Zadi posted “A Soldier’s Story,” which made me cry. I’m very sensitive to Vietnam stories. Here’s why. I filmed this in March, 2005.
Category Archives: bio
The Hundred Years’ War
The Strange Religious History of the Straughans
shot Mar 6, 2005, 7:29 mins
Some of my recent articles have caused some readers to wonder why I have it in for Catholicism. Actually, I am even-handed in my dislike of religion: I don’t like any of them. But, due to family history, I have un dente avvelenato in particular for Catholicism, and for the American Southern Baptist church. My father’s mother was a devout Catholic, my grandfather a born-again Baptist. Why they married in the first place was never clear to me, but the decades-long war that ensued left the rest of the family with an unpleasant taste in the mouth about both their religions (none of their descendants is now Catholic OR Baptist).
While I was visiting my dad in England in March, we started what will doubtless be a very long project: getting his life, and all his stories, on video. One of my questions was: “Why did Mamaw and Pawpaw get married?” Here are his thoughts on that, and on what happened afterwards.
The Great Turtle Escape
shot Apr 16, 2005, 2:25 mins
music: The Animals
Now that the weather’s finally getting warmer, we figured the turtles could spend time outside, so we bought some low fencing (intended to demarcate flowerbeds or something) and planted it in the garden. The enclosure didn’t need to be very high – turtles don’t jump, after all…
(later)
We seem to have solved the problem. I turned around the fencing so that the horizontal bars are on the outside, and the turtles are faced with tall (to them), smooth vertical bars on the inside. They still try to escape, but not nearly so hard, and they seem to have gotten the hang of just relaxing in the sun (there’s a plastic tub set up as a shelter for them to crawl under when they get too hot). I’m still looking for the right size and shape of ceramic planter to use as a pond for them. In the meantime, I put down one of those things you put under a plant pot to catch overflow (sottovaso – undervase – in Italian; what’s the word for that in English?). It’s just low enough for them to crawl over the rim, and they both immediately plunged in. Apparently they get thirsty quickly in the sun.
I was contemplating getting an iguana as a pet, til I read that they live 20 years and can get to be 6 feet long; I don’t feature me at age 62 trying to walk a six-foot lizard. Maybe we’ll get a python instead…
Down Memory Lane in a Corporate T-Shirt
One of the perks of working in high tech during the boom years was that you could wear jeans and polo shirts to the office every day, and you didn’t even have to pay for the shirts – someone was always giving you clothing.
If you represented your company at a show or conference, they wanted you “in uniform,” so they gave you a new shirt. My first was the infamous Adaptec polo shirt, purple with a turquoise placket and navy collar. I still have it, but don’t wear it much, because, like most of the shirts Adaptec gave me, it was too big.
Another polo shirt I received was embroidered to commemorate a project I hadn’t known I was participating in, something to do with an upgrade of the Adaptec network. As far as I was concerned, I had been helping out my buddies in IT by playing around with cool new stuff, so I was surprised to get a shirt about it. They swore they had even asked me what size I wanted (if they had, I would have asked for a small).
I was informally part of Adaptec’s web team, so I got a fleece jacket to commemorate the relaunch of the company website, in fall 1997 according to the embroidery. The jackets were commissioned prematurely, however – as I recall, the site didn’t actually go live til about six months later.
Let’s see, what else is in the closet? Another fleece, this one from a conference we hosted for our European distributors in Marbella. Nicer quality of fleece, but no pockets! A long-sleeved polo shirt from something else, too big as usual, and in a horrid shade of green.
Various baseball caps, pity I don’t wear them very often. My favorite is one that an IT buddy was given by UUNet, which he graciously passed on to me – if I’m going to wear a baseball cap at all, I want it to be as geeky as possible. The best-looking cap I have is naturally from ATG – Art Technology Group, a company that prided itself on its fine design sense (one of my Woodstock classmates was its CEO at the time).
I have t-shirts from various companies, but I never wore them in the office, nor much on the street in Italy. On one of our Caribbean vacations, a company logo t-shirt I happened to be wearing actually accomplished its advertising purpose. We went horseback riding on the beach. After an hour riding behind me and looking at my Toast + Jam t-shirt, a guy in the group with us asked me what it was about. I explained, and he said “Oh, I could use that.” Turns out he was a musician, and liked the idea of being able to create his own CDs of his work.
I get more wear out of the long-sleeved Ts, from Hewlett-Packard (wore that one out, in fact) and Roxio, and a nice black turtleneck from Roxio Germany commemorating WinOnCD 6 (for which I wrote the manual). Thanks to friends, I still enjoy some of my old industry perks: I recently received three black turtlenecks embroidered with “Roxio – a division of Sonic Solutions”. Come to think of it, my collection of shirts spans most of the history of the CD recording software industry.
My all-time favorite remains the denim shirt pictured here. It’s a little big, but just comfortably so, enough to wear over a long-sleeve knit shirt in spring. The embroidery was designed by a tattoo artist: a burning heart with “Born 2 Burn” inscribed on a banner wrapped around it. A couple of years later, after several changes of the guard at Adaptec/Roxio, I was wearing it the day I met our new CEO, Chris Gorog. He commented on the shirt, and I passed along the observation that one of the engineers had made about the tattoo design: “If you turn it upside down, it looks like a flaming asshole.” Which probably sealed my doom with Mr. Gorog. Oh, well. Perhaps he and I were never destined to get along in the first place.
You might also like:
Waiting for News
One of the joys of having attended Woodstock School is that I know people all over the world. Which is also one of the sorrows: when something bad happens almost anywhere in the world, it’s likely to affect someone of my extended Woodstock family.
I wrote almost two years ago about an Indian schoolmate who survived both Gulf Wars in Baghdad, with her Iraqi husband. In April of 2004, Shahnaz died of a galloping cancer. Had Iraq not been under embargo for so many years, effectively shutting down medical facilities for ordinary people, she would have had access to decent medical care, and perhaps her cancer could have been diagnosed and treated in time. As it is, she is one of tens of thousands of innocent victims. The difference is that, to me, she is no abstract figure. She’s Shahnaz, and she’s gone.
And now the tsunami. As class secretary, I have sent out email to all my classmates, and am waiting for news from the larger alumni family as well. But it’s too early to know for sure whether we’re all okay; the nosecount could take a long time. So far the classmates who have checked in are all right, though one was awaiting news of her father’s family in Madras.
