Taste

Shortly after my wife and I were married, she announced that she was going to buy me some clothes, as it was painfully evident that I had no taste. No husband of hers was going to wear that in public. Or that.

And that thing? Oh, Hell, no!

My protests fell on deaf ears. I was dragged to the mall, where we spent precious dollars on name-brand clothing which I was raised to believe belonged only to the well-to-do.

It has been thus ever since.

As a result, my closet is as nearly idiot-proof as is possible. When I was getting up at 2am to do morning-drive news, I would basically dress in the dark so as not to disturb her sleep. This meant that any pair of slacks had to go with virtually any shirt. It was a sight to behold.

Wearing name-brand clothing -- and having a reasonable supply of it -- usually means that it lasts longer, so that you actually get more bang for your buck. Go figure.

Over the past few years, I have become a brand buyer. I tried it once, liked it, and found that most everything this company makes is of good quality. More important, it passes muster. And yes, it lasts longer than lesser brands.

Morale: Taste cannot be taught; you either have it, or you don't. If you have it, be thankful. I don't, but I surely have the next best thing.

I'll be wearing my tasteful new shirt to work this week.

Assume

"Curiosity killed the cat." "Cats have nine lives." Which one is true?  Both.   Life is a gamble. I go for the "nine lives" part because of a strong curiosity.  It has served me well as a news guy, but it also is immensely satisfying personally. Was standing in line at a store check-out behind a man wearing a black silk head covering.  There were numerous elaborate tattoos on his arms.  "Nice ink," I said.  He turned around, looked me up and down and turned away.  Later, in the parking lot, he thanked me and said the tats honor a buddy killed in Iraq. Waiting for my food order at Schlotzky's, spotted four police officers at a table waiting on their order.  Walked up and posed a question that I'd wanted to ask for a long time: What's that radar-dome-looking thing on the roof of some police cars? A sergeant explained it.  I promised not to tell. Attended a lecture at SMU featuring Stephen Hawking.  The lecture hall was packed with physics and quantum mechanics and astronomy students.  Completely out of my league,  I took  lots of notes hoping to figure out the subject matter later.  Didn't help. Covering a shooting, arrived before the ambulance.  Asked the victim lying on his back if the wound in his abdomen hurt.  He said it didn't because it was only a .22-calibre bullet.  Did he know the shooter?  Yes, and the wounded man vowed to kick his butt later.  Why?  For being stupid, he said. I could have assumed that the guy with the tattoos was a thug.  Or that the police officers were to be avoided.  Or that the lecture would enlighten.  Or that the wounded man would curse such a question. What they say about the word, "assume," remains true. Mostly.

Church

I went to church last week and spent a few days there.  I go about twice a year.  It never fails to lift my spirits. My church has no steeple, no pews, no organ, no stained glass, no preacher. My fellow parishoners are bears, deer, wolves and other creatures, plus certain other humans. I discovered this church only recently.  A series of revelations led me there. One revelation occurred when I accidentally shot and killed a snowy owl.  I had never seen one until this gorgeous bird fell out of the tree.  From below, mostly hidden in the canopy, it looked like a vulture.  I have hunted before, but killing that magnificent creature broke my heart. Another revelation came when I was a boy learning the Bible.  When I read that God gave us dominion over the Earth and every living thing therein, the idea stuck. Aboard a 727 climbing out of Weir Cook Airport (now Indianapolis International),  I saw dirty grey air pollution until we passed ten thousand feet.  Decades later, it was noticeable up to nearly twenty thousand.  Yup, we humans sure know how to dominion. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound infuriated me, as it did many people.  For the next ten years I boycotted Exxon. Have you ever been to a landfill?  Actually climbed onto it, looked at it and smelled it? You've probably seen video of that giant collection of garbage floating in the central North Pacific Ocean.  Human stewardship at its best, I tell ya. Anyway, I spend a few days in the Rockies a couple of times a year.  And every time, I come away thinking, "You should go to church more often."

The Guard

There are of millions of National Guardsmen in the US, all of whom are in constant training. They are our neighbors, friends, family members. Every one I have met is a red-blooded American, proud to serve.

One whom I recently ran into is a 38-year-old US Army sergeant, here in town undergoing a month of training on upgraded attack and transport helicopter electronics. I didn't know that 'til he said he is from California. North Texas was really hot that day. "It's a lot hotter in Iraq," he said. "We have to work early mornings and early evenings to stay out of 140-degree temperatures. It's not good for the helicopters, either." He's to be deployed next month -- again.

There's the 26-year-old woman I encountered at a convenience store. She's a single mother from Oklahoma, and she's heading to Afghanistan next month. In civilian life, she works for an oil company full-time. She looked fit, and I wondered what she does in the military.

Then there's the 38-year-old woman training on new software. She was pleasant but offered few details. I see her around for a few weeks, then she's gone for many more weeks. Her duties are classified.

These are people just proud to serve their country. They don't like the over-used term, "hero." We civilians have no clue.

There's a calm about them. They don't brag, and they don't talk much to civilians about what they do in the service. You and I see them all the time but don't notice -- at the store, gassing up their cars, jogging -- doing the things we civilians do.

'Til one day you notice that you haven't seen them in a while. And if you knew they were military, and you knew they were to be deployed soon, you realize that "soon" has already happened. They're thousands of miles away, in some God-awful place on the other side of the world. Suddenly it's cold in your gut.

And you are humbled.

STS-135

The end of the space shuttle program is a bittersweet chapter in America’s space exploration program, but it’s not the end of it, and that’s exciting. Who among us can forget staying up all night to watch Neil Armstrong step off the LEM? Man will take another giant leap – on Mars, if not an asteroid first. You and I may not live to see that day, but our progeny will. Meanwhile, NASA is scheduled to launch a bigger and better Mars rover by year’s end to learn more about our sister planet.

Other spectacular unmanned missions continue. The incredible Hubble Space Telescope has sent back some of the most awe-inspiring photographs of all time since its 1990 launch. And the HST just found a fourth moon orbiting Pluto three billion miles away.

Another telescope -- Chandra, launched and shuttle-deployed twelve years ago -- looks billions of light years into the history of our universe using its X-ray vision (literally) to unveil never-before-seen wonders in that part of the spectrum invisible to us humans.

A NASA probe named Dawn just entered orbit about Vesta, the 3rd largest body in the Asteroid Belt. So what? Vesta may not be an asteroid. It’s huge (330 miles in diameter) and not just a rock like other, much smaller asteroids. It has a crust, a mantle and a core, like Earth and the other interior planets. It could be one of Earth’s cousins. Five percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth come from Vesta.

These are but a fraction of the projects still underway to help explore the eternal question that Ellie Arroway posited in that movie: Why are we here?

Because God put us here? Absolutely. With an insatiable curiosity.

When Police Say

"Attribution! Attribution! Attribution!" The words of Prof. Phil Bremen have rung in the ears of his Ball State University students for years. If your news story is based upon information from a source -- named or unnamed -- you must attribute the information to that source.

This may explain why you'll often hear a newscaster say something like, "A man is jailed after police say..."

Wait. A man was jailed because a policeman spoke?

"Well," a consultant might argue, "that's better than, 'According to police.' That's old-fashioned newspaper speak, and we don't want to sound old-fashioned ..."

Uh-huh.

Listeners (and viewers) don't have the benefit of seeing the puncuation in the script. Maybe the guy/gal wrote, "A man is jailed after, police say, ..." I'm willing to give 100:1 odds that s/he did not include the offsetting commas in the script because (1) s/he grew up hearing "..after police say" and assumed that it was correct because radio and TV newscasters are supposed to be expert grammarians and set an example, or (2) because s/he didn't comprehend the ambiguity, or (3) was never taught the difference.

Sometimes, newscasters will use voice inflection to infer puncutation -- e.g., dropping the pitch of his/her voice at the end of a sentence to indicate a period, or inserting a slight pause before and after reading a direct quote.

So I guess that, to avoid unwarranted arrest, we should all try not to be around when police say.

THE END

The California preacher who got so much attention with his Judgment Day prediction last month says he has recalculated, and that it will happen this Fall. I forget the date. We’ll see. But as his May deadline approached, I got to thinking.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I would have dismissed the man as just another wacko and not given him a second thought. But that was before I lost my father to a rare, fast-moving disease. And my mother to old age. My best friend in high school -- the healthiest, fittest man I knew -- died of a heart attack at age 50. A brother-in-law dropped dead in his 40s, and a colleague died just last month. All, within the last ten years.

While I ignored the preacher's prediction (What can one do, after all?), it reminded me that we are all on this Earth for only a while -- a relatively long while for some, a short while for others. But still just tiny, nearly imperceptible fractions of a second in the galactic clock.

There’s so much yet to do in this life – not the least of which is to appreciate this priceless gift, and the Lord who gave it to us. The economy may be in the tank and so on and so on, but that’s our doing. After all, we are the life-forms in charge.

It’s easy, amid our many woes, to forget that it is a miracle that we are here at all. Whether you view life and this planet from a religious or astrophysical position, our existence is truly a miracle.

So whenever The End comes, I’ll be ready. I’m just not holding my breath.