It's In My Nature

A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs. "Don't be scared," the scorpion says. "If something happens to you, I'll drown." Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, "How could you? You know you'll drown!"

"It's in my nature," gasps the sinking scorpion.

_______________

This fable of The Scorpion and The Frog is also a lesson on misplaced trust, on the limits of logic, on not escaping the insuppressible nature of things, and more:

What was the incentive for the frog to even entertain help carry that scorpion? NONE! It was not just the scorpion's nature that's in question here but more so it is the frog's nature to blame. That frog should not have helped in such an event with a clear eventuality. Wasn't this the co-dependency on the frog's part that sank them both? YES!

It is what it is, I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam. THIS co-dependent frog must question everything. I must fight my nature and do just my own... cross the river solo, and not help the scorpions. Kindness has its limits, clearly, and so I have my demons to fight.


- text © 2009 by Willy

Outplay Them

"Excuse me... do you have the time?" said one of the two young men in front of the mall's record store this morning.

Translated it means "Hold on there until my buddy blindsides you. And, by the way, do you wear a Rolex?"

I said "No" forcefully and kept a fast pace. He wanted to know when the store opens. I said a second "No." He walked after me in frustration as I kept him in my peripheral vision, but finally stopped.

The next step would have been to press the button on my switchblade.

This was early on a Sunday morning, while walking the mall due to inclement weather. I carry my handgun at night but seldom go out then, and haven't been in a bar in a decade or two. I haven't had an incident like this in years and years. I live in Podunk and we have little crime.

I'm 60 years old and so many pounds have transferred from my chest to my gut that it seems I've gotten to the point that I no longer repel punks. I remember the good old days when some road rage idiot would get out of his car, I got out of mine and he stopped cold, mumbling while he got back in.

The truth is that I can no longer fistfight nor run away, so my options are down to being more aware, reducing opportunities for incidence, and increasing the counter-lethality to match.


If you can't outrun them, outplay them.

But if I cannot evade, outplay or outthink them, I will shoot.




- text © 2009 by Willy

Exit Strategy

Johnnie and Jane went trick or treating on Halloween and knocked on an old lady's door, who gave them candy but felt it odd to close the door on them because they just stood there instead of running off to the next house, so she asked "What's the matter, kids?" and Johnnie said "We don't have an exit strategy."

Before you laugh: Afghanistan is costing us a million dollars per soldier per year.

A good joke can be reused. This one came out years ago and it was about President Bush on Iraq. President Clinton had Somalia and Bosnia, and it could have definitely been used with President Johnson on Viet Nam. The only difference is that this year "exit strategy" is called "off-ramp." It's all the same. It is unfortunate that we keep finding ourselves in the same spot, year after year, but I have to trust that our President knows a hell of a lot more than I do.

But wait... maybe I should apply this to my personal life. I should think ahead and ask myself "how am I going to get out of this" before I do anything. If I had, I would not have dated, gotten engaged, married, nor had kids (now you can laugh). I've made mistakes year after year. So, now, and in the future, I will not even date. I'm going to stick to the predictable, the reliable, even the boring... to what I know... solo... that has a built-in exit strategy. I will keep a much lower profile ("remain in the noise floor" in engineering), because I will not enter.

Versus the more common exit strategy of leaving once they get some.



- text © 2009 by Willy

P.S., That I need what I know is yet another blog.

To Believe the Incredible

You already exercise faith. You already believe the incredible... you're just used to it by now. Birds fly whether or not they believe in the laws of aerodynamics and we all enjoy the phone, TV, driving and flying... even though few of us understand the laws of physics. We enjoy a sunny day without understanding (believing) in nuclear fusion. Mother nature took billions of years, they say. Our technology took a couple of centuries to evolve and allow us to have our current era of magical gadgets, we think. God took six days, it says.


We can't see electrons any more than we can see the wind moving around... but we can see evidence of electrons via light bulbs and of the wind by rustling leaves. We believe through evidence, which is all around us. Yes, we can believe impossible things, Alice In Wonderland... and we do.

One must use faith to see the invisible and believe the incredible... and so we do, in this circular argument for faith.



- © 2009 by Willy

P.S., To be alive in such an age! - Walt Whitman

Lock Up?

"We lock up more of our citizens per capita than brutal dictators like Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro," wrote Cynthia Tucker in her request to end the War on Drugs.

I've got news for her. In the early 1960's, Castro's Cuban revolutionaries shot the entire previous party dead... up against a wall. No going to see a judge. It was televised, day in and day out. "Paredon!" they chanted. Thousands and thousands died, so there was no locking them up in the hoosegow. And many of the ones that were lucky enough to get to jail ended up dead anyway, due to starvation and sickness. Rape, murder and looting (in that order) were wholesale and only deterred by hefty walls and demonstration of defensive gunfire. No getting caught and going to jail for that, since the murderers were the new revolutionary party. Then in the 1980's, Fidel sent his prisoners here via the Mariel Boatlift and emptied his jails.

Since then, news and pictures have appeared of dissidents being beaten to death at the US Special Interest Section in Cuba ("the embassy")... no need to lock them up either.

Yes, Cynthia, brutal dictator Fidel Castro doesn't lock up the citizens... he kills them instead. Your statement is an insult.

"Tijuana authorities found 275 pounds of marijuana and a half-completed tunnel under the border," quipped Jay Leno, "Wonder why the tunnel was only half completed?"

Dahhh! Is it better to laugh with Leno and be ignorant like Tucker, or be stressed with the truth?


- text © 2009 by Willy

Thievery

Once is randomness, twice catches my eye but the third time is a 3-sigma event that raises the hair in back of my neck and makes me pay strict attention. The fourth time?


I knew that there were all kinds of thieves, from the idiot with a gun robbing a bank cashier to the bank vice-president stealing it big-time. But I did not expect to see our citizens in cahoots with congress and the bankers giving the entire country away. I lived through the Savings & Loan debacle of the 80's but the current thievery makes the S&L crooks weak amateurs by comparison. And it's happening not once, twice or three times... they're about to raid the treasury for the fourth time in a little over a year to the tune of yet another trillion or so. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking ALL the money (with appologies to senator Dirksen). The fiscal year 2009 deficit was three times that of 2008. The foreign-owned US debt is $3 trillion, a quarter of that China's. There is no letup in sight.

Our great nation is the last bastion of stoic common sense, but we seem to want to go the way of Rome. It's not my congressmen who are voting screwy, it's the big cities and "blue" states.

The fourth time scares me.


-text © 2009 by Willy


P.S., it's also called looting and plundering, but it's usually done to another country.

A Real Engineer

The times were when an engineer could work in his garage all by himself and invent a great new gizmo.

Those times are long gone.

Real engineers still help solve problems, first by careful observation and then by bold intervention, but we are now do-it-yourself self-starters with ant-like collaboration. We have to work well with others on our machines. We have to cooperate and coordinate. Sometimes we have differences and we get frustrated. Like brothers, we have to learn to get along and get past our differences. We have to share in the work, in the fun and in the glory. We have to make this people challenge equal to the technical challenge... a problem to solve.


It used to be that all we needed was a wirewrap pencil in a lab. Nowadays, it takes that plus the right words... and only the right words... spoken with all our heart, all our soul and all our might. Whether we like it or not, it's true: we have to work together to get things done.

Well, self... get on with it: go talk to the team and give them some inspiration, and remember that I'm a real engineer. I'm a real engineer. I'm a real... [clicking heels together]. Oh, for the good old days!



- text © 2009 by Willy