Horse Soldiers  reviewed by Harry Johnquest

If Cedar Point had a rollercoaster named "Afghanistan" it could not out-thrill the reader of  Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton. This is the true account of how a small group of Special Forces soldiers, first ones post 9/ll/01, dropped in on the upper reaches of Afghanistan --- to negotiate with warlords on horseback and ultimately to ride victoriously to defeat the Taliban. Horse Soldiers is as surreally real as Ghengis Kahn punching buttons on a cell phone. Surprisingly touching, Stanton clearly and masterfullly filters through multiple points of view from the home front USA to soldiers' advance in the thick of battle. Local politics are as clarified yak butter, Stanton in an epilogue updates the reader to Afghanistan's current devolution.  It reads as a thriller, it is hard to put down, I'd enjoy reading it again.

Horse Soldiers is major motion picture material. Besides, with its well documented thrilling prose it should win a Pulitzer Prize.

(to be cont.)

Harry's Rusty Metal Revival

From seed catalog,

"The Game of My Life", by Jason McElwain,
a book review by Harry Johnquest
******************************************************

On top it's about an autistic kid who gets a chance to play basketball in the final four minutes of the final game of his senior year. He scores big, the crowd goes wild, videos circulate worldwide, major networks feature interviews and highlights of the game. Oprah gets him on her show. Now there's a book, it's written by that autistic kid, Jason "J-Mac" McElwain along with Daniel Paisner, New York Times bestselling author. It's a novel read, profoundly moving, and a great story. Columbia Pictures already signed the deal for a movie. This is huge.

The heart of the book is a very personal view, mainly through Jason's eyes, of a life with autism. Struggle. Frustration. Determination. It's about never giving up. It's "Rocky" meets "Rain Man" as a child. It's "The Little Engine That Could" incarnate. The book's "keep focused" format centers around Jason getting into the big game which keeps the excitement building. But author Paisner guides McElwain to take the reader with him deep into his life's trials and the triumphs that allowed for such a game as this. Statements from family and friends pepper the story throughout.  

Fights of your life, Pavlik !

What's it like to shake hands with a great boxer, Kelly Pavlik, the current middleweight champion of the world?

I met Pavlik at an interesting venue for a professional boxer, The Butler Museum of Art, Youngstown, his hometown -- a day before Memorial Day. Kelly Pavlik gave a word of thanks and a brief motivational speech, performing his role in a lively unveiling ceremony for a recent acquisition, a painting, a portrait of Kelly Pavlik.

By luck I happened to be there that day. Walking up the museum steps I noticed something different. Parked right in front of the white marble-faced museum, in a broad row, stood over a dozen gleaming chrome and bright-wild-painted motorcycles, big honkin' hogs. Even though that sunny Sunday streets were quiet (virtually empty for soaring gas prices and Youngstown's depression), the museum's lots were better than half full.  Many had come to see Kelly Pavlik and the new painting.  

Pavlik's art is heart. Background: he was knocked to the ground, hard, in round two of his first title fight. But he got up, barely, he struggled somehow and he boxed, fought on and won the bout big time. They say it's a spectacular fight. Classic. Underdog rebounds. Yet I found Pavlik a humble guy in person. I felt compelled to go and speak with him.

I said to him, "Thank you, for motivating people to get back on their feet."

He said, "Well, we still have a lot of work to do." I suppose he spoke for greater Youngstown as well as the world at large. He implied he was not alone in this fight, "WE -- still have a lot of work..." he said, "WORK " to help motivate people to get back on their feet, to rebound. He's thinking ahead, way beyond his next title fight, June 7, Atlantic City. Nevertheless, he takes every day seriously and does what he can to make the most of his time in and out of the ring. There's a good deal of gratis work for charities that doesn't get so much publicity as does a good fight. He enjoys family time, his two-year-old growing up and his many friends, friends longstanding before fame and fortune placed him in the center-ring limelight.

Through triumph, triumph he encourages in others. Thankfully, his handshake was not a bone-crusher. It may have been demure but  it was certainly not a dead fish. Gloves off, the boxer imparted rarefied sensibilities: a strength of hidden reserves and a confidence in the future. That's what it was like to shake hands with a champion. What's in your handshake?







 

LEARNING CURVE FOR A LANDLORD

My second trip downtown to be interviewed by a detective occured today in a spartan room with a camera perched overhead. There, unfortunately, will be more of these chats. I've had to call 911 a few times for  tenants acting out inappropriately (one is hospitalized, in a home for the mentally bewildered, and out of the picture)  and I may have to get involved to help prosecute  societal miscreants that have serious needs--needing to be taken off the streets. Who lives in your sub-neighborhoods? Do you demonstrate actively that you care whom they affect and how? What can you do? Jail won't resove their problems.

The second floor tenant says he won't pay and he won't leave. He acts as if he has taken this stance before. He throws trash and tv's smashing from his second floor perch. Filing an eviction notice costs $99 in Youngstown, takes time, and the law stands by your side. But when the ax falls, it's in their hands. One of the landlord books at the library suggests that one can pay the offending tenant to vacate the premises, that it's cheaper and faster than evicting. Pitiful. It could so easily backfire. Vigilance and diligence is the order of the day, progressive action. Proactivity positively paves the way before there's a problem. It's a lot late now.

Last night 2:30 am I couldn't sleep. I got up to see about the gravel-crunching footsteps I heard faintly outside my window. Even in the shadows it was unmistakably the second floor tenant going back and forth to the house three doors down and across the street. A silver four-door cruised slowly by, turned around and pulled into that drive and around back of the house three doors down and across the street. Nothing was happening for a while, then two newer flashy cars took off up the street, a Cadillac and a two tone Chrysler.  I went to bed and fell asleep. I awoke later as (possibly) the same silver car was just leaving now from the back lot outside my window.

The bad news is that Youngstown, Ohio is the per capita "Murder Capital" of Ohio, USA, and lately, maybe of  the world. The good news is that I live on the so-called good side of town. The bad news is that they're passing out samples of crystal meth to school kids and that crack and heroin are already rampant problems. Could it be that Youngstown's infamous organized crime bosses have all gone... underground? The good news is that somebody has to be a good guy.  You, maybe. If I were a good wise guy, I wouldn't be here. But, I am here, for now.

It's not even my gig. I might-could just cut and run. The owner/landlord is out of town; I'm just filling in as property manager/junkyard dog. There may be a job opening here all too soon, one way or the other. Have a nice day in the neighborhood. .

Preservation Mystery.................................................................................................
...........
In preserving and restoring a wall mural over the fireplace mantle, I'm helping revive an ambiance of grandeur within a century-old house. I found the mural quite by accident under a couple of layers of wallpaper that I had been working on, priming and patching and painting, for a couple of days, along with the rest of the grand living room. Then it started lifting near the top; I tugged at it and discovered underneath hand painted leaves on the plaster wall. So curiously and carefully I kept pealing away larger and thankfully larger sections of the old wallpaper. I had that wonderful feeling of opening a big Christmas present. The "wrapping" paper came away fairly clean. Perhaps the paper-hanger was himself an amateur preservationist, a generous artisan who used an extra coat of wall sizing over the mural before he papered it over. So, now, it's not too shabby.

It's a classic pastoral scene, a grove of birch trees by a stream running into a reflective lake stretching out to wooded hillsides and sky. There's a young man standing, holding an eight-string harp, wearing a Romanesque or Greeky red mini-dress drape, staring away across the water. It's signed S.W. Rettegi, 1911. The house was built 1910-11.

The massive dark stained cherry wood trim, defining and dividing most of the first floor, retains its original finish. It's patina here and there has crinkled with age and is, amazingly, fantastically intact throughout. I have hardly to do much at all to that beautiful cherry woodwork (except for the stair steps requiring spot-staining and and an overall oil finish). Primarily I've been painting walls and ceilings. The solid oak floors could be sanded and varnished. The built-in oak cabinets and trim in the dining room need some cleaning and special treatment to bring it all around to look as though it has simply been treated well, practically unscathed, for a hundred years. The solid oak kitchen cabinets were painted over layers and layers ago. They're nice and white in the main kitchen and dusty rose in the butler's pantry.

Two days ago I met with the Realtor who will list the house for sale and soon enough I will have to find a new place to indwell... or on into even an older one.

PEACE NOW.
by H.M. Johnquest

I got prompted to promote peace by coming up with five ways to create peace at the "Universal Peace Now" Zaadz pod, and then to post it in my blog. Here's my five.

IAPETUS, MOON WITH A VIEW
by H.M. Johnquest

Of the photos back from Saturn, a revealing shot of Iapetus, that two-faced rogue satellite, tugs at  me remotely. Its globular cover has a subtle repeating geometry indicating a sub-frame structure, it's 900 miles in diameter. Rough and glazed, black and white, it's yin and it's yang. This moonscape is half dark organic matter and half  (H2O) water-ice. Hemispheres appear to be enjoined by a protruding five-mile-high, twelve-mile-wide equator, a twin-ridge that shoots straight across the patchy irregular black and white surface.

Let's simplify the picture. Iapetus resembles a blackened, pockmarked, walnut shell wearing an ice jacket that's half taken off. In the sun's light, it's black and white. The ice from afar is white but zoom in close and it's gleaming dirty black ice. Iapetus has large and small craters.  Looking into their shadows, some are iced-over, some are filled with coal-black organic matter with a greenish cast according to spectrophotometry studies. There's nothing in the known universe that's simila., not even remotely close.

Curiously, most of Iapetus' craters have sprouted center peaks. [Perhaps there was a plasma semi-liquid layer under the surface so that when attacked by an asteroid projectile, Iapetus reacted with a liquidic splash that sealed on the spot, leaving a single mountain peak frozen in place.] Three distinct ages-old epochs are derived by noting the three distinct directions in which craters have been formed.

Around the pastel-hued Saturn-world and well outside its rings, Iapetus circles once  every 80 days. It hurtles through space but doesn't spin. It leads with its dark and damaged face while its ice-encased tail trails. Iapetus artificially was placed  into orbit; it's in apogee; it orbits in opposition to Saturn's spin. What a show. And it's on a tilted track -- 15 degrees inclined to the rings. Half the time Iapetus has a view of the lighter side of Saturn and its rings and half the time it looks upon Saturn's shadow-side where sunlight sifts through the rings. But Iapetus itself stays in the light of the sun, hardly ever eclipsed. Still, it's very very cold on the surface.  It's theorized there is a layer of ammonia ice under the water ice.

There are tons of theories about Iapetus.  One of the more likely theories of just how Iapetus received it's two-tone paint was posed by a Youngstown State University astronomy and physics professor (now emeritus), Warren Young.  Years before the Casinni space probe transmitted data from Saturn, Professor Young and a colleague proposed this: one hundred million years ago, Iapetus was struck by a passing comet which ripped half its face off. [Perhaps a larger comet passing by sucked away the layer of ice as it dragged Iapetus into Saturn's stronger gravitational field where it now resides. But  where did it come from anyway?] How about  some more of the natural facts on Iapetus? It's not easy to get to the truth so deep, so close, and yet so far far away.

Better info on Iapetus comes from private sector sites, obscure sources, from various non-commercial publications. One's critical thinking needs be exercised. NASA, for their current freaking-control-freaking reasons, holds too tightly onto interesting new data and perspecuitous revelations obtained from the September 2007, Cassini-Iapetus fly-by. Those are my photos, my data; I need to know and I have a right (miniscule tax-payer that I am). Most of the better pictures still come from the 2004 Casinni-Iapetus fly-by, although just last month Casinni was 100 times closer!  That close range radar imaging will be the most telling data to come forth. NASA has withheld those radar images from 2004 and from 2007. Why? Because they might-could show this world what's on and below the surface, inside of Iapetus. For now, the best radar data comes from privately funded ground based observatories [go figure].  One can  learn a lot by perusing scientists' blogs, little from the NASA public press releases.

I would like to see deeper views and further analysis of our own moon so marvelously circling planet Earth. Why does this moon of ours seem to be off limits? What's up with that? How much farther out there into our just reachable outer limits is Iapetus? Is Iapetus also destined, deemed by NASA to be just another forlorn and lonely satellite? For now...

My theory is that Iapetus, even if it is older than dirt, is an affordable fixer-upper. An abandoned death-star. Mightn't it be turned into a great space hotel and research facility for R&R and R&D? A life-star. Bids for occupancy could commence August, 2020.  Free enterprise will be out of this world.  We may see a private sector space-race land-rush onto Iapetus. Stake your claim. Make of it what you will, Iapetus may very well be what's left of an intelligently constructed aeons-ancient ruins that is just now being revealed from under a battered sheet of ice -- it's a mother lode of a time capsule.

Some say that NASA wants you to think that you, yeah you, are the most highly advanced and most intelligent life form in the entire universe, ever.

Here's looking way up at you, kid.

c.2007, H.M.J.

SAILING INTO THE NIGHT by H.M. Johnquest

Just this last Labor Day eve she launched a borrowed kayak into the dark Connecticut River and was swept away by currents into darkness. My sister, Amy (www.bannerqueen.com) Johnquest, said she "found out immediately what it's like to try to steer a gyroscope." Okay... sounds like... fun. She struggled just to return to the landing and vowed not to go back out; she didn't think she would make it back after a longer voyage than this little preliminary trip of being swept away in a moment only to have to fight her way to reclaim safety. Bummer beginning. She was scared. But wisely she was not alone.

Amy told her friends to go ahead without her but Jeff intervened and "gallantly offered to take over that runtish, scrappy and unruly craft. Loaning me his kayak -- a long sleek and easy to glide vessel -- I was amazed at the huge difference in manageability." The kayakers paddled in the dark upstream to an island,  they landed, found a place to sit, and watched the moon rise over the river. "Big smileness," she wrote. Now she wants to buy her own kayak. That's a good trip.

For encouragement, I related my first night-sail which was also my first time out on a good-sized sailboat, the Pearson Triton 28. Friends Paul and Sandy had invited me simply because I had never navigated a sailboat at night. This would be a treasured gift. The sun was sinking, its soft atomic colors were fading. In the twilight we motored away from the docks, past old boat-houses, pilings and piers and beyond into the void, a darkened Sandusky Bay. Save for a few red or green buoys winking and bobbing and marking the channels, our little running lights were alone coursing across the water. After raising sail and cutting the engine, we shushed into the night, sailing silently all out and about for a couple of hours. I was thrilled and I learned plenty.

Thank God that first night sail was an exhilarating heavenly experience. Even if peaceful, it whetted the appetite for many a night sail; some would prove to be more ostentatious than others. Night sailing is a viable option depending on the weather. One takes advantage of conditions when and where one can and/or they'll take you. Here's a good example.

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

Heading south along the East Coast, my cousin Marty Root and I were fit to be tied up at a little marina in Atlantic City, New Jersey -- because of foul weather and repairs -- for two days we worked on the boat, a DuFour 29. I kept an ear on the weather radio and waited for a break. There were changes in the autumn air. The rain had stopped, winds were shifting coming from the North. I'd had enough of waiting and I lept into a narrow window of opportunity to get the show back on the road. We sailed at 8:00 p.m. into the Atlantic and headed South and down into tropical storm Fabian. The big storm wasn't due to hit for a few hours; we thought we could make Cape May as strong North winds blew, speeding us on our way, pushing, running us further southward.

We sallied past the firey red, orange, and yellow blaze of Atlantic City casino hotel signage which tinged the sails with pastel colors spread out before us wing and wing. Those glitzy hotel lights advertise for miles even past the horizon on a clear night at sea. But we ran close along the coast and after Ocean City, the New Jersey got pretty dark. Phosphorescent plankton shimmered in our bow wave and rippled alongside beaming a little more brightly leaving a light green glow in our wake--marking our passage behind us and fading away into the black ocean.

We almost made it to the Cape May inlet before the storm front hit us. We had already shortened sail to reefed main and storm jib and donned the foul weather gear. By dead reckoning, we were approaching, we thought, Cape May inlet. We saw lighted piles of rocks. Winds worked around to the West and buffeted the boat in gusts and whipped up waves heaving oddly. It was the front of a full gale. In the next two days we'd hear over the marine radio two boats calling "may-day, may-day". Yet instead of sailing right in, we went out to sea to see the number on the marker buoy and check it against the number marked on the chart. I wanted to be sure we were precisely where we thought we were. We thrashed about and things got worse as we sailed storm-tossed to get near enough to read the markings by waving a flashlight beam at the wildly bobbing red blinking buoy. It was the right one.

The boat was over-canvased. We droped mainsail, lashed it, cranked up the diesel. Now motor-sailing with the propellar pushing and the little storm jib pulling like crazy, we fetched the inlet directly. Lucky for us we had stayed out to sea to check that buoy number -- because it went wild out there with storm front winds shifting, veering and backing wily nilly at 50 miles per hour yet with plenty of dancing sea room -- instead of getting dashed against the rocks.

By the time we gained the inlet, the wind was a steady freight train roaring out the narrow rocky inlet. The waves, smaller, more orderly, came rolling like trestle timbers awash, wave crests breaking, sea foam spraying, shooting cross troughs, hissing and stinging into our faces. Under motor alone we would have been blown slowly back out to sea. So, with all that wind-power right on the nose, with the storm jib set, we could zig zag, tacking, motor-sailing, sail angling into the wind, leaning far to starboard, then far to port, sailing and turning from breakwall to breakwall, flying back and forth along the narrow rocky inlet, about a dozen quick short tacks skillfully executed (thank you, Marty) before we made it through into the unfamiliar safe harbor in the dark.

Even though I had already  plotted the course on the chart, and which "four-second green flash" lighted-buoy to look for next, and on what compass bearing, and approximately how far to enter the harbor before changing to the new course, I could not see the "four second green flash". My compass said I was dead on the right bearing. But in any strange harbor at night, four seconds is a long time between winks of light. Shore lights distract; some blind your night vision. Car headlights or taillights in the distance can mislead one's eyes off course. In a gale, visibility varies moment to moment. Eight seconds, twelve seconds, no green flash. Maybe I hadn't factored in enough leeway, or too much; I could be blowing off course and into shallow water in no time. Things had been going relatively well up to this point but now I panicked, my heart pounded.

Suddenly, it just came out of me, a prayer. There was no time to think out a properly holy prayer and I know this may sound incredibly trite or banal, I said, "Jesus! Help me see the light!" I swear, right away, there it was. Four seconds later it blinked green again; I changed course several degrees compensating for drift and thrashed on.

By chance we found in the mayhem an empty set of pilings by a wharf where we tied to for two nights, a day, and a half. We set sail when forecast winds were to diminish to "small craft warnings" for the afternoon. We weren't the biggest boat to take shelter inside Cape May's generous harbor but we were first to set sail in Fabian's aftermath. Several cruisers followed, sailed around us and on ahead  -- their sails becoming distant dots across a vast but calming Delaware Bay. That evening in the clearing sky was a fine sunset. I felt radiant... thankful for the light... glad to be sailing again, and for sailing into the night.
c.2007, H.M.J.