What Color Are Your Fire Trucks?

 The most minor things get my thoughts moving and into writing something.   Today, I pulled over for a fire engine, no big deal.  (Hint:  For those who live in caves, remember: “Sirens and Lights, pull to the right.”)

Apparently. it was a new or temporary engine because it is a different color from the deep International Orange that the Wheeling FD uses.  This one was red with a broad horizontal black stripe around about 4 feet from the ground. 

International Orange is the color of the broad 45 degree stripe on U.S. Coast Guard ships and aircraft.

I suppose Wheeling FD could be in the LONG process of repainting to a new theme, but I doubt it.  Fairmont FD took nearly 20 years to change from chrome yellow to kinds of crimsony red, not quite to Mack Red.  The equipment lasts in those departments 10 or more years, so getting things repainted or waiting until they are replaced is a long process.

So that started me thinking about the colors of emergency vehicles.  I remembered a study that was done in the 1970’s.  The scientists/psychologists/whatever hooked people up to a camera which watched their eyes move.  They judged their reaction time when they first saw the vehicle in the periphery of their vision.  They discovered that, by fractions of a second, their eyes were drawn first to chrome yellow.  Other studies have been done since and now they show that bright fluorescent lime green is preferred.  Red - the usual color of fire trucks - was somewhere down the list.

(I just saw on Facebook a picture of a parade, a red fire truck followed by a yellow fire truck.  On the back of the red one was a bit sign that said "Real Fire Trucks are Red.")

But the study also found some kind of social ,phenomenon.  When the subjects were shown pictures of actual trucks, when there was a chrome yellow, lime green, or any other color than red, one reaction was “What the heck is that?”  They didn't seem to immediately figure out that the great big truck bearing down on them sounding a Federal Q siren was something to move over for.  The study supported that social visibility by testing other vehicles.  Posting way ahead of any color of emergency vehicles was a big dude wearing black clothes and riding a black Harley.  As one who appreciates that culture, I got a hardy laugh out of it.  (1%-ers are highly moral and ethical people, accepting that their morals don't exactly match with most of society's morals and ethics.)

In the 70’s, we had rigs (now they call them “buses”) with the “federally mandated colors.”   True to the idea of central government as a whole, those vehicles were REALLY ugly.  The base color was a slight off-white, with two tiny half-inch horizontal stripes of International Orange around the middle.  Ugly.  In fact, fugly.

One time, I suggested a really neat color for rigs:  A bright yellow-green-gold body, a fluorescent wide horizontal Mountaineer blue stripe in the mid-body and the lettering inside the stripe in white.  The response to this wonderful idea was not only disappointing, but downright hostile.  Well, I’ve never said that my brothers and sisters had good taste.

 Mizpah!

An Amateur's Thoughts on Love

 I am not a linguist.  I use words.  I understand the common usages. But I’m no linguist.

 Also, I don’t know to any real degree any foreign language.

 With all that in mind, I have still concluded that the English language is very lacking in certain areas, including “love.” 

 To understand what is meant when one uses the word “love,” you must consider cues.  Cues like tone of voice, circumstances, gestures, posture, facial expression, and the history between whoever is in the conversation.  But only “love” is used.

 I have heard that Greek contains at least three words for different kinds of love.  Eros is romantic love; philia is brotherly or friendship-based love; and agape is supposed to be love of God, or the all-consuming love for another person.  (Frequently, the first is taken for the third.)  But I’m thinking that even Greeks have to explain – by other words, by the general cues to language, exactly what they mean.

 Inuit and related languages are supposed to contain 40 to 50 words for “snow.”  That’s natural, for snow is a part of their environment, and they need to know what kind of snow they are talking about.  For example, whether a snowmobile can get through depends on whether the snow is fine or with large crystals, the ice content, whether it is wet snow or dry snow, and probably other conditions I have never thought about.  But they need it; snow is all around.

 Now, Arabic is supposed to contain 99 words for “love.”  That’s what I’m talking about – A precise word for a full description of the love that we are talking about.

 But wait a minute – Isn’t “love” a part of OUR environment?  Why do we restrict ourselves to one word?

 What kind of words do we need?  I think we need words describing:

 The love between romantic lovers.

 The love for Deity.

 The love of your children.

 The love of children in general.

 The love for animals.

 The love of Humanity.

 The love of comrades in arms.

 The love of comrades in other fields.  I know that all people in the responder community feel great love for some of the people they have worked with.  Don’t believe me?  Drop in on a responder's funeral and see how many people are there.

 Brotherly/sisterly love – Maybe one word for your legal brothers/sisters and another for people who have no close DNA-based relationship.  I have one living brother in the first sense; and countless sisters and brothers in the second.

 Now, if you think that list is in some sort of order, maybe in the order of importance that I place on them, you are wrong.

 I don’t think so.  I believe with precisely zero research to back me up, that each kind of love can be experienced and expressed with the same level of commitment.

 When I say “Love you, brother,” I really mean it – in my sense.  I’m comfortable with that.  When I tell my very close friends “I love you,” they do know how I mean it.  Let’s see, I’ve used it twice in letters or emails today to ladies I know, and once to a lady I talked to on the phone.  Each knows what I mean.

 But if you don’t know me, when I say “I love you,” unless you are present and observe all of those cues and can correctly interpret the cues, you will not have a tip nor a clue what I’m really describing. 

 Love is also ever-changing.  It gets better or more intense, maybe over time and maybe over only a short time.  Ditto when it gets worse or less intense.  Not only do you have to interpret love once, you have to do it again and again with the same people.

 Perhaps all we can do is use “Love you (insert name)”, “Love you, (Brother or Sister)”, just an “I love you” or even signing off with “Love, Roger” is all we are permitted to do.

 In a time where we seem to be emphasizing differences (and even creating false differences because we like conflict for the “joy” of conflict), wouldn’t it be nice to focus on all manner of love?

 

 

Note:  Yup, this is a whole lot different from most of my writing.  And I have to tell you that I have no idea where this post came from.  But I had to write it and had to write it in the first person.  It might be the direction of God, although I don’t have much of a history of direct and unambiguous communications from the Deity.  Maybe it is just “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”  But I had to write this.  

Are We Celebrating Murder?

We refer to physical object or location by some sort of name.  Whether it is a “table” or “Houston,” using the name invokes a vision in our mind.  Acceptance of a particular name for especially a place changes with the times.  Today, I was reminded how absolutely delicious our naming things for people has evoked when we now know that their behavior was questionable.   We name all sorts of places “Columbus” or “Columbia.”  In very recent years, outraged people have destroyed or removed statues of Christopher Columbus.  Yet several towns, cities, one country and our national capital use Columbus or Columbia.  Are we still honoring Christopher Columbus, notwithstanding what he did?

Oh, a point:  Columbus (the guy, not a town) thought he was doing the work of the Lord.  He also did not know that he was bringing disease to the West.  The germ theory was centuries in the future.

By the way, this post is not about Columbus.  Read on.

Some – ok, many – people who rend their garments and gnash their teeth over names are totally or partially ignorant of history.  Among the statues and images attacked were of Lincoln (remember the 13^th Amendment?), Grant (remember the 360K killed in the Army of the Potomac let alone the 260K Confederate killed?) and even Albert Pike, whose true “fame,” if you call it that, is known to substantially less than 1% of the population.

So, let me ask:  When does a name cease to represent or memorialize a person and become nothing more than the symbol for the place or object?  Maybe St. James did some shady deals.  (Probably not.)  If so, I haven’t heard of a movement to change the name of San Diego.

In the history of the “Border Lands” of America – that’s the Ohio Valley, the entire Ohio watershed and the “Ohio Country” during the 18^th Century, one of the prominent bad deeds was the killing of the family of Tah-gah-jute, a Mingo chief.  (The Mingo’s were a recent amalgamation of the Lenni Lenape, Seneca, Cayuga and other groups.)  He was also known as Chief Logan, which was the name of a Virginia friend.  By the way, we have at least one county and one city named “Logan” in West Virginia.  In the recent past, Logan County has been known as an unsavory pit of political corruption which, of course, had nothing to do with Chief Logan 

The murders of Chief Logan’s family were sudden, violent, and were I to try to describe their cruelty in detail, some online provider would quickly censor it.  The murders were publicly condemned by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson (!), Charles Lee and Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia.  The governor called an emergency session of the Burgesses and presented them with a suspiciously complete plan for going to war with the Indians in the Border Lands.  That was “Dunmore’s War,” and killed hundreds before it was over. 

Part of the Cresap-Greathouse party who took an active part was an early settler.  Let’s call him “Joe Blow,” for he might still have descendants around who might be distressed by this bit of history.  A street in one of the towns we serve was named “Blow Street.”  I passed by it as I was passing the county courthouse which got me thinking about this. 

So now we come to my question:

Now that we know that Joe Blow was part of a foul murder 250 years ago – even though we know only his name and very little else – are we honoring the foul murder of Logan’s family by calling a street “Blow Street”?

Or is it just the name of the place?

Are we just waving a bloody shirt?

Mizpah!

The Sorrows of Samuel T. Cogley

 Star Trek provided a view into what the writers thought was the future.  In some things, they were remarkably accurate.  Today, we have personal communication devices we always carry.   We have weapons which stun but don’t kill or even expose a victim to permanent damage.  Today, there are far more machines which examine patients and which show remotely what the docs in the past had to cut a patient open to see. 

 The one thing the writers got ever so wrong are their view of computers.  We got beyond portable discs with limited information 20 years ago.  We already talk to some computers.  Some computers talk back.  Some convert one language to another. 

 Star Trek was noted for the main characters being able to outthink a computer. They could set up a paradox which not only froze the computer, but would cause the computer to self-destruct (in frustration?)

 So let me introduce Samuel T. Cogley.  Captain Kirk was on trial and needed a lawyer.  Somehow, he came by Samuel T. Cogley.  One thing was surprising:  While in that 24^th Century world, all legal research was done by computers.  Cogley didn’t trust computers.  He trusted books, the printed and bound kind.  He was pictured with hundreds of books he moved into Captain Kirk’s quarters.  (The actual books used were regional reporters by West Company, the publisher of all the federal courts and the state supreme courts.)

 It’s been a touch more than 50 years since I first started doing legal research. And I have done the book thing.  I was not known at the law school as a library-infester.  One time, some classmates who were in the library studying stood up and broke into applause when I cracked the library door.  What they did not know, my buddies and I used the law library in Marion County, not the school library.  OK, when we needed to go to the books, which to be fair to my classmates was less often than them.  I also worked during law school for a law firm with a decent library, where I established myself.  I learned law and law school; I learned lawyering from those guys.

 If you are only interested in West Virginia cases, there are still about 150 books with those.  When you do legal research, there is seldom a simple answer.  Some courts rule on an issue one way and some another. From time to time, a Supreme Court will change its collective mind. 

To do manual legal research takes a lot of books, piled across a wide, long table, 3 or 4 books deep.  You have to go from one to another to get an inkling of what the law is on a subject, and to find support for your client’s position.  (I well remember the late Al Lemley coming in the library and hassling me about how many books I spread around.  I miss Al.)

 That’s what Captain Kirk had to put up with books, books and more books.

 Sadly, it did not take until the 24^th Century to escape the clutches of Samuel T. Cogley.  By say 2010, the switch to computer/internet legal research was in full – and growing – blossom. Since then, I may have touched one law book a month, but some months I forgot.  (That doesn’t count my criminal code, which is my constant companion, to keep straight what the Legislature in its collective ignorance.  I have pending a post on the moronic modifications to the state drug laws.)

 The West Virginia State Bar provides us a free research service.  It’s a little hard to use, but which part of “free” do you not understand?  And then there is Google, which has . . . well, a hell of lot more information that I know.  There’s also FastCase, Justicia, FindLaw, WestLaw, and LexisNexus.

 Now – sadly for me – law books are mainly decorations in a law office, stuff which clients expect to see.

 So carry on, Samuel T. Cogley, right along with your buggy whips, button hooks and fireplaces.  But stay under the porch, you no longer belong to the big dogs.

 Mizpah!