the Blood on Overdue Fine from its Deceased Card Holders
by Mark Ganzer
Mirable! I found the Barrington Area Library book, Lake Bluff, the First 100 Years literally in the last place I could have possibly looked on the floor where our family room and my bedroom (staging area) are located! Praise the Lord and thank You Jesus! It was in a box that had been under two boxes and three book bags full of trinkets, baubles, books, and sundry papers.
This was huge for me, because it was a book that my recently deceased mother had checked out and was over due. A week ago, there were two books in this category, and I was able to locate one and take it to the library, where THEY DID NOT CHARGE ONE CENT for late fees “under the circumstances.” the librarian told me.
So, when I went to return this book, the librarian checked, and didn't find that it was overdue. She further checked and could not find a record of my mother's library card. The book WAS reported as missing, on their computer data base, so, the librarian made the proper annotation. I asked if there was a fine to pay. “No,” was her reply.
So, what happened was that the first librarian, without me asking, did all the administrative (computer) things, and if the book have never been found, there would still have been no fine.
Talk about taking the initiative. God Bless You, good people who work at the Barrington Area Library and are such wonderful ambassadors of good will!
WE ALL MUST BE AGAINST BULLYING
by Bradley Sinclair
"The Girl you just called fat? She is overdosing on diet pills. The Girl you just called ugly? She spends hours putting makeup on hoping people will like her. The Boy you just tripped? He is abused enough at home. See that man with the ugly scars? He fought for our country. That guy you just made fun of for crying? His mother is dying. Put this on your status for an hour, if you are against bullying. You never know what its like until you walk a mile in their shoes"
Village of Barrington Workers – Brilliant, Knowledgeable Helpful
By Mark Ganzer
At Macdonald's this morning, three Village of Barrington employees dropped in to have their lunch (these guys start REAL early. Dad took the opportunity to ask about something that could be used to seal Mary Catherine's (our neighbor just across the street, and Mike Singletary's sister-in-law) broken driveway. There IS a magic substance: UBM – ultimate bonding material which can be purchased from one of the big hard ware store outlets (whose name escapes me at the moment – further and clearer, ever clearer evidence that my short term memory is a thing of an ever more distant past), but that you'll need twice as much of the material as you think. You just scoop it out of its container into the hole, and then roll it over. As dad and I were leaving, we thanked them for providing such useful information at breakfast. “We usually don't do this at breakfast,” the one of them explained. “No, usually we do this at lunch.” Nice, knowledgeable gentleman. Thanks guys.
Damn Fine Advice From
Steve Jobs
"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."
Good Shepherd's Past Rapine Pricing Pracitces
and Technical Shortcomings Have Been
Replaced by Compassionate, Efficient
Employees and Fast Service
Went to get a tegretol level blood test yesterday. Tried Quest Diagnostics, but they close at 4:30 p.m., so we proceeded to Good Shepherd which used to charge $450+ for a CBC and Tegretol Level, back in the late 1990's. (Today these tests cost $123 at Quest – you can see why I wanted to go to Quest.)
It took them about 6 minutes to call me, another 3 minutes to process me (they needed new contact information now that mom has died) and another 2 minutes to decided which arm to prick and prick and draw the blood. And we wuz oudda 'dere! Amazing what you can do to improver you efficiency if you put your mind to it! Nice going Good Shep!
Siblings Blow Perfectly Good Opportunity
To Get Into Knock Down Drag Out Fight
Divvying Up Dead Mother's Possessions
by Mark Ganzer
My sister Marianne came in again from Providende, Rhode Island, to help with the clean up of the house. She and Gay (my udda sistah) went through mom's closets, took the things they liked, put the rest in 64 gallon bags, and took the bags to the Salvation Army Place in Lake Zurich, Illinois. They had not arguements over who would get what.
These kind considerations were extended also to Gay asking me if it was okay for her to take a picture from HER own old bedroom. Of course.
Marianne asked me about some jewelry, a necklace. It's fine, sez I. But you should know, sez she, that it has pictures of Adam (son) and Scott (nephew). Marianne, those pictures mean SO much more to an aunt, becuase you are Auntie Marianneski to both of them, while I am merely see him twice a year father and uncle to each one of them. Minimally, you will get double the pleasure from wearing it!
Ralph and Anne really fudged up raising their four kids. Not a materialist amongst them, not a one!
The Poetic Muse Calls Unto Mark
At the Event of the Barrington
Children’s Christmas Concert
by Mark Ganzer
While watching the Children's Christmas Concert in the auditorium of Barrington Concolidated High School was a spectacular treat. The young children came out and semi-circled the audience, and then, they each lit a flash light, shining upwards from their hands held chest-high, and illumination their faces. Of course, old sedimental me loses it, and tears start silently pouring down my cheeks. A soulful flushing. Thanks, Heavenly Father for moments such as these. And when I returned home, I wrote down the following poem:
THE CHILDREN'S PRAYER
Lord grant
that children
be loved, for
if they are loved,
they shall be loving.
Grant too that they might
find their instrument, for with
their instrument, they will come
to know their song. And when they
know their song, they will be able to
make music, and give all of what they are
and more, to a world which needs their song.
Finally, Lord, find ways to remind us, that in Your
eyes we are
all children
Fondly, and with the deepest
gratitude and warmest regards,
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Kind and Thoughtful Advice From John Prine
Had an apartment in the city. Me and Loretta likes living there. It's Been years since the kids have grown, a life of their own, left us alone. John and Linda live in Ohmaha, and Joe he's somewhere on the road. We lost Davey in the Viet Nam war, and I still don't know what for, on't matter anymore.The Most Accomplished Person I Have Known
CHORUS: Ya' know that old tress grow stronger, and old rivers grow wilder ev'ry day, Old people just grow lonely, waitin' for someone to say, "hellow in there, hello."
Some day I'm gonna' call up Rudy, we worked together at the factory. But what would I say if he'd ask "What's new?" "Nothin' much, what's with you?" "Nothin' much, what to do?"
CHORUS:
Me and Loretta. we don't talk much now. She sits and stares and the back door screen, and the news just repeats itself, like some forgotten dream, that we've both seen.
CHORUS:
So, if you're walkin' down the street sometime, and spot some hollow aged eyes, Please, don't pass 'em by and stair, as if you didn't care, say "Hello in their; say hello."
is the Honorary PhD, Marla Hegel
by Mark Ganzer
Homeless when I first met her, Marla Hegel, who graduated from Northwestern University with a double major: English Literature and Journalism. Marla went on to obtain five more advanced degrees: comparative religion, environmental studies, etc, etc. She received an honorary doctorate from Cal Tech in Environmental Studies and has written and continues to update “THE BOOK” that the EPA uses to base its rules and regs on. She taught for a couple of years as a guest lecturer in Edinburough, Scotland. One day not long ago, she got calls from a couple of her students asking if she was getting residuals for her book which was being used to teach the seciont on environmental studies at Edinburough. “Of course not,” she replied. There is no honor in the univeristies. We would like to think there is, but, times are tough, the fight for students and fighting relentless, and, in the end, even at the most prestigious colleges and universities in the world, the quest for students and funding goes unabated, and, so long as you don't get caught, upper management WILL NOT crack down on you. Au Contraire!
And then Marla got pneumonia. She called me in May when I was not here. She has not called since, although she did leave two phone numbers, both hospitals, and I have called those numbers and she is no longer a patient there. And I have returned to the All Night Rock 'N Roll Macdonald's on the North side, and she hasn't been seen there. So, I will continue to pray for her, continue to think happy thoughts about her landing on her feet softly and in clover and lots of cabbage ($$$$$)!
But, Marla, if you get the chance to read this, for Gawd's sake, PULLEASE call me at (224) 234-3550 (I have my own cell phone now!!!!)
Marla's parents escaped from Nazi Germany and immigrated to America. They found a house in Winnetka, Illinois. Now, you might think they wanted their daughter to go to the vaunted New Trier High Shcool System, but, au contraire, her father wanted Marla to get the best education available, and so Marla attend St. Assumption.
Which brings me to the GOOD NEWS of this particular article. After just nine indifferent holes of golf (worse, I was LITERALLY “the bogey man – nine over for nine holes”) dad and I stopped at Mickey D's for our normal breakfast -- for him: two sausage sandwiches plus a senior citizen's soft drink, and for me two sausage burritos plus the senior citizen's soft drink. We parked in back, in the Park District Parking lot, and got a little more exercise as we walked the rest of the way. Dad got to the door before I did (me wuz SMOKIN'!) and went inside first. As I got to the door, I saw a lady wearing a red T-Shirt, which I thought said “MaryHurst” where my good buddy Chuck Sweet went to school. Actually the shirt said, Marlhurst, which, upon inquiry, I learned used to be an all women's Catholic Liberal Arts College in the Portland area. I averred how the Catholics had ALWAYS provided the country with the best eduction. (In fact public education in America was a knee-jerk response TO catholic parochial education; the die-hard right-wing America-firsters full well recognized the value of an excellent education, and decided that the states would fund it at the elementary and secondary school levels. To keep the Catholics from owning the country!
And then I told her the story of Marla Hegel, by way of example!
It was a delightful conversation, AND, she even held the door for me in return for my holding the first door for her!
GOOD NESW AMERICA – strangers will almost invariably be courteous to strangers! Praise the Lord; all thanks to God!
Shock and Awe and Daylight Precision Bull Roar
30 Aug. 2011 by Jeff Huber
An experiment in color photography!
Parts I and II of “Post-Clasuwitzean Bebop in the New American Century” outlined the pathetic state of today’s American military intellect. Part III describes how Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare evolved from fundamentally flawed air power theory.
COIN (aka counterinsurgency) is the latest in a panorama of dogmas from the war shamans to promise a new and better way to fight armed conflicts. But COIN is actually a degenerative development in warfare philosophies, a return to manpower-intensive operations that high dollar gizmos of destruction were supposed to have made obsolete.
The collision between soldier-centric and gadget-driven conflicts began in the American Civil War and reached critical mass during World War I. Napoleonic infantry tactics designed to break through lines of sword and musket defenders withered in the face of machine gun fire. More than 10 million military personnel were killed in World War I and total military casualties topped 38 million, an unimaginable horror to Europeans who thought their races were far to civilized to ever allow such carnage to occur. Little did they know at the time that they’d only seen a preliminary bout—total World War II deaths exceeded 60 million.
World War I was combat airpower’s debutante ball. Much ado was made (and still is) of the magnificent men in their flying machines derring that do that they did so well in the skies above the pathetic mud knockers slogging it
The birth of air power theory.
out below. But as a Naval War College professor who was also a senior U.S. Air Force officer once confessed to his airpower elective seminar, “World War I did more for air power than air power did for World War I.” What ended the trench war of attrition stalemate in that conflict was the late influx of American bodies that ensured the Central Powers would bleed white before Allied Powers did. The flying circuses were sideshow entertainments.
Interwar air power advocates like Billy Mitchell, Giulio Duhet and Hugh Trenchard pandered the “strategic bombing” doctrine that advocated use of bomber aircraft to defeat enemy states by destroying their economic infrastructure and their publics’ will to wage war rather than battling their armies and navies. To this day the goal of air power psychopathy is to make all other forms of warfare obsolete and to redirect the budgets of armies and navies into air services’ coffers.
Strategic bombing theory and its space-age progeny, Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare, suffer from a number of famously flawed assumptions. First among them is the dictum that “the bomber will always get through,” a maniacal mantra first mouthed by Sir Stanley Baldwin in the late 1920s that promised that of bombers would always be able to sufficiently defeat air defenses and destroy enemy cities. That philosophy alone had sufficient holes to guarantee that air power would never live up to its hype.
Let's make that, "The bomber will sometimes get through."
The 8th Air Force bombing campaigns in Europe gave us a veritable entertainment franchise chronicling the adventures—dramatic, tragic and absurd—of bomber crews shot down over Nazi Germany who spent the duration of the war trying to escape from a Luft Stalag. What would post-modern life be without our fond memories of Steve McQueen bouncing his baseball against the wall of the “cooler,” or of William Holden organizing mouse races, or of Bob Crane threatening to pull some stunt that would get Werner Klemperer transferred to the Russian front?
The preponderance of Allied air casualties came about as a result of the daylight precision bombing concept, which was itself flawed in multiple respects. The most incongruous of these flaws was the assumption that heavily armed B-17 flying fortresses would be as able to defend themselves against enemy fighters during the day as well as they could at night, a notion spawned in an era when fighter aircraft were strictly visual combatants and did not fly at night. Daylight precision bombing also assumed that the B-17s’ super-duper Norden bombsights could consistently put bombs on whatever targets they were trained on. That assumption blithely ignored easily anticipated probabilities like changes in wind direction between the bomber and the target, clouds and fog and haze obscuring the targets, bombardiers not recognizing the target and so on.
The public's will to wage war.
“Conventional” strategic bombing did manage to destroy cities in World War II, Dresden and Tokyo being two of the most horrifying examples. But this type of bombing—also called “terror bombing”—failed to destroy the publics’ will to wage war. In fact, the publics’ will is seldom a factor in totalitarian nations like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or in so-called liberal democracies like today’s America where state-of-the-art propaganda distributed through the mass media has seduced the public into a state of bovine torpor. The only known instance of successful terror bombing was the 9/11 attacks that goaded malleable Americans into going along with ill-advised invasions of countries that had nothing to do with the attacks.
Asserting that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the decisive blow that ended the war in the Pacific is like saying that Julius Caesar died from a massive injection of tetanus bacteria. The Japanese had already been defeated through a years-long series of horrible land and naval campaigns. A very good argument, and one that I subscribe to, says that Hirohito would have forced his government to surrender without the need for atomic operations if we had communicated to him via back channels that he could stick around as emperor, which was what we apparently planned to do all along. (Please note that the argument over whether the nuclear option was necessary with Japan is a separate issue from whether or not nuking the two Japanese cities was moral or legal. If I were in President Truman’s shoes I would have dropped the nukes too.)
Air power made its greatest contribution to the war in Europe when General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme commander of the European Theater of Operations, ordered the 8th Air Force to switch its priorities from strategic bombing to support of the Normandy Invasion and the subsequent land operations that led to the defeat of the Wehrmacht, which Ike correctly identified as the German’s center of gravity.
In instance after instance since World War II, airpower’s useful contributions have consisted not of independent, strategic bombing but of strikes in support of ground and naval operations. We’ve seen that as recently as our Libyan lark; strikes against infrastructure and regime “target sets” had little impact. It was only when air power was used in support of rebel offensives that balls started dropping into pockets.
Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare are little more than a 21st century take on strategic bombing theory. GPS guided munitions replace the Norden bombsight and computers replace the bombardiers, but the strategic effect remains nil.
Next: A COINfederacy of Dunces
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Great News About Mellisa Kick
by Mark Ganzer
I spoke with Mellisa's mom at chruch this past Sunday in Ingleside. The lung replacement has been a success! The spaghetti dinner at the Fox Lake Fire Department raised $2,500 on an outlay of $25 for spaghetti. TWICE they had to go out and get more spaghetti. This reminds me so much of the bibilical story of the loaves and the fishes. So many thanks to all you who have been there raising monies to offset the cost of what the insurance won't pay! It will be handled. The Lord of Hosts has deemed that it will!
One of the Very Few Thank You Cards
Your Correspondent has ever Sent
by Mark Ganzer
Dear Adam,
I want to tell you how nice your Christmas presents to Scott, Gay, Mike, Grandma Anne, Grandpa Ralph and me were. Christmas time is a time for giving just as God gives us His love and Jesus gave His life for us. These things you will learn at Saint Anne.
It made me feel very happy and proud to hear your mother tell us that you used your own money. You picked great presents for us all.
Thank you very much. You are a very fine young boy, and I love you very much.
With love, your father
Mark Ganzer
The Psalms Still Speak to Us and Resonate With Us
Psalm 112
1Praise ye the LORD. Blessed is the man that feareth the LORD, that delighteth greatly in his commandments.
2His seed shall be mighty upon earth: the generation of the upright shall be blessed.
3Wealth and riches shall be in his house: and his righteousness endureth for ever.
4Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness: he is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.
5A good man sheweth favour, and lendeth: he will guide his affairs with discretion.
6Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance.
7He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.
8His heart is established, he shall not be afraid, until he see his desire upon his enemies.
9He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor; his righteousness endureth for ever; his horn shall be exalted with honour.
10The wicked shall see it, and be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away: the desire of the wicked shall perish.
First Corinthians 2 Verses 1-5
1) And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.
2) For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
3) And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.
4) And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:
5) That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
Prayer for You All
Be well, my brothers and sisters
Keep faith in Love, in the Love of God for we, his defenseless creatures, who can do much good. AMEN
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