College of Agriculture and Biosciences 1969 (50 years) Graduate Reunion

Nineteen Graduates from 1969 came to the reunion banquet on Saturday, January 12th, plus one came to the Friday get together but not the banquet. Not too shabby for a bunch of 72-year-olds. There could have been more but some never answered their emails, a  few said they had been to Saskatchewan in January and had no intention of repeating it.  But at least three flew in from Arizona, Mexico, and Hawaii just for the occasion.

Picture courtesy Jo Hammond.

The only girl in our class flew in from Kamloops. Her husband had to stay home to mind cows as they cowboy for neighbouring ranches since they retired. Less stressful than owning the cows.

What a great time catching up on all the intervening years. Some hadn't seen each other for 50 years, some 10 years, since the last reunion. I was at our 30th in 1999. The stuff we did in college had improved over the years with the telling and retelling.  Today, any of it would have got us expelled from the University.

One of the highlights of the banquet was introducing two graduates from 1939 (80 years) and 1943. They were 102 and 103 respectively. They looked healthy enough to make the next 10-year reunion.

The annual reunions are organized by Saskatchewan Agricultural Graduates Association (SAGA). Any graduate can attend but the focus each year is on the 10, 20, 30, etc. year grads. Next year the 50-year grads will be from 1970. SAGA has a program for 65 years and older grads who do not have to pay registration.  There were quite a few '54 and '49 grads plus the two centenarians.

On Saturday morning a number of us toured the new (opened in October) Beef Forage Centre of Excellence about 20 minutes east of Saskatoon.  It replaced and combined several aging facilities including the old feedlot where I did some of my MSc research work which had been built in 1962.

This three-minute video gives a pretty good overview of the new facility:

In my life, I have never wanted to relive one minute of it or be younger.  Once was enough.  But when I saw that new research facility and heard about the work being done and that could be done, I wished I was 40 years younger.  I would have signed up for a PhD program immediately. But it is a new generation that will have all the fun and that is OK.

And Now For something Completely Different

My Surgery to repair my incision hernia is scheduled for January 22.  This is the last if all goes well and I can begin healing for the long term. They phoned to say it was January 17th and Tanya said she dreamed it was to be January 22.  When they called back to reschedule to the 22nd, Tanya looked like the cat that swallowed the canary.  My friend Enoch will be in the following week to get a second hip replaced. If he ends up in my room we will terrorize the nurses though we will not be in any position to chase them.

Tomorrow I had to Saskatoon by bus for the 50th reunion of the Agriculture class of 1969.  Not sure how many will make it but it will be good to see old familiar faces.  I don't expect to see them again as it is highly unlikely I'll be back in 5 or 10 years when the next reunion will be. We are not getting younger, any of us. Winters in Saskatchewan are not much fun for me.

On Sunday, Kylee-Anne and I will drive up to North Battleford to see Grandma L.  It will be four and a half years since I was to see her. She will be glad for the visit though she won't know who we are. She turned 99 last week, not something she wanted but had no choice in the matter.  She has been ready to go for many years and it makes me sad to see this once vibrant woman, full of life, dedicating herself to looking after everyone else, to be so lost and helpless.

Sorry about the personal stuff.  Not very interesting and certainly not funny but not much happens around here from day to day.

Western novels and movies are my go-to for relaxation. By and large, they all have happy endings where the bad guy gets his and the good guy gets the girl and sometimes even the ranch. Usually the movies are totally unrealistic. There are occasional stories that try to paint a less stereotyped picture.  Monte Walsh, The Oxbow Incident and many of Dorothy Johnson's short stories (A Man Named Horse, the Man who shot Liberty Valence, the Hanging Tree). I watched Lonesome Dove finally, thirty years after it was made.  The first three episodes were powerful enough but I was not prepared at all for the final episode. No happy endings for anyone. So I bought the books, a series of four novels of which Lonesome Dove is the third.

Damn movie made me all melancholy and philosophical.  Are there ever happy endings in this life? In the end, we all die. Whether that is happy or not, I'll let you know when it happens. There are happy beginnings and middles, I guess, for some folks but not for others. Didn't sleep until 6 in the morning, thinking about it all night. My head sounds like this:

Give us a king to judge us. or Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus

One of the great puzzles of the last few years is why Trump (and his Canadian counterparts) have the support of the Evangelical Christians.  I call them Republican Jesus Christians as they are the antitheses of everything Jesus of the Gospels stood for, as is Trump.

It is more than the easy explanation that they are holding their noses so they get the supreme court stacked, or get abortion declared illegal, or get tax laws favouring the rich.  They actually love the guy.

Part of it is their expectation that the greater mess the world is in, the sooner Jesus will come again and rapture them out of it.  It is why the Christian Right does everything in its power to prevent peace in the Middle East.  For this reason, they support Israel, not because they have any use for the Jews.

Trump has been called the next thing to the Messiah and practically worshipped by the Religious Right.  Now he is the new Cyrus the Great, according to their interpretation of Isaiah 45.

An Opinion piece in the New York Times a few days ago shed some light on this Cyrus thing. I'll copy a few lines but it is worth reading.

Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

 They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

Of course, there is precedent.  Read 1 Samuel Ch 8. We know how that turned out.

Here is another article, the one I stole the picture from.

Remember Us by Martin Small and Vic Shayne - a book review

Many, if not most, of the histories written of the Holocaust, tend to be big picture overviews. The horrors of those who died or survived are viewed from a safe distance, perhaps as vignettes, while the story itself, intending to serve as a warning, can get lost in statistics and psychology. As Stalin said, one man's death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Remember Us is the story of one man's "journey from the Schtetl through the Holocaust".  If you recall the D-Day landing scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan, you will remember it was shot at waist height, close up. It revealed what the individual soldier saw. Total chaos, friends killed or wounded, no idea of progress except his own. 

That is how this book is written, up close and personal. All we know is what the author knows, all we see is what he sees. We feel his happiness, his pain and suffering, his loss, and finally his contentment and activism in his new life.

Martin Small was born Mordechai Lieb Schmulewicz in 1916 in the Polish town of Molozadcz, west of Minsk in what is now Belarus.  The Jews referred to their schtetl (small town) in Yiddish as Maitchet. The population was about 2000 people of which half were Jews and half Polish. They had lived side by side for centuries as had all the Jews and Gentiles in the villages, town, and cities of the Pale of Settlement. Everyone was poor and everyone struggled; they worked together because they had to.

There were two churches, Catholic and Orthodox, and one synagogue. The Catholic Church preached hatred as it had done for centuries. Jews were responsible for all the evil in the world from the death of Christ to the failure of crops.  The Orthodox priest was a kind and gentle man worried about anti-Semitism. The Jews were tolerated but despised for their way of life, their language, their education. They were second-class citizens and their future was never secure but they thrived in spite of it. On the street, Jews and Gentiles were friends and neighbours and had been for centuries.

Martin (Mordechai) spends a great deal of time describing life in the schtetl because he felt the loss of that way of life so greatly.  He was a scholar, studying at the local Yeshiva and traveling to other Yeshivas in other schtetls. Several chapters describe Jewish customs and traditions that he knew growing up and that had remained unchanged for centuries. Then in 1939 things began to change.  First, the Russians came but disrupted little.  However, a steady stream of Jewish refugees from the west began flowing through the village on their way east with horror stories which Mordechai and his community could not believe and ignored them as not happening to them.  Then the Germans came.

The villagers could hear the fighting in the distance but the Germans who came were SS Einsatzgruppen. They were welcomed by most of the Poles who suddenly found they were free to give full vent to their hatred of Jews and overnight turned into savage mobs.  Jews were hauled out of their homes, "beaten, burned, butchered", and shot. Their homes were ransacked and everything stolen. Mordechai and his friend Shmulek along with other men were tethered to a wagon and force-marched 30 km to Baranowicz (Baranovichi), the thriving city and Jewish centre of his youth. It had been turned into a holding centre and ghetto as had other cities with plenty of help from Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. The Jewish men were turned into slaves until their turn came to be shot.

Mordechai managed to escape and made his way back towards Maitchet.  He stopped at a farm whose Polish owner was a friend of his fathers and found them sheltering several Jews including Mordechai's cousin who informed him that his entire family had been driven to a pit outside of the village, shot and buried.  Moise was still alive and managed to crawl out in the night.  

The Jews scattered.  Mordechai was on the run in the forest where there were several Partisan groups, some of which were Jewish, some of which killed Jews on sight and some of which welcomed Jews. Mordechai kept moving but was eventually captured and sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria. Mauthausen was one of the oldest slave labour concentration camps, in operation from shortly after the Anschluss in 1938.  The complex of camps was built with private money as a profit-making enterprise based on slave labour. The main camp at Mauthausen was a Category III which meant the cruelest torture was to be used to exterminate the prisoners who were mainly Polish and Russian intelligentsia and finally Jews.  Life expectancy was 3 to 6 months. 

On April 5th, 1945, Mordechai's time ran out.  As the American army entered the camp, he lay on the floor, as skeleton among skeletons, with dead and dying scattered and piled around the camp.  A GI noticed there was a spark of life in one skeleton and carried the barely alive Mordechai to an ambulance. The chapters on Mauthausen are hard to read.  There is more detail in the Appendix told by the Americans who liberated the camp. Man's inhumanity to man knows no boundaries.

The remainder of the book tells of Mordechai's recovery, his time as a displaced person in camps in Italy, fighting the Egyptian Army in the 2948 War of Independence, immigration to New York where he was reunited with his mother's sister, Frieda, and her family, somewhat making up for those he lost. He changed his name to Martin Small for several reasons, the main one being to fit in as an American and eventually settled in Colorado, where he built a Holocaust Museum in his basement and spoke with student groups and others about his life.

At age 87 and over the next three years, with the help of Vic Shayne, he wrote his autobiography, "not so you will understand but so you will know you can never understand". . . "how friends and neighbours can turn to heartless killers overnight". 

Time to start blogging again

Many people have asked me to start blogging again. Sorry, couldn't resist.  Would you believe two people?

I needed a break.  I was physically tired and mentally tired of idiots on the left and right that well deserved rants so I contented myself with trolling them in the comments section rather than blogging.

I had a couple of interesting things to do that kept my mind from rotting entirely. Did some consulting work for a long time client and learned how to convert current prices into inflation-adjusted prices. And I was coerced into chairing the 50th reunion of 1969 College of Agriculture Graduates.

Every year the Saskatchewan Agricultural Graduates Association (SAGA) organizes a reunion of graduates from the College in early January. Any graduate is welcome to attend but specifically, those who graduated 10, 20, 30 etc years ago are encouraged.  2019 marks 50 years for our class. There were about 60 of us, including a half dozen who were in 4th year but graduated at a later date or not at all.  I started with contact information for about half and set out to track down the rest.

People lose touch with each other over the years and so not every graduate was contacted in past years. Ten years ago, I could not have done it but with the internet, you can run but not hide. Facebook, Google, 411, all helped as did knowing people who might know people. I got all but two graduates. Email addresses and phone numbers included.

We are not getting younger. Several of the guys (only one girl in the class) had no interest in coming back in January from their warm winter dwellings so we will discuss a summer reunion. We lost 6 of our class to various causes so will likely look at summer reunions every 5 years too as from here on in there will only be fewer of us.

Tanya was home all summer, returned the end of September. My ileostomy was reversed at the end of October so I am rid of my pouch finally, though persuading things to work after a 16-month hiatus was no simple task. After two months things are returning to normal. My next and I hope last surgery is scheduled for January or February sometime. I am sick of being sick but at least I am above ground still.

The family was all in Regina for Christmas. First time we had been together in 9 years. Of course, we forgot to take pictures but my second youngest is getting married in July so for sure we get pictures then.  And by then I hope to be well enough to go home.  It will have been two years. Tanya and I celebrated our 11th and 12th wedding anniversaries in Regina.  Time to go home.

Statues, History, and Whitewash

Statues and monuments have been in the news in Eastern Europe, United States and now Canada.

In Eastern Europe, counties of the former Soviet Union or members of the Warsaw Pact are ridding themselves of statues of Lenin and Soviet war memorials, changing the Soviet names of cities, towns, and streets. This, of course, infuriates Russia as it sees its influence slipping away. They claim it is "changing history". They should be "eternally grateful for the Soviet Army saving them from the Nazis". Essentially they just exchanged one set of butchers for another so the actions of these counties who feel the statues and monuments are just rubbing their face into it are understandable. Put some of them in museums as part of displays that explain what really happened. Destroy the rest.

There is a revolt in America against statues of Confederate "heroes" and attempts to pull them down have met with varying degrees of success. The bulk of them were put up at the beginning of Jim Crow or during the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's. They were there to remind Blacks that Whites were the master race and would keep them subjugated as long as possible in as many ways as available. Read about this dedication speech. But the cries of "politically correct" and "changing history" are heard often.  Some states have laws against removing them, guess which states. They need to be torn down and some put in museums as part of displays about Slavery, Jim Crow and |Civil Rights so people learn the truth, not just the version they were taught in school or fed on White Supremacy websites.

One of the scare tactics used by White Supremacists in support of keeping the Confederate Statues is that the politically correct class will come after statues of the Founding Father's next because they owned slaves. This is willful ignorance if they cannot distinguish between honouring the founders of a great nation vs honouring traitors. Now if there is a statue somewhere raised to honour a founding father BECAUSE he had slaves the sooner it is gone the better.

(American friends, do I understand this or am I oversimplifying?)

Ken Monkman - The Scream

Which brings us to Canada and Sir John A MacDonald, specifically. Sir John A was one of the Fathers of Confederation, Canada's first Prime Minister, and built the transcontinental railway. For that reason, he is revered in Canadian school books and there are statues of him in several cities, including Regina. Ours was installed in 1967 in honour of Canada's 100th birthday. We sort of knew he was no statesman, more of a sleazy politician with a fondness for booze and scandals involving using election funds for bribery.

Now we learn he was an overt racist, opposed to any people who were not White European, in particular, Chinese and further, while he helped found a nation he had no place in it for the indigenous people. He broke treaties, starved thousands of First Nations on reserves and was instrumental in setting up the residential schools. Tragedy doesn't begin to describe the Residential Schools where children were torn away from their parents, forced to give up language and culture and "assimilate" and were subject to physical, mental and sexual abuse. Many thousands died and are buried in unmarked graves. the survivors carry the scars and have passed their trauma down the generations. It is best referred to as Ethnic Cleansing and Cultural Genocide.

The statues of Sir John A are seen by First Nations people as rubbing their faces in the racism that MacDonald created as he established the relationship between Canada and First Nations. Especially in Saskatchewan but I suspect in every province where indigenous people were subjected to Residential Schools. The statues have to go, except perhaps in Ottawa. And his name removed from schools and other public buildings, along with all others named after people who were instrumental in the Residential Schools. Regina has already taken steps in that direction by renaming Davin School.

Nicholas Davin was sent by Ottawa to study the American Industrial Schools and came back with recommendations that Canada should imitate them. Davin School was opened in 1929. It was not likely named after him for the "Davin Report" but it was his claim to fame.

Some would argue that "everybody was doing it" but that breaks down as there were people who knew right from wrong and spoke against it. There were alternatives. Some call this "whitewashing" history but then some people have always had problems with definitions. Removing or renaming is not whitewashing; whitewashing is what we have been doing for generations in hiding the truth and pretending it never happened. History books must begin to include the ugly side of Canadian history. Students in renamed schools could get a special lesson on why the school was renamed eg that presents both sides of Nicholas Davin.

No person in history is without flaws but we need to weigh the flaws against the other achievements, decide when, where, how, or even IF, that person should be honoured.  And teach Canadian history warts and all.

Editing Software - Perfect It

Intelligent Editing has a software package called  PerfectIt, which I discovered several days ago.  Some software packages I have fallen in love with were pretty specific to certain kinds of work. PerfectIt can be used by anyone who writes anything. It came with a 14-day free trial so I downloaded it and ran my 165 page consulting report through it. It found hundreds of errors and inconsistencies.

It does not do ordinary spell checking but does tell you if you spelled a word more than one way. It does not replace having another human go over your document but it saves them hours of work. It does NOT automatically change anything - YOU are in control of all editing changes it finds. For example, a word might be spelled two different ways deliberately eg behaviour in the text of your document but behavior if you are quoting from an American source. PerfectIt will notify you but you don't change it.

This software would be perfect for academics, students, writers, consultants, bureaucrats, in fact, anyone that produces documents longer than a few pages on a consistent basis. I'm hoping to convince two of my kids, some of their friends, several of my friends to at least try it.  I may have already made a sale to my oldest as she ran a 30 page report through the trial version I had and was some impressed with what all it found.

Try it; you'll like it. Currently priced at USD $70 per year.

Here, in a few words, is what it does (from their website):

Abbreviations
Consistent Presentation: Check for consistent presentation of abbreviations (e.g. Nasa/NASA/N.A.S.A.).

A Definition for Every Abbreviation: Ensure that every abbreviation is defined the first time it appears. 

Defined When Presented: Make sure each abbreviation is defined only once, defined only in one way, and only used if it appears more than once.

Capitalization

Consistent Capitalization of Words & Phrases: Check proper names, processes and business terms for capitalization consistency.

Heading Capitalization: Enforce consistent capitalization across headings, such as sentence case or title case.

House Capitalization Rules: You can set PerfectIt to check your house style to ensure that capitalization in all documents reflects your brand guidelines.

House Style

Phrases to Avoid: Make sure every document produced by your organization does not include insensitive, inappropriate or dated terminology and language.

Uniform Branding: Create style sheets to reflect your presentation rules and your brand image.

Unified Voice: Enforce style preferences so that all writers in your organization speak with one voice.

Hyphens/Dashes

Consistent Hyphenation: Enforce consistent use of hyphens and dashes in common words and phrases, as well as complex terms of art or proper names.

Compounds, Numbers & Directions: Apply consistent hyphenation for prefixes, numbers, fractions, and directions.

Bullets and Lists

List Punctuation: Enforce consistent punctuation, such as periods or semi-colons, in lists and bullets.

Capitals in Bullets, Lists & Tables: Enforce consistent capitalization, such as sentence case or initial case in tables or initial capitals for lists and bullets.

Table Punctuation: Check for consistent punctuation in each cell.

Spelling, Typos, and Numbers

Spelling Errors & Typos: Check for errors that spellcheck won’t catch, including common typing mistakes (e.g. 'manger' instead of 'manager') and embarrassing errors.

Inconsistent Spelling: Check for individual words spelled in more than one way (e.g. 'adviser' and 'advisor').

Consistent Use of Numbers in Sentences: Correct numbers in sentences that were written as numerals but should be spelled out (and vice versa).

Table/Figure Numbering

Table & Figure Order: Find if tables appear in the correct order (e.g. Table 4 should not be before Table 3, which is an easy mistake to make when copy/pasting in multiple author documents).

Table & Figure Headers: Check for missing table/figure headings as well as inconsistent naming.

NOTE: Since I wrote Intelligent editing about how much I liked the software, they offered me 30% discount to buy it. I figured they should wait until I sell a few copies first.