Musings of a Restless Mind

Most people would consider my life very strange. I suppose some might call me an intellectual because most of my pursuits and interests are those that exercise the mind rather than the body. An elderly Chinese man once called my wife a scholar, to my ear a more complimentary term, and I certainly agreed with him, but, unlike her, I lack the discipline to become a scientist or scholar as she was, even if I have a great interests in science and history. She would dig deeply into what interested her whereas I tend to research only enough to understand something and how to explain it to those who lack the knowledge, but hardly enough to become a practitioner in the subject at hand.

I’ve always been a troublemaker who early on annoyed my patriotic parents by pointing out that The Star Spangled Banner wasn’t declared the national anthem until 1931 and not regularly played at sporting events until World War II. I annoyed my fellow baby-boomers by disdaining their anti-war protests as just vanity at best, and an excuse for vile behavior at worst. I didn’t run out to enlist, but neither did I even try to get a student deferment from the draft, considering it a cowardly and unethical thing to do. If you’ve read my work biography, you can probably see that at every place I’ve worked, I’ve likely left people who are still shaking their heads about that fellow who didn’t seem to fit.

I love history and literature and music and art, but am quite untutored at either music or art. My music career consists of 2 weeks of lessons on the clarinet (I would have preferred the saxophone, but couldn’t rent one). I have a deep and pleasant bass voice (so I’m told) with a range of about half an octave and a very primitive ability to read music. In the schools that I went to, art class consisted of the teacher saying, “Draw,” and music class consisted of the teacher saying, “Sing”. Somehow I don’t remember them approaching reading and math the same way.

Perhaps an admittedly incomplete list of the books I’ve read in the last year or so would demonstrate how odd I am:

A Tale of Red Riding: Rise of the Alpha Huntress—a fairy tale turned inside out

Becoming Superman—J Michael Straczynski’s autobiography

Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer—J Michael Straczynski on writing

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret—The classic tale about/for adolescent girls

Partial/Truths—an assertion that people don’t really understand fractions and so are easily deceived

Democracy in America—the classic DeTocqueville study of 1832 America

Economics in One Lesson—just what it says

Wonder Woman: Ares Rising—a graphic novel, proving I’m still a geek

2 Years Before the Mast—the classic tale of a tall ship voyage to the California coast in 1824

Oooff! Boff! Splat!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66—What can I say?

Three Coins—a Chinese girl sold into bondage in San Francisco in the late 1800’s

The All American Crew—the training, forming, and missions of a US bomber crew in WWII Pacific

12 Rules for Life—Jordan Peterson telling us all how to live 😉

The Last Days of Night—Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla compete to electrify the US.

That doesn’t include reading most of the Jack Reacher books and rereading the 11-book Horatio Hornblower saga, or the many essays I’ve read online. This morning over breakfast, I was watching the fifth episode of a documentary on The Great Indian Wars after finishing binging Gotham Knights last night, preceded by most of the Padres game in the morning. In between, I wrote the beginnings of a short story. I suppose one could ask of me what the FBI agent asked about the main character in National Treasure “What in the world did this guy want to be when he grew up?”

What I wanted and still want to be is a storyteller, as the love of my life also was. “I love people! They’re my species!” as Maude says in Harold and Maude. I’m a poorly socialized loner who’s life goal is to understand things, especially people. I try not to use obscure words like William F. Buckley or John Updike although I once was jokingly elbowed by a friend for using the phrase, “my parsimonious Grandmother”, so sometimes they slip out. I suppose my hero in that regard is Bob Dylan, who uses ordinary words (and will do almost anything for an audacious rhyme scheme), but fills his lyrics with metaphors that are odd, but evocative of what he wants to convey, from old horror movies to puns about “Arabian drums” meant to mean both the musical instruments and the 55-gallon drums of the oil industry, somehow evoking colonialism, the industrial age, native culture, and lives of wealth and privilege from both sellers and buyers in the oil trade—all with just two words.

I take my inspiration from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show that was fun for us kids but used amusing references that our parents could laugh at, and that we might not get until decades later, if ever. As you can see from the above paragraph, I can’t seem to keep myself from referencing all manner of things, from Rocky and Bullwinkle to Harold and Maude, and Bob Dylan to Warren Zevon. I read philosophy, economics, history, comic books, fantasy, and my own bizarre form of self-improvement books. That is why I call my blog Musings of a Restless Mind.

I’m either the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit or the universal tool that works on everything, but none perfectly. I seem to be able to convince people that I know things, but I can never seem to convince them to do what I think is right, or buy what I’m selling. I am where good ideas go to die. A few examples will suffice.

For decades I’ve tried to convince the W3C (the powers that be that control the world-wide web) to create a <sarcasm> HTML tag, so people could tell when someone isn’t being serious. It would help AI immensely to know when somebody’s just joking.

I’ve tried my best to convince cyber security experts to give up the fat fees they collect for cleaning up messes after the fact, to instead give all of us the simple tools we need to see if our computers are about to be, or have been hacked. Actually you can probably see why I can’t sell that one. It led me to formulate Hood’s Law of Innovation, “Innovative ideas eventually rise to the desk of the person in charge of all the people who are doing things the way they are now.”

Since 2014, I’ve tried to sell the Navy on a simple, cheap technique that would save them 90-98% of their bandwidth usage over their limited satellite network. Maybe I should have told them I had to charge them more?

Of course it’s not just me. My former landlord invented a relatively cheap cleaning device that would save the Department of Defense a billion dollars a year in cleaning their guns and equipment. After a couple of decades of trying, he could only sell it to some individual Army Ranger and Marine units who swore by it. He got it certified that it could be used to sterilize dental and surgical instruments. He rented it to a manufacturer that calculated they would save $6,000/month by using his machine. Did they buy it? No.

Is there a point to this essay? If you know, tell me. So I end this very rambling essay with a tribute to my Irish ancestry from Tom Lehrer.