A Floating Fortress

As most of you know by now, I was once in Uncle Sam's Navy. Enlisting seemed like a good idea at the time. That changed quickly... while on the plane flight to boot camp, actually. It took me a few years to settle into it. Had circumstances been a little different, I might have made a career of it. I did enjoy a good portion of my time. Once you have been to sea, it beckons to you forever. Well, I suppose it helps not to suffer from seasickness.

I have passed by Mobile, AL, more than a few times since I left the Navy as I traveled back and forth between the coasts. Each time, I saw the USS Alabama moored at the Battleship Memorial Park. Yet I never stopped. I always had a reason not to stop "this time". But on my return from California this time, I made sure I would stop and pay her a visit.

I served aboard a destroyer. The USS Brinkley Bass DD-887, to be exact. The "Bass" was just over half the length of the Alabama, less than half her width. You could have fit three of the "Bass" inside her. Battleships were no longer in service when I enlisted. One, the New Jersey, was brought back into service in 1968 to use in the Vietnam War. I missed a chance to visit her while we both served.

Arriving in the morning, I entered the park and found a parking place. Though it isn't a large area, there are enough things to see that it would be good to plan to spend at least 3 hours. Bring a picnic lunch and make a good half day out of it. The Alabama is not the only thing to see. There is a B-25 bomber, along with a number of other planes, helicopters, and jets to see. There are tanks and armored vehicles and even a WWII submarine (the USS Drum).

But the main attraction is the Alabama. And she certainly stands out. No one takes you on a tour, you just follow colored arrows as you go through hatches and climb up and down ladders to just about every part of the ship. The handout you are given explains each point of interest. Each description sparked a memory of my own ship and its equivalent.

There were only a few people around when I paid my entry fee and walked aboard. A much broader and more stable "brow" (or gangway) than I had encountered in the Navy greeted me just past the "screw" (propeller) mounted by the ship. Everything about this ship was bigger than what I had been accustomed to on board the Bass. In fact, compared to my little ship, this was a luxury liner.






The only tight spaces, comparatively, were the 16" gun turrets. Outside, they were huge, but inside was another story. Space is a premium and as wisely used as possible. My ship had only two 5" gun mounts. They were quite large to me then but these 16 inchers dwarfed them. I cannot imagine the sound of a salvo from one of those mounts. You can see the Alabama's 5" gun mounts to the right in this picture. Those same mounts took up much of the bow and fantail on the Bass.

I wandered about the ship and found myself missing those days I spent at sea. As I stepped onto the gangway, leaving the ship, I had to fight the urge to request permission to go ashore and to salute the ensign.

If you live near a port, of any kind, and you hear or read of a Navy ship's visit that includes a public tour, take the time to go. See how our sailors live each day as they serve their country. You won't be sorry.

Some links...

USS Alabama BB-60
USS New Jersey BB-62
USS Brinkley Bass DD-887

Customer Service

I once lived about 33 miles from DC. Manassas was a small city, quiet. Most folks seemed to work elsewhere, either in DC or in the cities closer to it that had businesses with ties to government. When I lived there, it was the Reagan years. 1986 and 1987, to be exact. And I worked in a hole in the ground. Behind blast doors. Right near where Ollie North lived, actually.

But this has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with economics and service. I thought I was alone in this observation but then I read the following...

With a hard economy thinning the supply of ready consumers, shouldn't we expect businesses to do more to keep them happy?

Yes, says Lopo Rego, a marketing expert at the University of Iowa, who has studied customer service in strong and weak economies. During the boom of the late 1990s, he observed that the quality of customer service had slipped badly. The tight labor market had drained the pool of good workers at the wages that stores and fast-food restaurants were paying. Businesses that hired lazy, careless and rude staff found that offended consumers were quickly replaced.

You can read the whole opinion column here.

I made a similar observation in the DC area during the 80s. You see, the DC area is pretty much recession-proof. No matter what happens in the rest of the country, the federal government just keeps going. Unemployment is low. Business is always good. Hotels and motels are in demand, housing is expensive and in demand. Stores were always full of shoppers, restaurants were always crowded, streets were full of cars going here, there, and everywhere.

Customer service stank. Cashiers were rude and impatient, salespeople couldn't be bothered, waiters were in no hurry, smiles were rare.

In 1988, I moved to Jacksonville. The economy there was not so good at that time. Housing was cheaper and readily available. Stores weren't so crowded. Smiles were readily available and service was fine. It wasn't just southern hospitality. It was a desire to keep the customer happy and to keep the boss happy because, if you didn't, it was easier to replace an employee than it was to replace a few customers.

There may be a bright side to this economic downturn...

Dams and Desert and Holes

While traveling through the desert from Las Vegas, I headed past Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam. I took only a couple of pics. One to show a bit of the construction on the new bridge and the other to show how much the lake has dropped due to the drought that has been ongoing for some time. On the left is the progress made so far on the new bridge which will be part of a new freeway through the area. No more snaking through the mountains. On the right is Lake Mead, the white areas on the hillsides show the pre-drought level of the lake.





After leaving that area, I traveled for many miles through the desert as we all might imagine it to be: sand, rock, cacti and dry... very dry. Which prompted me to take out a bottle of water and open it in my lap. That's when I realized just how thin the plastic of the new bottles are. They squeeze too easily when you place the bottles between your thighs to so you can twist off the cap while driving. As the cap twists loose, water is forced out and into your lap. Thus, it becomes unlikely that you will be stopping anytime soon unless you can ignore the stares of others regarding that damp spot in your crotch area. I drove on...

After a couple of hours, I began climbing into the mountains and greener pastures. The high country of Arizona is quite beautiful. I have only been through the mountains in Arizona in the Summer and Spring. I understand the winters are not harsh, though. I get this from my brother-in-law who lives north of Phoenix, above Sedona. I am not so sure, I have been in the high desert in Winter and the wind cuts right through you.

As I moved down into the high desert from the Flagstaff area, I came to the turnoff for one of the places I wanted to see on the way back. Meteor Crater is truly in the middle of nowhere. It is a 6 miles south of I-40 and surrounded by terrain that is the definition of "empty." It is what I imagine the Gobi Desert looks like.

It is flat, it is desolate, it is sun baked. It seemed to be a large flat area surrounded by mountain peaks far in the distance.

Let me give you a little rundown on Meteor Crater.... About 50,000 years ago, a chunk of iron-nickel estimated to have weighed several hundred thousand tons crashed into the plains. It created this huge crater that sits in the high desert in northern Arizona. I happen to think it did much, much more than that. For instance, did you know that this is about the time that humans began to travel out of Africa into the rest of the world? I don't say there is a direct link between these two events, I just note that they happened around the same time. I wondered if the flat land surrounding the crater in all directions was always like that or was another result of the impact. I wondered what the environment was like before the impact.


The crater itself, looking across the 4000 foot diameter and down into the 550 foot depth (originally 700 feet)










Looking north from the crater back toward I-40.












Looking west from the same spot as above.




So far as we know, no human beings existed outside of Africa at the time. The area was known to be cooler and damper with vegetation and forests, populated by woolly mammoths and other creatures of the Pleistocene era. What impact did the meteorite's impact have on that?

I am paralyzed by the power of my curiosity. That is, I want to learn everything and there is not enough time, not enough resources, not enough me to do it.

Here are some links for the curious to peruse...

Hoover Dam Bridge Construction
Hoover Dam Information
Meteor Crater, AZ
More about Meteor Crater
Human History


[1035/1036/905]

I Am Bugged

I arrived home at around 8 PM on Saturday. The last leg, through Alabama and Florida, was on crowded highways. I have no idea why. Just a lot of traffic for no reason that I could discern. It was not pleasant, especially after the last gas stop where the nozzle's auto cutoff failed to work. The gas flowed over and down the side of the car. A nice mess. And the gas station, a Shell station at Exit #399 on I-75, had known about the faulty nozzle for at least a day. A note on the pump might have been useful...

So, I get home. I pull into the garage. I sit for a moment, basking in the peace and quiet of no movement. And then I begin gathering up the trash, the little items sitting on the passenger seat, put away the sunglasses, grab the coffee cup, and start transferring things from car to house. Faye greets me and then starts helping. Out come the loose clothes, the two bags full of clean and dirty clothes (and shoes). The rest of the trash is cleaned out.

And then I hear it. A buzzing. Like bees. Above my head. Inside the garage.

I look up, thinking it must be the fluorescent light above the car.

It isn't. At first, I just stare. In the odd light that fluorescent emit, the insects appear white. Bees or large flies, but white. A couple inside the light's cover, a larger number buzzing around outside of it or crawling on the outside or on the ceiling.

Weird things. I back out the car. I grab a spray bottle of some bug spray and spray the light and ceiling area around it. They don't appear to react except maybe to bathe in it happily.

I pull Faye's car out and spray the light over her space also since they are also buzzing around that light too. Then I pull both cars back in and go in the house.

The next morning, I go out to the garage and look for corpses. This is what they looked like. Please forgive the fuzziness of one of the pics. Either I moved or I snapped it when the camera had not quite focused yet. As far as I can tell, they are some kind of deer flies. The shape and eye formation seems to bear that out. But the eyes are lighter than any I could find on the internet.



I also searched the attic above the garage for some kind of nest but found nothing. Do deer flies even have nests? Are they really deer flies or some kind of albino bee? The color, in normal light, appears to be a pale green.

Ah, home sweet home.

[1032/1033/902]

I Have My Reasons...

Some months ago I wrote a piece about prejudice. I offered a list of words and asked readers to examine the pictures that they brought to mind. The purpose of the exercise was to point out that, whether we realize it or not, we have prejudices and biases. Most of the time, these cause no harm to others. They are simply "quirks" to us if we don't readily recognize them for what they are. If we do recognize them, we can learn to cope with them. We cannot purge them completely, in my opinion, though we might think we can. Though we certainly might want to.

No, these prejudices remain as a part of us. They influence how we view the world. This is fine if we understand how this happens, what they do. It is not so fine when we think we do not have them or, even worse, when we think they are justified in some way. Yes, sometimes we really believe they are justified. I have met a number of people who have tried to explain how they weren't prejudiced until some incident or some experience caused them to be.

Someone just recently tried to explain this to me. He told me how he had been exposed to this terrible behavior by a certain ethnic group. How that behavior turned him against those people. He reminded me of others who had told me similar stories about their experiences which justified, to them, their dislike and distrust of entire class of people. There are members of my family which have related the same kinds of stories to me.

It's all bull. And I think these people, in their hearts, know that. That's what really bothers me. I really do believe that, deep down, these people realize they have a prejudice (or two or three). These are simply rationalizations for something that cannot be justified. Not unless stereotypes are not stereotypes at all.

When I was a young man, a teen, my mother talked to me about prejudice. I am not even sure how the conversation evolved but she related the following to me (paraphrasing):

"I don't think I am prejudiced but when I see a black man walking toward me on the street, I feel fear. I have even crossed the street in order to avoid them."

She couldn't point to any incident or experience that caused that fear. She didn't know why that prejudice existed. But the important thing I learned was that she recognized that it was a prejudice. She didn't let that prejudice fool her by rationalizing it. That was the important lesson. I don't know if it was the intended lesson or she was just getting something off her chest.

It is much worse to rationalize prejudice. It lets you believe you are better than others when you are worse. And when we accept those reasons, or ignore the prejudice of others, we are just as bad.

I write this because I have had to remove the blog from my OBTR list of someone I thought was witty, intelligent, and clever. Unfortunately, I cannot tolerate his bigotry regarding a certain group. It saddens me more than you can know.

By the way, I am back from my trip and promise the next series of blogs will be much lighter.