Hurricane Ike, Key West, and My Brain

This from a report in today's New York Times:

Edward Koen, 87, sat in his wheelchair outside the center Sunday in the shade, staring up at the blue, sunny skies, waiting for the bus.

'Why should I be nervous, because of a hurricane?'' Koen said. He'd rather stay put. ''My gosh. I've been living here all my life.'

Ohhhhh .... that comment brings back an important memory:

I've written three books and the inspiration for each came from some deep place in my brain -- as in, my brain said to me "HERE. This is what you should write about."

That's what happened one day in the fall of 1998. I was living in Mobile, Alabama, where I taught at a university. A few weeks prior to this particular day, I had decided to leave academia to write history for a popular audience. This was a major life change and I was figuring out what this would entail and how to start this new career.

No surprise, a large part of my brain was occupied with the most important question: What should I write? What topic would I use to launch this new part of my life?

On that particular day, I was driving home from playing golf (which, full disclosure, I played badly and which I can't play anymore because of my shoulder). The radio was on. Hurricane Georges was on the prowl and a reporter for NPR was in a place called Key West.

At the time, I had no idea where or what Key West was, although I gathered it was somewhere near Florida. The reporter talked to a 92-year-old woman who told him that she wasn't worried about the hurricane. She'd lived in south Florida all her life and lived through a worse storm in Havana in 1928.

Although I wasn't sure where KW was, I knew something about the history of south Florida. Enough to know that if this woman had lived in Florida her entire life, she came nearly pioneer stock. (South Florida was settled relatively late; anyone who was there in the early 20th century was there early. ) And the idea of Havana in 1928? That sounded ... romantic.

That interview hit a nerve that I didn't know I had. "Wow," I thought. "That sounds ... fascinating. Maybe I should write a history of Key West."

So I did. And that's what hurricanes and Key West have to do with my life. So, to my pal George, who has a house in Key West, and to everyone else on the island: Be safe!

I Love Having The Last Word

And I got it. I hasten to add that as many baby boomers know, it's a paraphrase of a hippie-maxim from the 1970s (and for all I know, there's some other version that's even older):

Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.

I first heard it c. 1974 (give or take a year or two) while sitting in an apartment in Iowa City smoking a joint. No surprise, under those circumstances, it struck me as the most profound thing anyone had ever said.

Detour From Beer: An Amazing Photograph

There's an amazing photo on the "front page" of the New York Times website. Leave your politics behind and enjoy the wonders of the internet age. The image (it's actually a series of images taken rapid-fire) is from last night's convention, just after McCain finished speaking. This link should take you to the large version. Then click on "full screen" and roll your mouse.

Almost enough to induce vertigo! And truly truly cool. And in case that link doesn't work, just go to the Times website; it's the image right there front and center.

Historical Tidbits: Beer. Why Women Need Beer, 1860

Temperance and prohibition were hot issues in the 1850s and early 1860s. The "drys" tended to hog the floor because then as now, it was politically difficult to express public affection for the pleasures and benefits of drink.

The editors of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Union were having none of it. As far as they were concerned, the problem with Americans, especially women, was that they didn't drink enough beer.

"Queen Victoria," the newspaper pointed out, "has raised eight or ten babies, and drinks beer. German women drink beer and are as robust as any women in the world."

There is no denying the fact . . . that our total abstinence American women are sadly degenerating, and that the present race of Young America are dwindling, compared with generations past. The most ridiculous thing of our time is to hear little, sallow, 'dried up' men and women making an immense blow about the vices and indulgences of the community, when one good, rollicking fast-liver could clean out a regiment of them in ten minutes.

_______________________

Source: The La Crosse, Wisconsin Union, as quoted in the Milwaukee Sentinel, March 3, 1860, p. 2.

Beer Festivals Coming At You

Yes, it's fall (or it feels like it here) and that means freshly sharpened pencils, the end of the peaches, the appearance of the apples and -- beer festivals right and left, including the Big Daddy, the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, now just a month-and-change away. (Tickets are still available.)

Charlie Papazian has a nice list of guidelines for enjoying festivals without going nuts.

To his list I would add this: 1. pack a supply of throat lozenges (festivals are noisy; you're gonna be shouting) 2. carry some earplugs (see above)

See you in Denver!

Tech Stuff Worth Noting

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg test drives Google's new browser and compares it to the new version of Internet Explorer. For the time being, I think I'll stick with Firefox.

Unrelated to browsers and several degrees up the "wow" scale is many-eyes.com, a website with software that allows people to create visual comparisons and analyses of, well, just about anything. Someone could use the software to construct a visual that compares the number of times Obama used the word "tax" in his acceptance speech to the number of times McCain used the same word.

Warning: I've had only sporadic success getting into the website the past few days. My guess is that its owners, a group at IBM's Watson Research Center, weren't prepared for the traffic generated by this New York Times article about the website and software. The article is worth reading because it provides a short, coherent explanation of what the software can do, complete with an image mapping the occurrence of names in the New Testament (no surprise, "Jesus" gets the biggest bubble).