There You Have It -- Not About The Bakken -- If You Came Here For The Bakken, Scroll Down Or Go To The Sidebar -- February 21, 2016

Environmentalists conveniently forget to remind 3rd graders that Rockefeller saved the great whales from extinction. I’m reminded of that after seeing an article in this week’s issue of The Smithsonian, “Murdering History: An eyewitness report on the devastating cultural genocide being waged by ISIS and combatants in Syria’s civil war.”

Years ago I remember an occasional article taking to task the great museums in England and France (e.g., The British Museum and the Louvre) for “looting” the great treasures of Egypt and the Mideast. There were calls for these museums to return these artifact back to their home country. I doubt we will see any articles praising the early western European collectors for having saved these priceless pieces from extinction, just as Rockefeller saved the whales, but there you have it.

Over the years, I’ve probably subscribed to as many as a dozen publications at any one time, but with the internet available some years ago, and the increasingly “fluffiness” and irrelevant magazines like Newsweek, I stopped all subscriptions. Off and on I would re-subscribe to The Wall Street Journal. My favorite periodical, beginning back in 1973, was The New Yorker. After years of letting that subscription lapse, I am now, once again, a regular subscriber. I also recently subscribed to The New York Review of Books and will renew.

I will subscribe to introductory offers of $10 for an annual subscription, and through that offer I also subscribe to The London Book Review. I doubt I will be able to afford The London Book Review when it comes up for renewal. I am also a one-year subscriber to The Smithsonian, a $10 introductory offer. I won’t renew when the subscription expires.

Another article that caught my eye in The Smithsonian: Into Thin Air: High in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, scientists and hunters are unlikely allies in an effort to protect the endangered snow leopard before it vanishes.”

I wonder if any dentist from Minnesota is tracking the snow leopard for an office trophy before the last one dies off.

“Into thin air” was coined by Shakespeare, by the way.

But I digress. It wasn’t the article itself that caught my attention so much as the coincidental juxtaposition of that article with the following article: “Power On: When Steve Wozniak booted up the Apple I, he launched a tech revolution.”

Snow Leopard was the code name for one of Apple’s recent operating systems. That operating system will no doubt vanish before the cat does. But computer code has a way of living on forever.

The Apple I article is worth the price of the single issue. With all the recent press about Apple, I think many folks have forgotten Apple’s humble beginnings, its heritage. Our younger daughter and I still take our prayer rugs to kneel on whenever we visit a new Apple store for the first time.

It is amazing how far we’ve come. In 1969, I was using a slide rule in high school. In 1972 I was waiting in line to hand my IBM punch cards to some geeky nerd (redundant) who would load them into an IBM mainframe that took up an entire air-conditioned room in the basement of a new science building which was probably designed around this single monstrosity.

In 1980 I was using basic BASIC to write basic BASIC programs for my TRS-80 computer. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the TRS-80 was called a computer. I tracked my first equity investments on that TRS-80.

In 1984 while stationed in Germany, I bought my first Apple computer — a model that was being phased out, but lasted for years after that. I had to buy it at an off-label kiosk because the Army Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) could not come to terms with Apple as a reseller. Both AAFES and Apple were losers in that pissing contest. US military men and women are heavy tech users and early adopters. That one decision by AAFES/Apple allowed Bill Gates the key to the kingdom and it was decades before Apple was able to recover.

I’ve never owned a Wintel/PC. I’ve never used an Apple while at work. I’ve probably had a dozen different Apple computers over the years — always buying the model that was being phased out. Phased out models were always so much less expensive and they were expected to last forever, and they did. Unfortunately, newer and better and more robust models are being released so often that if one doesn’t occasionally buy a new model, one will be hopelessly lost somewhere down the road.

I’m not sure I’ll read the entire article, “OMG! We’ve been here B4: Texting isn’t the first new technology blamed for ruining personal discourse and common courtesy.” But the little I did read is interesting: modern surveys have found that teenagers who text the most are also those who spend the most time face to face with friends. Communication begets communication.

More likely: some people are more social than others. Social people socialize across the spectrum.

On the other hand, it appears that haters who comment on FoxNews..com are probably social outcasts. If not, they should be.

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Poetry is very difficult for me. Try as I might, I have trouble with poetry. It took me years to understand why, but while in my “poetry phase” some years ago I finally understood why I had trouble with poetry.

Some years ago, while in my “poetry phase,” while reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I thought it was prose poetry. I did not know such a “thing” existed but one can google “prose poetry” and find that, yes, indeed, it exists.

I typed the entire Mrs Dalloway in blank verse; it took me about six months to complete, typing a couple of hours every day or so. I discovered some “connecting dots” upon completing that project, which I have posted elsewhere, on another blog. To the best of my knowledge, this had not been “discovered” before. If it has, I have been unable to find any references anywhere.

I followed that up by typing the entire The Waves, also by Virginia Woolf. This was typed out differently than the novel, but not in free verse. Again, I discovered things about The Waves I would not have otherwise known but no great insights like the ones I had with Mrs Dalloway.

I write all that to talk about a one-page poem in this week’s The New Yorker that caught my attention: “Money Road” by Kevin Young, on p. 54, February 22, 2016.

I assumed “Money Road” would be about money. I was wrong.

I think a lot of folks think “The Million Dollar Way (The Bakken Oil Blog)” has to do with investments / investing in the Bakken or with investing in general. Not at all. The Million Dollar Way was the stretch of US Highway 2 & 85 that led north out of Williston. It was probably so-named during the first oil boom back in the 1950s after the car dealers built along that stretch.

The Million Dollar Way was literally and metaphorically my way out of town, leaving one life to being another. The Million Dollar Way had deep meanings and great memories for me.

“Money Road,” the poem, turns out not to be about money either but about the description of the road the writer was taking to re-discover “Money, Mississippi.” My hunch is that his “money road” is my “million dollar way.”

The poem reminded me of the essay in the September 22, 1956, issue of The New Yorker on Mr Hunter and the oyster farms on Staten Island, and on a second reading of "Money Road" I was reminded of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey Into America.