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  • Generations and Cousins at Dyckman: Broadening Our Chances for Genetic Refreshment

    *The Dyckman Family Farmhouse perched above Broadway at 204th Street, New York City. The Dutch Colonial style farmhouse was built on this site by c. 1784. Opened as a museum in 1916, today it is nestled in a small garden.

                                              Dyckman Farmhouse

     Profiled in The New York Times on 6/27/15, as Two Reasons to Visit Inwood: Dyckman Farmhouse Museum and Darling Coffee 

    By Julia Sneden

    My eldest son, a public school teacher, called me the other night with an odd request. The principal of his school, for one of those team-building exercises teachers must endure during the week before the children show up in the classroom, had asked that each faculty member come to the first faculty meeting prepared to tell something that no one else knew about them.

    “I’ve taught with most of these people for so long a time that it’s hard to think of much that they don’t know about me,” John said, “but I doubt anyone knows that I am my own 8th cousin. Could Dad write down for me how my brothers and I are related to each other beyond being brothers?”

    It pays to have a father with good academic credentials, a man who absolutely loves doing research of any kind. Genealogy is just one of his sidelines, but it is probably the one that has drawn the most attention from the rest of the family. He long ago became Mr. Go-To for all questions of who lived where and when and with whom, and how are we related to them. And if he couldn’t find the answers in his charts and files, he knew which library to check, or which great uncle or aunt to query.

    It didn’t take him ten minutes to supply son John with the graphics for his 8th cousinship (although I seem to have been needed as typist/intermediary). That 8th cousinship dates back to the 1700’s, when one Jacob Dyckman had, among his many children, a son named William, and a daughter named Margaret. William grew up to marry a woman named Mary Tourneur, and Margaret married a man named Captain Jonathan Odell.

    The couples each had many children, who were, of course, first cousins. Among these were a William Dyckman Jr., and an Abraham Odell. Our sons’ line descends from them, through the eight generations, as follows:

                                         

    Dyckman line                                                     COUSINS                                                        Odell line

    Son Wm Dyckman Jr. m. Marie Smith             (1st )                   Son Abraham married. Ann Mandeville

    Son Evert B. Dyckman m. Harriet Hinckley   (2nd)                    Son William Odell m. Rebecca Stymes

    Dau. Prudence Dyckman m. Samuel Cobb      (3rd)                    Dau. Ann Janette Odell m. Daniel B. Leach

    Dau. Carra Cobb m. Henry W. Barnhart          (4th)                     Dau. Sara Jane Leach m. John E. Aitken    

    Dau. Prudence Barnhart m. E.D. Brown         (5th)                     Dau. Ann Janette Aitken m.Rob’t N. Sneden

    Son Orrin Henry Brown m. Mary E. Kelsey    (6th)                     Son John A. Sneden Sr. m. Jean Mackey

    Dau. Julia C. Brown m. John A. Sneden, Jr.    (7th)                    Son John A. Sneden Jr. m. Julia C. Brown

                    Our sons John III, William, and Robert are thus their own 8th cousins /

    As you may have guessed, telling this short tale brought several wisecracks from Johnny’s peers, who maintain that the inbreeding explains many aspects of his personality, intelligence, etc. Fortunately, such remarks don’t dent his self-esteem one bit, since he has, you may be sure, heard them all from his brothers, and handed out the same to them.

  • A Ten-Second Earthquake Alert: An Early-Warning System Across the US One Day

    south napa earthquake

    Damage to the US Post Office building in Napa, California, August 24, 2014, and known as the South Napa earthquake. Matthew Keys, Wikimedia Commons

    “Earthquake…. earthquake…” That was the warning to scientists at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory at 3:20 a.m. Sunday morning, 10 seconds before the 6.0 magnitude temblor along the Napa Fault rattled people and buildings from wine country down to Berkeley and San Francisco. It came from the ShakeAlert system being tested by UC Berkeley, Caltech, the US Geological Survey and other partners.

    Richard Allen, the lab’s director, wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature that action taken last fall by Gov. Jerry Brown to create a California earthquake early-warning system should be followed by the United States and other countries, “rather than waiting until the next big quake galvanizes political action” because of loss of life and property.

    In October 2013, University of California, Berkeley released the story that follows. Warning, the alert is a loud sound followed by a message.

    US should follow California lead on earthquake early warning, expert says.

     

    Although California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill last week to create a statewide earthquake early warning system, the United States is still behind the curve in embracing technology that has proven to save lives, lessen damage and speed recovery after a major quake.

    Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, makes this argument in a commentary in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. And he says it’s time to institute an early warning system in this country, “rather than waiting until the next big quake galvanizes political action” because of loss of life and property.

    Gov. Brown’s signing on Sept. 24 was “very exciting news, and something that we have been working toward for more than a decade,” said Allen, who is a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the state’s major proponents of an early warning system. “This bill will bring earthquake alerts to everyone in California.”

  • Culture Watch. A The Art of Mystery Writing: What’s in a Series? The Latest Books of Andrea Camilleri, Linda Fairstein, Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling), Donna Leon and Louise Penny

     By Jill NorgrenMiss Maple card

    Title Card for the BBC One television series based on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries

    Why do mystery writers create a series? Obviously, the pleasure of developing characters over time has appeal as well as the opportunity to explore varying issues within an established framework. Doting fans and good money also speak to the attractiveness of the genre.

    On the other side of the table sit the readers. What is the pull of a series for them, and does a series ever lose its allure? The recent publication of new works by Andrea Camilleri, Linda Fairstein, Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling), Donna Leon, and Louise Penny raises that question.

    Italian author and stage director Andrea Camilleri is a prolific writer. Seventeen of his novels have been translated into English, many of them volumes in the Inspector Montalbano series. The Sicilian police officer made his debut in 1994 in The Shape of Water (available in 2002 in English).   Human behavior fascinates the inspector, particularly greed, revenge, and jealousy. In his private life Montalbano is a foodie.He smokes, drinks, sleeps irregularly, and cheats on his long-time, live-apart lady friend. In Angelica’s Smile, the latest Montalbano mystery to be translated into English, the inspector is world weary and contemplating retirement. This might be best as Angelica’s Smile, with its forced Keystone cops quality, is thin, labored, and plain old tired.

    Thin and tired epitomizes many mystery series that do not stop after six or eight episodes. Readers know the characters and their locales too well, and the quality of the writing often slips. Sadly, Donna Leon’s latest, By Its Cover, also fails to be much more than a pleasant short story. Like Camilleri, the formula has worn to a veneer despite Leon’s admirable interest in putting social issues at the center of her plots. Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti is the epitome of a decent, smart man capable of mocking Italian bureaucracy. He is also a foodie. Unlike Montalbano, however, Brunetti is a faithful husband. Several volumes back Leon imbued the charming assistant Electtra with the ability to carry out mysterious, commanding internet investigations. This nod to techno-interests works well but in By Its Cover does not save Leon’s story, one centering upon the theft of rare library materials.

    J. K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) has just published The Silkworm, the second of her Comoran Strike crime novels. Rowling launched the series in 2013 with the appealing Cuckoo’s Calling. In that debut effort she introduced her central characters Cormoran Strike, a twenty-first century detective hero who brings the genre’s typical love life problems to the less than typical persona of a veteran of the Afghan war who has lost his lower right leg, and is the barely acknowledged son of one of rock music’s most famous swingers. Rowling pairs Strike with Robin, his about-to-be-married assistant who agonizes whether her inner Nancy Drew will be compatible with house and hearth. 

    The Cuckoo’s Calling succeeded because it was well paced and set in the glitzy world of pop culture.  In The Silkworm Rowling turns to a world she knows well, authors and publishing houses. Unfortunately, the book has a gray and bloated quality. Strike’s wounded heart pulls the book down and despite Rowling’s knowledge of literary professionals, she is not particularly successful in giving them compelling voice. The introduction of Al, Strike’s half-brother, offers the promise of new plot directions and colorful characters. Perhaps, Rowling will regain her footing in the third Strike novel.

  • Can’t Wait Until Downton Abbey’s New Season? There’s Always ‘Breathless’ Starting This Weekend

    Cast of Breathless

     

    Starring alongside Jack Davenport (Pirates of the Caribbean, Smash) in this stylish story of a dark secret amid the complexities of the sexual revolution are Zoe Boyle (Downton Abbey), Catherine Steadman (Mansfield Park), Iain Glen (Downton Abbey), Natasha Little (Case Histories), Oliver Chris (Sharpe’s Challenge), Joanna Page (Love Actually), and Shaun Dingwall (Touching Evil).

    Set in London in 1961, “Breathless” follows the exploits of doctors, nurses, and spouses connected with a busy obstetrics ward at a National Health Service hospital. It’s a time when gynecologists are all men and nurses aspire to a trip down the aisle with a good-looking doctor. Abortion is illegal, the Beatles are still nobodies, and society is on the cusp of profound change.

    No one seems to have more going for him than Otto Powell (Davenport), a well-off gynecologist who can perform miracles in the operating room and has a trophy wife (Little) and a bright, well-mannered son (Rudi Goodman). Otto also has a wandering eye, which alights most recently on new nurse Angela Wilson (Steadman), who plays uncommonly hard-to-get.

    Unknown to all, Angela is already married — although abandoned years earlier —- and is the sister of another of Otto’s nurse conquests, Jean (Boyle). Jean is now engaged to Otto’s posh colleague Richard Truscott (Chris), due to failure to take contraceptive precautions. Angela and Jean hide their relationship in order to aid Jean’s climb up the social ladder.

    Both sisters are mixed up in Otto’s occasional “specials” — secret abortions that he performs with anesthesiologist Charlie Enderbury (Dingwall) out of concern for the health of women in dire straits. All risk imprisonment for their deeds — a prospect that is increasingly worrying to Charlie. Meanwhile Charlie’s wife, Lily (Page), cheerily tries to cope with his strange moods, not helped by the arrival of an officious new anesthesiologist, Omprakash Mehta (Ronny Jhutti), who is suspicious of Charlie’s moonlighting.

    The plot thickens considerably with the appearance of Chief Inspector Ronald Mulligan (Glen), an obsessed detective who thinks out-of-the-box. The dots he is connecting link some of the characters to events in another country and a different decade. It’s an inquiry that leaves protagonists, not to mention viewers … breathless.

    Airs on MASTERPIECE on PBS: Sundays, August 24 to September 7; Check Local Listings. The DVD for the program can be found at PBSand at Amazon.

  • A Moment We’ve Been Waiting For: Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on ordinary AAA battery

    Hongjie Dai and colleagues have developed a cheap, emissions-free device that uses a 1.5-volt battery to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen gas could be used to power fuel cells in zero-emissions vehicles

    By Mark Shwartz

    Stanford graduate student Ming Gong, left, and Professor Hongjie Dai have developed a low-cost electrolytic device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen at room temperature.  (Photo by Mark Shwartz / Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy)

    In 2015, American consumers will finally be able to purchase fuel cell cars from Toyota and other manufacturers. Although touted as zero-emissions vehicles, most of the cars will run on hydrogen made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

    Now scientists at Stanford University have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis.  The battery sends an electric current through two electrodes that split liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron.

    “Using nickel and iron, which are cheap materials, we were able to make the electrocatalysts active enough to split water at room temperature with a single 1.5-volt battery,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. “This is the first time anyone has used non-precious metal catalysts to split water at a voltage that low. It’s quite remarkable, because normally you need expensive metals, like platinum or iridium, to achieve that voltage.”

    In addition to producing hydrogen, the novel water splitter could be used to make chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide, an important industrial chemical, according to Dai. He and his colleagues describe the new device in a study published in the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

    Automakers have long considered the hydrogen fuel cell a promising alternative to the gasoline engine.  Fuel cell technology is essentially water splitting in reverse. A fuel cell combines stored hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air to produce electricity, which powers the car. The only byproduct is water – unlike gasoline combustion, which emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.source splitting water into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2)

    This image shows two electrodes connected via an external voltage source splitting water into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2). The illuminated silicon electrode (left) uses light energy to assist in the water-splitting process and is protected from the surrounding electrolyte by a 2-nm film of nickel. (Illustration: Guosong Hong, Stanford University)

    Earlier this year, Hyundai began leasing fuel cell vehicles in Southern California. Toyota and Honda will begin selling fuel cell cars in 2015. Most of these vehicles will run on fuel manufactured at large industrial plants that produce hydrogen by combining very hot steam and natural gas, an energy-intensive process that releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

    Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases. But scientists have yet to develop an affordable, active water splitter with catalysts capable of working at industrial scales.

    “It’s been a constant pursuit for decades to make low-cost electrocatalysts with high activity and long durability,” Dai said. “When we found out that a nickel-based catalyst is as effective as platinum, it came as a complete surprise.”

  • Get to Know a Frog, or a Worm, or a Fish Says Sylvia Earle; Everybody has a vote. Use it to help sustain the environment

    Sylvia Earle and an Albatross

    Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle spends a moment with Wisdom, a Laysan albatross. US Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters, Wikimedia Commons

    Editor’s Note: Sandi Smith’s interview with Syvlia Earle some 13 years ago doesn’t seem out-of-date as the lady herself is just as current*. She will turn 79 on August 30th, 2014

    Speak to Sylvia Earle for any length of time and you soon realize that no matter what questions you ask, the talk always returns to ecology and conservation of our oceans. No surprise there — she’s spent her life increasing our knowledge about life under the sea. She doesn’t preach, but simply and logically presents the facts. “We’re not apart from nature, we’re a part of it. And to the extent that we continue to damage the natural systems, we are jeopardizing our own future.”

    At 65 Earle has no intention of retiring. “I’m just beginning as far as I’m concerned. Right now I’m in the process of writing an ocean atlas for National Geographic. No one has ever done an atlas for the ocean before. It will sum up what we know. But there is so much that we don’t know.”

    Leading the way and setting records comes naturally to her. “When you really want to do something, you find a way to make it happen. I remember wanting to go to sea and being told that women were bad luck as recently as the sixties.” She often was the only woman aboard during early expeditions. She led the first team of women aquanauts who lived underwater for two weeks in 1970. Earle was the first solo diver to descend to 1250 feet without a tether. In 1985 she piloted a remotely operated submersible to 328′ feet. Between 1990 and 1992, she served as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the first woman to ever hold the position.

    The head of more than 50 worldwide expeditions and author of more 100 books and articles about marine science and technology, Earle says, “The more you discover about our oceans, the more you find there is to discover, so you just keep going.” I caught up with Dr. Earle at her Oakland, California home between explorations for the National Geographic Society. She serves as explorer-in-residence and was heading out to sea again the next day.

    Earle grew up on a small New Jersey farm with her two brothers. “My mother advised me that I’d have to get used to the idea that there were things my brothers could do that I couldn’t. I thought that was absurd.” The family moved to Florida for a better climate when she was 12. The Gulf of Mexico became her back yard, which increased her fascination with biology and the oceans. “I had the Gulf as my personal laboratory. I observed and explored and took careful notes.”

    Was it difficult for a woman to get started in ocean sciences during the sixties? Earle said that when she decided to become a botanist, she met considerable resistance to the idea of a woman being involved in any science. “Women were discouraged. But I didn’t listen to the people who said science wasn’t appropriate for women. I just knew I wanted to work with plants and animals, and the oceans have the greatest diversity in life on the planet.”

    Her lifelong love of the sea began on a family vacation to the Jersey shore when she was three. I asked what the attraction was and she said, “Critters. Horseshoe crabs on the New Jersey beaches were irresistible and I still find them irresistible. Since then I’ve learned about the existence of so many other creatures and it just gets better. I always preferred frogs to dolls. And I watched people bring sick animals and birds with broken wings to my mother to take care of.”

  • Thirty Minutes of Terror in the Skies: Shedding Light on Risk Factors and PTSD

    Editor’s Note: We’re currently reading an excellent non-fiction account by Laurence Gonzales of the crash of a United Air Lines DC-10 in July 1989. Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.  It makes the moments before and after the flight even terrifying for the reader. 184 passengers survived out of the 296 passengers and crew on board.generic pix of plane over water

    f memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a group of Air Transat passengers who experienced 30 minutes of terror over the Atlantic Ocean in 2001 sheds light on a potential risk factor that could help predict who is most vulnerable to PTSD.

    The study findings, to be published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that PTSD may be linked with how a person processes memory for details of events in general, rather than memory specifically related to traumatic events.

    The study is novel, say the researchers at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto who conducted the study, because it involves detailed interviews and psychological testing in individuals exposed to the same life-threatening traumatic event. In fact, Margaret McKinnon, first author on the study, was a passenger on the plane.

    In late August 2001, Air Transat flight 236 departed Toronto for Lisbon, Portugal with 306 passengers and crew on board. Midway over the Atlantic Ocean, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. Everyone onboard was instructed to prepare for an ocean ditching, which included a countdown to impact, loss of on-board lighting, and cabin de-pressurization. About 25 minutes into the emergency, the pilot located a small island military base in the Azores and glided the aircraft to a rough landing with no loss of life and few injuries.”Imagine your worst nightmare — that’s what it was like,” said McKinnon, who initiated the study as a postdoctoral fellow at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. She is now a clinician-scientist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and Associate Co-Chair of Research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

    “This wasn’t just a close call where your life flashes before your eyes in a split second and then everything is okay,” she said. The sickening feeling of “I’m going to die” lasted an excruciating 30 minutes as the plane’s systems shut down.

    Following the incident, McKinnon and her colleagues at Baycrest recruited 15 passengers to participate in the study.

    Using their knowledge of the moment-to-moment unfolding of events in this disaster, the researchers were able to probe both the quality and accuracy of passengers’ memories for the flight in great detail along with their memories for two other events (September 11, 2001 and a neutral event from the same time period).

    The researchers found that the Flight 236 passengers showed tremendously enhanced vivid memories of the plane emergency. However, neither the vividness nor accuracy of memory was associated with onset of PTSD. Rather, passengers with PTSD recalled a higher number of details external to the main event (i.e. details that were not specific in time, or were repetitions or editorial statements) compared to passengers who did not have PTSD and to healthy controls.

    This pattern was observed across all three events tested, not just the traumatic event, suggesting that it is not just memory for the trauma itself that is related to PTSD, but rather how a person processes memory for events in general.

    “What our findings show is that it is not what happened but to whom it happened that may determine subsequent onset of PTSD,” said Brian Levine, senior scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute and the University of Toronto and senior author of the study.

    This inability to shut out external or semantic details when recalling personally-experienced memories is related to mental control over memory recall, adding to a growing body of evidence that altered memory processing may be a vulnerability factor for PTSD.

    (This research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the National Institute of Mental Health.)

  • Where Do We Die: Hospice Care, Caregiver Evaluations & Preferring to Die at Home

     

    Biglin Brother Racing

    Thomas Eakins, 1844 – 1916, The Biglin Brothers Racing, 1872. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

    About 1 in 5 Medicare patients is discharged from hospice care alive, whether due to patients’ informed choice, a change in their condition, or inappropriate actions by the hospice to save on hospitalization costs related to terminal illness.

    How live discharge rates differ between hospice programs and geographic regions, and when those rates should raise red flags are among the issues explored in the article,  A National Study of Live Discharges from Hospice, published in Journal of Palliative Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc, publishers.

    The article is available free on the Journal of Palliative Medicine website until September 13, 2014.

    Joan M. Teno, MD, Pedro Gozalo, PhD, and Vincent Mor, PhD, Brown University School of Public Health (Providence, RI), and Michael Plotzke, PhD, Abt Associates (Cambridge, MA), examined all of the Medicare hospice discharges in the US between January 1 to December 31, 2010.

    For the patients discharged alive, they gathered data on survival for up to 6 months, subsequent hospitalizations, and Medicare payments during the 30 days after live hospice discharge. The authors provide details on the substantial variation they found in the rates of live discharges across states and between individual hospices, in particular comparing not-for-profit to for-profit hospice programs and more mature programs versus those that had been in operation for 5 years or less.

    “The phenomenon of hospice patients ‘graduating’ because they get better with hospice care is well known. But, all patients discharged days to weeks before death is very strange,” says Charles F. von Gunten, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Palliative Medicine and Vice President, Medical Affairs, Hospice and Palliative Medicine for OhioHealth (Columbus, OH).

    (Journal of Palliative Medicine is the official journal of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) and an official journal of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association.)

    Editor’s Note: Below is another article we found that will have relevance with the many caregivers we have encountered over the years through SeniorWomen.com.

    The final article cited  is one which  co-authored by the article cited above in Palliative Care Journal, Dr. Joan Teno and using  Medicare claims data for 2000, 2005, and 2009, documents places of care and health care transitions for Medicare decedents in the last months of life.

    Caregiver Evaluation of the Quality of End-Of-Life Care (CEQUEL) Scale: The Caregiver’s Perception of Patient Care Near Death

    • Philip C. Higgins,  Holly G. Prigerson 

    Purpose: End-of-life (EOL) measures are limited in capturing caregiver assessment of the quality of EOL care. Because none include caregiver perception of patient suffering or prolongation of death, we sought to develop and validate the Caregiver Evaluation of Quality of End-of-Life Care (CEQUEL) scale to include these dimensions of caregiver-perceived quality of EOL care.

  • Today in DOD: Daily coverage of activities and a tribute to Robin Williams

    Editor’s Note: I have been married to men who were  US military service members.  First as wife of an Army Security Agency member in Germany while I worked for Army Special Services in Frankfurt and, later (and still today), as the wife of a former Air Force Public Affairs Agency member who served in Viet Nam. During those years, the military draft was still in effect, and while our husbands were in Viet Nam, I was one of three wives who met each week in Sarasota, FL as our husbands served, and we lived off base. Unlike today, we had little chance to communicate with our husbands except through letters and once to meet in Hawaii on R&R after the Tet offensive.

    What follows is taken from the DoD’s site picturing some of their daily coverage of the Department’s activities during the month of August. 

    Best Warrior Competition, Germany

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    08/15/2014

    Best Warrior Competition, Germany

    U.S. Army 1st Lt. Mitch Messick crawls out from a tunnel during the Joint Multinational Training Command’s Best Warrior Competition on Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Aug. 12, 2014. Messick is assigned to Company A, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Gertrud Zach

    Winnefeld at National Defense University

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    08/15/2014

    Winnefeld at National Defense University

    Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks to students and spouses attending a Capstone course at the National Defense University on Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., Aug. 15, 2014. The objective of the six-week course for senior defense leaders is to improve their effectiveness in planning and employing U.S. forces in joint and combined operations. The course is mandatory for senior officers in the U.S. military. DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel Hinton

    Dempsey Visits Hanoi, Vietnam

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    08/14/2014

    Dempsey Visits Hanoi, Vietnam

    U.S. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meets members of his Vietnamese counterpart’s staff upon his arrival at the Ministry of Defense in Hanoi, Vietnam, Aug. 14, 2014. The ministry manages, coordinates and supervises military affairs, including all military units, paramilitary units and similar agencies in the country. DoD photo by D. Myles Cullen


    U.S., Canadian Troops Train

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    08/14/2014

    U.S., Canadian Troops Train

    U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Lionel Gillis, center, explains a mission to a tactical air control party before boarding a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during Operation Northern Strike near Alpena, Mich., Aug. 7, 2014. Operation Northern Strike is a multinational combined arms training exercise. Gillis is assigned to the Illinois Air National Guard’s 182nd Air Support Operations Group and the airmen are joint tactical air controllers assigned to the Illinois Air National Guard’s 169th Air Support Operations Squadron. National Guard photo by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Scott Thompson


    Robin Williams: True Friend to Troops

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    08/13/2014

    Robin Williams: True Friend to Troops

    Celebrities Lee Ann Tweeden and Charles Clark autograph footballs that comedian Robin Williams will toss to U.S. troops on Camp Al Tahreer in Baghdad, Dec. 14, 2004.  U.S. Army photo by by Sgt. Dan Purcell

  • Pets, Pleasures, a Black and White Great Dane and a Kleenex Cat

    By Joan L. CannonThe Yearling

    Reams have been written about how animals — pets, in most cases — contribute to the comfort of human lives. Most of us have wept over Flag in The Yearling, Black Beauty, Old Yeller, and many more. Even unfortunate city kids have an inkling of what fur-bearers offer in tacit sympathy and devotion. They see homeless people hugging a stray and get the message. The more fortunate have known a number of animals intimately.

    One of the things about animals to me is their place as memory triggers. Our family has a small number of members who are unaware of what they’ve been missing all their lives, and it makes me wonder if it’s too late to show them. My son-in-law is allergic to cats. I don’t know about his sons, who are polite to our dogs. No one in that group seems ever to have wished for a pet. It makes me nervous about their children, should they ever have any. Certainly I’ll never forget my mother taking a switch to my legs when she caught me trying to frighten our cat our from under a bush where he’d hidden. There was no answer to her question of how I’d like that, as I rubbed my stinging calves.

     My own earliest memory of an animal is our cat Pusskit. A big tiger tom, he used to get up on the kitchen counter and steal cantaloupe slices if my mother hadn’t put them in the refrigerator. Other than his color and size, that’s all I recall of him, He was followed by a big black and white female improbably called Snowball. While we had her, I acquired a reject from the biology lab’s nutrition experiments in what would now be called middle school. A white rat still showing evidence of malnutrition that I named Confucius. He loved to ride on my shoulders under my hair that was clipped at the nape with a big barrette. He would poke his pink nose and pinker eyes out under one of my ears and let his tail hang out under the other.

    One day I came home from school to find Confucius inside his large cage along with Snowball. I have no idea what would have happened if I hadn’t dragged her out, but when I found them, they were both hunkered down just staring at each other. By the time he found another home, Confucius was sleek and spotlessly white.

    Having been sent to a ‘progressive’ camp at the age of six, I was early introduced to wild creatures. In my day, summer camps would hold reunions in the winter, presumably to attract clients for the following summer. The first one we went to featured home movies of camp activities. It’s possible that the first frames on the reel were ill-chosen. They showed me with a fair-sized garter snake around my neck, and a smaller one in each hand. I remember audible gasps and three or four prospect mothers departing in haste. Of course I didn’t understand why at the time.

    This was the period when I took care of a handsome terrarium occupied by some kind of tree frog. We got it at Wanamaker’s pet shop, which was where I went every week to buy live mealworms to feed it. That’s where I got my white mice named Punch and Judy. By now you know my mother was an animal lover, or she would never have tolerated such a menagerie. I remember that Punch and Judy learned to lift the sliding door of their cage so they could wander in my bedroom at will. We kept the door shut because of the cat. My mother was unnerved by the possibility that she might inadvertently vacuum one or both of these little things up because the soot in Manhattan in the thirties (before anthracite as the common heating fuel) was legendary.