Green Market Press Blog

We’ve been hanging close to the TV and computer, watching the progress of Irene up the East Coast. This is of special interest to us since son David and his family (Connie and granddaughter Rebecca) live in Hampton, Virginia, smack in the path of the storm. (Karl and Rita may get slightly brushed in Burlington, Vt.)

 Dave and Connie’s power went off Saturday morning, but they have a generator and are storm veterans, who know what to do. Connie has sent Facebook updates occasionally, and says that despite about 15 inches of rain the sump pump has been keeping the basement dry, and there have been few problems as of this writing. She tells us the world championship for Trivial Pursuit has been under way on their enclosed porch.

 We’re happy that David is there with them, rather than at his job in Surrey as a control-room operator for a nuclear power plant. He was on duty during the earthquake, and it seems only fair that he doesn’t have to be on the job for two natural disasters in the same week.

The news media are covering the whey out of this story, which may save some lives. But after riding out a couple of hurricanes in Taiwan (they’re called typhoons there), I’m a little jaundiced. Typhoons are certainly serious—they do damage (notably by creating mudslides) and there are a few deaths. But they’re so frequent that residents take them in stride, usually without mass evacuations.

 My drill, in a 14th-floor apartment, was to criss-cross the windows with tape, which was supposed to cut down on flying glass. I laid in plenty of food and water. Work was cancelled and I stayed indoors until the all-clear was sounded. I preferred typhoons to earthquakes, which were pretty scary on the 14th floor.

 When I emerged it was clear why everyone stayed off the streets. I don’t recall that a lot of windows were blown out, but the sidewalks were always littered with potentially lethal shards of plexiglass from hanging signs.

During the media coverage of Irene, Colin remarked that he was getting tired of breathless descriptions of siding being torn from sheds. This reminded me of the story of Jonathan Livingston Shed, many years ago in Louisville.

 A Courier-Journal reporter, John Finley I believe, was sent out to cover a report that a freak wind had blown a tool shed over a garage, depositing it intact on the other side. (It was a slow news day.) John elected to model his report on the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull—one line, I recall, went, “’I’m not just an ordinary shed,’ said Jonathan—‘I can fly!’ And he did!”

 The little story delighted the editors so much they put it on Page 1. (Did I mention that it was a slow news day?)

 So far nothing that whimsical has come out of Irene, but I still have hopes for something from the 90 feisty senior citizens who are refusing to leave their apartment building in Atlantic City.

Bounty of the Wayside is the name of a delightful book by Walter Beebe Wilder, in which the youthful hero learns (from an eccentric uncle, I believe) about all the wonderful items of food and drink that can be produced by harvesting the treasures growing in woods, pastures, and along rural roads.

 I was entranced with the book as a child, and it’s probably to blame for the five gallons of elderberry vinegar I once produced while trying to make wine.

 I’ve been thinking about this again during an e-mail correspondence with John Paul Mueller in Wisconsin, which began when I remarked casually on my blog that I’d seen some Queen Anne’s Lace while walking along Hurricane Creek in Franklin. John wrote back, urging me to make sure that what I was seeing was really QAL and not water hemlock. It would be unusual, he said, to find QAL growing in a moist area. He urged care in approaching it, and when I googled water hemlock I could see why. This is powerful and nasty stuff, and the flower heads look a lot like QAL.

 I sent him a photo of what I’d seen, but the leaves weren’t clear enough for him to make a determination. So I made another trip to the spot, brought some leaves home, and photographed them on a white background.

 This reassured John that I was in no danger of the blind staggers or death from handling hemlock or making tea out of it. It also spurred him to write a blog item of his own, “The Wonders of Queen Anne’s Lace,” which can be found as his entry of August 22 at http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com.

 The blog item also provided a recipe for and a photo of some delectable Queen Anne’s Lace jelly. John and his wife, Rebecca, believe in and practice a self-sustaining lifestyle, and one purpose of his blog is to tell how they do it. Besides the QAL piece, there are now more recent posts about zucchini and about how to handle overabundance in the garden, two topics that can be related. (Someone told me it’s a good idea to lock your car in late summer, or you may return to find it filled with zucchini.)

 John’s blog alternates between lifestyle pieces and computer-related topics. I recommend it highly for both. 

Karen and I went out to buy a new mattress Saturday, to replace the one that’s been on our bed since 1993. Karen shopped for that one by herself while I was in Taiwan, so this was a whole new experience for me. I figured on devoting the day to it, which turned out to be about right.

 Janey the Cleaning Whiz had recommended a place just around the corner from Panera’s, a favorite lunch spot. It had beautiful mattresses and an attentive and helpful salesman—almost too helpful and attentive. We didn’t have much of a chance just to lounge and get a feeling for the merchandise, which was also a little pricey for us.

 So we decided to go on to a department store in Greenwood Park Mall, where Colin had recommended talking to Warren (not his real name). Colin had met Warren during an employment stint at the store, and said he knew everything about mattresses. He did indeed, and we were swept into an extended and useful demonstration, with Karen as chief guinea pig. Warren had her try a number of mattresses, urging her not to say how each felt. “’Feel’ is a comfort word,” he said. “I want to know how it supports your back.”

 We liked Warren and could easily have bought a mattress from him, even though I began to feel after a while that I was watching a performance. That was okay, though. Warren was having fun, and so were we. His prices were somewhat less than the first store’s, though still above what we had hoped for. Prices seem to have gone up since 1993.

 We adjourned to the Olive Garden for lunch. I was for going back and buying from Warren, but Karen wanted to try a cut-rate place just down the road. So we did.

 It turned out to be a nice place, with a Simmons Beautyrest of about the same sort Warren was recommending, but with $200 off on a closeout sale. (We’re prejudiced in favor of Simmons—that’s all we’ve ever bought, and Karen’s mother before her bought Simmonses for the family motel.)

 Best of all, though, the salesman left us alone. We lounged, and discussed both how the mattress felt and how it supported our backs. We tried side sleeping. Then we lounged and chatted some more. We considered asking the salesman what time the store closed, and instructing him to wake us then. In the end, we sold ourselves.

 Karen explained that we needed a “low profile foundation” for what she kept describing as “our antique bed.” Well, antique in the sense of old. It’s just an old iron frame, painted white. But a standard foundation would have required a ladder to get into bed.

 The new mattress will arrive in about a week, and the haulers will carry away the old one for free. We should be set for another 17 years.

November 4, 1993

[A putative letter from Olympia, the Typewriter Pony, in Taipei to Karen’s Schaefer ink pen in Franklin.]

Dear Schaefer Pony,

He Who Types has gone to bed. I thought I would drop a short note to you, since we seem to have a lot in common, including owners who are a bit strange.

I should not really complain about He Who Types, since he is a good master and even brought me a new ribbon the other day. But he acts very oddly at times, and I think it has something to do with his religion. He worships an idol on the table next to his bed. When it summons him with a ringing sound, he drops whatever he is doing and runs to placate it. The holiest times appear to be on Thursday night and Sunday morning, when he makes a sort of shrine on his bed with papers, pens, calendars, etc. When the Ringing God speaks to him, he writes down the words and always seems very happy afterward. Does your mistress ever act in this strange way?

I have a very nice stall here, but it is lonely with no other typewriter ponies around. There is another creature of some sort in the corner next to my table. Every morning it snorts and whinnies and produces a brown substance of some sort that He Who Types drinks eagerly. The substance appears to be a mind-altering drug of some sort—at any rate, He Who Types has a totally different personality after he has drunk two cups of it.

There is also a sort of Whirling Dervish living in the other corner of the kitchen, which He Who Types feeds with clothing every day or two.

Neither of these creatures is communicative at all during the day, so I am very glad when my master returns in the evening, especially when he is carrying blue pieces of paper. I have learned that these are letters from you, with news about your mistress in whom He Who Types seems to take a great deal of interest. Quite often after he has received one of the Blue Papers, he and I write a long letter in reply, and he seems very happy, even ecstatic. This may also have something to do with his religion, because he sometimes begins typing in tongues—phrases like “Ich liebe Dich” and “Wo ai ni,” which mean nothing at all to an English typewriter pony like me. I often wonder what your mistress makes of such things, and why she continues having you write to my poor, weak-minded master. She must be a very kind person.

He Who Types often mentions something called “love” in his letters. This evidently is an ailment that afflicts humans, and I fear he is seriously ill with it. However, he seems to feel that a cure will be found, perhaps as early as next February. In the meantime I encourage him to type as much as he wants, since this seems to relieve the worst symptoms. I hope your mistress has not been similarly afflicted, but from what little I have seen of your letters I fear she is also a sufferer. But neither of our humans seems unhappy about it—who can understand them? Give me solid, dependable ribbons and ink cartridges any time.

This reminds me . . . . I understand that you and your mistress are coming to visit us in February. Willie Waterman (I forgot to mention him) has offered to share his penholder with you. There is a very nice stationery store near here that you would enjoy visiting. It has a wide variety of refills.

I suspect that we will not see a lot of your mistress and He Who Types once they get together. Dare I hope that we might become better acquainted? I realize we are different types, but I like your slant on things, and, after all, ink is thicker than water.

Having praised David Carlson’s new book, Peace Be With You: Monastic Wisdom for a Terror-Filled World, I’ve been interested in the reader response on Amazon, now that the book is published.

 There are a number of favorable reviews, mine included, some of which were solicited before publication. Of the 12 reviews currently on the site, three are unfavorable, and these were the ones I read with the most interest. (It appears these reviewers were supplied with review copies by the publisher, Thomas Nelson, which may have been seeking a spectrum of views.)

 The review by Michael Lee is the most measured of the three. Lee writes from an evangelical Christian perspective, and questions whether we should be “dialoguing” with Islam or other religions “since it seems we would be righteously burdened to evangelize the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ so our neighbors won’t suffer eternal damnation in Hell.” That’s not quite my understanding of the full Christian mission, but I’ll give Lee considerable credit for praising Carlson’s suggestion that we might view our “enemies” through the eyes of Jesus Christ. I was also more interested than Lee in the details of Carlson’s visits to monasteries, which Lee dismisses as “uninteresting fluff.” One reader’s piquant detail is another reader’s irritating distraction, obviously.

 The other two comments, by M. Smith and Burgundy Damsel (the latter apparently a pseudonym), were short and didn’t strike me as actual reviews of the book so much as reactions based on the writers’ preconceived ideas of the subject, which is ironic, since each taxes Carlson with twisting his subject to support his preconceived ideas. Smith said his main reaction to the book was anger, and that he felt Carlson “was on a quest to point a finger at the U.S. government and how it handled the crisis.”

 He concludes that “turning the other cheek is proper in a face-to-face situation, but in acts of terror, I don’t think so.”

Damsel condemned the book and Carlson personally. “The author’s own faith and attitude toward Christianity smack badly of New Age and globalism, showing very little Biblical basis or scholarly diligence,” the review said. Carlson got no good marks at all, and the reviewer concluded by recommending another book that by its title appears to preclude any fruitful conversation with Islam. At least you know where Damsel stands.

 The reviews raised a point or two that I’ll think more about, but I continue to feel that Carlson’s book is a remarkable one, well worth reading as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, whether you agree with everything he says or not.

The old line goes, “A week ago I couldn’t spell ‘editer’ and now I are one.”

 I seem to be in danger of becoming the webmaster for the little non-profit agency where I volunteer.

 This is itself says something about the agency’s computer literacy—I suspected something a while back when I mentioned a jpeg file to the young office assistant, and she replied, “What’s a jpeg?” (She’s a recent college graduate, too, which may belie the notion that the young are universally computer-savvy.)

 Anyway, the director asked me recently if I could do some updating of the agency’s website (there is someone out there who created the site and would update it for an hourly fee, but the agency needs the money for the homeless). The director turned her admin password over to me and said, “Play around.”

 I reviewed what little I remembered about HTML and sort of figured out how the site worked (it’s hosted by WordPress, as is my blog, so the format was somewhat familiar). Of course I had Colin to fall back on, so together we accomplished the necessary updating. He even went a little further and corrected some sloppiness in the original website design.

“Do I sense that you’re coming out of retirement again?” he asked me. Well, no—I have no illusions about my webmaster skills or lack thereof. But it’s sort of fun to hack around at it.

October 16, 1993

There’s a little time until I leave for Jon’s, so will get a progressive started to you. I’m to meet Connie Sheehan, the intern, under the ersatz glockenspiel at Sogo at 6:15 and take her around to Jon’s apartment to meet him and Jun-yi, then to a Chinese restaurant and on to a night market.(Connie went to Snake Alley, the big tourist trap, last night, so the little neighborhood night market may seem tame. But I’ll enjoy it.)

Jessica and family just rolled in—the whole tribe plus grandma and grandpa, who came to pick up some kitchen stuff and bedding that were stored. I have two very curious small children leaning over the typewriter and flat-out fascinated by the way I can make things go. So Olympia, the typewriter pony, is really going through her paces for them!

Much later, like Sunday morning: By all rights, your husband should be horribly hung over this morning, after a long and beery evening yesterday. For some reason he isn’t, although coffee does look good. Connie Sheehan, Jon Welch, and I had a good Chinese supper and toured the night market, which was fun—about two blocks of food stands and fruit/vegetable stalls, with a little temple to the Earth God on one corner. Jon bought us little rice cakes with ground peanuts in the center—sort of like eating cookie dough—and we also stopped for plates of ai-yu, shaved ice on a gelatin base, topped with sugarcane sauce and lemon flavoring.

After that, Jon left to go see Jun-yi; she had had a hard week at work and begged off from the expedition. Connie wanted to meet some people at the “Dinosaur Bar,” so we headed off there.

The Dinosaur Bar is . . . well, indescribable. But I’ll try. It’s a huge place, four stories high, with a giant neon dinosaur on the roof. It’s built around a theme of dinosaurs and American Indians. If Jonah had been swallowed by a dinosaur, he might have seen something like this. We climbed to our fourth-floor table under arches of dinosaur bones (phony). The telephones are mounted inside T. Rex skulls, etc. Beer is wheeled to the tables in kegs.

A fellow names Mike Woolson met us, a friend of Connie’s from OU, who has been working for a year as a writer and graphic designer at the China Post, and is about ready to go home. This was his going-away party. We were joined by Alex and Chris, also from the Post. Alex, who is Chinese by way of Brazil and Los Angeles, told us about her woes as community-page editor. Chris, a young guy about half a year out of Tufts University, told about trying to be a reporter in China with minimal Chinese. Reminded me of UPI days in Germany. Anyway, I heard all the lowdown on the China Post, which evidently is a horrible place to work. They advised trying other places first—nuclear-waste dumps, garbage scows, anything. (However, they were delightful—clearly very talented kids who would make something out of the CP if they got any encouragement at all from management. If you can imagine Bob Satnan, Steve Polston, and Becky Sun working for a Chinese Don Guerrettaz, you’ll have the picture.)

Mike Woolson is a friend of Maria Marron’s from OU, and my buddy at Scripps Howard in Washington. We drained a couple of small kegs. Chris had just come from a trying day at the paper, and put away a phenomenal amount of beer for someone who looks like a 120-pound college freshman. The party broke up about 1 and I walked home through still-active Taipei—got to use my building key for the first time.

I have drunk a lot of beer in some strange places, but few stranger than the Dinosaur Bar. We will have to go there—once. Pictures were taken during the evening, and at some point you may get one of your husband being supported by the jawbone of a brontosaurus. It was a lot of fun, pleasant people, and I’m going out for lunch with them near the Post tomorrow.

The Post is a pretty awful paper. This is the one that ran the story of the Bhutanese princess smuggling rhino horns, under the cryptic headline, “Princess Caught with Horns.” The staffers were passing around a critique done a while back by a consultant from the U.S. It began, in big letters, “Get an editor!” I also found out that Allen Pun is its fulltime city editor. I thought he was fulltime with us, though I’ve noticed he’s not in the office a lot. This may explain something about the Post’s English.

Flashback to earlier Saturday: It was a gorgeous day. I had lots of things I wanted to get done—letters, rescrub the kitchen floor—and decided to do none of them. Instead I took a cab out to see the Lin An-t’ai Old Homestead, the oldest surviving house in Taipei, dating to 1783. It’s been moved and reconstructed in a park—an interesting building of which I took many pictures.

The park was Wedding Central on a sunny Saturday afternoon, with at least a dozen bridal parties being photographed on the lawn, under the trees, in front of the house, in the house. You could hardly move without tripping over a bride.

I’ve been working out fairly regularly at the gym down the street, but yesterday afternoon I went back to my old walking grounds along Hurricane Creek, hoping to see some ducks or geese.

 The local folklore is that the creek is named after a windstorm that blew down it in pioneer days, but I suspect this is faulty etymology. An early document refers to another creek as “the hurricane,” which makes me think this was a generic term for a fast-running brook.

 Hurricane Creek was anything but fast-running yesterday, with the water well down and sandbars showing after an unusually dry summer. I did my usual walk from the parking lot near the Boys’ Club to Webb School and back, about 45 minutes. The city’s Greenway Trail runs beside the creek, so I had company now and then from other hikers and cyclists, including three tykes on bikes, with Mom bringing up the rear. They all had their helmets on.

 On this stretch, Hurricane Creek is nearly invisible much of the time because of high growth along the trail. Occasionally there’s a glimpse through the underbrush of glinting water and rocks in dark shallows. As a kid I would have slithered through the weeds and down the bank to dabble in the riffles, but WACW—With Age Comes Wisdom—or maybe just stiff muscles.

 I dawdled through my favorite wooded stretch, where sunlight dappled the path and the first fallen leaves of the year.

 There were no ducks or geese this time (although Colin saw a megagaggle of geese on the west side of town while returning from work in Bloomington). Wildflowers were also scarce—a few Bouncing Bets, some daisy-like flowers (stick-tights maybe), and Queen Anne’s Lace.

 It was a beautiful, peaceful afternoon, and while I may not have exercised as intensely as at the gym it was a lot more fun.

 Later I drove to the library, checked out the next Commissario Brunetti mystery by Donna Leon (set in Venice), and flipped through the Christian Science Monitor in search of a little good news. There was some, too, in the form of a long article called “Five Myths About Africa,” by Scott Baldauf, the paper’s departing chief correspondent there. Baldauf didn’t gloss over bad news about the continent, but pointed out some bright spots he’s observed in his five years there. Among these were the kindness and hospitality called “ubuntu” in Zulu—“human-ness.”

 The news in our media is brutal these days and likely to get more so in a worsening economy with an acrimonious election ahead. With this in mind I expect to watch for, and relay, bits of “ubuntu” in the news as I encounter them. It’s the least a recovering journalist can do.

After a sometimes discouraging first brush with the Adobe InDesign publishing program, I’m back working with it again, expectations lowered.

It’s an amazing program—and huge. I believe Adobe has thought of every possible contingency that could arise in preparing material for printing, traditional or electronic. There’s a plethora of menus, buttons, and hidden instructions to do everything from handling hyphenation to dropped caps. That’s “plethora” in its original meaning of “overfilled, swollen with blood.”

 InDesign makes my little old Word Publisher program look like a Model T next to a Ferrari. My impression is that InDesign is pretty much the standard now for all publishing, whether it’s newsletters, newspapers, advertising, or full-length books. So it’s a handy program to know something about.

 I’ve been reviewing some of the material from Lindsay Hadley’s spring class, and also getting assistance from the training films on Linda.com. Colin knows InDesign and uses it on his new job, so he helps me out when I’m stuck.

 The saving thing is that I don’t have to use—or even need to know—many of InDesign’s features in order to do the things I’m interested in. It was relatively easy to put together a six-page newsletter for Christian Help, the local agency that aids the homeless. And a couple of nights ago I created a new 100-page document, with page numbers, for Taipei Diary and then poured about 60 pages of type into it. It’s rough, spacing is way off, but it’s there.

 Best of all, no pressure. I can work on it when the spirit moves. The real challenge of Taipei Diary is simply transcribing all the letters I wrote in 1993-94—when did I have time to do all those?

 Nice note from son David, a nuclear power-plant operator, about storytelling. He writes, in part:

 “I think I’m more a verbal storyteller than a written one. One of the things I enjoy at work is training the new operators we get, and I try to do it in a way that keeps them interested in what I’m explaining, and surprises them once in a while. Coming at a subject in a different way, then sliding what I’m trying to impart to them in at the end, tends to make them remember it. ‘What’s our normal voltage? 4160 watts. If you can remember that, you can remember that four impacts on one channel in 60 seconds with give us this alarm. Get it. There will be a test.’”

In answer to a question from Dave, the little short story, “Discovery,” on which Uncle Bill commented, will never be seen again. It disappeared aeons ago.

October 13, 1993

Went out with the Cynical Journalist crew for supper tonight, but left early to come back here, wrap Christmas presents, and glue another chair—have two completely done now, one in the final stages and another one almost there. (There are an additional two I may fix at some point—but main thing is to get four for the kitchen.)

This was catch-up day on the FCJ—paying for the Monday holiday. I worked steadily all day and even came back early from lunch to keep ahead of the flood—first time that’s happened. As a result tomorrow ought to be fairly easy. Even on a light day, though, each story presents its own problems. None of the reporters have had much training or experience in really nailing down stories, so I’m continually going back to them with questions that a reader in the States would have. Today most of them seemed to be questions about Chinese politics, which are almost as confusing as Kentucky’s.

The tailor hadn’t quite finished our clothes, so Sam and I will go tomorrow and get them. I have one or two more Christmas things to get, and will finish packing the box tomorrow night. (The Good Mr. Chen found a box for me—don’t know what I’d do without him.) Should get it in the mail, registered, by Friday. You have no idea how virtuous I feel—me, who used never to shop before Dec. 24.

Got part of my 10/10 pictures back today and the rest will be ready tomorrow. Think I’ll send all these to you at once, by separate package. They’re OK snapshots, but nothing like Sam’s. which are pro quality. (He actually has the dragon breathing fire, and has promised me a copy.)

Thursday morning: A beautiful clear morning with all the mountains visible. Coffeemaker is churking along, with the first cup due momentarily. Will go catch the morning news and see how the Blue Jays did. . . . They won! And the Phillies are up 3-2. Should be a great World Serious. Time to go scramble some eggs. Bisquick sounds like a good idea—I can do small pancakes in the bottom of the wok.

From the office: Nice walk to work with wisps of cloud over Yangmingshan.