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IN THIS ISSUE

• Dick Monaghan makes his New Year´s resolutions
• Geoff Goodship knows first-hand about waiting in airports
• Jim Olson recalls the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose
• Bill McNeill has a program which makes PC compatible with Macs
• Tony Lewis and Maura Boguski suggest this exercise in futility
• Anita Henderson forwards a story about an airport encounter
• Jack Peaker suggests a site for music lovers
• Here is an idea for a laudable New Year´s resolution

Dick Monaghan makes his

NEW YEAR´S RESOLUTIONS

Thank goodness New Years´ Eve and Christmas are behind us! This incessant merrymaking is taking its toll on me. I was out of wind long before the ball fell in Times Square (Pacific Standard Time), having exhausted myself trying to pry the lid off the cocoa tin. This was in addition to having to get up to retrieve a slipper that fell off my foot while I watched TV from my recliner. It was nearly nine p.m. before I retired my party hat and my whistle-that-unrolls-itself (while making a disgusting sound).

New Year´s requires making resolutions, and here are mine:

1. I will no longer refer to certain politicians as "you dumb bastards." In 2007, I swear I will be more moderate, limiting myself to the occasional, "Get your head out of your pocket."

2. The next time some unprintable whooshes into the parking space I had staked out, I will not roll down the window and reflect unfavorably on his/her family tree. I will merely tip my hat (without extending a finger) and drive on.

3. I resolve not to change a whit of the following: if I go into an electronics store to buy something and have to round up a mildly-irritated clerk myself, I will go right on asking him a hundred questions and then not buy anything. Especially if he doesn´t seem to know (or care) much about the products. Especially if he tells me they´re out of the display model I might want, and doesn´t bother offering to order it for me. Especially after I have to round him up a second time, while he´s drinking coffee and schmoozing with an equally-ignorant, couldn´t-care-less type.

4. I will make my side of the bed at least twice a week.

Have a sane and rewarding year!

Geoff Goodship says that their recent holiday in the Dominican Republic was uneventful, but the prelude was typical of many recent scenes in airports:

GETTING THERE IS NOT HALF THE FUN

It was 4:30 a.m. when the phone woke us. I don´t usually sleep well in hotels, but as we were at the front end of a two-week all-inclusive holiday, Freddie and I had slept fairly well. In 20 minutes we showered, dressed, packed quickly, and were ready for the 5 a.m. shuttle to Vancouver International. With 10 minutes to spare, I phoned to confirm our flight was on time. I don´t usually do this but this time it was fortunate, for our flight was delayed till 7:05 pm that evening. The 12-hour delay was only partly upsetting for as Freddie reminded me, "We´re on holiday." We got up for the second time around 8:00 a.m. With breakfast out of the way, we decided to kill most of the day in Richmond looking for last-minute Christmas gifts.

At 4:30 in the afternoon I phoned again to confirm our departure. This time it was delayed till Thursday evening at 10:15 p.m. At this point we decided to rebook our hotel room for the chance of a further delay seemed quite possible. Before rebooking our room, I decided to make one more phone call to confirm that departure time. A recorded voice advised that "Your flight will now depart at 3:05 a.m." That was enough to let us decide to have an early dinner and a few hours sleep. This time we would need to be up at 12:30 a.m. Friday morning.

At 12:30 the hotel wake-up call came for the second time. Before getting dressed, I phoned once more to confirm the scheduled departure. This time the 3:05 departure was confirmed. Once more we dressed, packed, checked out, and dragged our luggage to the airport shuttle. The shuttle was on time, a good omen. In the rain and darkness, the driver´s bright smile and cheerful manner seemed to be a good start to our holiday in the Dominican Republic.

At 1:20 a.m. the airport seemed almost deserted. Attendants took our tickets, checked our luggage, apologized for the delay, and handed us $15 food vouchers before explaining that the only thing open at this hour was Burger King. We lingered for awhile in the main area before passing through security gates into the departure lounge around 2 a.m.

Here the scene was surreal. Most departure areas seem to have a quiet business-like atmosphere. In this one, everyone appeared tranquilized. A few folks wandered about aimlessly without speaking, passing each other like sleepwalkers. Most seemed in a fitful state, not asleep and not awake, sitting up and fidgeting restlessly on the benches. Among the holiday crowd were small children and teenagers. I spoke to a couple who had not phoned the airline at all and had been there two hours in advance of the original 7 a.m. departure the previous day. Others had stories of arriving for what they believed would be a 7 p.m. departure, and still others had arrived for a 10:15 flight. Some, like us, had flown or driven in from other parts of B.C. and were now on day three of their holiday.

About 2:45 I stared into the darkness to see if I could see our aircraft arriving at the ramp. Nothing there. I spoke to an attendant at the departure gate who told me, "The aircraft will arrive in 5 minutes." A few minutes after 3, the flight crew arrived. They too looked out into the darkness for an aircraft that wasn´t there. The fact that the crew didn´t know what was going on with their company shook me. A few minutes later a company representative arrived. A crowd quickly gathered around her. Without a public address system, she tried unsuccessfully to address the whole departure lounge. She offered sincere apologies. She explained that unscheduled maintenance was the problem and that her company was doing all it could to rectify the situation. She said that coffee and donuts would arrive momentarily and that our aircraft would now arrive at 6 a.m. and leave at 7:00 "A full 24 hours late," I thought.

The crowd around her reacted as if that hot coffee had been poured on them. For a moment I felt the woman was in real danger. Several people shouted into her face at once. Some demanded their money and their luggage back. A few just swore and left. Others claimed they would never use this airline again and if they ever did get to the Dominican Republic they would be coming back by boat. One tough-looking blond in a sequined black dress swore loud enough to be heard throughout the departure lounge. She got out her video camera and began interviews she said she would be sending to the company. She certainly caught some genuine outrage on tape. One fellow sat down, slapped his forehead with his palm for about 10 minutes, then headed off to a washroom.

These Roman Candle personalities were not the majority, however. Most of the families simply tossed in their seats and tried to sleep. Some smiled and joked quietly. Que Sera! One gentleman had reached the limit of his tolerance with the bench. Ignoring his two small children, he rolled onto the floor under a bench, put a coat both over and under his head, attempting to blot out the world. The smaller children seemed least disturbed by the long delay; mostly it was the adults who behaved badly. What a scene! Before us lay most of the range of human expression: love and hate, fear and calm, resignation and indignation, serenity and rage. "This is a great opportunity to observe the human animal," I thought to myself. I wondered how this broad collection of personalities would handle a real crisis.

At 6 o´clock no airplane. Seven o´clock, no airplane. Finally at 7:45, a Boeing 737 docked at the ramp. By 8:30 the aircraft was ready for pushback from the ramp. The captain entered the cabin and picked up the intercom. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We´re very sorry for the delay but hope to have you in the air in just a few minutes. Before we go, I want you to know that each member of this crew volunteered for this particular flight. All of them answered their pager, gave up their days off, to be here for you, so complain to the company all you want, but please don´t take out your anger on my crew." A few minutes later the wheels came up and we were on our way to Calgary to pick up the remaining passengers.

Once in the air, the captain returned to this intercom to say, "We will be in Calgary in 59 minutes. I´ve asked the company for permission to put on extra fuel so we can fly a little faster. We will put on fuel and passengers in Calgary and should be on the ground not more than 30 minutes."

The cabin crew were in the aisles with juice and coffee before we were at cruising altitude. We began our descent as the cups and trash were being cleared away. Having lost an hour on our journey east, it was late morning by the time we were at Calgary´s ramp and ready to load. The Calgary passengers, who had also waited a full day, boarded quickly. No one spoke. An hour passed. An hour and a half passed. Two hours passed. Two hours and 15 minutes after landing, the gentle bump of the tractor signaled our pushback from the ramp. There were two aircraft ahead of us in the lineup for the departure runway but at this point the wait did not seem long. Sometime Friday afternoon we were airborne again on our way to Puerto Plata. Once again: "This is the Captain speaking. Sorry for the delay, but we had to wait for the fuel truck."

Exactly five hours and 59 minutes from wheels-up to wheels-down. We cleared customs in Puerto Plata in record time. The buses were waiting to take us to our resort hotel. A truly obnoxious resort greeter, a Canadian who works winters there, welcomed us, saying that he was buying the first round and that we should all begin drinking ourselves into a stupor for the next week or so. In 25 minutes we were unloading suitcases and looking for rooms. "Sorry, no bellboys available at this hour," said a clerk who handed out room keys. We headed into the darkness to find our particular building, our floor, and our room numbers. It´s perhaps ironical that having dozed on the plane and in the bus, we seemed beyond sleep.

We had left our Vancouver Island home Wednesday morning for an hour-and-a-half ferry ride to Vancouver, a one-hour flight to Calgary, and a six-hour flight to the Dominican Republic. It was a few minutes after twelve on Saturday morning when we finally arrived.

In the warm Dominican sunshine, the problems of the past hours melted quickly, but I shall long remember that scene in the early morning hours at Vancouver International. What an erratic tribe we are!

Jim Olson is reminded of Tokyo Rose by the death of a past president:

HOORAY FOR GERALD FORD!

I have mixed feelings about president Gerald Ford, but I have always admired him for his pardon, not of Richard Nixon, but of Tokyo Rose.

Back in WWII, I was stationed on Okinawa for a brief time. One of my first jobs at the 24th Corps Headquarters was to distribute copies of a pin-up drawing of scantily clad "Tokyo Rose", with Dragon Lady eyes, sweater-filling attributes of Lana Turner, and Eleanor Powell legs. An artist in corps headquarters had designed the pinup to challenge the ubiquitous Betty Gable pinups, but neither image stood much of a chance against the many photos of wives and sweethearts from back home.

I later found that the renowned Tokyo Rose was a myth, a creation of the GI imagination. But then some of the wives and sweethearts were myths also, myths exploded by occasional "Dear John" letters. There was a girl in my mind as the army band played "I´ll Walk Alone" and "Sentimental Journey" on the dock in Seattle when we boarded the troop ship bound for Hawaii. By the time I reached Okinawa, hers was the third and last of my Dear John letters announcing the end of a correspondence that came with little x´s marked on the envelope. Oh well, if they were no longer walking alone, I had Tokyo Rose.

Radio Tokyo aired a number of broadcasts aimed at GIs with a variety of announcers, some of them women. One of the more popular shows was "The Zero Hour", written by some allied POWs who cleverly imbedded hidden encouraging messages in the script. The typist and often collaborator in the messages, and later the announcer for the 20-minute disc jockey segment of this show, was a Japanese-American girl who had been trapped in Tokyo while attending the funeral of an aunt as the war started. Unable to return home, she found a job working for Radio Tokyo as a typist.

She had a very pleasant seductive voice which, along with the music, charmed the listening GI´s all over the Pacific, and they dubbed her Tokyo Rose. Using Dragon Lady images from the Milton Caniff comic strip "Terry and the Pirates", they had her image (like Kilroys´s) plastered all over the Pacific.

Pilots coming back from raids on Tokyo reported they had flown so low and so close that they could see various portions of her anatomy.

Neither she nor any of the other female announcers ever called themselves "Tokyo Rose". She called herself "Orphan Ann" because she felt orphaned by the war. Her sign-off siren call coming through the static was, "Your number one friendly enemy, Orphan Ann - be good."

"Be good" indeed - what a turn-on to someone starved for the sound of a teasing, playful female voice and the other fine amenities of female companionship.

"Oh sweet and lovely, Lady be good. Lady be good to me."

In my imagination Tokyo Rose was good to me.

Her name was Iva Ikoku Toguri, a real American girl born on the 4th of July, 1916, in south central Los Angeles. She was raised Methodist, listened to The Shadow and Orphan Annie on the radio, joined the local Girl Scouts, played on the varsity tennis team, took piano lessons, and had a crush on Jimmy Stewart.

If the effect of the broadcast were the criteria, she might have been given a medal after the war for her work in entertaining the troops and keeping morale high, but instead, based on presumed intent, she was tried for treason and sent to prison.

Several years later after returning from the war, I found someone I have walked with for 58 years now.

Eventually Orphan Ann was pardoned by President Gerald Ford after the story came out of how she had assisted and cooperated with the POWS, and had not used the propaganda line used by some Radio Tokyo announcers, Axis Sally, and others.

Thank You, Gerald Ford.

Bill McNair claims he has solved

THE INCOMPATIBILITY PROBLEM

My Windows 2002XP will format for Macintosh and different versions of it. The Tale Spinner comes to me in a pristine manner. The only thing I get sometimes is a small block at the end of a sentence. I haven´t noticed anything else ... yet!

ED. NOTE: So all you PC users, if you want to see the Spinner in its "pristine" form, get Windows 2002XP. ;)

First Maura Boguski and then Tony Lewis sent this "mild diversion before tax season":

THE UNCONTROLLABLE REACTION OF THE RIGHT FOOT

While sitting at your desk, make clockwise circles with your right foot. While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

Speaking of waiting in airports, Anita Henderson sends this story, told by Dan Greyling, about another

AIRPORT ENCOUNTER

A friend of mine, returning to South Africa from a long stay in Europe, found herself with some time to spare at London´s Heathrow Airport. Buying a cup of coffee and a small package of cookies, she staggered, laden with luggage, to an unoccupied table. She was reading the morning newspaper when she became aware of someone rustling at her table. From behind her paper, she was flabbergasted to see a neatly-dressed young man helping himself to her cookies. She did not want to make a scene, so she leaned across and took a cookie herself.

A minute or so passed. More rustling. He was helping himself to another cookie.

By the time they were down to the last cookie in the package, she was very angry but could still not bring herself to say anything. Then the young man broke the remaining cookie in two, pushed half across to her, ate the other half, and left.

Some time later, when the public-address system called for her to present her ticket, she was still fuming. Imagine her embarassment when she opened her handbag and was confronted by her package of cookies. She had been eating his.

Jack Peaker suggests this site for music lovers:

THE ULTIMATE JUKEBOX

When you click on the site below, it will take you to a jukebox with different years listed. Click on the year you want to hear. When the music starts, you can move the curser in the playback down and see all the songs associated with that year. You can let it play through the entire list of that year, or highlighting a particular song will play it instantly.

http://www.tropicalglen.com

YOUR NEW YEAR´S RESOLUTION:

This is the year I will write some personal stories for The Tale Spinner. (Much easier than losing weight, or giving up smoking, or getting more exercise!)

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. - Marshall McLuhan