Soka Gakkai

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Tuesday April 15, 2014 · 2:57 PM PDT

2014/04/15 · 14:57

On a hot day In July 1963, I was walking around Yokosuka, Japan, where I was waiting to join my first ship as a new ensign in the Navy. USS Constellation (CVA-64), the huge aircraft carrier on which I was to serve, was at sea. Having nothing to do for a few days, I was sightseeing in the Japanese naval port. There was some sort of shrine or temple atop a hill that I could see from the town, but getting to it proved to be impossible in the maze of tiny roads and paths.

Not knowing a word of Japanese, I tried in vain to find someone who could tell me how to get to that temple. Eventually, a couple of college age girls approached me and asked, “You want go to temple?” “Yes!” I replied enthusiastically. Instead of taking me up the hill, they took me down to what looked more like a storefront than a temple. “Here is temple,” they said indicating the sliding paper door. We went inside and took off our shoes before walking on a large area of tatami mat flooring.

corwinabell

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Saturday March 15, 2014 · 1:10 PM PDT

2014/03/15 · 13:10

My full name is Corwin Allan Bell. “Corwin” was my maternal grandfather’s first name. My parents called me “Allan.” After five minutes, friends shortened it to “Al.” If a friend discovered that my first name is “Corwin,” the inevitable response was “Ccoorrwwiinn? What the heck is that?” I avoided use of the name for that reason. Corwin is a very unusual name.

In the age of the Internet, the urge to Google one’s own name brings surprises. Despite the oddness of the name, I recently found twelve Corwin Bells listed. The list gave names, ages, and city of residence. That encouraged me to contact these people. Everyone has a story, and I am curious to find out more about each of them. Initial efforts at contact have met with mixed results. I found references to recent obituaries of two of the twelve; a Nebraska farmer my exact age and an 88 year old retired Canadian railroad man. Younger ones either had no phone number listed, or failed to return messages left on their machines.

I had better luck with Corwin E. Bell of Boulder, Colorado. He really has an interesting story, or actually several stories. He is a noted beekeeper, who fosters backyard beekeeping, or what he calls “bee guardianship, a natural beekeeping approach.”

corwinabell

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Tuesday March 04, 2014 · 12:06 PM PST

2014/03/04 · 12:06

This morning I awoke from a nightmare. No, it wasn’t one of those all too frequent Vietnam War combat nightmares. It was far worse. I was back in school. I was taking a math test, but I had no paper or pencil, and the problems were being flashed briefly on a screen in the front of the room. I could not get the teacher to stop the test until I could get a pencil and paper. The other students seemed to have no problem continuing.

This type of nightmare was depicted beautifully by Val Kilmer in the comedy film “Top Secret.” In a dream sequence, he is running wildly through the hall of his school when he encounters a fellow student. He asks desperately where the chemistry final exam is being held. The student tells him that all of the exams are over. Val cries, “Oh No! I haven’t studied. I’m back in school!” At this point, he awakens to find that he is being whipped and beaten by mindless Nazi-like guards. He says, “Thank God!” I think we all would have a response similar to that of Val in this situation.

In my senior year at Duke, I did something that must now give over one hundred of my fellow students similar nightmares.

corwinabell

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Monday February 24, 2014 · 4:50 PM PST

2014/02/24 · 16:50

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed House Bill 2153/Senate Bill 1062. The controversial bill would have protected all individuals, businesses, and religious institutions from discrimination lawsuits if they could show that their discriminatory actions were motivated by religious convictions. Written by the conservative advocacy group, Center for Arizona Policy and the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, the bill would have enabled businesses potentially to discriminate against virtually anyone under the guise of religious freedom. The bill, vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer, has been described by opponents as discriminatory against gays and lesbians. It would have led to marginalization and oppression of many groups and had the smell of the Nazi’s Nuremburg Laws about it.

This law would have brought Arizona back into the lead in the race with Kentucky and Kansas to return to the Dark Ages. Arizona first gained the lead in 1997, when Arizona enacted a tuition tax credit law. The available evidence shows that the law is a model for seriously undermining public education, particularly the public schools that serve poor children. Arizona scheme has cost state education hundreds of millions of dollars, money that has gone largely to subsidize education for middle- and upper-income families, both in private and public schools.

The losers are low-income families who pay fewer taxes but do not benefit from the tax credit. Money needed for public schools is diverted to private schools, depleting state funds from needed improvements to public schools that serve low-income and disadvantaged students. The law has loopholes allowing one family to pay over one thousand dollars for another family child’s tuition in return for that family paying the tuition for the first family’s child. There is no accountability in the system, designed chiefly to benefit religious schools. Public schools, you see, teach evil things like science and evolution and do not allow sufficient time for prayer.

The following essay from 2011 contained my idea for benefiting from Arizona’s religiosity.

corwinabell

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Saturday February 22, 2014 · 1:54 PM PST

2014/02/22 · 13:54

A few years ago, the City of San Diego overreached itself in making demands upon the dog park club that I had helped to form. We had persuaded the city to let us fence in for dogs to run around off-leash an unused area of a large park. They did so, but required us to form an organization to represent us on the local recreation council. This was fine, but they then demanded the right to approve, disapprove, and edit the bylaws of the club we had formed.

Specifically, they objected to a clause in our bylaws that prohibited convicted felons or people who had been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude from serving on our club’s board. It was there because, before we had organized, our self-appointed president was found to have stolen for personal use donations for dog park improvements made by generous users. After his thefts were discovered, an Internet search had revealed that the man had three felony convictions, two for selling drugs and one for DUI. He had another DUI accident in Mexico that was not even on his record.

We met with a senior City Parks and Recreation Department representative to settle the matter. We brought a lawyer to the meeting and forced them to back off. Most of the meeting was taken up by the city official’s unsolicited soliloquy about his “illustrious” life. That inspired the following story.

corwinabell

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Friday February 21, 2014 · 2:07 PM PST

2014/02/21 · 14:07

~~~~~ In 2006, the film "Idiocracy" gave a comedic view of a future in which the human population has devolved into stupidity. Two ordinary people of average intelligence from our time awaken hundreds of years in the future from a suspended animation experiment gone awry. They find that they are the smartest people around. The mechanism for this devolution was the propensity of intelligent professional people to postpone having families until it was too late, while beer-guzzling, trailer park trash of low intelligence bred like locusts. This process continued over time until there were no intelligent professionals. The only people were the mindless, incompetent breeders who loved demolition derbies, tractor pulls, and professional wrestling.

Are humans evolving or devolving? Let's look at the evidence and listen to the experts.

corwinabell

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Tuesday February 18, 2014 · 8:08 PM PST

2014/02/18 · 20:08

To slow the glacial movement of my gut down over my belt buckle, I have returned to the gym for regular workouts. Recently, there has been a change in the way the gym operates. Before, the gym provided stacks of orange towels. When you entered the gym, you took one of these and used it to wipe up perspiration before, during, and after exercising. I took two, one for wiping my brow and one for wiping the equipment.

Now, the policy is that you bring your own towel for yourself, while the gym provides special mauve towels at ten foot intervals throughout the work out area for the equipment. At each towel station is a spray bottle containing an antiseptic solution for wiping down the equipment before and after use. The spray bottles state that it is a disinfectant cleanser, bactericide, virucide, fungicide, mildewstat, etc. that is caustic and toxic, requiring the user to wear goggles and rubber gloves before applying the contents to a surface. No one in the gym using the stuff is so equipped. I stay away from it, but I notice that I must wash my hands after touching equipment or my hands begin to itch from contact dermatitis.

corwinabell

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Monday February 17, 2014 · 11:48 AM PST

2014/02/17 · 11:48

I’ve known Bob Tilbury for several years, and I have always considered him to be one of my three naval heroes, along with Popeye and Hägar the Horrible. We met at the local dog park, where we both exercise our dogs. Bob had served in the British navy during World War II. His most significant adventure then was serving as a gun layer on HMS Exeter during the famous Battle of the River Plate, in which the German pocket battleship, Graf Spee, was disabled and forced into Montevideo. Not able to extend her stay for repairs beyond 72 hours due to neutrality laws, the Germans took her to sea and scuttled her. Bob’s friends assume that he is in his nineties, but his mother assures me that he is older by many millennia.

Until recently, I was unaware that his experience on the sea began much earlier when he was a deck hand on Noah’s Ark. Bob explains that it was not hard for Noah to recruit him when he was young and naïve. He had responded to an advertisement that Noah had scratched on a rock, asking for seamen to man a vessel that he had under construction in what seemed like the middle of the desert.

corwinabell

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Saturday February 15, 2014 · 1:22 PM PST

2014/02/15 · 13:22

As an advisor to the Vietnamese riverine boats in 1969-70, I had no choice but to eat food prepared by their sailors. I contributed money to a Vietnamese officers’ mess. Sailors purchased meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables the nearest local market place or simply hailed sampans heading to market. Everything was boiled. It was the only way anything was cooked. The only condiment was nước mắm, a fish sauce made by aging layers of anchovies and salt for a year on bamboo racks in the sun, collecting the drippings. When the smell was strong enough to knock a buzzard off of a dung heap, the sauce was deemed to be ready.

corwinabell

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Friday February 14, 2014 · 9:44 PM PST

2014/02/14 · 21:44

Being obese, I’m always looking for a good diet. Just as I was finally considering the “Caveman Diet,” “Paleolithic Diet,” or, simply, “Paleo Diet,” my Discover magazine’s April 2013 issue panned it as the “Paleomythic” diet. The diet encourages folks to model our eating habits after that of our cave-dwelling ancestors by relying upon meat to the exclusion of carbohydrates, sugar, and processed food. The Discover article summarizes scientific research that fossil hominids also ate starchy tubers, bulbs and other plants, in addition to their usual woolly mammoth burgers. The experts now say that, even if our ancestors ate a predominantly meat diet, one cannot infer that such a diet was ideal for them. I have to agree, for every one of those people is now dead.

corwinabell

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Thursday February 13, 2014 · 11:13 PM PST

2014/02/13 · 23:13

Once upon a time, actually July 2008, in a faraway land, actually Yosemite Park, a young blonde woman, the eponymous Goldilocks, was enjoying a camping vacation in the great woods with her parents. Her mother and father were again arguing over whether the State Constitution of California should be amended to prohibit gay marriage, which had recently been ruled legal by the state’s Supreme Court. The father felt that the amendment was necessary to save the American family. The mother felt equally strongly that any two people should be allowed to formalize their lifetime commitment of love to each other.

Her parents’ bickering over politics, however, drove Goldilocks to stroll by herself into the forest. Venturing too far from camp, she became lost. Wandering aimlessly, she came upon a strange sight.

WARNING: RUSH LIMBAUGH WOULD NOT APPROVE OF THIS BEDTIME STORY!

corwinabell

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Wednesday February 12, 2014 · 11:53 PM PST

2014/02/12 · 23:53

The events below occurred exactly as described. Paleontologists have shown that saber-toothed carnivores were well known as frightening and ferocious predators of the Cenozoic. With their enormous, deadly-sharp canines, they were the top predators of their time -- the dire wolf, the sabertooth tiger and many others.

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Soka Gakkai

What's in a Name?

I Had It Coming!

Praise the Lord!

Adventure!

Evolution or Devolution?

Gym-nasty

Saltiest Sailor

The Heart of Darkness Diet

The Caveman Diet

Yosemite Story: Goldilocks and the Two Bears

The Secret Life of the Sabertooth Labradoodle