Neanderpundit

Having been a Boy Scout in my distant and misspent youth, I tend to agonize over preparedness. Not in the way the mormons do, but preparedness to make it through the next thing with little difficulty.

IN Africa i was well prepared. I went with a list of things that I felt would be useful, and returned having used everything and wanted almost nothing. In retrospect I would only have added a pair of Crocs to my bag, and my prep would have been utterly complete. Some day I’ll publish my list, it made it possible for me to enjoy the trip and not think about a single thing I might have needed.

When I was shopping for my first home, I looked at what seemed like a million properties. Too small, too big, too old, to expensive, too crowded, too nasty, too much whatever.

And then came the flood.

We had what was termed a “hundred year” flood in northwest indiana, in 1981. We were living in an apartment at the time, and we received about 28 inches of water in an 8 hour period. The summer had already been wet, the ground was supersaturated, the storm drains were full before the storm started. And that saturday, when the rains began, we woke up at six to knocking on the door.

Our downstairs neighbor had fourteen inches of water in her apartment. We helped her move the most vulnerable of her belongings to our apartment, and she spent the rest of the morning sleeping on our couch.

Later that day, we went to look at homes AGAIN. It was our hobby, in those days.

I drove my aging Impala down a street axle deep in water. We turned into the driveway of a little center-entry colonial and met the realtor inside. A nice Mormon couple invited us in, and we looked around.

Despite the horrid rain outside, the house was completely dry, and in fact the unused basement had a thin coating of dust on the tile floor. We made an offer on the house that day, and moved in a month later when our lease expired at the apartment building.

Duriing that flood, there were several homes that were damaged or destroyed. One area still known to it’s residents as “Frog Hollow”, less than a mile from the new Cabelas, had had a sign on it ‘if you lived here, you’d be home now”. That sign was now almost entirely submerged. Many of those homes are still there, but because it’s aknown flood plain, it’s nearly impossible to get insurance, and the homeowners must sign waivers when they buy the homes. One homeowner picked up the house, lock, stock, and barrel, and built a 10′ garage underneath it, so no matter how high the water got, he’d be high and dry.

The house I live in now has city water and a private well. There is 50’ between my basement and the water table. We’ve had ::Several:: “Hundred year floods” since we’ve been in this house. Sometimes we even get water in the backyard. Several times the flooding has completely erased one of the roads into the neighborhood.

yes, the world is full of idiots that choose to live stupid places where they aresubject to the whim of nature- even here, we get winters that 250 years ago would have been fatal to a large population not served by natural gas and electricity. When I’m told that a: I have to bail out those people for their stupidity, or b: they deserve the right to bitch at the government- any government- for not making their lives right again, it makes me wish they’d been more efficiently been removed from the gene pool so Humanity could raise it’s collective IQ.

I haven’t read all of the new one yet, I started but I had to stop; I’m now revisiting the earlier one which has been updated and is available for Kindle for $3.

The “earlier” edition includes a good deal of the biography written by his daughter Susy, as well as his comments about it.

If you ever liked Twain the author, you should read this, to get to know Twain the man, the father. If you have a heart, this will tug at it, if you have a soul, this will enrich it, if you have a mind, this will stimulate it.

The “new” autobiography shows a little more of the man, but I stopped because I chose to remind myself of his better angels before I read the one that seems to contain more of the demons.

Not the Fishburne one, which I haven’t seen, but the Sir Lawrence Olivier one, with Derek Jacobi. I’ve been listening to it over my shoulder all morning.

I have as part of my regular desk reference a decent Shakespeare, everyne should. So much of our language and idiom is due to it, after all. It is, for me, like nails on a chalkboard for reading. I just can’t do it. but to see it? to hear it done, and done well? oh, my god. I could do that forever.

Of course, R&J has been way overdone, so that gets on my nerves, but The Merchant of Venice? Brilliant. The Taming of the Shrew? both the Richard Burton verson and the John Cleese version make me glad to be alive. Others, like The Tempest- well, if Shakespeare had had robots, he’d have written it like Forbidden Planet. Titus, with Anthony Hopkins, is wonderful to listen to, not so much to watch.

And Othello, with Olivier’s beautiful voice and acting chops, and a very young Maggie Smith… What a way to start a lazy midwinter’s saturday.