Mini-vacation diary, Part the segundo

The day starts early because the ROTC kids are up before 6, banging and thumpin around in the hall. What was that I said about they're not being too annoying?

Still, we laze about -- it is Saturday for heaven's sake. We'd bought some microwave breakfasts instead of partaking of the "continental" breakfast the hotel serves, so I cook. Silly me, I think I can grab some orange juice before we head out for the day, but by the time we're ready to go just before 9, the staff is cleaning up, and the juice has been stowed. I must remember that.

We jump in the Cube, set the GPS for Anderson and take Lisa's directions. From what I'd seen on Google maps, she's taking us by a circuitous route, but that turns out alright when we drive through a seriously ritzy neighborhood. I miss a turn, but it's not really Lisa's fault. She'll guide us straight to the entrance of the Fanthorp Inn State Historical Site in Anderson.

Seems Henry Fanthorp settled in Texas while it was still part of Mexico and persuaded Stephen F. Austin to give him some prime land on a major stagecoach route. His original dwelling was in a corn crib, but after he married, the wife, Rachel, decided she needed nicer quarters to live in.

So Henry built your basic dog-run, then expanded it by adding a second story and dining area to accommodate travelers. Eventually the establishment also became the post office, with Henry as postmaster. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/moconn852/sets/72157626072797979/)

While touring the site, we heard the park guide refer several times to "Washington," meaning Washington on the Brazos to me. Silly me, I didn't know the existing town is called Washington. You live and learn.

We checked a map in the car and discovered that WOTB wasn't far away, so we decided to buzz over and check it out. We programmed Lisa, who once again redeemed herself for Friday's miscues. (I did forget to mention that she tried to lead us astray in Bryan on our way back to the hotel, but we outsmarted her. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I buy a new GPS.)

As we neared the state park, we saw farmers sitting in their fields next to signs offering parking for $5. Why in the world would anyone want to park in their fields? Was something going on? Yep. Seems the park was having a 175th anniversary celebration of the declaration of Texas Independence. We turned into the entrance only to find we were about to join hundreds and hundreds of other visitors.

Guardsmen were on hand to direct traffic, and we were shuttled to an empty field way in the back of the park. But we didn't have to pay five bucks. And because it was a celebration, everything was free. No park admission, not other fees. Huzzah.

Historical re-enactors were scattered about the park grounds, doing demonstrations on just about anything you could imagine. Some demos we've seen previously in other museums and parks. One we hadn't seen was for rope making. The demonstrator invited children to run the hand-cranked apparatus and make 4 to 5 foot lengths of rope they were allowed to keep. That explained why we saw so many kids wandering about with rope.

A crowd had gathered at the replica Independence Hall to witness a re-enactment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Only problem was that so many folks had crammed into the hall that the "delegates" couldn't get in. I skipped out.

Picked up a couple of interesting tidbits in the visitor center. Seems Anson Jones' life went a bit downhill after the glory days of Texas independence, and he ended up committing suicide. Somehow I missed that story in Texas history class. Ah, well.

The other bit of trivia explained that Tejanos were native born residents -- usually of Mexican or Spanish descent -- while Texians or Texicans were immigrants. You can insert your own undocumented worker comment here.

Jones' home has been moved to a section of the park called Barrington Farm, and functions as a living history center, with demonstrations all the time. We walked and walked until we just couldn't walk any more. With sore feet and achy backs we trekked to our car in the back 40 and gratefully headed for the hotel.

The junior soldiers were gone, and we took time to recover before dinner at McAlister's Deli -- like Jason's, only better. For fun we walked the mall, though there wasn't much to see, except for a couple of really interesting outfits on some teens. Though now I think about it, I don't remember them well enough to describe. Oh, well.

A stop at Starbuck for tea and desert topped off the night, and we retired, tired but happy.

Tomorrow we head back to Calvert, the town that's almost entirely a national historical site.

Mini-vacation diary, Part the primero

Day 1

GPS commercials would lead you to believe that the handy little instruments can deliver you anywhere you want to go.

The navigation aids have been quite a boon to me, a person who make the wrong turn just walking out of his closet. Over the years I've slowly learned not to argue with my GPS, even when I'm convinced it's wrong because I'm almost always the one who's really in error.

So, as we're taking Highway 6 from Waco to Bryan-College Station, I'm fairly confident that I have a straight shot. Imagine my dismay when Lisa (I think that's her name) tells me I have a turn coming. I glance at the map, and it indicates that I'll have to move onto a road to my left that doesn't exist.

We keep traveling and Lisa tells me I need to take the next left and go back to some county road, the sign for which we'd recently passed. I dutifully used the turnaround and returned to the county road, where it was painfully obvious that Lisa and the GPS map were woefully out of date and wrong, wrong, wrong.

We pulled back onto 6 and watched the map as we ran out of road -- or so it seemed -- and were driving across a field. Suddenly Hwy. 6 reappeared on the map, and the Cube icon fairly leaped from the field back to the road.

The purpose of this particular route was to take us to Calvert, which we intended to return to on Sunday, where the Internet had informed me I could by a self-guided driving tour booklet at "any merchant."

We parked "downtown" and proceeded to try to find a merchant who was open to sell us a book. This was more difficult than you'd think for early Friday afternoon. We found a store with a quite friendly owner who gave us a rack card with a map of the historical district and who assured us that was what we were looking for.

The Internet had also informed me that Calvert had a Chamber of Commerce, so we thought we might have better luck going there. Fortunately its location was marked on the rack card so we headed that direction. We soon encountered a second shop owner standing on the sidewalk who quite amiably struck up a conversation. We told him we were going to the chamber office, and he told us not to bother. The chamber had a building, but no one was ever there, he said.

We mentioned that we intended to return to see the historical houses, and he lead us into his shop so he could show us the very booklet the Internet said existed. Unfortunately, he only had the one copy. Did he know where we might obtain one? Why, hmm. Probably if we went back the other way, one particular store would probably be open, and if anyone in town had one, that shop owner would.

Sure enough, when we arrived at the store, the wizened owner was in possession of a number of copies, which she happily sold for $7.50 -- please note that the Internet said the booklets cost $5. Ah, nice to know that even in small-town America, profiteering is alive and well. Supply and demand at work.

Having purchased our precious guide -- which will now be part of my estate, to be handed down to my children, with many hopes they won't fight over it -- we proceeded to Bryan. After we checked in, we decided to visit historical downtown Bryan.

The area is being renovated, probably as a result of a grant, with quite a bit being complete. During our wanderings we find O'Connor and Associates, a law firm whose primary attorney is apparently a fellow named Michael O'Connor (I'll post a picture on Flickr soon.)

We spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering about and left just as the post-work traffic seemed to be picking up. Despite the presence of numerous restaurants, we decide to eat at a chain place across from the hotel -- and no, it wasn't a Denny's.

When we returned, we discovered that a large Jr. ROTC group was sharing our accommodations. They thumped an bumped a bit, and took over the breakfast area for a pizza feast, but they weren't really as annoying as they could have been.

Saturday we'll head to Anderson and wind up on a much bigger adventure.

I hope to post Day 2 on the morrow.

Hey, don't touch my pet project

The budget battles in the Texas Lege and Congress would be amusing if they weren't so stupid.

Letters to the editor galore appear in my daily newspaper decrying any suggestion that the brilliants in Austin are even thinking about making a single cut to education. Now, I believe that education is among the most important items the state funds, and I understand the frustration of the critics who look at our rankings and wonder why we want to go lower.

But surely there's some fat in the education budget somewhere. At least the solons have the wisdom to say we need to end mandatory steroid testing for all high school athletes, a program that used millions of dollars to catch a handful of violators. Tell me we don't have more boondoggles like that in any government budget you want to name.

Then a Democrat up in Wash. D.C. suggests cutting funding for the Army to sponsor a racer in NASCAR. The sponsorship amounts to chump change in a trillion dollar budget, but the Ellyphonts decided that the sponsorship was inviolable. Never mind that other branches of the armed forces abandoned their sponsorships because of a lack of evidence that they worked as a recruiting tool. Apparently the pro-biz Republicans never heard of the idea of jettisoning a program that costs money but doesn't actually grow the business.

Instead, they want to cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This has sent the management of our local PBS and NPR stations to the airwaves to urge viewers and listeners to contact their congressmen. CPB is a favorite conservative whipping boy because public broadcasting is considered to be too liberal. Interestingly, the NPR outlet in Abilene is a part of the journalism department of ACU, where it functions as lab training for budding journalists. ACU can hardly be considered to be a hotbed of liberalism -- except among some parts of the Church of Christ. And for my money public broadcasting is much more useful than NASCAR sponsorships.

But therein lies the problem -- us. We go to Congress or the Lege and say, "This is a worthy program, and it won't fly unless the government helps fund it."

In the case of Texas, when we were flush with funds, the Lege said, "Sure, we can do that." Up in D.C. they didn't have the funds, but if the project resonated with the party in power, it was funded.

Now we don't have the money, but no one seems to want to give up their favorite program. This is valuable, we tell our representatives, you can't possibly cut this.

As the old song says, "Somethin' gotta give." I hope the twerps we've elected to represent us can figure out what really important, but it's only a faint hope at this point.

The dumbest thing I heard in the past week

The shooting in Tucson has given rise to a lot of useless nattering. We'll never know for sure what set the gunman off -- even his own explanation, if he ever gives one, will probably not bring light.

This, of course, has not stopped the various factions -- conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, pro-gun, antigun -- from using the occasion to hop on a soapbox and start slinging accusations.

But the item that caught my attention this week was the reported e-mail exchange between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. If you haven't heard or read about it, write "Palin Beck e-mail" in the search box of your favorite search engine.

To say that Beck is given to hyperbole is akin to saying elephants have big ears and long trunks. But I'd have to say this time he was off the charts.

Beck encouraged Palin to hire some security to protect herself and her family because -- get this -- if something happened to Palin the republic might fall.

Oh, yeah? This republic withstood wars that threatened to unmake it, including a little donnybrook in the 1860s that started because of an express intention to split up the republic. Iit withstood presidential assassination attempts and assassinations, the lunacy of a couple of morons who blew up little children in Oklahoma and 9/11, among other things.

But if something happens to La Sarah, it's going to fall apart? I don't think so.

C'mon, Glenn. Do you really hold the American public with such little regard?

Someone explain to me again why anyone listens to this guy.

Time to put away the carping

The presents have been opened. The family have returned to their respective homes.

The joy of being with my children remains, along with some sadness that the time together couldn't longer, but that's what happens when they grow up and begin to build their own homes.

The trees are still up and lit -- one of my favorite parts of Christmas because the ornaments remind me of the years gone by. I'm sure they'll come down this weekend, and I'll miss the lights each evening.

As glorious as the Christmas season is, one aspect will not be missed: the annual carping about putting the Christ back in Christmas. The message has been the same for decades, only the reason for carping has changed.

The phrase used to be bandied about because we were afraid Christmas had become too commercial, now it is seen as a remedy to the so-called War on Christmas.

Thing I haven't figured out is why we keep pushing that worn out phrase. Christmas is more commercial and secular than ever. Do we really think that continuing to fuss about it is going to stem the tide, especially when the nation is even more diverse religiously than before? No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me how giving overworked, harried store clerks "permission" to violate their companies' rules wins hearts and minds to Jesus.

We are so combative these days. Editorial letter writers complain about every perceived slight to Christianity and whine that no one worries about offending us. Heck, they don't have to worry. We're offended by just about anything -- or nothing -- these days. Our sense of outrage grows almost daily.

We are a bunch of spoiled, former only children who have suddenly been faced by younger siblings. "Mom, he's picking on me again!" is our cry.

Of course, our mothers would have told us something along the lines of, "Honey, just ignore him. He's just try to get your goat. Every time you react, he gets what he wanted."

Of course some Christians suffer injustice, even persecution. But most of the stuff being carped about fails to rise to those levels. And given that Jesus warned us that the world would be against us, why do we continue to be surprised when it is, even here in America?

We are not called to protect the American way of life; we are called to live as the faithful disciples of Christ. And no, the two are not the same, no matter how much we believe that Christianity forms the underpinnings of our our culture and government.

We'd do well to complain less. And we'd also do well to remember that Jesus' harshest words were not to the Romans and pagans of his day. They were directed at the community of faith. The people who believed they enjoyed God's favor.

Maybe, just maybe, if we were to listen, we would hear the Master's voice telling us that the problem lies not so much with the government and the boards of corporations and "the media" but in ourselves.

Who are "they"

I was fussing about something one day -- don't remember about what because I fuss so much -- and whoever the poor victim was who had to listen to my ravings interrupted with a question.

"Who are 'they'?"

You know how it goes. You're upset so you start nattering about how they did this, and they did that, but you don't ever indicate who "they" are. My listener wanted to know specifics. If my rant was the usual kind of fussing, I probably had no specific individuals in mind, and the whole concept worked better if I didn't become specific.

As long as my oppressors, or villains, or whatever were some nebulous "they," I could be as indignant as I wanted and also put myself in the position of powerless victim.

Though the phenomenon probably goes back to the beginnings of human consciousness, I've been unusually aware of how we use nonspecifc groups to feed our rhetoric these days.

One favorite group of long standing is, of course, the Liberal Media, often referred to as the Mainstream Media. The Media are responsible for an enormous number of our current woes, and we all apparently know exact who "they" are.

Except we don't. The New York Times is one favorite whipping boy, but some of its writers go off on their own tangents and produce articles that agree with a particular complainer's point of view. When that happens, The NYT may be freely quoted without the Liberal or Mainstream tag.

A current favorite is the Government. Whatever the Liberal Media aren't busy ruining in our society, the Government is. The Government is this evil, wasteful, horrible entity whose only purpose seems to be to make life miserable. Until, of course, we have some problem we want solved.

Amorphic groups can work on the other side of an issue as well.

The Founding Fathers are often invoked in support of a number of causes. Whatever you want to see happening in society can be backed by bringing them up.

The Founding Fathers wanted America to be a Christian nation. No, The Founding Fathers wanted America to be a haven for religious liberty. But what Founding Fathers are we talking about? Who are they?

Every election cycle brings up another amazing group: The American People, who always "have spoken." The only problem with that is that apparently I cease to be part of The American People about every other election or so.

Just think about all the groups that have so much influence. The Man wants to keep you down. The Religious Right wants to us to live in a theocracy. The Liberals want to create a socialist society. The list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, I find that the actual uselessness of using these nonspecific groups as support for whatever side I'm taking hasn't stopped me from invoking them. Apparently I prefer the easy argument to serious discussion and specifics.

One of my own favorite groups was Readers, as in newspaper readers who might have actually read an article of mine in the paper or magazine we produced. I have to admit I miss them as both scapegoats and supporters.

I'm in search of a new, amorphous group. Sure hope I find one soon because when I do, they're going to have some explaining to do and some causes to promote.

Only three kinds of lies

Numbers. We use them all the time; we're influenced by them; and we haven't a clue much of the time as to what they really mean.

We listened to an interesting podcast about numbers while driving home from Thanksgiving dinner with the wonderful sons. The interviewee is a journalism professor who's just published a book about what he calls "the dark side of mathematics."

Most of what he dealt with was the statistics branch of math. No better way to lie to people than by using statistics.

The amusing part of the podcast came when the prof failed to properly apply his own principles.

Citing a study that showed men have an average of seven sexual partners in their lifetimes while women report only having four, the prof declared that this was impossible, that the numbers should be close to even.

But he forgot that the study involves sampling a population and making generalizations about the population. Of course, this is the basis of modern polling, and it works in various levels of success.

But consider this. We have an unusual sample of eight people, one guy and seven women. Now, it happens that the guy happened to sleep with all seven women. So he reports having seven partners. Now what if each woman also slept with three other men during their lifetimes. Men not represented in our sample.

Bingo. We've matched the study results.

This is, of course, wildly simplified. But in a study like this one, unless you've a huge sample, you face a similar difficulty. The results may be absolutely accurate and still not be representative of the population as a whole.

But in one of those delicious coincidences often mistakenly referred to as irony, the next morning a news show I was watching reported on a "study" conducted by Popular Mechanics (one of my favorite sources for reliable research!) that showed the U.S. Postal Service handled packages more gently than FedEx and UPS.

They even included graphs, another technique the professor noted as being useful for deception, and one of my personal favorites. By manipulating the scale, you can make relatively small differences seem much greater.

Since the title is about three kinds of lies, I'll mention one more -- even though that's not what the quote refers to.

The professor noted that many studies the news media report on show correlations. You know, people who eat kale tend to have fewer cancers than people who don't, or people who drive red Fords have fewer accidents than people who drive black Pontiacs.

But correlations don't necessarily indicate cause. They can help point the way, but correlations are always starting points.

I learned so much about how to properly use numbers, I decided to do a little research and report on the results here.

Consider the graph above. I took a representative sample of approximate IQ scores of people I know read these ramblings. The first thing to notice from this graph is that I am dumber than my readers.

Note, however, that I am not myself particularly dumb. The graph clearly shows I am way above average.

But the obvious conclusion to be reached here is that reading my blog makes you smarter, so I encourage you, dear reader, to pass this along to all your friends.