Thank you Jose Melendi

It’s Spring, the sun is shining (when precipitation is not pouring down upon us), and my best friend and spouse is refinishing the nest, applying ideas she has gleaned from a winter of Home and Garden TV.

It’s time to paint the garage, moving shelves, possibly making more usable space into which will, within months, funnel more stuff that needs stored. That’s the way with garages. You clear a path, and it fills itself in, like silt in a stream bed — nourishing to plant life but difficult for human passage.

I have a deeply rooted aversion to cleaning out the flotsam and jetsam I’ve acquired over the years. Now and then I poke into it, and some piece will trigger a flood of memories. Like the cigar box my wife found while clearing a path to the garage walls.

The box is what remains of an enjoyable supply of Vega V cigars by José Melendi. In it, there was a Polaroid picture of the remains of a 1940-something Aeronca 7AC Champ, a pipe and canvas two-seat aircraft with an engine about as powerful as a sewing machine.

The plane was one of two owned by the flying club at Naval Air Station Rota, Spain when I was stationed there over the winter and spring of 1967-68. I enjoyed flying it, until one day the “the rubber band broke” and the plane landed in an olive tree somewhere near Granada, Spain.

I saw leaves scatter as though trying to escape from the path of the craft settling into the branches. Then I was standing on the ground, alone, looking up at the stricken craft. Jimmy Buffett says any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. To be able to reuse the airplane is a bonus. No bonus for me, but I did walk away from it.

The night before, I had become lost in the mountains and decided it would be prudent to land someplace and ask directions. I found a convenient tractor path along the border of an olive orchard, near a small village, and set down. Within a few minutes, a pickup truck came by, loaded front and back with young people. I didn’t know much Spanish, and they didn’t know any English, but they invited me into the truck and took me to the village.

They introduced me to a hostel keeper, and went on their way in search of an evening’s youthful pleasure.

The hostel was a family affair, with mom and dad and a couple of late-teen offspring sharing their home with travelers. They treated me to a walking tour of their town, including a visit to the local bodega, where, it turned out, a very nice wine was available for local sale. of which a half-dozen bottles became my souvenirs.

And they gave me a warm place to spend the night.

Next morning, we shared breakfast, during which I attempted to learn what I owed for my room and board. The proprietor and his wife simultaneously would not accept my money, with looks I was slow to realize indicated I had messed up.

Still, I insisted. After all, it was how they earned their living, and back home, a motel clerk would have demanded I hand over my credit card before showing me to a bed.

Finally, one of the breakfast guests suggested I walk with him. He was a sergeant in the Guardia Civil — the Spanish national police force — and the sole law officer in the area. He explained the family had offered me a gift of hospitality.

“When we go back, they will take your money,” he said, “but if you pay them, you will not be welcome here again.”

A short time later, my pesetas still in my pocket, I climbed into the Champ and headed back down the tractor path.

I spent that night in a rural clinic, cared for by some pretty great doctors and nurses.

I don’t recall the name of the village, nor the names of the family or the sergeant.

But I remember the lesson, the first of many I would learn about residents of homelands other than my own.

To borrow from humorist Will Rogers, I’ve traveled quite a bit in 60-plus years, and many of the roads have been unpaved.

I wonder what else is in those cardboard boxes in the garage.

Readers may contact John Messeder at john@jmesseder.net.

Bully-free zone? Not necessarily

Many schools have signs on their doors proclaiming them to be Bully-Free Zones. I have even seen such signs alongside the road as I’ve driven past school driveways.

They indicate the schools are at least thinking about the problem. Unfortunately, they do not really indicate the schools have solved the problem.

Most people, in general discussion, immediately think of bullying as one kid pounding physically on another. I suggest there are other forms of bullying , sometimes more difficult to notice.

I was about 10 when my family moved from New York City, where I had attended P.S. 173 through third grade. In the small rural town in Maine where I started fourth grade, things were different. There, I was a “city slicker.” For a time, the punishment for my unfortunate infraction was an almost daily physical reminding of my inferior status. But fighting was against the rules in my home. And anyway, it only happened when the aforementioned Alpha Dog — let’s call him Tad — was not otherwise occupied.

Tad had a brother — self-described, “I may be short, but I’m wiry” — who occasionally tried to mimic his bigger sibling. The two were amazingly similar to the pair in “A Christmas Story,” the annual movie in which the tall kid beats up on younger folk, and the shorter, playing the toady, cheers him on.

Years later, other former classmates said they were unhappy with what happened, and the way I was treated. Kids don’t know how to butt in, though, often because they fear becoming the new target of abuse.

Over the course of my public school career, I found it necessary, and downright scary, to put one lad in a ditch and break another’s nose. Both were brief, frustrated, reactive instances that left me wondering what price I would pay.

In another school, a youngster entered first grade after spending his early years in a state at the opposite end of the nation. He had seen things of which his new classmates had never dreamed. His teacher, who herself had never been out of the county, found herself frustrated, and called for a parental visit.

“Whenever anyone else has a story, he always has to tell a bigger one,” said the teacher — let’s call her Ms. Newbie. “He always has to have the attention.”

It turned out the youngster’s stories involved such descriptions as his dad shooting fish before bringing them into the boat, and filling a bathtub full of crabs before boiling and freezing them for future dinners. They did, indeed, seem tall tales to youngsters whose own stories talked of catching brook trout from a stream, and to whom crabs were, uh, somewhat less than savory.

And, it turned out, they were true, derived from living his early years on the coast of Alaska, where halibut can be more than 200 pounds, and where Alaskan King Crabs can be cheaply bought fresh from the boat.

Unfortunately, Ms. Newbie’s life experience did not encourage her to check out her young charge’s stories.

In yet another school, another student from another state moved into a new elementary school. He quickly found a few friendly neighborhood youngsters, but he also finds a few classmates less than welcoming. They didn’t know the new kid, or anything about where he came from.

For his part, he knew little about his new surroundings. So he said things like “Back home,” and was reminded, in not very friendly terms, that he was not “back home.”

He was a star where he had lived. In his new school, others had staked out their own stardom, and early on, they, like Tad and Ms. Newbie, made it clear interlopers would not be tolerated.

It happens. It shouldn’t. And simple posting of a Bully Free Zone sign is not going to stop it.

Readers may contact John Messeder at john@jmesseder.net.

Sexting: skinny dipping for the digital age

Time was, I am told, when teenagers would occasionally gather at the local swimming hole, shuck their duds, and jump in the creek. I’m thinking, as I write this from my advancing chronological vantage, that most of the participants turned out OK. They re-donned their duds and became doctors, lawyers, and farmers.

Unfortunately, for most of our young, there is no creek, no break in the pond-side shrubbery on which they can hang the trappings of proper society and share a few illicit moments of rebellion with selected compatriots.

The bushes have been cut back, the trees cleared, to build houses on the new private property, with locked doors and window shades pulled tightly against their frames. Inside the shingles and vinyl siding, away from the prying eyes of passersby, we go online and post messages, secure in the knowledge that only those we intend to see them will know what we wrote.

It’s a strange quirk of human-ness that we can titter at a video posted by someone we do not know, and not realize that the pictures we posted for our best friend to see are equally public to viewers in Latvia, California, our arch enemy two classrooms down the hall, or the school principal’s secretary.

In one school district, a teacher who discovers a student using a cell phone for Sexting — the new word for texting that includes pictures of admittedly inappropriate visual aids — may give the student a choice: have the phone destroyed, or face prosecution for child pornography.

I have been told that when the Polaroid camera came out, and kids discovered the film didn’t have to go to the drugstore to be processed, they did the same thing with “inappropriate” pictures of themselves. What is different is that back in the day, only those to whom the photographer actually handed the picture got to ogle its depiction.

When I load my Facebook account, I am treated to messages from friends, pictures of their family outings, and other innocent postings. I also am suddenly privy to comments about their postings from their other friends — people I do not know and likely will never meet. I detect within their comments inside jokes, underlying meanings I am not meant to decipher.

Our silliness and personal confidentialities are on the wall, like graffiti painted on a roadside boulder, except the spray-painted rock does not include the name and address of the artist. Unlike the Rust-Oleum-covered boulder, words and pictures posted to the online networks cannot be easily, if at all, deleted.

LinkedIn, a social networking site populated primarily by upwardly mobile professionals, has no delete function on its mailbox. One can remove past emails only from view, by archiving them.

I have accounts on Facebook and Twitter. I still have one on MySpace; I tried to get rid of it and could not. Once you sign up, you are permanently a member.

Facebook recently went through some controversy when it altered its rules to declare its ownership of everything its users posted on the site. It has backed off on that rule, but I would not count on it not returning when people become a little more complacent about the public-ness of the site.

Ironically, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and several other popular gathering places have become the digital equivalent of a pre-historic community dwelling with paper-thin walls. Both provide the barest illusion of privacy. Candidates for public office share space with hormone-laden teens in their quest for attention and passing of not-so-private messages, still pictures and videos.

The sites are useful. They are wonderful meeting places, fostering, at their best, a modern equivalent of pen-pals. They are places where we may share the joys of our lives with many recipients, at the touch of a single button. Media outlets and politicians may post features and viewpoints with a click of a mouse.

But how do we separate note-passing from child pornography, indiscretion from victimization?

I am not certain the correct way to do that; it is different for each child, each situation and each parent. Our parental job — and school staff are surrogate parents — is to somehow stand hidden at the base of the picket fence, our hearts in our throats, while our children carefully balance themselves in their teetering walk from childhood to adulthood.

And when they lose occasionally their balance, we are there to catch them before they splatter on the ground. They need to know we will do that, even while they plaintively wail, “Mommy, please! I want to do it myself.”

I am certain the incorrect way is to smash their cell phones and label them pornographers.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

Get outside and play

A popular children’s television cartoon features a boy-cow named Otis, with udders. About a year ago, there was a movie about bees, and the boy bees left the hive in search of pollen for honey.

In rural Adams County, I’m guessing most kids pretty much know how to tell a bull from a cow, and probably understand that the only way boy bees leave the hive is dead; their job is indoors.

Unfortunately, more than half our nation’s population, and a growing portion of Adams County’s population, live in urban and suburban settings, and all they see of the natural world are the movies.

Too many of them glide in an SUV past farmland and fields of living story-book animals, but miss seeing while they watch geese learn to “Fly Away Home” on the in-car DVD player.

They really need to get out more.

And I mean Out. They are suffering from what Richard Louv, in “Last Child in the Woods,” calls “nature-deficit disorder.” And the cure is not to be found in Ritalin, counseling, or the courts, all of which deal with pent-up energy that could otherwise be released in outdoor play.

In his book, Louv quotes a San Diego, Calif., fourth-grader saying, “I like to play indoors better, ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

I was lucky. I was raised on 50 acres of woodland, on the shore of a fairly large lake in the middle of thousands more acres of woodlands. I spent my formative years where the last human sound I heard, as I headed into the forest primeval, was Mom saying, “you kids go out and play.” I’d wager most people of my generation still hear echoes of that refrain.

But times have changed.

We have become over protective of our offspring, and the future of my childhood books and science fiction movies — populated by body-less beings with large hairless heads plugged into atomic power sources — seems too true. Well, almost. Our kids have bodies, but there is a whole industry springing up around their obesity.

The police showed up at the door one day when my family and I lived in Hampton, Va. A neighbor had called because the youngsters, both second-graders, one boy, one girl, had been seen climbing a tree. The neighbor, said Officer Friendly, was concerned they might fall and be hurt.

True. And they might fall and be hurt if they drive a car or fall in love. They need guidance, not prohibitions, to learn how to recognize too-thin branches, too-slippery curves, and too-slick lovers. Even then, there is risk.

After traveling a goodly portion of the world, I returned to the woods of my youth, only to find what of it remained was fenced off. Cables and large rocks blocked entrances to old logging roads. A state law allowed police to prosecute anyone they found on posted land without written permission to be there; there was no need to contact the often-out-of-state landowner.

We Adams Countians have preserved thousands of acres of fields and woodlands, and we should be proud of the water and air we have protected. We missed a chance last month to buy a 200-acre parcel that would, had the plan worked out, have become a public park where children of all ages could walk among 300-year-old trees, fish in a creek, and watch hawks hunt their dinner.

But I have to wonder how much good the park would have been to those young immigrants from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., now living in Littlestown and New Oxford, who would have depended on their harried parents to drive them to the park on the other side of the county. I suspect it would have been, as a playground, of little more value than other preserved land — private property fenced in with wire and yellow signs telling passersby to stay out.

There is a growing body of evidence indicating the value of time spend playing in whatever world is outside the fortress our children and grandchildren call home. We need to stop and let them see real cows, but we also need to allow them outside to simply play.

In 1971, Simon Nicholson offered a “theory of loose parts,” in which he said, more or less, the number of possibilities a child’s imagination may create is directly related to the number of playthings that have no assigned purpose.

We need, when we design housing developments, to design into them places where children may simply play, and then let them play in it, unhindered by geometric pipe structures, PlayStation game sets, and team-colored uniforms. Instead, give them a few trees, large rocks, and maybe a mud puddle or two.

I know from experience that I gain girth when I sit all day in front of a computer, and I lose it when I get up off my derriere and move my limbs. I also know from experience there is no real fun to be found on a machine at the gym, my ears plugged into an mp3 player.

We say we want only to keep our kids safe. There are, after all, so many dangers lurking outside the fortress we call home.

The best way to keep them, our communities, and our planet safe is to tell our kids what our parents told us:

“Go outside and play.”

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

The Key to Afghanistan

We are about to withdraw our soldiers from Iraq — and send them to Afghanistan. They are needed there, Cong. Todd Platts, said Wednesday, to help knock down a Taliban resurgence in the southern part of the country.

“In the short term, we may see more casualties,” Platts said. “In the long term, it will result in much more stabile Afghanistan, for the good of that country and the region.”

Afghanistan is a small country, completely landlocked, surrounded by Pakistan to the south and east, Iran to the west, and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan across its north. It’s official languages are Afghan Persian (Persia is the ancient name for Iran), and Pashtu, but there are numerous local dialects as well.

The 250,000 square-mile country could be dropped into Texas and be surrounded by, well, 16,000 square miles of Texas.

In the middle of its roughly oval shape is the “Ring Road,” an approximately circular highway connecting the nation’s largest cities — Kandahar to the south, Herat to the northwest, near Iran, and Kabul near its eastern border. Most of Afghanistan’s approximately 30 million people live within 30 miles of the Ring Road.

There is an awful lot of territory in which Osama bin Laden can hide.

Back in the U.S. of A., Maine dairy farmers, several years back, won an increase of eight cents a gallon for the milk their cows produced for drinking. The week before that price took effect, the price of milk in the grocery story jumped 14 cents a gallon.

On a farm near East Berlin, about two years ago, I visited a husband and wife who had not taken a vacation away from the farm for 13 years.

Farmers, especially small mom-and-pop farmers, do not get an especially large cut of the price we see charged at retail.

I mention those farm stories to mention this one:

The main money-crop in Afghanistan — about 40 percent of the nation’s Gross National Product — is Poppy, a nifty flower that is the source of opium, and from that, heroin. There is, therefore, something to the argument that drug addicts — who buy the heroin sold to them by Taliban tribesmen who bought it from Afghani farmers — are financing enemies of freedom and democracy and, indirectly, killing U.S. soldiers who have volunteered to go help keep those enemies at bay.

For some silly reason, there is a long history of military incursion into Afghanistan. Alexander the Great tried it, 300 years before Christ. About the time of our Civil War, the British were attempting to add the Asian nation to their empire. The Soviet Union launched a failed 10-year attempt in 1978; we helped in the failure of that mission. And now we are there.

Meanwhile, there is a $50 million reward posted for information leading to the capture, dead or alive, of Osama bin Laden. For that much money, one might wonder why some impoverished farmer hasn’t turned the guy in.

But what, exactly, can you do with $50 million in a land with little electricity, where the only iPod to be seen was in the hands of a U.S. soldier who was trying to blow up the folks who threaten to blow up your home and burn your crops if you tell where they are hiding — which could well be your house.

“Our efforts (are in) trying to help them have a different livelihood,” Platts said. “Because the price of wheat is up in the world market, it’s been a very good time to encourage some of the farmers to transition to wheat.”

We will send in more soldiers, and a bunch of helicopters to go where soldiers and Hummers dare not go — the IED-infested side roads and dirt tracks off the Ring Road. We will, at least for a time, knock the Taliban back into submission, or hiding.

But the key to long term success, as Platts noted, is an infrastructure system to help farmers get wheat, pomegranates and other foodstuffs to market — more roads, better transportation, and cold storage systems to preserve their produce while it awaits shipment.

Otherwise, the farmers of Afghanistan are still there in their mountains, producing a crop that has a worldwide cash value, waiting for yet another war to go away.

Electricity is like water, wire like a hose

I was reminded this week of a lesson my grandfather taught me about electricity a large number of years ago. Grandpa had retired from the Massachusetts Transit Authority, where he had been responsible for keeping the electricity running to the streetcars. (In San Francisco, New Orleans and many movies, they are known as trolley cars.)

I do not recall what precipitated that discussion nearly a half century ago, but his explanation involved water: Amps were the water, volts were the pressure pushing the amps through the wire, which is the hose, and ohms were the measurement of resistance caused by too-small hoses/wires and switches/valves and other impediments to the smooth flow of the water, er, amps.

Later, I learned about red, black, white and green wires — and which ones normally could kick a young fellow on his butt, were he not paying attention. Those are lessons of which I am reminded from time to time, most recently during a home project intended to make a garage door open and close at the push of a button.

My son the plumber was attempting to install the aforementioned garage door opener over the past weekend. He had handled the mechanical parts really well, but he became a little stymied when he opened the box in the ceiling where a light had been mounted and discovered more wires than seemed necessary.

“I’m a plumber,” he said when I questioned his apparent confusion. “I’m not an electrician.”

His confusion, it turned out, was engendered by two pairs that seemed to go nowhere.

That is, until we accidentally discovered that there was no electricity in two upstairs bedrooms.

Our house was built in the 1950s. It’s first owner was a jurist of some prominence in the community, and probably, as would befit a person of his seniority and communal stature, capable of buying and enjoying a multitude of toys — few of which ran on electricity.

The house in which I spent my earliest years — the one with the porch on which my grandpa gave me my earliest lesson in electricity — was built in the same era, and thus equally devoid of such trinkets as large screen televisions, computers and wireless networks.

In the house of my youth, there was a Stromberg-Carlson radio about the size of a bar in a suburban basement. There was an electric lamp in each room. The cook stove was fed by liquid petroleum gas from two tanks outside the kitchen window. The “facilities” were in a small building constructed for the purpose about 75 yards from the kitchen door.

Instead of circuit breakers, the electrical panel was a four-hole fuse box — with only two of the holes actually in use.

Fast forward to 1985, when I retired from the Navy and moved back to that house, accompanied by a plethora of electronic gadgetry that had been invented since my youth, and upon which I had come to depend.

But if the television was on in the living room, one could not start the microwave without blowing a fuse. There was a choice to be made between making coffee in the kitchen and turning on a lamp in an upstairs bedroom.

That was when I discovered how many fuses there were in the box in the kitchen cupboard. The problem was cured with installation of a 200-amp electric service panel and new wiring.

I had, this past weekend, the opportunity to pass on, I hope, a little of my grandfather’s lesson to a lad who needed to know how to separate and reconnect red, black, white and green wires without being knocked on his butt or seeing the house burn flat around him, and how to get electricity, like water, from one place to another through wires/hoses of various colors.

A darn good plumber he is, my son. I’ve listened proudly to hear that from independent sources who did not at the time they spoke know he was related to me. It is great fun to know the lad who sometimes surprised his mom and dad merely by his survival had actually learned a thing or two he has thought worthy of remembrance.

And it also is rather fun to discover there is still a thing or two the old man can pass on to the youngster who, it turns out, does not yet know quite everything.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

Seeking Sakai

In Fall 2007, I was privileged to write about P.O. Box 1142, an ultra-secret World War II interrogation site near Washington, D.C. One of the most significant factors in the story, other than it had been kept secret more than 60 years, was that it’s methods involved treating the enemy with respect and friendship.

Herewith, another chapter in the life of P.O. Box 1142:

February 1945. U.S. Marines attacked Iwo Jima, a Japanese stronghold with airfields that had been giving our side fits. A photo of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising an American flag on Mount Suribachi, would become the iconic image of the Marines’ prowess. Some sources say of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on the island when fighting began, more than 20,000 died.

One who didn’t die was Sergeant-Major Taizo Sakai, the man in charge of communications for Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the defense of Iwo Jima. Sakai knew stuff about the Japanese situation, plans, and communications.

Sakai surrendered to a Marine unit commanded by 1st Lt. Fiorenzo V. Lopardo, and it is then this tale really begins.

The two men soon discovered they both spoke college French; Lopardo had been a language major at Notre Dame, and Sakai had studied French at the University of Tokyo.

Lopardo took his prisoner into a foxhole, ordered his men to protect the enemy communicator, and began to talk with him. According to a note Capt. Robert N. Spangler, one of the battalion operations officers, left in his personal journal, “Taizo Sakai … was nude when he surrendered, so we outfitted him with some Marine clothing so no one would shoot him.” Someone else gave him a candy bar.

Eventually, Sakai was transferred to Fort Hunt, near Washington, D.C., — code named P.O. Box 1142 — for interrogation. As he left Iwo Jima, he gave Lopardo, two wallet-sized black and white photographs, one of which showed the young man with his wife Sumiko, and son Taizaul.

On the back of one of the photos, he had written in French, “Be wise,” which Lopardo later said referred to his prisoner’s belief that Japan had lost the war and that it was unwise for his country to continue fighting.

He also wrote, “Oh ma douleur” — “Oh my pain” — because he believed himself to be officially among the dead of the Iwo Jima battle. He believed he could never return to Japan, and would never again see his family.

Before Lopardo died, in January 2004, he gave the photos to his son, Stephen, now an attorney in California, to be returned to Sakai’s family. The mission took a few years, but …

Sakai had, indeed, returned to Japan and his family, but had otherwise disappeared. The address where he had lived had been bombed during the war, and the Sakai family had relocated.

In March 2005, the younger Lopardo attended the 60th Anniversary Reunion on Iwo Jima, and handed out flyers to the Japanese attendees. A year later, while skiing in Canada, he met a Japanese veteran and retired teacher who took the story to heart. When he returned home, he helped spearhead a search that resulted in a Japanese television documentary.

Finally, in September 2008, Steve Lopardo was able to joyously report Taizo Sakai’s granddaughter had been found. The television documentary was revised. More family was found.

Sakai had been gone about 20 years, but finally, 1st Lt. Fiorenzo V. Lopardo’s son was able to return the photos to his family during filmed ceremonies, Dec. 11, 2008.

Sakai had been clothed and fed and apparently treated well in war by a man to whom he gave his sole possessions: pictures of the family he thought he would never again see.

At Fort Hunt, he would have been questioned by interrogators trained at Fort Ritchie. He might have lived for a time at Pine Grove Furnace, where high-level captives awaited their turn at the camp known as P.O. Box 1142.

War is a miserable endeavor, but here and there stories of humanity surface from an otherwise inhuman environment.

Unfortunately, Gitmo is no P.O. Box 1142.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

Those silly ad phrases

Some of the boilerplate verbiage we encounter as we are prevailed upon to purchase various wares guaranteed to help — or at least not hurt – us, is a bit amazing. Most of them are on television, and an ad starring Alec Baldwin may explain why.

In the commercial, Baldwin has come to Earth to promote Hulu, an online service that allows viewers to watch endless repeats of shows which long ago stopped airing, even on late-night television — often with good reason.

“Once your brains reduce to a cottage cheese-like mush,” Baldwin tells us, “we’ll scoop them out like a melon ball and gobble them right on up.”

The argument has oft been made, even by yours truly, on occasion, that the aliens’ campaign has been entirely too successful, especially on advertising writers.

I regularly receive email that carries some version of the following at its top:

“IMPORTANT: To ensure you receive (this company’s) emails, add (our email address) to your address book. Learn Why.”

If I do no add the company’s email address to my address book (and in most cases, I have not), they seem to think I will not be reading their message. Clearly, that didn’t work. I have not put any such addresses in my address book, and still receive the messages — except for a few I have wanted to receive and have discovered my local cable-internet provider has blocked on my behalf.

Another favorite is the “up to … or more” phrase, as in, “Discounts of up to 50 percent or more.”

“Up to,” by definition, means that’s it. That’s as high as it gets. There is no “or more.”

There may be a lot less. A discount of two percent would easily fit the bill, since “up to” does not mean we’ll actually see a 50 percent discount.

TV meteorologists love the “up to” phrase: “We may see up to three inches of snow on our lawns tomorrow morning.”

On the other hand, we may not. If there is no snow on the ground in the morning, he didn’t lie.

A notice at my bank advises me “funds may be withheld up to seven or more days.” OK, which is it? “Up to seven days,” or “seven or more days.” Just how long are you going to not allow me to have my money, anyway.

When I was in high school, many more winters ago than up to 50 percent or more teenagers may think possible, a common rule of exercise was “20-30 minutes a day, three times a week.” That, said the medical profession, was the requirement to keep one’s heart ticking fairly smoothly the other four days.

It must have been good advice. Every diet seems to carry the note that all one needs to do to live a healthy, reduced weight life is follow the regimen — and exercise 30 minutes a day, three days a week.

The exercise machines that consume late night and Sunday morning television carry similar encouragement. Use the device just 30 minutes a day, three times a week, and you, too can have washboard abs and a tight butt that will be the envy of everyone who’s stopwatch ceased functioning at 29 minutes.

Drug companies have their own special brand of silliness. After using 58 seconds of a 60-second ad exhorting us to tell our doctors we should be taking the latest tear producing, blood thinning, cholesterol eliminating pills, they end with some version of “do not take if you are pregnant, thinking about becoming pregnant, or know someone who might be thinking of becoming pregnant.”

There even is one pill women should not even touch. (There’s a sexism lawsuit waiting to be filed.)

And then there are the lines about “certain specific side effects,” such as if you stop breathing for more than four minutes, call your doctor immediately.

On the other hand, if you stop breathing for more than four minutes and still can call your doctor, especially if you are pregnant or know somebody who is thinking about becoming pregnant, you have a very good chance of becoming owner of your very own drug company.

Or television ad agency.

I suspect some ad writers have been watching too much Hulu.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@gburgtimes.com.

21st Century Pen Pals

I am on Facebook, one of the better known “social web sites.” Users of Facebook get to designate certain people as “friends.” Mostly it is simply a place to leave each other messages.

My site has remained mostly dormant for the several months I have had it. My real friends generally communicate with me more personally: with regular email, text messaging or a slap on the head.

Then came a note in my email: “Bobbi added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Bobbi in order for you to be friends on Facebook.”

At first, I thought I didn’t know Bobbi, but then I read the next line: “We used to work on the Buckroe Rescue Squad together!!!”

About 25 years ago, I served on a community rescue squad. Bobbi and I attended the same class to become Emergency Medical Technicians. I drove a motorcycle, and her mom allowed me to take her 17-year-old daughter to class on the bike. Mom’s permission was not eagerly granted. I promised to be extra careful.

Bobbi and I often sat in the hospital parking lot after class and discussed matters of import, such as why choices were made on who received treatment and who didn’t if there was a serious accident at the nearby nuclear power plant.

We talked about religion, too, although not at first. Whenever I would bring it up, Bobbi would shy away. Finally, I asked her why.

I was Catholic, she reminded me, and Catholics generally do not discuss religion with Jehovah’s Witnesses. We finally agreed that neither would try to convert the other, but that if either did convert, the other likely would get extra points in Heaven for providing something the converted one had been seeking.

We crewed together on the ambulance — my wife, Bobbi and me. We went on our first heart attack call together. The man was driving a lawn tractor when he expired. We and the medics did what we could, but it had been written in the Big Book that we would not be successful.

After more than five years on the squad, I moved away, and lost contact with Bobbi, and the rest of the squad members.

And here she was in my email, linked to my Facebook site.

I tell that story to tell this one: Like many others of approximately my age, I have concerns about where my information will be used, and how, as I travel around the Internet.

On the other hand, I had, in my younger days, a pen pal from Lewes, Sussex, England. I drew her name in a high school history class and we corresponded for several years. Eventually, Prue married and had a couple of boys, I joined the Navy, got married and had two children of my own, and we stopped writing.

That was my introduction to someone from a homeland distant from my own.

As an amateur radio operator, I conversed with people from other countries. In college, in the early days of Internet, I talked with still more.

In the Navy, I traveled to places about which I had only read, met some really nice people, and began to wonder what would happen if Soviet sailors and U.S. sailors could visit a port together, instead of one waiting for the other to leave before having a beer with the local lasses.

My 10-year-old granddaughter asked me recently to help her find a pen pal. Kass has a computer. She would like access to MySpace and Facebook and email. I would like her to have those means of learning about other people – but that would involve strong parental and teacher oversight to help her stay clear of mayhem. Unfortunately, it’s easier to prohibit access than to guide her past some pretty nasty dangers.

I suspect there are ways for teachers in widely separated classrooms to arrange connections between their students. There are, in the immediacy of computerized pen pals, some wonderful opportunities.

Had it not been for the Internet, Bobbi would not have found me. Maybe more old friends will find me. A message the other day told me my sister is following me on Twitter. One day, someone I’ve never met will become a valued Facebook friend.

There are other sites for what now is called “social networking.” The Internet can be a pretty nice tool for keeping in touch with people we know, and for getting in touch with people we don’t. With appropriate guidance from parents and teachers, it could be a wonderful tool to help the younger set learn about the rest of the world.

,Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.,

What a way to start the year

The news Wednesday night carried a rather innocuous notice: The U.S. Post Office has asked Congress to allow it to stop delivering mail one day a week.

NBC gave the story a little history. On CBS, there was a simple one-liner.

Neither network mentioned the number of jobs that would be lost when mail delivery drops from six days to five. I’m guessing there are a multitude of part-timers who will not be stopping at Starbucks for coffee.

Oops. What Starbucks? That company is cutting 7,000 jobs and shutting down 300 stores. That’s in addition to the 600 it announced closing last July.

I’m a little mixed about both stories. On the one hand, I won’t miss either the coffee shop or the junk mail delivery system. I like Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, in my Starbucks stainless steel mug. Sorry guys; whoever makes Starbucks’ stainless steel cups does a super great job. The coffee, to my taste buds, not so much.

My wife, however, will miss the company’s unsweetened iced black tea.

And I like my postal delivery lady. She’s friendly, and when something doesn’t fit in the already large mailbox, she’s been known to get out of her truck and carry it to the door.

But let’s face it: most of our mail is junk. What a postmaster where I once lived called “pre-sorted bulk mail.” And many of us pay our bills online, reducing the plethora of bills that once filled our mailboxes.

On the other hand, more people out of work cannot be a good thing for any of us. I left town to attend a wedding last week, just as 500 Adams County residents were told they no longer had a job. People who aren’t working don’t buy stuff, and more people end up out of work.

What I know is the more we earn, the more we hurt when we lose some of it. I was in the Navy when there was a decision made to bring sailors’ pay up to some semblance of civilian par. That was the first of a series of four percent “across-the-board” pay raises.

Unfortunately, four percent of what a junior enlisted man earned was not a whole lot of money. A four percent increase for an admiral with 30-some years service was, well, a lot more than I earned.

But when the hourly pay is low, an “across the board” pay cut is also less noticeable. And people who are laid off need not worry about the price of gas to get to work.

CEOs of large companies such as AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack, and General Motors have a much rougher time when they have to cut expenses.

Meanwhile, there are important legislative advances in health care — often named as a major contibutor to the lousiness of the economy.

New York Republican Congressman Peter King wants cell phone cameras to make a clicking sound. It’s to protect the kids, he says of his Camera Phone Predator Alert Act.

One might have supposed that if someone was close enough with their cell phone that it could be heard clicking as they took a picture, they might be close enough that the person being pictured would notice the camera in their face. King, apparently, thinks otherwise.

And it now is illegal to smoke in your apartment if you live in Belmont, Calif. A group of apartment dwellers prevailed upon city government to enact the ordinance; apparently, all that smoke pent up in a neighbor’s apartment might, when the offender’s door opened, kill passers-by.

I am not about to claim that smoking is not harmful. Everyone dies at some point, but lung cancer is a particularly messy way to go.

Teresa Ghilarducci, author of a book about how 401(k) pension are not a very good idea for most retirees, told Terry Gross, host of public radio’s Fresh Air show, “(longevity) has really flattened out for white women. For white men it has really taken off, mainly because white men are actually taking a little better care of themselves. They stopped smoking.”

When they lose their jobs, they probably will start smoking again, which will put cigarette and coffee makers back to work.

I am not certain what that will do for the post office. Maybe if we could mail order cigarettes …

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

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