The Disappearing Spoon -- a book review

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a history of the development of the Periodic Table of Elements, the basic map chemists use to understand the makeup of all things in our univers.

I know. I know. Some people find history and science boring. The complete title of this book is The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Element. It's anything but "boring."

Take the German chemist Robert Bunsen. You remember the Bunsen burner in your high school chemistry class. This book clarifies that although Herr Bunsen didn’t invent the Bunsen Burner. He did improve it by adding a valve that controlled oxygen flow which made a more efficient flame. That allowed him to heat elements causing them to emit unique bands of colored light. Take a disused cigar box and two telescope eye pieces and, voilà! He had a spectroscope. He was also into experimenting with cyanide and building working models of geysers in the middle of his lab.

Speaking of Bunsen Burners, when I was a high school sophomore in chemistry class, I discovered that you could use a Bunsen Burner to heat a test tube topped with a cork and shoot that cork with great accuracy at anyone within about eight feet.

Chemistry class! Ah, yes, I remember Mr. Rice’s high school chemistry class. It was the fall of 1963 and I was new to the town, to the school, and definitely to Mr. Rice. He was a very big man, over six feet tall and over 300 pounds, no hair. That first day, he set out the following facts about himself and his class. He declared the United States may be a democracy but his class was not. His rules were the rules and students had no say. He could swear in six languages. He was qualified to teach every class available at our high school except Home Economics and Girls P.E.

He announced that he was required by the State of Oklahoma to issue the approved text book, which he promptly did. Then he said we would not be using said book and he recommended that we turn them back in before that day’s class ended rather than keeping them in our lockers and risking damage or loss for which we would be responsible for the replacement cost.

If he mentioned the very large Periodic Table hanging on the wall, I don’t remember it.

He passed out a list of the 103 elements on the table at that time complete with its one- or two-letter chemical symbol, atomic number, and valence which we would then be tested on. In order to pass the class, we must pass the test. We would have as many chances to pass the test as we needed. We could miss three elements the first time we took the test and pass. The second time, we could miss two. The third and any succeeding attempts would require perfection. Yes, you guessed it. I passed on the third attempt.

This whole process was to help us do equations quickly using the information we’d memorized. Until I read The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, I didn’t understand that all this information was readily available on the Periodic Table of Elements which was there on the wall of that classroom. Not that that would have helped. As big as it was, I sat too far from it to easily read it. And you had to know where to look on it to find any particular element. Not to mention that the one- and two-letter chemical symbols were printed large while the name of the element was a smaller font and the rest of the information was even smaller.

Many of those symbols had seemingly nothing to do with the element they stood for. I mean, okay. “H” for hydrogen. “Li” for Lithium. But “Na” for Sodium? “K” for Potassium? “Au” for Gold for heaven’s sake! And they were not organized alphabetically by symbol or name.

I don’t remember if Mr. Rice explained how to use the Periodic Table of Elements. Perhaps he did, but I was too overwhelmed to hear him, much less, process and use that information. So it was memorization for me!

I should have read this book before I had that chemistry class!

Reading Kean’s descriptions of some of the elements and how they could effect a human’s physical self was, if not frightening, certainly sobering.

During that year in chemistry class, we had a unit on “unknowns.” Mr. Rice would give us a sample to be identified – a powder, a liquid, a solid. He handed out instructions for a series of tests we were use to identify the element. Rather like recipes. I quickly discovered that I could just taste whatever it was and identify it. Of course I first tested the sample for arsenic, arsenous, cyanide, and acetate. The first three sounded dangerous to me. And one taste of acetate taught me not to taste it again. (If you taste acetate, you won’t be able to spit for a week. Think biting into a green persimmon.)

Apparently I wasn't the first to think I could identify an element by taste. Kean specifically says: “A live body is so complicated … that if you inject a random element into your bloodstream or liver or pancreas, there’s almost no telling what will happen. 
...when it comes to the periodic table, it’s best to keep our mouths shut. ”

When Mr. Rice discovered some of us were using this unsafe method of testing, he took steps to dissuade us from continuing to use it. He said he put urine in some of the samples of unknowns. Now we didn’t know if he actually did, but I for one discontinued that particular method of testing.

My favorite story in The Disappearing Spoon is a cautionary tale about a Detroit high school student who, in the 1990s, for an Eagle Scout project, built a nuclear reactor in the potting shed in his mother’s backyard.

No spoilers here.

There are so many good stories about scientists and, shall we say, science enthusiasts in this book. It’s definitely worth a read.

 

Freedom of Choice

 

The statue on top of this building is called "Freedom." 

Buckle up. You're in for a history lesson!

In 1854, Sculptor Thomas Crawford, originally from New York, was commissioned to design and complete a full-size plaster model of the statue "Freedom" in his studio in Rome, Italy. All nineteen and one-half feet of her. 

Jefferson Davis (yes, indeed, that Jefferson Davis) was in charge of the then ongoing construction of the Capitol building and all it decorations. There was a kerfuffle between the New Yorker and slave-holding Mississippian. Crawford had originally crowned Freedom with the liberty cap, a symbol of an emancipated slave. Needless to say, Davis being the boss, won the tussle. 

Crawford died in 1857 before the full-size plaster model could be shipped to the United States. In the spring of 1858, divided into six crates, she set sail for New York. During her voyage the ship began taking on water and put in at Gibraltar for repairs. The ship left Gibraltar only to begin leaking again and ending up in Bermuda. After stopping there in storage for a while, Freedom, or at least half of her, arrived in New York City in December, 1858. Finally all parts of the plaster model arrived in Washington, D.C. in late March 1859.

Casting of Freedom in bronze at the Mills Foundry outside Washington, D.C., began in 1860. The work was interrupted in 1861 by the Civil War and again when the foreman in charge of the casting went on strike. Instead of paying him higher wages, Mills turned the project over to Philip Reid, one of his slaves working at the foundry. Reid presided over the rest of the casting and assembly of the figure. Freedom was finished by the end of 1862. On December 2, 1863, a year and a half before the end of the Civil War and eleven months after the Emancipation Proclamation, former slaves completed the installation of this bronze woman called Freedom to her pedestal atop the Capitol of the United States. 

I find it ironic that "Freedom" a.) is personified as a woman; b.) that her design had to be approved by a slave-holding man; and c.) that she was finished and raised to her pedestal by slaves and newly-freed slaves.

Just like that beautiful statue standing high above Washington, D. C., women's rights, indeed almost everyone's rights, have followed a long and torturous path from that grand Declaration of Independence and the nascent days of The Constitution. And it looks like we've still got a ways to go.

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie and his Alice's Restaurant, "Freedom" is what I come here to talk about. Not a statue, or a symbol, but the real freedom for American citizens to make life-changing (even life-or-death) decisions about their own medical care -- specifically women citizens and anyone with a uterus. The Freedom of Choice. And that is exactly what I mean Freedom of Choice. NOT pro-abortion. And having only one choice, is no choice at all.

There are as many experiences of pregnancy as there are people who have been or are pregnant. 

I have a friend whose mother was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy, but she exercised her freedom of choice and carried my friend to term. And I'm glad she did. That instance, however, did not in any way involve a "law" or a court's decision.

What about governmental regulations? 

In 1970 when Air Force Capt. Susan Struck, a career officer serving as a nurse in Vietnam got pregnant, she was transferred to a base in Washington, one of the few states where abortion was then legal. Not only was pregnancy a reason to discharge her, albeit honorably, but the regulation extended beyond that "The commission of any woman officer will be terminated with the least practicable delay when it is established that she...has given birth to a living child while in commissioned officer status."

Despite Struck's plan to give the child up for adoption (which she did) and the fact that she had 60 days of accrued leave for recovery time, a disposition board gave her a choice: Have an abortion on base or leave the military. An abortion or the end of her career? There is no choice here.

Struck's case was brought to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Her attorney in the case was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Although the Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear Struck v. Secretary of Defense, Ginsburg's legal wrangling led to the Air Force's decision to reverse its policy.

                             

Where was Liberty for women among these symbols? And it wasn't just the Air Force. It was the Department of Defense.

And it wasn't just the Federal Government who treated pregnant women differently from men although their pregnancy would not affect their ability to do their job. Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women teachers could be required to take enforced, unpaid leave. Private companies could use pregnancy as a reason to deny disability benefits otherwise available to all employees. (I know, I know. pregnancy is not in and of itself a disability. But sometimes pregnancies do not follow a normal course, and mothers-to-be are put on bedrest or have other restrictions to avoid premature birth or miscarriage.) Businesses could refuse to hire someone because they might become pregnant. (I suppose they still can, but they can't say out loud that is the reason.)

Probably the most important thing about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is that it was passed after the Supreme Court, in 1976, upheld the General Electric Company's right to treat pregnancy-based disability differently than any other nonwork related disability for insurance purposes on the basis that pregnancy-discrimination is not sex discrimination. That 1978 amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress.

"Passed by Congress" to correct what many thought was a wrong decision by the Supreme Court.

The current Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. They said they were returning decisions relating to abortion to the States. Many of us think the current Supreme Court's decision to turn our decisions regarding our own reproductive health over to the various and sundry States was a wrong decision. It's already limiting our Freedom of Choice and endangering not just our reproductive lives but our actual living-and-breathing-free lives. 

Pro Choice is NOT Pro Abortion. It is just what it says. Pro Choice. The Constitution does not give us Freedom. It prohibits government from taking our Freedom away from us.

You and I cannot decide who sits on the Supreme Court of the United States. And we cannot change the fact that it has now given our Freedom of Choice to the State governments to do with as they will.

But we can, together, decide who sits in our State Houses and in our Congress with our votes. It's up to us to protect our Freedom. Our choices this fall will have real life effects on our mothers and sisters, our daughters and granddaughters, on all the men in their lives, and anyone whose lives are directly affected.

It's time to stand up for Freedom.

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Hiroshima -- Book Review

The original book was copyrighted and published in 1946. It is nonfiction. The edition I just finished reading was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1985. I know, I know -- where have I been that it's taken me so long to read it? And why did I read it now?

Reason No. 1 -- my daughter loaned it to me. She's a student at Colorado University, Denver. Her Honors Project is a book of poetry focused on poetry of witness and documentary poetics. This is but one of the books she's reading in preparation to write her poems.               .

Reason No. 2 -- In today's world climate the threat of nuclear war has thrown me back to the days of my youth when magazines had Jello recipes, diets, and blue prints for bomb shelters.

And Reason No. 3 -- Hersey's book Hiroshima mentions Father Hubert Schiffer, a German Jesuit priest. He and three other priests were in their Hiroshima mission compound less than one mile from ground zero on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the bomb called "Little Boy" exploded over the Japanese city.

Many years ago I got to hear Fr. Schiffer speak. At that time he was the Catholic Chaplain at the University of Oklahoma. Appropriately enough, he was speaking in the underground auditorium between the Sequoyah Building and the Will Rogers Building in Oklahoma City's Capital Complex. That area included a cafeteria, the auditorium, and enough space for important state government officials to take cover in the event of a nuclear attack.

I remember it had huge metal doors that could be closed and ample supplies of water and crackers in barrels. I also remember that across the hall from the auditorium was a cafeteria (which we Welfare Department employees patronized religiously.)  They made the best cinnamon rolls and coffee, good reasons for us to look forward to coffee breaks.

Anyway, when Fr. Schiffer spoke, he told about his time in Hiroshima.

At the time of the bombing Wikipedia sets Hiroshima's population at approximately 340,000–350,000. Fr. Schiffer said that before the bomb, he could not see the ocean from his building because of the city's many other buildings. After the bomb, almost everything in the central part of the city was gone. There was nothing to block his view of the sea. Wikipedia estimated as many as 123,000 people died that first day.

Fr. Schiffer told about being taken out of the city to recuperate from injuries and radiation sickness. It took about a year for him to recover. When he was well enough, he returned to the city to find orphaned children roaming the city, depending on each other, and living however they could. He took over the bombed-out shell of a building and began collecting the children and the necessities to care for them -- sometimes leaving food outside the building to lure them in.

The American occupying forces had plenty of supplies in the area but Schiffer was blocked from them by the red tape many of us are familiar with. Finally, with a borrowed truck and a couple of people to help, he showed up at the gate of a supply depot. He explained that he needed bedding and food for his orphans, but he did not yet have official approval. The MPs refused him admittance.

He said he was going in to get what he needed. He had his helpers get out of the truck. He laid down in the front seat behind the truck's steering wheel, gunned it, and crashed through the gate. The MPs (I guess thinking it not a good idea to fire on a priest) stood by while he and his helpers loaded the truck. They handed the MPs a list of what they were taking and left. Father Schiffer said he never heard any complaints from the American military, nor did he receive a bill. In fact, after that, the Americans responded in a more favorable and timely manner to his requests for aid.

John Hersey's book follows six survivors of the bomb. The book begins:

August 6,1945

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personel department of the East Asia Tim Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Priest, lay on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, was about to unload a cart of clothes at a rich man's home in the suburbs.

The mundane activities did not really touch me until I read the Hiroshima Methodist Church and, all of a sudden, I realized that my view of World War II Japan was fundamentally wrong. A Methodist Church -- not a mission, but a church lead by a Japanese Methodist minister and attended by Japanese parishioners. In his book Hersey talks about damage to the Chamber of Commerce Building, the difficulty of withdrawing money from the damaged banks, the heroic efforts of medical personnel to treat the horribly wounded in equally badly damaged hospitals, etc., etc., etc.

This did not at all fit my John Wayne/Robert Mitchum-American-movies-trained concept of the people who attacked my people at Pearl Harbor.

Of course, these were not the people who attacked Pearl Harbor, any more than I was the person who dropped that atom bomb on them. I hadn't realized just how complete my sense of us and them was -- at least for the Japan that existed then.

That was before I was born. That was the Japan that my father fought in the Pacific. In my mind, somehow World War II Japan was completely separate from the Japan where my school friend Ray's great grandparents came from. Or the 1970's Japan my little yellow Honda car came from.

The original book ended and was published during the first anniversary year of the bombing. Hersey wrote:  A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.

The hope at the end of World War II was that nuclear weapons would never be used again. Hersey does not end the revised edition with such rose-tinted glasses. He dates the development of nuclear weapons around the world up until the 1985 edition of Hiroshima. He brings us up to the fortieth anniversary of that first nuclear bomb. Each of the six survivors was still alive. They had built new lives for themselves. They had endured.

The cover of  Hiroshima quotes the Saturday Review of Literature -- "Everyone able to read should read it."

I concur.

No One Snaps Beans with Grandma Anymore -- Nonfiction

Or shells peas or shucks corn or pieces quilts or, for that matter, quilts with Grandma anymore.

This was the title of a piece that showed up on my Facebook feed and now I can't for the life of me locate the article. It doesn't really matter. Whatever point the article made, the title makes the point for me that we need to take time to explore our history.

Not the history that Miss Hall taught us in the eleventh grade. That history was about people so important that they have become legends. People who wrote the Declaration of Independence and spoke the Gettysburg Address and spoke the I Have a Dream speech.

I mean our history. Our stories. And we didn't get them just snapping beans. We got them around the dinner table. Or in the early evening sitting on the front porch. At family picnics when the little kids sat on the ice-cream churn holding the top down while the men cranked and cranked until the ice cream was frozen enough to make churning nearly impossible.

Or in the car when us kids couldn't stand Daddy's Country and Western music and he couldn't stand our Rock and Roll so the radio just rode along silently while someone said "Do you remember the time..." Or someone else pointed out the place where Great Grandpa and Great Grandma first settled when they came to Oklahoma -- the men and big boys came in a covered wagon along with the livestock, the women and little children came on the train.

The story about Grandma's grandpa who was still picking cotton at age 94 and making his grandchildren hop to keep up with him.

The story about a time when Grandpa could ride a horse in the Deep Fork Creek Valley through grass so tall you couldn't see the horse.

And about Granddad carrying planks in the back of a vehicle he called "the duck" to lay across creeks where there was no bridge so he could deliver the mail.

The story about Dad's being sent by steam locomotive from Rhode Island, a place none of us were quite sure where it was, all the way across the United States to the West Coast to be shipped to the South Seas in World War II. And how they had to go north from Denver into Wyoming, then west across the Rockies, because the mountains weren't so tall there and the train could pull the grade.

About the mean rooster that flogged my cousin Chris who was just a little boy. And we had that rooster the next day for Sunday dinner.

About watching Neil Armstrong in that grainy, black and white, TV picture take humanity's first step on the moon. Astronaut Armstrong was definitely the stuff of legend, but the people in the den watching were my story. There were nine people, three generations -- some watching avidly as history was made, a couple oohing and ahhhing over a new baby and a couple more playing with a new puppy. It seemed to me that I, alone, understood the importance of the television event.

Actually, I alone was missing history being made right there in that room with me. Now, the old people who were in that room are long gone. They took with them, the recipe for Big Mama's Fresh Apple Cake, stories of the early days in the uranium ball mills of New Mexico and the oil fields of Oklahoma. Even the baby has grown children and I've lost touch with him and all his stories.

The important thing about snapping beans and shelling peas, is being present to our own histories as they're being told. Indeed, as they're being made.

Where was I when the big world events were making news? When the Cuban Missile Crises made the news? When President Kennedy was murdered? When my friends were being shipped to Vietnam. When the Oklahoma City Bombing happened? When the World Trade Center was attacked?

How did I meet my first husband? What was it like when my son was born? What went wrong with that first marriage? How did I meet the man I happily live with now. What was it like when my daughter was born.

Where have all those people gone? What did they do?

Where are all those people still in what is becoming my history? What are they doing right now, today? What will they do as they make their way in the world?

What are we doing? How will we make our way?

We don't need to snap beans anymore. We can if we want to. Better yet, we can take the time whenever, wherever. To find out what that youngest grandchild's favorite color is? Take a ride with the newest licensed driver in the family. With the radio turned off, of course. Watch the video of the band performance and basketball game on Facebook.

We can scrapbook, read our daughter-in-law's blog, attend a slam poetry competition, listen with enthusiasm to a discussion of soda firing pottery.

The venues may have changed, but we're still busy making our histories. And we can still pay attention.

#atozchallenge

Campaigns, Schmam-paigns

image from billtatro.com

Oh, my. Politics to the left of me. Politics to the right of me. And Peyton Manning/Brock Osweiler in the middle. I do live on the Front Range, you know. Guess I might have to tune into an infomercial.

And how does this fit in with my blog's purpose -- writing about writing? It's all life imitating fiction. Some thriller. Some Fantasy. Some mystery. Some horror...

I am a registered Democrat. In national and state-wide elections, I have almost always voted Democrat. I acknowledge that there have often been rowdy, even venomous Democrat campaigns, especially on the state level. (I'm from Oklahoma and I can think of quite a few Governor, U.S. Senate, State Attorney General, even Lieutenant Governor and Corporation Commissioner races that qualified as less than genteel, though never so vulgar as today's Republican race for presidential nominee.)

Will Rogers, another Oklahoman, once said, "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

I still appreciate his succinct description of my party. It seems that this year's Democrat contestants uphold the tradition of differences of opinion or perception or point of view. Bernie, the idealist. Hillary, the pragmatist.

However, I'm going to have to cede to this cycle's Republicans the mantle of Most Disorganized Political Party. Indeed, they are currently authoring a state-of-being that has accelerated from disorganized to chaotic. Not to mention noisy.

We humans have short memories and think that our own time is either/and/or "the best of times ... the worst of times." Sometimes our collective memory is shorter even than a lifetime.

But division is nothing new.

Not for the Republicans. Abraham Lincoln, the first elected Republican president, was reelected on the National Union Party ticket his second time around. The Civil War was still raging and the Republican Party split in two. The other took the name Radical Democracy Party and nominated John C. Fremont of California, a supporter of general emancipation.

The Democrat Party nominated former General-in-Chief of the Union Army, George McClellan.

The outcome of the Civil War was still in doubt and McClellan supported the concept of union with slavery -- anathema to the abolitionists and the new territories who did not want slavery to spread.

Keeping in mind, all three of these candidates represented only the Union side. The Confederacy was still months away from recognizing theirs was a lost cause.

Talk about a mess!

And then there was the 1912 campaign for the Republican presidential nominee. Teddy Roosevelt had lost faith in William Howard Taft whom he had anointed his successor in the 1908 election. TedRo came back full bore. But, failing to get the Republican nomination, he headed a third party, the Progressive Party, also called the Bull Moose Party.

They lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Third parties (other than Lincoln's, I suppose) have no history of winning presidential contests in the U.S.

Did I mention that the Democrat Party is not an organized party?

Probably the most exciting multi-party presidential campaign in my lifetime, but before I can remember, was the 1948 election which saw the Democrat Party divided three ways -- the segregationist States Rights' nominee Strom Thurmond; the liberal left Progressive Party's Henry Wallace; and the centrist Democrat incumbent Harry Truman.

A less contentious Republican Party nominated Thomas E. Dewey and with the historical precedents that divided parties lose elections the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press with this:

 

A victorious Harry Truman! The paper got it wrong.

Twenty years later the Democrat Party splintered again and another Wallace (this time a segregationist) headed the American Independent Party.

1968 was such a chaotic time -- Vietnam, Civil Rights, demonstrations, riots, and assassinations -- the Republican Richard Nixon, promising to restore law and order, won. (And we all know how he worked out in the world of law and order.)

In 1980, incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter's lagging popularity as President -- oil embargo, the Olympics Boycott, the Iran Hostage Crisis -- had him facing three other Democrats for the nomination.

Smelling blood in water, eight Republicans vied for the nomination. Ronald Reagan got the nod, but fellow Republican John Anderson pulled out and ran as an Independent. His defection hardly affected Reagan's win at all.

In 1992, Ross Perot's run as an Independent with the Reform Party is given credit (or blame, depending on your politics) for incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush's loss to Democrat Bill Clinton. Perot, a billionaire who ran against Washington insiders. Sound familiar?

Thus endeth the history lesson for today.

So here we are in 2016. For some of us, this election cycle is a thriller with impending doom. Who'll save the day? For some a Fantasy with Utopian ambitions. For others, a mystery -- how is this happening? And for far too many, a horror too scary to even imagine.

Did I leave out comedy? Yes, I did. The humorous aspects have worn thin. I think I'll turn the TV and radio off and avoid Facebook comments.

The Lone Ranger--a movie review

What has this new Lone Ranger movie got? Flash and dash and a laugh or twenty-three. 

And Johnny Depp.

With a bit of computer magic there are more cliff-hanging, hair-raising, heart-stopping, spine-tingling sequences than I’ve ever seen. And so tongue-in-cheek that you’re bound to leave the theater laughing.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s more than enough graphic violence to earn it its PG-13 rating. In fact, it’s my opinion that the visual and auditory intensity of the movie should be quite enough to make it PG-13. That said, I had plenty of warning so I could close my eyes when I didn’t want to see what was coming. (I do that regularly in the movies, to the point that my daughter has punched me in the ribs thinking I’d fallen asleep. Well, to be fair, I’ve done that, too, but not in The Lone Ranger.)

I may be old, but not old enough to remember the radio Lone Ranger. I do remember the TV Lone Ranger. I loved it as a kid. This is not my father’s Lone Ranger, nor my generation’s Lone Ranger, but if you remember those Lone Rangers, you’ll get more of the jokes.

Johnny Depp has brought us The Pirates of the Caribbean Goes West. They play fast and loose with geography, history, physics, and probability theory. But the bad guys are ugly and mean. The whore has a heart of gold and a leg of another precious material. The school marm doesn’t teach school but she’s lovely, sweet, and vulnerable. And the hero wears a white hat.

What more could you want?

A side-kick, of course. Who, in this movie, is really the main character. Johnny Depp as the wise and wonderful wizard of odd. He’s Tonto wearing a dead crow on his head and leading the wrong brother by the nose into hero-hood.

And the score is grand. I swear I heard bits of Carmina Burana in there. Well, maybe not, but they finally did get around to The William Tell Overture and Silver reared up and The Lone Ranger shouted “Hiyo, Silver! Away!”

To which Tonto responded… Well, that would be giving it away. Go see the movie and don’t be afraid to laugh.