Alpha Males

Bad news first: I had to uninstall the sweet NASA program, World Wind, this morning. You know the dreaded blue screen. The color is not bad, but the warning that came with it gave me a start. Maybe it is Windows XP or the combination of the two. I am going to try to download and install again later. Why is it we always want what we cannot have? I wonder how many blue screen incidents I need before I learn my lesson?

Now the good news: I got my dog-wish fixed. I spent two and a half hours at the Humane Society this afternoon. They had a six month old tri-color Collie that could be a great dog in about six months. I spent some time with him, first with a volunteer, and then alone. The dog was picked up off the streets and had never been trained in any way, but he sat and stayed down for treats quickly and eagerly. When the treats ran out he chewed my shoes, my hands, and acted like he'd enjoy a wrestling match. Obviously, he knew who the Alpha male was and it wasn't me.

Maybe if my Alpha Male had been with me it would have been a different picture. The Collie would have found out he was close to the bottom of the pack pronto. Raising and training a German Shepherd 35 years ago seemed so easy; this is a sad realization for me, but will definitely be a big relief for He Who Must Be Obeyed. I'm not keen on even telling him.

World Wind

My friend, this Internet is. It is a friend when the world is going crazy in front of my eyes, when distraction is the only way I can forget the thorns in my side, both the figurative and the actual, it is my friend when my inquiring mind flails about for the new and the extrordinary.

This morning Lockergnomie, Chris Pirillo, has found it for me and it is truly amazing. I subscribe to Lockergnome Tech News Watch and Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics. He has other topics, but being pragmatic about myself, they might pile up in my inbox, unread.

World Wind is served up by the folks at NASA. I down loaded it and the first thing I did was to control the world by spinning it around to get my bearings and yes, Finland is northeast of us. Here is what he Pirillo says about World Wind:

Topographical
11:13PM (PST) on February 25, 2005
As Robert so eloquently put it, this thing is amazing. We heard about NASA's free World Wind application tonight on .NET Rocks. The sucker weighs in at ~180MB, but it's worth every byte (and then some) - completely putting Google's Keyhole to shame. Imagine having the ultimate 3D mapping system sitting on your desktop... and then see it." World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there." I know that Ponzi will appreciate the topographical features, as that's what she's been wanting in a consumer-oriented mapping system for some time. I use Google Maps because it's quick, Microsoft Streets & Trips when I want to explore local resources, and... World Wind for a bird's eye view of the globe. You don't need to be into GIS or anything - this digital mapping system is quite accessible. Topo maps, satellite photos, free download - what's not to like?

Indeed, what is not to like? This can undoubtedly distract me for hours, days, weeks. Thanks.

Don Cammack

Don Cammack was the editor for The Buffalo Times-Herald when I grew up in Buffalo, SD. The print shop was up the street from my dad's blacksmith shop and they served together on the Buffalo Town Council. I read in the paper, now called the Nations Center News, that he had celebrated his 85th birthday a while back. More lately he had written about getting the paper put to bed during the blizzard of '48 and 49. It occurred to me he might like a copy of the book on my dad.

Today I got his letter and what a letter it was. It was so heartwarming to read of his friendship with my dad and of the things they accomplished together when the town was being organized as a city with "not a dollar to operate with." They served on the Buffalo Town Council from 1949 to 1952 and started with "three pieces of 16 ft. bridge plank spiked together in a triangle shape to be pulled behind a tractor. During those years we had a modern sewer system installed, a used grader working on the streets and tax money coming in to pay for it.

In the Arco (Idaho) Advertiser this week, the Old Inkslinger writes of recieving the book and a couple of others this winter. He closes his letter to me in part, Thanks a million, Willo, you'll never know how much you've added to an old newspaper man's life.

Thank you, Mr. Cammack, for the memories.

Hypertext Linking Does Not Violate Copyright

If you think your life is sailing along just fine and dandy, read a few blogs. It appears that the Tulsa World is getting huffy about blogger BatesLine using links to the newspaper.

Blogs are one way to counter the 'big bad media,' or another voice among thousands and thousands of blogmouths. It is hard to know what is the truth and what is the spin or what is the truth spun. All of it boggles the mind.

Anyway, I am happy to know I can link to hypertext so you, my reader, can plink or clink on these pink links. Just always, always consider the source of anything you read. The Midwest Conservative Journal contains many links to news and blogs.

Here I am on a Google blog. Google donates a lot of money to the party that is not my choice. Will this blog be nudged one way or the other politically? Who knows?

I don't know another web search engine that does the job so well. I used to use Alltheweb, and Dogpile. They are a little different, and I am down the road from my prior research librarianship, haven't done the comparison, and I hate to bail out on Google because of a political difference. Isn't it too bad it even matters. I know, though, everything 'matters.'

Last night I listened to ABCs, Peter Jennings, interview Bill Gates, another of my heroes. Gates has a heart that I don't see in our own Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett.

This is certainly off the topic. Maybe I just wanted to see how many hypertext links I could use in one writing.

Mother-In-Law from Hell

This is what happens when Carnival and Valentine's Day very nearly coincide. I could name these three, I am the melancholy one on the left. Just click the link, you will see what I have as wallpaper today.

A family fight on the internet is akin to a food fight at a holiday table. It takes a day or two to get the mess cleaned up. I have been there, I have caused it, I have tried to clean it up. Neither one are a pretty sight.

One thing the mother of the groom should keep in mind is that not only do you keep your mouth shut and wear beige at the wedding, but I would do well to keep that in mind the rest of my life. I don't think I have but two beige things in my closet, mostly black and blue, which seems appropriate, as I feel a little bruised.

Being a mother-in-law is serious business. I never had one, so have no have no first hand knowledge of how to go about it. Over the years I have watched my own mother and husband spar at the table, right up to the month she died. Both Libras, each had the scale in their hand. I lived my entire life in that balance; the Libras of my life directing my coming and going. Each playing the part against each other. Survival was not always easy.

It was on a 12 hour drive to Omaha from my home town that my mother told me she felt it was her duty to tell people of their errors, to correct them. I can still recall the impact that made on me. God got pulled into it because it was her "God Given Duty" to do this. She was good at it, let me tell you, and she had been on that mission all her life, I think. I was easy, as she told my daughter one time, "Willo was a compliant child." I have a good idea my quiet father was one of those Myers-Briggs INFP's as well as me. But that is all history. Not quite all, I still live with a Libra.

Once I took an assertiveness class. It didn't help a whole lot. Menopause was more helpful to me; I cut my hair, knew my own mind, became semi-assertive. But I still can't say much out loud, nor do I care to dial a telephone. On the Internet, I am a loose cannon. It would be hell broken loose if I ever took the time to write a novel, not using real names of course; I have a lot of material. I am now the mother-in-law from hell. I have to put on that beige shawl again and SHUT UP.

Outsider Art

Outsider Art is a term I had never heard until the Library of Congress used it as a subject heading in for book I wrote posthumously about my father; and in which I included over a hundred of his 'outsider art' works. In the link above is a sentence describing an outsider artist: "Outsider artists are the fringe-dwellers of the world, the outcasts of society. They are the ones left over and left behind. These people are in the gray area of art, quite literally outsiders to the modern gallery / agent system which seems to be required for one to be recognized as a legitimate artist. " That was pretty much my dad except for the outcast of society remark.

I tape CBS Sunday Morning, programming it to automatically turn on and tape the hour and a half program for watching later. This afternoon I rewound and watched the program aired January 30. One of the features was Outsider Art. It appears it is a big deal right now. " OUTSIDER ART CBS News correspondent Serena Altschul learns about the colorful characters behind Outsider Art, a creative movement whose artists are untrained and often mentally unstable but who nonetheless remain unceasingly imaginative."

This 'creative movement' does not describe my dad at all. He was the shy guy painting day and night in a ranch community and if that made him odd, and I suppose it did, but was he mentally unstable? Not at all. Just about as solid a citizen as one could possibly be. But he was very introverted. He and George W and I have one thing in common. Sentences don't come out of our mouths quite like we had imagined. But we know what we meant.

I am wondering if all this 'outsider art' I have hanging on my walls might be of interest to EBay or Amazon customers. Perhaps I should write one of those disgusting little query letters. I haven't figured out how to do anything but order books, old and new.

Ash Wednesday

This highway phenomenon was no apparition.
It was there in my morning to and my evening fro,
Forty miles from nowhere in the prairie grass.
It lie there like some fallen space craft
Downed by cultural progress, and shamed by the
Worthless weathered outhouse.

Dakota winds blew the golden grass
Arcing its improper placement like a frame,
Guilded, and further emphasizing the awkward
Accomodation of this once nobel pinnacle.
This proud attribute, like its builders, has fallen,
And as they, become the epitome of Lent.

"Memento homo, wuia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris"
Willo Boe

BookTV

Can anything be said for a person who can listen to a three hour interview on BookTV and enjoy it? Sometimes I wonder just what kind of goofy person would DO that. When I went back to college at 37, I was so glad to be there that I sometimes slipped into lectures in classes I didn't take.

One I recall vividly. It was by a pediatrition who was lecturing to a group of nurses on how to identify babies with problems, at the time of birth. The thing I remember most is his proposing that palmestry might have some scientific bearing; no he didn't say it was absolute, he just said MAYBE. He went on to say that at the time the brain synapses are developing in a fetus, the lines in the hands are forming simultaneously. Of course his point was the simian fold.

That is when I went into a research project on Gypsies and was so darned mad that one of the two books in the University card catalog on palmestry had dissappeared. Book theft still infuriates me. But to be truthful, I have copped a book, maybe two, in my life as a librarian.

But back to BookTV. He Who Must Be Obeyed doesn't give one snap for it, but he listened a while yesterday when a panel of fairly distinguished people read poetry to a group of adults and children. There was William Krystal and others enchanting us. Poetry is certainly meant to be heard, instead of read. He Who Must Be Obeyed used to read poetry to me off and on over the past 50 years. When we had the Harvard Classics in the house it happened more often. I remember a lot of Confucious tossed in.

My wish for the year is to go to a local poetry slam. We have a active poet, Matt Mason, in Omaha who has organized them. It is the word 'slam' that has kept me away. But then it probably isn't a dance.

The three hour interview on BookTV was with Charles Murray; the writer from Iowa, Harvard, MIT, who had the country in an uproar over his book "The Bell Curve." He doesn't blog because he is the kind of writer who has to do a lot of editing. He has a point there. He uses the Web for a great deal of his research. His latest book is "Human Accomplishment." He had his list of high achievers. Wouldn't it be grand to have Lexus-Nexus!

Auschwitz: 60 Years Later

The past few weeks I have thought a lot about the Nazi extermination of the Jews in Europe. It was prompted by a book sent to me, on my request, from a former pastor of my childhood church in the Cave Hills of South Dakota. I had previously read Pastor Wayne's book of his childhood and life, and one he translated into English from Finnish written by his father. Now I have the one written by his wife. All are great treasures and I appreciate reading and re-reading them.

"In the Shadow of the Swastika" tells of young Erika, and opens this way: "Located on both sides of the Elbe River, Dresden is the capitol of the Free-State of Saxony, a province of Germany. It was a city of rare beauty whose buildings in rococo and baroque style had won world renown. Nightly performances were the rule both at the large playhouse and at the opera with its exquisite building. There were parks and fountains, a zoo, and a circus as well as many very beautiful castles. The collections in the museums were breath-taking. Truly, Dresden was a city of art and culture. this is where I was born on June 1, 1927,...."

Erika's father was Jewish. The reading of it gripped me with dread and fear. How beautifully this tragic event was written. "Hitler's ascendancy to the chancellorship affected people I cared about, and I mourned theloss of these friends for years. However, I could never tell anyone how I felt." Her memory for events, places and individuals is remarkable.

Simultaneously, PBS ran a six hour series on Auschwitz. It was doubly horrifying. Sometimes it was so difficult to absorb, I had to tape the second hour of the presentation to watch a different day.

February 4th was the birthday of one of my heroes, Diedrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Germany who took part in the plots being planned to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested, imprisioned, and eventually hanged following the failure of the assissination attempt. Prior to his imprisonment he was involved, with others, in setting up the Confessing Church, an underground group opposing the Nazis. Many of these leaders were sent to internment camps.