The Pesky Love Bug Menace

We started our summer journey on April 26 and it was a bit of a slaughter. We drove to the east coast of Florida, cutting an ugly swath of destruction coast to coast. Millions of pesky love bugs gave up their lives on our windshield and the front of our rig. After we traveled for an hour through the flatlands, past the hundreds of thousands of cattle grazing and sleeping under any available shade, we had to stop and scrub off the black bugs that obscured our vision.

These love bugs seem to be unique to Florida. We are told they are visible in Louisiana and Mississippi but we've never hit them there. They have the delightful habit of seeking out a mate in mid April. The male attaches himself to the rear of the female and the two of them fly off on a wild copulating ride that always seems to result in death. Somewhere, though, some of the little critters manage to survive and produce more offspring so this ritual might be repeated in the coming year.

When we sailed in Florida, we'd have hundreds of these bugs fly onto our boat. But that doesn't kill them because the boat was traveling around 6 miles an hour. Sixty miles an hour is a different story.

So we'd done our part in reducing the pesky population. We are told the best way to get the carcasses off the rig is to spray the rig with WD-40 lubricant before setting out. Now that we are in Hobe Sound, on Florida's Atlantic coast, we might just do that before heading north in another couple of days.

Here's what Wikipedia says about this phenomenon:
Lovebug flights can number in the hundreds of thousands. The slow, drifting movement of the insects is almost reminiscent of snow fall except the flies also rise in the air. Two major flights occur each year, first in late spring, then again in late summer. The spring flight occurs during late April and May, the summer during late August and September.

Flights extend over periods of four to five weeks. Mating takes place almost immediately after emergence of the females. Adult females live only three to four days, while males live a little longer.

This species' reputation as a public nuisance is due not to any bite or sting (it is incapable of either), but to its slightly acidic body chemistry. Because airborne lovebugs can exist in enormous numbers near highways, they die en masse on automobile windshields, hoods, and radiator grills when the vehicles travel at high speeds. If left for more than an hour or two, the remains become dried and extremely difficult to remove.

Their body chemistry has a nearly neutral 6.5 pH but may become acidic at 4.25 pH if left on the car for a day.[1] In the past, the acidity of the dead adult body, especially the female's egg masses, often resulted in pits and etches in automotive paint and chrome if not quickly removed. However, advances in automotive paints and protective coatings have reduced this threat significantly. Now the greatest concern is excessive clogging of vehicle radiator air passages with the bodies of the adults, with the reduction of the cooling effect on engines, and the obstruction of windshields when the remains of the adults and egg masses are smeared on the glass.

Goat-sex man pays four cows

King Sitentu Mpasi in the Kavango region of Namibia

This is a strange story you'll never read about in your local newspaper. I thought you should hear about it, though. I pass this along because I have met one of the people involved. Chief Sitentu Mpasi - called King Mpasi when I was around in 2007. I advise you to keep reading to the end for a case of "That's more information that I actually needed."

A 20-year-old man who was ordered by village elders to pay six cows as punishment for having sex with several goats at Namutuntu village in the Kavango Region of Namibia has so far only managed to pay four cattle.

The culprit, identified as Joseph Kangungu Ngongo, was brought before an Ukwangali Traditional Court hearing on January 22 at Simanya village.
The village’s senior headman, Matheus Nyambwe, said Ngongo paid four cattle and a N$500 admission-of-guilt fine that will go into the coffers of the Ukwangali Traditional Authority.

The headman said of the two remaining cattle, one would to go the leader of the Ukwangali Traditional Authority, Chief Sitentu Mpasi, while the other one goes to the owner of the violated goats at Namutuntu village.

The complainant, Anton Mukunga, told the traditional court that he had on two separate occasions found human footprints coming out of his goats’ pen as he opened the gate to allow the animals out for grazing.

He said he never suspected theft because no goats were missing.

However, when he went to take out the goats for grazing the third time, Mukunga said he saw clothes hanging on a pole in the pen. Upon closer inspection, he saw a naked man having sex with one of the goats inside the pen.

The man ran away naked when he realised that the owner of the goats had spotted him but he was caught by villagers.

During the traditional court hearing, Ngongo pleaded guilty to bestiality. He said he had tried out several goats before marking the hoofs of the animal that satisfied his sexual needs the best.

A brush with royalty

King Henry VIII stands between us at the Tampa Bay Renaissance Faire. The real Henry Tudor is pictured at right.

I've met two kings in my life. In Africa, I spent a pleasant enough morning with King Mpasi, up on the northern border between Namibia and Angola. On Saturday, however, I met up with King Henry VIII. Henry struck me as the most authentic king. This is not to say Mpasi was not an impressive character. Maybe it was the see-through, mesh T-shirt that made him “un-kinglike”. Maybe it was that I had to teach him how to use an asthma inhaler – for which he was extremely grateful. No matter, the guy who carried off the title with authentic gravitas definitely was Henry.

Henry, the second of the Tudor kings, strolled around the Tampa Bay Renaissance Faire, holding forth in regal form. All his vassals bowed and scraped before him. They remained bowed until he acknowledged them and bid them arise. He reigned just shy of 38 years from 21 April 1509 – 28 January 1547.

Henry was the reason Jo and I had driven north to spend time in his kingdom.

After he discovered me he reached out and gave me a bear-hug. For Henry is a long-lost friend and former reporting/writing colleague. He is a massive man, quite realistic in terms of the royal fellow who went through six wives.

Jo, not realizing that Henry stays in character no matter what, hugged him and said, “Oh, Michael. It is so good to see you.” “My lady, you know me not,” said the king. “For I am Henry Tudor.” And so he stayed, chatting with us in early and quaint English, carrying us back to those pre-Elizabethan days. We were constantly interrupted by passersby who asked to be photographed with him. He gladly acceded to their requests, always addressing them with regal bearing and asking that they place their left hand above his raised right hand. He entertained the assembled masses while his yeomen stood by with their pikes.

The king also had a chamberlain whose job it was to keep him moving along. We walked through the faire together, but the chamberlain stepped up to the king and asked if he would be willing to perform a marriage ceremony for a betrothed couple. Henry was on his way to knight some worthy commoners but he veered off and made his way up to the couple, Jennifer and Alan. They were dressed in medieval costumes, with their two daughter in long velvet dresses.
Henry stopped at the entrance to the chapel until a vassal could raise a fluttering banner, permitting him entrance with having to stoop.

The to-be-married couple approached and were given in marriage by a white-clad knight. Henry proceeded with consummate skill to perform the ceremony. Bride Jennifer had tears on her cheeks as she sealed the ceremony by placing a ring on her beloved's finger.

After the deed was done, King Henry signed the papers to make the marriage official (Michael, as I recall from the mid-seventies, became an ordained minister in one of these mail-order preacher legitimizers). Then he proceeded along the path to make knights of men.

The faire was a melange of beautiful girls in high-waisted corsets that did much to accentuate the positive protrusion of their breasts. Men looked suitably rugged in their leathers and plain kilt. A number were warlocks and sprouted petite horns on their foreheads.

There was every kind of activity: palm reading, men diving into mud, camel riding, brawny men – and equally brawny women – throwing a metal weight. The women threw a 14 pound one, while the guys threw a 28-pounder. On the advice of the king, Jo and I made our way to the rat-catcher's show with Emrys Fleet. We had been told this was a former copy-boy from the 1970s at The St. Petersburg Times although I could in no way recognize him. He'd given up on newspapering in 1979 and turned his full attention to being a faire performer. This was one funny dude. He was daring in his willingness to out-wait his audience till they got the joke – and then got the audience to laugh at itself. His polished, laugh-filled act confirmed for me that he made the right decision to take the route of performing.

We sauntered over to the Scottish-Irish games area for lunch. I quizzed a vendor about the quality of his haggis since I'd recently bought an inferior version of this Scottish delicacy. He assured me his was the best haggis to be had in Florida. He even offered me a forkful and it was just enough to encourage me to order a haggis and chips platter. Mmmmm. Now that puts hair on your chest.

An Auspicious Day

Feb. 13, 1961. I boarded a Boeing 707 with only six other passengers in Scotland and headed west…leaving my homeland with my two cardboard suitcases for my journey to a new life and a new world. Fifty years ago today. It’s a significant date in my life.

I had made my decision to leave my job as a weekly newspaper editor in the north of Scotland because I felt confined by a union shop that insisted I could only do certain things in the production of a newspaper. I chafed under this when the union went out on strike – a strike I didn’t believe in. So I began looking around at the world’s possibilities.

I met a sea captain in my regular bar in Inverness, and he told me he would be sailing to South America in a few days. Did I want to sign up as crew? It was an exciting possibility but I hesitated and the ship sailed. At around the same time, I received a letter from the Hong Kong Police Department, offering me a position as sub-inspector of police in Hong Kong. They offered the position based on the simple fact I was British and white. That, in their view, automatically qualified me to supervise a bunch of Chinese policemen. Silly, silly people.

It was an intriguing offer for the lure of Asia was strong in my heart. But I also knew I’d be a lousy cop because my genetic makeup made me constantly question authority. And then the National Union of Journalist’s newspaper in Britain ran a story on its front page which told about a small daily newspaper in New Hampshire that was seeking to employ a British journalist in a reporting position. Pay would be $75 a week. Since I was being paid $20 a week I applied along with (I learned later) 284 other British journalists.

The paper’s editor picked an English guy, Larry Masidlover, who worked on Fleet Street in London. They liked him (even though ultimately they had a problem with him because of his unwillingness to bathe!) Three months later they decided to hire another Brit. I was chosen and three weeks later, I had received my green card and had bought my one-way ticket. Age 20.

Back in those days, if you were British you were considered a desirable immigrant and there was no impediment to getting into the U.S. so long as you had a job.

When I arrived in Logan Airport in Boston, I was met by the newspaper’s managing editor, Ray Brighton. He shook my hand but I sensed a moment of hesitation as he looked at me. “I can’t let you leave the airport without shaving off your beard,” he told me. “New Hampshire isn’t ready for a beard.” I stopped in my tracks. New Hampshire wasn’t ready for a person with a small Van Dyke beard? That made no sense to me. I had grown the beard in a desperate attempt to look older than my 20 years. But Ray was adamant. I negotiated with him that he would pay for the shave. We stopped into a barber shop in the airport and the barber made me acceptable to enter New Hampshire.

Fifty years on I have my beard. It’s much, much greyer now. And, I’m also happy to report that Ray Brighton grew a beard in the late 1960s. So America can change. America did change. And it needs to change much, much more.

In 50 years, I have lived through America’s golden years, as well as its darkest hours. I was a reporter in Rochester, N.Y., when President Kennedy was cut down in Dallas. I watched my managing editor marshal his newsroom resources with quiet skill moments after the news flash announcing the president's death. It was on my watch that Rochester, N.Y., riots erupted in 1966 and I went into the ghetto with a Canadian reporter and was spat upon and rocks were thrown as we made our way into the heart of the war zone. I had just put the newspaper to bed, as we called it, and had gone home when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was the only time I ever issued the order to "Stop the presses." I drove back downtown in Rochester to remake the newspaper that night. I was the editor in charge the night Apollo astronauts circled the moon and sent back the astonishing picture of earth-rise with the blue marble of earth rising above the grey moonscape. I remember the struggle of convincing a group of union engravers that I wanted to remake the front page with the earth-rise picture covering the top half of the front page.

I still think of my decision to come west as the most important decision of my life. All good things have sprung from that fork in the road.

I would not have met my bonny Jo.

We would not have produced two beautiful and talented daughters and, now, they have produced four grandchildren.

I would not have had the agony and ecstasy of working on some of the best newspapers in the U.S. – as well as some of the worst.

And I would not have been able to work with some of the finest writers, best editors, world-class photographers, designers who have worked in the U.S.

I would never have met my first news editor, Bob Norling, a brilliant, irascible editor who loved to stir the pot and make The Portsmouth Herald better every day.

Nor would I have been touched by sparkling, raw talent like Bill Duryea, now national editor of The St. Petersburg Times. I gave him his first job as a reporter and then manager editor of our principal weekly newspaper in New Milford, Connecticut.

How would I have found the sparkling writing talent of Michael Marzella, with whom I worked in St. Petersburg and, later, at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His prose was poetry. His ability to grab a reader and illustrate bizarre concepts like the history of bricklaying or the creation of a time capsule entertained and dazzled readers. He is a diamond.

And I think particularly of the utter unmitigated brilliance of Jose Azel, a young Cuban-American photographer whom I hired for The Miami Herald. He was a diamond in the photographic firmament - and remains so to this day, running his own photo agency.

My particular friend, Richard Curtis, my assistant newsfeatures editor at The St. Pete Times, grew into a design giant as the managing editor of photography and design at the founding of USA Today.

The best - definitely the most courageous - journalist I have ever worked with is Gwen Lister, editor of The Namibian. I worked with the people in her newsroom three separate times for a total of more than 10 months. She is without peer as a leader, an ethical, moral force in her country. She has been imprisoned, her newspaper has been fire-bombed. But she pushes ever onward. She is respected by her readers as is no other journalist I have ever met. And she has trained black men and women to be excellent in their craft. My beloved black brother, Oswald Shivute, has been my primary teacher to the ways of his people. He has been the door-opener to the horrors of apartheid, to HIV-AIDS, to the raw brutality of unjust tribalism. I love this man for opening so many doors for me on my journey into the heart of Namibia. And I have great admiration for a brilliant white reporter, Maggi Barnard in Swakopmund, on Namibia's west coast. She was the one who introduced me to the cultural shock of a black enclave called the DRC, outside of her pretty town. The poverty and humiliation of life in that township was so overwhelming to me that I could not get out of the car to talk with the people. But Maggi wouldn't let me shrink back from this. The next day, she gave me a sheaf of used paper and we returned to a kindergarten in the DRC. I gave the used paper to the teacher and the teacher introduced me to the children and then their mothers. The dam was broken. My eyes were opened to the spirit of those who lived in abject poverty but who retained the sense of pride and self.

At the top of my list, though, is a petite Burmese woman, Hla Hla Htay, whom I taught in Cambodia. Hla Hla was shockingly shy but made of titanium. She was strong 'way beyond her 95 pounds. I received a call from the news agency Agence France Presse bureau chief in Bangkok, asking if I knew of any Burmese journalist who might be a candidate to run their bureau in Yangon (Rangoon). I said I was thoroughly impressed with the strength and brain-power of this diminutive woman who was currently in the journalism class I was running in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I arranged for Hla Hla to meet with the bureau chief when she passed through Bangkok on her way back home. I sat down with Hla Hla in my office and spent hours teaching her how to interview for a job with a western news agency. I taught her about eye contact, about projecting competence and self-assurance - all of it counter-intuitive to Hla Hla who was astonishingly shy. She set out for the interview and the bureau chief gave her the job on a trial basis. Her pay jumped from $50 a month to $1,000 a month. Hla Hla is still out there seven years later and I had the pleasure of being able to look at her pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi when she was released from house arrest earlier this year.

All of my work years were preparation for becoming a teacher/mentor/guide to journalists in every corner of the world – perhaps the most worthwhile endeavor of my life.

Had I not struggled to make newspapers better in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Connecticut, I would not have had the training to go into the most interesting places in the world – Bhutan, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Borneo, Nepal, Singapore, Colombia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Namibia.

When I flew to Bhutan, tucked into the snow-covered peaks of the Himalaya, I remember the editor of the only newspaper in that country, Kinley Dorgi, tell me about auspicious moments. He saw everything through the lens of auspicious moments. I had brought him a book called China Wakes by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryll WuDunn. Kinley had just read a review of the book that very morning in his precious copy of The Economist. “This is an auspicious moment, Robert,” he told me.

So Feb. 13, 1961, is my auspicious day. It is that moment Robert Frost wrote about in “The Road Not Taken”. This is what he said:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Not many have taken my road. But one has. I gave Lisa Schellinger, a new graduate back in 1981, her first job as a rooky reporter in Warren, Ohio. Today, Lisa remains my friend and she followed my path by going out into the world to give of her skills. She has taught/worked in Fiji, Cambodia, Afghanistan, among other places. She still is making all the difference in Afghanistan where she is a guide/mentor in the creation of a news agency, as well as creation of a school.

Now we look forward to new adventures. You may remember the Monty Python skit in which they are making fun of the Black Death in England. "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead," was the cry onstage. A skinny guy in a white nightshirt is thrown onto the death cart. "I'm not dead, yet," he calls out. And so it is.

Just making numbers work

Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today's computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we imagine it to be.

The End of the Road

This grizzly met us on the road in Yukon Territory.

It's the end of the road... for the time being.

We have pulled into the heart of Florida. There are an additional 14,512 miles on our odometer at the end of our journey. Add an additional 4,417 miles we drove our car along the way. Twenty thousand miles is not a bad adventure for one year. But it really isn't about the miles.

So much of this odyssey took us to vistas and worlds we have never before discovered. Texas wildflowers along the 1,000 miles of interstate that hustled us across that vast state... winds blowing so hard we had to put down our leveling jacks to keep the rig from rocking and rolling while we were parked in New Mexico....the bizarre world of Roswell, New Mexico, where alien conspiracies seem to pop up at you around every corner.... The glory of Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah...the crispy clean and antiseptic Mormons who greeted us in Salt Lake City....the re-enactment of the joining of the east and west railroad tracks to make transcontinental travel relatively comfortable in Promontory, Utah.... the spectacular waterfalls along the Columbia River in Oregon.... the snowstorm we drove through in Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington state...the love affair with Vancouver, British Columbia... the endless miles that are British Columbia (so large it's like driving from Miami to Maine)....Yukon Territory and its iffy roads but gorgeous territorial parks.

Then we made it to Alaska, a world unto itself. The people there see the world through a quite different prism from those who live in the lower 48 states. Everything about the state is record-breaking. The mountains, the glacial rivers that are milky blue, the incomparable wildlife. We'll never forget the shivers that went up and down our spines as Denali uncovered her snow-covered peak to reveal herself to us for three and a half hours late one night. We'll treasure the plethora of bald eagles that allowed us to get up close and personal with them at Anchor Point State Park in the Kenai Peninsula. And the glaciers.... ah, the glaciers. They're receding at such an alarming rate that we were both depressed and also elated that we were able to see them in our lifetime. But we do fear for this exquisite part of our world being lost to our children and, particularly, to our grandchildren.

We wept at the awesome culmination and death of the thousands of salmon in a natal stream west of Juneau, as we watched the writhing and dying fish struggle in their final ecstasy to fulfill their hard-wired instructions that, before they die, they must make their way home to spawn and then to die. It was beyond the ability of words to capture this final act as we watched thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these fish reach their goal and drop their eggs before lying bruised and broken in the shallows of the stream, awaiting the end of their life.

The exquisite joy of watching a grizzly bear pass through our campground on the shores of the inland passage at Haines, Alaska, and then, in the dawn of the next day, to meet the same grizzly as we drove our rig to the ferry for our 1,000-miles journey south. We will treasure our encounters with the Tlingit and Athabaskan Native Americans who welcomed us on our journey south, permitting us to park in their campgrounds and sharing their cultural traditions.

The K’san Indian in British Columbia who offered us a newly caught salmon, along with the outdoors man in Slana, Alaska, who offered us a fully-cooked salmon that had been left over from the wedding of his daughter. We loved so much of the experience and these things will live on for the remaining years of our life's journey.

We've been delighted to have you come along on this journey. I have uploaded a “Best of the Journey” photo album and you are welcome to visit that. Enjoy.

It's All About Serendipity

Federal troops fire their canon at the Creek and Seminole Indians southwest of Lake City, FL.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. We drove across the Florida line on Sunday morning. Temperature was 75 degrees. Full sun. Ah. This is why we're here. We looked down the highway to choose a campground for the night and settled on the insignificant O'Leno State Park, just south of Lake City.

And that made all the difference in the world.

When we checked in (it cost only $9.90 for our slot), the ranger told us about Alligator Days that were about to begin. This is a re-enactment of a battle in the Second Seminole Wars against the Seminole and Creek Indians who lived in the area back in the 1830s.

The battle was scheduled to start in an hour which gave us time to get parked, have some lunch, and wander over to the battle.

Booming canon announced the start of the proceedings. Indians – who looked awfully white to me – whooped and yipped as they crept through the pine scrub, shouting their taunts to the US soldiers, pioneer militia and settlers and reenacted the Sept18, 1836, Battle of San Felasco Hammock. I checked into the demographics of the recent census and Native Americans now only account for 1.6 per cent of the population. But they looked good, with some awesome face painting, superb top hats and lots of rawhide clothing.

The battle pushed back and forth, with U.S. Officer, sucking on his pipe and shouting orders to his men to advance with their muskets, then to report back on the location of the Indians in the hammock. The big gun then opened up and cleared out the recalcitrant Indians. In the meantime, the audience, often made up of the fighters' wives – wearing period dress – photographed the proceedings with their digital cameras.

The festival also included Native American musicians and dancers, a drum arbor with dance ground and tee pee camp, as well as traders selling historic replicas, handcrafted arts, manufactured souvenirs, and food.

All of this was a great way to return to our home base – we still are 322 miles out – and we are delighted to be back. This has been a wonderful journey down the eastern edge of the country. We spent much time in the cradle of the Civil War. We took in the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, where the war ended with the surrender of Gen. Robert Lee.

Farther north in Virginia, we spent a day at the home of that American genius, Thomas Jefferson. Monticello is perched on the top of a high hill, giving views of the Blue Ridge mountains. He had a thousand acres and 200 slaves up on that mountain, helping him grow the crops and even making iron nails. The entryway to his home has a complex clock that run along the front wall and shows not only the time, but the day of the week.

When we entered Georgia, we met up with friends we'd made while living in Cambodia back in 2003-4. Then we connected with one of my proteges from early journalism days. She and her husband now shuttle back and forth to Afghanistan where she created an Afghan news service that supplies unbiased and credible journalism in that beleaguered country for embassies, CNN, BBC, many of the U.S. TV networks, as well as newspapers inside the country. She is rightly proud of her “baby”.

We drove with them to the little town of Jasper, GA, for dinner and visited her photo exhibit in an office building on the main street of this little town. The picture of the Afghan man in his turban hangs in the front window and already had created some trouble for the locals. Someone had called the local radio station to complain about the afront to their community of having this turbaned man's picture in the center of their town!

Lisa decided to replace the picture with one of a fresh-faced Afghan girl because Hallowe'en was a day away and that might prevent the building from being egged or even having the glass broken. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in!