Category: My life

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Risky Business

NPR featured a story this morning about a couple of people who were bitten by a non-poisonous snake at the Renaissance Festival in Maryland.  Stop the presses!  Unfortunately, this kind of “news” is becoming more common.  I suppose it is a kind of human interest story, but it feeds the general impression of the world as a dangerous place. 

I went down to the farm a couple of days ago.  I picked up lots of chiggers and got stung by a hornet that managed to get under my work glove.  I killed the hornet  and scrapped off the chiggers.   In the spring, I often pick up ticks.  I read in the paper that you are supposed to save the tick and show it to your health care professional.  Who goes to the doctor for a tick?  I would have to go every week and he would have a complete collection of ticks.  Are hornets, chiggers, ticks and snakes dangerous and annoying?  Yes, they are.  But you elevate them to the level of a major risk, you cannot do very much. 

When I was a kid we used to play in a swamp in back of Nordberg and Pelton Steel mills.  This was not a natural swamp.  When we followed the stream to its source, we discovered it issued from the factories.   I suppose by today’s standards, we were playing in the toxic waste dump.  That explains why the water would burn your skin a little.  We were too casual about those things back then.  But we have overcompensated and overreacted now.   Today if somebody finds a little battery acid they cordon off the area and men in moon suits go in to decontaminate it.  They evacuated a local high school a while back because somebody broke a thermometer and some mercury spilled on the floor. 

Poison is defined by the dosage.   Most life enhancing medicines and vitamins can harm or kill you if you take too much, which means that most – in the wrong dosages – are poisons.  Many things have threshold levels.  Below a certain level, they are harmless or even helpful; beyond it they are dangerous or deadly.  We too often make the error of extrapolating that if something is dangerous in quantity even a little must be harmful.   This is wrong. For example, arsenic can occur naturally in spring water.   Arsenic is a deadly poison, but you can drink this water your entire life w/o suffering any consequences.  If you really analyzed it, almost everything we eat and drink is full of poisons.  Plants evolved with them as a means of defense.  We tolerate or even benefit from all those chemicals found in apples or pears. 

As our ability to detect risk has improved, we have become a little hysterical about it and have begun to avoid low probability risks to the extent that it impacts our fulfillment in life.  Ironically, our risk aversion creates a whole new set of risks.

I took this picture in Germany.  They still have the old stuff sometimes.

Take the example of playground equipment.   I don’t see how kids can have much fun at the playground anymore.  Everything is low down, easy to climb, slow paced or stationary.  I remember the high metal slides that burned your ass on a hot day or those merry go rounds that you could spin so fast.   Teeter totters?  They are gone.  So what happens?   Some kids push into even riskier things.  Most just learn to sit around and get fat playing video games.   In the long run, you are a lot better off breaking a leg when you are eleven than staying fat your whole life.  Which risk would you prefer?  There is not risk-free option.  Some problems just take a longer time to develop.

I assume snake-bit couple will make a full recovery.  Now I am sure our society will take added precautions to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.

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Leadership

Below is a pond on Ft. Pickett near Blackstone, Virginia.  I was there during my field day mentioned a few posts back. 

State Department has a course on leadership that I will take and they sent me some preliminary questions to prepare.   Generally, they want us to think about the nature of leadership.   It is not easy to define.   I have seen those who seem to be the ultimate leader in their manner or comportment, yet the organizations they run produce little.  On the other hand, there are those who seem barely aware that they are in charge whose teams produce phenomenal results.   Since the essence of leadership is the ability to produce results through the efforts of others, we must conclude that that second kind of leader is better.

Leadership in government is particularly hard to judge because we don’t have a bottom line.  Everything is political and subjective.  People in government can win points just by being busy.  In practical affairs, sometimes doing nothing or at least doing less is preferable to taking action or doing more.  The non-action alternative is rarely available in government.  Many times government officials are running around solving problems a smart leader would have avoided entirely.  More often than we like to recognize the problems are actually caused by our own activity.  The need to be seen to be doing something limits the efficacy of government.  Government also comes with a specific overt limit on leadership. 

We really don’t want government officials to be leaders.  Think about it.  Government is a public trust.  Government officials work within the rules ostensibly created by the people and their representatives.  Leadership usually involves setting new courses, changing paradigms and innovating, i.e. changing the rules … unilaterally.  

Leadership always concerns making decisions in the climate of risk and uncertainty.  Otherwise it is just administering rules.  The leader decides and leads others in toward the goal he defines or discerns.   Government bureaucracies are designed to make that difficult or impossible.  Let me emphasize that point.  They are DESIGNED to limited freedom of action.  It is not a by-product or a mistake.  Government systems are and must be designed to limit innovation by those operating them.

This is an important distinction that divides private enterprise from government administration.   Government and free market techniques overlap, but they do not occupy the same space.  There are things government can do and private enterprise cannot and the reverse is also true.   That is why is doesn’t make much sense to advocate more or less government w/o determining the appropriate TOOL to be used. 
 
It is not appropriate to ask government to innovate.  Government always must follow a set procedure.  If government officials or bureaucrats deviate too far from the rules and regulations they are, by definition, acting illegally.  That doesn’t mean government cannot be creative if given a task.  The USG sent a man to the moon and brought him safely home.   But it cannot do the kinds of innovations that determine truly new courses or preferences.  Government cannot legitimately be entrepreneurial.  Government consumes wealth; it does not create it. 

Private individuals and firms create wealth.  However, government is necessary to the production of wealth.  W/o the rule of law and reasonable regulation the private sector cannot create wealth, since individuals and firms cannot protect the wealth they create.   Government must provide the legal and often the physical infrastructures.  Since government has a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of coercion, only it can perform this function.
  
Lately I have been thinking about my government job in relation to my “job” on the tree farm.   In the past year, I have made decisions in both jobs that put thousands of dollars at risk in the anticipation of greater good.  In the tree farm, it is my money.  I will benefit if I am right and suffer if I am wrong, so it is really nobody’s business to second guess me.   I can also do things just because I think they are good things, with little or no anticipation of a concrete return.   For example, I spent a couple thousand dollars on wildlife plots, which I never expect to pay off in any practical sense.  I have a personal preference for that.  I can feel generous and virtuous for improving the environment.  My land is nicer, but only in my opinion.  In government I cannot and should not allow my personal preferences to impact decisions.  It is not my money.  Nobody can be generous or virtuous giving away the government’s money.   As ePRT leader, I had a lot of discretion, but it was a very different sort of discretion spending taxpayer money and using Uncle Sam’s resources.

As a government official, I have a duty to LIMIT my own leadership and not elevate my own preferences beyond my assigned mandate.   It is a significant responsibility.   I can exercise leadership, but only in the predetermined direction.   It is not like running your own show.

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Stupid

Below is the crescent moon over the Wal-Mart parking lot in South Hill, Virginia.

We figured that it was more economical to have only one car and rent one when we really needed another.  This was good logic and over the past year we probably have spent less than $200 on rentals versus the thousands it costs to own a second car.  But now that Espen got his license we now have five drivers (Mariza doesn’t have her own car and uses ours); we probably need a second vehicle.   Next week we are getting a Ford Ranger.   Tony, Jerry and Andy have Rangers and like them.  They know about these things, so that is what I am getting.

I had to rent a car to drive down to the field day and farm visit.  Alex needed ours.   I am always a little paranoid about rental cars.  I take special care not to lock myself out, but I did.   I went to Wal-Mart in South Hill to get some necessities: beer, peanuts and a pair of work gloves.   I tossed these things in the trunk of the rental car, along with the keys I had in my hand and closed the trunk.  I checked to be sure I had my keys in my pocket, but my good habit was ineffective as I misled myself by finding the keys to my Honda.  Not surprisingly, those keys didn’t open the door.  It was kind of embarrassing.  I had to call the sheriff to help me.  A deputy came by a few minutes later.  He opened the door; I popped the truck, showed him the rental agreement to prove my bona-fides and we were both on our way.   

It is shocking how fast and easy it is to break into a car.  The sheriff’s deputy told me that a real crook would be even faster, since he wouldn’t bother to unlock the door, but would simply break the window.   Maybe you would be better off just leaving the door open. 

Back in 1988 some guy broke into our car in Washington.   He didn’t steal much.   In the glove compartment was one of those glow sticks, a Norwegian language tape and a motivational tape, ironically talking about the need for high ethical standards in business.   The crook took those things.  He must have been disappointed; maybe that accounts for the large number of highly motivated Norwegian speakers in some parts of Washington.  The loss of the goods was inconsequential, but the cost of replacing the window was significant. 

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Twenty-Four Years

I started with the FS twenty-four years ago today.  Time flies.  I wanted to fight world communism and the Soviet Empire, which seemed to be ascendant.  Five years later it was gone.   Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, millions of Poles, Afghans and others were undermining the foundations in the middle of the 1980s, but the outcome was far from assured, despite our hindsight certainty.  Nobody predicted its imminent demise in the middle of the 1980s and the relatively peaceful breakup of the Evil Empire was completely unexpected.  We can thank many for pushing the old bear off the cliff, but we have to credit Gorbachev for taking it quietly into that good night.   It could have gone down a lot worse. The decline agony or the Austria-Hungarian Empires dragged us into WWI.  

Vladimir Putin considers the fall of the Soviet Union the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century.  That is an astounding statement when you consider the many tragic events of the 20th Century.   Today Russia is resurgent, buoyed by the high prices of oil and other primary materials.   There is no reason to believe the Soviet Union could not also have restructured and also been resurgent if it had not been dispatched when it was down. 

Some people long for the stability of those times because they have forgotten the fundamental horror of the Cold War and have sometimes taken the wrong lessons from the finish.  We rightly see our success as the triumph of the ideas of freedom and democracy over those of communal tyranny.  But our ideas won because they were supported by an infrastructure of strength.   If Ronald Reagan had not faced down the Soviets AND the peace movements in the early 1980s, we could still be facing the near instant Armageddon we did back then.  If Pope John Paul II had not pushed communism in Poland, if the American and Western labor movement had not worked with the president and the Pope to help keep Solidarity alive, the Warsaw Pact would not have cracked.  And if we and our allies had not carried on the forty-year twilight struggle that interdicted the spread of communism they would not even had the chance.

Freedom is built on a foundation of strength and resolve.  When people forget that or just take it for granted, they soon stop being free.  However, when strength and resolve are exercised successfully in a timely and prudent manner their impossible achievements tend to look inevitable.  That is why some people think that the Soviet Empire just kind of fell by itself or that Iraq would have worked out okay w/o our recent efforts.

Freedom is usually not taken away.   People give it away because they think keeping it is too hard or they want to get things w/o the effort.   When you give someone the power to take care of you, you also give them the power to control you.

Anyway, it has been twenty-four good years to be alive and active.

The start was not that auspicious.  We had the fear of nuclear war; uemployment had reached more than 10% a short while back and the economy had shrunk.  We could all remember long lines for gas and even long lines to get free cheese.  All those things we worry COULD happen now DID happen in then.  But we were coming out of it.  It was morning in America.  

Old guys get nostalgic and I look at the time of my youth and vigor with fondness, but when I really think about it, times are a lot better now.  There is no final victory, just constantly changing challenges and our happiness and success depends on how well we identify and address them.

I am glad I chose the FS and very lucky in what I got in the last twenty-four years.  I am more or less where I should be doing what I do well.  What more can you want?

“There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.”

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Disastrous Predictions Exceeding Disastrous Predictions

Now that I am back from Iraq, where we succeeded despite the dire prediction, I see that we are now having the same sort of scare re the economy.  People think it is wise to be pessimistic.  They are just silly. 

The good thing about the terrible predictions we constantly see and hear in the media is the most of them don’t come true.   The bad thing is that we usually don’t hear that part.  Somebody makes the big-bad prediction and then when it doesn’t happen, just moves on. 

We are now hearing the warnings of economic Armageddon.   This is not the first time we have heard it.  Remember the big industry in decline and doom books during the 1980s?  How about the S&L disaster that was supposed to pull us all to hell around 1990?  Do you know the government actually MADE money on the S&L bailout?  That contributed to the prosperity of the 1990s.

We have to go through adjustments.  Systems tend to get out of whack.  It is nobody’s and everybody’s fault, but we always have to look for the guilty parties.  Politicans make their careers out of leading the virtual equivalent of a mob of torch and pitchfork bearing peasants against the “monster castle”.  Remember the old Frankenstein movies?  Now we do it online and through the media.  There is always plenty of greed and stupidity to go around, but that is rarely the cause of the trouble.   We will get through this if we don’t overreact and try to solve the wrong problem.  Some of the early programs in the New Deal actually deepened the Depression.  Strong action in the wrong direction is worse than none at all.

It is useful to remember that the property boom started in the 1990s and it didn’t start in America.  Places like the UK, Australia and Spain saw property values rise before we did, and they have fallen even more in some other places.  That property values could rise and fall in so many disparate places with such different  regulatory regimes indicates that it was not a particularly American problem.  That the boom started in the middle of the 1990s indicates that it is not merely a problem of the most current administration.   

We should also remember that Freddie and Fanny were doing what their masters in Congress asked them to do – push loans to low income people.  There is something about low income people that makes it harder for them to get loans.  What could that be?  Oh yeah – they don’t have much money.  They tend to default more often.  That is why Congress has to push lenders to put their money there.  Why does this surprise anybody?   Much of the problem is not in SPITE of the best efforts of government, but BECAUSE of it.

Despite all the gnashing of teeth and the real response that are required, prudent people were not much hurt by the swings.   If you bought your home before 2005, it is likely still worth more than you paid for it.  Maybe you felt richer last year, but you had paper profit.  If you sold you house, it would have cost you more to buy a new one.  Now both your house and the one you might want to buy are cheaper.  It is a wash.  If you didn’t take money out of your home with a refinance or equity loan, your payment is lower in real dollars than it was when you bought the place.   Over the long run, home prices rise not much faster than inflation.   In the short run they fluctuate.  That is why smart people don’t speculate. 

Many people have been living beyond their means.  It is not a bad thing to bring them back to reality.  This is not only natural, it is useful and good.   I understand that the government needs to stabilize the markets, but they should avoid the moral hazard of rewarding greed & stupidity.  That goes for the big guys who lend money to bad credit risks AND to the bad credit risks who are currently defaulting.   The only victims in this whole thing are the good people who lived within their means, didn’t buy what they couldn’t afford and now have to bail out the deadbeats. 

Remember the tale of the grasshopper and the ants.  Unfortunately, in modern times the grasshopper gets a bailout, but let’s not feel sorry for him.  He is still a deadbeat, not a victim.

BTW – for all the gloom re the U.S. consider this:  The United States accounts for 40 percent of total world R&D spending and 38 percent of patented new technology inventions by the industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), employs 37 percent (1.3 million) of OECD researchers [full-time employees], produces 35 percent, 49 percent, and 63 percent, respectively, of total world publications, citations, and highly cited publications, employs 70 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize  winners and 66 percent of its most-cited individuals, and is the home to 75 percent of both the world’s top 20 and top 40 universities and 58 percent of the top 100.

I won’t say, “don’t worry; be happy”  but the world will not end next year and we will still be #1 for a long time to come.

P.S.  Take a look at this article.   It seems the better things get, the more people complain.

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Ghost Busters

This is the first of the out of sequence posts from Frankfurt.  I will dump them in, but please look back a few posts when you come on these.

My sister believes in ghosts and she has what she purports to be a picture of one, so when I noticed the interesting – almost three dimensional – play of the light, I had to take a picture.  Maybe I can sell it to “National Enquirer.”

The picture above is from Goethe’s house in Frankfurt.  A believer in ghosts might well say that this was Goethe’s wife or maybe a serving girl.  It seems a little small, but I suppose people were smaller in those days, or maybe you shrink when you turn into a ghost.  You can easily imagine it as a woman in 18th century costume in profile.  What do you think? 

Who ya gonna call?

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Once & Future Frankfurt

Frankfurt was the first city I visited outside the U.S.  That was almost thirty years ago.  Time flies.  Things have changed in Frankfurt, but not that much.  I use Euro instead of Deutsch Marks and the city seems more international than German.  There are a lot of immigrants and Irish pubs.

I met three Irishmen in the youth hostel when I was here in 1979.  They had checked into a hotel and went out to get drunk.  That night, none of them could remember where their hotel was located and they still couldn’t – three days later.  It didn’t bother them too much.  They seemed to have money.  During the day, they walked around the city trying to recognize their erstwhile lodging.  At night, they went out and got drunk.   Maybe they got stranded permanently and founded one of those Irish pubs.

The Irish wandered Europe and the world in those days looking for work.  Germany was booming and they could find unskilled work.  Today the Irish economy is one of the most vibrant in the world and the Germans envy their low unemployment rate. Ireland used to have high taxes and a government unfriendly too business.  No more.  It is now easy to set up shop in Ireland and the country has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world; it around 12% compared to the Germans’ (and ours) of around 35%.   Some things change. 

BTW – I heard that number on the debates today AFTER I wrote this.  I guess I am topical.

But a picture is worth a thousand words.  Below are some pictures with captions of less than a thousand words to explain them. 

I was hungry most of the time when I visited Germany in 1979.  I didn’t bring enough money, so I lost weight.  One of my favorite dishes was goulash soup at Weinerwald.   IT was cheap.  I loved it.  Hunger is the best cook and it doesn’t taste as good now as then, but I still eat it when I can, for old time’s sake.   Below is what I like to eat now.   This is breakfast at Courtyard. Much healthier food, but still enough fat to make it good. BTW – Courtyard Marriotts in Europe are great.  They are usually in nice, wooded locations and they are not too expensive.

Even with my meager funds in 1979, I still could afford beer – liquid bread, cornflakes in a bottle.  My favorite beer was Heniger, a local Frankfurt product.  It still is good.  The picture is from the old town square.  It is great to sit in the sun on a cool day and drink a cool beer. 

Es gibt kein schoneres leben

You can tell a good beer by the “cling”.  Cling is the foam that adheres to the sides off the glass as you drink it down.  It should look foamy, with small bubbles.  If there is not much cling, the beer is too light.  If the bubbles are too big, it probably means that the cup is a little dirty.  Don’t order anything containing mayonnaise at that establishment.  Below is good cling.  The beer is Bitberger, with the slogan “bitte ein bit” – please a bit(berger).  It doesn’t translate so well.

Germany has a good street culture, with lots of sidewalk cafes an food shops.  This is typical of the bread and pastry shops.   I couldn’t stay in Germany too long.  The beer and chocolate would be too tempting.

This post is getting a little long.  Let me continue in the next post.

P.S. It may seem like I drink a lot of beer.  I don’t …usually.  The Marines (and me) drink not a drop of it during deployment.  I do like beer and during my time in dry and beer free Al Asad I developed an aching hunger for the liquid bread.  As luck would have it, I spent a day in Germany on my way home.  I saw my chances and I took ’em.

Im Himmel gibt’s kein Bier,
Drum trinken wir es hier.
Denn sind wir nicht mehr hier,
Dann trinken die andern unser Bier.

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Beer

I suffered from Red Sky, which prempted my trip for a bridge opening in Baghdadi, so I was just thinking about and remembering times past and people gone.  It can be a little melancholy, but remembering family gatherings also brings along many good memories and some interesting insights.  At my family gatherings, we always had lots of beer.  I don’t suppose that comes as much of a surprise in a German-Polish Milwaukee family.

Drinking Beer is a tradition in my family.  I have been drinking beer since just a little before it was legal for me to do that.  (BTW – in those days Schlitz was the leading beer.  It soon went downhill as they fooled around with the brewing process.  Now Schlitz is owned by Pabst and they are bringing back the old Schlitz formula.)  As I travelled around, I learned to appreciate different sorts of beer.  The Germans have a superb Beer culture, but the Belgians have a wider variety of beer and the Czechs are the world’s most dedicated beer lovers.  I even learned to like English beer served at room temperature, which, BTW, is not warm.

Beer connoisseurs generally have little love of American beer.  Paradoxically, American beers are among the world’s top sellers.  In fact, this paradox is easily explained and doing so help s explain the general paradox of American culture, which is simultaneously coveted and reviled.

Major American beer brands developed in a large market with lots of diversity, choices and competition.  Like other producers in such a market, beer makers had to appeal to a variety of tastes. Beer drinking is usually a shared-social event.   The beer consumed must appeal to everybody in the group. It is a kind of consensus system that leads toward a lowest common denominator.  The beer that everyone accepts will tend to be preferred over one that a couple people love but others cannot stomach.   The more diverse the group in question, the less extreme the choices are likely to be.   Five guys with similar tastes might agree on a very dark bitter beer; a hundred people from diverse backgrounds will not.

For example, most people find Budweiser (the King of Beers from St Louis) inoffensive, although few love it.  Some people love Budweiser (from the Czech city of Budvar), but most people find it a little heavy and “skunky”.  Beer lovers might object, but most casual beer drinkers prefer American Budweiser, which is even making inroads into the European beer market. 

America is good at producing products with mass appeal, which annoys those who consider their own tastes better than the ordinary people’s.  This means that many intellectuals and artists disparage the U.S. and its consumer culture, even as they live off its largess.

Adding insult to the injury they perceive, as the global mass market develops, the world is becoming more like America.  This does not mean that people are copying America in all or most cases.  It just means that the large mass market that helped shape American tastes and habits is now acting on people worldwide.  In the beer world, for example, we see the ascendancy of Corona, which follows the same pattern as innocuous American mass brews.

BTW – when Corona executives took their beer to be analyzed by a chemist, he told them that their horse had diabetes. 

Beer connoisseurs and lovers of distinction in all fields are encouraged by the counter trend, ironically made possible by globalization and new technologies made possible by the mass markets.  It used to be called mass customization.  In a very large and rich market, especially with the help of computer technologies, it is possible to assemble market worthy groups for all sorts of things.  Maybe a million people would like to drink some dark and heavy beer, but if they are spread across the whole U.S. they were so thin on the ground that nobody could afford to cater to them under the old paradigm.  Now there is more choice, as the marginal costs decline for producing variety and marketing it widely. 

We have passed through the mass undifferentiated market to a mass customization, with more choice and more variety.   The cooler of even local beer outlets now has a dizzying variety of brews.   The days when it could be technically accurate to say “When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer” are over.  The scary regimented socialism of the 1960s Sci-Fi never developed.

I am not sure we need all that choice, but that is not my choice to make.  That is the way its going to be for beer and everything else.

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Bubblers & Civic Virtue

I went down to Washington to meet Chrissy for lunch and took advantage of being there to see some of the memorials.   

Washington is a truly beautiful city.  There is a lot to see and it is all free. I corrected a German tourist who I overheard saying to a fellow European, “Americans have so little history that they have to make a bigger thing of so short a time.”  I pointed out the truth that we Americans enjoy the OLDEST continuous government in the world after only the UK.   We have not had a radical or violent overthrow of our government since 1776 and we have lived under the same Constitution – never suspended – since 1788.   I asked him just to think about it.  I didn’t point out that Germany was not a country until 1871 and that it went through some interesting changes after that.

Below is the new office building where I will work in 2009, although I bet I won’t get a good view of the Potomac.

Below is the same building in April.  They are making good progress.

Many Europeans have a different and, IMO, mistaken view of history.  They fix on places and traditions instead of people.   Some people live close to old things but no “people” or culture is older than any other.   My mother’s family left the new Germany soon after Otto Von Bismarck’s unification thing in 1871.  My father’s family left Poland (then subject to the Russian Empire) soon after.  I am glad they did.  When they came to America, they didn’t just set back the human clock to zero and start over.  They added to America’s in a shared heritage.  I have been to Germany.  We make better sausages in Milwaukee, but they still make better beer. 

BTW – I hear my great-grandfather used to imply that things were better in Germany.  This made him unpopular during World War I.  Of course he was not telling the truth.  ALL immigrants think that America is better than the places they left, otherwise they would be there and not here.  It is true even if they don’t want to admit it.

Below – Washington still has many big and beautiful American elms.

There is no such thing as a culture outside its human carriers.   It is not resident in old buildings, the land or anything else non-human.  Parents pass their culture on to their children and some cultural traits can be astonishingly long-lived, but each transition produces an imperfect copy.  This is great.  Otherwise the culture would be as dead as a rock.  No two individuals have the same understanding of their culture.   We talk about culture as thought it was something palpable, but it really is just a chimera and a very ephemeral one at that.  Better to adapt the best things you can find rather than stick only with the adaptations that worked for your grandparents.  Even the best things must be adapted.  Living people adapt and so do living cultures.  I think America does this well.  I love our traditions and still feel a kind of excitement when I walk around the Capitol Mall, even though I done it literally hundreds of times.  On the other hand, I would not want to be limited to the skills of Washington’s dentist.

Above is WWII memorial from behind.

Of course, I didn’t bore the European tourists with all that either.  Germans usually have good teeth. 

I thought of change and persistence as I walked past the World War II memorial.  It is a new memorial, but it is so very well done and fits perfectly into the Mall that you would think it had been there forever.   It commemorates the courage of my father’s generation.   Each year there are fewer and fewer of them.  Their courage is something worth passing along.

There is one simple tradition that seems to be disappearing – bubblers.*   There are still bubblers on the Mall.  There used to be lots of bubblers around generally, now not so much.   I suppose they are trouble to maintain.  Vandals break them or put gum in the spigots.  But I think the culture has taken a small wrong turn in not keeping those things around.   A bubbler is an obvious symbol of civic virtue.  Everybody gets to have something everybody needs and it is available to all.  The symbolism is one of the reason that separate bubblers were so offensive during the time of Jim Crow.   Now people sell bottles of water.   Everybody carries a bottle of water around to “hydrate”.   I would rather have the bubblers.

*Drinking fountains to people not from Milwaukee

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Busch Gardens & City Life

The kids like Busch Gardens because of the roller-coasters.  I like them too, but good amusement parks are places where you see experimental urban planning techniques and methods of cueing control.  First the amusments. 

Along side is Espen arm wresting the machine.  He won, but it still cost 50 cents.

We went on the new ride called the Griffon.  It has a fantastic vertical drop.   Roller-coasters keep getting better.  I recall the first time I went to Busch Gardens about twenty years ago.   The best they could do back then was the Loch Ness Monster.  My favorite is Apollo’s Chariot because you feel like you are going to fly out when you hit the high points. 

 The park is designed around a European theme.  They have Italy, Germany, England, Ireland and France.  Busch Gardens in Florida has an Africa theme.

Below is the Ireland part of Busch Gardens.

Now for the urban planning.  Amusement parks create the illusions of space and distance.  They do this by using travel time and changes of venue.   Most of us cannot measure straight line distance very well.  Instead, we use the proxies of time and effort.  We also notice changes in scenery, especially when we pass through some kind of threshold such as a bridge, arch or gate.  When you walk between and among the various parts of a well designed park, you never get to go the straight line.  You often have to take some kind of transportation, usually a train, that makes it seem like you are embarking on a journey.  You also cross a lot of thresholds.  Bridges, arches and gates are placed strategically to make you think you have entered a different place.  It works.

Below – there are nice gardens at Busch Gardens.   One reason I like that park is that it is pretty.

Amusement parks are some of the places where various methods are best applied, but they are the basis of all good urban and park planning.   I read a very good book re called A Pattern Language where the authors tried to figure out the patterns that make landscapes and cities pleasant.  The book is full of suggestions that apply across cultures.  I found a website re.  You have to be member to get all the benefits, but it has some nice picture.

Below are Espen and Alex, practicing their usual looks, in Busch Gardens England.

At the risk of sounding like a philistine, IMO most great cities have that amusement park atmosphere and were essentially built with that same idea in mind.   That is why people like to go there.  Go to Venice, the Vatican, Paris or Vienna and tell me you cannot see that.  It is just that in those days the amusements were for the princes and fat cats.  At first I just thought amusement parks copied these places, but the closer I looked the more I understood that these were indeed amusement parks only on a grander scale and had developed more snob-appeal from just being around a long time.   Just as in a modern Disney World or Busch Gardens, patronage allowed architects, engineers and artists to experiment with new forms.  If the popes or the Medici could have built a roller coaster, they would have had one.  Imagine them whooping it up on the drop. A roller coaster is a wonder of engineering and physics and requires an understanding of human perceptions and psychology.  It is no small thing, physically or intellectually.  I don’t doubt that Leonardo da Vinci designed one or two of them, but like the other things he drew, they didn’t go into production.

Below is the wisteria.  Grows fast. Notice the arch as you pass from one section to the next.

For example, a path with uneven width (i.e. with wider spots and curves) is more appealing than a straight road.  People all over the world like structures with galleries or porches.  A well designed house offers a transition area from outside space to inside space.  We are attracted to houses with a sheltering roof.  A room with a corner with windows on both walls is nicer than one with windows only on one.   Most of the things are obvious WHEN they are pointed out.   Unfortunately, many of our modern cities violate almost all the precepts of a comfortable place to live.  In recent years, we have designed our cities for the convenience of the automobile and make humans second class inhabitants in our cities.  It doesn’t have to be that way and we can learn from what they do at quality amusement parks and public gardens.

Below is Busch Garden’s Italian street.

Some communities are being designed with the human principle in mind.  Unfortunately, they tend to be only upscale places where ordinary people cannot afford to live.  They also tend to run up against zoning rules.  Recently, we also have the added permutation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.   Most of the nicest places in my favorite cities such as Krakow, Vienna or Istanbul would never pass the tests of accessibility.   In theory, you could build a neighborhood as charming as some of those we find in great old cities, but modern rules would not permit it.  However, you might be able to get an erzatz version as in Busch Gardens.  That is not so bad.

Below are Alex and Espen entering the German section.  Notice again the distinct entry.

Re housing, I read an article in this month’s Wilson Quarterly about housing.  The author was Witold Rybczynski, who wrote a very good book called City Life that I read a couple years ago.  Witold Rybczynski says that housing is so expensive because of all the restrictions governments place on land use and building requirements.   Places where the red tape is the strongest, such as the New England and the West Coast, have much higher home prices.  It is not simply a matter of greater demand, but also of artificially restricted supply.   Builders are complicit in this, although you can see why they would be almost forced to do it.  If a parcel of buildable land costs a lot, it just makes sense to build a big, expensive house there to make it worth the effort.   Many people have more house than they need, but they have been convinced that they need even more.  I recommend both the article and the book.   Unfortunately, neither is available online, so you have to look at them in the old fashioned paper way (Wilson Quarterly is worth the subscription, BTW), but I did find a good interview with author.

Below is Roman Rapids at Busch Gardens.  You get wet, but it was hot so good.  Only Alex and I went. Mariza took the picture.  Espen paid a quarter to try to squirt us from the side, but missed.

PS – this is a little off topic, but as long as we are talking re things that make life work, I also found a good article re freshwater.   This is the link.   

Below – the kids don’t like to have their pictures taken. 

IMO – the recuperation part of R&R is getting a chance to think about things besides work, so this is what I have been doing.

Above – Mariza and Sponge Bob.

Below – Espen got a gum package that gave a shock when you tried to take one.  He couldn’t understand why he got no takers.  We are all suspicious of him bearing gifts.