"They Don't Do That Anymore"

 

Ricardo Guiraldes, scion of a notable Argentine ranching family, saw the end of the gaucho way of life coming forty years ahead.  His novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926) idealized the cowboy era much like Zane Grey did for the North American West; an elegy for tradition passing away.  The story is based on real-life neighbor Segundo Ramirez.

Guiraldes wrote in the estate house, La Portena, of the 1500 acre estancia in the heart of cattle country near Areca until his death at age 42, and was affectionately known as the "voice of the gaucho."  

The gauchos wandered from job to job all over Argentina, supporting themselves in between on wild cattle and ostriches.  Their distinctive accoutrement of beret or Andalusian sombrero, baggy pants, large knife, poncho and scarf reminds me of the Cossacks, another hard-living brotherhood whose glory days are gone.   

 The urban and land owning elite of Argentina grew tired of the gauchos' drifting, drinking and lawlessness, working over decades to rein them in.  Like the wild and free clan life of the Scots highlanders,   it was soon after popularized and romanticized when the threat was removed.  The moment the gauchos must have known it was over came in the late 1960s with the last traditional cattle drive.  Five ranch hands drove around 400 cattle from San Antonio de Areco to the stockyards outside of Buenos Aires in three days.   Said one, "They don't do that anymore.  Now they put the cattle in big trucks."

Segundo Ramirez himself

     

The Point Is...

 

People have always rewritten or spun history to suit their point of view, the discoverable facts taking a back seat.   Engaging, made-up stories live on forever -- Nero certainly didn't fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome and likely didn't set it, as the popular tale goes.  There was a great worldwide flood and sea level rise as the Ice Age ended, but the story of Noah doesn't really explain that very well. I have several late 19th century U.S. history books; the common theme is we're heroes and everyone else inconviently got in the way.  It took getting  to Guns, Germs and Steel to see why and how things happened.

I think most of it can be interpreted, beyond events triggered by fear and hate, by considering two related factors:  control of trade and resources, and the millennia-old quest for free or very cheap labor.  Julius Caesar enslaved about a million Gauls, Middle Easterners  raided Africa constantly for the same reason, children worked in deadly factories and coal mines, and we in the New World had that Atlantic trade in humans running for centuries.

You won't find it in the Iliad or most accounts, but the Trojan War was about control of the lucrative trade between the Aegean and the Black Seas.  The Romans were motivated to eliminate those great traders, the Phoenicians, from the Mediterranean and the silver mines of Spain and despite passionate Senatorial speeches obscuring this goal, that was the reason for the three Punic Wars.  Commerce was everything to the Carthaginians and they were willing to fight for it until their utter destruction. 

 We learn in school that the War of 1812 was ignited by the kidnapping of Americans to serve in the British Navy; that was an important, but not the only, part of the war's close relationship to the Napoleonic conflicts.  More importantly, for Great Britain's blockade of European trade to work, they had to stop American commerce from crossing the Atlantic to France.  Resources were in contention also, as Britain also wanted control over the Great Lakes to be under Canada.  

After Napoleon abdicated in April 1814,  four invasion forces were freed up to put an end to a war that did not need to be pursued any longer.  All failed to achieve their main goals, (as at Ft. McHenry and New Orleans) while support for continuation faded rapidly among governments and the mercantile class.  As for the territory issue, the Empire was not going to keep American expansion out of the Lakes anyway.

World trade pursued peacefully and in good faith has had much better results historically than going to war to seize power over wealth.  But I wonder what the eventual outcome will be from Nixon's (really big business') opening up of China.  

     

We Aren't Going to Make This Easy, Part II - or - More in the Ongoing Struggle With Bad Design

 

If you are looking for the serial number on the underside of a MacBook Pro, good luck.  The type is very light gray, and the size of an ant's foot.  This info can be called up on the screen, but if you're out of battery this would be the (useless) backup.  However, the box it came in is quite nice, so they got that right.

 There are hundreds of words, symbols and numbers on the back panel of our garage door opener, but the only thing you really need to know is where the "Learn" button is -- you will use it many times when the machine loses its programming from a power loss or several other mysterious reasons.  It is not labelled -- why not?

I rented a Chevrolet Cruze once, not by choice, but it was what they had available at an airport.  Instead of words, every control had only cryptic symbols.  I never did find the lights switch.  Car reviewers have said that even tech-savvy BMW drivers couldn't figure out their early touch screen controls.  Our Bush-era car has very few things anyone can't figure out intuitively.  You can even turn on the heat or cooling without taking your eyes off the road to scroll through menus.

  We had to accept a new "smart" thermostat along with the replacement heat pump.  The lettering is tiny with very low contrast (unlike the much better example above) and of course it has layers of useless functions which, if used, could ball up the system so badly you won't even be able to get the air conditioning going.  All those nighttime and vacation settings don't really do much of anything you couldn't just as easily acccomplish by turning the temperature setting up or down.  With a physical dial, as Nature intended.  

In a lot of homes, the clothes washer and dryer are crammed together in an opening that doesn't allow the dryer to be slid out for cleaning lint from the duct pipe, which must be done.  I used to have to disconnect the washer after removing the louvered doors, wrestle it out and then pull the dryer out part way (there wasn't room for more than that) and go to work, mostly upside down.   An added six inches or so more of opening width on either side would make this task so much more doable. 

That was the only one of these design messes I could fix.  The appliances went down to the basement, which is a better place for all that noise, too.  Makers of cars, thermostats, garage door openers and MacBooks, the rest is up to you.