Dendrochronology, say what?

I love to read, and my reading tends to be eclectic. I read a number of books at once and to be honest I rarely finish a book. This is for two reasons. The most common is I lose interest. There are people who will pick up a book and trudge through it even if they do not like it. I have no idea why anyone, reading time is too precious. The other reason is that if I really like a book I hate for it to end. I understand this is an absurd reason, but I figure I will always come back and finish it someday.

The books I read can be on almost any subject. I often get ridiculed for the books I read. My wife thinks I am weird in this. She has made fun of my reading books on soils (I am a Bronx native, I figure you never know when you have to determine the appropriate crop for the soil you have, but I guess the odds are rather high against using that knowledge), rats (a great book on the rats of Manhattan) and almost any non-fiction book I read.

However every once in a while some of the esoteric knowledge I have picked up comes in handy. Last night, for example, I was helping my daughter with here homework. The topic was archeology. I am by no means an expert in the field, but I have read my share of books that touch on the subject and she needed some methods of dating archeological artifacts. She, brilliant young woman that she is, had gotten the obvious ones, and she asked me for anymore. Well, from somewhere deep in the recesses of my cluttered brain I blurted out "Dendrochronology" . I even astonished myself. She looked at me and started to laugh as I explained how scientists used tree rings to get the exact date of things from fairly far back in the past.

Sometimes, and you never can tell when or where, our ‘useless knowledge’ may come in handy, if only to persuade your teenager that you are not as dumb as they think.

We don't look good in black hats.

I remember when we were the good guys. I grew up in the 1950s just after we saved the world from the AXIS. We were proud to be Americans because we did the right thing in the right way.

It was the height of the Cold War. America stood for the rights of man, we fought against the abuses of ‘godless communism’. In Russia we knew people were being spied upon by Big Brother, they were being taken from their homes in the dead of night and being tortured in concentration camps for their religion and charged with being enemies of the state, .

We were horrified by this.

We would never do such a thing.

But now, it seems we do.

Agents rounded up hundreds, if not thousands of American citizens, because they were practiced Islam. No one was told why or where they went.

Our President is trying to authorize torture of ‘enemy combatants’.

American citizens are having their phone conversations spied upon.

I ache to wear the white hat again.