Hmmmm, looks as if the back-end WordPress format has changed again. I suppose I’m happy that I’m only learning a new format arrangement and am not going through the adjustments during the change from an agrarian society to an urban one, but not every time I seem to log on?
I’m not quite “back” yet to regular blogging, but I sense progress. Not that it matters, but I’ve been trying for the past week to blog from my iPad. Unfortunately (for me), the iPad is a geriatric version that will no longer update past version 12.something.something. I believe 14.something.something is the present version.
Because of iPadish geriatritude, I wasn’t able to gain access to this blog until I fired up the PC. The PC is even antiqueier than the iPad, but, miraculously, it still works, for which I honor the cyber gods and all their little cyber-minions. <burns an old floppy disk as a sacrifice> Maybe Santa will be kind to me at Christmas and surprise me with a new portable device? One can only hope.
“Life” marches on, but I wish it would stop stepping on my toes. In between grandchild-minding and virus-dodging (I had a just-before-we-knew-about-it brush with The Smell-Stealing Help-I’m-drowning Virus and don’t want to repeat that experience — get your shots!), I’ve been working on essays for the Museum of American Military Families (MAMF), located in Tijeras, New Mexico
This coming winter, MAMF will be publishing a book looking at the concept of E Pluribus Unum as it plays out among the personnel affiliated with the American armed services. The topic I’m working on at the moment is “code.” The military services have so many ways that codes affect the lives of servicemembers, DoD civilians, contractors and their families, from actual codes to everyday language. I take a look at the everyday language given that the actual codes are, like, secret ‘n’ stuff. Shhhh.
Regarding codes, this photo of me and Pippin Baby (no one put Pippin Baby in a corner; he traveled) reminds me of the radio transmissions of in-the-clear spoken numbers that we used to occasionally pick up on the car radio while driving around Cold War Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. The transmissions had a kind of Twilight Zone feel to them as Someone, Somewhere, with a very flat voice was doing nothing but reading numbers into the void of the radio wave frequencies: “Two. Seven. Five. Nine. Three. One. One. One. Six. …” They went on and on. Boring, yet fascinating.
If you still listen to the radio and ever come across someone on an obscure frequency reading numbers (apparently the practice isn’t completely obsolete), you’ll know what you’re listening to: Code.
Valerie Bonham 