Doug’s World

Presidential Golf

I’ve been looking around a bit, and the Presidents whom I can find playing golf in photos are: Taft, Wilson, Harding, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.

It seems that with Eisenhower (shown here hitting balls on the deck of the heavy cruiser USS Canberra), golf became expected Presidential behavior. After Ike, only Carter has not played golf, but before Ike and after Taft (our first golfing President), six presidents abstained: McKinley, Coolidge, Hoover, both Roosevelts and Truman.

“All of us have heard this term “preventive war” since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it … a preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn’t preventive war; that is war. I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”

- President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower,
Supreme Allied Commander, WWII
August 11, 1954

In terms of golf handicap, Ike was our finest President ever. If you include VPs in the competition, Dan Quayle takes the prize; all serious amateur golf tournaments include a spelling bee, for this very reason.

Building Consensus

“The government of Afghanistan has to understand that we believe they have, indeed, been harboring a man who committed, and whose organization committed, this most recent egregious act.”
- Vice President Dick Cheney, 9/16/2001

Well, at least we can all agree on something.

Comforting the Enemy

I chatted with an articulate young Somali cab driver yesterday on the way home from Sea-Tac, and he convinced me to pay more attention to what’s going on in Mogadishu. It seems we’re not just winning hearts and minds in Baghdad these days. US troops are helping spread peace and democracy in Muslim neighborhoods all over the world.

Is Mogadishu the next Baghdad? Or was it the last one?

Plata o Plomo

A few years ago, I read Mark Bowden’s “Blackhawk Down,” the story of the disastrous incident in Somalia in 1993 that effectively ended American military operations there. (Tom pointed out to me that Amazon has cleaned up the entry for Jimmy Carter’s latest book, so I guess I’ll start linking to them for books again.)

I thought “Blackhawk Down” was great (and from the Pulitzer Prize that Bowden received for coverage of that incident I guess I’m not the only one), so when I was looking around at the Sydney airport yesterday for reading material for the SYD-LAX flight and saw another book by him, “Killing Pablo,” I bought it. I figured I’d just start it on the flight, but I liked it so much I wound up reading it straight through.

It’s the story of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian druglord whose name is generally associated with the Medellin cartel. Most of the book, as the title implies, is the tale of the hunt for him and how he was eventually found and killed, covering events that took place between 1990 — when Escobar was the 7th-wealthiest person in the world, right up there with Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei — and his death on December 2, 1993.

The sheer magnitude of Escobar’s criminal success is something I hadn’t appreciated. As he did in “Blackhawk Down,” Bowden makes only passing references to the gory details (only a few sentences in the entire book mention Escobar’s legendary sadistic cruelty, for instance) but masterfully conveys the personalities and interactions of all the characters involved: ruthless bad guys, naive fools, corrupt cops, military hardasses, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and many others.

The tale of Escobar’s final years builds like carefully crafted fiction. First he amasses this amazing criminal empire, while conning a large percentage of the Colombian public into believing he’s an idealistic socialist revolutionary like Che or Fidel when really he’s just a self-centered thug with a knack for manipulating the media. Then, after his true nature is exposed in a way that instantly kills his political ambitions, he starts a campaign of terror that eventually brings all of Colombia to its knees. The daily killings leave leaders of business and government literally begging for him to stop, willing to cut any deal he’s willing to accept.

So he “surrenders” — on terms he defines — and checks himself into a jail of his own design, where he lives like a king until a bizarre escape. That’s when the intense manhunt begins, and the Colombian and American governments are eager to find and kill him because everyone knows there will never be justice for him if he’s captured alive. His violent tactics flare back up, and soon there’s a nationwide vigilante backlash. After a while an average of 20 people a day are dying violent deaths in Colombia’s big cities, for many months in a row, all related to the hunt for Pablo.

For those who don’t remember the punch line, I’ll give away the ending: the authorities find him and kill him. By that time he has gone from wealthy mafioso-style kingpin to a hunted animal hiding in the city, and Colombians of all types are so tired of his antics that the government, the citizens, and competing criminals are all trying to bring him down, each in their own way.

I just noticed the reviews on Amazon for this book, after writing my thoughts above. Very entertaining. A Colombian nitpicks a bunch of little details in a way that reminded me of Escobar’s lawyers constantly debating the syntactical details of laws while ignoring their obvious intent. An American reviewer sadly observes that it may be “overly optomistic” to think that this book “might help America rethink its drug startegy.” And another reviewer complains “while this will definitely whet your appetite for knowing about Escobar, at the end of the book you would not know much more than what was done to kill him.” (Gee whiz, and to add insult to injury Bowden had the nerve to entitle the book “Killing Pablo.”)

Speaking of titles, the title of this post is an expression that means “silver or lead,” and was widely used in Colombia to describe Escobar’s style of doing business. For example, he would offer a judge the silver (a bribe) and if the judge didn’t immediately accept it he’d get the lead (a bullet).

Man, there were sure a lot of bad guys named Guillermo in this book. What’s that all about?

Canberra

That’s “canbra,” by the way — it’s a two-syllable word around here. And speaking of, Melbourne has a silent R — “Melbun.” Another colloquialism I ran into this week: sausage. As in “did you get anything for your birthday?” — “not even a sausage.” Or, as I heard it first used, “he didn’t say sausage about it in the meeting.” Origin unknown.

Anyway, we spent the day calling on people in the capital city and I snapped a few pictures. Not many, because we were mostly inside meeting rooms and those all look pretty much the same.

Headed for the airport. Goodbye, Australia.

My friend Annabelle

Annabelle works at the Hilton here in Sydney. Well, she did as of Wednesday when we took this picture and she was working at the Zeta Bar on the 4th floor.

Tonight, after a train ride back from the airport (the taxi line was a mile long) after a long day in the capital city of Canberra, I walked over to the Hilton and met Gray at the Marble Bar in the basement of the hotel. A local band called Brown Sugar was playing, and they were awesome. We hung out for a few drinks (mojitos, mmm), then we decided to check out another bar since it’s our last night in Sydney and we’ve only seen a few places. As we walked out the front door, I saw Annabelle (looking a bit pissed, as they say here) and the next thing you know we were all (me, Gray, Annabelle, her friend Damien) in a taxi headed for Bayswater Brasserie.

Annabelle is cool. When we told her we work for Microsoft, she said “oh, they make PC stuff, right?” And she told me she has a friend from Boston “who has the worst American accent ever, she says razzberry instead of rossberry!” Uh, right. And Annabelle and her family are going to Hanoi for some sort of delayed Christmas vacation — how cool is that?

But seriously, Annabelle is great. She took us to where she and her friends hang out over in King’s Cross, and we met Damien and Jason and Ryan and we had a great time. Then we left and had some fun elsewhere, and suddenly it’s 2:30AM and I’m waiting for room service to deliver some hot soup.

I miss you Megan! See you soon … my flight leaves tomorrow morning. And for those who don’t know, today is the second anniversary of our first date, dinner at the Space Needle. Happy anniversary, Babe!

And Annabelle, please send me that picture you took of me and Gray at Bayswater Brasserie.

More Sydney photos

And these will probably be the last ones, since I’m busy the rest of today and will be spending all day tomorrow in Australia’s capital city of Canberra. (Dick Cheney arrived in Sydney today, and this town ain’t big enough for the two of us.)

Cold Beer

Night photos of Sydney

I posted three shots from this evening on the work blog here.

Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb

Sunday afternoon (keep in mind its 19 hours later than Seattle here), my colleague Gray and I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Not in that criminal daredevil way that many bridges and skyscrapers are climbed, but as part of an orderly group led by a guide.

It was a blast. We traversed gangplanks and stairs and various types of walkways, winding through the architecture of the bridge to its very top and then back down. The whole adventure takes about 2.5 hours, and as they say in promoting the experience, “you have a different relationship with the bridge when you’re done that when you started.” I’ve seen the Sydney Harbour Bridge in photos many times, but now it won’t be an abstract engineering marvel, but rather something I’ll look at closely and think “oh yeah, I walked right up that part there, then over there, then …”

There’s a company that runs these tours, and they have a 20-year lease that started in 1998. Some of the walkways we used are things they’ve built (to be removed in 2018), and at other times we were just walking on the bridge itself.

The bridge is massive. It’s the widest long-span bridge in the world and also the largest steel arch bridge in the world. The top of the bridge is a little over 400 feet above the water, and the roadway down below includes 8 lanes of traffic, a wide pedestrian walkway, and two train lines. They had great foresight, to have built such a huge structure back in 1932 when only a fraction of its capacity was needed.

The climb is just part of the experience. The preparations are interesting too — part mountaineering expedition, part military operation, part tacky tourist trap. You start with signing a waiver, of course, then you take a breathalyzer test — over .05 and you can’t go up. Having just disembarked from a 14-hour flight in business class with free drinks a few hours earlier, I was a bit tense about the test, as the photo below shows.

After signing away your life and proving you’re not drunk (Megan, notice I didn’t say “pissed” — that’s for you), it’s time to strip down to your underwear and don a one-piece jumpsuit, then pass through a metal detector to assure you’re not hiding anything under it. Then it’s time to put on the equipment: the climbing harness around your waist, the hat and handkerchief and water bottle, the radio the tour guide uses to communicate with the group, and the hi-tech military-style bone-vibrating headphones that “work equally well underwater, so if you fall off the bridge we can continue talking to you.” The Aussie sense of humor is a big part of the experience too.

The climb itself was full of great views, and really not scary at all. You’re strapped to a steel cable the whole way, and also between railing at all times. I guess you could fall 20 feet or so down the stairs in a couple of places (assuming your cable harness didn’t break the fall), but to actually fall off the bridge you’d have to really work at it.

And some have. At the top, I asked Matt our tour guide “what’s the dumbest thing anybody has ever done on these climbs?” He then told the story of two separate incidents where guys had taken the tour intending to commit suicide at the top, but the tour guides managed to restrain them after they unbuckled their equipment and tried to jump. As Matt said, “that really kills the upbeat tone of the experience for others in the group.”

Then, a few minutes later, Matt remembered another dumb thing somebody had done. A guy and his girlfriend had done the climb with a bunch of relatives, from both his family and hers. At the top of the bridge, the guy dropped to his knees and proposed. Her answer was an icy “we’ve talked about this before,” and then the group all went back down in awkward silence. Having said that, Matt did say there have also been many successful proposals on the bridge.

Mom, you should do this climb. Seriously, I’ve been up many monuments with you, and this climb isn’t nearly as difficult or dangerous as some of the stuff you do. And with your new knees, it would be a piece of cake. Pick a date, and Megan and I will accompany you.

Anyway, that’s the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb. One of the final things Matt told us was that the average person burns enough calories on the climb to make up for three drinks, so when you stop at the nearby pubs to rehydrate you don’t have to start counting until the fourth one. We had three pints of Toohey’s Extra Cold lager (which has a little LED on the tap that says “-0.7F”), so I guess that means we didn’t have a drink at all. Should have gone back and tried the breathalyzer again, by golly.