November 2011 - Page 5 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Military Losses

Here’s a weird thing. A friend of a friend of mine had a husband in the military. She (FoF) started making comments on her Facebook page that people should send pictures of her husband so that her children would have mementos by which they would be able to remember him. Oddly, she never actually wrote that he had died.

So I began searching. I discovered that the most comprehensive listing of those who were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I could find is provided by MilitaryTimes.com, “honoring those who fought and died in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.”

But, as it turned out, he didn’t die in battle. He was stateside and had committed suicide. Apparently, after a third tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, it was just too much.

From this ABC NEWS story:

The increase in suicide deaths is one of the most distressing issues facing military leaders who want to reduce the rates among active-duty service members. More than 2,000 of them have killed themselves in the past decade [PDF], including 295 last year compared with 153 in 2001.

Despite their best suicide-prevention efforts, reducing the number of military suicides has been a frustrating challenge, military leaders acknowledged [in September 2011] at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. Recent efforts have included increasing at-risk service members’ access to mental health professionals, while reducing the stigma attached to mental health care. Internet outreach, including “video chats,” has also shown some promise.

The difficulty, however, is in identifying which initiatives work best and deciphering the multiple triggers that can lead to suicide within the armed services, which accounts for a small fraction of the total number of people who serve.

Despite my lack of understanding of the reasons for going to war, I feel real grief over the sheer despair these men and women must have been going through to take their own lives. Here’s hoping that the Telehealth programs now being used by the military can stem the tide of these horrible losses.

Repeating numbers

There will be other repeated phenomena, such as 2/2/22, 3/3/33, which will save us from a total desert of no repeated digits.

Tomorrow is 11/11/11. I’m as fascinated as anyone by this fact. A bunch of people are getting married on that date. Is it that they consider it particularly lucky, or is it that they just want to make sure they don’t forget their anniversaries? Or maybe it’s that it’s a peculiar phenomenon that takes place 12 times at the beginning of the century, then not at all for 88 years, that they wish to embrace.

The movie being released on that date with that name is being directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV); to say that I’ll never see it is a gross underexaggeration.

The repeated number phenomenon is much more interesting to me than the sequential system – 09/10/11, e.g. It’s because the latter is not universal. In the United States, that’d be September 10, but in most of the rest of the world, it’s October 9.

Not that I wouldn’t use the sequential if it made sense. My officemate Amelia was pregnant and due on 8 October. So I picked 09 (day)/10 (month)/11 (year) at 12:13 pm. Charlie was born on 9 October 2011, at 12:51 p.m., and I won the office pool. Amelia’s happy because he was born on Jackson Browne’s birthday.

There will be other repeated phenomena, such as 2/2/22, 3/3/33, which will save us from a total desert of no repeated digits.

Let’s look back at the previous repeating digits this century:
01/01/01, a Monday – the beginning of the 21st century, and the third millennium as many needed to point out. We learn that many people cannot spell the word millennium, which has 2 Ns, not 1.
02/02/02, a Saturday – Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, heir to the Dutch throne, marries Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti in Amsterdam.
03/03/03, a Monday – “third day of the third month of the third year of the third millennium. That’s an awful lot of threes,” as noted here.
04/04/04, a Sunday – According to the Hartford (CT) House of Prayer, “This date is strategic. God raises up prophets to point the direction.”
05/05/05, a Thursday – The Canadian House of Assembly celebrates “the victory that Canadian troops helped make in World War II.”
06/06/06, a Tuesday – A number of sites express concern over occult happenings. Also, If Your Child Is Born on 06-06-06; Christian Parenting Alert!
07/07/07, a Saturday – Conversely, the Magical Qualities of the Number 7 led to perhaps the biggest wedding day ever.
08/08/08, a Friday – The Beijing Summer Olympics began on this date because 8 is lucky in Chinese culture.
09/09/09, a Wednesday – The Beatles’ mono and stereo remasters are released as well as the Beatles on Rock Band.
10/10/10, a Sunday – Yet another significant day.
11/11/11 will be a Friday, of course, and 12/12/12 will be on a Wednesday.

Promoting the Concert

In general, how many days ahead of time do you plan attending an event? How has it changed with life circumstances?

There was a nice article in the [Albany, NY] Times Union newspaper on Saturday, November 5 about a concert of Mozart music taking place at First Presbyterian Church in Albany on Sunday, November 13; I will be participating. This led to some discussion about how people decide to go to events.

One parishioner thought that, while it was a great piece, it was too bad that it did not appear the day before the concert. Apparently, some people see an article on the Saturday religion page in the TU and are primed to go the next day.

Whereas I almost never see an event on that page that I have the means to attend a day or two out. Likewise, even in my single days, it was rare that I saw something that I first learned about in the TU Preview section or in Metroland on a Thursday and was able to attend within 48 hours of reading about it. An article might provide additional info beyond what I knew, but it would not be the initial inspiration for a night out.

Besides, the article published a week earlier allowed one to tweet and Facebook about it, and blog about it, especially to those who DON’T READ THE NEWSPAPER. Then other people might retweet and reFacebook (is that a word?) about it as well.

My question then: in general, how many days ahead of time do you plan to attend an event? How has it changed with life circumstances?

Anyway, it’ll be a busy weekend for me, with a dress rehearsal on Saturday and the concert on Sunday. If I’m slow approving your comments or visiting your blogs, you’ll know why.

Willard Asylum Suitcase Documentation

Jon is awed by the support from the Kickstarter community, with over 560 backers, from points as far away as Italy.

Photo: (C) Jon Crispin

I have this peculiar fascination with old suitcases. Well, not just any old suitcases, but suitcases that once held the worldly possessions of the people residing at the Willard Asylum in Ovid, NY in Seneca County. I remember a large article in Metroland about the New York State Museum’s 2004 exhibit “Lost Cases, Recovered Lives: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic”, curated by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny.

Then recently, I was looking at my weekly Kickstarter e-mail, and I noted the highlighted Willard Asylum Suitcase Documentation: a photography project in Albany, NY by Jon Crispin. So I e-mailed him, and he called me back.

Jon Crispin, born in 1951, has had the opportunity to take pictures of various projects involving the State Museum over a number of years. For instance, he took some photos, well after the Attica prison uprising, that had been saved.

Jon recalls growing up in Meadville, PA, where the great entertainment was to go to the railroad station to see the daily train departure. Then, at one point, as is true in many small towns, the train stopped coming. He felt the need to make a photographic record of it.

The youngest of three, Jon seems to be following his sister’s path, of a sort, as a preservationist. He seems to be particularly drawn to things left behind, seeing their beauty. The Willard Project most assuredly falls into that category. Both he and I are fascinated by the letter, unmailed, in the photo above, and imagine what the story of it might be.

The photographer wanted to note the assistance he’s gotten from Craig Williams of the State Museum, who has been a champion of his for a number of years. He appreciates the work that others have done in this arena before him. He is awed by the support from the Kickstarter community, with over 560 backers, from points as far away as Italy. Most of all, he is grateful for the fact that his wife has had a steady job with health benefits, which had allowed him to stay home with their son, who is now at college, while he worked on his photography.

Jon mentioned that he read about Willard in a New York Times article. While looking for it, I found an even more intriguing piece: an April 1872 Times article about Willard, which informs how people of the time saw the facility in a positive light. I also recommend an article from the blog Joy of Caking.

I suppose that another element of my interest in Willard involves the fact that there was a state hospital in Binghamton, where I grew up, and my father went there periodically to entertain the patients. I went with him only once or twice; I found it rather foreboding. In retrospect, I wonder if the patients there, and the other “asylums” felt the same?

Q is for…

In other words, expecting rationality in the development of English is…irrational!

The last time ABC Wednesday was on the letter Q, someone asked, “Why does U usually follow Q in English-language words?” And the answer was simple to find but mighty difficult to explain.

As is noted here, it’s because modern English evolved from the Phoenicians to the Greeks to the Etruscans to the Romans.

Like the Greeks, Latin had only the one k sound. As a result, over time kappa was dropped, koppa evolved into q, and gamma into c (these changes explain why Greek words spelled with k have their Latin equivalents spelled with c). The Romans used q only before u, though the combination was actually written as qv, since v was a vowel in classical Latin, to represent the kw sound that was so common in the language.

If we move on about a thousand years, we find that Old English had the same sound, but represented it by cw, since q had been left out of their version of the alphabet (so queen in Old English was spelled cwen, for example). French, however, continued the Latin qv, though by now written as qu. After the Norman Conquest, French spelling gradually took over in England, eventually replacing the Old English cw by Latinate qu, though this change took about 300 years to complete.

In other words, it’s because English is an evolving, bastardized language. Or, blame the French.

I like the answer here as well: “As for why q is always written with a u in Latin itself… The ‘u’ part is actually the easiest to understand, as its pronunciation approximates the glide sound that ‘w’ represents in the ‘kw’ cluster. What’s harder to understand is why Latin chose to have 2 separate symbols for the ‘k’ sound (the other is c; they never used ‘k’). It’s also amusing that English adopted all 3 symbols (q, c, and k). One of those accidents of history, I guess.”

Helping the Daughter with her spelling reminded me that, linguistically, the letter C has no function that isn’t being rendered by the K or the S.

In other words, expecting rationality in the development of the English language is…totally irrational!

There is even debate as to whether, typographically, there should be a qu glyph – i.e., the letters joined as if they were one. I’ve sometimes seen them written as though aligned.

Here’s a video that will enlighten the issue not at all.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9