Monday, December 31, 2007

8 for '08

HEADING OFF FOR MORE VACATION TIME, BUT HERE’S ONE LAST POST. WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK:

Here are eight things I’d like to see in 2008:

8) A whole lot less about the worthless lives of Britney, Lindsay, Paris, etc.

7) A report from the National Hurricane Center expressing amazement at the third successive slow season.

6) A confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Thicket.

5) Barry Bonds standing in a tense courtroom as the jury foreman says, “We find the defendant guilty on all counts.”

4) A deal between the city of Beaumont and its firefighters that both can live with.

3) A World Series that does not involve a team from New York City.

2) A Hillary-Rudy face-off. These are the two best candidates in both parties; let ’em tangle.

1) A report from Baghdad that begins, “The first withdrawal of U.S. troops has begun and is expected to be completed by … ”

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Friday, December 28, 2007

Farewell, Fidel

I hope this is the last year we have to put up with Fidel Castro.

He’s 81, he’s a dictator, and he needs to kick the bucket.

He’s also senile, I think, as indicated by his latest comments in which he said he did not want to be known as “a person clinging to power.”

Uh, Fidel, you’ve been “clinging to power” since 1959. For 17 months, you’ve been so sick that you can’t “cling to power” openly, so you do it from a hospital bed.

He keeps vowing not to stand in the way of younger leaders ... but he keeps “clinging to power.”

His idea of a “youth movement” is handing off power to his brother Raul — a sprite of 79!

And he’s still on the ballot for Cuba’s phony elections Jan. 20.

You know how that game works in communist countries, don’t you? A hand-picked slate of “candidates” is presented to voters, who can play along and rubber-stamp the ballot … or wake up in a re-education camp.

That’s “democracy” under communism.

Whatever. The open secret in Cuba is that Castro really only wants to outlast the second term of President Bush, which expires at noon on Jan. 20, 2009.

I hope Castro expires first.

Then, and only then, will he no longer be “clinging to power.”

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

R.I.P., W.T.

They buried W.T. Block this week. He was 87, and I knew it was coming. So many of the heroes from the Greatest Generation are leaving us each day. My father Carl, a flight engineer on a B-29, departed several years ago.

As editorial page editor here and at the Port Arthur News before that, I developed a special relationship with W.T. Block. Well, it was special to me, but he probably knew dozens of people like me.

He wrote a guest column for us for many years, and he was one of the most interesting and best-read local writers we ever had.

His columns covered the gamut, from pirates to logging, but I particularly loved his columns on World War II.

I am fascinated by that great war and the greater men who won it — men like W.T. Block. Whenever he sent in something on the war, it got into print ASAP. On our occasional phone conversations, if the talk drifted to the war, it wouldn’t be brief.

Of course like most of the men from that conflict, he was modest about his own achievements even though he faced death many times.

In one column, he mentioned the cold nights he spent on the front in a dugout … and waking up to see footprints in the snow of German patrols from the night before.

In another column, he noted that he was standing alongside a colonel at the famed Remagen Bridge when a piece of shrapnel or a bullet entered the officer’s side and killed him on the spot.

So many memories from that great writer flood through my brain. Of all the columns he wrote, however, one stands out. We ran it years ago, and it is reproduced below.

Read through it and think about what W.T. Block did for those two days in that bitter cold. Think of the horror he must have felt. But think of how he did his duty anyway that day — and dozens of other days when it seemed unbearable and undoable.

He titled this column, “I Remember ‘The Lucky Stiffs’ ”

NEDERLAND — Some time ago, a friend asked me, “Bill, have you and your wife seen the movie (name deleted) yet?” I replied that “No, we hadn’t,” and he asked why. I responded, “Because each of us had already seen enough brutality for this life!”

Suddenly I recalled the days I spent with the “lucky stiffs,” days during which every evil thought nibbled at my conscious, and days I could never forget. The day before, the 309th Infantry had jumped across the Roer River, making a lightning advance into the weakly defended Rhineland, but several of our 78th Division soldiers had died during the onslaught. And the several inches of snow beneath our feet had hardened to ice consistency, with the temperature hovering in the minus zero range.

Early that day Sgt. Novy and I, our mess kits still dangling in the brisk breeze, had just returned from breakfast at the HQ mess truck. Suddenly I heard a loud voice bellow, “Hey, soldier, come here!” I turned and inquired, “Me?” “Yes, you!” was his response. “Go help Davis do his job for a day or two. His helper has gone on sick call!”

I was reluctant as I pondered the price of refusal, since the man with the loud voice wore no visible rank or insignia on his uniform. Sgt. Novy added, “Go ahead, Block, it’s just a temporary assignment, and refusing a direct order at the front can mean a general court martial for insubordination.”

I opened a door of Davis’ truck and as I did so, I read the sign on it, “Graves Registration Command.” We drove a short distance to a soldier, whose body was half covered with snow, and whose shoulder insignia was the same as mine, a red half moon and lightning patch. Davis stopped his truck and said:

“Grab his shoulders and swing with me, and let him fall in the truck,” he shouted above the icy breeze. The frozen body hit the bed of the truck so hard that ice fragments broke off and scattered everywhere. Something rushed up inside my throat, but I said nothing that time.

We drove a couple blocks and repeated the procedure, but I could not keep quiet that time; I cried out:

“Good Heavens! Must we toss these bodies in like so much cordwood? There must be a better way. Every one of them represents a trail of broken hearts back home, and but for the Grace of God, they could be us!”

“Don’t be foolish, Block!” he retorted. “You’ll git used to it! They’re ‘the lucky stiffs.’ They don’t feel no pain no more. Their fingertips and toes don’t ache no more like ours do. And besides, we still got ours to git!”

“Git what?” I asked him curtly. “I mean git a bullet in the head from some sniper!” he responded.

I winced at the words, but got back into the truck. Once I had to take a shovel and pick up the insides in a basket of a fallen soldier’s body, which had been mutilated by an 88 shell; and the scene was so sickening I quickly tossed up all my breakfast.

All that day and the next, we threw scores of bodies into the truck — an American here and a German there. I remember one big German body — must have weighed 350 pounds — that required four of us to pick up and put in the truck.

Of course, I could not escape the fact that a day earlier, he probably had killed some of the Americans we had loaded on the truck. Nevertheless, I also could not escape thinking that the death of the big German was heartbreak for some one in his country. Each day we kept loading bodies and hauling them back to the Henri Chapelle Cemetery in Belgium.

After that, I was glad to get back to the pillbox where we were billeted, but the memories of “the lucky stiffs” continue to haunt me to the present day. I remember too that I was able to return home and raise a family, but they couldn’t — so I know they were not the lucky ones.

I remember too how the Army had trained and honed me and other soldiers to butcher-shop perfection, and I do mean razor-sharp perfection, with never a thought of undoing that training as we became civilians again. Perhaps it was a credit to most of us that we were able to shed our chicken-hawk aggression toward others with no more damage to society than was wrought by us.

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Friday, December 07, 2007

Hang in there, Andy

TAKING ANOTHER WEEK OF VACATION, BUT HERE’S ONE LAST POST. BE GOOD UNTIL I GET BACK:

You gotta feel sorry for Andruw Jones.

The former Atlanta Braves star has had a great career since 1996. He was a five-time All Star. Won 10 straight Gold Gloves. Was MVP runner-up in 2005, when he had 51 homers and 128 RBIs. Next year, he hit 41 home runs with a career-high 129 RBIs.

Everything was spiffy … until last year. He had his worst season ever.

The second half was a little better, but the first part was awful. We’re talking Mendoza Line awful

In the end, he hit only .222 and had just 26 homers — pitiful numbers for him. He did manage 94 RBIs, the only bright spot in the nightmare.

Worst of all, he was a free agent after this year. If he had had a typical Andruw Jones season, he could have reaped millions.

Instead, the best deal he could get was … $36 million from the Dodgers for two years.

That’s right, fans. After stinking up Atlanta, he becomes the fifth-highest paid player in baseball.

The economic laws of the game are simple and brutal.

Have a good year, and you rake in the millions. Have a bad year, and … well, you still rake in the millions.

... Oh, and you thought life was fair?

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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Goodbye to pay phones

The latest casualty of the Information Age is pay phones.

If you feel sad or nostalgic about this loss … get over it. Cell phones are 100 times better.

And it is cell phones that are sending pay phones and phone booths to the history books along with manual typewriters, elevator operators, restroom attendants, etc.

On Tuesday AT&T announced it will disconnect its pay-phone operations in 2008.

A spokesman, speaking the obvious, said, “Usage has just dropped so much — precipitously.”

If you have an IQ larger than your waist size, you had to see this coming.

Cell phones are everywhere. Kids have ’em. Grandmas and grandpas have ’em. Even poor people have ’em.

(Though in America, poor people also have color TVs, air-conditioning, home computers, etc., but that’s another blog.)

I suppose some people have fond memories of phone booths and will moan about the clunky old contraptions.

I’m not one of them. Whenever I had to use a pay phone, I was worried about catching a disease from the filthy thing or having the correct change.

Gimme a cell phone anytime. Sure, we overuse those babies too. We wonder how we lived just a few years ago when we didn’t have one on our hip all the time. (Somehow, we survived.)

The only downside is that anyone who has passed puberty has another thing to explain to kids who ask in the future, “Uh … what, like, was a phone booth used for in, like, the old days?”

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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Unbearable

They’re baaack, and you don’t want to run across one.

I refer of course to Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear.

Seems that the griz are returning to parts of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington since coming under federal protection.

That’s good.

What’s not good is what happens when a member of Homo sapiens sapiens — that would be you or me or another human being — comes across a grizzly bear. What happens is that the person usually wakes up dead.

That would be because your average male grizzly bear is 6 or 7 feet tall and weighs up to 850 pounds. Throw in hellacious claws and teeth along with incredible muscle mass — not to mention a nasty disposition — and you are talking one big-time killing machine.

In the last eight months alone, the Associated Press has tallied a dozen grizzly-human confrontations.

Incredibly, the AP said that among those incidents, “seven people were injured, some severely.”

Wow. Only seven? I didn’t know it was possible to tangle with a grizzly and not end up looking like a sack of raw hamburger meat.

Anyhow, with more of this happening, some folks out West want to be able to hunt the bears again.

They figure if grizzlies get scared of people, they’d be less inclined to think of them as dinner.

I dunno.

I would say this: If the number of grizzly bears continues to increase in the Pacific Northwest, people are going to suddenly remember why they wanted to eradicate these critters from the lower 48.

Personally, I’ve got no beef with the bear.

In fact, if they want to have Montana, I wouldn’t fight ’em for it.

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