On-Screen Scientist

At the risk of thoroughly alienating some potential readers, I’m taking this opportunity to set the record straight. Despite my physics background, I am not an atheist, though I was one—and a “hard” atheist at that, one who would almost certainly have quit reading the blog of an avowed theist had there been blogs back then—throughout most of my adult life. I well remember my mindset as an atheist, though it is absolutely foreign to me now, and I look back at those decades with some wonderment at how I stayed stuck so long in what I now see as an immature world view, which I stumbled into during my adolescence.

I, as many do in those years of immaturity, made some bad decisions back in high school. First I joined the Cool Sophisticates’ Club (open to all cigarette smokers without further accomplishment) and a little later The Truly Smart Peoples’ Club (one of whose main requirements was a rejection of all religion and any belief in a Creator). I think I was fortunate that there was no functioning Cool Drug Users’ Club at my high school back in those days, though the possibly even more dangerous Wild and Crazy Beer Drinkers’ Club was definitely taking in members. I’m not sure The Truly Smart Peoples’ Club had any other members in my high school, but I could read (Bertrand Russell, for example), so I knew it existed, and I was ready to claim my place in it, especially as I had just discovered (and greatly overestimated the extent of its explanatory power) physics.

I was able to get beyond the idea of cigarette smoking as a cool thing to do (even if Sartre, Brando, and James Dean all smoked) in a few years and, after about a year of trying to quit, finally escaped the notoriously strong hold which nicotine has on those addicted to it. But my addiction to the view that science can explain everything worth considering proved to have more staying power than nicotine’s chemical changes to my brain. Part of the difference was, I think, that, while I came to see that membership in the Cool Sophisticates’ Club, in addition to bringing serious health hazards, really carried no cachet, since any punk with half a dollar could join it, The Truly Smart Peoples’ Club maintained its elite, even heroic, status in my mind.

Someday I may trace on these pages (if I may call them that) my path to recognizing that our universe is created and meaningful. Given my intellectual approach to things, it was certainly a more purely reasoned and rational path than most people would take; which is not to say that it was at the end merely a logical conclusion with no mystical component. So the story may be of interest to others.

Today, however, I feel moved to look back at a couple of statements made by famous atheists, which, when I first read them, found great favor with me as being wonderfully eloquent. I somehow felt pride at being able to join with these highly intelligent and bravely defiant men in facing the reality of the meaninglessness of the universe, while inwardly mocking those who took the cowardly, intellectually weak way out: religious mystification and consolation. Of course, I have a very different response to them now.

The first passage to which I refer was written by Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist whose work on unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces of subatomic interactions was recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. Weinberg, in addition to his contributions to theoretical physics, has written several books that attempt to explain new physics discoveries to the general educated public. One of his most famous works in this line was The First Three Minutes, which dealt with physicists’ understanding of what took place immediately after the initial singularity or big bang (or moment of creation or beginning of time) from which our universe seems to have sprung into being.

In the Epilogue of this book Weinberg writes the following (speaking at first of our beautiful Earth): “It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.”

Weinberg is a very good writer, and I recommend his books both for the science and the writing. But let us critically consider this passage of his. First comes his dismay that, from what we can tell, life must be very rare in the universe. The thought of all that vast space devoid of the conditions for life is evidently depressing to him, but that is a personal view, not something everyone must feel of necessity. If God created the Heavens and the Earth, this is the Earth and everything else is the Heavens. Consider the wonders of what we have here, whether or not we are the unique home to life!

Then comes his reference to the “unspeakably unfamiliar early condition.” What should we expect from the moments after creation? Isn’t there cause for joy that we have been able to arrive at a reasonable scenario for that almost unimaginable period of time, rather than depression that it is so strange to us?

Future extinction? We know that each of us faces personal extinction in this material world already. That the universe may (and we are extrapolating from incomplete knowledge) also have an end, or an end to its life-supporting time, is depressing from the purely materialist viewpoint to some minds, but is it inherently depressing? Weinberg sees the continuation of life or, in truth, conscious, intelligent life, into the indefinite future as the main criterion for there being (just possibly) purpose to the universe. I wonder if the reason why the prospect of an end to all life in the universe seems so hard to Weinberg is that psychologically it makes our own end seem even more final. Perhaps it is just a transference of sadness over personal mortality to that of the universe. I might add that, whatever beliefs a theist may have about personal survival, God’s eternal existence is not in question.

From my current perspective, it seems obvious that hoping to find purpose in mere matter is bound to lead to disappointment. Weinberg is trying to read the universe as one reads tea leaves, searching for meaning in quarks and galaxies, but he seems to be excluding in advance the existence of a Creator as an outcome of this interpretation, thereby eliminating the only possible source of purpose. Weinberg sees the scarcity and precariousness of life as a sign of pointlessness. In Weinberg’s view, the briefness of life’s candle in the universe, makes human life in essence farcical, with scientific research offering the only meager, perhaps illusory, hope of temporary transcendence. Thus he rejects the mere existence of any conscious life existing at all as evidence for meaning, though I see this is as clearly a matter of personal opinion and interpretation.

At the time I first read it, I think I took Weinberg’s statement (and the words that follow it) as a powerful upholding of the materialist viewpoint and an admirable way of responding to its hard realities. Now I see that the only argument that could be extracted from it is circular, as it assumes materialism from the beginning. Within this materialist context, a single finite creature examines the universe from the standpoint of his own personal preferences and finds that the universe fails to match his hopes, which he takes as proof that there is no purpose to the universe. And it is only this perceived lack of purpose that could be used as an argument for the materialist view, already assumed.

It may be reasonable to think that the creation of moral, rational beings was one of the purposes, or even the purpose, for the creation of the universe, but a human being is overstepping the bounds of competence in rendering judgment on the whole project of creation based on personal feelings about whether the universe should continue to support material life eternally. And what is Weinberg getting at anyway? Does the idea of a purpose without a mind and agent behind it make sense at all? It seems that Weinberg is actually trying to see signs of God in the universe; but he has auditioned God and rejected Him as not suiting the part.

The second quotation comes from Richard Dawkins, the well-known biologist and author of popular books explaining natural selection and evolution from a strongly anti-teleogical standpoint (e.g., The Blind Watchmaker) and, more recently, a spokesman and propagandist for atheism (The God Delusion).

Here is what Dawkins wrote in a Scientific American article in 1995: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. …In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”

Whoa, Richard, hold on. Precisely the properties? I can imagine universes much more devoid of obvious design or purpose. What about one with only empty dark space: no matter and no light? What about one in which stars never ignite? What if the physical laws were changing all the time, so that nothing could persist, nothing were predictable? Yes, but there would be no pain and suffering in those empty universes, and that is really Dawkins’s only point.

While Weinberg is downhearted over the insufficient friendliness of the universe to life in both space and time, Dawkins, the life scientist, sees the existence of life as it actually is as a conclusive argument against purpose and good and evil. Beyond the suffering, Dawkins doesn’t seem to like chance and contingency at all, which is somewhat surprising given the supreme role it plays in his view of evolution and its wonderful results. But I gather he finds evolution by natural selection as being in itself an argument against God for the reason that any God worth his salt wouldn’t leave things to painful chance that way. Curiously, on this point he thus finds himself in agreement with religious fundamentalists who use it as an argument against evolution!

Dawkins surveys our universe of beautiful order, as seen in its physical laws and the immensely complex phenomena that flow from them—including the production of thinking creatures such as Dawkins himself—and then implies that if he were God, he would surely have done things differently. I gather he would have avoided all animal suffering and the eating of one animal by another. He is not the first to wish for this, but does the existence of animal suffering really show there is “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good?” Or does the notion of good and evil only apply to moral creatures such as ourselves? Is Dawkins not trying to impose his own idea of morality to the whole animal kingdom?

Dawkins is really wishing for Heaven on Earth, isn’t he? The ultimate materialist seems to be longing for a purely spiritual existence in which eating and dying don’t occur. In some circles such beings are known as Angels. Or perhaps there should be only vegan animals that live forever. That is an Edenic vision. Yes, Dawkins has a particular bone to pick with God: he doesn’t like animal suffering or anything involving chance accidents that harm the good as well as the bad or even give better genes to one individual than to another. Starting from his perception of “pitiless indifference,” he extrapolates to “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good.” How can one even speak of good and evil if the concepts have no meaning in this universe? Dawkins goes well beyond Weinberg in his willingness to judge Creation.

Both Weinberg and Dawkins are turning their backs on God basically because they find fault with Creation: Weinberg because it seems life won’t last forever and Dawkins because of animal suffering. There can be no God because this universe offends me in certain ways is what they seem to be saying. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth! Actually, I shouldn’t say they are turning their backs on God because of these perceived shortcomings of the universe. They, as I did, very likely banished God from their lives without giving it much thought at an early age. Now they are finding reasons to maintain their world view; and it is good to remember the distinction.

Why did I particularly remember these two statements? I think I know. They are both examples of how deep the spiritual pit can be for a materialist that thinks a lot about such matters as purpose in the universe. I too was one of those. These men both find that the universe is far different from their ideal one They use the perceived defects in Creation as their argument against a Creator. This goes well beyond “I see no evidence for God” or “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

No, these critiques are from men who are deeply disappointed in their failure to discern purpose in the universe, though this is bound to be the result of confining their search to the materialist context. Based on my own experience, I have to think that they are yearning for God, even as they resist turning to God, and even rail against belief in God, which they see as irrational, just as I now know I was yearning when I found their indictments of Creation praiseworthy. Purpose cannot be pulled out of the material universe without reference to a Creator whose power and wisdom, by very virtue of their being the Creator’s, are beyond question.

So what about suffering? That there are some things beyond the limits of our understanding is something we must humbly accept. Those who believe in God do not demand that God satisfy their personal criteria for perfection in the universe, but recognize the great disparity between creature and creator in understanding, wisdom, and power. I think the immense disparity–infinite disparity—between creature and Creator is the hardest thing for an atheist to imagine and appreciate. It really has to be experienced. This disparity is expressed poetically in an ancient text (Isaiah 55:8-9) thusly: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

I think that in originally accepting both Weinberg’s and Dawkins’s statements as exemplary, I was looking for and finding support from prestigious sources for my world view, with which my very self seemed inextricably entwined after so many years. Weinberg is one of us! I should have known that a man of such brilliance would agree with me on the subject of God and purpose. This of course confirmed once again that I was indeed a member of The Truly Smart Peoples’ Club. Beyond that, I have come to realize during the course of writing this piece, I took heart from the authors’ being able to carry on in the world under the burden of purposeless mortality.

I recall a conversation my wife had with one of my son’s sixth grade teachers, an atheist who, as most atheists probably are, was puzzled at the persistence of the superstitious, as he saw it, belief in God. I think more out of curiosity than through a desire to convert the students to his unspoken view on the subject, he had had them write briefly on why they thought people believed in God. In discussing this exercise with him my wife had told the teacher that I wasn’t an atheist, which he had naturally found surprising since he knew I was a physicist. She told him a little about my conversion and that I thought theism was more reasonable than atheism. This revelation evidently made him consider in a theoretical way the possibility, perhaps for the first time, that he might change his own mind on the subject. He said, “I don’t know how I could deal with that. My atheism is so much a part of who I am. I wouldn’t want that.”

Our strongly held beliefs, including our negative ones, are a major part of who we think we are. Weinberg and Dawkins were helping to reinforce my sense of self and the pride I could take in it. My son’s teacher was saying that even if he were wrong on the most important question of all, that of God’s existence, he would rather not change his mind because the attendant psychic adjustment would be too great. I doubt that he was really admitting the possibility that he might be wrong, but only thinking about how utterly different his outlook would be were he to change his mind on the ultimate question. In other words, he feared the mutilation of his self beyond recognition. For myself, during decades as an atheist, the only reason I could have imagined for my adopting theism at some point in the future would have been insanity.

When I was addicted to smoking, every cigarette I smoked not only kept my physical addiction going; it also helped reinforce my image of myself as a smoker; and, of course, the world can be divided along smoker and non-smoker lines just as along atheist and theist lines. I believe there was a similar dual reinforcement of my habit of thought at work in my reading of atheistic writing by authors I admired. I find it very plausible that statements like those by Weinberg and Dawkins may have served the function of maintaining a kind of downright physical addiction to the atheistic outlook. I certainly took pleasure in reading them far beyond what was justified by the content, which, as we’ve seen, was deeply pessimistic in tone and without value as argument. Thus there was probably something chemical going on in my brain that I liked and would want to have repeated.

Just as smokers continue to light up in order to relieve the anxiety brought about by the onset of nicotine withdrawal symptoms, so that the main purpose in the drug’s use becomes preventing the negative psychological effects of the addiction itself; so did I find comfort in reading such statements, though small comfort, from the ever present sense of despair that came with my bleak view of the universe as a place without meaning.

I would like to encourage any atheist that’s read this far to consider this one thing: whether or not God exists to give a purpose to the universe and our lives is the most important philosophical and personal question we have to answer correctly in our brief time of life. Were you raised an atheist or did you come, as I did, to atheism before reaching intellectual maturity? If so, then you may want to re-examine that step you took. Throughout history and into our own times there have been many “truly smart people,” who have recognized God’s existence, and their conclusions should not be dismissed out of hand. I’m speaking of scientifically literate people to whom the idea that God is a substitute for science applies not at all.

The question of God’s existence deserves deep investigation and thought and not casual dismissal for lack of scientific “evidence,” when the very nature of such hypothetical conclusive evidence is never even postulated. Can you imagine what the scientific evidence for God would look like? If not then perhaps you are looking in the wrong direction and not seriously looking at all. If there is some single phenomenon in the world (the suffering of innocents, for example) that prevents your even considering God’s existence, try to put it aside for the time being.

If the evidence you demand is something in the nature of a direct communication from God, then you are speaking of revelation, not sharable evidence. Keep in mind also that hostility to belief in God often becomes hostility to God. Are you truly open to revelation? The best way to become open to it must be through prayer, but few are the atheists who would start from that point. Only a miracle will satisfy you? Just remember that if God exists, you are not in a position relative to the Creator to set the terms of your enlightenment.

Also, keep in mind that if God exists, then so does the spiritual realm; for God is not material. Thus a categorial dismissal of the spiritual right from the outset is already a renunciation of the inquiry. If we are spiritual creatures as well as material, then internal evidence may need to be considered also, even though it is not objective in the sense that you could guarantee the same experience to another under the same conditions.

Evidence can be material or circumstantial. The law recognizes that circumstantial evidence can lead to certainty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Perhaps there is circumstantial evidence to be considered in the question of God’s existence? There is. A book that made a strong (decisive, really, coming when it did) impression on me was by John Polkinghorne (a theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest) entitled Belief in God In an Age of Science. It is of course written from a Christian standpoint, but the main arguments are for a Creator God without reference to scripture but only to the observable facts of the universe. Polkinghorne is a prime example of a “truly smart” theist. Of course, for an atheist to accept God’s existence requires him or her to drink long from the cup of humility, which comes with recognizing that oh so many “dumb” people have been correct on the most important question of existence all along.

Will strong circumstantial evidence satisfy you? There’s no way to answer that question in advance. From my own experience I can say that becoming convinced intellectually can lead to an opening of the heart from which certainty comes. And, in my experience, the nature of that certainty is very different from and stronger than the anxious and despairing lack of hope I felt as an atheist. The recognition of God as the Creator is not the end of the journey, far from it. With that awesome recognition comes the exciting responsibility of figuring out what that means for one’s own life.

My own evolution from atheist to theist took many years, and I was not consciously open on the question until near the end of that time. There’s no turning back the clock, but I feel very blessed that I didn’t die before I changed. I recommend to anyone at all open to the quest for God to try to become yet more open. If you are looking for Truth you are already on the right path.

OK, here goes another computer (Mac) problem and tech-support story. It could be useful for a few people that wonder what they would need to do if they had to replace a hard drive that had both Mac OS X and a Boot Camp Windows partition installed on it. Other than that, it is a story of persistence in the face of frustrating hardware and human error, ultimately resulting in a successful restoration—improvement even—because the customer support came through in the end. Some people evidently like such stories, and this is for them as well. Those only interested in procedural details of restoring a Windows partition on an Intel Mac should feel free to skim.

My previous efforts in the Pournellian genre of computer problem personal narrative (Boot Camp? I Was Ready to Punt and Vista on My MacBook Pro Is Hot—Boiling Hot!) continue to be the most frequently read (or visited, who knows if they are read?) of all the posts to this blog. There are evidently quite a few people out there searching the web for “hot vista macbook pro” and such each day, presumably because they have encountered the same problem or, let’s say, unexpected behavior I did.

This story begins with my decision to go ahead and upgrade the Mac OS version running on my MacBook Pro from 10.5.2 to 10.5.4. I’d waited a while and hadn’t seen any horror stories not connected with exotic configurations, so I figured it was safe to upgrade. Following my usual procedure, I launched Disk Utility in order to repair any file permissions that had somehow been altered. I don’t know how file permissions get changed, but some do, and everyone says you’d better repair them before you upgrade your system software.

Uh-oh. Major uh-oh. Disk Utility literally used red letters to impart the following message: Fatal hardware error detected. It also advised me to back the disk up pronto (if it was still working at all) and replace it. Except for being a little bit noisy, which was nothing new, my hard drive had not shown any signs of going bad. Well, maybe those files that couldn’t be copied at the time when I was first installing Boot Camp were a sign I hadn’t recognized. Still, I was hopeful that a google search on the message would bring up some well-documented cases of that message having been bogus due to some known fixable cause. No such luck. I tried booting from my original Leopard installation disk and running Disk Utility from there and obtained the same alarming message.

I immediately backed up what seemed my most crucial files onto three DVDs. When I say immediately I mean I started immediately. Anyone that backs up to DVDs will know it is a time-consuming process. The files seemed to copy all right, so I shouldn’t be facing total disaster if the hard drive totally stopped working.

Merely having those crucial files backed up would not be enough to get me back to normal though. I needed a complete copy of my hard drive with all applications and user setup info just as they were. I used to use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) when I had a smaller hard drive on a PowerBook, but I didn’t have an external drive big enough to back up my MacBook Pro’s hard drive and I wasn’t completely sure about how I would use CCC to restore my drive’s contents to a new drive anyway.

It was clearly time to buy a new external hard drive and start using Time Machine, Apple’s own backup and restore solution, which was supposedly the greatest thing about Leopard (OS 10.5) anyway. I learned online that I could restore from a Time Machine archive to the internal hard drive after booting from a Leopard installation DVD. Not wanting to wait even until the next day, I drove to the Cambridge Micro Center and got there about fifteen minutes before closing time. After a quick walk through the generic PC areas, I decided I should just go see what the Mac section had. Sure enough, there was an external hard drive section which included boxes proclaiming Time Machine compatibility, which probably wasn’t an issue anyway, but eliminated any doubt. I grabbed a 500 gigabyte Iomega drive, which only cost about $170 and headed for the cash register, forgetting I’d sworn years ago never to buy anything from Iomega again after the trouble I’d had with their cartridge drives.

As promised, the drive box included a Firewire cable, albeit a rather short one. I connected the drive to my MacBook Pro, started it up, and then clicked on the Time Machine icon on the Dock. This allowed me to choose the new external drive as my Time Machine backup drive. So far, so good. The spacey Time Machine user interface was annoyingly mysterious, and backing up and restoring a hard drive is not something I want to experiment with. So I haven’t even looked at the big-screen Time Machine interface again, but I’ve been able to use Time Machine without it. There’s a good old-fashioned menu that drops down from the Time Machine icon on the menu bar, and that enables me to choose Back Up Now, which is all I’ve needed it for.

I can’t remember how long the backup took, but it was pretty fast for 65 gigabytes or so. I was now realizing that the Time Machine backup did nothing for my Vista system in the Boot Camp Windows partition. OK, that’s what Winclone is for, right? I ran Winclone again and used it to make a new image of the Windows partition. To save space, I trashed the old one. Then I ran Time Machine again, so that I would have the latest state of the Vista partition backed up.

Since the full Time Machine procedure had been completed without any complaints, I felt pretty confident that I had a full backup in place. Now I had to face the reality of my need to get a new internal hard drive installed, First step: call AppleCare. When I entered into the Apple Lease on the MacBook Pro, I decided I had better get AppleCare. After more than two years, this was the first time I was having to use it, not counting the time I called for advice of what to do about the Boot Camp Setup bug in 10.5.2 related here. Based on my recent experience with a number of machines, I’d say that the lifetime of the hard drive in a Mac laptop (Sorry, Apple, notebook—so it’s OK to be hot) is only a couple of years, which hasn’t always been the case. Better get AppleCare with a MacBook or MacBook Pro and back up your data regularly. Anyway, I called AppleCare, and the guy I got assured me that the Disk Utility message was infallible. He assigned me a case number and recommended I take it to an Apple Store, though he couldn’t say whether they would do the work on-site or not.

I just wanted it done quickly, since my backup computers were missing the latest apps and data, and I didn’t want to fool with new installations and data transfer if I could avoid it. I called the Cambridge Apple Store (annoying menu of options—mainly trying to get you to hang up and go online instead—you have to listen to when you call an Apple Store) and the person I finally reached said they did not do repair work on-site. It seemed they would send it off to Apple. I asked if she knew whether the big new Apple Store in Boston did the work on-site, but she didn’t.

I remembered a small Mac repair shop in Roxbury. They had done good work in installing a hard drive in my wife’s iBook after its hard drive had failed. That work hadn’t been covered by AppleCare, but I had noticed they were an Apple certified repair shop. I sent them an email asking if they did AppleCare and if so how long a hard drive replacement would take. The reply was succinct: “Apple cut us when they opened up the big Boston Apple Store…we are dead!” I was sorry to hear this since the place seemed one that might have opened in the days of the original 128K Mac, or at least the Mac Plus, and looked like a Mac repair shop right out of Dickens if you can imagine such a thing.

That news strongly implied that the Boston Apple store did repairs on-site. But Micro Center does Mac repairs too, and a hard drive replacement is a straightforward operation with no diagnosis required. Micro Center was a little more convenient for me (I knew how to get there), so I thought I’d check them out. First I called AppleCare again just to make sure Micro Center could handle the job. Yes, they could, though they would not be able access the case number; but the serial number would be enough to verify AppleCare coverage.

Then I called Micro Center and asked to speak to the service department. Rather than transferring me there, the guy on the other end of the line asked me what I wanted to know and answered my questions himself. His answers were yes they did AppleCare work on-site, and a hard drive replacement would probably take about twenty-four hours. Great! Off to Micro Center. After a fairly long wait in line I reached a person who heard my story and then took the MacBook Pro out of sight into the repair area. She came back after several minutes to tell me that it would take a few days because they would have to send the computer to Apple, as they didn’t do the hard drive replacements themselves. She suggested that I take it to the Apple Store, where they would do the work on-site. As they say in Italy: pazienza! Since the person I was talking to was not the one that had misled me, I managed to walk back out to my car without blowing my top, having learned this lesson: consider no one else but Apple for AppleCare repairs.

Back home, I called the Apple Store in Boston. The person I talked to wasn’t sure about the turnaround time, but I would have to make an appointment with an “Apple Genius” in any case. Just go online and sign up. Fortunately my computer still worked despite the fatal diagnosis. I made an appointment and then, after one last incremental Time Machine backup, jumped on the “T” (the MBTA subway/trolley system in the Boston metropolitan area) to head for the Back Bay store. The online map indicating the location of the Boston Apple Store was a little misleading, so the walking part of the trip took longer than it should have, but I was only a few minutes late and got to see a Genius pretty quickly. The last hard drive of the right size in the shop had been allocated to another repair, so they would have to order one but should get Saturday delivery of the drive (this was Thursday afternoon) and have the replacement done by Monday. Not bad, since I was going to be out of town until Monday afternoon. Taking advantage of the fact that the MacBook was going to be cracked open anyway, I asked if they could also take a look at the fans since I had a lot of fan noise when they really got going.

Sure enough, when I returned to OnScreen Science, Inc’s Intergalactic Headquarters Monday, there was a phone message waiting to tell me the computer was ready for pickup. Just to be certain about the procedure, I called the store before going to get it. No Genius appointment necessary. Good news at the Apple Store: not only did I have a brand new hard drive; they had determined that one of the fans was bad and had replaced it! I would probably never have brought it in just for a fan replacement, so this was a big bonus for someone that hates unnecessary computer noise.

Back home with my MacBook Pro, I followed the procedure outlined for restoring the old system. Connect and turn on the external drive serving as the Time Machine archiver. Start the computer up with the letter C key held down and the Mac OS X install disk in the drive slot in order to boot from the DVD. Pretend I’m installing the system software, but at the earliest opportunity switch over to restoring from a Time Machine archive. Wait while the long transfer takes place, then restart and cross my fingers. It worked! The next step was to once again make a Boot Camp Windows partition.

Uh-oh. What happened to my empty disk space? I’m showing only about 8 gigabytes as free, when before I had about 12 free after 17 had been allocated to the Windows partition. I’m short 20+ gigabytes. My first thought was that somehow everything had reverted to the ghost of my original attempt to partition my old drive into Mac and Windows parts. This didn’t really make sense, but the Boot Camp hangup was my only prior experience with disappearing disk space.

The answer turned out to be more straightforward. The AppleCare folks had replaced my original 100 gigabyte drive with an 80 gigabyte one. There were evidently two editions of the machine, and I had leased the top-of-the-line one with the bigger drive and more VRAM. Perhaps the Boot Camp partition had thrown them off. I called AppleCare again to see how to proceed. The AppleCare guy I’d talked to in my initial inquiry had had a very strong Southern “country” accent, I’d call it, but he was loud and clear and easy to follow. This second guy spoke without sufficient variation in pitch and inflection for me to be certain whether he was muttering while he thought out loud or giving me instructions on things to do on the computer. I eventually determined that they were all instructions, but I still had to ask him to repeat them most of the time. It seems he just wanted to verify what I had actually gotten installed. It was clearly a mistake, and he gave me a new case number.

I went through the now familiar process of making a Genius appointment online, backing up with Time Machine again, and heading to the Back Bay with my MacBook Pro. The “Genius,” who by chance happened to be the same one I had seen before, was apologetic, and I vaguely remembered having heard him say 80 gigabytes, which means I should have been on my toes more also. One piece of good news was that, since there was nothing wrong with the drive currently in my computer, they could just make an image of it and then transfer it onto to the new drive, saving me the long step of restoring by means of Time Machine.

By the time I got home, having left the computer in Apple’s care once more, someone had already called from the Apple Store with a question, which turned out to be would I rather replace my original 100 gigabyte, 7200 rpm hard drive right now with a 120 gigabyte, 5400 rpm drive or wait a couple of days to get a 200 gigabyte, 7200 rpm drive. The question was being asked because the 5400 rpm drive would represent a step down in speed from what I’d had before. Having no immediate critical need for the machine, I opted for the bigger drive, which took a day or two longer than I’d thought it would, but was installed about nine days after my original bringing in of the computer for the first try. The Apple Store was open on the Fourth of July, and that was when I got it.

As an aside, let me say that four visits to the three-storeyed Boston Apple Store left me feeling a bit like I’d been inside the headquarters of a cult, some kind of cool technology cult. I’ve been mainly a Mac user for over twenty years, but there was something a little disconcerting about the large numbers of young (non-genius) Apple employees walking around the store wearing color-coded tee shirts (dark blue shirts for “Creatives,” light blue ones for “Specialists,” and orange ones for “Concierges”) and continually asking you if you were finding what you needed etc. I mean service is great compared to what Apple used to get in retail stores it didn’t operate, but the combination of the smiling kids and the colored tee shirts made me half-wonder if Apple hadn’t hired one of the Rev. Moon’s organizers as an adviser. Just joking—Steve Jobs doesn’t need advice on cult creation and maintenance. Let’s just be careful not to start worshiping these machines, no matter how powerful and elegantly packaged they may be, nor buying them just to be part of the cool technology cult.

With my new hard drive installed I felt I was in good shape to make a Windows partition, as there were over 120 free gigabytes to play with. First I used Boot Camp Setup to partition the drive, allotting 32 gigabytes for Windows. With all that hard drive space available this was not really a test of whether Apple has eliminated the bug that made disk partitioning impossible with Boot Camp Setup on a fragmented disk. Now came the big test. Would simply using Winclone to copy the old Windows partition’s contents into the new one be enough? I fully expected it would not, having read many tales of users having to go to Microsoft for permission to install Windows again if the system it was running on changed in any way, including the use of a new hard drive.

I launched Winclone and set it to restoring from the saved image to the Windows partition. It seemed to work OK. Now to start up under Windows if possible. This is where I expected Microsoft storm troopers to intervene. Windows seems to get underway properly. Now chkdsk wants to check everything about the Windows file system. That doesn’t take too long, and soon I am looking at the Vista login screen. I enter my password and everything is totally normal (allowing that running Vista on a Mac can now be considered normal). It worked! Winclone is a great solution. I owe them another donation, and I mention that here so I won’t forget.

In summary, with the help of Apple personnel, the Mac system software, and the very useful program Winclone, I was able in about nine days to move in an indirect path (with some backtracking) from a doomed hard drive to a new one with twice the capacity, while incurring no data loss nor additional monetary cost. In addition, I now have quiet fans. No more model airplane propeller noise! I was able to reinstall my Windows system without any headaches and with almost twice the original amount of disk space allocated to it. I should add that Disk Utility alerted me to the problem (always assuming there really was one) before it had started to cause data loss etc.

So, despite some unhappiness with the unreliability of Apple notebook hard drives these days and one or two Apple employee errors along the way, since rectification was prompt, and the end result was very good, I am satisfied. AppleCare and the Mac’s disk-maintenance and backup software came through very well. Human error can never be completely eliminated. The support system works efficiently, and that’s pretty impressive.

About ten days ago I came across an article in the msnbc.com site’s cosmiclog section about the issuing of a safety report by CERN, the major European high-energy particle physics experiment facility, located in Geneva. The report was meant to answer concerns raised about possible catastrophic consequences of operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which, after years of construction, is about to commence operation this summer.

The safety report is an interesting document, not only for its content, but also for the reason for its production, which was objections, including law suits, raised by private individuals based on some otherwise obscure speculations by a few theoretical physicists about novel particles and microscopic objects that might be produced in proton collisions at the never-before-attained (in the lab) energies of the LHC.

I was particularly interested in the topic because it followed in rough outline a movie scenario I had imagined around thirty years ago. That scenario, which was sketched in an earlier post called Dangerous Experiments, was based on a physics graduate student’s having determined that high-energy experiments about to be conducted in a new particle accelerator would destroy the universe.

I am working on a note about the issues, which I aim to post here in a few days. In the meantime, however, I am going to present some observations on the comments posted online about the cosmiclog article, since I found the comments themselves to be interesting for what they said about the commenters, who to some degree must represent people that read science news posted online.

First, I should mention that this was a moderated comment section. All comments had to be read and approved by a moderator before they were posted. This procedure aims to eliminate spam as well as personally abusive comments, examples of which anyone that has read unmoderated comment sections will have encountered. Published comments are the “normal” non-commercial responses to the article. I even contributed a few comments myself.

I have gone through the comments trying to assign them all to categories. This was obviously a subjective and rather arbitrary process. I present the results of this exercise below in the hopes they may be of interest. Some comments fall into more than one category and, in a couple of obvious cases, a category is a subcategory of a more inclusive one. There were 156 comments in all, and I list them by categories below with the most numerous examples first.

Note that there were a few comments that I placed in the category of organized opposition, meaning that I thought those comments were from people already committed to opposition and who were there to rally people to their cause. Where noted, certain categories (e.g., Skepticism about scientists’ competence or objectivity) do not include the comments deemed part of the organized opposition.

A few comments may have fallen through the cracks, as I had a few categories of one comment only that I dropped and whose exemplars may not have appeared elsewhere. This was a laborious undertaking I won’t repeat for a while, so I hope someone will find it amusing if not enlightening.

The categories and numbers in each follow.

Comments containing statement or clear inference that LHC experiments are a real gamble, whether deemed worth taking or not (organized oppositon excluded): 17

Comments mentioning religion and/or the Bible in some way: 16

Humorously intended end-of-world comments: 15

Comments containing negative opinion or portrayal of physicists: 12

Comments containing blatant physics errors or nonsensical physics statements: 10

Uncategorizable useless comments: 10

Comments making erroneous, inadequate, or unclear attempts to correct physics mistakes in other comments: 10

Comments expressing skepticism about scientists’ competence or objectivity (organized opposition excluded): 10

Casual or humorous comments about desirability of mini black hole: 9

Comments containing antireligious statements: 8

Comments using physical arguments of CERN safety report to reject danger: 8

Comments expressing the idea that progress is more important than the potential danger without estimating the danger: 7

Comments referring to the Mayan calendar: 8

Comments expressing concern about specific points in CERN report (organized opposition excluded): 6

Comments with a reference to fiction or poetry: 6

Comments expressing belief that danger is minimal without specifically referring to the report: 5

Comments used to make an unrelated political point: 5

Comments attacking report by apparent organized opposition: 5

Comments attacking funding for particle physics per se: 5

Comments containing defense of physicists: 5

Comments largely concerned with criticizing many previous comments: 5

Comments adequately correcting physics mistakes: 4

Humorously voiced regret that no black hole or end of the world: 4

Comments stating or implying that physicists carried out experiments or tests they thought potentially catastrophic in the past: 4

Comments raising “overlooked” dangers of LHC: 3

Comments rebuking others for misunderstanding Mayan calendar: 3

Comments supporting the LHC experiments from a religious standpoint: 3

Comments expressing view that LHC catastrophe would be a great way to go: 2

Comments expressing view that if it’s the end, so what?: 2

Comments wondering whether any of the commenters are competent to judge: 2

Comment using Bible to reject idea that LHC will directly bring about the end of the world: 1

Ironic or sincere appreciation expressed for an erroneous comment: 1

Sarcastic expresson of approval of a previous comment: 1

Comment questioning non-scientist judge’s competence to decide queston: 1

Comment supporting use of non-scientist judge: 1

Irrelevant musing on the end of the world: 1

Misanthropic outpouring: 1

Oblique reference to attempt to stop experiments by force: 1

Call to arrest and jail those pushing the project: 1

Comment promising this blog post: 1

One of the most striking things in the comments was how very few were the commenters that showed much physics knowledge. Of course, many of them didn’t pretend to know physics, and I wouldn’t advocate limiting comments to people knowledgeable in physics. After all, if the doomsday scenario were correct, we would all perish. I do have a problem with people who pretend to physics knowledge they obviously don’t have though. Some of those who took upon themselves the task of educating their ignorant fellow commenters unfortunately demonstrated only a misguided self-assurance and the ability to throw around terms like “general relativity” without physical understanding.

I only made one comment dealing with an erroneous physics statement (two billiard balls with equal and opposite velocities were said to come to a dead stop upon colliding), and it turned out to be one that a few others corrected. There were just too many erroneous or fuzzy statements. It would have been too much work to correct them all, and when comments don’t really make much sense in the first place it’s hard know what to say except this is gibberish. I suspect such comments are meant mainly to impress, and they usually don’t have an obvious point that needs to be taken on. But I shouldn’t speculate too much on the motivation.

It’s obvious that a substantial percentage of the commenters saw an opportunity to display their wit; and, given the democratic nature of the forum, there was no high standard imposed on the level of humor attained. Some people post a comment without reading all that have already been posted, so very similar comments appear multiple times. This accounts for the repeated comments of the “Great! I can use a miniblack hole to vacuum the house!” type, as well as the multiple corrections of the erroneous statement about the billiard ball collision.

As might have been expected, I suppose, given the end-of-the-world theme, there were a number of short, humorously intended comments of the “Oh no! We’re doomed!” type. I didn’t note a single one that said this was an obvious fulfilling of a Biblical prediction, but there was a good bit of discussion of the Mayan calendar, which is due either to start a new cycle or to bring our world to an end, depending evidently on your interpretation, sometime in 2012. There was one commenter who felt sure the LHC could not directly bring about the end foretold in Revelations since other necessary events had not yet occurred, but he left open the possibility that it could be the start of a domino effect, which in any event did not worry the securely saved writer, who asked if other readers were as confident of where they would spend eternity.

One of the supposed dangers of the LHC operation is the creation of mini black holes, which might in time gobble up the Earth. The mini black hole idea sparked a number of humorously meant comments about how handy these might be for waste disposal etc. Well, for a while anyway.

There were a few misanthropic comments of the “Good, this will eliminate a blight from the universe,” sort. And there were political references to our government’s propensity to wage war etc.

At a certain point people involved in the campaign to stop the experiments seem to have gotten wind of the discussion going on, and a small flurry of comments highly critical of the report as a whitewash and with links to anti-LHC websites appeared. I think I may have let a couple of earlier comments of this type slip through the filtering, but that’s not a big deal.

I was surprised at the number of people that accepted the notion that running the experiments was a serious gamble, but one worth taking for the sake of progress, sometimes based on the anticipation of unlikely future applications that might result from knowledge gained by the LHC experiments.

Of course there were those who thought it was a gamble not worth taking, including some that saw it as just another example to add to earlier ones in which physicists had risked destroying the world through reckless experiments or tests, the atomic and hydrogen bomb tests usually being cited.

One commenter (anticipating the call by NASA’s James Hansen to arrest oil company executives for fostering doubt about anthropogenic global warming) maintained that anyone pushing the project forward should be arrested and jailed.

I would recommend to CERN that they have people monitoring online science news forums such as cosmiclog and googling away to see when the issue of LHC safety is being discussed online, in order to minimize the number of uncontested erroneous statements. The anti-LHC folks are obviously on the job, if their arrival in this observation forum is typical.

I’m not sure what I expected, but going through these comments was a bit disheartening for me. Maybe comment sections become dominated by people who like seeing their comments on the screen, which ends up discouraging those with something more of substance to say from commenting. I know I quickly saw the erroneous physics statements—not to mention the irrelevant posts on the commenters’ favorite topics of religion or anti-religion—start to swarm like gnats, and a swarm of gnats is something you want to get away from.

Juneteenth! What a marvelous word! I almost let the day get by without realizing that today is the day. I first heard the word when I was a boy visiting my grandparents who lived in rural northeast Texas. It was a holiday by Black folks for Black folks, but they were willing to share the barbecue, which was superb. This was not an official holiday, this was a folk holiday. And it is the only non-religious holiday except the Fourth of July and New Year’s Day that is still celebrated on the original date.

Juneteenth—doesn’t it just sound like a word the freed slaves would have applied to the day their freedom was made official and permanent? Jubilation! On June 19th, 1865 the following proclamation was issued in Galveston by Union Major General Gordon Granger:

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.

It’s time to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

A few weeks ago (May 21) while I was out, my teenage daughter took a phone message for me from someone who started off the message by saying “This is probably not going to make sense to you.” Since I hadn’t been expecting a call, and since my daughter had known nothing beforehand about the subject of the call, her account of the conversation was at first puzzling to me, and I wondered if it involved some strange kind of scam. But then the words “passed away” and “team” (or some other sports-related word) and the notion that I had inquired about someone came through, and I knew what it had to be about.

When last I wrote about Ronnie Knox, the gifted quarterback whose reference to the pleasures of reading Proust had so intrigued me some fifty years ago, I noted that a college teammate of his, Jim Hanifan—later an NFL player and coach—had mentioned in his book that Ronnie had died homeless. Since I had not found anything else referring to Ronnie’s end or how he had spent the decades of his post-football life, I thought contacting Hanifan might be my best shot at learning more. I learned that Hanifan was now part of the St. Louis Ram’s radio broadcast team. Through the radio station’s website I submitted an email query, asking the unknown recipient to please contact Hanifan for me, both to confirm that Ronnie was dead and to see if he could provide any more information. For anyone just stumbling in on this, I refer you to prior posts here and here to catch up on my interest in Ronnie Knox.

About a month had elapsed between my initial inquiry and the phone call. The person that had called and talked to my daughter was Jim Stassi, the director of the Rams’ broadcasts. Stassi had left his phone number, and I called him the next day. What a nice guy! He was apologetic for not having gotten around to calling sooner. Anyway, he had talked to “Coach Hanifan” and could attest that Ronnie Knox had indeed died. He also mentioned that a San Francisco Chronicle writer named Ira Miller had written a piece about Ronnie at the time. I thought he said Ronnie had died in 1986 or so, but I may have misunderstood him.

Now I had to consider that the “few years ago” in Hanifan’s book from 2003 might be closer to twenty years. I went back and checked online for California death notices that far back and came across the definitive (birth date is Ronnie’s) answer: Ronald Knox, born in Illinois on February 14, 1935, died in San Francisco on May 4, 1992.

Unfortunately the online archives of the Chronicle only go back to 1995, so I will have to track down a physical (or microfiche) copy of the paper in a library to see the Miller piece that Stassi mentioned. I did find online, however, in the archives of the Los Angeles Times an article from July 17, 1988, when Ronnie Knox was 53. I paid $3.95 to get the full text of this article, which was a treasure trove of information on Ronnie (including the years after football), his stepfather, and other family members. The writer, Bob Oates, or an assistant, had interviewed both Ronnie and his notorious stepfather Harvey. Without quoting too extensively from the article, I will pass on some of the information that was completely new to me, and which helps fill in the missing years and casts a different light on some of the earlier strange goings on.

About Ronnie’s appearance, the author mainly affirms that he hasn’t changed all that much since a much earlier description was made in the LA Times:

To Times writer Cecil Smith 34 years ago, Ronnie was “a big, rangy kid, handsome, with tousled brown hair and hazel eyes, an easy, relaxed manner and a great deal of physical charm.” And most of that still goes. Ronnie’s weight and hair are almost unchanged today, although, like many old quarterbacks, he is noticeably round-shouldered.

Ronnie had evidently led a bohemian existence from the time he quit football until the interview thirty years later, and presumably continued to do so until his death. Hanifan had called him “homeless” when he died, but from the Times article it sounds as though he had been pretty close to that much of the time. At the time of the interview, he was moving out of a “one-room apartment” he’d been in only a week. I said his life was that of a “bohemian” rather than a poor transient because he evidently felt he was devoting his life to literature. However, if belonging to an artistic community is required for bohemian status, then he may not qualify.

Basically he seems to have been a drifter who wrote poems, tried various jobs (including coaching eight-man football for a Baptist school and working in the kitchen of a San Francisco harbor boat), and went through a number of career false starts. The article speaks of his longing to go to sea, but not of his having done so. Neither comradeship nor romantic attachments are mentioned, so one gets the picture of a solitary vagabond, which may not be accurate. I think of the phone call from Ronnie that Hanifan didn’t take because of a meeting he was in. Ronnie’s summary of the past thirty years: “Like James Fenimore Cooper’s noble savage, I’ve been away.”

The constant through these years was his devotion to literature, both the reading and writing of it. Over the years Ronnie wrote many poems, and had had the manuscript of a novel called Masquerade (on the theme of life is but a dream), which he considered his masterpiece, stolen along with hundreds of his poems in a suitcase from outside a motel in Galveston. Obviously he was not storing everything on a hard drive or remote server in those days.

Harvey, the stepfather, who, according to the article, had gained and lost several fortunes in his up-and-down life as a promoter of things like real estate developments, in addition to the careers of his children, said he always helped Ronnie when he could and alluded to Ronnie’s “emotional problems.” There’s no way to know exactly what that meant. Had there been serious mental breakdowns? There was no mention of drugs or alcohol. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Ronnie was incapable of living a normal life with a regular job. Ronnie seems to have been given to expressions that don’t make obvious sense both in his speech and poetry. For example the article quotes him as saying, “The trick is to stay fluid without turning into H2O.”

Ronnie had been married for four years to a “Viennese artist,” but the divorce had come in 1964. No children were mentioned. Ronnie’s sister, Patricia, who was referred to as a millionaire in the article, lived in Florida. His mother was said to be dying of cancer at the time of the article. Ronnie also had a half-brother I hadn’t heard of before.

I recently came across online a Pageant magazine from July 1956 that featured Pat Knox (then twenty-three) in her starlet phase. She had a good figure, I’ll say that. There’s a family shot of all the Knoxes, including Ronnie’s and Pat’s baby half-brother. The magazine was for sale on eBay. The fifties were a strange time, and looking through a Pageant magazine is a good way to be reminded of that. Perhaps only the fifties could have given rise to the sixties. Is it just that those were the decades of my youth, or have the subsequent decades really been blander, despite their own momentous events? Decades of my youth, I’d guess.

The LA Times article gave a little information about Ronnie’s actual father Dr. Raoul Landry, who was a professor of nuclear physics, of all things. Interestingly, a Google search turned up a man of that same name as having been a senior on the 1925 football squad at Southwestern Louisiana. There’s no way to tell if it is Ronnie’s father, but the age fits. From the LA Times article one gets the feeling that Harvey Knox may have stolen the prof’s wife, but I guess the couple could have been separated already when Harvey met Marjorie Landry, whom he first spotted making machine guns in an aircraft factory. In any case they married the same day the divorce went through.

Ronnie was seven at the time of his mother’s remarriage, and it must have been quite jarring to change his last name at that age, never mind to suddenly have a new father. I don’t want to engage too much in uninformed psychological analysis, but I can’t help noticing that this was perhaps the first of many abrupt changes in Ronnie’s life. Harvey set about teaching young Ronnie how to play football right away, initially against Ronnie’s desire. But, according to Harvey, the boy’s extraordinary natural talent, even at seven, was dramatically revealed in a way befitting the start of a legend.

In addition to saying something about what Ronnie had been up to since he quit football, the article also challenged my previous understanding of the early Ronnie Knox story, i.e., what went on back in Ronnie’s high school and college days. The article flatly states as fact that Ronnie was always the one calling the shots about his numerous moves from team to team and school to school, sometimes even going against the good advice of Harvey. This is contrary to everything else that I’ve read, and it’s hard to accept that all the contemporary accounts would have been so wrong.

OK, that’s what I wrote. Since then, and at the last minute (before posting), so to speak, I found online the original Harvey Knox article in the September 6, 1954 Sports Illustrated issue called Why Ronnie Knox Quit California. Although I looked for it a couple of months ago and couldn’t find it, it now turns up in the SI Vault. Lo and behold, there is the same account of Ronnie’s making the decisions about high school and college transfers due to dissatisfaction with his coaches. So if Harvey was stretching the truth, it started a long time ago.

Obviously, Harvey wasn’t telling Ronnie to quit football altogether or to bounce around from job to job in California, Mexico, Texas, Maine, and Europe in the following decades. So it may well be true that Ronnie was the one making the dramatic moves all along and that Harvey just took the heat and enjoyed the limelight. Based on the affection Jim Hanifan expressed for Ronnie, I can’t see Ronnie as the prima donna type, yet he does come across in Harvey’s accounts, at least, as extremely critical of his coaches, and with reason.

An interesting fact reported in the article was that, when the American Football League was being formed in 1960, Ronnie, then twenty-five, was offered a contract to be the first quarterback for the San Diego Chargers at any salary he wanted to name, but he told them he was through with football. Charger coach Sid Gillman, who tells of spending six weeks trying to track Ronnie down to make him an offer, finally finding him in a “dump at the beach,” is quoted as saying Ronnie was the John Elway of his day, unbelievably talented at running and passing.

Despite the disdain he expressed for football (“for animals”) when he quit playing the game for good back in 1959, Ronnie seems to have maintained an interest in it, especially for the strategic aspects of the game. The article says he was willing to call Bill Walsh the outstanding coach of the time. Ronnie’s own coaching of the Faith Baptist team is praised by the pastor.

Dr. Roland Rasmussen of Canoga Park’s Faith Baptist Church and Schools has been his most faithful employer, bringing him in three times—in ‘72, ‘77 and again this summer—to coach his eight-man football teams.

Knox never stays long—he learned a different way in high school—but as a football man, he has made a strong impression on Rasmussen, a pastor who discusses football with the efficiency of an expert.

“We got acquainted through his mother when she was a member (of Faith Baptist) in 1970,” Rasmussen said. “Ronnie relates beautifully to athletes—he gets the most out of each one—and he has a brilliant football mind. I think he could be an offensive coordinator anywhere.”

So the mysterious “lost years” of Ronnie Knox’s life (the major part of his life, in fact) have been filled in somewhat, if vaguely, in my mind. Inevitably, the Golden Boy mystique has been largely effaced by all those thoroughly unglamourous years of what seems to have approximated aimless bumming around writing incoherent poems (based on my reading of the one—the only published one?—that concluded the article).

Yet I can still remember when, as a kid in Texas, I first heard of Ronnie, when he was maybe the best football player in the country, and both our lives since then were all potential and unknown. What does that young Golden Boy have to do with the rather pathetic fifty-seven-year-old drifter that died in San Francisco? Well, what does that Texas kid that looked up to Ronnie as a hero have to do with the white-bearded fellow at the computer keyboard writing these words?

Although it seems a bit ridiculous to me now, there was a time in my life when I thought I might become a writer (as in novels, not a blog) also. I just never wrote anything. I did go through a phase of occasionally writing “poems” (mainly on napkins in bars, as I recall), though I never quite deluded myself into thinking I was a poet. Poems had the advantage of being short. Ronnie just kept on living his dream. Was he crazier than I or a poorer judge of his own talent than I was of mine, or was he just more serious, determined, and steadfast?

My life has also had a few periods of uncertain direction (see for example my posts Don’t Gamble, Hire a Physicist and The Perfect Italian Woman), but always with a PhD in physics to help out on the employment front and then to make “regular life” too comfortable and, at times, too interesting to forgo, without even mentioning the rewards and demands of family life, which Ronnie missed out on. And there were those periods where political activity took precedence in my life, which doesn’t seem ever to have been the case for Ronnie. Still, I can see more similarities in our lives than I would have guessed. I wish I could have run into the guy at some point. Imagine what it would have been like for me to have realized that the athletic fellow scribbling in the bar in Austin or the cafe in Berkeley was the real one-and-only Ronnie Knox!

Now I know with certainty that Ronnie died sixteen years ago. How should we think of him: eccentric or mentally ill? If he was crazy it was the sort of craziness that afflicts saints or crackpots who cause no direct harm to others. Was this obsession with literature a curse? He didn’t view it that way. He was in it for the long haul, and there is something admirable about Ronnie’s continuing to write poems all those years without encouragement, while still viewing it as his true calling. Literature was something he could stay connected to when his life was otherwise without mooring. He compared himself to a “noble savage,” and I will keep that interpretation in my mind as I recall the words of Jim Hanifan: “I thought the world of him, and it hurts to see him gone.”

I need to get caught up on some thank yous to sundry fellow bloggers that have taken the trouble to visit, read, and then link, sometimes with very nice compliments included on their pages. It also gives me an opportunity to point my many readers in new directions. I find the blogosphere to be so large as to be overwhelming. Looking at the virtually endless list of blogs in a blog directory can truly make me a bit sick with vague dismay. But, along with the myriad dull plastic needles in that worldwide haystack, there are many sharp ones of genuine steel, worthy of close examination and perhaps useful for spiritual mending or embroidering. I was glad to come across a few more of these, and, believe me, I appreciate the needle-grabbing magnets other bloggers have supplied to their readers in the form of links to this blog.

Christina, who runs the Everything Worth Reading monthly blog carnival (one of the few “carnivals” a themeless blog like this one can submit to), honored The Perfect Italian Woman as one of the worth-reading selections for the April 23 edition and with the Link of the Week (think she meant month) designation. Thank you, Christina.

Baseball in Normandy mainly recounts the fortunes of the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks, an entry in the Normandy section of the French Baseball League (whose existence was a welcome discovery for me). I hadn’t heard of most of the towns in the league, but Dunkerque and Cherbourg are familiar from World War II. Chris, who is on the team’s roster and writes the blog, also occasionally reminisces about baseball in his younger days in the States. Chris refers to himself as an ex-philosopher, but how do you stop being that? A post called Best Baseball Memory and Rick Silva, which turned out to be very well written, was what drew me to his blog. I was looking for other baseball reminiscers after I’d written A Rocky Little League Start.

I emailed Chris, thinking he might be interested in my piece, and it turned out he was. He read it and liked it, so I also told him about the follow-up It’s Only One Game when it was posted. A bit later I was pleased to see a few folks coming to this blog as a result of a post of Chris’s called Introducing Bob Estes (a nom de correspondance of your On-Screen Scientist) with a link to the two Little League coaching posts. I haven’t checked on the Chucks’ fortunes in a few days. They finished in first place during the regular season and were about to begin playoffs last time I read about them. Earlier, their season had seemed in jeopardy due to the sound (like a gun shot) foul balls make hitting the slate roofs of houses (including the mayor’s) near the field. I’ve wanted to visit the D-Day Landing sites for a long time. Now I hope I can make that trip happen during the baseball season. Thank you Chris.

Helena, an Australian lady who blogs as Dysthymiac, emailed comments about the dangerous (naturally produced) drug testosterone in regard to the risky juvenile behavior recounted in my post Times I Might Have Died, which she came to having seen a comment I’d made about a beautiful photograph elsewhere. She has since read and liked Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I and has recommended it on a couple of blogs I know of. We have exchanged emails on various topics of overlapping interest (e.g., Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Billy Sol What’s-his-name, and the blogosphere), and she has added a blogroll-type link to here on her blog. Thank you, Helena.

Norm Geras’s links contain numerous interesting blogs. One I found that way is Far-South-of-I-10, which is written by Joe, a guy who has spent years working on oil rigs and is currently in Columbia about to move to Italy. I thought he might be interested in The Perfect Italian Woman, to which I referred him. He responded with a cordial and complimentary email. Later I saw that my post Times I Might Have Died may have given him the idea to write Dancing With Death about a truly harrowing job experience on an oil rig. Joe’s gift for humorous narrative makes the story—even if your fear of heights is as strong as mine—a pleasure to read. Thank you, Joe.

A few days ago I became aware of Sports Illustrated and Proust, another blog post that referenced my Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I piece. Seeing that I had found the 1958 reference in which Ronnie Knox mentioned Proust, Michael of Orange Crate Art decided to utilize the full Sports Illustrated online archives to see just how many times and in what way Proust had been mentioned by SI in its history. So far, no Petite Bande references in the Swimsuit issue. In one excerpt, I’m afraid an NFL player was pulling the sportswriter’s leg, but the player must at least have taken some review courses in college to be able to reel off the names that he did. Referring to his reading preferences, the player said that he couldn’t abide fiction, except for “Dostoevsky and Melville,” preferring to spend his time reading “sociology, philosophy and political thought” as found in “Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Mill.” And above all, Kafka. I don’t mean to say that stuff’s not there in Proust in Kafka, but it’s still fiction. Thank you, Michael.

Sure, I read political and news blogs, but I don’t think the world needs another one, so I am not planning to join in. I am delighted to find other sorts of blogs in which people far and wide are writing well about things from their lives and thoughts which can be of interest to a number of people outside the small circle of family and friends—if only to a very small percentage of all internet users. May this blog come to be one of them.

May 22

Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I finish writing this, but I am going to leave the beginning as it is. I had hopes that the antibiotics he started yesterday would do their saving work; and his eating one of his favorite delicacies—cucumber peelings—last night with a final, feeble amount of gusto gave me hope that he was bouncing back, perking up. But he has retreated inside his little plastic “igloo” inside his cage, with his back to its opening, minimizing sensory input; the equivalent of turning over to face the wall. He makes no sound, but turns away from proffered food or water as from an annoyance that belongs to the past. He has decided it is time to die. I know that he hasn’t decided anything, really; he is just too sick to stand the sight of food or drink. Yet it seems he has decided it is time to die, and he knows the right way to do it. He has decided it is time to die, and the house is heavy with his decision.

To whom shall I pose silly rhetorical questions with Chestnut gone? How long will it be before I stop adding, “Right, Chestnut?” to the end of statements. Chestnut, Chesty, Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield, C-Field—he answered to them all the same way: with the inexpressive face of a rodent looking in your direction. “Did you mention food?” he perhaps was thinking. He loved to eat. He lived to eat. And now he turns away from food, but seems to have a certain quiet wisdom about him.

That reminds me of something our friend Carmi said when she was visiting. Being a poet with a mystical bent, Carmi often says things that stick in your mind just in her ordinary talking. She and her daughter had had a guinea pig named Oreo. Carmi was impressed that when I went out the back door, scissors in hand, to harvest some fresh grass for Chestnut, he had been so excited that he’d jumped out the open door of his cage in clear anticipation of the upcoming treat. Oreo, Carmi said, had had “ancient wisdom,” but had not been as “street smart” as Chestnut. Now Chestnut’s ancient wisdom has come to the fore.

The antibiotics and painkiller the vet gave us yesterday were just to make us all feel better that we were trying what we could think of. But Chestnut has something called bumble foot, a foot rot—maybe it’s the equivalent of gangrene, I don’t know. Anyway, for it to have affected him so severely means almost certainly that it is too late. The vet wanted to be sure that we knew it was serious, not to be surprised if he was “much worse” this morning.

Yes, there’s some guilt here. We should have noticed how bad the foot was and taken him to the vet earlier. We didn’t take him in for the foot, just for the severe overall decline, lethargy, loss of appetite, etc. Chestnut lived the life of a king from the food standpoint, but I’m afraid his long claws bear witness to a certain lack of care in other regards, including regular inspection for things such as infected feet. He had a known problem, common in older “boars,” of stool agglomeration. Instead of numerous small dry pellets, he would also produce large masses of soft fused pellets. Sometimes it would be a great effort to pass the mass of guinea pig poop. We assumed that one too big to expel was the problem that was causing his loss of appetite, which would not have been as serious.

Chestnut is my daughter’s first and only pet. Well, mammalian pet; she had some African dwarf frogs. He was a birthday present a few years ago, a reward for her agreeing to attend a summer chamber music day camp. We had taken care of a few guinea pigs for days and weeks at a time in the past, and she had been wanting one for quite some time. My wife remembered how she had lost interest in her own guinea pig as a child in a fairly short period and didn’t look forward to becoming the real guinea pig care provider. Looking farther into the future, she dreaded years more of such duty after our daughter had gone away to college. But little Chestnut, just weaned, was purchased at a local pet store, and amused us greatly with his antics, especially the “popcorning”—spastic leaps which guinea pigs engage in when they are feeling good (I guess).

We left the door of his cage open when we were home, and he would roam around the house, even follow people from room to room sometimes. He seemed to like company and play. I would put newspaper (to absorb pee) under the wicker coffee table near the chair in which I would sit reading, and Chestnut would stay under the table. Except he would venture out on a quick foray to nibble away a corner from a paper or a paperback book cover. We turned it into a game with me putting paper out for him and then gently swatting at him with a sheet of paper when he came to get it. I will think of you, Chestnut, when I see those books with the neat bites taken out of their covers. He was quick! And their teeth are so sharp.

This was all when he was young. As he matured, he stopped venturing out of his cage, even though the door was still left open. We found he had chewed on a lamp cord. Had he gotten a traumatizing shock? We couldn’t know of course, but the exposed copper made us think he was lucky to be alive. For a while I was able to lure him out by putting a newspaper near the cage door, which he couldn’t resist coming out to nibble on, but eventually he got to where he almost never came out except when it was forced on him during cage cleanings. Then, he would usually take a few laps around the cage.

My daughter cried for Chestnut last night, as is only right. Sad as it makes me to see her feel bad, I would rather have that than see her heartless and unconcerned.

We have given Chestnut his pain killer and antibiotics for the day, and then used the antibiotics mouth syringe to get some water into him. Dehydration will kill you far more quickly than starvation. He’s fat enough to miss a few meals, I imagine. The only encouraging sign is that he is now facing the entrance to his igloo so he can see out to the world.

May 23

OK, it’s now the morning of the next day. We forced some more water down him, and it must have done him good. He still wouldn’t eat until I brought him some fresh, green grass. That he munched on for quite a while, a very big improvement. Don’t know whether we should get our hopes up.

12:30 pm. Now he’s whimpering in the most pathetic way. It’s really unbearable to hear. Catatonic was better. We will have to euthanize if that doesn’t get better. When my wife gets back from the store, we’ll give him another dose of painkiller. One little rodent in agony here has more of an effect on me than the somewhat abstract knowledge of mass human suffering now occurring. I have not been watching television coverage of tragedies; perhaps I should be.

11:30 pm. My wife said that he had been whimpering that way for days, though I hadn’t heard it before. So it doesn’t signal a new stage of decline and pain, but it is still painful to hear and makes his earlier suffering seem all the worse. She went back to the vet’s because the test-tube-like container the antibiotics was in was too long for the syringe we need to use for giving Chestnut his dose. I doubt the vet thought he’d still be alive, for only now did he mention the importance of food and water. He suggested pulverizing the hay pellets he eats and mixing them with baby food carrots and water and using another bigger syringe to feed it to Chestnut. We thought we got a little into him in the afternoon.

Just before bed, all three of us—my wife, daughter, and I—tried again to get some more water and food into him. He had trouble keeping his eyes open, nothing I’d ever seen before. He didn’t drink water that was squeezed into his mouth this time, as though reflexes aren’t even working. He wasn’t interested in food and didn’t get much if any. Would not be surprised to find him dead in the morning. Glad he ate grass one last time anyway. We’ve gone from hoping for recovery to hoping for a quick end.

May 24

Chestnut greeted me with what might be described as loud whimpers when I came downstairs to start breakfast. Maybe he is doing some things automatically, like greeting, but can only make certain sounds. Hard not to take it as a plea to put him out of his misery. He turned away from his water bottle spout as from something noxious.

10:30 am. We’re now waiting for our daughter to wake up (it’s Saturday morning), so she can be in on the decision to take him to the vet to put an end to his suffering. The waiting is getting to me, since it is starting to seem urgent to put him out his misery, as I think of what he must be enduring with so many bodily systems having broken down. Hopefully the vet is open today.

11:00 am. He’s not, but the phone message gave another place to call for an emergency. My daughter is up, and she agrees it’s time.

1:30 pm. She took him out of his cage and carried him, wrapped in a towel like a baby, upstairs to her room for a long while.

My wife has been felled by the same cold I have presumably, but harder and with fever. She got the news yesterday that an old friend she hadn’t seen in years had just died. The friend’s husband called.

The only place I have found that will euthanize a guinea pig today is quite a distance away, and my wife is too sick to be left alone. She is weak, dizzy, and nauseated in addition to having a sore throat.

I go in to check on Chestnut and he is lying flat, rhythmically whimpering. When he becomes aware of my presence, his whimpers get louder, definitely an acknowledgment of some kind. Maybe a plea. The guilt I feel is heavier, the sadness more acute.

A friend is coming over. Maybe I’ll take Chestnut to the place that will end his life for a fee while she stays with my wife. We haven’t attempted forced feeding today.

5:30 pm. I’m not changing anything I wrote before. Chestnut has been buried in the back yard. My son arrived back from his ultimate frisbee tournament just in time to help his sister and me dig and cover.

I drove to Jamaica Plain to have Chestnut put to sleep. On the way there, I and drivers in the other lanes of a very busy road had to stop for some Canada geese and a passel of goslings to cross. Very slowly. First one bunch, and then another. Especially given the nature of my journey, it was a heartening sight to me, animal life and new animal life. And everyone seemed glad to stop. The geese were lucky, and I hope they don’t try it too often, for their luck must run out.

I talked to Chestnut on the way. I told him what a good pig he had been. He was in the back of the minivan in his cage, so we couldn’t see each other. I wanted to pray, but didn’t know what to pray for. I decided to pray for whatever was the best thing a guinea pig in Chestnut’s condition, about to die, could have. I put in a word for him, knowing it was superfluous, but I asked that he might have the very best the Creator still had to offer.

We arrive at the animal hospital, and I take Chestnut out of his cage and put him in a small cardboard box, just his size, along with an old teeshirt of mine. Judging by the movements of his body and head, as we enter the building, he seems to be more alert than I’ve seen him in days. What is going on? Is this a miracle starting to happen? He actually starts trying to climb out of the box!

At the intake desk, where I’ve already told them my purpose, I’m talking to him: “What are you doing, Chestnut? Are you trying to get me to take you back home?” His body feels surprisingly strong in my hands. I look at him closely, trying to discern what the change means. I say to the intake woman, who is looking at me quizzically, “He hasn’t eaten anything in days. He hasn’t moved like this in I don’t know how long.” Chestnut moves about again. And then a small popcorn! Tired out, I suppose, he relents.

I take Chestnut and the registration form that I need to fill out over to the empty “cat area.” If Chestnut’s activity resumes, I’ll have to think harder about what I’m about to do. I’ve gotten through name and address when I look in at Chestnut, who is still. I wonder. His visible eye is now wide open and clear. His body is soft and warm, but feels totally relaxed in my hand. Is he? Yes—dead.

I’m stunned, as though a lightning bolt of mystery had struck me, electrifying me with hidden meaning I can feel but not decipher. I feel a sort of joyful sadness and great relief. I stroke his beautiful white and light-chestnut coat a few times, then carry him over to the intake desk. I know he’s dead, but I say “I think he’s dead.”

A technician takes the little box with the body away to verify he has no heartbeat, free of charge and with genuine sympathy. The young woman at the desk tries to reassure me about having let his foot infection get so bad. Small animals are very fragile, so the least thing can kill them. She has canaries. Yes, I will take him home, and we will bury him in the back yard.

What was the urgency that drove Chestnut to use every last atom of his remaining strength and life in that seeming attempt to escape? As far as I know he’d never acted that way at the vet’s before, even in that same box, which came from his last trip there. He had always been quite docile the few times he’d been to the vet. But maybe he had some memory of the recent painful foot treatment associated with being in the box. Could he have had a vague premonition, which awakened a powerful desire to live, when he hadn’t been able to summon up the strength or desire to eat or drink for days? Was he trying to escape a sudden pain or fear that came with death’s arrival and which had nothing to do with the external situation? Was it something like a chicken running around with it’s head cut off? It seemed more natural than that.

I don’t know enough about physiology, guinea pig or otherwise, to venture an educated guess. None of these speculations keep me from feeling proud of Chestnut for dying such a death. The burst of activity was brief and strangely inspiring; and, for whatever reason, the timing was just right. If we hadn’t had to wait for the geese to cross… I don’t know.

Did I cry over his death? Well, rodents have never been my favorite kind of animal. They are not the most intelligent beasts. They don’t have to be, the way predators do. They eat whatever suits them with those wonderfully efficient teeth, and they survive by reproducing bountifully, so that an individual is not so precious to the species. Do you think a rational grown man would cry over the death of a mere rodent? Even over a beautiful death that spared us from having Chestnut die at the hands of a stranger and spared me from the possibility of lingering doubt about the decision? Yes, I did cry. When out in the parking lot, I even said “Thank you, Lord” out loud more than once. Superstitious, irrational, childish: call it whatever you like. I felt and feel that Chestnut’s death at just that time—and with a flashback to his former vigorous self!—was a gift, and gifts require a giver. Amen. And, Chesterfield, I have faith that you are getting or have already gotten whatever is the best a guinea pig can get.

I recently decided it might be a good idea to start a podcast. I figured I would just read and record my blog posts. Most of them are timeless—well, as good one time as another—so the fact that a podcast was based on a blog post from a month or two ago wouldn’t make much difference except for the small number of people that had already read the post. The idea was that I might expand my readership into a bigger “listenership.” I don’t subscribe to any podcasts and seldom listen to episodes, but I guess some people do, maybe a lot of them. In any case there can’t be as many podcasts as there are blogs.

I still haven’t decided if I will do it, but I did record one of the earlier, shorter posts just to see how it might be done. You can skip to the last paragraph if you’d just like a link to the recording. I am not happy with it, primarily, I’m afraid, because I don’t like the sound of my own voice, as recorded. Maybe that would be a little better if I hadn’t been getting a cold. Also, I’ve noticed a tendency to slur my words. Do I do that all the time? Probably. It could be a Texas thing. I believe President Bush does it too. Anyway, there have been places where I did that and then went back to record the paragraph again. Total blunders—mispronunciations or saying a word different from the one that was written—have occurred also. So I’ve had a chance to hear some paragraphs recorded multiple times, and I’ve noticed that I emphasize different words in different readings. The meaning doesn’t change much from the emphasis usually, but it is subtly different, and since I clearly don’t have a fixed idea for which emphasis is better, does it make sense to record one rather than just leaving it as text on the screen? Probably not.

There is also the issue of whether to use good old-fashioned mp3 format or new-and-improved m4a (AAC). If I use Apple’s iWeb software to set up a podcast, then I get the Apple-favored m4a. This is probably the wave of the future, and anyone that has iTunes can presumably play it, but what about those PC users that don’t? I haven’t been able to get an answer to this, but I don’t like the idea of having two audio files for each recorded post. I have done it for this first experiment though. The superiority of the AAC file seems clear: it sounds better, and it’s substantially smaller. Having played them both again, I realize that I dislike my voice less in AAC.

Podcasting would be very time-consuming. The recording I made is less than six minutes long, but I hate to think how long it took me to get to a place I could quit, even then with some parts in it I really didn’t like the sound of. That would probably improve in time, but most of the posts are longer, some a lot longer.

Anyway, if you’d like to hear Dangerous Experiments, click m4a or mp3 for the format of your choice. And, if you think I should be encouraged to do more, please send me an email. I’d also appreciate feedback on the audio format issue. Email address is in the upper right section of the page.

I have not lived a life fraught with peril. I have never been in combat, nor have I been attracted to dangerous activities such as mountain climbing or sky diving, which others find recreational. The physics jobs I had were not dangerous. I was on one demonstration where a man was shot to death by the police, but I was not even aware of it when it happened. Yet, there have been a few moments in my life which have left a lasting taste of possible fatality.

This is not going to be an all-inclusive account. The one serious car accident I was in is not going to be dealt with here. Instead I am going to talk about three times when I was lucky, and nothing serious happened. Yet the thought of those times makes me realize that I’m alive through luck or providence, and thinking about them gives me an uneasy feeling, a bit like having to go through them again. What a short life it would have been! The three incidents have in common the hurtling toward a road, with the danger of death coming at the road. The scenes seem well suited for appearing in a nightmare, and I suppose that may be what makes them so vivid and gives them their lasting power to evoke fear.

The first of these times was when I was quite young, probably eight. To my shame at the time, I was one of the last among my peers to learn how to ride a bicycle. But I got one for Christmas, and I mastered bicycle riding pretty quickly after that. To be more precise, I mastered the balance and pedaling part. I didn’t get braking. This was an old “balloon tire” American bike without hand brakes. To brake such a bike one has to apply pressure to one of the pedals in the sense opposite to that which propels the bike forward. I understood there was something different about the pedal work to brake, just not what. Instead of standing up and applying the back pressure on one pedal, as I had observed others doing, I stood and applied pressure to both pedals, one in one sense and the other in the other, so that I just balanced them and might as well have taken both feet off the pedals. It was coasting, not braking.

I think I knew that method wasn’t quite right, but it resembled what the others were doing to brake. I remember that when I needed to stop, I would run off the sidewalk into the grass to help me slow down, then dismount while the bike was still rolling to pull it to a stop. I was not thinking this through or verifying stopping power. I guess I basically thought I knew how to brake the bicycle just from the looks of things without analyzing the actual effect. It never occurred to me to ask anyone, adult or child, to show me how to brake.

Highway 80 ran right through my small hometown as broad, red-bricked Main Street, whose surface, I remember, seemed especially hot to our bare feet in the summer. This was the busiest street in Eastland, Texas. Given our theme of luck and fate, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Eastland was named after an early Texas Ranger, William Mosby Eastland, honored for a brave death as the first to draw a black bean, fatal in the “lottery of death” ordered by the Mexican dictator Santa Anna in 1842 to determine which prisoners were to be executed after an escape attempt.

One day I was out riding my bike by myself and rode up by the high school, which was on a hill above Main Street. I rode along the street that went past the high school parallel to Main St. then turned to go down the steep hill, intending to turn right on Main as part of my loop back home. I don’t remember if I picked up extra speed by pedaling downhill, or if my acceleration was strictly due to gravity, but I know that I was going fast as I came to Main Street. Of course, any attempt at braking with my method could do nothing to slow me down.

This is naturally the part of the journey that gives me that uneasy feeling and makes me want to ward off the memory even as I call it up today. I was trying to make the right turn, but I was moving much too fast for that, and I was moving so fast that a driver in a car approaching that intersection would have had little warning time to try to stop. Unable to slow down, I might as well have shut my eyes and trusted God or Fate to get me safely across. I crossed Main Street at an angle, unscathed, then hit the curb on the other side of the street and went on up it.

Embarrassment now became stronger than fear. There must have been people around that had seen me hit the curb. I tried to give the appearance that that had been my intent all along by continuing to turn to the right so as to ride on the sidewalk alongside Main Street. But I was still going too fast to do that either. I ran into a low stone wall, which finally stopped the bike. More embarrassment. I wasn’t hurt; and the bike, though dented, was still rideable. I can’t remember if I walked it home or rode it. It would have been sufficiently uphill for safe riding.

Eight-year-olds do get killed in bike accidents, and I could have been one of them. In those days, I might add, a kid would have been as likely to wear water wings as a helmet when riding a bicycle. I don’t remember telling my parents about the accident, and I don’t remember when I learned how to brake my bike. The accident did teach me not to go down steep hills until I had mastered stopping. Rest assured that I made sure my own helmeted children learned to brake before they went very far on their bikes.

The next time that sticks in my mind was when I was fifteen living in Garland, Texas. My friends and I would ride around in a car almost every evening. This was a Saturday night, and we were out late. It was one of the rare times when I had gotten our family Ford and was the driver for the night. There were five of us, all fifteen or sixteen years old. It was well after midnight, perhaps as late as 2 am, and we were in a heavy rainstorm. Without going into the details here, suffice it to say that we were being chased by a determined adult in a pickup who had good reason, relating to certain decorative auto accessories recently in his possession, to be chasing us. The consequences of his catching us might be physically dangerous, for all we knew, and would likely involve trouble with the law (and of course our parents) for us. It was a living nightmare: I was responsible for making sure we didn’t get caught.

The windshield wipers on the car were of the type that completely stopped working whenever you accelerated, which meant a lot of driving blind, given the circumstances of the heavy rain and frequent acceleration. We were sliding around like crazy, fishtailing as we turned corners on the slippery streets. The part I remember most vividly is our approach to a major thoroughfare we would have to cross. The chances of a car coming down that street were much lower so late at night than during regular hours, but still not zero. There might be some other speeding teenagers! Before we came to the street someone shouted “Don’t slow down!” so I flew across the street without slowing or looking. The street had been empty; we had won that round of automotive Russian roulette. Soon after that, however, we realized we were not going to shake the guy anyway, so that we had better stop and throw ourselves at his mercy.

Playing the mental tape of the approach to that intersection at full speed gives me the same quasi-panicky feeling as remembering that uncontrolled street-crossing on the bicycle years before and makes me want to put my hands out in front of me to stop it. The difference between the two times, during the actual events, was that I remember being scared of a crash at the time I crossed the street in the car. I was conscious of the possibility that I might be in my last seconds of life. Now I wonder what in the hell were a bunch of kids that young doing out that late in a car? That was the fifties in Texas.

The third incident occurred sometime later while I was in high school. Near the town I lived in there was a 3M plant. Next to the plant was a street that mainly served as a way for workers at the plant to enter the plant parking lot. The street, which was probably less than half a mile long, ran between a major street and what amounted to a country road. It was straight and wide and had very little traffic except when workers were coming to work or leaving. The 3M plant was on one side of this street, and the fenced backyards of houses that faced away from the street were on the other. This broad side street was regularly used as a drag strip by area teenagers, illegally of course.

A drag strip needs to be a quarter of a mile long plus sufficient additional track length to enable the racers to stop or slow down enough to turn after crossing the finish line. The object of a drag race is to accelerate from a complete stop to the quarter-mile line in the fastest time. Improvised drag races along the 3M strip were head-to-head matches between two cars that raced side by side for a quarter-mile. I don’t recall what landmarks were used for the start and finish lines, but I assume there must have been some. One kid would stand in the middle of the street in front of the two cars and signal the start of the race with a dramatic gesture. The cars would accelerate to the finish line and then start braking because the street’s end was not far ahead. Even beyond the obvious danger of speeding, each race would have been something of a gamble, as the street was not marked as being one way, so an unlucky driver could have turned onto the drag strip from the country road to meet a speeding car head-on. Drag races were usually late at night when that danger was minimized. In addition to accommodating two-car races, the 3M road provided a place to see what speed your car could reach in a quarter of a mile.

I don’t remember any of the circumstances of the next event beyond the fact that I was once again driving the family Ford and that I had two passengers in the front seat beside me, Bobby and Jim. Bobby was a year ahead of me, Jim in my class. I recall that it was broad daylight, most likely on a Sunday. Probably at their urging, I drove to the 3M “drag strip” to see what the car could do in a quarter. I should mention again that I didn’t drive all that much, usually relying on one of the other members of our group to get his family car or, in the case of a couple of them, drive his own personal car, to cruise around in. I really didn’t share my friends’ fascination with cars and speed. Somehow I had ended up running around with a certain group, starting with a couple from my neighborhood, despite my not feeling a very deep connection with them or sharing their tastes and opinions on much of anything except music and sports. It did provide me with a group identity, something to do, and a certain status, since a couple of the group were known as being very tough in a fight.

Anyway, there I was at the wheel of our Ford, ready to make a test run. The car had an automatic transmission. I revved the engine up, while holding the brake down with my left foot. The back wheels spun slowly, squealing a little, but without propelling the car forward until I took my foot off the brake and the car surged forward “burning rubber.” There was no gear shifting required on my part; all I had to do was keep that gas pedal on the floor as we raced up the strip, checking the speedometer to see what speed we’d reach in the quarter. I believe it was about eighty miles an hour. We continued speeding on. On down the straight road, pedal on the floor. I must have seemed transfixed.

“Bob! Bob! Shut off!” Jim’s voice broke through to my blanked-out mind to alert me to the reality of the danger we were in, as we rushed toward the road at the end of the street. I don’t remember what was on the other side of the road, probably a ditch and a barbed-wire fence, but we would not have wanted to go flying into it at ninety miles an hour. I managed to slow the car down, without a panic stop, just enough to make the turn onto the road. Fortunately, there wasn’t a car on the country road approaching the intersection at the same time.

I don’t know what was actually in Bobby’s mind, but he was merciless in ridiculing Jim for having been so afraid as to cry out. I was still in a daze, weak with relief and residual fear, realizing how close we had come to a terrible crash. I didn’t join in Bobby’s razzing of Jim, but I also didn’t let on that we had been in danger because of my freezing at the wheel. And I never thanked Jim. I was weak, and in my weakness I didn’t want to acknowledge weakness. I haven’t seen Jim in close to fifty years.

Jim Allen, I hope you have had a good and interesting life, which you are still enjoying. Thank you for speaking up that day when seconds truly mattered.

I recently wrote (Looking Back At a Rocky Little League Start) about my unplanned entry into Little League coaching when my son was seven years old. That had been coach-pitch ball, where everyone batted each inning, no matter how many outs were made, and no score was kept, except by the players of course.

The following spring we were excited by the prospect of real baseball in the Little League minors. One afternoon, my son, a friend of his, and I were at our neighborhood park engaging in a little preseason baseball practice. A Little League team, or as we later learned, two teams—minor and major league affiliates—were practicing on the diamond, while we were in deep right and center field. This is not a regulation park with Little League fences, so the field is regularly used for frisbee tossing, sunbathing, etc. when games are not being played.

My son and his friend caught the talent-scouting eye of one of the coaches on the diamond. The coach walked over to talk to us to see what was what. He asked the boys if they played Little League. The friend did, but was about to move out of town. All the interest was then focused on my son. The coach, whose name was Jon, invited him to join in the next team practice. Actually, since it was an unofficial practice, he called it a get-together or something like that.

I remembered a story I’d read in the local paper a few years before about a coach in our town being arrested at a ball field right in front of his team for conducting an early unauthorized Little League practice. The league president had called the cops on him supposedly for practicing on a city field before receiving permission from the city. I had thought it was crazy, and that the more practice kids got the better, but there’s no denying the early bird coach had probably been seeking an advantage. These coaches must have felt the heat was off as far as any consequences as extreme as arrest went. They probably would have said that everyone was doing it.

I guess my son and I were flattered by Jon’s desire to have my son practice with his team. Or, more likely, I was flattered, and my son was just happy for the chance to get started with real baseball. We came to the next unofficial practice of these Little League Red Sox. We were delighted to see that Wilson, one of our favorite kids on the “traveling team” from the previous year was there as well. Since his older brother was on the major league Red Sox, Wilson was guaranteed a spot on its minor league affiliate, which made it all the more attractive to us.

What a step up it was for my son to be practicing with experienced players under experienced coaches! Jon’s son was on the minor league team, and he seemed to be a very nice kid, which won Jon points with me as a potential coach for my son. I liked the way the coaches treated the kids and ran the practice, so both my son and I were quickly sold on the idea of being on the Red Sox. I planned to sign up to be eligible for coaching again in case my son’s team had need of coaching help. It felt like the Red Sox were our team already.

The player draft was conducted before one of the Little League meetings. Jon came from the draft to the meeting where I was waiting and told me there had been no problem; the Red Sox had landed my son. I glanced at the list of players in the draft Jon was holding and thought I saw next to my son’s name the notation “Will only play for Red Sox.” Since that went far beyond anything we would ever have said, stretching a strong preference into a requirement, I realized there had possibly been some chicanery involved in getting my son. Assuming I saw what I thought I saw, I still don’t know if the statement was actually used or just held in reserve in case someone tried to draft my son before the Red Sox could. I never said anything to Jon about it; and, since I didn’t, the only sure thing is that I let it go by without comment despite my suspicion.

It appeared that I was going to be Jon’s main assistant coach. I was looking forward to helping and learning from Jon and was glad not to have the responsibility for a team, which had been thrust upon me at the last minute a year before. There seemed a good possibility that I might inherit the managerial role the following year after Jon had moved up with his son to the majors. For now I was doing whatever Jon asked me to, whether putting balls on the tee for batting practice or hitting ground balls to players.

During a practice shortly before the season was to start Jon asked me, somewhat dubiously I thought, “Can you handle this team?” Thinking he needed to go to the bank before it closed or something and wanted me to run the practice for half an hour or so, I said I thought I could for a while. But no, he meant could I take over the managing job for the season! His son was being called up to the majors along with a couple of the other older players, and Jon was moving up with him to help coach at the next level. This meant I would be on my own and with a team depleted of some of its best players. It seemed to be my fate to have a team thrust on me each year. Despite my doubts, I said yes I would try, part of the reason being that I didn’t want to take a chance on whoever else might get the job at that point, as there were no other candidates on Jon’s coaching staff.

If I had been reluctant to take on the seven-year-old coach-pitch team the year before, I really felt in over my head now. This was real baseball, and I imagined it as being close to what my only experience with organized ball had been when I was a teenager. What about run-down pickle drills? What drills would I use at all beyond the most basic fielding and throwing to bases? Could I throw strikes in batting practice? My coach-pitch experience should help there. I would have to start learning the Little League rule book. I would at least be able to know for a fact that no rules were being evaded or stretched by our team. Teaching kids how to pitch? I’d never pitched. Time to order some videos and books! I did find some that were helpful, but time seemed so short.

The two best older players left on the