con­tents are kind of bare for now on the new site but it is easy to find since the URL will be www.eightfeetdeep.com. This infor­ma­tion, I pass along for those friends of mine who like to check in from time-to-time. It’s not like I am going to be giv­ing away prizes for those who visit my site although I sup­pose I could give the 1,000th page viewer a box of rocks. That would hap­pen, when, some­time next Spring maybe?

My friend and new Tokyo cor­re­spon­dent, Paul,  is try­ing to help me fig­ure out this new Word­Press means of blog­ging. So if what comes out looks stu­pid, please for­give me. It isn’t my fault. That’s a joke son!

It is Fri­day in the Laun­dro­mat. Peo­ple seem either hyper, wist­ful or in the case of kids — kids. I am stay­ing on point with my clothes get­ting clean but am largely con­tem­plat­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of chang­ing Web providers.

For some time I have wanted to do more with the Web. Per­haps not so much this blog because it has long been sin­gu­larly a writ­ing exer­cise — moti­va­tional exer­cise to be more pre­cise. But the oppor­tu­nity has pre­sented itself via an old col­lege friend who lives in Japan to change to a dif­fer­ent plat­form with which improv­ing my old Web haunts is pos­si­ble. In doing so, I just might improve my prod­uct or per­haps go off on some dif­fer­ent direction.

I am think­ing about it. Change is dif­fi­cult. More so when you get older. But what else do I have going right now?