New Braunfels, Texas

For people from outside of Texas, the city of New Braunfels comes as something of a surprise. Before moving to the state my expectations had been largely formed through an intermittent diet of old westerns on TV, the occasional glimpse of the soap opera “Dallas”, and the even less occasional speech from Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t say it was a coherent set of expectations; it was just the vague sort of impressions that stick to your unconscious when you’re busy thinking about other things and trying to grow up in the Midwest.

When I arrived in the some 15 years ago, I was pleasantly surprised that instead of tumbleweeds blowing through the streets, there were Cyprus-lined rivers coursing through the various towns. Instead of flat and desolate prairie the hilly area Northwest of San Antonio was lush with Live Oaks, rolling grassland. And, in the spring and early summer, there are wildflowers.

No one had ever told me about the wildflowers.

The wildflowers in the spring are a breathtaking explosion of color; bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrushes, Pink Evening Primrose, Buttercups and Black-eyed Susans, vie for attention with Yucca and Cactus whose blooms can be equally spectacular. The profusion of colors, and the progression of colors as the spring turns to summer, is striking to those who have been living here for many years, but startling to one who comes from elsewhere. In the early spring, when the rain has been cooperative, the bluebonnets bloom in such profusion that at times it seems as though you're looking at ponds and lakes floating in the grasslands. A bit later in the season, the blue is replaced by the pink of Evening Primrose, the orange and yellow from the Indian blankets, the yellow of winecup and bachelor buttons.

The culture of Central and South Texas is no less spectacular. Instead of a culture driven here from the East in Conestoga wagons, there is a rich and complex society formed in part from Spanish/Mexican influences as I had more or less expected, but also from France, Italy and the rest of the world. The Institute of Texan Cultures lists among the cultural influences in the state people from Africa, Belgium, China , Denmark, The Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and many other places.

Germany in particular has had an influence.

The town was established in 1845 by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels in central Germany. Prince Carl named the city for his home town of Braunfels and, though his name lives on, his direct involvement was somewhat brief.

As the Commissioner General for “The Society for the Protection of German Immigrants” or “Mainzer Adelsveren” he had organized hundreds of people in Germany to settle in Texas with an eye to creating a new German outpost in the young republic. Immigrants began arriving at the port of Galveston in July of 1844 with most then traveling by ship to Indianola from which they would begin the long overland leg of their journey to the Fisher-Miller land grants purchased by Prince Carl in the area around present day Fredericksburg. Time was working against them though and by the time they thought they'd be arriving, it was going to be too late in the year to build homes and plant crops before winter. Once that became clear, and with the settlers were still en route, Prince Carl purchased additional land along the Guadalupe River that would serve as a the site of a new town.

This newly purchased land, known as "Las Fontanas", was located northeast of San Antonio on the Camino Real, the Royal Road. It had excellent freshwater springs, and was about half way from Indianola to the Fisher-Miller land grants. The first settlers forded the Guadalupe River on Good Friday, March 21, 1845, near what is now the Faust Street bridge. As the Spring of 1845 progressed, the settlers built a fort, divided land, held the first classroom under the tree by river, began building homes and planting crops.

For his personal home prince Carl selected a site at the top of a hill overlooking the new town. Soon after, he returned to Germany intending to bring his fiance Lady Sophia, Princess of Salm-Salm, to their new home. He left John O. Meusebach to manage the settlement in his place but as it turned out, he never returned as the Princess refused to leave Germany. It strikes some as odd that he stayed in Germany to marry the Princess rather than return to Texas and the colony that he'd worked so hard to found, but as things turned out, in December of 1845 Texas became a state in the United States of America, eliminating any notions that the German aristocracy may have had to establish a German principality within the politically and militarily weak Republic of Texas.

The siting of the settlement was serendipitous, and the rivers and springs serve in part to define the modern town. New Braunfels basically has two rivers coursing through it, the Guadalupe that passes through, and the spring fed Comal that is fully within the town's boundaries. The water in the Guadalupe is ice cold as it makes its way from the Canyon Dam a few miles up river. It's cold as it comes from some 60 feet below the surface of the lake, and the chill makes it an almost irresistible draw for locals and tourists seeking a relaxing afternoon bobbing downstream in the hot Texas sun.

Can Bad Formatting be Considered a Virus?

I have gone though a considerable amount of time, in complete and blissful ignorance of the ALL CAPS format in Microsoft Word. I came upon it suddenly, and by complete accident. I'm a bit mystified.

Is it for folks that can’t find the button that says “Caps Lock” on the keyboard?

Admittedly, The text saying “Caps Lock” was not written ALL IN CAPS, but it seems pretty straightforward. If I had to guess, I’d say that it locks the capitalization of the entered or selected text, and my next guess would be, that it would probably set the text capitalization to "on", as in "turn all typed text to caps".

I guess I've seen some word processing packages that toggle caps on OR off, so if caps were locked, and you typed a letter, it would come out capitalized, and vice-versa. Type an upper case letter, get a lower case letter. I guess there is that slim possibility that the useability team got together and said to themselves “what if the user thinks we mean to lock the capitalization in the "OFF" position ?". There wasn’t enough room on the top of that key to fit “Caps Locked ON” with a little drawing of one of those “Bride of Frankenstein” knife switches to make very very clear that it’s going to go “ON” when you push it.

The other possibility is that the designers thought that having the user go into the “Styles and Formatting” menu, and selecting the “ALL CAPS” format, and making sure that the format doesn’t blow up any of the rest of the formatting, was a good, a just, and a kind thing to do.

I must have copied in some text from somewhere and I thought my keyboard was flaking out. Could bad formatting be considered a virus?

The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, part 38

OK,

It's confirmed. There is no hope.

My evidence? The "Lazboy 13.6 Foot Rectangular Solar Lighted Cantilever Umbrella with Base" advertised in a recent Bed Bath and Beyond circular.

It's..it's...solar powered? It seems that it has LED lighting which, I'm guessing here, is the must-need-gotta-have for those whose compact fluorescent illuminated beach umbrellas are just too 15 minutes ago.

Just when was the last time you went to have a nice relaxing siesta under your beach umbrella, and reached for your flashlight? Just what problem does this solve?

Well, as I said, it's SOLAR POWERED, so it must be good, and at only $299.99 it must be quite the bargain. I further note that if you're soon to be married you could even add this necessity of life to the store's bridal registry.

We are not a serious people.

George Washington on Leadership

I just finished reading "George Washington on Leadership" by Richard Brookhiser. I'd read one of his previous books on Washington, "First Father" and had really enjoyed it, so I'd approached this with a degree of enthusiasm that, in the final analysis was not warranted.

I think that the biggest issue for me was that I was looking for more of what I'd gotten in the first book; fresh insight into Washington as a man and perhaps, given the title, insight into what made him so effective as a leader. Gouverneur Morris is quoted in the book as believing that a book on leadership was unlikely to give any real guidance on that score, and after reading this particular work, I'm apt to believe him.

The introduction is titled "Introduction: Founding CEO" so I certainly had some warnings that there would be trouble ahead, and while there were a few good facts and and some interesting background, the homily at the end of each chapter, the uneven flow, and the continuous effort to nail Washington's time to our own with cute phrases such as "Washinton Inc." when describing Washington's various business enterprises, for me at least just didn't work.

I suspect that Brookheiser's editor put him up to this and, while I don't know what a successful book on leadership is like, I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

Chosen at random: "Rules are useful in start-ups, but every rule needs a road test" (Page 22). The rule in this case referred to the practice, tried exactly one time, of having the president and the congress confer directly on a treaty, a literal rendering of the Senate's "advise and consent" role in the making of treaties.

Well, it was an interesting event. The fact that it was such a complete waste of time that the president, and all other president's to date, have avoided a repeat of it was also interesting, and I think that there were undoubtedly loads of ways that Washington's leadership was demonstrated in negotiating the Senate's approval of treaties, both this one and those to come, but the take-away for Brookheiser was that "rules are useful in start-ups, but every rule needs a road test". That's not the lesson that I would have taken, and doesn't seem to be the one that Washington took either. The lesson that he took from the event seems to be that it's best to avoid wasting a lot of time in meetings when your work can be accomplished with a few well placed letters and could also be delegated.

Chosen not so much at random: In the chapter titled "Avoid Weakness" he states that "Washington was far from first in speaking, in an age when oratory was at its height" (Page 200). That's all well and good but rather than dwelling on how Washington made the best of his limited oratorical talents, Brookheiser then goes on at length to describe great orators of his day; John Adams, Patrick Henry, and the English evangelist George Whitefield.

He goes through the same exercise with polemical writing describing Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and so forth from the standpoint of their polemical writing, and pointing out that Washington was not in that league and so stayed away from that aspect of writing.

I think that's fairly well known. What might have made the chapter interesting would have been some insight into how he managed in those instances where that sort of writing was called for. How did he engage with his staff or with any ghost writers that he may have used? Who knows?

All in all, an uneven work that didn't leave me very much farther in my understanding either of Washington, or leadership.

Wimberly Texas

My wife and I just got back from a beautiful drive in the country. We'd not been to Wimberly in quite a while, and thought it would be a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Wimberly is just off of a stretch of highway 32 that folks around here call "The Devil's Backbone", though whether that puts the town near the Devil's shoulderblade or, um, his right buttock, is unclear as I've never figured out which way the Devil himself is supposed to be facing.

The town is one of those places where, at some point in the 60s, "artistic" folk began to settle. There are several very nice galleries where very nice, and very expensive artwork is to be found. There are however several other places where it's clear that the people of artistic temperament out number those of artistic ability. One piece in particular looked as though they'd gotten half way through making a wooden armadillo, and decided to finish it off with the head of an elk.

Pulling out of town, as we headed up the road to the Devil's Backbone and home in Gruene, I say yet another of those signs telling me that I was entering the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, but as with all signs of that type, I was not told what exactly I was to do with that information.

Frank Laubach - The Apostle to the Illiterates

In doing a few more interviews for the book, I came across a very interesting story. It's only tangential to the main narrative, but interesting nonetheless.

Frank Laubach was a gentlemen from Pennsylvania who had gone to the Philippines in 1915 after study at Princeton. In 1929 he moved in with a tribe of Islamic aborigines who had just finished a 300 year guerrilla war with the Spanish, followed by 14 years of war with the Americans. These were the Muranao or "Moro" Tribesman.

The Moro armed, as often as not, only with knives, were sufficiently scary that the US military chose at that point to switch to the more powerful .45 caliber revolver.*

Anyway, on to the story itself.

Laubach is said, by his English-speaking biographers, to have come up with a system of language instruction called "Each One Teach One". He then went on to refine it, and use it to bring literacy to over 60 million people. A truly accomplished individual. The only missionary ever to be placed on a US stamp (the 30 cent in 1984).

However there's one place where the oral history, and the written history seem to diverge.

According to the story as told me by one of my story sources, what really happened is this.

Laubach went into the Moro village.

They were really not in a very good mood.

They had it up to HERE with the Provincial Government sending folks into their villages to try and ram English down their throats.

It went something like this:

Chief: "You"...."Yeah you "Laubach"".

"You are going to collect all of our words, and for each word you are going to make a drawing. When you have all of our important words, and the drawings that go with them, you will take your letters and you will use them to write down words that will work for us. You are then going to teach one of us to read those words. That one will teach two, and those two will teach more, and so on. And that way we will learn to read."

"You are going to do this."

"Do you know how I know that you are going to do this?"

"Because if you don't, I will kill you."

"Now get started."

And so he did.

* note: I've read that anecdote in several places but I haven't been able to find just what they switched from. All I'm finding is references to .45 caliber revolvers from Colt going back to 1873. That being the case, until I can find that piece of information, I recommend taking that statement with a grain of salt.

Hyperbole thy name is the History Channel

You just can't make this stuff up.

I just watched a few minutes of a History Channel show on Ben Franklin. They did a pretty good job of the first part, his pre-revolutionary days. Amazing stuff, and arguably his contributions to science/engineering (which were pretty closely tied together in those days), home heating, postal delivery, music....It's really breath-taking all the areas that he was active in, really do live up to the importance attributed to it by the shows writers.

But then they do the lead-in for the next phase of his career; the Revolution.

Why, they way they told it there was really no need for those other bumpkins; Washington, Paine, Revere, Jones, Adams, Jefferson, Swift, Smith*, to be involved in the American Revolution. Ben took care of everything. They could have stayed home.

I like the History Channel but I'd like to see them adopt more of a "keep it real" policy.

*I count Adam Smith in this group as, while not generally associated with the American Revolution, he was an active part of a flourishing intellectual movement; the Scottish Enlightenment, much of which was well known by the founders. When his book, The Wealth of Nations (OK, OK, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations") came out in 1776 much of the economic basics of that book were well known and informed the thinking of at least some of the founders. Heck, he'd been teaching for years so there were probably several hundred of his students scattered around the British empire, and they may well have a connection to one or more of the founders.

Update on the book

Well, the book proceeds apace. I have a usable basic framework of around 10,000 words. With that I think I have something like a "narrative arc" that will come together as a coherent whole. I have to flesh it out with some background, settings, and a few side trips that will probably fall out of the outstanding balance of the interviews that I have yet to conduct

One thing that I've noticed about my approach to date; I'm missing about half of the story. I've been heading down the path of focusing too much on the bad things that happened, and not the good things that were supposed to happen. I need one good story that coincides with the bad one and I think I'll have some symmetry and balance.

The writer's market in 2010

I've been working on a book for a little while, I'll be posting more about it at a later date, but for right now I'm interested in learning what I can of the market for new authors.

There are many many ways to get in front of an audience, either by self publishing or by publishing co-ops such as Javalina Press in Austin, but is it possible at this time to break in with a mainstream publisher with a first effort? As bad as it has traditionally been, I've spoken to some folks that believe that it's gotten worse.

What I'm hearing is that, if you're not already published and have a reasonable track record, the odds on getting any sort of advance against the completion of any unfinished book, are between slim and nil. That means that instead of coming up with a good idea, punching out a couple of chapters, and putting together a proposal, now you have to essentially finish the book, then try to market the idea.

Part of this is the economy; It's certainly cheaper when you're on a budget to go to the library than the bookstore. But there's another dynamic that I hadn't appreciated that has more to do with what's going on in another segment of publishing, and that would be the newspaper business. With many many publications laying off or thinning out by other means, there is now what may be a surplus of writers, new to the book business, but with many years of writing experience behind them. Well, it worked for Tom Wolfe....

Rockster Plus Pro

I reviewed a product from Borntorock.com called Rockster Plus Pro. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Zen, and the art of the yardsale

Well,

This inaugurates my new blog. I've actually been posting to my web site (http://www.tuneburg.com) for some time, but it's more geared to musicians and social networking, where this will be more of an open format. My background is in engineering and technical marketing but I've had a long standing interest in music, am working on a book, and in generally am engaged using this recent, ah, free time as productively as I can.

The title for the blog sort of popped into my head. Well, after a number of other titles that had already been taken. I like it though as I've always had a soft spot for good quality nonsense. Think of this as the Department of Redundancy Department, and apologies to the Firesign Theater.