Kickemuit Rainbow

A front rolled through here around 7pm Sunday - bringing showers and then with clearing, a rainbow off to the east, over the Kickemuit River. Here's that lovely rainbow, which I tried to post on FB but couldn't. View is from my backyard deck.

Weathering the Recession – and Remembering Maxx

I figured out some time back that I am too young to quit, and too old to start over in a heavily physical job. But I cannot be idle, either, moping doesn't work, and when money is tight, I can't afford to spend my time drinking and feeling sorry for myself. So what's left?

Keep on plugging and just don't ever give up or quit. When business is really down and I can't afford to do anything including buying paint to paint the house, I put on my hiking boots and spend a couple of hours in a vigorous hike in the woods. It clears my head, gets me into a soothing environment and helps me plan new strategies.

A few years ago I knew a guy named Maxx Robinson. He was sort of an old-time hustler entrepreneurial type who had been in sales and marketing and PR and had grown up Bruce Robinson and changed his name for some dumb reason. Maxx grew up poor in Cherryfield, Maine, a one-horse town that still looks a lot like it did when the Civil War broke out.

Maxx was in his mid-80’s when I met him and unlike people of his generation, he was computer-savvy, knew the ins and outs of e-mail and desktop publishing and more. He was always trying to start new ventures, was a self-published author, cigar-chomping old-school guy who knew modern media and computers extremely well for a guy his age, who even in advanced age never lost his spirit for new entrepreneurial ventures. He wasn’t rich, was something of a boaster and a windbag, but was never down or discouraged and refused to believe that there was a time in life when you simply stopped looking ahead, or simply stopped trying. I liked his spirit even if he could be, at times, a real huckster.

He tried, as one of the last things, to get Maine lobstermen interested in branding, adopting a statewide "Genuine Maine Lobster" tag for their products. He was rebuffed and then disappointed by those 'crusty fishermen' from his home state who did not seem interested in getting on board with the idea.

Maxx passed on a couple of years ago in his 90's, his body finally gave out although his mind wanted to keep on going. Only recently, the "Genuine Maine Lobster" idea has caught on big-time up there. Maxx would have said that he told ‘em so. He was a visionary who had great ideas before the rest of the world was ready for them.

So whenever I feel like the world is closing in on me and no one wants my abilities or talent, I ask, "What would Maxx do?" The answer is that he would say "F**ck 'em, let's get something else going, I've got an idea, and we need to sell some people on it..." and he would be off on a mission. That was Maxx. Remembering him and what he might do gets me out of my funk and back to exploring fresh ideas, new possibilities. All of a sudden what looked like a dead-end street becomes a highway stretching off into the distance toward the mountains. My boots are laced and my backpack is snug and packed well; let’s go.

Boat Dreams

When people speak of dreams coming true, the first thing that comes to mind, to the listener, is suddenness – a dream coming true manifested as a surprise, or sudden stroke of good fortune. But in reality, many dreams come true in the same way that a tree grows, or a wine matures; slowly, incrementally, in stages, more like plateaus, more like occasional pauses along the trail on an autumn hike up a New England mountainside. As one ascends the rocky-rubble path, first at the lowest elevations, and then later far higher, where the air becomes drier, cooler, and crisper; where the wind now begins to be felt; where the trees become straighter, thinner, and shorter, one still notices little but the boulders in the path; the sweat and exertion of climbing, gasping breath, the focused, intensive care of each footfall placed, so as not to stumble and fall. Every once in a while the climber pauses, for a break in the effort, to take a swallow of water, to look around; and he or she immediately realizes the extent of the progress made since the last pause; it is greater than expected. These are truly serene moments, mentally and physically, despite the vibrant pulse in one’s breast, and the decreasing urgency of breath; a sense of satisfaction comes from the realization of achievement; the summit is reachable, and will be attained. Thus the view of the end result changes, slightly; the mental image shifts, once again, and the urge returns stronger.

When the restoration of my old 33-ft. wooden cabin cruiser Fish Tales was nearing completion, she stood on blocks and stands in my driveway, as high and dry as a boat could possibly be. I could only imagine what she would feel like cutting through the clearing blue waters off Point Judith; what her engines would sound like, and such. I was anxious to take this boat, the largest boat that I had ever owned, out into waters that I had never traversed, except perhaps on ferry boats to Block Island. In the late fall of the year before she was launched – and the odyssey of her restoration had now absorbed three years and more – I purchased a used LORAN “C” receiver from a fellow in town who had advertised it in the local paper. I had wanted one, and they were not cheap, but his was offered for a reasonable price and was a good make and not very old. There were few GPS navigation systems in use among recreational boaters yet and LORAN was still in widespread use. This receiver was made by Furuno and these were the days before the simplicity of chart plotters. The LORAN set, using a triangulation technique based on the time difference between signals received from land-based transmitting towers, displayed a set of coordinates that gave the navigator a precise position fix, displayed in either Latitude/Longitude coordinates, or LORAN “TD” (Time Differential) lines which were marked on charts in semicircular patterns. Most commercial fishermen used the TDs; the rest of us non-professionals used the Latitude/Longitude readout. Even then, it was up to the navigator to take these coordinates and plot them on a paper chart to establish a position fix; there was no such thing as an electronic chart or graphic display. Still, to me it was absolutely magical that this receiver could, at any given time, display my actual position in real time so that I could plot it, in clear weather or fog. So on a few chill late autumn nights I stood at the steering console of Fish Tales, with the LORAN turned on, the manual open, learning how to use the thing, to zero it in properly and set it up right, pretending that I was out on the bay somewhere heading for Block Island or the Vineyard. Indeed, although the LORAN set would not work right with the boat out of water and not properly grounded, so the manual said, or because it was on land (unlike GPS, land masses interfered with LORAN reception – for it to work right you had to be out in open water), I still calculated the distance from where I was to an unseen goal, a waypoint, the 1BI green bell off the North Reef of Block Island. It was more than twenty-five miles, but I knew that, someday, most likely the following season, my boat and I would be there.

I remembered my first experience with LORAN as a young Coast Guardsman in 1975. Back then, LORAN “A” was in use, but it had limitations that I do not quite recall. LORAN “C” was more advanced and required an on-board computer of sorts but the results were more accurate. Our Coast Guard ship used both A and C but C only occasionally as it often malfunctioned. It also required a rather large module or unit and seemed clumsy, but this system demonstrated to me that in twenty years or so the technology had come a long way; the unit I purchased was the size of a small radio and gave highly accurate readouts on a backlit LCD screen. So I learned to use the unit, and played out my fantasies for the time being, navigating not an inch beyond my driveway, but I knew that I was getting there.

A couple of months later, a week before Christmas, the weather was unusually warm. It was a gusty, rainy night, and the Christmas lights in the trees and bushes throughout the neighborhood were jumping around in the restless wind squalls. We were hosting a a group of our friends over for a Christmas party and at one point it became so stuffy and warm in the house, and with everyone talking loudly and one of my tipsy friends couldn’t be pried away from the piano, that I felt the sudden need to go outside for a few minutes for a breath of fresh air, alone. I took my drink with me, and stood out on the front lawn, in the hour before midnight, and felt the occasional raindrops whip by and watched Fish Tales in the driveway, bow pointed ever-westward, waiting patiently for spring, her 1950s-era flared bow and graceful old sedan cruiser lines looking as though they were ready to cut through the seas at any moment. Like many powerboats of her age, she sported a small decorative mast, resembling a swept-back cross, mounted on the deck just in front of the windshields. I had strung a couple of sets of colored Christmas lights on her little mast and had run an extension cord up there, and had even arranged a 12-volt connection to her topmost white Perko light globe and her big luminous Fresnel red and green sidelights, so that her navigational lights would be ‘live’. She looked jolly with that little bit of Christmas holiday ornamentation and at that point I realized that indeed she would be launched, she would cruise, and that the long road of her restoration actually had a terminus, and that God willing, I would live to see it and have many adventures aboard her. It was a precious moment, and it caused me to forget the rain and the party noise inside and focus on a dream that was gradually inching closer to eventual reality.

After the Hurricane

When I finally awoke, the morning after the hurricane hit St. Martin, it was nearly noon. The terrible wind had finally eased some time during the wee hours of the morning, and I had been able to stumble stiffly out of the bathroom and back into the bedroom proper and collapse onto the big king-sized bed. The wind was abating and I was no longer afraid that it would burst the sliding glass patio doors into the room and kill us with flying glass. That’s why Steve and I had been hiding in the cramped bathroom, sitting on the counter, in case the big glass doors exploded into the room. We would be decapitated, or worse, I thought, because there was no place else in the room where one could hide or be protected.

My friend Steve and I had just sailed a 45-foot French-built catamaran from New York to St. Martin. Steve, a seasoned sailor, had been hired by the boat’s owner, Wally, to help sail the boat to the island, where Wally had planned to lease it to a charter fleet home ported in Oyster Pond. It had been a difficult, stormy passage, and when we finally reached St. Martin we learned that a late-season hurricane had developed and was headed toward the island. Steve and I had spent the night of the storm in a little hotel up the street from the Oyster Pond docks. The skipper had arranged a room for us, since it was not possible to remain on the boat. Wally was staying somewhere else – we didn’t know where – with acquaintances, at a private home with plenty of food and comforts. We had been left to shift for ourselves which was, in our opinion, still much better than being stuck in the same place with Wally, whom, we discovered early in the voyage, was a weird, obnoxious crank.

As I gradually came to my senses on the damp bed, a gray light filtered into the hotel room. The air was hot and humid and there was no electricity and no running water. I opened the drapes and looked out upon the scene of devastation under overcast skies. The patio outside was a mess - parts of the roof had blown off and there were smashed, splintered timbers and roof tiles scattered everywhere. It was still windy, but the hurricane had passed.

There was no coffee and no hope for any. Steve awoke in the easy chair about the same time, and we both stepped out onto the patio, rubbing our eyes, still groggy from the nearly sleepless night, trying to take it all in. I had a small bottle of water – tepid but fresh – and poured most of it into a cup, filling it two-thirds, and the rest with Mount Gay rum from a half-full bottle that I had brought up from the Dinghy Dock bar down the street the night before. I took a big swallow and handed it to Steve. Instead of recoiling from the liquor, as he usually did, he took it happily, and took a long pull at it, even though it was warm. Any other time he might have gagged.

“I’m going up the hill to have a look around” I said, slinging my camera and a small knapsack with a water bottle and the Mount Gay. “Want to come along?”
“I’ll stay here in case Wally comes back” he said, “He might bring some food.”
“F__k Wally” I said. “He won’t bring us dogsh_t.”
“Fine then. Let’s go and see what we can find for ourselves.”

There was a path across the street from the hotel that led up a scrubby hill to a promontory with an overlook that provided a good view of everything around, including Oyster Pond. An ancient naval cannon was mounted on a stone base resembling a carriage at the top of the hill, pointing out to sea. The hurricane had not budged it, but the odd cacti, grasses, and shrubs that covered the hill had been strangely altered. Any part of a cactus – and these were sizable, tough cacti – above a point horizontally level with the top of the hill had been sheared cleanly off, as though a great scythe from the sea had swept across the top of the hill and had cut away anything not protected in its shadow, on a direct horizontal plane. It was eerie. Even from the hilltop, we could hear the roar of the breakers on the beaches below. White, angry surf and big swells were still rolling ashore on the unprotected beaches, while occasional drizzle and mist blew by. Down in Oyster Pond, we could see the crazed jumble of masts along the ring of the pond of all the sailboats that had blown ashore and now lay on their sides on the beach, at odd senseless angles to one another, stranded and damaged. “This island is one hell of a mess” I said. “Let’s go back and have another drink and a smoke.”

Back at the hotel, Steve and I moved a big piece of broken roof – part of an eave – out of the way, dragging it off the patio so that it would not be stepped on by bare feet or tripped over. It was a mess of splinters, nails, and jagged wood. As we did so, a door to a room on the second-floor opened, and a heavy-set older man stepped out onto the balcony. He was dressed casually in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts and spoke with a British accent. He and his wife had been staying there for some time, and had apparently come through the storm all right. She was still asleep, he said.

“Do you fellows have any bottled water?” he asked.
“Not really” I answered. “I filled our wastebaskets and every pot and pan we could find from the taps before the storm hit, so we have some clean water, if you need it.”
“Oh, no. I mean for you fellows. Here.” He reached down and handed us four liter-bottles of French bottled water. “Take care, conserve it. Trust me, chaps, you’ll be needing it later on.”
“Come have a drink with us” I offered.
“No, thank you mates, we’re all set here. I have to tend to the missus. Be careful and take care. Cheers.” With that, he went back into the room and shut the door.
“Decent fellow” I said to Steve, who nodded in agreement.

While we had been exploring the hilltop, a French couple had pulled up a couple of chairs and a table on the patio and when we returned they were still seated there, drinking a big bottle of wine. They spoke no English, but the tall, long black-haired woman that was the wife or girlfriend – they seemed young – was laughing and talking loudly and animatedly and was apparently quite drunk. At least she seems happy, I thought to myself.

I looked down into the hotel’s in-ground pool. The chlorinated water was still clean and clear, but the blue bottom of the pool was a crazy-quilt of black asphalt roof tile squares. There were some palm fronds and a couple of small green coconuts floating in it. The sun had begun to burn through and it was getting hot. “I’m going in” I said to Steve. “Sounds good to me too” he replied.
We stripped down to our shorts – after all there was a lady nearby – and went into the pool, removing the palm fronds and floating junk. The cool water felt good.

While we were thus splashing around, I suddenly noticed that the woman had stood up, and, despite the emphatic entreaties of her male companion, had stripped off her bathing suit, every stitch. Steve noticed too; then I saw his jaw drop as she hopped across the patio laughing and saying something very fast and very loud in French, and then swan-dove into the pool directly behind Steve.

A very loud and earnest exchange ensued between the laughing girl and her male companion, who was quite upset with her, probably because there were two other strange men in the same pool with her and she was completely naked. She was finally persuaded to climb out and put her bathing suit back on; Steve and I were mum, of course, and did our best to pretend that nothing was happening, Steve keeping his back to her while she was in the pool. Finally they stood up and took what was left of the bottle and made their way around the corner to a different hotel, presumably the one that they were staying at.

“She had very nice, long black hair” Steve said.
“Yes, she certainly did, didn’t she?”

A while later, we went down to the Dinghy Dock Bar looking for something to eat, and were happy to see that much of the debris around the docks had been cleaned up, or at least pushed aside, and we saw, to our delight, that the Dinghy Dock was, remarkably, unshuttered and open. It had suffered no real damage, and there was Ryan, its proprietor, the American hippie expatriate, behind the bar, operating some type of propane-powered portable stove linked to a big rusty gas bottle set on the ground. Steve and I had sauntered down to the dock – it was around eleven in the morning now – not expecting to find anything open; there were boat owners out on the docks, trying to assess damage to their boats, and salvaging clothing and other soaked items from down below. It was still a little breezy and overcast and an occasional rain shower spattered the docks. I could smell coffee brewing; the aroma was heavenly. The little bar was nearly full; people were drinking coffee, rum, coffee with rum, beer, every variety of beverage, mostly with alcohol. Ryan had put out open cartons of Parmalat milk on the bar so that folks could lighten their coffee. There was sugar in little damp packets. Ryan was busy, hopping around, and in response to a query from a fellow at the bar about running out of things, he shook his head and smiled, “Oh, no! I’ve been through this hurricane thing a few times. I know how to plan ahead.” Indeed, in the few days prior to the hurricane, when it was becoming near-certain that the island would be in its path, Ryan ordered extra cases of beer and liquor, eggs, bread, batteries, bottled water, propane, ice…as much as he could cram into the limited storage space that the Dinghy Dock building afforded. Now it would pay off. There was no food around, only at the Dock. Ryan had multiple pans going. He was making breakfast sandwiches for everyone. There was no electricity, so eggs were scrambled in a pan over the gas grill. There was cheese, there was bacon, and the bread was toasted, sometimes blackened a little, over the blue flames. It was grilled bread; a little crude, perhaps – like camping and toasting your bread over a fire – but it worked, and everyone ate.

Thereafter, ever day, in addition to breakfast, Ryan, who was a rather decent cook, made one main dish – and lots of it – for the rest of the day, lunch and dinner. These meals were planned, their ingredients ordered in advance, and it changed every day, although there was nothing else on the menu. But there was no need. Each meal was a one-pot type, spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken a la king, chicken curry, or a big stew, something that involved a main dish over rice or noodles. It was good, satisfying, and filling; the portions were generous and nobody starved. Ryan kept a log on a notepad of who ate and drank what, and everyone was expected to settle up before leaving the island – whenever that might be. If you wanted to sit at the bar and drink rum, you were given the bottle, a glass, and a little notepad and pencil to keep track of your own tally. You mixed your own drinks, poured them yourself – weak or killer, the choice was up to the drinker. So, depending on what sort of a day you were having, you self-medicated accordingly.

It went on like this for several days until we were finally able to get off the island on the first departing flight out of damaged Juliana Airport. Because the runway had been damaged, flights had to take off with minimal fuel, so we stopped in San Juan to fill the tanks before going on to Newark, New Jersey, not the last stop by far in what would be my long journey home to New-England. As we flew through the night, I looked out my window into the cold moonlit blackness at the sea below, the hundreds of leagues that we had taken many days to sail over, crossing our path, and now crossing that gulf in mere hours at more than five hundred knots and more than five miles up in the sky. I felt my tired body relax, settle, conform to the seat like a wad of silly-putty, and at long last fell into a brief, but deep, sleep.

Word Length - How Long - or How Short - Should my Story Be?

A friend in Tasmania wrote a piece, which he sent to me, about his annual travels around Australia in his old diesel van. He makes the trip every year when it is winter in Tas; by taking the ferry to the Australian continent and then driving north and circumnavigating the continent over the course of a month or two, he drives to warmer weather for awhile. He sent it to me and of course I wrote back after reading it with questions about certain things that I thought he could have expanded upon to make them clearer, or to paint a picture for the reader. Eventually the question arose: How much expansion, or going into detail, is enough? How much is too much, at which time the meaning is lost and the section becomes bloated with too much detail, tiresome, or trite? There is no simple answer; there is a balance between diluting the power of a passage with too much detail, or not including enough to have the right effect, whether the point is to paint a picture with words, or to make a powerful point. However, my feeling is always that as much as possible that matters should be written down first; it can always be trimmed later.

So I say, based on my own experiences, never be concerned about the total length of a piece, ever, unless you are writing for a magazine and your article must fit certain word count or length requirements. Otherwise let the subject matter (and your heart) dictate length. Take your time and write it all out, tell the whole story, all the important details and enough description to put the reader in your place. Write it all down and do not stop until you are satisfied that you have said everything that you wanted to tell the reader, until you know that you have told the whole story. Skip nothing important. Leave nothing inside because whatever you leave there is as lost forever as a diamond buried deep in the earth where no one can ever mine it.

Conversely, do not artificially extend anything, or set a length goal; that is like overstuffing a couch, or diluting good whisky with too much water. Put it away and then go back to it in a day or so with a fresh mind and read it through it and when a picture appears in your mind that the words have not told, stop and add that picture or comment or observation to what is there but not yet mentioned. Then you will also remember important additional details that you were in too much of a hurry to write down the first time. Go back to it again later and trim, hone, smooth, polish, put weight in every word and make it flow like music. When you can no longer add anything to it that seems worthwhile, each time you revisit it, or that additional changes or embellishments don't feel right, then it is done. The same rule applies, the old proverb in wooden boat building: "What looks right, is right." Remember that you can always cut material away to suit your publisher's length requirements, but that adding material where there is none is infinitely harder after the fact.

Project Aiko and the Perfect Robot Woman

Every so often, in the search for current news items about breaking technology, something really remarkable or off-the-wall will make me stop dead in my tracks. Consider the case of this little article about a gentleman scientist in Canada who has designed a robot intended to serve the needs of man – er, men specifically.

The complexity associated with creating or obtaining the assistance of a non-human helper has been explored over the centuries, well pre-dating the concept of robots. The pitfalls are also known; any kid who has ever read “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” knows what can happen when things go wrong.

Times change, sometimes quite a lot. Who doesn’t remember the robot named Rosie in the cartoon series “The Jetsons”? Rosie could do it all, cook, clean, tidy up after George. In the world of the early 1960’s (1962-63), that’s all that one could conceivably (or properly) imagine a robot housemaid doing.

The gentleman whom we are going to discuss – Mr. Le Trung, and his ‘Project Aiko’ – a decidedly female robot designed to look remarkably like a young woman - are definitely not out of the early 60’s. As I said, times have changed – and in common parlance, we might say that “This cyber-chick ain’t no Rosie.” Mr. Trung certainly wants his robot to serve man, but perhaps in more than a simple utilitarian way. I present the brief article first, without editing out its decidedly negative slant by the writer, who clearly does not approve of Le Trung’s project:

Project ‘Aiko’ The sexy virgin robot built to serve man

Dvice.com
Anyone who had any doubt that the future of humanoid robots would inevitably veer towards the seedy side need only look to the example of Le Trung and his fembot Aiko. The Vietnamese-Canadian tinkerer put Aiko together and controls her functions using software he calls the Biometric Robot Artificial Intelligence Neural System (BRAINS). Le Trung claims Aiko can read newspapers, check the weather, distinguish between different medicines, detect 300 faces per second and answer airport arrival/departure time questions.

The inventor also claims that due to an array of sensors, Aiko can also function as an intimate companion, but on his website he states, "Yes Aiko is still a virgin, and no I do not sleep with her." But as the development of the currently wheelchair bound robot advances, we'll be waiting to see that line of text mysteriously disappear from his website. Le Trung's plans for the future of Aiko would offer the robot for public consumption at around $15,000-$17,000, followed by a newer singing robot called Project EVE. You can see video of Aiko in action here, and find more interesting (creepy?) information on the Project Aiko website.”

Like many online articles, this one allowed comments to be posted at the bottom of the page. I found these comments a bit eyebrow-raising; one writer suggested that the negative (almost jealous) tone of the writer indicated that the writer was ‘definitely a woman’ (which is certainly quite possible) and some of the other comments were a great deal less than polite. None were supportive, however, and I thought that, quite possibly, folks were being just a little bit unfair to Mr. Le Trung, after all.

Consider if you will that the tasteful Mr. Trung has created a robot that is certainly attractive as a young woman would be. There is nothing outwardly seedy or promiscuous looking about her. And, if she can make a good pot of tea and whip up a batch of biscuits, and be on the whole more pleasant to look across the table at than, say, an empty chair, whence the objections? Also, I must sympathize with Mr. Trung. Ever since Adam gained Eve for the price of only a rib, Man has sought to create the Perfect Woman. Women, conversely, are not interested in creating the perfect man, since, as they well know, a man is by his very nature imperfect, and as grandfather said, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

So I visited Mr. Trung’s web site for the project, http://www.projectaiko.com/, and watched the videos, read the story, and in the end, came away with some observations, certainly, but a great many more misgivings, particularly about Mr. Le Trung’s intentions. Allow me to list my thoughts:

- Aiko the robot makes no facial expressions. This is a little creepy. While it may be preferable to, say, a wife’s facial expressions of disapproval, disgust, repugnance, etc., I would almost prefer those to a blank expression. Because of her blank expression, I would never know where I stood with Aiko. At least with a wife, when you’re in the doghouse, there is no mistaking it.
- Aiko is really only for single men or widowers, those who are too painfully shy to seek out female companionship in popular taverns, men who keep cats, or who do not drink, or who have no personality themselves and thus do not want competition. She’s for guys who live alone, don’t like plants, and don’t like anyone else touching anything in the apartment or mussing up their papers or throwing away mouldy stuff in the refrigerator. No other woman in a household would tolerate Aiko for a New York minute; the fur would fly the moment that a fellow even headed in her direction with an oil can, or suggested the need to spend a dime on her.
- Aiko talks like a machine in dull emotionless monotones, and cannot do anything; she won’t even get up off her duff. The fact that she won’t do anything useful but has to be waited on makes her in many ways a lot like the wife of one of my younger brothers. She’s a sister in law whom no one in the family can stand. The fact that Aiko cannot do a single domestic task was the first thing that made Mr. Trung’s motives suspect to me. But it also gives me an idea about how to help my brother out of his rut (for clarification, Aiko is in a wheelchair, but not because she is intended to portray a handicapped person, but because LeTrung has not yet engineered an ability to walk for her.)
If you have doubts about Le Trung’s intentions, look at the list, from his web site, about his future engineering plans for Aiko. Here’s a guy whom you would never trust with a secret:

Aiko's future abilities:

1. Facial Expressions
2. Make tea and coffee
3. Feed me sushi
4. Make simple breakfast: eggs and bacon
5. If I lie my head down on Aiko lap, have her clean my ears with a Q-tip.
6. Ability to massage my shoulders and neck.
7. Able to do print and write
8. Clean the windows
9. Dust the shelves
10. Clean my toilet. (I hate cleaning the bathroom, might as well have someone else do it for me)

I stopped at #3. Feeding him sushi is only a small step away from feeding him cream of wheat in the nursing home. And since he taught her to slap him (also in the video), he had better not spit up. Mr. Trung also forgets that Eve fed Adam the apple.

#5 is scary too. What if her logic malfunctions and instead of a Q-tip, she picks up an X-acto knife? His ears will get plenty clean then! But #10 floors me. I mean, I don’t like cleaning either (no guy does), but what’s gotta get done, has gotta get done, and sometimes a man has to do certain nasty jobs himself.

But for Mr. Trung, I have to scratch my head, here. After all this – years of effort and struggle, trial and error, engineering, money, success and failure, what will he really have in the end? The perfect young woman? Wouldn’t it be a lot less hassle in the long run (with the attendant benefits of near-term satisfaction) to simply hire a cleaning lady once a week and find a mistress?

In the meantime, if I must have a domestic robot, I’ll take Rosie! She’s a pro.

Voices among the Old Cellar-Holes

It all began at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford – but oddly enough, it was less about whaling than about something else – typical for me.

When I was a young boy – before my teenage years – my grandfather often took my cousin and I to visit the Whaling Museum in New Bedford occasionally on a grey wintry Saturday when there was not much else to do and the weather was not conducive to outdoor activity. It is not a long trip to New Bedford from where we lived in the East Bay area of Rhode Island – maybe a half-hour at best – but it seemed much longer then. We boys rode in Grandpa’s old Studebaker and took turns packing his corncob pipe with fresh tobacco. Grandpa had been a boatbuilder before his retirement, among other things, and he was full of the lore of the sea and never missed an opportunity to share it, and the history that he knew, with his young charges. I loved these trips to the museum, because it was, and still is, a very special place, full of bones, blocks, baleen, and musty old marvels too numerous and remarkable to list here.

The Whaling Museum was, and still is, owned and operated by the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, which, in addition to the magnificent centerpiece that is the museum, also had an interest in preserving the history of that delightful little corner of southeastern Massachusetts that includes New Bedford, Westport, and some of the surrounding area, and thus the museum had, in some small part, exhibits relating thereto. But whaling and everything to do with whaling has always been 99-percent of the museum’s offering. There seemed to be little else having to do with the rest of Old Dartmouth and its environs, which puzzled me.

Yet oddly enough, my favorite exhibit at the museum, one that was very easy to overlook, had nothing to do with whaling per se. It was a small room that re-created a 17th Century primitive household in what would presumably have been Old Dartmouth in the time of the earliest settlers. It was off in the eastern part of the museum building, a doorway off a hallway, not labeled if I recall, easy to miss, and might have been taken for a broom-closet except that it was not at the end of a hall, and the door was open. It was, in appearance, a dark room, small, lined with brown, rough-hewn beams and bare wooden walls, wide-plank floors and sparse furnishings. There was a big faux field-stone fireplace at one end of it, with a make-believe fire roaring in the hearth, little red coals and gold flames cleverly recreated with lights and technique such that it looked real, so real that I could swear that I felt the warmth from that primitive hearth when I stood in the room.

Of course, you could not actually go into the exhibit room and touch anything; a small square area inside the doorway was roped off, only enough room to stand and observe. I wanted to go over to the hearth and lie down next to the fire; it seemed like such a cozy, other-worldly place, a window into the past, a place to rest in snug comfort while, I imagined, the sharply-biting cold and sleet of the New-England winter lashed the outside of the crude dwelling and massive mortared grey stone chimney, and the forest primeval, populated by bears and hostile, skulking Indians, encircled it. Indeed, there was a little recording, I think, of wind – howling wind, as one would hear through the chimney-flue – playing over and over again in the background, adding to the ambience of the little place. Although I was young, I clearly understood the message behind it; it was a statement about the tough life that our forebears faced in the primitive land that was 17th Century New England. It spoke of their privations, hardscrabble life, and precarious existence, but also showed that there was yet comfort to be found in home and hearth.

The exhibit remained for many years – I have no idea how long, twenty, maybe thirty years; and as I grew older, and visited the museum less frequently, I nevertheless always made it a point to stick my head into that little doorway, and I had to smile. There was something unchanging and comfortable about it; the same vision, the same room, nothing unmoved; and why not? History is written; it recedes into the past, but it does not change. Facts, as John Adams pointed out, are immutable. The message too is unchanging. In a world where nothing seems sacred anymore, nothing seems stable or noble, everything is in flux, where uncertainty reigns and old values have been turned on their heads, this little room, in later years, offered me a connection to my youth, to the values that a young bright-eyed boy learned and embraced and had reverence for, once upon a time. I hoped that it would always be there.

Time passes all too quickly. The first streaks of gray in the once-boy’s hair have spread like mushrooms on a log to a pepper-and-salt beard with more salt than pepper. I went back to the museum a few years ago and to my dismay found the old room walled off, with a note saying that the exhibit area was being remodeled, and soon would offer a new display of some sort. My heart sank; if the ‘interpretations’ in the rest of the museum are any indicator of direction (and this is true of so many museums nowadays), the new display will be, or is, not about Old Dartmouth, not even about whales, but is quite probably configured as another tiresome paean to “celebrating ethnic diversity” or such, as if we don’t have enough of that theme being force-fed to us everywhere we turn nowadays. Is there some point in time when we can collectively get a point across to the politically-correct zealots that we do get the message? That we’re OK with it? That perhaps it’s time to move on and recover a broader and more inclusive view of history, one that once again includes our early local forebears? Perhaps not; the early settlers have too many things going against them, demerit check offs in the enlightened postmodern culture classroom. They were white Europeans; a good many of them males, at that; they were religious; and they even (and unfortunately) shot at Indians occasionally. They often did not pay their help – or themselves – a ‘living wage’, and did not practice ‘fair trade’. Still, that’s enough right there in modern revisionist culture to deny them any creditable place in history, even the place that they heretofore occupied as the founders of the country that we live in at present.

These days I hike the woodland trails of a large preserve in Tiverton, Rhode Island, fairly adjacent to the Massachusetts border and that whole area of Southeastern Massachusetts that contains Westport and Dartmouth. I hike during the cold months of the year, when there are few people to meet on the trails. I hike nearly every day that time permits, sometimes when a lovely dusting of snow has decorated the quiet landscape and my boots crunch with every step. Sometimes I go when the wind is blustering and roars in the bare upper tree branches, and other times yet when the weak winter sun shines golden in the late afternoon on the bright tan beech-leaf carpet of the forest floor and the green Boston ferns that hang from the rocky ledges and will not wilt and curl until they feel the deepest bite of January’s freeze.

I hike several miles of trails that include the old Eight Rod Way, an uncompleted road from the 17th Century that had once been planned to run to Plymouth. It is still, in places, paved with the small round cobbles that local farmers painstakingly gathered from their fields to deposit by the wagon-load yard by yard over decades. Areas of exposed ledge are worn and rutted from wagon wheels. This area was settled back in the early days, by subsistence farmers and pioneers. It is a haunted place and their voices whisper from the old cellar-holes that dot the landscape, foundations often hidden behind groves of lovely green mountain laurel, a shrub that remains green year ‘round, even when its upper branches are laden with snow and ice.

Little babbling Borden Brook, dark as English tea from the tannins leaching out of the Ice Age-era remnant cedar swamp from whence it originates in underground springs, murmurs its way through the woods. It flows under heavy stone slab bridges put in place by rough hands three centuries ago. The brook tumbles on happily beneath the jumbled collapsed stones of the raceway of the old Borden sawmill, its foundation and corbelled arch stone bridge still sound since the mill sawed trees into planks for Tiverton village houses in the 18th Century. There may be burials out here; perhaps, deep beneath the soft blanket of oak leaves, tangled brown roots and humus are the bones of Indians who never saw a European face; perhaps there are graves of slaves, or of the very poor, or of the early settlers’ children, for their mortality was very high.

I pause at the cellar hole of one man’s home, and this one has a name, in the guidebooks – Scipio Cook. I do not know who Scipio Cook, with his classical Roman first name, was, although there must be someplace where I can learn more about him. A little family of chipmunks darts in and out around the mortarless stones of his old foundation, all traces of wood or timber long gone. But I found Scipio’s little dug well one day, and the remains of his small garden – for herbs and vegetables, probably turnips and onions for his stew-pot – can still be outlined, for the vegetation is different there.

Further up the trail, there lies a group of stone-lined cellar holes that is most intriguing, for this was a small, closely situated community or farm with intersecting stone walls. The cellar walls are bulged in, looking as though they are ready to collapse, although they have looked that way, most probably, for more than a century. But these cellar holes, dating from the First Period, perhaps, are the same size as would fit the little re-created room that used to be in the museum. These were small houses, very small, very simple. Many has been the cold day’s hike that I wished, with the rustle of sleet in the upper tree-branches and little crystals speckling my hat and shoulders, that I could walk inside, warm myself by the fire, and have a bowl of stew, perhaps, or tea, at least haven and shelter, brief respite, from the weather, sharing a few moments with these early, hardy people.

There is a new neighborhood development nearby, cutting deeply into the Tiverton woods. Although this preserved place will, by deed, always be protected from the incursion of that development, in the nakedness of winter that plat of vinyl-sided plastic box-houses can occasionally be glimpsed through the woods, their treeless lots and loam-less lawns re-seeded desperately trying to grow grass before the rains gully them. But some of the boxes have fireplaces, though not built with stone or brick chimneys but siding-covered ones with tin caps. Burning seasoned hardwood produces the same aromatic incense no matter what it is burned in, however, and occasionally, as I pass these foundations on a day when the gray sky is lowering and threatening snow, I will catch a whiff of that burning wood, and it will overwhelm my senses. Even though that anonymous early home is no longer here, I can smell the aroma of its hearth on the cold air.

At such times, I will pause at the edge of a cellar hole, whose nameless inhabitants long ago passed to dust, and will whisper a brief prayer for them, to let them know that in the stillness of the woods, decades and even centuries after their hard lives have ended, in a small piece of land that in many ways has begun to resemble once more the world that they lived in, someone remembers them, cherishes the memory of who they were and how they lived, and what they sought to do in carving a settlement out of a howling and unforgiving wilderness. Despite their sufferings and losses, Puritan father William Bradford observed and wrote, “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits."

They are remembered now by someone not confused or distracted by the myopic fad-currents of the moment, who does not judge them by today’s political cause-driven standards. History, after all, cannot be changed or erased, though many have tried to do both for selfish ends and private agendas. The glass that looks backward can at times be obscured deliberately, ignored, or trivialized; but I stand at the stone doorstep of a yawning hole filled with stumps and leaves, and listen for the whispering voices of the family that once lived there and the wind howling in the flue. It is there, they were there, and always will be for the patient listener with an open and uncluttered mind. Listen not with the ears, but with the heart, and you too will hear them, calling out to be remembered.