A soldier from Wilkes ...

... is returning to Iraq. No big deal in most ways - we have sent dozens of men and women over there from Wilkes. Up in Boone I am currently teaching several returning veterans and occasionally get in touch with one of my former students who are there or returning. Still, it helps to have it brought home in specific and personal terms, as this young woman does on gowilkes.com:

I would like to ask everyone to pray for my cousin "SPC.D[...] B[...]" he has been on an 18 day leave from Iraq and will be returning back to Iraq on Tuesday the 30th.Out of his 4yrs,he has been over in AFGANISTAN and IRAQ for about 3 and a half of those.Please remember him and all the other soldiers in your prayers and for their safe return.He has 11 more months in Iraq and will be out for good in December 2008 if all goes well...Thanks in advance...He's just a kid as so many of them are he's only 22yrs old and has been in the army since he graduated highshool. It is gonna be so hard to see him leave again,folks just don't realize just how it really is over there until you sit and listen to some of the horror stories,I just couldn't imagine...

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Some disturbing news about the accident ...

... on 421. The Winston paper now has a news story about it. Three people died in it. Here are the details:

The crash happened ... after a tractor-trailer headed south crossed the centerline and overturned and slid into a northbound pickup driven by Thomas Simon [Simon and a couple riding with them were killed; his wife is still in critical condition].

The driver of the tractor-trailer was identified as Curtis Isaac Mondy, 47, of St. Petersburg, Fla. He was exceeding the posted truck speed of 30 mph, said Trooper Joe Berrong. Mondy was treated and released from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. He was charged today with three counts of misdemeanor death by motor vehicle and one count of reckless driving, Berrong said.

Hard to say what exactly happened. It could simply be that the driver was speeding, or that he was having a hard time controlling the truck on that grade. You sure don't get much experience with mountains in St Pete, Florida. Or that his brakes had burnt out. But this time, I am afraid the driver was at fault. The Simon's pick-up occupied a spot on the highway my car is in four or five times a week, often with a semi-rig coming down the other way. This is not the first time I have seen an overturned truck that has swept across the median and through the traffic lanes coming the other way.

Somedays getting to work is a bit more difficult than others.

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A grim sight greeted me ...

... as I drove home from work yesterday. Coming down the mountain from Deep Gap on 421 I rounded the great curve, the last one before the road begins to straighten out and flattens. I suddenly had to brake hard to avoid hitting a line of stopped traffic. Then I realized that there was a line of parked cars on my left and people were leaving their cars and running or walking across the road towards the left side of the highway where traffic was completely stopped. It all had an eerie, almost slow motion quality.

Then I looked left and saw what the problem was. I first thought part of the mountain had fallen into the road because there were mounds of gray colored rock laying there. Then I realized that those weren't rocks but vehicles covered with an ashy gray substance like dirt or ash. I made out an SUV completely off the road and then a tracker trailer rig - or rather its undercarriage and wheels stuck down into a ravine.

There was nothing I could do at that point except get in the way so I drive on by. About three miles down the road I saw the first fire truck and ambulance go by. From there all the way to the Wilkesboro strip I saw more emergency vehicles of every sort heading towards the wreck.

The wreck was horrifying and I don't say that about much. I am sure people were killed. I have checked the news this morning and can find nothing about it. It occurred just a few hundred yards down the road from this accident last month and close to where several other truckers have died since I moved to Wilkes seven years ago.

Since this stretch of 421 was four laned a few years ago speed limits have risen and so has the fatality rate, I think. Now I know why I sometimes see as many as four state troopers stopping traffic. Once you lose control of a semi-truck on that slope it is almost all over.

So let's be careful out there.


UPDATE: On gowilkes.com there is a discussion about the wreck. Apparently 3 people are dead and one other was pinned in a car. A tractor trailer carrying lime was involved, which may explain the powdery stuff I saw. There was at least one other car and perhaps one other. Very bad news.

Rain, rain go away ... NO - wait a minute...

... we want you to stay. A solid five days of rain has not been enough to make up for an entire summer and fall of virtually no rain. The lakes and reservoirs are still low. But this did help. Carmen tells me that the big lake here rose two feet in the last week. That's a relief.

So I guess the only part of they rhyme that we want to repeat is the "come again some other day." And again and again.

This is a picture of mark twain.

Just in case you didn't believe me ....

.... about how cute our new virtual grandchild (or whatever) is:



You will notice that they have already dressed him in Irish Green. Erin go bragh!!

For the next couple of weeks ...

... I may have to exercise my imagination to come up with something other than Maeráed's trip to Vietnam to post about. Not that Carmen and I are doting virtual grandparents or whatever we are to Maeráed. But their trip is interesting, especially to my family with its ties to the old country. And the new brother is exceptionally cute. Exceptionally.

And that's my unbiased opinion as a scholar. With a PhD. And all that.

Our favorite picture of Maeráed in Vietnam ....

... for both Carmen and me is this:

There's Maeráed, striding straight ahead into the orphanage to find her brother all by herself. We can just picture her giving orders: OK - get those little boys out here - line 'em up. I want my brother!

To no one's surprise, she got her brother out of the orphanage (with a little help from Maire, Marty and the Vietnamese government officials). To our total unsurprise, she was the hit of the entire place - everyone wanted to take her off to show her all the babies, and to make over her and pet her. She took it all in stride.

Persepolis, one of my favorite books ...

... has been made into a movie and may, but probably isn't, coming to a theatre near you soon. Or in December anyway. It is animated the old fashioned way, with real drawings, which makes sense since it is a comic book memoir. Stephanie Zacharek, who usually gets nothing right, gets this one right.

"People who have no interest in graphic novels often think the people who love them are nuts, and vice versa. But every once in a while, there's a book -- or a set of books -- potent enough to close the gap between the people who read "comics" and the people who don't. Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs, "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" and "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return" -- .... -- fit that description."

If in the unlikely event it comes anywhere near you, go see it. Especially if you are fed up with Americanized crap like "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising."

It will be an education.


And if you don't have the chance to see it, get the books and read them.

Anactoria called it right! ....

... In response to my post about the awfulness of the trailer of an Americanized movie version of "The Dark is Rising" she said:

They've taken away everything that made the story good and the movie promises to be a huge flop. :(

Carmen told me with a certain amount of malicious glee to check out the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of it. They're brutal. It only earned a 16% rating. The Cream of the Crop critics only gave it 12%. Here's a sampling of the reviews:

It communicates almost no sense of its own identity; everything seems borrowed and tired.

Screenwriter John Hodge strips Cooper's story of its details and charm, reducing it to a kind of characterless, elemental video game -- an apocalyptic scavenger hunt.

And our favorite, proving that Carmen's instincts were absolutely right (well, they usually are):


Remember hearing that the early studio inclination with Harry [Potter] was to Americanize him? This tedious, plodding, thoroughly unmagical movie could well be what that Hollywood Harry might have been.


So there.



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Maeráed and Maire and Marty are all in Vietnam ....

... for the next two weeks or so picking up a baby brother for Maeráed. They started the adoption process ages ago, and a very few weeks ago were suddenly told 'come over here and pick this kid up!' Or words to that effect. So it looks like Carmen and I will have a little Vietnamese notional relative to spoil along with our real Vietnamese relatives in that unnamed port city to the south, and out in California. His new parents will call him ... Mickey.

Which for some reason reminds me of that scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
"There are some who call me .... Tim?"*

I am not sure this is going to work right, but below should be a picture of little Mickey Brown Eyes and his adoring older sister Maeráed. Carmen is already in love with him and says he looks like a little Buddhist monk.

2 Attached Images

There. That seems to work, though I am sure I did something unintended if not illegal. Oh well. My lawyers will call their lawyers.

By the way, if Maire reads this in Vietnam, the class discussion of the Damascus Chronicle went very well. The students were stunned, simply stunned, by my wit and knowledge on the subject. Or, maybe they were just speechless.


* In researching this point I came across this scene: I think Zoot's identicle twin sister Dinko looks a bit like Maire, what with the wimple and all. But I could be wrong.

We took Maire's advice ...

... and went to this webpage.

We both tried the little test to see what our daemons would be. Here they are:

Clemens: A hare named Lysander, because I am flexible, modest, solitary, shy and humble*.

Carmen: A spider named Sirion, because she is modest, competitive, spontaneous, assertive and solitary.

Looks like we are well matched as long as I don't mind a spider bite or two. And Lysander doesn't leave too big a mess in the living room. Try it for yourself!

You might also want to read the books. You have until December and they are a good read, even though we do not quite see how they can be true to the author's intent when they get around to writing the script for number three.


*at least it doesn't sound as bad as the graphologist's opinion.