Bare Ruin’d Choirs

When King Henry VIII ordered the destruction of Catholic monasteries and cathedrals, what was left were skeletons of buildings, and their bleakness was captured by both Shakespeare and, later, Wordsworth.  The entire Catholic world was overturned, and the spiritual desolation of the worshipers must have been horrifying.  They were, however, in the minority.  Worse was to come.

I first read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in the original French, and sadly, spent so much time grappling with the translation of the 19th-century French that I never did appreciate the novel fully.  In fact, I wondered what all the fuss was about:  the novel, by modern standards, was hopelessly long-winded, had all sorts of irrelevant characters to the plot, and so on.  Then, some dozen years later, I found a brilliant translation and read that, and all my earlier scorn for Hugo disappeared.

In that monumental work was the entire catalog of human existence:  love, death, betrayal, forgiveness, venality, cruelty, compassion and kindness, to name but some.  The panoply of Man’s humanity and inhumanity was all there, laid out like a feast on a table, all for the reader’s tasting;  and then came Inspector Javert.

Suddenly, there was a sinister addition to Hugo’s comédie humaine:  the State. The State, with all its papers, its registrations, its mindless bureaucracy, and its wheels of justice, grinding slow and grinding extremely small.  Suddenly, the story of Jean Valjean, which could have been told in just about any age, now became a modern story.  And suddenly, the balance between justice and mercy, once the provenance of God, had been transferred to the State – and the State, as personified by Javert, had no mercy, only justice.

The order of the world had been overturned;  the old order had disappeared, and been replaced with something different, something ineffably worse.

At first, I thought that this was it:  one world had ended, another had taken its place, and sure, Hugo’s work was fiction after all, and such wrenching change was uncommon, perhaps a once-in-several-millenia occurrence.

Five years later I read the Loss Of Eden trilogy by John Masters.  In Eden, Masters describes in minute and appalling detail how an entire civilization disappeared as a result of the First World War.  Like the appearance of the impersonal State bureaucracy in Hugo, the modern manifestation of the State was its impersonal application of technology to the wholesale slaughter of the opposing army.  In Les Misérables, the bureaucrat Javert at least had the option of solving an insoluble conundrum by his own suicide.  No such option existed for the generals on the Western Front.  The result was the disappearance of an entire generation of young men, a decimation or worse of lower- or middle-class youth, and the virtual disappearance of the upper class, doomed by their class and upbringing to lead their men into the hot mouths of the machine guns, and to suffer disproportionately.

At a stroke, the old ruling class disappeared, whether by slaughter on the Western Front, or by revolution in Russia.  In its place came the modern government bureaucracy:  more faceless than before, more powerful than before.  The post-Great War government was to rule not by divine dogma, nor even by royal whim, but by cold, impersonal philosophy.  After the Great War, literature (and the arts in general) fell into the hopeless nihilism of Dada and the antiwar horror of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front.  The Second World War, a continuation of the Great War’s slaughter, was brought to its apogee by the killing of thousands by a single bomb, twice.  What the Second World War enabled was the growth of the Leviathan state, with its impersonal bureaucracy (like mass destruction) brought to its ultimate conclusion.  Instead of the post-Great War Dadaism, post-Second World War literature was defined by bleak dystopian visions like George Orwell’s 1984 and absurdist plays like Samuel Becket’s Waiting For Godot

Movies have progressed into huge, totalitarian productions like Avatar and Titanic, winning awards not because of their literary or cinematic brilliance, but because of their astronomical production costs.  As a reaction, my taste in movies has moved towards the little, personal movies like Sideways and The Cooler.  In contrast, however, my taste in literature has been influenced by the immensity of Les Misérables and Loss Of Eden, where whole societies come to an end, and the misery of human existence is captured in all its facets. 

I have no idea how much the Information Revolution is going to change society.  All I know is that it will.  However, if I want to see how we will be affected by the next overturning of society, and get an idea of the misery we will endure, I just have to re-read Les Misérables and Loss Of Eden.

This time, Shakespeare’s “bare ruin’d choirs” will not be in our buildings, but in our souls. 


I wrote this in late 2010.  As far as I can tell, not much has changed since then.

The Layabout Sailor

Longtime Readers may recall that a bunch of my friends and I used to get together once a year for the Feinstein-Daley Memorial Shoot at the east Texas ranch of Reader Airboss (sadly, since deceased).  It was always a festive affair and featured the occasional gun.

It was at one such event where I met Doc Russia, at the time still a med student at UT-Houston, who had a blog entitled Bloodletting (which I miss dreadfully, even though I still see him regularly for shooting and dinners etc.).  Another blogger also came along at that same meeting:  Jim Siegler from Smoke On The Water, which featured guns, politics and details of his life on board his beloved yacht, the sloop New Dawn.

While Doc was an excellent shot, Jim was likewise;  actually, Jim was easily the best all-round shooter — pistol, revolver, rifle and shotgun — I’ve ever met.


(that’s a youthful Son&Heir spotting for him, btw)

We played all sorts of shooty games, potting bowling pins and plinking at golf balls.

If not doing that, we “tested” each others’ guns (uh huh) and shot impromptu IDPA- or rimfire rifle competitions.  In the former, the competition was usually between Jim and Doc;  with the .22, I was occasionally able to keep up, but mostly, it was always Jim.  Not even the S&H — a competition handgun shooter — could match him, especially when Jim unholstered that ancient and worn S&W Model 14 (K-38 Masterpiece), his favorite gun.

It’s probably true to say that some of the best shooting fun I’ve ever had was with this man, because over the past two or so decades whenever he came up to Dallas or I went down to Galveston, we sent many thousands of rounds downrange together.  To call us “shooting buddies” would be a total understatement.

Then he met a lovely woman, and his life was complete.  (I nicknamed her “Irish” because of her thick, occasionally impenetrable Belfast accent.)

Then Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2009.  It destroyed the New Dawn, which ended up in pieces closer to Houston than to Galveston.  Jim’s normal procedure when faced with storms was simply to batten down and ride it out;  but this time, for some reason, he and Irish left Galveston and stayed with friends up in Livingston.  Had he stayed on the yacht, as he usually did, he would have perished.

Afterwards, Jim and Irish bought a small house, still on Galveston Island — which itself was almost destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.  When the floodwaters receded, they discovered that the insurance would only cover repairs up to the sub-floor;  so Jim rebuilt the rest of the place himself, carefully and meticulously:  floors, kitchen and bathrooms.

In fact, “meticulous” was a word that could describe Jim best:  his house looked as though it had been put together by a master builder, his guns were all in perfect working order, his reloaded ammo was faultless and wonderfully consistent, and his various trucks looked brand new even though they were decidedly not, and all ran like a sewing machine.

I need to make a comment at this point.  Frequent Readers of this website may remember that I have always referred to Jim as “the Layabout Sailor”.  That was a total lie, because Jim was one of the hardest-working men I’ve ever come across, and the ironic nickname was the complete antithesis of him.  Having come from extreme poverty — his first job was washing dishes at a restaurant, at age eight — Jim worked his whole life at a number of jobs, sometimes two at a time:  insurance adjuster, car salesman, bus driver, roofer, whatever paid the bills.  He used to joke that his best-paying job was when he enlisted in the Air Force in his late teens, so you get the idea.  College was never an option because there was little money and he refused to get into debt.  But he was always well-groomed and impeccably dressed — and by the way, very intelligent, well-read and well-spoken, his soft Texas drawl a welcome sound always, along with his impish sense of humor.   (His online signature: “Jim S.– Sloop New Dawn” became “Jim S. — Sunk New Dawn”, which masked his despair at the tragedy of its loss.)

Last November Jim wrote to me to tell me that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s Disease — and of course as we all know, ALS is incurable.  His prognosis was grim — perhaps two years — but the cruelest part was that while ALS can affect both the brain and the muscular system, Jim’s brain was completely unaffected.  So his body was starting to collapse, leaving his lively, intelligent brain intact.  He became weak and his speech began to slur.

Doc Russia and I visited him in April this year following a warning from an alarmed Combat Controller;  and while Jim was in bad shape, he was still able to get around with a walker — we went to his local bar in the evening, and to his favorite breakfast place the next morning — but his speech was barely intelligible, and Irish had to translate much of it for us.  He was much thinner, of course, because he wasn’t able to eat much.  But we left him doing okay, albeit a shadow of his former self, and were comforted by the fact that we’d be able to see him again over the next year or so, at least.  We were wrong.

My friend Jim died two weeks ago, in late June 2025, after only nine months since his diagnosis.  Rather than a slow decline, his condition simply went over a cliff, and he died of pulmonary failure, as his lungs — even with a respirator — ceased to function.

And the world became a little worse for his passing.

Of course, Irish’s world became a lot worse, because Jim had been her whole life, and her his.  New Wife and I spent this last July 4th long weekend with her down in Galveston, and to see one of the nicest people I know in such a state of unutterable grief has taken my normal good humor completely away.  To put it bluntly, I’m in a state of deep melancholy, and it’s going to take a little while before I feel better.  Expect blogging to be light for the rest of this week — most of what will appear is post-dated — while I try to come to terms with all this.  Details will follow when I’m able to tell them.

So long Jim, you rotten layabout.

Nice Dream, Not Gonna Happen

There are dreams that are achievable, unrealistic dreams that can be achieved but where the odds are hugely stacked against you, and then there are those dreams that are just… dreams without any chance of achievement.

Achievable dreams would include that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911, the restored & modernized E-type Jag, etc.  They are out there, you just haven’t found one yet or else you don’t have the moolah on hand to buy it when you do.

Unrealistic dreams… well, there’s that night in bed with Salma Hayek, winning Powerball, finding that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911 for only $500… you get my drift.

And then there is that category of dreams where there’s no chance in hell of success.  And here’s where I’m going to get into trouble, but oh well:

Space travel and extraterrestrial planet colonization.

What bollocks.  Given the vast distances between planets, even-vaster distances between habitable (by us) planets, it requires not only advanced science of a degree unimaginable — which may be possible — but most of all it requires a bending of the laws of physics (e.g. the time/space continuum, the frailty and short shelf life of the human body, etc.), which is not so easy.

So while it’s all very nice to ooh and aah over Elon Musk’s latest wizardry, at some point realization is going to set in and we’re going to discover that it’s just an impossible dream.

Nice song, great lyrics, but that’s no way to go through life.

Let’s face it:  we’re stuck here on good old Planet Earth, and that’s the beginning and end of it.  We’ll just have to deal with it, and come to terms with the fact that in a few million years’ time, this planet will become uninhabitable (swallowed by the Sun, our own red star in the making) and all life as we know it will cease.

(I don’t want to hear about Mars — when our sun becomes a red dwarf, it too will be swallowed into the eternal fire / black hole whatever.)

And then, to quote Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Great Britain (1902 – 1905):

“Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”

He may have got the dimming of the sun wrong — it’s more likely the opposite — but the final outcome will be the same.

At least it’s in the very distant future, so there’s that.

Not Ready For Prime Time, Perhaps?

From the Heart Of Stone Department comes this report:

A couple who embarked on an eco-friendly voyage across the Atlantic were found dead in a lifeboat after seemingly being forced to abandon their yacht.

Brett Clibbery, 70, and British woman Sarah Justine Packwood, 54, were reported missing after setting off from Nova Scotia in Canada in their 42ft sailing boat Theros on June 11 – and were found last week in a washed-up liferaft.

The couple’s remains were found on Sable Island, nicknamed the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic‘, 180 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, the liferaft having washed ashore. They had intended to sail to the Azores 900 miles west of Portugal.

Thanks, but if I am going to cross the ocean by sea, I’ll use one of these, despite the effect on Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©:

…as long as it’s not captained by someone named “Edward Smith”, because the last time that happened, we ended up with a shitty James Cameron movie (is there another kind?).

Sky May Be Falling

…or in this case, the ground may be moving:

An underwater fault line along the US West Coast could trigger a megaquake that would be more devastating than California’s ‘Big One,’ a new study suggests.
Using underwater mapping techniques, scientists have mapped the Cascadia Subduction Zone — a 600-mile fault line extending from southern Canada to northern California — in never-before seen detail.
It has revealed that the fault splits into four segments instead of being one continuous strip like most fault lines. The discovery could prove more catastrophic because the tectonic plates can slide under each other, creating more pressure and more severe earthquakes.

The researchers concluded the Cascadia Subduction Zone has the potential to unleash a nine-plus magnitude quake.

I know:  Chicken Little, sky falling, “studies suggest” etc. etc.  That doesn’t mean that catastrophe isn’t going to strike at some point in the near future — the law of averages says it must — and I’m sure my Readers will all join me in expressing support for the citizens of Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and San Francisco, the cities most likely to be horribly damaged by this earth shift, with the concomitant massive loss of life.

Memory Lane

I arrived in the United States in the early 1980s, by which time most of the eating places that follow were on their last legs, or else pretty much doomed.  However, I thought I’d offer my Reader Demographic (i.e. Olde Pharttes) a chance to reminisce…


…wait, beer-steamed hot dogs?  Why is my mouth watering?

I was only ever able to visit a couple of them, but this one stands out in my memory:


…for obvious reasons, and I dearly wish Treacher’s was still around today.

And then there are these guys, if only for those prices:

Feel free to share your memories of these or similar places, in Comments.