Leveraged Intelligence

The Opposite Sex …

This topic was brought to us for our Friday Consortium offering by Ashok.  Not all Consortium members will write on it, because many are finding themselves intermittently occupied by vacations, careers or romance.  But, all are always worth the read and I will be going through my list of Consortium links on the left side of this window right after I post this.  I encourage you to do the same.

Everyone knows the confusions involved with understanding the opposite sex … but what if the confusion were, “Which sex IS the opposite sex?”  In someone very close to me and my wife, it played out as I will soon narrate, but please understand that I have not asked nor gotten permission to indicate either the identity of this person or how they are connected with our family.  Suffice it to say that we are close.

He was still identifying as a man when he came to Carol and me, saying there was something he wished to talk about with us.  We assumed, once we learned that it was not a health issue, that he might tell us he was gay.  But he didn’t.  He told us that he was a transgender personality.  We were unprepared and frankly puzzled, for this was before the condition was known well to the public, so it took awhile for him to acquaint us with the concept.

He told us that he was and always had been attracted to women and was not gay, perplexing us further.  Then he said that he saw himself as a woman and always had as far back as he could remember.  Indeed, he had worn his mother’s and sister’s clothing in private since the age of four.

It was then that he dropped the shoe and told us that he intended to live as a woman.  We immediately wondered if this meant surgery and he assured us, no, he was not going to have a sex change.  But, he wanted to tell us first, because he had others that all of us knew who would need help with acceptance and he wished for our assistance.

Well, to make a long story short, we became more acquainted with the idea.  We attended a Halloween party that year of his – who had now become her, the way that I will refer to her from this point forward – friends in the San Francisco transgender community.  One was a former Marine, who, to my amazement, didn’t bother much with acting in any feminine manner.  But, others were quite feminine as well as the transgender women-to-men who appeared fairly masculine.  We learned a different view of the universe that night.  One woman, quite attractive, was a well-known male newspaper columnist with a family by day, with a family and kids – an arrangement that was totally above board with the family, but not with the newspaper!  She was so articulate and intelligent, we talked for a length of time and came away much more comfortable.

Somewhere in the vicinity of 5 to 10% of the population is gay.  But the prevalence of transgender individuals is much less!  They have been shunned historically in a much more vehement manner than homosexuals and have often been killed.  Many of the readers of this post may be feeling discomfort or worse as they read this piece.

But, I say to you the same thing that I said to so many of those near me regarding this subject: “I know you have questions, for so do I. Would you like to discuss this?”

Time Travel Revisited

Of course this would come in AFTER our piece on time travel.  The irony isn’t lost on me.  Then again, now that I’ve found it, maybe I can go back in time to the earlier piece and use this!

If I could travel in Time, I would …

This is the Friday offering of the Loose Bloggers Consortium, a list of the members with links to their blogs on the left.  We write on the same topic each Friday without knowing in any way what the others have written.  This should be VERY interesting to see what the different members come up with and I want to personally thank Judy Harper, the Creative Writer in Progress on the left for such a delightful suggestion.

How many of you have seen the Will and Grace show when Jack met Cher?  This clip is so funny, because Jack always imitated Cher – and you will see by the end of it how it fits in with our time travel theme.

Jack meets Cher

If I could turn back time … what the heck would I do with it?

I put this together with certain assumptions.  First, I assumed that I would not be visible to anyone in the circumstance, would not be able to interfere, just observe.  Second, I assumed I could not be harmed by events or the environment.  Third, I assumed I could place myself anywhere in space as easily as I could in time.  In other words, I would be kind of a ghost!

Then I decided to just start free associating.  My interests are always so eclectic, as anyone who has read this blog for awhile knows.  I knew that if I had this ability, I would have a large number of interests that would be continually changing.  In fact, what I can’t actually put in place here is how my next target would change depending upon the experience at the current and last place.

Also, note that none of my travel is to the future!  I would only want to learn things from he past … but I wouldn’t want to screw up my present by knowing anything of the future.  Besides, I think that any future would be a probable outcome anyway.

So, enough with the prelims.  Here is the list of times / places that flowed out of me.  And, let me tell you, this list would just grow and grow and …

• Go back to see how the pyramids were constructed!
• See if I could find Jesus, Joseph and Mary, John the Baptist, the Disciples.
• Check out the events surrounding Moses at various points!
• Check out the first humans at Olduvai Gorge.
• Go see the Founding Fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin.
• Go to the School Book Depository in Dallas to see if Lee Harvey Oswald really did do it alone.  Also, I might have to multiply locate to the Grassy Knoll.
• Visit Einstein in his study at the point that he boiled the essence down to E=mc²
• Return to the Renaissance and watch Michelangelo at work on David, on the Sistine Chapel.
• Go to the moon to watch the first landing, the first steps.
• Watch Mozart and Beethoven compose.
• See how Shakespeare wrote and directed some of his plays.
• Watch Krakatau explode and Vesuvius erupt!
• Watch DaVinci painting the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
• Watch Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige, each in his prime.
• Watch and listen to Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.
• Watch Orson Wells and crew create War of the Worlds for the radio.
• Go to China and observe the life and surroundings of Confucius.
• Go to old Tibet, with one of the early Dalai Lamas – or, at least the Dalai Lama in early incarnations – at the Potala.
• Check out some of my early ancestors in Germany and see, in about 1630, where Barthold Hake came from.  He lived in Hemeringen, ten miles from Hameln, but … before that we do not know.

And on and on.  Where would you go?  What would you want to see?

Mayo’s Descendents

Only one of these two sitting here with Maynard is a bloodline descendent.  Guess which one!

Mayo, sorry to hear about the accident that took the pinky off your left hand, man.

The Wildest Thing I Did in My Youth

Gotta tell ya – when gaelikaa came up with this, my main problem was choosing what to say … and deciding what was appropriate to say … so I decided to just say it! I can’t wait to see what the other characters came up with, so be sure to peruse their takes on this, all published more or less simultaneously.  You can find links to all their sites on the left.  And, now, let the recounting begin:

It was the summer of 1977 when my best friend and I decided to take advantage of Greyhound’s offer of travel to anywhere in America for $50.  I had been teaching all year and while working nine months, I was paid on a twelve-month basis.  When you are young that seems like free money.

So, we got on the bus in Topeka, Kansas and headed for California!  Let me recount for you, chronologically, all the things that happened.  Cross my heart, all of them are true:

• On the way to Denver, the guys behind us were smoking pot.  The bus driver kept thinking it was us, probably because we had hair down to there.  I was getting ready to give the driver what for when my friend informed me that he was “holding,” the term for having a drug or two in his possession, and that we should just let it go.  So we did.  And we were summarily kicked off the bus at the Denver Depot.  At midnight.
• In the bus depot, the manager told us that if we wanted to go to the bathroom, it was best to go together, since a guy had been murdered in the bathroom overnight a couple of weeks before.So, a guy came in and we smoked some really good pot with him out back.  We had to do something with our time.
• We decided that we should make even better use of our time, so we decided to get train tickets across the Rockies to our friends’ house in Grand Junction.  We were on the train by 6:00 – and if you’ve never taken a train across the Rockies, let me highly recommend it!  We would stand between the cars and hang out in the fresh air, taking in the gorgeous views.  Then we settled in a car that seemed really nice – only to find that it was really nice because it was the crew’s car.  But, they liked us and told us we could hang with them.  In return, we got them stoned in Grand Junction.
• In Grand Junction, we got back on the bus with the ticket from the original $50, if you can believe that.  We went to Salt Lake City, where I met a lovely lady with whom I made out all the way to San Francisco.  You need to do something on a bus to pass the time.
• She put us up in North Beach in San Francisco for a couple of days and I really think she and I could have made a go of it – except that I was moving on, she had her boyfriend returning to town and, unbeknownst to me, my future mate was only 25 miles away.  Anyway, that was when I fell in love with San Francisco!
• Traveled on the bus to Southern California.  Met up with my buddy’s distant cousins.  Did our laundry.  Spent some time with them.  They tried to convert us to their brand of Christianity.  So, we exchanged pleasantries, explained how tight our schedule was – of which there was actually nothing, of course – and moved on.
• Took the local bus with no destination in mind.  Decided totally on impulse – because, and I mean this sincerely, when we did that, something a whole lot greater than us guided with uncanny precision, a concept a bit foreign to my buddy’s relatives – to get off at a hole we saw in the fence.  Went through the hole to the beach below.  Found out it was named Capistrano Beach, put down our sleeping bags … and found out later that this was a contested stretch of beach and thus was the only beach in Southern California you could sleep on without fear of reprisal.  Thank you, GREATER POWER!
• While we are staying on the beach, learning to harvest grunion, and partying in general (we were very popular, because we brought no expectations and just joined in), we sleep through a woman having a domestic argument, being shot, trying to run away and being hit by a train that ran by the beach.  She was OK after some patching up in the morning, because people who sleep on the beach seem to be pretty damn hardy, and my buddy and I helped her patch it up with her husband the next day.  We were very good at listening.
• Deciding to take a bus for a quick jaunt, we find a movie we’ve never heard of, go to the first Star Wars movie.  Walked up just in time to be in the front of the line … of course.  The Force was definitely with us and the movie made a crapload of sense.  Dude, we lived like that!
• Take another bus trip to the LA area and miss a connection.  No problem, because even the screw-ups workout for the two of us.  We notice that we are across the street from Disneyland (I’ll be damned!) so, my buddy, who always seems to have an endless supply of something, wheels out some mushrooms to munch and we go get tickets.  Wow!  It really IS the magic kingdom!
• Near the end of the day, out of the blue we meet up with a girl we know from Kansas.  This is a girl whose parents  have decided I am bad for her and that she is not to see me anymore.  We REALLY like each other.  Neither of us had any idea that the other was going to California, let alone anything else.  So, we go back to the Whalers Inn to talk and make out.
• Time to meet up with my buddy’s brother in Tucson.  We head back, find that Hell is actually cooler, but somehow find a place that we can stay for a bit.  I sleep in the basement the first night – and … the wall opens up for me with no chemical assistance whatsoever and I see things that Moses could relate to.  Next morning, I tell my mates that I am not sleeping down there again!
• Head to Durango, have adventures in mountains a bit, sleep on a mountainside – you know, regular stuff.
• Well, it is time to head home.  Now, we split into different groups and I am with my buddy’s brother, definitely one of my best friends in the universe these days, a guy I will be calling Saturday.  But, he and I can’t get a ride hitchhiking for anything.  However, we are picked up by a forest firefighter who is having all his animals and his wife shelling out new little beings.  This guy is magical!  He puts us up in a bedroom to sleep in paper firefighter sleeping bags on a floor that goes right out the window to a patio that he built on a second story into the trees.  Wow!
• We can’t get a ride together for anything.  So, we split up and decide that might help.  It does, but I get caught at the end of a day in Limon, Colorado in a rain storm and sleep overnight under a park bench.  I’m really starting to feel ridden hard and put away wet at this point, but I haven’t been put away quite yet.  Sheesh!  Cop wakes me up, makes me move on.  Later, I find that Mom had to pay a $12 fine for me sleeping there.
• Finally get the remainder of the rides home that I need.  Or, at least close enough that my folks can pick me up.  I have … and this is no exaggeration … 4 cents in my pocket!

That is the wildest adventure of my youth!  But, I still have a few others to relate to you.  Uh … quite a few!

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

“If I have given my all and still do not win, I haven’t lost. Others might remember winning or losing; I remember the journey.”

Apolo Ohno

Another in the Loose Bloggers Consortium series, this topic suggested from Maria.  I have Consortium members listed with links to their blogs in the left margin.  Since we all post simultaneously, it will be interesting as always to see what they have to say!

Question of the day: does loose refer to bloggers or to consortium here?  Ah … might have something to do with today’s topic, so let’s begin …

Lindsey Vonn / Apolo Anton Ohno / Lindsey Jacobellis / Shaun White

Above, I have four American Olympic athletes, each interesting in her or his own right.  Each represents an aspect of the American psyche in rather unique ways and it is a very important part of the American psyche at that.  America embraces competition as part of our ideal, so the way that our representatives relate to competition is very important to understanding us as a people – a people in transition.

In the ideal, we believe in accomplishment of the individual and we believe in that accomplishment in a competitive environment.  We believe that is what drives our wealth and – as I observe it – that our job in the world is to NOT LOSE!  We often see ourselves as the heroic carriers of the torch.  The world is obviously more complex than that, but it is very much at our core since World War II.  That colors how we compete in something like the Olympics, so let’s look at our four competitors as examples and see how they are doing and their attitudes toward it.

Lindsey Vonn

Lindsey is an American story that we really like.  She is the best, but she is injured, playing in pain.  She has to overcome obstacles to achieve her goal, she has to EARN a medal.   And, she has a mixed bag so far, but she sees it all to the good, for she gutted her way through to a gold in the women’s downhill skiing event.  It meant everything to her and she let it be known that she had given up so much to get that medal.  She was very emotional.

The mixed result for her is that I have just gotten the news that she fell in her second event and thus ends out of contention.

Apolo Anton Ohno

Apolo is, in many ways, the competitors competitor.  He has tied Bonnie Blair as the most decorated American Winter Olympian ever, with six medals, undoubtedly with more to come.  His workout regimens have been grueling to get to this point and he is in the prime condition of his life.  He will, almost without a doubt win more medals than the silver he got in his first race, thanks in VERY large part to one Korean skater taking out himself and his teammate to prevent a Korean sweep of the Short-track skating event Ohno has competed in.  It is a sport where fortune, good or bad, can play a major role and sometimes I wonder how much that has to do with Ohno’s attitude.

He is a nice balance of fiercely competitive and philosophically mellow, as evidenced by the statement he made at the beginning of this post.  The statement was put on Twitter this morning by him.  And, from observing him, I think he means it.  Nice.

Lindsey Jacobellis

This is one of the most interesting cases ever.  Lindsey is arguably the best in her sport of Snowboard Cross.  She has been world champion numerous times and – this is the monkey on her back – she dominated the Olympics in 2006 when, with a commanding lead coming to the finish line … she … tried an unnecessary trick … fell down … and took Silver! This was her chance for redemption, because she has been reminded of this every interview for four years.

She was well on her way.  Until she slipped up on a hard turn, hit a gate, and was immediately out of the race!  It was a stomach blow that would be hard to take!

But, she rolled with it and pitched herself into winning the consolation race.  Like Ohno, she talked about how great the experience of this Olympics was.  But, she added something else – she said that she was grateful she wasn’t injured and would be able to keep on racing.  The way she said it, you realized that she just LOVES to get on that snowboard and do what she does and I had the feeling that is more important to her than the medal.

Good for her!

Shaun White

This kid is phenomenal.  He does the half-pipe snowboarding and he absolutely dominates.  Like Lindsey Jacobellis, he is part of a culture more surfer than anything else, and they really hang loose!  Known as the Flying Tomato for his long red hair, Shaun has learned to market himself without losing either his competitive edge or his cool.  He is kind of the new American hero of his generation, to be honest.  He is someone you CAN’T resent for making 8 mil a year, more than any other Olympic athlete.  He hangs out with people like Richard Branson!

How does this fit in with our title of Fifteen Minutes of Fame?  Olympic athletes, unlike our professionals who parade before us week after week, year after year, only get one shot every four years.  There is only so long you can train before you age or just get tired of the regimen.  More than any other athletes, these people will be pretty much forgotten by the public until it is time for them to compete again.  They epitomize the torch itself that no one thinks about between Olympics, in the background, forgotten.  These people really don’t worry about that, I don’t think, for when they burn, they burn bright!

And, there you have it.  America as seen through one group of Americans.  We are a young culture.  We have a lot to learn.

The Birthday of My Uncle Con

The name Conrad in my family has been passed down through many generations, beginning in Germany in 1737.  This is my Uncle Con – Edwin Conrad Hake – for whom I am named.  We each carried as our first names the names of our fathers; Edwin in his case, Joseph in mine (although my father is actually Joe, not Joseph … and, no, I am not a junior).  We each have always been called by our middle names, although Uncle Con was called Ed in the US Air Force, in the service of which he lost his life as a bomber pilot over Germany in 1944, I believe on the day that we lost more pilots than any other, a day when it is reported that a cross appeared in the sky.

He would have been 89 yesterday, had life turned out differently, and I always wondered what it would have been like to have known him as my uncle.  I think it would have been marvelous from everything I have heard.  He was an amazing athlete (all-state basketball player) and a natural leader, the type of man who quietly commanded respect by his behavior, not by his insistence.

Clearly a very handsome man, the above picture was taken of him reading a newspaper in England during the war.  The women absolutely loved him.  He could have been arrogant with his qualities of physical attractiveness and athletic prowess.  Not to mention the status of becoming an air force bomber pilot.  He obviously had the top coin in the realm of American popularity.  He could have gotten away with mistreating those “below” him.  But, he didn’t live life that way.

My father, his younger brother, became frustrated at some teasing when they were young and popped his older brother in the nose – bloodying it!  But, Con didn’t cry, didn’t retaliate.  He laughed!  And, told my dad that was a pretty good shot.

Editors note: like with most family stories, there will be some details about this one that I don’t have quite right, LOL.  However, I think this is substantially accurate.

My point is this: I never got to meet you, my namesake.  I was born five years after your death, Uncle.  All I know is this – I would have loved knowing you!  I also know that your loss was SEVERELY felt by your family.  While it is normal to idealize those we lose so young, I think there is a lot of substance to your legend.

I have one last bit of knowledge about you that you would love – I know that you were not EXACTLY six feet tall!

Laughing ‘til the Tears Roll Down

There is cerebral humor, the type that you really enjoy, the type you comment upon, the type that often makes a point and makes you think.  Then … there is humor that goes so immediately to something so primitive, so deeply seated, that all you can do is laugh ‘til the tears roll:

Carol Burnett, Tim Conway, Harvey Korman – they were masters of this.  Enough said, for here is another of my favorites from their show.  Enjoy:

A Person, Place, Thing or Idea

They call it the Annus Mirabilis of Albert Einstein, the year 1905.  In one burst of genius virtually unparalleled,  he produced four papers that year and a doctoral thesis.  Every one of the papers was Nobel Prize caliber and every one of them helped shape our modern world.

The first three papers, remarkably were all published in the same journal, Annalen der Physik 17.  This is what they each essentially accomplished:

Explanation of the Photoelectric Effect – for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 – described light as composed of photons and led to the quantum revolution in physics.

Explanation of Brownian Motion of small particles in liquids.  This indirectly confirmed the existence of atoms and molecules.

Special Relativity.  Perhaps you have heard of this one!  It ushered in a whole new way of understanding space and time and tossed our understanding of what we perceive on its head.

His fourth paper was a further work on Special Relativity and introduced the famous E = mc2.

And, did I tell you he also did a Doctoral Thesis that year?

Years later, after the Nazis had run him out of Germany in 1933, he was courted by the best American academic institutions.  He was at Stanford and they were showing him all the magnificent scientific instruments and tremendous facilities they had and he was like a kid in a candy shop.  When one of the professors turned to his wife Elsa and asked her if she thought he was impressed, she told them that he loved it – but that they needed to realize he could do more than all that on the back of a postcard.

From his theories, nuclear energy has grown, the LASER – which he spelled out as possible – was developed, and the list of derivative inventions in many ways frame the Twentieth Century and beyond.  But, he only invented and patented one item himself – a refrigeration unit.

Just think.  Instead of all that academic stuff in his head … we could be seeing a quite wealthy Einstein legacy of Frigidaires with his picture right on the front!

This is another Friday offering in the Loose Bloggers Consortium, the list of whom are on the left.  The Magpie came up with this topic – so I tried to channel him in its creation!  Please take some time to enjoy the writings of the others on such a broad theme.  I have no idea what they will write, but it is always interesting, fun and thought provoking.

My Little Warrior

She isn’t very big, just a smidge over 5 ft. tall (about 153 centimeters).  A smidge is just about this much – ||.  And, she can seem quite civilized as you can see above.

Yet, we find that going to New Zealand has brought out a different side: a mini Maori Warrior Princess!  She texted this message to me on Sunday:

I’m about to dress in warrior clothes, get my face painted with traditional markings, and do the haka!

I show you the Maori Haka from YouTube:

She said that only the men stick out their tongues – as though that would make me feel better.   Her group was videotaped performing it (not the group above, no) and then put on a DVD that she will be bringing home in June.

But … I’m almost afraid to bring her home …