Here's what an eastern diamondback looks like
when he's getting ready to launch an attack.

A Sobering Thought About Living Close to Nature

It's a very pleasant place to live, but the subdivision where I live some thirty miles from downtown Birmingham still has some disturbing reminders that the wild side of nature is still a bit too close for comfort. While setting up my new flower garden, for example, I have had to be careful to avoid the poison ivy and poison oak that pops up all over my back yard. Those nasty little plants were there before I came, and they evidently have no intention of leaving. Another annoying reminder of the wilderness that was here before my house was ever built are the deer that I occasionally encounter. This past Easter Sunday morning I went out on my deck to drink a cup of coffee, and there in that garden I had worked on so hard was a six-point young buck making his breakfast on about about a hundred dollars worth of freshly planted shrubbery. The most disturbing visitors from Nature, however, are the snakes. Every time a new house is started, the bulldozers and back hoes seem to dig up at least one four or five foot long copperhead or rattlesnake. Just two weeks ago my next-door neighbor killed an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake with thirteen rattles. The three-foot-long snake was right beside his driveway. Oh, it's pleasant to live out here in suburbia -- as long as I don't get too close to Nature or Nature doesn't get too close to me.

Return to Guide

In the beginning the sports reporters called new Bama coach Mike Shula "uncomfortable," "awkward," and "immature," but -- after Saturday's 40-17 win over South Florida -- the media guys have really changed their tune. One Birmingham News writer, for example, completely forgot Shula's early awkwardness when he described game day Shula as "unflappable" while he calmly led the team from a 10-point deficit to a 17-17 tie in the waning moments of the first half. Another writer claimed that "the movie-star handsome young coach" looked entirely "comfortable along the sidelines," and still another sports scribe upgraded his opinion of the new coach to "calm, cool, and collected." Perhaps the highest praise, however, came from the writer who described Shula as "veteran-like" and as "presidential." Those two adjectives are just about as opposite as possible from such insults as "awkward" and "immature." At least until the young head coach loses his first game, it seems that the sports writers have really changed their minds about Mike Shula.

Return to Guide

Maria Cavalcone, a girl in my college algebra class, has invited me to her home for dinner only twice so far, but her family already seems far more colorful and exciting than my own ordinary family. For example, all nine kids in the family call their father Mister Lou and their mother Miss Anna. The first time I heard that I remember thinking that neither I nor my sister would dare call our father Mister Rick. Another unusual thing about the Cavalcones is that there is always red wine and olive oil on their fifteen-foot-long dining room table, and at meal times all the children in the family (from six-year-old Tony up to college freshman Maria) drink wine and dip Italian breadsticks into the little pools of olive oil they all pour onto saucers. At my boring house alcoholic beverages simply do not exist, and my mother would consider that olive oil business disgusting. What I find most exotic about the Cavalcones, however, is the constant emotional upheaval at the dinner table. There are always at least four different conversations going on simultaneously: little Tony and little Al whining that they want a color T.V. for their room, sixteen-year-old Lou Junior telling Maria that college hasn't made her as smart as she thinks, Mister Lou asking me whether my family votes Democratic or Republican, and Miss Anna laughing until tears trickle from her eyes about some comment one of the other kids made but which I didn't hear because I never get to practice following multiple emotional conversations while eating the wine-and-olive-oil-free dinners at our quiet, dignified house. If Maria keeps inviting me to dinner, I will get accustomed to their ways; but, at least for now, I think that the Cavalcones must be one of the most interesting families on earth.

Return to Guide

This was a good school back in 1910, but
time and technology have passed this building
by. Also, all the affluent people have moved out
of this school zone. Poor test scores are expected
to be the result in upcoming SAT testing.

Return to Guide

I recently made a very depressing visit to Brookley Heights, the neighborhood in Mobile where I lived quite happily as a child. To begin with, about half the homes as well as Brookley Heights Park where I used to play baseball with my friends vanished when I-10, the interstate between Mobile and New Orleans, sliced through the southern half of the neighborhood about twenty years ago. In the remaining part of my old stomping grounds, many of the houses are boarded up, and there are even several vacant lots where the houses have disappeared entirely. For example, my old friend Charlie Morrison's home -- where I spent so many nights with Charlie, Gene, Freddie and some of the other guys -- is gone without a trace, and nobody who lives in the area now seems to know or care what happened. (An old lady sitting on the porch of Gene and Freddie Lambert's old, falling down house across the street from the vacant Morrison lot told me, "There ain't never been nothing on that lot.") The most depressing sight, however, is the old family residence on Brooke Avenue. All the azaleas and camellias that my mother took such pride in are gone as is most of the lush green lawn my dad and I worked so hard on. The screen wire on the old-fashioned front porch has mostly rusted away, and the garage behind the house is just about to collapse into a pile of weather-beaten boards. Alas! Alas! It's so depressing that I doubt I ever again go back to Brookley Heights.

(This paragraph is about 235 words in length.)

Return to Guide

American paratroopers landing near Ste.-Mere-Eglise
on D-Day. In this wide open field, they were easy
targets for the German machine-gunners hiding there.

The paratroopers who survived the attack on the little French village of Ste.-Mere-Eglise on D-Day (June 6, 1944) really learned what danger means. As the American Army Air Corps planes approached the village, for example, the Germans opened up on them with all sorts of machine gun and anti-aircraft fire. While waiting to jump and praying that their planes didn't crash or explode into balls of flame before they could jump, many of the airborne troops were killed or maimed by the storm of bullets flying through the flimsy sides of the C-47 troop carriers. As soon as they jumped, however, they faced another danger. The planes were so close to the ground in most cases that some troopers hit the ground before their chutes ever opened or were plunged into rivers or canals where they drowned before recovering from the shock of their landing. (In one group of eighteen troopers who jumped from the same aircraft, six were killed by hitting the ground and eleven drowned in a canal running near the village. Only one soldier made it to the ground alive.) For those who found themselves floating like proper parachutists down toward Ste.-Mere-Eglise, the danger was worst of all. German troops in the village could plainly see the American soldiers, and began slaughtering them as they floated to earth. Hundreds of troopers from the 101st and the 82nd Airborne Divisions died that day before ever getting to fire a shot, and the lucky survivors would later say D-Day was the most dangerous day they ever faced during the war.

(This paragraph is about 280 words in length.)

Return to Guide

The ceiling of this room is eight feet high, and Mr. Grizzly
is clearly touching the ceiling. Also, you can see that the
bear has four 4-inch fangs and that his claws are at least 5
inches long. Anybody want to play around with this old bear?

Probably the scariest animal in the early American wilderness was the grizzly bear. Weighing perhaps 800 pounds and reaching at least seven-and-a-half feet tall when standing upright on his rear legs, the fully mature male grizzly had very intimidating five-to-eight inch long claws on his forepaws. One swipe of the bear's claws would easily disembowel a moose, a mountain lion, or a human hunter and could literally cut a hunting dog into two pieces. What was even scarier than that was the bear's legendary bad temper. Unlike most wild animals, who wisely tried to avoid contact with human beings and guns, the permanently grumpy grizzly would usually attack any human he saw or even smelled. The scariest part of dealing with a grizzly bear in the wild, however, was that he was really hard to kill. According to an old mountain man's joke, the worst place to shoot a grizzly bear was in the head because all the shot could accomplish was to make the bear really mad. It's really not surprising that the most feared American animal during frontier times, when explorers had nothing better than single-shot rifles, was the grizzly bear.

(This paragraph is about 215 words in length.)

Return to Guide

It is a scary thought to consider that every improvement in the weapons of war makes it possible to do more damage with less effort and at a greater (and therefore safer) distance from the target. In the beginning, for example, a warrior with a club or a sword or a stick had to get very close and had to expend a whole lot of energy to do any real harm to his foe. By the time the bow and arrow had been invented, however, an archer could actually kill his enemy from a couple of hundred yards away without really working up a sweat. Today we can see that greater destruction at a safer distance with lower expenditure of energy has continued up until the present day. Cruise missiles with 2,000 pounds of high explosives, for example, can be launched at an enemy from a couple of hundred miles away with little more effort than pushing down a key on a computer keyboard. Actually our very best weapons today -- thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles with a few megatons of explosive force -- can destroy nearly everything from thousands of miles away with almost no effort at all. It is frightening to think what the next improvement in weapons of war will bring. Perhaps we will be able to destroy an entire planet with no effort at all from millions of miles away.

Return to Guide

This is the original Wanted poster on
Osama (or Usama) bin Laden. He was being
sought before 9/11 for his role in the
bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

In the past America’s most sought after criminals were usually bank robbers, organized crime figures and drug kingpins -- lawbreakers such as Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone, the kind of criminals whose lives make entertaining movie plots--, but the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for February 2003 is a collection of cowardly terrorists, brutal murderers, and disgusting sexual perverts. I noticed right away that Eric Robert Rudolph, accused of deadly bombings in Birmingham and Atlanta, and Osama bin Ladin, accused of masterminding the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa and the devastating 9/11 bombings, were both on the list because of their involvement in those cowardly acts of terrorism. Looking a little further into the list I found that a sadistic multiple murderer named Robert Fisher is wanted for killing his family by burning down the house where his wife and two young children were sleeping. The most distressing character on the list, however, was Richard Goldberg, a creepy-looking man in his forties, who is wanted for six counts of having sex with little girls under ten years old and who is also accused of videotaping his sick activities with the girls. After looking at those disturbing characters and the rest of the people on the most wanted list, one can see that those ten terrorist bombers, brutal murderers, and sexual perverts are definitely not the sort of people whose life stories make good movies.

Return to main page.