Stories – Dennis C Merritt

Russell

My cousin, Russell Merritt, recently passed away. I was asked to talk at his memorial for a family perspective. The other nine speakers were all people from his various walks of life presenting a wonderful overview of the lives he touched. Here are my comments.

We had a small family. I was an only child as was my mother. My dad had a brother, my Uncle Dan who, with Aunt Joyce, had my cousins Russell and Carole. They were a little older than me, and Carole always remembers them enjoying me coming to visit as she and Russell would argue over who would get to play with me. I don’t remember that too much, but I do remember enjoying seeing how they interacted, the connection between them. The laughter, the in jokes, the twinkle in their eyes.

Carole’s Stories

Carole said she thought growing up with Russell was just how siblings were. She had no idea how special it was, with Russell coming up with all sorts of ideas for adventures and games for them to play. The ideas weren’t simple. Like the time Russell thought they should play disc jockey. Well you couldn’t just do that. First the the room had to be cleaned and set up like a studio, then the playlists had to be worked out, and the commercials, and everything just so for putting on a disc jockey show.

They had secrets as kids, hiding from their mother. Like one hide out was behind the “whistling” door, which turns out to have been a cabinet with a squeaky door that little kids could crawl behind and read their comic books with flashlights. Carole suspects their mother knew…

I wonder how much of Russell’s development was fueled by his willing partner, Carole, in those early childhood adventures.

Carole was not the student Russell was and she always marveled at how different they were. I remember when Russell was finely getting ready to start teaching and Carole said, “Fail a few for me Russ” and Russell said he would.

Sherlock Holmes & Wilbur

Of course Russell is remembered for his love of all things Sherlockian. He’d explained to me that that was started by our grandfather, Wilbur. Apparently something was lost one day, and Wilbur told Russell he’d help him solve the mystery of the missing item, but, he said, it will require careful logical thought. We need to think like Sherlock Holmes. Russell was hooked.

It probably wasn’t much after that that we started hearing stories of Russell’s exploits and I remember he had built this detailed scale model of 221b Baker St.

Puzzle

Here’s a family puzzle requiring Sherlockian analysis. Wilbur and Mary were married and were grandpa and grandma to Russell, Carole and me. Mary was our mutual biological grandmother. Wilbur, however, was not Russell’s or Carole’s biological grandfather, but he was mine. There was nothing illegitimate, everyone rightfully married, or remarried, so how could that be? Contact me if you think you know the answer, or want to know. It’s classic Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

A clue… From left to right: my Uncle Dan, Grandma Mary, my mom (Aunt Peg), me, Russell, my Aunt Joyce, Grandpa Wilbur, Carole. Photo by my father (Uncle Ralph).

MWA in New York

One of Russell’s story of growing up involved him getting involved with the Mystery Writers of America chapter in New York City. It was easy to take a train from where they lived in N.J. so Russell found them and hooked up with them. They made a deal with him. If he cut school and came into the city and spent his morning working on his writing, then they would help him make letters of excuse for missing school, and he could spend the afternoon exploring the city.

It was a great deal, but the problem was, these being mystery writers, all the excuses involved a death in the family.

This went on for awhile, but eventually the school got suspicious. What I loved was Russell telling me the story, laughing as he told it. “My mother was furious, but not at what I’d done. What she was really mad at was that I had only killed off relatives on her side of the family. I didn’t kill you, or Aunt Peg, or Uncle Ralph…”

Christmas Goose

Growing up there was one Christmas where Russell made a show of dinner. He was in high school and got it in his head he wanted to make a full Dickens Christmas with a roast goose and all the trimmings. Who does something like that in high school?

That Christmas Carole and I got more playing time together and I don’t think either of us at the time appreciated or understood what an amazing thing he was doing. The grownups were all impressed though, and I am now.

Wedding

My biggest regret was when Russell and Karen got married. My dad went, but he recommended I pass as weddings were boring. I guess he didn’t know Russell that well… I suspect many here were part of that spectacle. What a show it must have been.

Reunions

Time passed and our parents were dying. We hadn’t seen each other for years, but there we were at the funeral of some parent, just standing there, and someone said something funny and we all just started to laugh and laugh until we cried. We said we need to get together more often cause we’re running out of parents.

Then it was Aunt Martha, don’t ask, who died and second? cousin Al and his wife Linda and we started having the family reunions. I put a question mark there because our family history those few generations back was pretty confusing. Like Aunt Martha was an aunt of our fathers except not really much older than them.

Who steered our way through that history? Russell. He had all the players and their comings and going and could explain why we were all related to the first post mistress of the Panama Canal Zone, and at each reunion we would go through it again and laugh at our confusion and write it all down so next time…

One character in the history was our ne’er-do-well grandfather, Ralph Merritt senior, who apparently had left our dads when they were around five. (That’s why Grandma Mary remarried.) Our dads would never talk about him, so we knew next to nothing. But Russell’s research dug out something. He found an obituary in a New York paper describing a car crash on the highways around New York.

There was a core at the reunions, me, Russell, Karen, Carole, Butch, Al and Linda, but then there were other family members always there as well, my son and his family, my daughter, Carole’s son and granddaughter Ali and for Mike and myself, our wives.

I always enjoyed hearing Russell at the reunions, just the wide range of stuff he was interested in, but for me, one of the biggest highlights was seeing him interact with Carole, laughing at the same jokes, doing the same routines they had as kids — “zip it”— and all with that same twinkle in their eyes I remembered from those years past.

And on a similar note, to see the love he shared with Karen, well it was just a pleasure to be around.

Grandboys

My grand boys were at the reunions as well, Juan, Diego and Miguel. Russell always enjoyed interacting with them, and I’ve since heard they were a highlight of the reunions for him. He shared a love of chess with them.

Film too, maybe it’s in the genes somewhere? but the boys started making movies a while back. The last communication I had with Russell was when I told him Diego was in Italy and taking Italian film classes. Russell sent back an email with all sorts of films that Diego might enjoy watching. Not just a list of films, but films in categories, historically important, good, and maybe of more interest to a younger generation.

Sigh, it would have been great to see that connection grow…

La Noche de las Tortugas

The Night of the Turtles

I got to spend another week in Cancun getting more work done at (product placements coming) Cancun Dental Specialists. I stayed at the Flamingo Resort hotel which is right across the street. The dental work was good, as was the resort, but that’s not what this is about.

Walking along the beach one day I saw some strange tracks.

With a groove down the middle between two scalloped rows…

I wondered what could have made them. They all connected the sea and deep, freshly dug, depressions, three or four feet in diameter.

And then I thought — Sea Turtles!

A woman with excellent English and a French? accent came out from a condo on the beach where I was standing. She saw me taking pictures and came out and explained.

It was turtles. They come out at night and lay their eggs which then take weeks before they hatch. But there’s a problem. Frigate birds, which I loved watching fly, were hanging out just waiting for baby turtles to eat.

Hmmm, is that why I saw so many when I first arrived?

They have a six to seven foot wing span..

So, she and her husband would wait for the turtles to hatch and gather them up and hold them until dark, when it was safe to let them in the ocean.

There were also conservationists who would ride up and down the beach on ATVs and collect the eggs and put them in nurseries. There was one at the Flamingo hotel.

Each with a sign documenting the date the egg was collected, so they would know when they would hatch.

She said they saw turtles at any time of night, after sunset, before sunrise and in the middle of the night.

So I decided to go and look. The first night I went out after dark. I saw nothing. The next night it rained. The following night I woke up at 2 AM and thought, I’m going to look for turtles.

I walked one way down the beach, seeing some fresh tracks but no turtles. I turned around and headed back, with a half moon hanging over the ocean. As I was walking, I saw a small light down by the water. A flashlight of a person? Too dim. Some phosphorescence? Too regular. Maybe moonlight reflecting off the back of a turtle???

Maybe you can’t see the small circle of light below the moon light, but I could.

I approached and in the dark, saw a big old turtle crawl from the water’s edge over the sea weed. I watched as it lumbered along. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest.

I wanted to watch the whole drama unfold, but really? This turtle was moving sooo slow. OK, OK, I have nothing else to do. I didn’t want to use a light because in the 1960s movie Mondo Cane they said artificial light confused the turtles.

But I couldn’t help myself and took one flash photo. I was behind and the turtle was making its way up that steep mini-cliff that ran along the beach. It didn’t seem to mind.

The iPhone takes surprisingly good night time photos. Well, still dark, but here you see the turtle digging its nest, throwing up sand.

And crawling away, the white on the left of the nest is the underbelly of the turtle.

Compare to the photo above, you can see the turtle has moved further away.

And then it returned to the ocean. I tried to capture the turtle wading into the sea in the moonlight, but you can’t see the turtle in any of them. Here though is some glint of moonlight off the turtles back as it approached the sea. The same lighting that first drew my attention.

The next day I wanted to go back and see the nest of the turtle I had watched. On the way I saw this evidence of another turtle’s work, covering resort beach chairs in sand as a result. Yes, there were nests all in and about the resort’s chairs.

Beach chairs covered by another sea turtle’s nest building.

Here then are the photos of the track and nest from the night before.

The nest, right in front of the condo where the lady told me about the turtles.

You can see the entrance and exit made to the left, as in the night time photos above.

The track to and from the sea, with others that must have appeared later that night.

The sand cliff ascent point, with thrown sand from the nest in the foreground.

The track looking up from the beach towards the condos.

St. Crispin and the Iroquois Confederacy

I’m working on a follow-on book to Jazz Chords for Baritone Ukulele which will be called, surprisingly, something like Jazz Chords for Guitar. (This story is only going to be about that for a little while, major digression coming.)

The chapter I’m working on is about chord progressions, of which a fundamental one involves the I, IV and V chords. (Doesn’t matter if you know what that means or not.).

So I came up with a simple progression using those chords that sounds like a lot of songs. This is it:

I IV I V I IV V I

Seeing as how I was going to use this progression to illustrate different ways of playing it, I decided it needed a name. I came up with the clever name 1415-1451.

But that’s kind of boring. What if I considered those numbers as dates? And used some historical context for the name? Enter Wikipedia.

1415

The Battle of Agincourt, that’s the battle where Henry V lead the heavily out-numbered English to beat the French and made St. Crispin’s day a memorable one for the British.

It was the center piece of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and Henry’s speech before the battle was considered some of Shakespeare’s best writing. Here’s Kenneth Branagh’s version:

1451

A Mohawk prophet, whose name means Two Rivers Flowing Together had a vision of peace between the warring tribes in the area. He’s also called The Great Peacemaker. Some didn’t agree with his vision, but he formed an alliance with Hiawatha, a great orator, and a woman, The Mother of Nations, who offered her home up as a meeting place for the leaders of the five warring tribes.

(How do they know it was 1451? Legend has it there was a solar eclipse at the time. Hmmm, that means it could have been in the 1100s as well, but never mind that.)

They created the Iroquois Confederacy with a tribal council made of the leaders of all the tribes. This might have been one of the first, if not the first confederacy. That is, a government where there are a number of independent political entities that join together just for those things that benefit all, such as for the common defense.

Defense was, of course, the big one, and by joining together for that they could better deal with the other tribes in surrounding areas. Other non-defense issues, such as marriages, property disputes, etc. were all handled on a tribe by tribe basis.

This was state of the Indian Nation when the French and English, still fighting after all those centuries, arrived in North America. And why it was so important to get the Iroquois on your side. The French got the Iroquois on their side, whereas the English had other tribes on theirs.

300 Years Later

It is said that our Founding Fathers were well aware of the Iroquois Confederacy and used it as a model for our own Constitution. The rules of that confederacy are all written down and were widely known at the time. Just like the Iroquois tribes, each state wanted to run its own business, but they wanted to join together mostly for the common defense. (Against who? well Canada was one of their big fears, territorially very similar to the Iroquois situation.)

Background of French and English

The French and English fighting all had to do with 1066, when the French conquered England and English royalty was French, and so let them claim rights to land in what we now call France. As did the French, who happened to live in the land we now call France.

Key to the legal battles was one of the nobles on one side or the other didn’t have a male heir, and the claims of the other side that the female heir counted were disputed, and, well a lot of people died. And how did the English win at Agincourt? It appears it was a superior weapon.

The English long bow delivered an arrow with such force that it could penetrate the cheaper armor worn by the French infantry. (The nobles were better protected.) One move in the eternal arms race.

But the French wound up, in the end, coming out on top of the war, in large part due to the efforts of Joan D’Arc. She’s in this story too!

Well clearly I needed to write some lyrics to go in this song, 1415-1451. Here they are.

Two Rivers Flowing Together

I – In fourteen fifteen
IV – On St. Crispin’s Day
I – At the Battle of Agin-
V – Court,

I – The English destroyed all
IV – French hope of victory
V – And ended the Hundred Year
I – War.

—

I – In fourteen hundred and
IV – Fifty one in a
I – Land across the
V – sea,

I – Warring Iroquois tribes
IV – Made a lasting peace
V – In a new born confedera-
I – cy.

—

I – Three Hundred years later
IV – The French and the English brought
I – Their strife to the American
V – Shore.

I – The Iroquois Nation
IV – Allied with the French in
V – The French and Indian
I – War.

—

I – Defeated again the
IV – French then supported the
I – Colonist’s revolu-
V – tion.

I – Who on winning then used
IV – That Iroquois model
V – In framing their new
I – Constitution.

Abbot Cutler and Diana Merritt helped get to the final verses, and Nancy Shinn then wrote a melody line. I then performed three parts in a video. Now, I don’t really have any ego in my musical or reading ability, but I did have fun putting this together while in Cancun getting my teeth fixed.

Jerry, who’s blind

Jerry was probably more of a college acquaintance than friend of mine, being closer to our mutual friend John. Like John, Jerry was a math major, and like John and myself, Jerry was a Go player.

Jerry was blind, and I mean completely and totally blind. He had had some degenerative disease around age five which required the removal of both his eyes. He just had eye sockets. He didn’t wear dark glasses or anything, he just figured he looks how he looks and if seeing people had a problem with it, that was their problem.

His parents enrolled him in the Perkins School for the Blind. Apparently the first thing they do with the kids is put them at the edge of a large playing field and ask them to run. Very few blind kids will run. Jerry was one who did. It turns out this changed the way the school approached his education.

I was walking down one of the streets just outside of the college campus and Jerry came up behind me, moving fast, late for class. He never used a cane, but had a kind of defensive gate and moved quickly and precisely. As he passed me I watched him avoid the other people on the sidewalk, and then, without slowing down, veer right through the center of the archway and onto the main campus.

Wow.

John said he was walking with Jerry once and Jerry asked him, “what’s that big square object over there?” It was a truck parked where there usually wasn’t one. Did I mention Jerry didn’t have any eyes?

Go is a game played on a 19×19 grid with black and white stones. Jerry wanted to play and someone made him a metal Go set with holes for the grid and pegs for the stones. The tops of the pegs had two different textures so Jerry could tell them apart. He would run his hand over the board, “seeing” the position, and then place a peg for his move.

I played with him a few times, and I was talking about it with his friend John. I mentioned that Jerry took a long time making his moves. John replied, “That’s not because he’s blind. He knows the board as well as you do. It’s because he’s Jerry.”

Cancun Teeth

My dentist looked in horror at my latest x-rays. Decay all over my mouth, most worrisome being large areas below the gums.

This was all relatively new. I’d already lost two molars because of it, but now it looked like there was additional extensive damage.

I was getting implants for the two missing teeth, but since they were $5,000 each I just got the more inner one (30, I now know tooth numbers) and decided to live without the last one (31).

The new x-rays lead to a visit with one, I’m told, of the best overall dentists in the Amherst area. He took more x-rays, admired the gold work I’d had done already, and told me to come back and he would have a plan.

The plan was for a complete rebuild of my mouth. Based on what I’d seen as well, this seemed like what was necessary. I could have done dentures, but if they could save my teeth… I had some savings, but not a lot, and the house needs painting.

I went in to learn the plan. The dentist showed me and I immediately saw the bottom line. $40,000! I knew it would be expensive, but that was more than I expected. Then I noticed the top of the page. That was for the uppers.

Next page, lowers. $30,000.

$70,000?!?! And that didn’t include the last molars (31, 18, 2 and 15) But I’d love to save my teeth…

My Spanish daughter-in-law said dental work was much cheaper in Madrid, so I started to look into it. Then a FB acquaintance said he’d gotten a lot of work done in Cancun, and it was excellent.

So I contacted the place he’d recommended. They looked at the plan.

$13,000. And if I wanted the back molars rebuilt as well, another $2,000.

So I bought a ticket to Cancun. Upgraded my flight to comfortable seats, bags included, got a nice Air B&B and here I am.

I had a consultation yesterday, and began to understand the economy a bit better. The dental office was nowhere near as opulent as the one in Amherst, but the dental equipment… Easiest x-rays I’ve ever had taken, plus photos that I’ve never had taken, and software on screens that gave the dentists views and options I’d never seen before.

Two dentists, a surgical guy and a crown guy went over the pictures, long conversations where the only word I understood was “corona.” They came to similar conclusions as the Amherst dentist, but explained it all using the computer display.

There were some differences, they said I’d have to lose a couple of more teeth than I thought, and showed me exactly why, and what their plan was to deal with those gaps. Another implant, a temporary bridge covering the extractions giving them time to settle, and another visit in six months to finish that work. (The Amherst dentist was proposing supporting a bridge on a tooth that was probably beyond saving.) All still for around $16,000.

Tomorrow it starts. Four long days, 6-8 hours of dental work, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Then again on Monday if necessary to readjust, fix, etc.. A couple of days of vacation and time for me to see if anything in my new bite needs changing. (The scheduling and billing software was as amazing as the dental diagnostic software. The manager clicked on icons of teeth taking the dentist’s plan very quickly into a schedule of the work to be done and the billing.) And then back home.

I feel like a customer here, dealing with an organization that is proud of the service and value it provides. Cancun Dental Specialists. (I did feel more like a mark in Amherst, or maybe to be fair, someone who they determined might not be willing to pay the cost of American dental work and therefor not worth spending too much time with.)

How did this happen you might ask. Well I’ve had the same dental routine for thirty years, since I got the gold work, and had some cavities and work done, but this last year’s damage was extraordinary.

I think it had a lot to do with Rolaids. I would brush my teeth at night, go to bed, not be able to sleep because of indigestion, and then chew a Rolaids or two. Sugar tablets in my teeth over night.

It might also be due to dry-mouth, which can destroy teeth in around three months I’ve read. (I’ve done a lot of Googling.). The Rolaids and indigestion are related to dry mouth as well.

And old age, my gums are receding and a lot of the expensive damage is at or below the gum line.

Funny thing, upon learning all this I stopped taking the Rolaids. And my indigestion greatly improved. Just a little an hour or so after I eat, but none other than that and none at night. I don’t eat much late, but I didn’t before either.

It’s as if the Rolaids were destroying stomach acid causing more to be created which, somehow could it be, was related to dry mouth.

I’ve now got more saliva than I recall having in recent years.

The Cancun dentists are also going to do a “deep clean” because they sensed the food that had gotten between the gums and the teeth. A deep clean is one of the recommended procedures for dealing with gum disease.

I’m for sure going to have a new personal dental routine, as even after all this work, decay can still erode the underlying teeth if it continues to penetrate beneath the gums.

Those are the before pictures. You can see the decay at the gum line of my upper front tooth. That’s just appeared in the last month or so. There were two similar spots on the lower front teeth as well, which were filled by my local dentist, before he sent me to the uber-dentist in Amherst.

The gold work was done thirty years ago by a dentist who it turns out was famous and known by both the Amherst and Cancun dentists.

Writing Well

A personal journey from reading about database to writing about jazz on a baritone ukulele.

My Path

If you were involved with computers in the 1970s you would be impressed with the name James Martin. He was big then, but fame is so fleeting, even programmers today don’t know of him. However, then, he used to get $20,000/day consulting for large companies on software strategies, and was a prolific writer on all things computer. He supposedly made more money selling text books than any other text book author.

I was the kid good at math and hated English. This led to a programming career in my 20s, working in aerospace. When I was around 30 I decided to leave aerospace and work in the commercial sector, for a company selling mainframe database software. (Late 1970s.)

I didn’t know anything about database technology, so I bought James Martin’s book on database. A large book. I was ready for a slog, but instead, it was like reading a best selling novel. And database knowledge just seemed to osmose into my brain. I was amazed, how did he do that?

That book got me interested in the challenge of writing about technical things. I saw a similarity between trying to logically structure software code to solve a problem, and trying to logically structure sentences and paragraphs to explain a topic. I started to dabble in articles for trade magazines and the like, all about a software niche, Prolog, I was doing as hobby.

40 – time for a midlife crisis, I had abandoned the commercial software companies and had decided to make it on my own. It wasn’t going well. I was almost out of money and ready to crawl back to the commercial world when my son crashed my car (nobody hurt) with surgically precise damage that got me a check from the insurance company for the total, which I didn’t need to spend on the car, and provided me funds for another month.

Then, and here comes the too coincidental to be a coincidence part, a fellow I’d known back in my aerospace days noticed I was doing some writing, and asked if i wanted to work for James Martin. Turns out James Martin had spun off a bunch of other writing products and needed writers for them.

So I started doing contract work for the James Martin Report writing in-depth papers on various IBM technologies and ghost writing a magazine column for him.

It was all about the illustrations

He told me that there was a direct correlation between the number of diagrams in a text book and the sales of that book. But it wasn’t just that he had illustrations, it was that they were how the book was written.

(I’ve always been fascinated by how writer’s creative styles affect their work, like Wodehouse used to make three story lines on pieces of paper tacked around the walls of his cabin and then look for ways to have them intersect, and if you read his books, well yes that’s exactly what happens, and Elmore Leonard coming up with characters and then putting them in situations to see what they do, instead of having a plot, and in his books the characters are memorable but you never remember the plots. Like that…)

James Martin had a bunch of folding tables in a big room in his large house in Vermont. (He had bought it from Larry Bird’s Celtic teammate, Kevin McHale, who had designed it for a tall person, as James Martin was.) He drew diagrams, charts, pictures on pieces of paper and laid them out and organized them on these tables. If anything wasn’t clear, he’d add more pictures.

(Hmmm, I bet the large spread out physical work space let him work with the big picture a lot more easily than someone sitting in front of a computer screen, double hmmm, I bet that explains Wodehouse’s ability as well…)

(Triple hmmm, total digression, these are thoughts just popping into my head, not part of what I was trying to say, but Wodehouse has been called the best writer of English language fiction, and James Martin has been called the best writer (he’s English as well) of English language textbooks, and both used large scale spaces to lay out their works before setting pen to paper.)

Then Lillian, his red-haired girl friend who used to be married to someone who worked for the Shah of Iran and was kicked out in the revolution, would computerize his drawings, and then he would write the words that glued it all together.

I went back and looked at some of his books. There was never a page without some chart or diagram on it.

When he told us how he wanted the articles in the report written, he had a series of basic diagrams that he wanted us to fill in for the particular technology we were covering. These diagrams had differing relationships of visual elements that would illustrate the layers and connections between elements of a technology.

And the structure

He also had an overview architecture that we followed that solved the problem of how to talk about interconnected bits of technology and drill down on one bit without fully explaining the other. It added two steps to the classic, tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them structure.

The technology document sections were: 1- abstract, a paragraph, 2- executive overview, a one page discussion of the technology, 3- overview, three-five pages describing all the components of the system and how they related, and only then, 4- a 30-50 page detailed dive into the technology, including examples of use worked out, and 5- a summary.

That detailed overview made it possible to write the deeper details referencing bits of the technology that had not yet been covered in depth. Did that make sense? So if A is related to B, then because the relationship is laid out in the beginning, the in-depth analysis of A can refer to B before B has been described in detail. And of course there were diagrams that had A and B visually related.

My Ukulele Book

And, so now around 70, retired mostly from software, and trying to learn about music, I discovered the Baritone Ukulele and started playing with chords, and decided to write the book. As you can see, it’s lots and lots of diagrams that tell the story and mostly they came first. But yes, I care about the words too and did go over them many times. At a parent-teacher function my son’s English teacher noted that there’s no such thing as good writing, only good re-writing.

Dad’s War Diary

Here’s a digest of my Dad’s War Diary, including photos and maps.

Law and Order

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups…”

I was just starting up with a new girl friend who had a third floor walk up apartment in Charlestown MA, which had a reputation as a tough town.

She told me that not too many days ago she had been raped in her apartment. An actual real home invasion sort of rape. The guy had climbed up the fire escape and came in through a window and used a kitchen knife he found to threaten her.

It was the sixties, things moved fast and I wound up staying over with her. After we had gone to bed we heard something in the hall. We thought it was her cat, but then the guy appeared in the bed room door.

He had a cowboy style bandana mask on his face, and his junk hanging out. Instead of a knife, he was brandishing a knife sharpener he had found in the kitchen. I was naked and stood up and looked at him. He looked surprised and asked me what I was doing there.

I was scared but tried not to show it. I told him if he left now there would be no trouble. He thought for a moment, and then seemed to agree. He left.

We then realized that he had been in the apartment the whole evening, hiding in a closet. We had been out, and we’d come home, he was already inside. Shudder.

We called the police and the uniformed officers didn’t seem to have ever seen any TV about policing. They handled, with their bare hands, the knife sharpener and just casually looked around and really didn’t seem to take note of anything.

The two detectives were different. They said their name fast and we always referred to them as Mike&Jimmy. They too didn’t seem to care much about evidence, but acted like they were on a mission.

A couple of days later they said they were pretty sure they knew who did it and asked us to come to the police station to identify the guy. They had had him called in on a phony excuse about his driver’s license. He was standing in line. Mike&Jimmy pointed him out.

A chill went up my spine. Although I never saw his face, I knew it was the guy. My girl friend felt the same way.

Mike&Jimmy took us to their office. They showed us a picture of the guy. Then they said, here’s a book with a bunch of pictures. Go through it and pick out his photo.

We did. (TV crime viewers will know this was, of course, an illegal identification.)

They told us when we got to court we would be asked if we did the identification by looking at the book of photos first. We should testify that that is what happened.

There was a back story. This guy had been involved in a number of rapes in the town. One of the most recent was of a nine year old girl. Mike&Jimmy had the guy, had the girl’s testimony and were ready for trial.

Then the parents of the girl decided she couldn’t go through the trauma again, and moved to Baltimore before the trial.

So Mike&Jimmy had no option left but to leave the guy on the streets and wait until he struck again. When he did, that was my girl friend.

They did not want to let him go again, which is why they made sure they got an identification from us, which is why they told us how to testify.

We met with the prosecutor. He also knew exactly what was going on, and we rehearsed how the questions at the trial would go. (Witness tampering, also illegal.)

It turns out this guy was borderline functioning with an IQ of around 70. He was assigned a public defender. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect he was also in on what was happening.

The judge read the charges. The guy was charged with “ravaging and carnally knowing” the defendant.

We were asked the questions on identification and the incidents, and gave our answers. Sounded bad for the guy.

The defense was an alibi. The guy’s cousin said how wonderful he was and how he had taken his nephew to a Red Sox game that day. When asked if she remembered who they played, she confidently said yes. The Tigers, and the Sox won 2 – 1.

The prosecutor was showing a little glee, as he asked for a recess while they located and brought in a special witness, the scheduler for the Red Sox.

Turns out the Sox were on the road that day.

In the summary arguments, the last statement by the public defender was “… and we heard she had cats. I ask you, where were the cats?”

He was put away for seven years.

But still, we couldn’t go into the apartment without first checking every possible place a person might be hiding. It became a ritual. For at least five years, we couldn’t not search where we were living as that fear of a home invasion stayed with us.

So my question is, did we do the right thing? Did Mike&Jimmy? The prosecutor?

Years later I was watching the OJ Simpson trial. Testifying about the glove which might have been planted, detective Mark Fuhrman described how police, detectives, prosecutors and witnesses often worked together on evidence to make sure they put the bad guys away.

He was ridiculed as people said: the prosecutors and the detectives working together to fix a case? No way.

All I thought was, way.

Breast Cancer, AI, the Military and More

My ideating friend, Abel Viageiro of Mozambique, was pondering the ways technology could be used to better handle pandemics. Which reminded me of some work my small company, Amzi!, was involved in back in the late 1990s.

War Fighter

The work was for a part of the Army involved in medical technology, and was called the “war fighter” project. The idea was that you put intelligent devices on soldiers that could monitor various health aspects, and then communicate to a local net so that the commanding officer could see the data, which could then be aggregated at different steps and sent up the chain of command. (This was how Abel was thinking, using the Internet of Things and other network ideas.)

The data would be used for various things, one being triage, knowing which soldiers were not going to live, and which had a good chance of survival. The other being that the commanding officer would know the health status of his immediate command, who was still in fighting shape, who wasn’t. Other general health data, such as fatigue, would also be aggregated so higher up the command they would know which units would be most effective to deploy in combat.

Where did we fit in? We were a vender of tools for adding AI rules in network environments. These would aid in the decision making up and down the chain of command.

That project ended, at least for us, prematurely when our sponsor, Fred, in the military died. I don’t know anything about whether the project went to completion or not, or if anything like it is being used today.

Military Spending in the Clinton Years

Fred was also the sponsor of an earlier project that we did complete. It was an online, breast cancer decision support system that helped thousands of women understand and navigate through the course of treatment for that disease. It won us an award from the Smithsonian and the Washington Post said it was the only Internet application worth anything at the time. This was in the 1990s.

Why was this work done for the military? There was a lesson in politics in the project. It was part of how Bill Clinton fulfilled two contradictory campaign promises: 1- reduce military spending and 2- not reduce spending on our military. He did this in part by defunding a center for cancer research and giving those contracts to the Army. So Fred, in the military, was getting funding for non-military work on cancer.

The project was also a lesson on internal politics. These were Fred’s pet projects, which he nurtured and saw through. When he died, ironically of cancer, a brain tumor, nobody else stepped up to take over “his” projects. So the funding stopped. He was a bit of a cowboy, an outside-the-box thinker (for the 1990s) and no-one else in his area quite had his vision.

Marketing AI in the 1990s

We got involved with Fred as the result of our work trying to capitalize on integrating two relatively new (1990s) technologies, AI and the Web. We had developed a product we called WebLS (Web Logic Server) that was an easy to use tool that allowed developers to encode decision making rules into a Web site. (for online diagnostics, sales recommendations, advice giving, etc.)

We were going to make our fortune selling these at $99 each. We had ads in all the right places. And we waited. We didn’t get a single sale, not even a single inquiry. It seemed nobody cared.

Except Fred. He was the only one who saw our well-placed ads and saw the tool’s potential, as eventually realized in the breast cancer system.

It always seemed strange to me, WebLS didn’t generate a single $99 sale but led to a number of years of government contract work that, while not making us rich, definitely contributed to the retirement I’m currently enjoying.

And Now for Something Completely Different

To be clear about the breast cancer system, we were not experts in breast cancer treatment. We developed the software framework for the system, which was then used, with our help, by medical experts to encode the actual knowledge the system provided. In other words, we understood AI and the Web and worked with others who understood breast cancer treatment.

As part of that work we were in interviews with the various specialists that might be involved, such as surgeons, ontologists, radiologists, psychologists and others.

It was all very technical and somewhat dry, but the interview with the psychologist at Walter Reed made a big impression on me, given my fascination with mind/body health issues (see Reflection).

He said (this is just that one psychologist’s opinion at the time) that the women who had breast cancer fit a similar psychological profile. They had emotionally given totally of themselves for the lives of people close to them, their husbands, children, parents, etc. Those who reacted to the disease by making changes in their lives, paying more attention to maybe their own needs, had a much greater chance of survival than those who didn’t.

I did, by chance, get a second opinion on this a number of years later. I had just casually met a doctor who was involved in cancer research at Duke University. I had asked about what he did, and in a relatively dry and boring way he was relating to me some of the medical research he was doing.

It occurred to me to see what his reaction would be to my story of the psychologist. I didn’t expect his reaction. He suddenly lit up, became very animated and said, yes, yes, that’s it exactly, said how important it is to change the way one’s living in order to survive, and went on to tell me of his wife’s work that was very much involved with that side of it.

These ideas are scary, nobody wants to hear them. Dry medical information is much more comforting. The psychologist never explained his emotional profile idea to a patient directly, but instead tried to gently steer them towards new paths or attitudes in life.

And so, interesting anecdotes about the mind/body connection, in particular about breast cancer. But today the march of science has made it not as relevant for breast cancer. Today, most people survive breast cancer, so not such a big deal. I know a number of these women. One, a nurse, after being diagnosed said just cut these puppies off and let me get back to work. She’s doing fine.

Qualifying for the Boston Marathon

I like to brag that I once qualified for the Boston Marathon. Anyone who knows anything about that race is impressed. One needs documented fast times in one or more previous races to simply get to the starting line. That’s how it is now, and has been for quite some time.

But back in 1968, to qualify all you had to do was send in $5. I did that.

Now I had been running some, and thought I would do OK, but I spent the Saturday/Sunday before the always-on-Monday race climbing. So when my alarm went off at 8:00 AM Monday morning I was faced with two choices.

1 – get up, drive out to Hopkinton and then run 26 miles back into the city, or

2 – go back to sleep, wake up later, make a big pancake breakfast, and go out and enjoy watching the race.

I made the logical choice.