Walking My Bike in a Grocery Store

 

Bike path??

Yesterday I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from the afternoon ride. I was on my racing bike so I did not have a lock and was not going to leave a bike with $2,000 wheels outside a store, so I walked my bike through the store.

As I walked to the back, a woman said, "I've never seen that before."

I remembered I needed coffee cream so I walked over to the dairy section. After I picked up the carton, a man in his mid-40s looking at the milk display said, "You look like someone who stayed trim later in.....as you got older. What kind of milk do you drink? I could slim down some. Do you drink almond milk?"

When he took a breath I said, "I drink Lactaid. I tried almond milk. I don't like it. But you could try it."

He thanked me and said he should exercise more. I waved and clicked away (bike cleats) toward the cash register.

Only once did I have someone tell me I could not walk my bike in a grocery store. I pointed out that my bike took up less space than a shopping cart.

Have you ever walked a bike through a store?

Visiting Auschwitz Again It Is Even More Horrible

 

Auschwitz I

The second death camp I visited on this trip was the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was here in 2017. It was the first death camp I had ever visited. In fact, before that Auschwitz visit, I had never been to a Holocaust museum. 

The Nazi lie at the gate of every death camp

On this second visit I was more aware of the terrible scale of the slaughter and of the
camp itself. Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp taken over by the Nazis shortly after their victory in 1939. The camp is on the edge of the small city of Oswiecim. 

The little Polish town of Oswiecim became the center of death as Auschwitz-Birkenau

To Nazis expanded the camp by using slave labor to add second stories to existing barracks and added other buildings. The brick construction in Auschwitz is still solid today, unlike in many camps where wooden and hastily built brick buildings have long since fallen or crumbled. As Auschwitz became the center of Nazi genocide, the huge Birkenau camp was built two kilometers away. Acres of barracks and workshops cover a large field just outside the town of Oswiecim. 

The vast facility at Birkenau was where most Jews were murdered

In between acres of barracks is the rail siding where Jews were unloaded from box cars and separated to either work as slaves or be immediately killed by gas. Cliff and I walked for hours between and in the two camps trying to take in the full scale of place where more than million Jews were murdered.

Life or immediate death at the whim of a malignant Nazi

The Three Little Pigs in French--the original gruesome version

 

Last night I read the original version of "The Three Little Pigs" in French. Children's books used to be so much more gruesome.

In this version the pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks ended up in the wolf's baking dish with an apple in their mouths.

The last pig tricked the wolf three times and made him so angry he jumped down the pig's chimney into a cauldron of boiling water.

The pig had boiled wolf for dinner!

That gave me paws (a telling tail).

Since the story is in French, it sounds lovely. I read aloud to enjoy the sound. Here is the exchange when the wolf arrives at each of the houses:

--Petit cochon, petit cochon, laisse-moi entrer.

--Non, non, par la barbiche de mon petit menton.

--Alors je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

My Daughter's First Book -- Amelia's Journey to Find Family

 

Lauren Auster-Gussman, my oldest daughter, 

with her book Amelia's Journey to Find Family

If I were asked to name one thing that defines the life of my oldest daughter, I would say, "Lauren loves dogs!"

We got our family's first dog when Lauren was eight years old. The German Shepherd named Lucky was the whole family's dog, but Lauren really loved that dog.  Except for when she lived in college dorms, Lauren has had dogs ever since.  She currently has two rescue dogs named Guinness and Watson, but she wrote her first book about a dog named Amelia.  

Amelia and her book

Lauren adopted Amelia last year and kept her alive and as healthy as possible until she passed away last month on May 20, National Rescue Dog Day at the age of approximately 12-14.  The book is a story told by Amelia about finding her last and final family.  If you would like to get the book for a child in your life (or yourself), order here.

Lauren volunteers for Lu's Labs, a Labrador Retriever Rescue organization.  Lauren fostered thirty rescued labs over the past five years before deciding to keep Amelia.  

Over the past year, Amelia posted daily on the Lu's Labs site as well as her and her brother's instagram page. These posts detailed her transition to Lauren's home, old lady ailments, the difficulties of training the humans and attempting to understand their behavior, and about finding the simple joys and things to be grateful for in each day.  These posts had hundreds of followers. 

In her passing, Amelia received over a thousand messages from people telling her how her posts inspired them, taught them about love and gratitude, helped them through difficult times in their lives, the uncertainty of COVID, and how reading her daily posts became part of their morning coffee routine or part of family dinner each night. These messages also had another common and incredible theme, so many people spoke of the incredible love they had for dog they'd never met. 

Lauren is currently posting on Facebook at Team Wag Forever.

On Instagram:  Amelia Writes Books and Guiness Watson and Friends.

Lauren shared with me many of the hundreds of comments she received.  I was really moved by the comment from her soccer coach at Juniata College, Scott McKenzie.  I only went on one college visit with Lauren and that was the college she picked. I remember little of the visit except the first moment of meeting coach McKenzie.  

Lauren and I walked into McKenzie's office. He was sitting at the desk looking at some papers, looked at Lauren then bolted straight up out of his chair, hands raised like he was in Church and said, "Praise the Lord. A five-foot ten goalkeeper wants to play for my team."  

Lauren played every season, but missed a lot of her senior season after an open fracture of her finger in a pre-season game.  

Here is Coach McKenzie's response to Amelia's passing.  Lauren's nickname on the team was "Goose."  

A good friend of mine lost one of her dogs this morning. Not just any friend and not just any dog!  Goose (my friend) competed for me while a student-athlete at Juniata College. Goose was a terrific goalkeeper for our women’s soccer team. She’s an even better human being who has dedicated her professional life to caring for others. It makes sense, then, that this tendency towards care would carry over to her personal life in the dedication she shows to her family and her pets. Goose volunteers for an organization called Lu’s Labs, which connects available dogs with their forever families. 

In Amelia’s case, the cards were stacked against this wonderful chocolate lab. Elderly dogs and dogs with compromised health are tough to place. In steps Goose (about a year ago) and becomes Amelia’s foster and then forever Mom. Goose and her husband welcomed Amelia into their family of two other labs and they became a family of five. 

Goose and Amelia wrote a children’s book together about finding a home and being loved. I can’t wait to get my “pawtographed” copy. 

Goose gave Amelia a voice and many of us have followed their wonderful journey together. 

This morning, that journey ended as Amelia earned her wings and will be waiting for her families at the Rainbow Bridge. 

Before she left, Amelia asked for a favor from all of us. She asked us to consider an elderly or ill dog if/when you adopt. She proved, over the past year, that they can give love and laughs with the time they have left. I believe this to be true. 

So, please learn more about adoption. Visit Lu’s Labs online. Consider Amelia’s book as a good read for you or a friend. 

Most importantly, open your heart to the possibility of the great amount of love that remains in our dogs, no matter what their age. 

Amelia, I never met you but my eyes were filled with tears of heartbreak when I learned of your passing. 

Good dog Amelia. Good dog. 

Goose - you’re an amazing person and I thank you for allowing many of us to join you in loving that good dog.

Reliable Randomness Makes Air Apparent

Every yard or meter that a bicyclist or pilot or runner or driver or anyone else travels through the air means passing through trillions and trillions of molecules that together make up what we call air. The faster the rider, runner, pilot or driver travels the more molecules per second bang into their body, bicycle, car or plane and spin off in another direction. The first philosophers called air a single substance.  Reality is quite different. 

Each molecule of oxygen, nitrogen and water, as well as fart smell, scent of lilac or Corona Virus moves with through three dimensions in any possible direction depending upon all the physical forces acting on it. Each molecule of what we call air moves freely. Heat speeds them up, collisions with other molecules and with bicyclists send it off in another direction, gravity keeps individual molecules from favoring the up direction but with a mass of a few or a few thousand atoms, gravity is not a huge influence. 

In describing the motion of these molecules and the forces affecting them, I did not include wind resistance. Together the molecules of air are wind resistance, but they are so small that the forces on them are heat, gravity, and collisions. They move in what is effectively a vacuum. The effect of trillions of molecules per second smacking into a rider from random directions at varying speeds is completely predictable in its total effect--a surprising and wonderful reality.

If a rider maintains 20 miles per hour in still air, that same rider will reach the same speed at the same effort an hour or a month or a year later. And assuming the same air density, the same effort will achieve the same speed in Belarus, Borneo, Botswana, Bosnia or Belgium. The random motion of molecules in air has the effect of totally predictable wind resistance. 

When the air moves collectively, when there is wind, the effect is exactly, predictably the same. Uncountable trillions of molecules of varying sizes and shapes moving in unpredictable directions with different speeds will cause exactly the same amount of friction on a car, bicycle, runner or airplane everywhere there is air. 

Wind resistance is both invisible and unavoidable. When I feel strong, I leave my house and ride with the wind knowing that the exhilaration of riding 25mph in a 20mph tail wind will turn into a 12mph slog on the return leg. When I don’t feel so great, I ride into the wind first and give myself the tailwind at the end of the ride. 

So much of the history of science is discovering that reality is not what anyone guessed or expected. Few of the ancient scientists could wrap their minds around the idea of atoms in a vacuum. Even some of the alchemists who provided the first experimental evidence for atoms could believe what they demonstrated. 

Before atoms, air was considered a single substance. The discovery of atoms showed air is a complex mixture of molecules. Physicists then showed that the individual molecules of air, moving randomly, together became, in effect, that single substance the ancient scientists believed in. All that randomness taken together is as predictable as the motion of the moon. And at the same time any single molecule can and does move as randomly as a toddler in a room full of shiny toys. 

The Physics of Descending on a Bicycle

When a solo rider or a group of riders descend any hill, particularly a steep hill, why are some of the riders so much faster than others? 

The fastest descenders, whether by experience or instinct or learning, are the ones that sense or know the laws of physics and do everything they can to use them. 

When a rider descends, the motion of the bike is governed by a series of variables: 

--The grade of the hill 

--The total frontal area of the bicycle and rider 

--The air speed of the bike 

--The total mass of the bike and rider 

--Momentum: the combination of ground speed and mass 

--Spoke count of the wheels 

--Rolling resistance 

The grade of the hill is the most important variable. I have descended eight percent grades in the Alps and in the eastern US and never hit 50 mph, even after two or three miles. But I have gone 55 to 59 mph on half-mile hills with 15-20 percent grades. 

 

The frontal area of the bike and rider determines the top speed on any given grade. Wind resistance increases by the square of the speed. Double the speed, quadruple the wind resistance. At 11mph a rider is mostly pedaling to move the mass of bike and rider. To maintain 22mph, the same rider is putting 80% effort into moving air. The riders who descend the fastest, especially above 40mph put their crotch on the top tube and their sternum on the handlebars and pull their elbows and knees in. 

Related to wind resistance is air speed. I worked seventy miles east of my home for many years. I would ride to work once a month between April and September. I would wait for a day with a 20mph west wind and ride that 70 miles in under four hours, under 3.5 hours on the best days. When the wind was exactly behind me there were times it was quiet. I was going 22mph in a 20mph tail wind. My air speed was 2 mph. I was flying. 

I am the wrong size to be a bicycle racer. At nearly six feet and 185 pounds, I am 20 pounds heavier and several inches taller than many top racers. But descending, every pound is to the good, because… 

Mass plus ground speed makes momentum. The higher the speed and the greater the mass, the more force pushes the bike down the hill. When I pull out of the draft and sail past a 160-pound rider, momentum is my friend. 

One variable every rider can control is spoke count. Every revolution of the wheel, from the perspective of the wind, whips the spoke from no speed to twice the speed of the bike and back to zero. Low-spoke-count wheels with thin or bladed spokes reduce the wind resistance and the turbulence of spokes. The faster we ride, the more wind we whip through the spokes in our wheels. 

On a road bike with fully inflated 23 or 25mm tires, rolling resistance is negligible, but not zero. 

In summary, to go really fast downhill, find a steep grade, make yourself as small and narrow as you can, ride low-spoke-count wheels with fully inflated tires and hope the wind is behind you. I love going fast. My Strava KOMs are downhill, not up.

Rural Drivers Hating Bicyclists is Nothing New

In 2004, a bicycle hater with the unlikely name John F. Kennedy threw tacks on the road when he knew bicyclists would run over them and get flats and possibly crash. 

He did it twice. The second time, I saw him do it. I got his license number and harassed the local police until they arrested and charged him. Here’s the story: 

From the mid-1990s until March of this year, I rode two or three times a week with a daily training ride group led by a former National Champion named Scott. Monday through Thursday at 4pm and Friday at 1pm, riders join the group from the west side Lancaster, Pa., and follow an unvarying route of 35 miles by the time the riders return to the city two hours later. 

The ride is so predictable, that I and other riders would join the ride at several different points knowing within two minutes when the riders would pass a given intersection or landmark. The ride goes southwest of Lancaster to Safe Harbor Park near the Susquehanna River, then turns north toward Columbia, and back to Lancaster through Millersville. 

Just before Safe Harbor Park is Conestoga Boulevard, the place where pickup trucks are most likely to pass too close, blow their horns or occasionally yell their displeasure at sharing the road—a nearly empty road. One day in 2004 passing over the crest of a half-mile hill, several riders got flats. 

There were tacks on the road. Recently a man in an old red pickup truck had yelled at us several times as he passed. The ride crests the hill at 4:40pm and that was when he was headed home to the apartment where he lived south of Safe Harbor Park. Apparently, he got ahead of us, threw tacks on the road and drove away. I thought it was him. 

Two weeks later he passed us yelling as we neared the top of the hill. I sprinted as hard as I could down the hill wanting to see where he went at the next intersection. As I neared the bottom of the hill, I saw him on the side of the road throwing tacks. He saw me, got in his truck and took off. I got his license number. It was a level road and he was speeding so he was gone in moments, but I did see that he went south. 

Two other riders had followed me and seen what happened. Now we had witnesses and actual tacks. I called the Conestoga Police Department and got little cooperation, but I insisted, and they relented. John F. Kennedy was charged two misdemeanors. I told the officers that I had witnesses and we would all be happy to testify. 

On the day of the trial, Kennedy arrived in the pickup truck I had identified. We learned later he had another vehicle. It turns out he did not have an attorney. Criminals, when you get to know them, are stupid. Those of us who were witnesses showed up at trial in suits and ties. 

Kennedy wore work clothes and had his sunglasses on top of his head. If he had a lawyer, the lawyer would have known that the judge had a son who was a Lancaster City police officer, a member of the bicycle patrol. The lawyer also would have known that one of the witnesses was a bicycle patrol officer and a veteran. But Kennedy was too arrogant to think he needed a lawyer. 

The judge presented the evidence. The witnesses said what they saw. Kennedy spoke in his own defense saying he did not throw the tacks on the road, but bicyclists should not be blocking the roads and we deserved what happened. After the testimony, the judge gave a summary of the evidence and the defense. He was so calm and impassive, I thought Kennedy would get the case dismissed. The police officer who rides with us and was a witness knew better but said nothing. 

When the summary was complete, the judge told Kennedy to stand to receive the verdict. He stood and smirked, also thinking he would get off. The judge exploded. Kennedy stood straight. All of us sat up straight. The judge lectured Kennedy for ten minutes, gave him the maximum fine of $880 dollars and said he would be in jail if every penny was not paid on time. 

Four of my kids were at the trial. They all rode bicycles and they knew all of the riders who were endangered by Kennedy. Like us riders, they sat very straight and still when the judge charged Kennedy. I was glad they could see justice served. 

Kennedy never bothered us again. I never saw him again.

America's Future: Combat Medic in Training

 

Emily Burgett on Mount Monadnock just before enlisting 

Eleven years ago, I wrote a lot of articles with the general title "Who Fights Our Wars?" Now I am years away from serving and a friend who I met while volunteering at an ESL ministry is in training to be a Combat Medic. 

On Tuesday, March 17, four days after borders began closing all over the world, I got a flight back from Paris to Kennedy Airport. Emily and I had talked and messaged a few times while I was in Israel and Europe and she told me she decided to enlist. By the time I landed that day, Army Specialist Emily Ann Burgett was flying to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to begin what was to be the last Army Basic Training for a while.  

Emily thought about enlisting for a long time. She thought about becoming a pilot. She finally settled on Combat Medic.  Right now she is in medic training at Fort Sam Houston.  I occasionally get a text from her about medic training and Army life then don't hear from her for a week or two.  

At 28, Emily is a decade older than most basic trainees. She lived in both California and Massachusetts with her family, lived in Lancaster, Pa., as an undergraduate and after getting a masters degree. She earned that masters degree in history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While there she studied Arabic and plans someday to work with refugees. She has traveled to China with her family. The family business is making pianos sold in America and Asia. She has been across Europe and in Central America. 

Emily is an avid rock climber and an adventure tourist so the Army travel will continue the adventure.  Last week, one of the messages I got from Emily was about the explosion in Beirut.  Her class had just learned a new life-saving procedure. She said it reminded her why she joined. 

She will complete medic training next month and join her unit in Massachusetts. 

When Walking I Don't Get Angry: Cycling is Different

Slowly healing. 

Today I saw the surgeon who put my arm back together with plates and screws  and considerable skill.  Tomorrow I begin a more sadistic physical therapy with pulleys to get more range of motion from my shattered elbow.

Three times during the visit, the doc said I should ride. I have enough range of motion in my arm to ride.

But during my three-mile walk home from the visit I had another moment of the making the contrast between bicycling and walking as exercise.  More than half the time I ride, someone in a vehicle--most often a plus-sized redneck in a pickup truck--will swerve at me or just pass too close. Occasionally he will yell faggot (women never do these things, only men).  A few times I have been hit with bottles and cans or got a "rollin' coal" cloud of smoke from a diesel pickup.

And I get angry.

Only rarely can I do anything about it. Once more than 15 years ago I got the license plate of a guy who threw tacks in the road because he hated us so much much. 

I have walked in hundreds of miles since surgery and no one has swerved at me, thrown tacks in the road, spit, called me a faggot, or any of the other things that have happened to me only in America and mostly on rural roads. 

So now I am really thinking about how much I want to ride.  I live in a rural area with lots of pickup trucks.  Do I want to return to getting pissed off at the pathetic cowards who think bicyclists don't belong on "their" roads? 

It's a question I never asked before. I love cycling so much that I thought the anger was part of riding. But knowing that I can walk and challenge myself makes the world look different. What is inner peace worth?  I will be asking myself that.

Wives and Mothers Will Rip Trump a New Asshole

Trump has dodged many bullets in his deplorable term as President, but he won't get out of this line of fire.  Military wives and mothers and fathers are asking for answers about the Russians paying bounties for dead Americans.  Trump can tell another hundred of his 20,000 lies denying he knew, but he now has an enemy that will not give up.

In 2011 and again in 2013 I was on a roster to be deployed to Afghanistan. In both cases I did some pre-deployment training. The first time I was cut from the roster when the deployment was reduced in size, the second time the entire deployment was cancelled.

If I had deployed, I planned to blog every day if possible.  And if I did, I knew that my main audience would be the wives and mothers and other family members of the soldiers in my unit.

When I deployed the first time and blogged every day, I thought my audience would my friends and family and maybe those who were curious about military service. They were my audience also, but most of the comments I got were from wives and mothers who heard little or nothing from their soldier.  They really wanted to know what we ate, where we slept, what we did night and day. 

The most popular post I wrote the whole year was about the containers we slept in. 

The wives and parents wanted to know about everything and they worried over every news report. If a base was attacked 200 miles away, someone would ask me what happened. I would answer that the attack was 200 miles away. The response would be some variation of, "No one tells me anything."

With more and more reports coming out confirming that both Pentagon and intelligence leaders knew the plot to be true, military wives and parents will demand answers until they get them.

No amount of bullying or whining will make this crisis go away. A grieving parent who feels betrayed is an implacable enemy.

          

                                        

Old Age is a New Adventure

Two weeks ago, surgery restored my smashed left elbow to something like its previous shape. The next morning, after surgery, another doctor gave me some stunning news: I needed to start taking large doses of Vitamin D right away and when I get home, call the hospital and come back for a Dexascan.  The doctor said I had low bone density, a significant Vitamin D deficiency and said I should join an osteoporosis support group. 

Wow!!

I knew this day was coming. Someday my bones would be frail enough that it would be stupid to ride a bike.  I did not know the day would be so soon. 

The strange thing, from inside my mind, was my feelings of excitement—not loss or panic.  Since the early 90s when I became bike obsessed, every day, every trip, every vacation, and all future plans were built around riding.  I took two bikes to Iraq on deployment. I took a bike with me on more than 30 business trips in three years between 1998 and 2001. 

One of the first things I thought about was how different the world would look if the bike were not part of the trip. I have been to Paris two dozen times in the last two decades. I have never been to The Louvre.  Because visiting the premiere museum in Paris takes all day and when I am in Paris some part of every day, I ride with the racers at the daily training race at L’Hippodrome in Bois de Boulogne.  One way or another, The Louvre never happened.

I then imagined myself walking across every bridge from the Eiffel Tower to Ile de Cite because I would not feel the need to ride. 

As I healed from major injuries several times over the last 30 years, my focus always was getting back on the bike.  When I broke my neck, I spent 90 days in the neck and chest brace. On the 91^st, I rolled down the hill I crashed on.  Now, I was oddly delighted that I would not be focused on getting back on the bike. It was a relief.

I knew Old Age would impose limits on me, like not riding, but I expected the limits to feel like fasting or waiting in line—deprivation.  But against all my expectations, I feel excitement. I have a new frame to view the world.  I started thinking about moments over the last five years when I began to deal with the effects of change from aging and other causes.

If I had to date the beginning of Old Age, I would say it was July of 2015.  On June 30, 2015, I retired. I had worked summers and Saturdays and sometimes after school since I was 12. I had a full-time job from my 18^th birthday until the day I retired. I have not worked a day since.  I have not missed it.  In June of 2015, I went on my last Army training exercise and took the Army fitness test for the last time.  Soon after, I left the Army. With the rise of Trump and his popularity among soldiers, I was glad to be gone.  It was a big change to no longer be a worker or a soldier, but after a half-century of defining myself as both, I was neither and I was unexpectedly happy.

I started meditating. I started taking Yoga.  After years of resisting both, I was open to both and began practicing. I am currently not doing Yoga in part because of COVID-19 and now because of my injuries but have been meditating daily for years.

Also, in 2015, my workouts changed.  The swimming and running that carried me through an Ironman race in 2014 were history for me.  Both shoulders had torn ligaments. My left knee ached and would be replaced three years later.  No more Army fitness test meant no more pushups.  The bike was my only workout besides yoga. 

And coincident with my own advancing age, in 2016 America became senile. America elected a racist who wanted to make America white again.

Since 2017, much has changed in my thought and spiritual life because America is in rapid cognitive decline. More on that soon.

Three Tankmen, Три Танкистa--A Soviet Song About a Tank Crew

There are not a lot of songs about tank crews.  The 75th Anniversary of VE Day is very soon. Here is a song about those of us who are Tankmen: Танкистa!

“The Three Tankmen”

It is a very famous song. It was made in the time when a large danger of a war with Japan was real. 
Japan militaries acted very impudently so the two border conflicts - in the region of the Khasan Lake 
in 1938 and in the region of Khalkhin Gol (in the West it is known as “Nomongan conflict”) in 1939, - 
occurred. In both the conflicts Japanese invasions on Soviet territory (Mongolian one in the second 
case) were repelled by Red Army. It looks like the song was made on the basis of the events in the 
region of the Khasan Lake.

This song was sang in the famous pre-war movie “Tractor men”. A former military gets the post of 
the team-leader of the tractor men’s group, tightens up discipline and learns his subordinates to 
prepare to be drivers of tanks in the case of an enemy invasion.

This song stayed very popular and during WWII. I read memoirs of the WWII veteran who recalled 
how a Soviet tankman played on a bayan and singed this song in a captured German town in 1945.

********************************************************************************************

“The Three Tankmen”

(Translated by Andrey)

Some lowering black clouds move on the state border,
The inclement land is filled by silence.
The high banks of the Amur River are securing by
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.

A firm covering force is placed there against an enemy.
A valiant and strong unit is standing
Nearly the border of the Far Eastern land - 
It is an armored shock battalion.
It is an armored shock battalion.

Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle,
Live there like an inviolable firm family –
And the song guarantees that it is true.
Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle.

Some thick dew fell on grass,
Wide fogs fell on a ground.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.

But the intelligence reported exactly
And the powerful unit was given by an order and became to move
On the native Far Eastern land -
It was the armored shock battalion.
It was the armored shock battalion.

Tanks were rushing, raising a wind,
The redoubtable armor was advancing.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.

And all the enemies were eliminated - and the song guarantees that it is true, -
In the fire attack
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!

1938

Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch

"He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels"--Riding a bike made of ash wood up a 1000-meter climb

This bike is entirely made from ash wood including the seat and handlebars

It's not great for a 1000-meter climb on a switchback road.

Several times during my recent trip in Europe and Asia I switched my plans to avoid the places where the pandemic was currently worst.  I was in Athens when I was supposed to be in Rome.  It was a Sunday. The bike rental shops were closed. The only place I could rent a bike was at an upscale hotel that was connected to a local company that makes bikes from ash trees--fifty bikes per tree and then they plant fifty seedling trees for each tree they use. Here is their website.

The bikes are seven-speed, planetary hub city bikes.  Three miles away from my hotel was a 1000-meter high mountain in the middle of the city with several cell towers at the top. It was 60 degrees, sunny and I wanted to ride!  So I rented the wooden bike, raised the seat as high as I could and rode up the mountain.

At three miles up, the road got really steep and I had to walk a hundred meters, but then it leveled a little and I kept going.  The view was beautiful. Halfway up I looked back at the city and was looking down on the Acropolis.  Further up the road turned south and I was looking at the harbor and the Aegean Sea.  Near the top the switchback interval got shorter and the grade went above ten percent.  I gave up when I was looking at the base of the cell towers knowing I could get a steel bike with a triple crank the next day and ride to the top.

Along with its planetary gearset, the bike had a caliper brake on the front wheel, but a coaster brake in the rear. On the way down the mountain, riding into a couple of switchbacks I slid the rear wheel when I went to backpedal and braked instead. By the bottom I was used to it, but it made me realize that I backpedal on the way into sharp turns--some of the switchbacks were 180 degrees.

The road had few guardrails and many long, sheer drops. I thought if I had really screwed up with the coaster brake my epitaph could be:  "He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels."

Shades of Yellow--in Taxis

This lovely, pale shade of yellow is the color of taxis in Greece

This German-standard color of taxis has also been declared yellow by the government in Greece. 

This is the cab of Niko, the taxi driver who took me to my hotel. It is only yellow in Greece.

When I first arrived in Greece, the hotel where I was staying sent a taxi for me.  The taxi ride was free, along with a very low nightly rate at the hotel.  The driver, Niko, met me at international arrivals. We walked to his cab. I noticed that many of the cabs were Mercedes and that they were a pale yellow—very different from the harsh yellow of NYC taxicabs.  When we got to his cab, it was cream color.  I said, “This is the color of a German cab.”

Niko spoke English well and told me about flying to Europe to buy the cab.  He was part of a group of Greek cab drivers who got permission to use cabs in German cream color rather than yellow.  He said the government decided to call cream color a shade of yellow, allowing any cabbie who wanted a cab that color to do so without special permission. 

Like German cabs, there are no ads, phone numbers or writing of any kind on cabs.  Not all are Mercedes, but all the cabs I saw were a paler yellow than is true in America. 

As in Tbilisi and Jerusalem, I saw a lot of Priuses as cabs.  Hybrids really are at their best in the intermittent, fast/slow/stop driving of city cabs. Niko wanted to keep driving Mercedes sedans as long as he could.  We talked like two old motorheads (which we are) about the joys of driving the A5 Autobahn in Germany in the middle of the night and going 150mph. 

Niko wants to travel to America someday, to New York and to California.  He loves Greece and is very proud of the projected number of tourists for the coming year. He said 36 million was the projected number.  The coronavirus will certainly put a damper on that, and on Niko’s travel plans.  

"Go Take a Flying Fuck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”

Back to the Latrun Armored Corps Museum

This is my third trip to Israel and my second trip to the Armored Corps Museum and Monument at Latrun.  The museum at Latrun has dozens of tanks from all of the wars in Israel, including many captured Soviet-built tanks used by Arab armies.  Several of the tanks on display are variants of the Patton tank that I served on in West Germany during the Cold War.

On my last visit, I wrote a Patton tank that is sliced in half lengthwise showing the guns, ammo racks, engine, fuel tank and all of the other equipment inside the tank: https://armynow.blogspot.com/2019/11/at-armored-corps-museum-latrun-israel.html

And I have pictures of other tanks on display at Latrun: https://armynow.blogspot.com/2019/11/armor-from-entire-cold-war-and-beyond.html

Below are a few pictures of Patton tanks. Like me, the oldest of them are of early 50s vintage.

Met First Cyclist on the Way to the Airport

Amtrak Conductor and cyclist Don Austin Tucker

On the train from Philadelphia to New York one of the conductors looked at my computer and asked "Are you going to do an Ironman?"

He saw the brag stickers on my MacBook.

I told him I did an Ironman more than five years ago and a knee replacement last year meant I will never do another one.

He told me he was becoming an avid cyclist. He did his first century (100-mile ride) last year and was cycling more and more. He told me how his first distance ride was on a mountain bike with cleated tires.  "That was 50 hard miles," he said. We talked for a while about tires and wheels and types of bikes and types of training.

Don rides the trail along the Schuylkill River and in Valley Forge Park.  We talked about riding in Philadelphia and the surrounding region.

Then Don told me he rides with MS. He is also living with cancer.  A group of his friends formed to walk and ride with Don. The group is called: Team Don Austin.

Don is hoping to ride the Covered Bridge Metric Century in Lancaster County in August so we may see each other again outside the train.

Vermin, Cockroaches, Human Scum: Words That Lead to Death

Three who described their opponents as human scum: 

Josef Stalin, Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler

Every tyrant needs an enemy.  In the malignant moral world of tyranny there must be Us and Them.  The Them for a tyrant is never spoken of as human.  Hitler called Jews vermin; Stalin called many groups "enemies of the people" then slaughtered them; Hutu leaders called the Tutsi cockroaches, then Tutsi men, women and children were butchered in Churches with machetes.  The two most murderous leaders in the 20th century are being quoted in the 21st century by the U.S. President when he refers to his enemies as human scum.

So far, in every case but America, calling the opposition vermin, cockroaches, enemies of the people and human scum has led to murder.  America may take longer to go from words to murder than Germany or the Soviet Union, but Trump's words will eventually cause death.

This week I am leaving on a five-week trip that will include visits to some of the places where 20th century genocide was at its worst: Dachau and Flossenberg, Germany; Kiev, Ukraine; and Rwanda. Since the summer of 2017, I have been to most of the countries in which The Holocaust occurred, as well as the Yugoslav genocide. I want to see how countries recover from mass murder.

For me, The Holocaust is just as much about the 400 million Christians between the Pyrenees and the Urals who participated in or turned a blind eye to the slaughter of six million Jews.  I am convinced that a Church with temporal power will eventually kill or condone killing.

Trump's Church of white Evangelical power seekers and idol worshippers will bless every outrage he commits. And when Trump's words lead to death, the false prophets like Graham and Falwell will say dead Americans are God's will.

Re-Reading "The Prince" for the 10th Time: So Different Under Trump

Since 1980 I have read and re-read The Prince every four years. I have been delighted anew each year as I read his advice to rulers.  His central advice:

"A ruler must take power and keep power because without power the ruler can do nothing."

Until this year, reading Machiavelli was an act of cultural translation as well as being translated from 16th Century Italian.  I was reading advice to a monarch as a citizen of a republic.

That was then.

This year when I read The Prince I was reading as a citizen of a republic which is slouching slowly towards authoritarian government.

With Trump in office, I don't have to translate into democracy. His every instinct is authoritarian, so he grasps for power. He is limited only by his own willful ignorance and laziness.  But that limitation is glaring.

Machiavelli said the leader should constantly study war.  He recommends the leader go hunting to allow him to see his land up close and to know how it feels to live off the land.  Trump could not be farther from this advice. He is soft, delicate with no exposure to hardship, so some of the pathetic errors he makes would be remedied if he were not a physical and moral coward.

Trump wants to control and close the southern border.  If he spent time on the ground on that border, many of the issues would be clear to him.  The blazingly stupid foreign policy of abandoning the Kurds would not have happened if he were capable of exposing himself to hardship.

Thankfully, he is a gelatinous coward. Many of my worst predictions of what Trump would do have not come true, overwhelmed by Trump's own aversion to actual hardship.

Machiavelli says people are cowards and fools for the most part. They will swear loyalty to the leader when times are good and desert him when times are bad.

Trump knows and believes this. There are things Trump does exceedingly well because he knows he is talking to fools.  Machiavelli says the leader need not have actual religious faith, all that matters is the appearance. Despite bragging about breaking every commandment and being entitled to break every commandment, he draws thunderous applause from white Evangelical and conservative Catholic audiences.  The gaggle of millionaire televangelist that gather around to worship Trump declare Trump's true faith.

Machiavelli says that the leader must never use half measures. He must either pamper people or destroy them.  He also said if the leader has a choice either to be loved or feared, he should choose fear, because people will easily betray love but respect those who can hurt them. Within the Republican Party leadership, loyalty to Trump is based on fear of his twitter account.  In a party where the primary is the election, a Trump tweet can end the career of any red state Republican.

Another glaring Trump failure from Day One has been his inner circle. Machiavelli says we can judge the quality of a leader by the quality of his inner circle.  In this Trump is beyond pathetic.  Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Betsy DeVos, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, the rogue's gallery is endless. Trump's deplorable quality is evident in those who surround him.

Chapter 23 of The Prince says the leader should avoid flatterers.  This advice is pathetically funny. The vile chief of flatterers Mike Pence leads the worship of the Dear Leader. Kissing Trump's dumpy rump is a requirement for continued service in the administration.

Machiavelli ends his little book discussing fate and luck.  America has been lucky for nearly two and a half centuries to avoid the incarnation of idiocy that is Trump, but now it's here. Trump has been lucky at every step of his improbable rise from failed casino owner to the Racist-in-Chief.  Can his luck hold? I wish him and his minions nothing but failure, but the odds are with an incumbent, so I will fight until he is out of office.  And I will look for other places to live that will accept Americans and re-read The Prince in 2024 from somewhere far away from Don Junior's 2024 campaign.

In the meantime, I am re-reading On Tyranny for how to handle the present.