Monday Meanderings - 4.30.2018

Blogger graciously reminded me that tomorrow, Tuesday, May 1, marks my 11 year "blogaversary." Huh. Never thought I would still be at it for 11 years. Still, it keeps me occupied.

And speaking of occupied, I have a new book to narrate. By this, I mean a new Audible.com book (I always have a learning Ally book in the works). I'm moving up in the narrating world - this contract is with a publishing house. The author has written some 30-odd (and that may be a true statement) books on World War II. Evidently, he has decided to move on to another conflict and this is his second book about events in the War between the States; specifically the siege of Vicksburg - as seen from the Confederate side. The author lives in the South, and has no love for Yankees. It's interesting.

This book brings a unique set of problems. Audio book narrators "prep" their manuscripts before recording them. In addition to actually reading the material, they delineate  characters with speaking roles and decide how best to "voice" them. They read for places that need particular emphasis and mark their scripts accordingly - and they look up words unfamiliar to them.

In a book about the siege of Vicksburg, there all sorts of names of actual geographical places;  towns, rivers, church houses, plantations, bayous, bogs, roads, etc., and a lot of them are not well-known (at least to this Texas boy) and not intuitive as to how they are pronounced. For example, who knew that the Coosawhatchie River is pronounced "koos-uh-HATCH-ee." The manager at the KOA located just a few miles from the river did - and he told me when I called him and asked.

Usually, I look for a library in the area I'm researching and asked for the reference desk. Yes, there are still reference desks in libraries, or there are kind ladies who have lived in the area all their lives, and they are delighted that I'm interested in General Beauregard (BOH-ree-gard) and their General Mackall (MAKE-awl) and they go out of their way to help me. And I just love to hear their Southern accents.

The KOA guy? I consider that one of my research wins. A Google search of the Coosawatchie River turned up a reference in a Yelp post that said, "There's a nice KOA about 6 miles down the road in a town whose name I have forgotten, but that gave me a phone number and that got me to the manager, and that got me to "Please, please don't say, "Coo-sah-WATCH-ee."

The people are harder. There are few definitive sources for the correct pronunciation of the countless citizens caught up in this event. Some known only to history because they perished in a battle, or were minor players in a grand event. Today I need to call the Tourist Center in Vicksburg (they all know me by now) and ask about the "Balfour" House and then call the Yulee Florida library to ask about the General the town was named after. How would you handle Cadwallader Colden Washburn? Can't get a handle on him - but I bet there's a sweet-talking librarian out there who knows. If I can just find her.

Monday Meanderings - 4.23.2018

The local PBS station aired Ben-Hur the other night - the venerable, much-decorated movie from way back in 1959. Barb tuned in at about the midway point (the movie is 3 1/2 hours long) and we watched for a while, then taped the rest for an earlier viewing slot.

I'm fairly certain that my children - and certainly not my grandchildren - have ever seen this movie. And that's a shame. With a budget of $15.175 million - a staggering sum in that day - and a cast of more than 10,000 extras, not to mention 200 camels and 2,500 horses used in the shooting of the film, the film defined the term Block Buster. It garnered 11 Academy Awards and is considered to be one of the greatest films ever made and was elected for preservation by the Library of Congress for being a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" motion picture. Phew.

As a freshman in college, I was so impressed with this film that I convinced my parents to drive 60 miles to Abilene one evening to see this movie. If you knew my parents, you would know how remarkable this was.

I read the book back in high school, and it is perhaps a more remarkable story than the movie. Written by a former Union Army General while he was whiling away a couple of years as Governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallis did not profess to be a Christian himself, but his book is considered to be the "most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."

Monday Meanderings - 4.16.2018

Woke up the other morning in the stone age. No Internet, no phone service, no TV. It's fairly sobering how much we depend on the Internet to be there for so many reasons. Checking Facebook is not the issue. The big deal is how much we depend on the resources. Barb can't get what she needs for her ESL lesson prep. I can't do book narration or even preparations. The files I need are on the cloud.

So with no Internet, one spends the morning cleaning out drawers and file cabinets and sorting out all the detritus that ends up in my office. And checking every few minutes to see if Spectrum has restored service. Luckily, it was a little too chilly to comfortably work in the yard. Too bad.

Alternately, one can sit around and listen to the clock chime. I calculated that the heirloom clock chimes 312 times in a twenty-four hour period. Other chiming clocks strike 306 times, but the family clock over achieves and strikes 3 extra times at the 1 o'clock hour. Ahh! Internet's back. Thank goodness. I was getting ready to rearrange my sock drawer.

The Mormons Again - Tales from the Tree

  There's a passel of Mormons hanging out in my Family Tree. I've mentioned them previously, and noted that given the fundamental leanings of most of my relatives, they sort of stand out. They are not in the direct line of ancestors, but sit far out on skinny little branches, for the most part distantly related to or married to those in the line of closer relatives.

Of course, with multiple wives and boundless progeny, it is not hard to find some connection. The gentleman that is the subject of this post was married to a woman who was my 9th cousin, 4 times removed. Whatever that means. But then again, he had 19 wives and 67 children! He could be related by marriage to you, as well. By the way, I'm not sure how you even come up with 67 names for your kids, and I'm pretty sure they probably had to wear name tags.

But what caught my eye about this near-relative was not his family, but the statement, "John D. Lee is perhaps the most controversial figure in Mormon history."  Say What?

 Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up a lengthy Wikipedia article, several PBS features from The West film project, an article from the Smithsonian, several treatments from a variety of sources, including official LDS postings, and even a link to a 456-page book written by Lee himself, entitled, "Mormonism Unveiled; Or The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee; (Written by Himself)."

According to these accounts, Lee was a shining star in the early and formative years of the Mormon movement. After he and his first wife converted to the young religion formed only 7 years prior, his religious zeal became the driving force in his life. He played an active role in the near-war conflicts that rose between the Mormon communities and the resentful "gentile" neighbors, joining the "Danite Band" - the organized Mormon militia. He was promoted to the First Quorum of the Seventy, which directed the church's extensive military activities, and was chosen to guard the home of founder and prophet Joseph Smith.

He must not have been much of a guard, however, because Smith was arrested and later killed by a mob. Undeterred, Lee turned his devotion and loyalty to Brigham Young and was a key figure in the mass migrations to Utah's Salt Lake valley. Along the way, he adopted Young's doctrine of plural marriages - rather zealously, it seems.

For the next decade, Lee played an important role in expanding the Mormon refuge in the West. He became a prosperous farmer and businessman in Southwestern Utah, helping to establish communal mining, milling and manufacturing complexes. He became the local bishop and the Indian agent to the nearby Paiute Indians. And he continued to be a frequent visitor and trusted confidant of the church leadership in Salt Lake City.

By 1857 the United States government had had enough of the "Godless Polygamists" and President James Buchanan sent an army to Utah to set things straight. Fearing annihilation, the Mormons responded in force, and that's the backdrop for the still-controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a wagon train of about 120 gentile immigrants, suspected of hostility toward the church, was slaughtered by Mormon and Paiute forces in southwestern Utah.

Lee's involvement in the massacre -- the extent of which is still vigorously disputed and will probably never be known -- was to haunt him for the next two decades, and would ultimately lead to his execution. He had written a letter to Brigham Young shortly after the massacre which laid the blame squarely on the Paiute Indians, but even among his own neighbors rumors of Lee's guilt abounded. In 1858 a federal judge came to southwestern Utah to investigate the massacre and Lee's part in it, but Lee went into hiding and local Mormons initially refused to cooperate with the investigation. 

 By the late 1860s, however, even  his Mormon neighbors were turning against him because of his connection with the massacre, and even some of his wives and children deserted him. In 1870 a Utah paper openly condemned Brigham Young for covering up the massacre. That same year Young exiled Lee to a remote part of northern Arizona and excommunicated him from the church, instructing his former confidant to "make yourself scarce and keep out of the way." 

He was not successful, however, and in 1874 Lee was captured and placed on trial. After an initial mistrial, Lee was found guilty in a second proceeding. The trials were the subject of enormous public attention and gave rise to many accounts of the massacre and of Lee's life, no doubt varying widely in their factual accuracy.  Most played up the fact that Lee had numerous wives and emphasized the plight of the women and children killed and captured at Mountain Meadows.
 
 On March 23, 1877, nearly 20 years after the massacre and proclaiming his innocence, Lee was executed at Mountain Meadow.

Monday Meanderings - 4.9.2018

The Austin Learning Ally studio closed its doors at the end of March. As I understand it, this was the last production studio to close and the Learning Ally organization is now a virtual community. All of the readers, checkers and the preponderance of staff members are working from home, connected online.

It was sort of a poignant moment when I finished up my last studio session; I've been showing up there a couple of times a week for more than 10 years, and on my first no-studio day, I felt slightly bereft. I had been leading a somewhat hybrid existence for a couple of months - working both from home and from the studio. Now it's all home studio.

And the home studio continues to be a work-in-progress. I have quieted the echo or "slap" in the room with foam panels, but the Eskimos living next door presented a bigger challenge. I'm sure they are Eskimos, because they run their air-conditioner 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I swear I head that A/C unit during our hard freeze in January! Just glad I'm not paying that electric bill.

The air-conditioner is located right outside my "studio" windows, of course, and the noise it makes is clearly discernible in my recordings. First I stuffed foam panels in the window spaces, and that helped, but not enough. Barb was strangely dead-set against my bricking  the windows, so, I took the scientific approach and began researching materials with the highest noise reduction coefficient that I could afford.

That material, it turns out, is "rockboard" - rigid panels made up of compressed rock wool insulation. I figured that I could make up some panels that were only semi-permanent and stuff them in the openings, so I ordered a big box of panel boards.

No home improvement project - or in my case - studio improvement project is without setbacks, and mine came when I opened the box of rockboard and was greeted with a big warning notice that rockboard was only slightly less dangerous than a runaway nuclear reactor, and that you should wear protective clothing, use a breathing apparatus, double wash your clothing afterwards and to be safe, burn them and junk your washing machine. Huh. You would think the company selling this stuff would have mentioned this.

So no raw, uncovered rockboard surfaces allowed, but unbleached muslin has a nice, tight weave and a few yards of that and a can of spray adhesive and all my panels are properly diapered and currently stuffed in the window openings.

Did it stop the A/C noise? Not completely, but I can live with what remains. Now if I can just get Barb to remain absolutely silent while I am recording.

Monday Meanderings - 4.2.2018

I blame Daylight Savings Time. The older I get, seemingly the earlier I rise - which is annoying, but but more about that in a moment. And with the time switch, it is now dark when I get up. So the other morning, I got up - in the dark; made my coffee - in the dark; poured my cup - in the dark; missed the cup and poured hot coffee on my hand - in the dark. Ouch. I am certain that would not have happened if we were observing "real" time.

Now about this early rising. One would think that this phase of my life would allow me to be a slug-a-bed whenever I wanted. That I could snooze as long as I wanted. But noooo. Some seven hours after I go to bed, I've enjoyed all I can stand, and its up to greet the dawn. Which is a while comeing, these days. See above.

Barb, on the other hand, does not share this affliction, so I have some quiet time to listen to podcasts, or music, for example before she gets up. I even got me some nice blue-tooth earphones for that. So the other morning, I'm getting all set to listen, and I realize that I had not "paired" the headphones to my iPhone, and rather than quietly enjoying my music, it is blaring away. I panic at this point, and I'm smothering my phone and pushing all the buttons on my phone, trying to get it to shut up.

Did you know that if you press the side button five times your phone automatically dials 911? Yes. Yes, it does. But first it alerts you with a piercing WHOOP WHOOP alarm! And then, a voice says, "Do you need police, fire or EMS?" According to Apple support, there was a countdown screen to allow me to cancel the call, but if you are clutching the phone close to muffle the loud music (which is still playing) you are unaware of this bail-out screen.