God save the Queen (and her grandkids, too)

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Jim

At the risk of visualizing the Founding Fathers rotating in their hallowed graves, I’ve been enjoying the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth. Just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, even the most patriotic Americans can get sentimental when the Brits trot out their royalty.

Part of this kinship is a shared heritage and culture and a (mostly) common language. We can credit the Founding Fathers with the sense to hang on to the best British stuff, such as Shakespeare and the Magna Carta, instead of stamping out every vestige of the old order as the French and Bolsheviks did. It’s hard to visualize a similar bond between any other two nations, even those with similar cultures (think India and Pakistan or the Balkans).

It’s easy to embrace the British (and Canadians and Australians) because they’re so much like us. We may find it hard to relate to the odd customs of the French, Arabs or Chinese, but we tolerate the eccentricities of the Brits (such as warm beer and driving on the wrong side) because they’re family – like the goofy uncle who tells embarrassing jokes but you love him anyway. We’ve even forgiven the Brits for burning the White House.

It probably helps that I’m part Scottish. Whenever I hear bagpipes I get the urge to invade something, and when my daughter painted herself blue at the age of two I chalked it up to genetics.

Watching the Queenfest was fun because nobody does pomp and circumstance like the British. No other people can be so dignified and so zany at the same time: the Queen doing her understated wrist-wave from the royal barge while rain-soaked subjects with painted faces cavort in the streets. Super Bowl halftime shows and Moscow May Day parades just don’t measure up.

Even the Americans who claim to dislike the British do not take it all that seriously. A sailor on my ship in the Navy, a streetwise kid from Brooklyn, was intensely Irish and disparaged the English daily… until he went ashore in Hong Kong. There his favorite pastime was to walk into a bar frequented by British sailors, settle in with a beer, and then stand up and loudly propose a toast to the Queen. The Brits cheered and bought him a beer or two. Then he would move on to the next Royal Navy bar and repeat the performance.

The royal family is fascinating because they are fairy-tale and folksy at the same time. TV coverage of the 1994 Winter Olympics showed the King of Norway hanging out with the spectators like an ordinary working stiff. You won’t catch the Windsors rubbing elbows in the crowd, but hearts melt every time the Queen dotes on a toddler.

If nothing else, the royals are so damned durable that they eventually grow on you. Tabloid scandals are momentary blips in a reign of decades and the tradition of centuries. Prince Charles has developed a sense of humor (something new for the Windsors). He will make an engaging monarch if he outlives his mum, and the next generation is off to a classy start.

Memo to the Founding Fathers: The royals have learned from the mistakes of George III. It’s okay to love them again..

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Thank you for your service

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Jim

Being a veteran is trendy in New Mexico. When I wear my U.S. Navy Retired ballcap, people walk up to me on the street and thank me for my service. That surprises me every time because veterans of my generation got no thanks, especially those of us who served in Vietnam.

I was never an uber-patriot but found it natural to join the Navy when I graduated from college. The draft helped, as did my aversion to honest labor after working all through college. I was bucking a trend because many of my peers contrived to either avoid the draft or wangle a stateside assignment as a company clerk.

When my active duty ended in 1968, I never encountered the outright hostility that greeted some Vietnam veterans as described in Bob Greene’s Homecoming. Instead, I encountered quiet indifference.

I found myself several years behind my peers in building a civilian career. Most employers regarded my military service as lost time. One career counselor advised me not to mention that I had served in Vietnam when I interviewed for jobs (even though I never saw active combat and did not kill a single baby). I was fortunate to join a company that gave me credit for my experience in managing people and resources as a naval officer.

Over the years, people of my generation have told me that they protested the war in Vietnam but assured me that they always supported the troops. That’s not the way I remember it.

When I became active in the reserves in the 1970s the armed forces were largely invisible. On my first reserve tour in the Pentagon, everyone wore civilian clothes instead of uniforms. In Chicago, I was the only person at work or in my neighborhood who attended weekend reserve meetings and got static from one supervisor for my two weeks of annual active duty. When I wore my summer white uniform, some of my neighbors may have thought I was selling ice cream on the side.

One effect of this period was that military people became more isolated from the rest of America. As recently as the 1980s I encountered career officers who still thought civilian society was dominated by longhaired hippies. We still may be feeling the effects of this divide: ROTC has been excluded from some college campuses for decades, and today’s military force is more representative of the South and West than the United States as a whole.

I have always thought it was a bad decision to rely so heavily on reservists and the National Guard to sustain the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of expanding the armed forces. One positive result, however, is that widespread participation in the wars has raised awareness of the sacrifices of our service people and their families.

As a Vietnam veteran, I am touched by the outpouring of support and gratitude for today’s returning veterans. In Albuquerque, service people returning from overseas are greeted by cheering crowds at the airport. That may be because New Mexico has always had a big military presence, but I hope this is happening in other parts of the country.

It’s great to see that caring for military veterans has become a national priority. Now we need to elect more veterans to Congress. I find it disturbing that most politicians who commit American lives to conflict have never served themselves. It’s also good to see that we can have a healthy anti-war movement and still support our troops: Perhaps we are maturing as a nation.

When someone thanks me for my service, I hope it’s a sign that things have changed since the 1960s. Some day I may get used to it.

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Getting in touch with my inner sailor

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Jim

Nearly all my 25-year career in the Navy, mostly in the reserves, was spent behind a desk. But just as every member of the Army and Marines is a rifleman at heart, every Navyman is a sailor. So it was with me. Although my advancement in the Navy was due to my expertise in public affairs and not my seamanship, my one tour of sea duty forever cemented my kinship with sailors everywhere.

The sea fascinated me from childhood. I read C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower books  and watched Victory at Sea on TV. After college I joined the Navy, got a crash course in seamanship and navigation in officers’ training and, with typical military logic, was stationed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was not what I had in mind when I joined the Navy. I volunteered for anything that would get me out of there and was transferred to a minesweeper based in Japan.

Minesweepers clear sea mines to prevent other ships from being blown up. Modern mines are triggered by the magnetism of a ship’s steel hull or the sound of its engines, so minesweepers are built of wood with mostly nonmagnetic equipment and quiet engines. The idea is for the ship to pass safely over a mine while the minesweeping gear it is towing –which pulses an electrical charge or makes noise – detonates the mine safely astern. This is an inexact science, so minesweepers are small and cheap.

USS Woodpecker

The result is what one writer called “belligerent-looking yachts wearing grey paint.” At 144 feet long and 400 tons my ship, a coastal minesweeper, was one of the smallest ships in the Navy. Coastal minesweepers were named for birds and my ship was the USS WOODPECKER (MSC-209). We may have had the toughest crew in the Seventh Fleet: Our enlisted men wore a uniform patch with the ship’s name and felt compelled to defend it in every bar in town. (One of our sister ships was USS ALBATROSS (MSC-289), whose crew apparently had not read Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)

My wife saw the ship for the first time when we returned from a cruise shortly after she arrived in Japan. She said: “You went to sea in that?”

Minesweeper sailors take a perverse pride in their tiny, rough-riding ships. Some cannot resist challenging larger ships as a gag. The captain of a minesweeper I was riding in a fleet exercise in the 1970s tweaked a nearby cruiser with the message “Your money or your life.” The cruiser replied: “Any attempt on either will result in world’s largest pile of matchsticks.”

Years later I visited an aircraft carrier and mentioned during dinner conversation that I had served on a 400-ton minesweeper. I was told: “That’s about how much we eat.”

 

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Whatever happened to journalism?

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Jim

It would be tempting to mourn the passing of the golden age of journalism.

In the 1960s the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University initiated me into a quasi-priesthood of accuracy, fairness and balance. It was a reporters’ boot camp where crusty, ex-editor professors like the legendary Richard Hainey unleashed withering scorn on any unchecked fact or unattributed source. It was drummed into us that our first responsibility was to our readers and our stories were bigger than we were.

In my first job as a reporter for a community newspaper I was delighted when my stories angered people on both sides of an issue. Later, as a corporate media spokesman in Chicago, I encountered occasional bias and sloppy reporting but found the vast majority of reporters to be straight shooters. In those days we venerated Walter Cronkite and cheered the meticulous digging of Woodward and Bernstein.

The media landscape that nourished a couple of generations of great journalism has been paved over by economics and technology. Metropolitan newspapers and news magazines are withering:  Those that have survived declining advertising revenue have downsized their editorial staffs. The major television networks have lost chunks of their audience to cable TV and can no longer afford blue-ribbon news operations. And both print and broadcast media face growing competition from the Internet.

At a time when nobody can afford to hire reporters, technology has put the news cycle on steroids. Stories that went unreported until the evening newscast or morning paper now go viral on the Internet and are quickly picked up by multiple cable news outlets to fill 24 hours of airtime.

One result is the tabloidization of news. Local police stories such as missing toddlers or hostage situations are now national news because they build ratings and are cheaper to cover than the economy or the nuances of foreign relations. The media herd instinct means that a sensational but trivial story such as the Casey Anthony trial sucks the oxygen out of the news schedule for weeks at a time. For a news junkie like me, it’s a helpless feeling to get on the treadmill at the gym and realize that there will be no actual news on any of the TV news channels for at least half an hour… so it’s either the sports channel or the Home Shopping Network.

Think of the great news coverage we could have seen if the media had assigned all the reporters who covered Michael Jackson’s death to develop stories on the economy instead. But would anyone have watched it?

Another trend is the breakdown of boundaries between news, entertainment and opinion. Network news anchors are chosen for celebrity appeal rather than reporting skill, and political operatives double as news magazine columnists and television news show hosts. One result is that political coverage – fueled by today’s climate of hyper-partisanship and the celebrity appeal of President Obama – has become more overtly partisan. Wonder what my journalism professors would think of Al Sharpton hosting a TV news show one day and leading a demonstration the next?

It had never occurred to me to watch Fox News until I saw Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin on ABC News during the 2008 campaign. I’m no fan of Palin, but Gibson’s interview was a textbook display of bias: the raised eyebrow, patronizing tone and “gotcha” questions, especially compared with his fawning interview of candidate Obama. So I now channel-surf between CNN and Fox in the hope that the truth will be somewhere in the middle.

This year’s presidential campaign is a bonanza for media-watchers. Was there a connection between political-operative-turned-newscaster George Stephanopoulos’ unexpected question about birth control during a Republican debate and the Obama administration’s birth-control mandate a few weeks later? One wonders. Why does the Washington Post do a front-page story about Mitt Romney’s high-school pranks when polls show voters are most concerned about the economy? Does anyone outside network newsrooms really believe that gay marriage, free birth control and student loans are the most important issues to the electorate?

Amid all the controversy there’s not much reporting going on. National TV news programs are more likely to rely on pundit panels than reporters, and the Washington Post “expose” on Romney’s antics 50 years ago appears to be flunking the Woodward-Bernstein test.

It’s hard to tell whether this is a vast, left-wing media conspiracy, as Fox News claims, or merely a half-vast effort to boost ratings and circulation by grabbing the easy headline. Either way, it’s going to be a nasty campaign that may further tarnish the credibility of the national news media, especially if they fail to re-elect President Obama.

I don’t see partisan news media as a threat to democracy. We’ve survived worse. The fulminations of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and, for that matter, the SuperPAC attack ads, are tame compared to what newspapers of yore published about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

The silver lining is that the Internet has democratized newsgathering and put it into a fishbowl. Everything that happens anywhere is going to be reported on somebody’s blog, everyone with a cell phone is a photojournalist and the whole world is watching. The traditional news media no longer have a monopoly on news coverage. Anything they decline to report, or that their thin-spread news staffs miss, will inevitably pop up on the web and quickly go public. A growing number of national stories now originate in blogs and are picked up by the media.

If you’re as addicted to news and opinion as I am, today’s media scene is hog heaven. I channel-surf several news networks and read a local newspaper, a couple of news magazines, the Wall Street Journal website and selected blogs. My consumption of news and information is limited only by my desire to get a life. 

One can argue that more obvious media bias may help citizens become the thoughtful voters the framers of the Constitution had in mind. It’s easy to tell where MSNBC, Fox News, the Huffington Post and the Daily Caller are coming from, and consumers can weigh the alternative viewpoints of multiple sources. Everybody trusted Walter Cronkite a generation ago but today’s viewers are more skeptical, as evidenced by the rapid growth of cable news and the decline of the major networks. Some folks will flock to media that mirror their political views, but the diversity of media outlets means that issues will be raised and opposing viewpoints will be heard.

What has not changed is that the hardcore journalism is I learned is still alive and well in local newsrooms. Local newspapers and TV stations, even in a secondary market such as Albuquerque, are doing superb investigative reporting and earning Pulitzer prizes the old-fashioned way. Last week a local TV station followed city employees around with camera crews and sifted through records to expose illegal use of handicapped parking passes. The TV networks may be giving President Obama a pass, but the mayor had better watch out.

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A walk on the handicapped side

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Jim

The Boomer generation is destined to be the handicapped parking generation. I got my handicapped parking pass sooner than expected. Happily, it’s temporary.

The blue placard with the wheelchair logo is the result of my first snowshoe hike in the mountains in early February. Snowshoeing is easy, they told me. If you can walk you can snowshoe, they said. Well, some of us cannot snowshoe and chew gum at the same time. I tripped, went down and felt the tendon above my knee snap. A few days later they wheeled me into surgery at the local veterans’ hospital.

I was impressed with the VA hospital, by the way. I received excellent care and was treated with more respect than my late wife got in a succession of private hospitals. It was fun to swap war stories with my roommates, and I was reminded of how lucky I am when the x-ray technician asked if I had any shrapnel or steel plates in my body.

When I came home from the hospital I knew what to expect because my wife was disabled for many years. I have her to thank for our decision to buy a one-story house with a walk-in shower. I had it easy because my knee was not especially painful, just immobilized in a knee brace that kept my left leg straight.

Being disabled required reorganizing my lifestyle. After years of walking across the house on impulse, I learned to plan every perambulation by wheelchair or walker: Do I have everything I need before leaving the bedroom in the morning? What else do I expect to use from the kitchen cabinet that’s within reach? I forwarded incoming phone calls to my cell phone and moved frequently used objects from high shelves to my desk and countertop.

How do you put on a sock when you can’t reach your foot? One of my wife’s handicapped gadgets, a plastic half-pipe with straps, solved that problem. A long-handled grabber device helped me retrieve the morning paper and put the cats’ food dishes on the floor. I learned to bathe by sitting on a shower seat, sticking my towel-wrapped bum leg out the shower door and using the hand shower.

Carrying things is a challenge when you need both hands to hold yourself up on a walker or crutches. A travel mug helped me transport my ever-present coffee or soda from the kitchen to my desk without spills. Dining entailed a multi-step process to move the plate from one kitchen counter to another and eventually to the table.

Fear of running out of reading material was a handy excuse to buy a Kindle e-book reader, which also fits neatly into a pocket of my cargo pants for those long waits at the doctor’s office.

I don’t need my left leg to drive, but was housebound for a while because my immobilized leg would not fit through the door opening of my Subaru. Eventually I was able to tilt the power seat back, do some gymnastics to maneuver my leg into the car and start using that handicapped parking pass. The electric carts stores provide for the disabled are handy but are too slow – and are not much help in reaching the top grocery shelf or opening the tall, glass doors in the frozen food aisle.

Two months after my surgery, my left leg is no longer immobilized in a brace and I will soon switch from a crutch to a cane. I expect to stop using my handicapped parking pass long before it expires. In the meantime, it’s handy to park close to any building (except the VA hospital, where the number of disabled vets far exceeds the available parking space).

I’m grateful my disability is temporary, and that my introduction to disabled living taught me some lessons that will be helpful in my inevitable geriatric future.

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My favorite spectator sport

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Jim

If politicians did not exist I probably would be a big fan of professional wrestling. But politicians are so much more colorful and comic.

It’s probably my upbringing. I grew up in Chicago, was an avid reader of Mike Royko’s columns and covered city hall as a college-student reporter for a community newspaper. In the years when the Sox and the Bears were losing it was always entertaining to watch City Hall. You never knew what Mayor Daley was going to say, or which alderman or ex-governor would be indicted next.

So I feel right at home in New Mexico. Politicians here are just as corrupt as the ones in Illinois but have a banana-republic obviousness that I find endearing.

Typical New Mexico voters

The latest reality show is the border town of Sunland Park, where a candidate for mayor was arrested for extortion after he threatened to release a video of his opponent getting a lap dance. The extortionist was elected mayor, but under the terms of his bond is not permitted to set foot in city hall or talk to city employees. He plans to take the oath of office by phone. Other city employees are facing charges of voter fraud, including bringing Texas residents across the border to vote. The last mayor of Sunland Park has not been seen since he admitted that he was drunk when he signed a major city contract. City council meetings there have been compared to the Jerry Springer show.

In Columbus, another border town, much of the city government is in jail for smuggling guns to a Mexican drug cartel. Perhaps it’s payback for Pancho Villa’s raid in 1916.

One of the state’s elected public utility commissioners resigned in a plea bargain after he was charged with campaign fund violations, embezzlement and a massive spending spree with a government gasoline credit card. Auditors got suspicious when he bought huge quantities of gas and charged a chimichanga at a convenience store. The commissioner’s defense was that he has a drug problem (and the munchies, apparently).  Earlier, another commissioner was convicted of assault after she attacked a romantic rival with a rock. The courts had to remove her from office after her conviction because she wanted to continue serving until she actually began her prison sentence. You can’t make this stuff up.

When the leader of the state senate was convicted in a kickback scheme a few years ago, local politicians held a going-away party for him. Months later the National Hispanic Cultural Center removed his name from a building dedicated in his honor. The move was controversial because the senator had done a lot for the community before the feds caught him.

New Mexico’s tiny population (about two million in the entire state) makes government accessible in a small-town kind of way. My state legislator answers emails personally. Everybody who has lived here for a generation or two seems to know everybody else and many of them are related. Last year I had a pleasant chat at a social function with a former state official who’s awaiting trial for misuse of federal funds, and later learned that one of my neighbors was on the grand jury that indicted her.

This community feeling may be why there seems to be a higher tolerance for official misconduct here than in most places, even Chicago. The standard questionnaire the Albuquerque Journal issues to candidates for office routinely asks if they have been convicted of a crime. Hardly a week goes by without news of a government official being arrested (often for drunk driving) and an inordinate number of government employees are on paid leave awaiting criminal charges.

New Mexico’s spirit of tolerance and forgiveness extends to dead criminals as well as living ones. Former Gov. Bill Richardson’s last act as he left office was to consider a retroactive pardon for Billy the Kid. After extensive public discussion, including comments by descendants of the sheriff who shot Billy in 1881, the Gov decided against the pardon. But it was a near thing.

That’s how it is in New Mexico and I’m enjoying the show.

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So now I’m an author

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Jim

I’ve been writing for money since I was 19 but had not planned on writing a book. Writing is my favorite activity and I have been incredibly privileged to make it my career. But I never aspired to write the Great American Novel, nor felt a book inside me yearning to be released through my keyboard.

I’ve written just about everything else: newspaper and magazine articles, executive speeches, business white papers, booklets and brochures, opinion survey analysis, legislative testimony and, more recently, web content. I have been the editor of more than a dozen corporate magazines and newsletters and enjoy editing nearly as much as writing, especially when I can help writers bring out the best in their work.

So when my neighbor asked me for help with a book he was writing I agreed to take a look at it. He had known a World War II veteran who had survived a Japanese POW camp and made a deathbed promise to write the guy’s story. My neighbor had been working for years to sift through interviews and family memories, had researched military records and was working on a rough draft of the narrative.

I know a good story when I see one and accepted my neighbor’s invitation to sign on as co-author nearly a year ago. I edited my neighbor’s draft, added more research and writing and helped shepherd it to publication. The project was mind candy for me, and in the process of collaboration we gained a deeper insight into the heart of the story: why this guy survived when so many prisoners of war did not.

The result is Don Jose, An American Soldier’s Courage and Faith in Japanese Captivity. You can read about the book, and the story behind the book, on our website. Our copies of the book finally arrived a few days ago, and we have launched an aggressive marketing campaign that will dominate our lives for a year or two.

It feels a little odd to have my name on something that’s registered with the Library of Congress. I started my career as a newspaper reporter with the understanding that my work would line birdcages in a day or two. Permanence was never part of the deal. All the trees I’ve killed over the decades have long since been recycled, and much of my more recent work (such as this blog) exists only on the Internet as bits rather than atoms. Now I’ve helped create an artifact that may outlast me. People are even asking me to sign it.

Promoting something I’ve written is another new experience. I’ve learned a lot about book promotion from my daughter, the semi-famous author. I’m generating publicity, and my co-author and I are organizing book signings and working our networks. I’m getting accustomed to promoting the book shamelessly to everyone I know. And I’m trying not to obsess about the book rankings on Amazon. 

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Solar power

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Jim

I think solar power is a great idea. Free electricity: how cool is that? I’d love to use it at home because my house is an ideal solar site:, with a big flat roof under a New Mexico sun that shines 300-plus days a year.

Problem is, it’s too expensive. The last time I checked, converting my house to solar power would require an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Even with the savings on utility bills and all those tax credits, it would take as much as a decade to recover my costs. I could break even about the time they wheel me off to a nursing home.

I suspect that one reason why solar power is expensive is because solar equipment still lacks the economies of scale needed to make it affordable. The more of something you manufacture, the lower the cost of each unit. That’s why many things that used to be expensive, like flat-screen TV sets and cell phones, are now available at WalMart.

Solar energy is still overpriced despite years of government subsidies. At this point the biggest reasons to go solar are noneconomic: ecological guilt and government mandates. My utility company offered me a deal a couple of years ago to pay a voluntary surcharge for the assurance that some of my electricity would come from renewable sources. Seriously? My bills are likely to go up anyway because of government mandates that utilities use more solar and wind power. Forcing us to pay more for something because it’s good for us is not a compelling strategy.

The telecommunication industry faced a similar dilemma in the 1990s. Fiber optic cable was many times more efficient than copper cable, but the stuff was expensive. That was frustrating to telcom executives who wanted to convert more of their networks to fiber but could not justify its cost. Ameritech solved the problem by offering long-term, large-scale contracts to suppliers who could offer fiber cable at a price comparable to copper. Suppliers jumped at the deal because the long-term contracts enabled them to expand their manufacturing volume and achieve lower costs.

Government programs to encourage renewable energy may be falling short because they tend to focus on subsidizing manufacturing and creating artificial demand without reducing costs. There is a lot government can do by focusing its efforts on the areas where government is most effective.

It makes sense for the government to fund research, because research grants and subsidized national laboratories can perform more basic research and development than most private companies can afford.

Government also can create markets in its role as the biggest customer in the country for practically everything. Instead of paying companies like Solyndra to build luxurious factories in expensive locations, I’d like to see the feds announce a program to spend, say, $500 million a year for the next five years to convert government buildings to solar power and award contracts to the lowest bidders.

Companies with the winning bids could then raise private capital to build factories, with investors looking over their shoulders to ensure that the companies are managed prudently. The likely outcome is that a lot more solar panels would be manufactured and, as a result, costs would go down. Not only would the government get something for its money (for once), but solar panels would be more affordable for the rest of us.

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Snow? No, thanks

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Jim

I don’t like snow. Really, I don’t. That realization came to me on a snowshoe hike in the mountains in the light of the full moon. I thought: “This would be more fun without all this effing snow.” (And that was before I fell and ruptured a tendon.)

Winter sports are big here in New Mexico. We have lots of mountains and, I am told, some of the best skiing in the country. I know a guy who moved to Santa Fe primarily for the skiing. There’s downhill skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing. And snowshoeing, of course. The TV newscast has a ski report every night. My neighborhood mountain, Sandia Peak, boasts the world’s longest tramway to whisk snow fanciers the vertical mile to the top.

My lack of interest in winter sports may be a result of spending most of my life in Chicago. For Chicagoans, skiing entails a long drive to Michigan or Wisconsin for mediocre skiing, or an expensive airplane ride to the Rockies. I could never see the point of spending money to travel from one cold climate to another. It made more sense to board an airplane in the winter if there was a tropical beach at the other end.

As a child I enjoyed playing in the snow as much as the next kid: snow angels, sledding, skating, snowball fights, building snow forts and snowmen, getting a running start to slide as far as possible down an icy sidewalk. The novelty fades, however, when the snow sticks around until April, you have to put on galoshes whenever you venture outside and remember that your mother told you to never eat yellow snow. Spending more time with a shovel than on a sled made snow something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Snow in Chicago means shoveling the end of your driveway again after the city snowplow pushes the snow back… trudging through ankle-deep slush everywhere … spending an extra hour to drive home in a rush-hour blizzard… hoping the weight of the second fifty-year snow in three years won’t collapse the garage roof. I will confess that I was a little less grumpy about snow once I bought a big, noisy snowblower.

Snow is easier to enjoy in New Mexico because in most parts of the state it’s optional. When snow falls in the mountains by the foot, everyplace else gets a dusting or none at all. My neighbors in Albuquerque do not own snow shovels and snowplows are scarce. While cities like Chicago take snow in stride, the rare equivalent of a heavy Midwestern frost paralyzes Albuquerque. A moderate snowstorm closes the schools and shuts down the Interstate.

For the most part, however, snow in New Mexico is a choice and not a mandatory condition. You can be on a ski slope within an hour’s drive but can be a weather wimp the rest of the time. You can spend the day snowboarding and come home to a dry driveway. If you really, really love snow you can live in the mountains, buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle and savor the adventure of being snowbound. It’s your choice.

That’s one of the reasons I moved here. I enjoy looking out my window to see snow on the mountains but not on my driveway. If there’s snow on my deck in the morning it’s probably going to melt by noon.

I’m looking forward to hiking in the mountains this summer.

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Anyone for a Mediterranean cruise?

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Jim

I’ve been watching the unfolding story of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster and the growing list of ways in which the captain and others screwed up. I have a little experience in things nautical even though I spent more of my Navy career behind a desk than at sea.

The Costa Concordia grounding looks like a classic case of human error rather than weather or mechanical malfunction. This was no uncharted reef: people have been sailing ships along the coast of Italy for 3,000 years. Piloting a ship along a coast is the most accurate kind of navigation because you can see landmarks on shore, either visually or on radar, and can plot the ship’s position within a matter of feet. The guys on the Costa Concordia’s bridge should have known exactly where the rocks were and where their ship was.

The risk of bumping into things makes mariners extra-careful when they’re close to shore. When they enter or leave a harbor ships post extra lookouts, watch every radar display and depth indicator, and often hire a local harbor pilot who knows all the shoals and currents. This is when the captain’s reputation is most on the line, so skippers are on the bridge micromanaging and tend to avoid distractions such as blondes.

Cruise ships are especially good at close-quarters maneuvering because they enter and leave harbors every day. Most have side thrusters (jets that nudge the ship from side to side) that make them highly maneuverable for their size. When I took a couple of cruises a few years ago, I was impressed by the skill with which the captains parked their ships alongside the pier. That’s not easy to do, even for the nimble minesweeper I served on.

Update: Apparently the Costa Concordia was going 16 knots as it approached the island. That’s a good cruising speed in the open ocean, but close to shore it’s the equivalent of navigating the WalMart parking lot at 50 mph. When the ship turned, its excess speed carried it onto the rocks.

One effect of the Costa Concordia disaster is that cruising will be safer than ever (for a while, at least) because the cruise ship industry will overreact by doubling down on safety measures. I saw this happen in the Navy.

Pratas Reef is a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the South China Sea. It’s marked on all the charts and can be seen from space, so ships know where it is and have used it as a navigational aid to fix their positions. Easy as it is to find (or miss), the destroyer USS Frank Knox (DD742) somehow ran bang into Pratas Reef in 1965, resulting in a massive salvage effort and several courts-martial.

The following year my ship passed through the area on a course that took us within about 50 miles of Pratas Reef. The captain doubled the watches and was on the bridge all night. Can’t argue with his logic: If there’s anything worse than being the first captain to hit Pratas Reef, it’s being the second.

As I write this, every cruise line is reviewing its safety procedures and issuing stern memoranda to its captains. Cruise ships may be the safest places on the planet in the near future. I’ll bet the Costa line is offering some terrific deals. If you don’t mind a lifeboat drill every hour, that is.

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