Six seconds in Dallas viewed fifty years later

I first read the Warren Report when I was in seventh grade. This is one of those facts that I should have been legally obligated to reveal to Kim before we got married. Somewhere in the vows after for better or for worse should be “Are you aware of the fact that your potential husband had detailed discussions on the ballistic reports for the Kennedy assassination when he was twelve years old?” That is a pretty large skeleton to have hidden in one’s closet.

I mention this because I just finished reading Gerald Posner’s book “Case Closed” which pushes the mind boggling conclusion that Oswald acted alone and I want it to be clear that I have studied this subject for much of my life. I’ve read numerous books, wrote a research paper on the subject in college (which I still have a copy of) and have had to be forcibly restrained from spending time on vacation in Dallas recreating the steps of the motorcade. I can’t really explain why this is the case other than I grew up in a Kennedy-centric household and the mystery about it caught my attention. The fact that there was this world changing event where no one was quite sure what happened just fascinates me.

So this book was my latest examination of the case and the one that I agree with for the most part. Part of this is the technical details but another, and the more interesting side, is the personal history of Oswald. I had never really examined his life in great detail though I could recount the main points: joined the marines, defected to the Soviet Union, returned to the US, arrested for pro Cuba activities in New Orleans and ended up in Dallas after a strange trip to Mexico City. However, Posner went into other details that really struck me when viewed in the light of other crimes over the past fifty years.

In essence, if you look at the personal life of Oswald you do not see someone who would be a mob hitman or a KGB agent or a part of some wide ranging sinister plot. You see someone who much more resembles the guy who shot Gabby Giffords or some of the other mass shooters. Oswald barely had a high school education and went to like a dozen different schools over the years. He was fascinated by the ideas of communism and Marxism but in the sense that a fourteen year old would be. He grasped the talking points and the propaganda but had no deep understanding of it. He wanted to constantly be the center attention and show his importance but he was basically a nobody. In Russia he thought people would flock to him as an American. In the US he thought people would want to hear his story about his defection. But no one cared and when people questioned his beliefs he became belligerent. He was an abusive husband and paranoid and was against all types of government. You wouldn’t trust him to mow your lawn much less with a plot to assassinate the leader of the free world.

It just really struck me in reading this that I had read profiles of people like this for years and never made the connection. You see the parallels to the Columbine shooters and the Oklahoma City bombers and a number of other lone mass shooters over the years. Someone lost in society, anti-social, paranoid and delusional, who takes advantage of a weapon and an open society to perform a heinous act. One of the reasons that people are drawn to conspiracy theories is that we don’t want to admit that one lone nut can change the world. We want the view that someone, even a massive evil cabal, is in charge and driving the world. We don’t want to believe that one person can cause mass destruction and change everything. But we’ve seen it over and over again.

Once you grasp that then the rest of the assassination is relatively straightforward. Governor Connally has to be shot from behind. While it looks weird in the Zapruder film Kennedy was also shot from behind. We think we know what it looks like when someone is shot but all we have seen is thousands of TV and movie shootings and most of us have no first hand experience (thank god). We know that shots were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository because three people on the fifth floor heard the shots come from above them. Oswald was the last person seen on the sixth floor. Oswald was the only employee who left the building after the shooting. He was a lone nut with a rifle and a desire to show to the world that he was important. It is a story that we see all too often in history. We would love for everything in life to have a deeper meaning especially in history. But sometimes it is just a car driving past an unstable man with a perverse desire for fame.

What I Read 2014: Non-Fiction Edition

Thought that it might be a nice idea to review all of the books that I read in 2014 and give everyone an insight into my reading list and maybe a window into my personality. Ah, who am I kidding, I just want to try to show off how well read I am even though no one gives a damn. Like most people I don’t use Goodreads as a way to discover new authors or discuss my favorite books: I’d rather have quantifiable proof that I am a more cultured person than everyone I know. Anyway, I’ll start with the non-fiction.

“How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” by Scott Adams: Do you want life coaching from the guy who writes Dilbert? Yeah, I thought so too. However, the chapter on “how to make an obscene amount of money doing something that hasn’t been culturally relevant for fifteen years” is definitely worth reading.

“David and Goliath” Malcolm Gladwell: Speaking of making money while no longer relevant here is the latest by Gladwell who in this book explains that you should go to Maryland instead of Brown because you will rank higher in your class at Maryland and thus be more likely to complete your major. That is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read. I’m much more successful for getting a C in an electrical engineering course at Illinois as opposed to being a straight A student somewhere else.

 “The First World War” by John Keegan and “Aftermath: The Remnants of War” by Donovan Webster: If there is one podcast that I recommend that everyone should listen to it is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. In particular, you must listen to his current series on the First World War and Ghosts of the Osfront, which covers the Eastern Front of World War II. Don’t think of it as your typical military history where you are going to be forced to listen to lists of units and brigades followed by technical minutiae. Instead it is a fascinating and in many ways personal view of some of the most important events in modern history. This is the 100^th anniversary of the First World War and I have really tried to make an effort to understand what happened and why and I have been struck by two facts. One, the entire history of the last 100 years can be directly tied to what happened over those four years and two, this is some of the most horrific stuff I have ever heard or read. The only place worse than the trenches of World War I was Stalingrad in World War II and these podcasts cover both. Even more interesting, read Aftermath as it goes back to these battlefields to show how the areas have yet to recover. They are still pulling live artillery shells out of the fields of France.

 “The Intellectual Devotional” by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim and “1,411 Facts to Knock You Sideways” by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson and James Harkin: While I no longer play trivia on a weekly basis I still devour a few books on trivia, interesting facts or stupid things that no one else would ever care about a year. I wish I could find a good weekly trivia game again. If there is one thing I miss about Kansas City it is the merry band of misfits that made up the competitive trivia circuit. (Items two and three that I miss would be easy access to great concerts and Boulevard Wheat beer respectively.)

“Founding Myths” by Ray Raphael: Pretty much the same as above except with a focus on the Revolutionary War. Did you know that most of what you were taught in grade school history class was lies? Of course you do. It’s just amazing that we never bother to change that fact once we become adults and start writing the textbooks ourselves.

 “Get in the Van” by Henry Rollins: I caught a few episodes of Henry’s latest show on the history channel, which surprisingly did not feature aliens, pawn shops or Bigfoot so I don’t know how it ever even aired. Anyway, as much as I love Henry and his work I have to admit that time may have finally caught up to him. Not in terms of his thoughts or what he says but more in the fact that decades of screaming into a microphone has left his voice completely shot. You can almost hear him wincing in pain while he speaks. This book is the classic collection of journal entries from his years as the frontman for Black Flag. If you ever wanted to get a sense of what it was like to be in the middle of the 80’s punk scene, including all the brawls, riots and poverty that you could ever desire, this is the book for you. Great read.

“What If” by Randall Munroe: My website recommendation for everyone is the incomparable xkcd.com. In it, Randall Munroe uses stick figure cartoons to explain science, what it is like to be a nerd and occasionally presents the meaning of life as if he just feels like bestowing a gift on all of humanity. It’s truly some of the most amazing work that I have ever seen. This is his first book out of his What If series that explains what would happen if someone threw a baseball at 90% of the speed of light or opened a hole at the bottom of the ocean and let the water start to drain out. I’m not saying that you will ever need to know the answer to these but the book is funny, fascinating and a great way to introduce people to science without making them read pages of equations.

“Why Does E = MC²?” by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw: Ok, this book does have a decent amount of equations and includes a discussion on the space time continuum. And I’ll have to admit that while I can follow the math I am still working on understanding the theory completely. Do I need to really understand this for everyday living? No, but it does fascinate me that we can sit here on our small insignificant planet and figure these essential truths out while at the same time creating an entire industry out of the Kardashians.

“My Heart is an Idiot” by Davy Rothbart, “Hyperbole and a Half” by Allie Brosh and “Me Talk Pretty One Day” David Sedaris: I guess you could classify all of these as memoirs or collections of personal essays (or cartoons as the case may be.) I’ll get into a run of reading books like these and for the most part I enjoy them but once I read a few I am done for a while. I mean, I like David Sedaris but I’ve always read his stuff and chuckled as opposed to the people who talk about laughing hysterically. Just different tastes I guess.

“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant: I’ll definitely take writing advice from two of the guys that wrote the sketches for The State and Reno 911. However, they also wrote Herbie: Fully Loaded so I guess they can’t win them all.

 “The Baby Boom” by P.J. O’Rourke: Ugh. I want to state up front that I really like P. J. O’Rourke and that he has written some of my favorite books. However, this is not one of them. Pretty much an entire book about how awesome the Baby Boomers are by turning all of their flaws into sweet little harmless eccentricities. Somehow they still believe that the fact that the country went to hell in a handbasket after they arrived was a complete coincidence.

 “Things That Matter” by Charles Krauthammer: I read this book after listening to a speech of his and I will have to say that I liked the book a lot more than I thought. I don’t entirely agree with his political view (I’d explain it but I don’t want to spend three pages discussing how the United States should operate in a solo superpower world if it ever even inhabited such a place) but he hit a lot of good points. My view on pretty much all political writing is that I don’t mind if I agree or disagree with someone’s point. The important thing is that the writing makes me think and that the writer leaves him or herself open to the possibility that they may be wrong.

 “But Enough About You” by Christopher Buckley: Talk about an underrated writer. Maybe he gained enough fame for “Thank You for Smoking” but I have been a fan of his for years and this was his first collection of non-fiction essays in a long time. Worth checking out.

 “Of Dice and Men” by David Ewalt: A history of Dungeon and Dragons. Yes, I read a book discussing the history of Dungeon and Dragons. I have had longstanding arguments about how horrible it is to play as a cleric “We’re fighting kobolds! Cleric, go over to that corner and, I don’t know, pray or something.” As someone who started playing in the early 80’s and would like to play again one day in the future it was a lot of fun hearing about the history and just reading about the fun the author had playing various adventures.

“The Best in the World” by Chris Jericho: I have a set rule that I allow myself one book on pro wrestling each year. It is tough to limit myself to just one because, I mean, it’s pro wrestling. You can never learn to many of the intricacies of the sport. (True story: I have been playing a wrestling computer game recently in which you manage a wrestling company. Not an arcade game where you play matches. A game where you sit around, hire wrestlers, book cards and matches where you say who wins and in what way, and then see what the crowd thinks of your matches. It’s essentially playing a giant spreadsheet and one where I am upset that one of my wrestlers retired on me. I wish I could say that I am embarrassed by this.)

 “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein: A discussion on climate change and how we would need to change the entire nature of the world economy to address it. As I have said on many occasions the planet isn’t screwed just yet but we are getting close. The biggest problem is that this is a global issue and we have never dealt with a global issue before. We do not have the structures in place to deal with such a thing. That is what scares me about the future. 

New Year's Resolutions: 2015 Edition

It’s that time of year again. Time to pull yourself out from under the tree, apologize for your horrible behavior the night before, vow that this year will be different from the last and then go about living your life exactly the same as before other than writing a different date on your checks except that you don’t even write checks anymore so the entire concept of a year is effectively irrelevant. Anyway, as always I have put together my list of resolutions for the year and since I have my own website I figured that I would post them in an effort of personal accountability and public ridicule. Here we go…

1)      Weigh less than 180 pounds and maintain that weight: I’ve actually gotten my weight under 180 several times over the past few years, which is great given that I maxed out at about 215 back in 2009. But, I can never seem to maintain the weight and over the past few months, which have been extremely stressful personally with the added addition of people continuing to put holiday cookies in front of me, I’ve fallen back to 195. So, back on the weight loss program, back to DDP Yoga (I swear it works. I don’t know how or why but it really does work.), and back to fixing my diet. This time I’ll keep the weight off.

2)      Take Landen for one long walk daily: Of our two dogs Landen, our black lab / border collie mix, has taken to following his daddy’s example and gained weight as well. So, in addition to my weight loss efforts Landen will join in the action as we will have scheduled daddy – doggie bonding walks around the neighborhood. He’ll love it because he will get to be outside more, I’ll love it because I will get away from looking at a computer screen for every hour, and hopefully we will both be healthier for it. If you’re wondering our other black lab Katie has seniority over me in the household and I can in no way tell her what to do. If she wants to go for a long walk I will take her. Hell, if she wants to go for a ride she’ll grab the car keys and bring them to me.

3)      Get Lasik surgery: This has been a point of contention between Kim and me for years and between myself and everyone else I know since third grade. As most people know I have worn glasses since I was nine years old and have absolutely horrible vision without my glasses on. However, unless most people who get glasses as a kid I did not convert to contacts as I grew older event though I looked much better without glasses and the glasses that I wore made me look like I was intentionally trying to get the role of “third guy in the computer lab” in every college movie ever made. The idea of contacts and touching my eye just goes entirely against my internal programming. I’ve discussed Lasik for years but have always pushed it off in that it was a new procedure. Well, twenty years has passed and Kim personally knows one of the best doctors in the country so I really don’t have an excuse anymore. Plus, finally I would be able to wake up in the middle of the night and get to see what is causing that noise.

4)      Write one blog post a week: Yes, this resolution has been scaled back over the years. I’ve had this blog for more than a decade now and have gone from a five day a week posting schedule for years to a more sporadic schedule to the current, “let’s try to start writing again only to quit after two weeks.” But I was thinking about some writing advice I heard last year from Philip Margolin, who I met at a book fair. When he started writing he was a criminal defense attorney and I could not imagine just how he found the time to write. He explained to me that he set up an agreement with his wife where he had four hours on Saturday morning and four hours on Sunday morning where he could close the door in his office and spend that time writing. He figured that gave him a full day’s work every week and it was done in a way that he could work it in with his personal and professional life. My old method of writing five nights a week means finding a half hour every night and I just can’t do that anymore. But an hour or two once a week is doable so I will go at that pace. Plus, I hope that less content will equate to more quality but who knows. I’ll just be happy to be writing again.

5)      Listen to a different album every day: Ok, this one may seem odd. I have a massive music collection but I have discovered three important facts over the past few years 1) I only listen to a few albums, 2) I am really, really out of touch with the current music scene and 3) I feel a lot better when I am listening to new and different music. So, I am bringing back the random CD project, which because I am running it involves spreadsheets, random number generators and surprisingly complex algorithms just to pick a CD. Hopefully this will bring me back into music and help me to fill in the gaps in my collection. I’ll be posting the random album daily to Facebook so if you read my Facebook feed expect the spam and consider it revenge on all the people who continue to send me Farmville notices as if Farmville is still a thing.

6)      Read forty books in the year with at least ten different female authors: Forty books is for some reason a difficult threshold for me to break. I have been keeping track of every book that I have read since 1998 (no, I am not OCD, why do you ask?) and only once have I ever broken that milestone. Last year I read 38 books, 37 the year before so you get the picture. More embarrassingly, of the 38 books I read last year only four were written by women and the year before that the total was five. If you ever wanted quantifiable data that I am a sexist pig there you are. Thus, time to at least get the number of books I read written by women up to a quarter of my total.

7)      Listen to everything Kim is saying before acting on the first request: Like all husbands I am flawed and in my case probably more flawed than most. Sometimes they are sins of omission, sometimes they are sins of commission and sometimes they are things that may be completely out of your control. But, I feel that I should at least try to address one of the things that I do that drives Kim insane. She will be talking to me and say, “Put the sheet in the dryer,….” and before she can finish pausing for the comma I am immediately walking away with the sheet in my hand because I am a robot and will perform the first task given to me regardless of the fact that she hasn’t even finished her sentence yet. I do this all the time. I’ll walk away in mid-conversation because somewhere in there was an action I was told to make and it’s as if I operate on a one task at a time, complete immediately basis. It’s annoying and rude as hell and it is a habit that I need to break.

8)      Kim’s choice: As always, I feel that one of your resolutions should be to do something that someone else tells you to work on so Kim gets her choice here. Keeps a bit of mystery to the process as well.

9)      Update five year plan and note cards: Roughly eleven years ago this week I sat down and on a set of note cards wrote down the goals that I had for the next five years of my life. I then folded them up, put them in my wallet and whenever I needed to remind myself what I should be doing with my time I would look at them and see how I was progressing. The amazing thing is that, for the most part, I’ve accomplished everything I put on those cards. Sometimes it took longer than five years, sometimes they took on different forms but those note cards with my overall goals were always with me and it worked. But it is time to update them and figure out what I want to do in the next five years and redo the note cards.

10)  Take Kim on a work free vacation: I cannot recall the last time I went on a vacation and did not work. I’ve taken conference calls in Disney World, Las Vegas and the French Quarter. Kim has had it even worse and has emailed clients from Iceland and called people from the emergency room in which she was the one who had been taken to the emergency room. We need to get away and spend some time away from work, email, phones, computer screens and everything else that we cannot escape. Not sure how we are going to do this but it is a necessity.

There you go. Should be an interesting 2015 even if I still don’t have my freaking hoverboard yet.