Pam's Home Page

I remember quite a long time ago things were different. A man could, with a little hard work and a great idea, make something of himself. And with this I would like to tell you about my friend Andy. Sure Andy received his higher degrees at Stanford and now works for a major consultancy in NYC, but Andy's most memorable contribution to the human race started back in the summer of '95. Oh what a time to remember.

You see, back in the olden days of the web there was no Google or MSN. This was a time when the Web was free. Before the web was polluted with advertisers and adwords, people actually had to type in urls manually. There was Lycos and Gopher and a few other search engines trying to help the 15 users (mostly teenagers without dates) of the world wide web find earth shattering and life changing information (porn). Oh to stumble upon such a nugget of knowledge (nude photo) was truly a blessing. It was no where near as easy as it was today. No pop-ups, no animated gifs, no videos. Just imagine a world without Utube. As web crawlers and search engines began to become more wide spread, the search for "knowledge" became a lot easier for the users of this world wide web. At about the same time in history another phenomenon was sweeping civilization, Baywatch. The popularity of former KnightRider star, David Hasselhoff was soon surpassed by a new star--Pamela Anderson (CJ). The two words , Pamela Anderson, were the most prolifically typed words into web crawlers of the day. This was solely for the sake of "knowledge".

Searching for the nuggets of knowledge was not all the 15 or so users of the web did, they also created these things called "home pages". Home pages were places where one could place pictures of oneself and pictures of one's cat. One could also place textual information about oneself and one's friends. My friend Andy had one home page. (I just realized how stupid one sounds when one overuses "one".) He showed it to me. The early adopters of the WWW were quite competitive. The way to know that you were the king of the Web was to have the most visits to your web site. This, of course, is still the object of Web page writers today however it is mostly to generate advertising revenue. Back then, it was only for bragging rights.

Andy was the king. He had the bragging rights and then some. He kicked everyone's butt. By the summer of '95, there was a heck of a lot more people on the web than the founding 15. Andy's home page surpassed all of his competitors with 1000's of hits daily. How did he do it?
Andy revealed his secret. He showed me that his web page was quite long. It had a colored banner at the bottom that when the color was changed in the editor, the magic was revealed. There, I made out, in the smallest font possible, the words "Pamela Anderson" back to back millions of times. I told him I didn't understand. He opened up Lycos and typed in those same magic words. When he hit "Go get it" the top return was Andy's Home Page. All work and No play didn't make Andy a dull boy at all. It made him King, at least for a while.

However, in a few weeks Andy's reign was over. The world had moved on to become much more sophisticated. The search engines got better. Would-be porn surfers got what they were looking for and it wasn't a picture of Andy's family on a rock in their Sunday best. Innocence lost. But for a few weeks that summer a man, his hard work and his dream were combined to create the American Dream.

I'd Tap That

So I just recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and it inspired me to reenact the Native American's discovery of maple syrup. I'm not a reeanactor by nature, but who doesn't love a good middle ages fair or civil war reenactment. But this would be different. I would research all my facts rigorously. I would be alone in my woods with a 7/16" spade bit, buckets and taps (unfortunately made in China). But I can rest assured that there wouldn't be any lead in those galvanized taps because the Chinese manufacturers really adhere to strict standards. Also, I hear they punish their workers for any infraction on these US standards by taking away their binkies, teddy bears and sending them to bed without their dinner. After all it was China that first brought the art of tapping trees to the Native Americans during the 7th century AD. The Chinese did not discover the syrup, but drank the life blood of trees straight for increased sexual performance. My spade bit was mounted in a Dewalt cordless. It's a little known fact that the birth of the cordless drill occurred amongst the natives in the Northeast during the mid 10th century. The name Dewalt is actually a derivative of the Chinook word De-Walt, meaning "Dewalt". Before the invention, they tapped their trees by placing the bit in a birch branch and twisting by hand.

Now to make my reenactment more authentic it was important to not know which trees would yield the sweetest sap. It is very temporal centric of us to say "Dah, everyone knows its a maple tree that you tap for syrup." But recently we have found evidence that carbon dates as late as 1100 AD that some tribes insisted on tapping willow trees. It appears that although the sweetness wasn't as strong, it did have slight hallucinogenic properties. Any way, I set out to place four holes in three trees. The first was a rather large maple or sinzibuck (sinzibuckwud is the Algonquin word for maple syrup, so wud must be syrup and sinzibuk obviously must be maple). It started weeping sap immediately. I decided this was a good sign, so I would drill again. The next two trees I tapped still haven't leaked anything and its been a week. Some of you might say that I am a dumbass for tapping an oak. But remember that I am not a dumbass but an experiential historian and that I tapped these non-maples on purpose. This is the only true way to experience the fear and disappointment that our Algonquin ancestors must have felt when they first set out to make sinzibukwud. They did not have the Discovery channel or the World Wide Web to show them how to produce sinzibukwud. They had only their Chinese taps, cordless drills, and their natural instincts and intellect to sweeten the day.

Mantis 1 : Humming Bird 0

After seeing a web page that my buddy Dave sent my way, bird watchers should now be considered hip and with it. Why? Check out this link to Bird Watcher's Digest. Credits should be given to Richard L. Walkup and his son from West Chester, PA who took the following picture. And to Bird Watcher's Digest for publishing it.


And if you think that after stabbing the humming bird, the mantis would not be able to pull it up to eat it, you're probably right. He still eats his prey by using his free "hand" to scoop out the creamy nougat on the inside. I guess a praying mantis was never taught not to eat with its hands.

Nature is cool. Remarkably, this mantis didn't have to attend sensitivity training for this obvious hate crime.

A Midlife Crisis is Preceded by a Pre-Midlife Crisis. I sure hope both are solved before my After-Life Crisis sets in.

There comes a point in everyone's life where who they thought they were and where they thought they were going is introduced to who they really are and where they've been. Sometimes the attendees of this introspective double date are truly surprised at how much they have in common. More likely, however, they realize that although they have similar family roots, they're quite different from another. Sometimes, as was my case, who I thought I was and where I was going sat silently and stared blankly across the table at who I've become and where I'd been. Everyone involved had nothing in common, not even enough for small talk.

Executive Summary: Before you think this is going to be a self-loathing tale ending in ambiguous redemption, let me tell you that today I am wicked happy that I am who I've become instead of who I wanted to become. Besides, I am quite sure that I do not have the necessary writing skills to pull off "ambiguous redemption" anyway.

Having a over-inflated opinion of ones self can come in quite handy. Especially when you are growing up. If you had this rare form of mental delusion that I had you'd know what I mean. Growing up was pretty easy because of it. The delusion is quite simple because it involves only two tenets. Tenet 1: You are the best at everything you try. Tenet 2: You are smarter than everyone else. Everything bad that normally happens to kids is no problem for someone with this delusion. Public speaking jitters? No problem. You're the best public speaker around (T1). Nervous about a final? No problem. You're smarter than everyone else . . . even the teacher (T2). Feeling awful about failing that final? No problem. The test was obviously crappy because failing a real final would be a violation of both Tenets 1 and 2. And so on and so on. Like all good delusions, you never realize you are actually delusional. It is your reality.

Where did all this overinflated ego come from? Rule #1: Assign Blame. Like all good whiners, I would love to blame this on my parents. Looking back, I believe my parents were truly ahead of their time on this one. Ground Breakers in the cult of generating self-esteem in kids they were. A movement that in ten years time would be sweeping the nation in every school, my parents developed on instinct and practiced it on me. No "know it all" child rearing books for these guys. Perhaps all of their parenting techniques were just great big experiments done on my siblings and me. I guess that would explain the Skinner box they bought for my sister one Christmas.

But the blame doesn't really lie with my parents does it? I realized over a long period of time that the blame rest squarely on my shoulders. My failure to question the sacred tenets of self kept me in my delusion for a long time. Only when a preponderance of real life evidence pig-piled onto the Tenets 1 and 2 did I start to question their validity. Maybe the Tenets just got worn out and decided to retire. However it happened, I started coming to grip with the fact that there are huge numbers of people smarter than me and that I am not the best at anything. And boy, what a relief. I didn't grasp how tiring this delusion was. Coming around probably made me a little nicer to hang out with, but you'll have to be the judge of that.

Old Truck: Life Cycle Analysis

In my last post I told you about my old truck. Unlike some folks out there, I do actually need a truck. I use the truck to cart manure and other things that would not be pleasant to transport in the back of a Subaru Outback. People always ask me why I didn't get a newer, more fuel efficient one. You know, one that would be better for the environment. Other than the cost of a new truck being a deterrent, I would always respond that by purchasing a new vehicle I would be using more energy by creating a demand for the manufacturer of that vehicle. This sounds rather obvious and silly unless you consider the energy used to create a vehicle. Metal must be smelted or recycled, formed into new body and frame members. Plastic and Foam must be created from petrochemicals. The new truck would have to be transported on a truck from the factory to me. Not to mention, I would be selling my old truck to another driver (using the 12 mpg) instead of retiring it at a junk yard. This type of argument would continue with out any resolution. With no concrete facts to go on except our opinions, it was hard to reach consensus.

Then I discovered a really cool website: The Institute for Life Cycle Analysis
Check it out. They have all sorts of cool debates analyzed. Paper or Plastic? Cloth or Disposable Diapers? On it they summarized a Carnegie-Mellon study looking at the energy and pollution debt of manufacturing a car versus the energy and pollution associated with its operation. That one can be found here: Automobiles: Manufacturing vs. Use

Basically 12% of the car's life time energy use was chewed up in manufacturing. This is a lot less than I thought. Score one for my challengers. However, check out the graph on toxins released into the environment. 58% of the toxins released over the lifetime of the car are set loose during the manufacturing process. Score one for me and for those toxins.

However, after crunching a bunch of other numbers I probably should buy a newer used truck that gets better mpg, but only if I retire my old one to the junk yard. Oh No! Carnegie Mellon didn't talk about the energy used and the toxins released during the junking of a car. As you can see, life cycle analysis can be quite a rabbit hole, but one we should probably start going down if we are going to make things better. Life cycle analysis should be the premier way of looking at environmental decision making. For example if you buy native landscaping instead of run-of-the mill non sustainable plants because you want to use less energy in taking care of the shrubs around your house, you may be thinking that you are helping the earth. But what if those plants were raised to market size in a green house heated by oil and sprayed with fungicides and lots of water etc? What if the "sustainable" ones where trucked in from 3000 miles away? How would you know which shrub actually used less water and energy over its life?

So will I buy a new truck? Probably not, because of my bank account's life cycle. Its in a declining period of its life right at this moment. But that's just me. Don't let that stop you. You should definitely buy a new energy efficient car. Hey, I could be a great politician: live as I say, not as I do.

Good Trade: Truck for Truck, 12ga, and $100

Everything has a story. I realized that the gas guzzling truck I spoke about in the last post needed a little more explaining. We'll begin this story almost 3 years ago. Before owning my current truck, I owned a rather large well preserved truck. It only got 10 miles to the gallon. I used to use it to go the dump on occasion and at the time it started running like crud, it was my only mode of getting around. This was a problem. The other problem was Jonny (bad 3rd person ref) didn't have any cash reserves and was being very stubborn about taking an auto loan. After many failed attempts to fix the problems myself, I only made things worse. Why did I try to fix things myself? You see the truck had a carburetor on top of the engine and this was very rare. It was very rare in a bad way, not in a good way like on antiques roadshow. Even more rare than carburetors, were guys that knew how to fix them. I didn't know this then, but I can be concretely placed in the group of guys that doesn't know how to fix them.

One day when I was at the dump I realized that my truck had a secret admirer. This guy came up to me and said "Nice truck. You let me know if you ever want to get rid of it. Okay?" I told him that I was trying to get rid of it, told him the problems, and then told him how much I needed to get for it so I could buy another car. He said "I got 3 guns I'll trade you for it." I explained that although the 3 guns were a very generous offer I would not be able to use any one of them to get to and from work and so I declined. Not being deterred he said "I'll give you my truck and my shotgun, Whaddya say?" I told him that I was definitely interested but he would have to sweeten the pot a little. His truck did run better, but it lacked a certain style. He said "I'll throw in $100 and a truck cap." Now we're talking! I closed the deal and have been driving his truck ever since. My only regret is that I didn't hold out for a back window gun rack to hang the shotgun on.

Toyota Paseo + Male Driver = Security in one's own Sexuality

So my company is moving from 7 miles to 40 miles from my house in April. This is rather disappointing because my truck gets 12 mpg. Over the past few weeks I've been looking for a little 4 cyl. car to be my daily commuter. I was budgeting about $3K because I do not want to have another car loan. While telling my woes to one of my coworkers, he offered me his wife's older Paseo. When I asked him how much, he said "free". The car dealer would not take it on trade-in. I graciously accepted and am quite stoked about my free car.

The Pluses: Free Car great on Gas (30-35mpg)
The One Small Minus: I think this two door coupe was a very popular car for college girls to own in the 90's. (much like the Ford Probe) Consequently, the other day on its maiden long distance voyage I was checked out by no fewer than 6 pickup trucks full of construction workers as they passed me on the highway. The response was always the same, their eager faces were suddenly changed to disgust as they realized that they just ogled at a heavily bearded man instead of the little hottie that they thought would be driving.

Origins of the Separation of Church and State

The following post was written by a non-historian.

I downloaded my first digital book from Google the other day. I was searching for some quotes from Thom Jefferson when I stumbled upon The Writings Of Thomas Jefferson .I've only read some excerpts so far because reading scanned pdf books in Adobe Reader still stinks a little. I am resisting the urge to print out the 527+ just so my eyes can read it on paper instead of a laptop screen.

In the introduction it talks about Jefferson's time as an active politician in Virginia a decade after the Declaration of Independence. During this time, the battle for religious tolerance was taking place in the Virginia Assembly. This was still a few years before the Constitution was written. I was amazed to learn that many of the early states had acts and laws that made it "penal" for parents to not have their children baptized. And forget trying to be a Quaker in those days. It was unlawful in Virginia for a ship master to bring a Quaker into the state. Jefferson was key in fighting the union of Church and State in Virginia and did not escape unharmed.

"Jefferson was denounced as a communist, an atheist, a foe to all religion . . ." -page xvi

Sure, in school I learned about the Salem witch trials, read The Crucible, and learned that the Pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution from England (not exactly true I understand), but I figured by the time we became a Country that stuff was well in the past. I've always assumed that the origins of the 1st Amendment Freedom of Religion was in there to protect us from King George wannabes. After all that's what Schoolhouse Rock had to say about it. I didn't know it was to protect us against repeating the deeds of our fellow Americans.

I'm not sure how Mr. Jefferson would weigh in on the 10 commandments in the courthouse issue, but I now know a little more about the historical context, his mindset and perhaps the mindset of his peers who authored the Bill of Rights. I think it's sad that Thom was in France when the Bill of Rights was being authored. I feel it would have much more explicit on some issues. Ask your kids to tell you about the origin of the 1st Amendment. I bet they won't mention Americans oppressing Americans.

On Thoreau's Civil Disobedience 1

I finished up The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (that explains the last post) a while back and needed another book to start. When I finish a really good book I feel the need to wind down a little before stopping for a while. The rebound book almost acts as a cool down run (if I ran) for me. This time I grabbed a Thoreau anthology. The last time I read any Thoreau was in high school. I have revisited a lot of those freshman English books recently and they are so much better than I remember. Maybe it's because books like 1984 really appeal to middle aged men like my high school English teachers and now me.

Thoreau: I started reading the first paragraph of "Civil Disobedience" and I was amazed at how timely his comments are about standing armies. I gained a little sense of relief that the current leaders were just as evil as the leaders of the past.
"Oh no you don't Mr President, you don't have the monopoly on evil" -James K. to George W.

The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. - H.D. Thoreau

Time Machine: Now, if you substitute just one word in the above paragraph you will magically thrust Mr. Thoreau forward some 150 years. Now H.D., as he would like to be called, would probably write in a Blog. This is now a commonplace thing for eternal whiners to do. And he would have probably written the same above paragraph in his blog, except for one word. But what is that word? (Hint: Replace Mexico with a word that rhymes with MyBack.) The more things change . . . .

Organic Chinese Baby French Beans Through the Center of the Earth

Some time ago, my wife and I brought some freshly purchased frozen green beans to my in laws' house for dinner. They were purchased in the new "Wild Harvest" section at our local (read proximity only) Hannaford's grocery store. The bag had several wonderful pastoral images on it. Pictures of freshly harvested green beans were accompanied by a sunset silhouette of a farmer carrying a basket of produce. The logo, which said "Woodstock Farms", lead us to believe that these beans must have come from Vermont. Green beans from the green mountains perhaps? On another part of the bag was a peaceful affirmation:

Seasonality: Harvesting crops at the height of ripeness, bringing them straight to market and shortening the distance from the farm to you, preserves the flavor and freshness of each season. Eating food in season honors the rhythms of nature's cycles.

I turned over the package to read the nutritional facts and kill some time when the phrase, "Product of China", popped out at me. After realizing that they were not referring to the packaging I was dumbfounded (I could have said speechless, but I am seldom without speech.) "Shortening the distance from the farm to you" was a little bit of a stretch. You can't find a farm much farther from me than one in China. You can be sure that this summer we will be planting a few more rows of green beans for our freezer. Perhaps if I have some extra, I'll send them over to that organic farmer in China to say thanks.

One more thing, they were called Baby French Beans. If we still aren't getting along with the French I wonder if they should be renamed Baby Freedom Beans. And yes, the beans were rather tasty. Lesson learned.